"But..."
"Jacob, if you do not feel comfortable tapping into your employee account and monitoring the now active fah'ti, well, I suppose I'd understand..."
He knew what he was doing. Looking back, I can see just how easily he set me up. In the moment, that one word was all I could think about. "It really is active?" My heart began to race with excitement, with anger, with panic, all jumbled together. "Reginald promised he'd tell me..."
Alistair sighed. "I'm sorry if you believed him. Personally I don't trust the twerp farther than I can throw him."
It wasn't so much hearing that Reginald lied that bothered me. It was the fact that I didn't know when the fah'ti was active. I didn't know, inside. I thought...I thought there would be a flood. There would suddenly be holonotes from Dad and schematics from Mother and edicts from Morhal to the human race. I thought as soon as it turned on, there would be the link we needed, the way to talk to them, to remember them, to prove that they were still there. Or here. Or...wherever in the universe. And most importantly, I fully believed that as soon as that switch flipped, I'd have my friends back. I'd be able to inspeak with them, and I'd have Little Blob, have so many jokes from him I'd bust out laughing out loud. I'd have those connections. I'd have Ashnahta.
It was on. And I had nothing. The thought was terrifying.
"I need a pass code from you," Alistair said, holding out his hand.
Instinctively I grabbed for the key that hung on my belt. Or had. It wasn't there. I wasn't in uniform. My stomach sank deeper. "I don't have my pass key."
Without missing a beat, he pulled a device out of a drawer and connected it to his terminal. "Have you ever used a retinal scanner? Sit still and look at the center of the bright green light. It'll hurt your eyes for a second, but blinking rapidly will clear it. Now, don't move."
The light felt like a stab and my eye instantly watered. It was over in just a few seconds.
"And that's why we rarely use these outdated beasts," he said sympathetically. "Keep blinking. It won't last long. Now if I'm right, they would have taken your scan when they picked you up as standard...aha! Yes. We're into their network. Now, we only need to get to your account."
"Is this really going to get us into the fah'ti?"
"No. Better. This is going to get us into what they're monitoring about the fah'ti. Not any raw data, but already processed and compressed into a nice, neat little package. It's as if they did all the work and gift wrapped it for us. How nice of them, eh?" He tapped and chuckled. The screens flicked by. It suddenly struck me as very funny that Marlon had spent the day in the presence of an amazing hacker and never once even looked up from his holo.
Alistair was staring at a screen of data. I tried to search him, but his internal door was closed. Even the expression on his face was unreadable. I looked at the screen. It was in a code I didn't understand. I sat back to wait. He would tell me what it was about eventually. He was, after all, a scientist. There was no way he could keep discovery silent.
After a few minutes, he clicked a couple keys. Another screen popped up with a bunch of same looking code. This time, he said a little swear to himself and clicked to another screen. My leg was shaking up and down and I was biting my nail, the nerves twisting me up inside.
"Calm, Jacob. Take a deep breath. Let me get the codex cleared."
I took a deep breath. "Okay," I said, trying to sound calm while inside I was trying to fight the panic.
Alistair opened the desk drawer again quickly and removed a holo. It was an old one, like the one I still insisted on using. He clipped it into the sync dock on the terminal and clicked a few more keys. After just a couple seconds, it let out quick series of beeps and he pulled it from the dock.
"What are you..."
"Sh! Let me work." He tapped the keys on the holo furiously, giving me a perfect look at Marlon sixty years from now. While he was doing whatever on the holo, the screen on the terminal changed. It flashed a message in red and beeped.
Unauthorized entry. Terminal execution code 24437-1 in 00:00:60...00:00:59...00:00:58...
Uh oh. That was not good. In less than one minute, the terminal would be killed. A remote program would overload all circuits and anything linked to this network would never be able to function again.
I sat forward and reached my hand out instinctively to...what? I didn't know what I was doing. It was warning and flashing and something needed to be done. "What do I do?"
"Not now, Jacob," he said distractedly, not even looking up from the holo.
"But you've got a terminal execution happening in like forty five seconds!"
He sighed. "Will you stop interrupting me?"
He was distracted and not understanding what I was saying. "Alistair, it's going to fry this terminal. Just tell me how to disconnect and..."
My panic got through and he finally looked up. "Oh!" He tapped on the keys quickly, but nothing happened. "Those wily bastards!" He tried several combinations, but nothing worked. The timer ticked down.
00:00:32....00:00:31....00:00:30...
He slammed the keys, now, the holo tossed aside. "They disabled their own kill code!" The thing is, he sounded almost excited. He was even almost smiling.
00:00:24...00:00:23...00:00:22...
He threw his hands in the air. "He got me. That son of a jackal finally got me." He sighed and shook his head. "At least we got this first." He was giving up.
I quickly looked around the room at all the terminals. "Are they all linked?"
"About half of them, yes."
"So it's going to take those out, too?"
"I would say probably."
"How can you be so calm?" I almost shouted.
00:00:16...00:00:15...00:00:14...
"Valor, honor, pride in the face of defeat. It's what really separates humanity from animals."
That was all well and good for him to say, but I didn't like losing. I jumped up and scooted around the desk. I grabbed the network feed cable and pulled as hard as I could. Just when I thought it was hopeless, the cable snapped loose with a pop and I fell back into my seat, hard. The screen flashed a new warning.
Terminal disconnected from network. Please seek assistance from a network administrator.
Alistair just stared at me. I sat panting as if I had just run a race. "Well," he said after a minute. "There is that, I suppose."
"Did it stop it from the rest of the network?"
"Yes. Looks like. Crude but effective." He shook his head. "Hardly seems like a fair win, though. Oh well. What's done is done." He didn't seem all that pleased that I saved his network. I dropped the cord and sat back in my chair. He could have at least thanked me. I was about to tell him that, but he was already tapping away on the holo.
I couldn't just let it go. "Hey, all's fair in war, isn't that a saying here?"
"In an intellectual war, swinging a club is bad form." He waved a hand again. "Sh. I'm almost done." There was some beeping from the holo, then a voice.
"Welcome, Jacob."
"Ha!" Alistair jumped up and pointed at the now blank terminal screen. "I did it, Bradley! Stick that in your circuits and choke on it!" He was grinning broadly as he handed me the holo. "They didn't think I'd have one of these dinosaurs around. Didn't even dream that any of these relics would be used." He tapped his head. "Robots will never outsmart this, my boy. Never! Here. Take it."
I took the holo. "What's on it?"
"Everything. All the data that has been uploaded to and, most importantly, downloaded from the fah'ti." He pulled a little flask out of one of the desk drawers and sat back down, propping his feet up. He removed the cap and tipped it to the blank terminal before taking a swig. He then began gloating, long and loud to the Bradley bot that couldn't hear him.