In ten seconds it had reset itself into other codes, other patterns. Lizzie and Vicki, carrying their sacks, had already run across the rough grass and through the information failure.
It was all done in silence. No floodlights came on, no alarms sounded. Factories were fully automated, managed by systems based in distant enclaves, which the owners could consult and direct. Or not.
The first security ’bot skimmed toward the two women almost immediately, terrifyingly fast, a soundless metal shape speeding over the grass. Vicki pointed her EMF disrupter at it and it stopped, sank to the grass, and fell over. Vicki laughed, a little too wildly. “Die, impudent upstart!”
“Come on!” Lizzie urged. She scrambled a second security ’bot and raced for the factory doors.
They had locked, of course, when the Y-shield went down. Lizzie punched in the manual overrides, and held her breath. It had taken months to dip the TenTech security data, and even though she could do anything, somehow she had never quite found the resets for the manual overrides if the security breach had automatically reset them. She hoped that meant there weren’t any resets, that the designers were so arrogant or so cheap they’d gone with faith that the complex Y-system was enough, that no one could breach it. Except, of course, Sanctuary, who had no reason to try.
Sanctuary, and Lizzie Francy.
The doors opened, and Lizzie took a precious moment to squeeze her eyes shut in a brief prayer of thanksgiving to a God she didn’t believe in. Billy’s God, her mother’s God. Lizzie didn’t need Him. She’d done it.
Actually done it—broken into a donkey factory where energy cones were manufactured, to steal enough of them to take her tribe through the winter. They had everything else they needed, since the Change. A plastic polymer tarp for the feeding grounds. Water that no longer had to be clean. An abandoned soy-processing factory from before the Change, with more than enough space to house their tribe. A weaving ’bot that could easily turn out enough clothes and blankets for everyone, even young people whose bodies ate clothes fast. But they had no Y-cones, and winter in the Pennsylvania hills was cold. Now that donkeys no longer shipped things like cones and blankets in exchange for votes, tribes just had to take care of themselves. Nobody else would.
Lizzie opened her eyes. Another security ’bot darted from an alcove, and she zapped it with the disrupter. Hidden monitors were of course recording the break-in, but both she and Vicki were enveloped in head-to-foot holosuits. To the monitors, Lizzie appeared to be a twelve-year-old blonde girl eight months pregnant. Vicki was a redheaded male donkey dressed in a business suit. And all the infrared detectors would get were two heat patterns of human shape, female gender, a certain size and mass and metabolism—but not a certain identity.
It was so easy! Dart in, stuff seven or eight cones from the end of the line into their sacks, run back outside to wait for her equipment to fire a second laser array and bring down the shield for another ten seconds, dart back out. Pretty good for a Liver brat! She ran down the short corridor to the factory floor, her belly swaying from side to side like a bonga rhythm.
And stopped dead, in front of a place gone mad.
Two forklifts rolled across the floor. One lifted, stacked, sorted, and removed nothing at all—batches of empty air. The other carried a single packing case to the end of the robotic line, placed it there, received empty energy cones, carried the same case to the center of the factory and dumped the cones out. Then the forklift rolled through them, sending them clattering over the floor, while it carried the empty case back to the end of the line. The case was dented in a hundred places, folded in at one corner, missing both sealing flaps. It looked as if it had been through a war. On the line itself, robotic arms lifted the delicate cone innards fed to them from the sealed cold-fusion unit—and missed stuffing the power packs into the cones by six inches. The packs, crushed, dropped to the side of the line. The empty cones sailed on, to the waiting demented forklift at the end, which packed, transported, and spilled them before going back for more.
Vicki said, “What…”
“The ranging algorithms are messed up,” Lizzie said, with great disgust. “God, the waste… your owner friends must only check the output figures, not the quality control or even the—Vicki, it’s not funny!”
“Of course it is!” Vicki said. She doubled over with laughter, barely able to get the words out. “It’s… hysterical. The high-tech donkey world… it looks like a ’bot Holy War on Endorkiss… and… that stuffed shirt Jackson… Aranow…”
“We only have a few more minutes, and we need cones! Help me find the cones packed before this all went diseased, it can’t have been going on that long…”
“No? Look… at the dust on everything!” And she was off again, holding her belly, laughing like some crazy in a bedlam holo. Sometimes it seemed to Lizzie that she was the adult and Vicki, with her weird donkey humor, was the child. Then, other times, Vicki became the woman Lizzie remembered from her childhood: scary, knowing, poised, a being from that other world that ran the world. Why couldn’t people be as easy to dip as systems? Lizzie jabbed Vicki in the shoulder.
“Come on! Help me look!”
Vicki did. The two women raced to the packing crates stacked by one of the forklifts before (when?) they went crazy. Fortunately, the sealer ’bot must have malfunctioned as welclass="underline" none of the crate flaps were fastened, which made it easier to yank them open. The first crate on the top tier was empty. So was the second. The third was stuffed with crushed energy packs, smeared against and around cone casings like smashed yolk on unsmashable eggshells. Lizzie marveled. What could have messed up the programming this bad?
“Vicki—time is running out! The laser array only fires once more, resets are paired but the next pair is random-generated, I couldn’t program for it—”
“Here!” Vicki said, no longer laughing. “This crate is good. Grab three or four cones—go! Go!”
They stuffed cones into their sacks, then ran for the corridor, dodging rolling empty cones from the forklift. At the corridor’s end, the factory doors were closed.
“What—Lizzie! They locked automatically!”
Lizzie clawed at the manual override, punching in various standard “open doors” codes. Nothing happened. The security system had reset the door closings, but not the openings. It made sense. If the shield was breached, let whoever had breached it go in—but not out.
Vicki said, “Can you get in and get the code?”
“Not before the shield collapses. That happens right… now.”
Lizzie slumped against the door. Slowly her body sank to the floor, like a rag doll, the sack of precious Y-cones clutched in her arms. She hadn’t done it, after all. She had failed—she, Lizzie Francy!—and now Vicki and she were trapped inside the cone factory, an impenetrable foamcast building. And even if they could get out of the building, they were stuck inside a ten-foot dirt moat around that building by a Y-energy shield that no molecule larger than air could get through. Trapped.
“Vicki.” she whispered, and she wasn’t the girl-genius datadipper, she was a scared seventeen-year-old girl clutching at an adult, “Vicki—what are we going to do, us?”
“We’re going to wait,” Vicki said matter-of-factly. She settled down beside Lizzie, her back also to the door. “Until somebody shows up.”