The thought made him jump out of the water and start a futile attempt at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Dead she may have been, but he did not want Curtis accusing him of negligence. But as soon as his mouth fastened on hers he recoiled, gagging on the overpowering chemical taste on her blue lips, unable to continue. Seconds later he was retching into the swimming pool.
Aidan Kenny worked on a keyboard, preferring to type his transactions through the various sub-systems he had created on the BMS root directory instead of having to translate his thoughts into spoken words. His fat fingers moved quickly and expertly across the keys.
'Goddamn it, where are you?' he grumbled, scanning the hundreds of transactions that covered his screen. He sighed and cleaned his glasses on his tie. Then he flexed his neck against the clasp of his hands and typed some more, fingers moving furiously now, like an expert stenographer in an attorney's office.
Kenny winced as he hit the wrong key. The thought of Ray Richardson waiting for him to sort this problem out was making him feel nervous. Sweat started to pour from his heavily furrowed brow. With all his money and success, why did the man have to be so bad-tempered? There was no call for him to have spoken to the cop like that. Any minute now he felt sure he was going to have Richardson on the phone cursing him for a sonofabitch and blaming him for the fuck-up. He started to prepare his answer out loud.
'Well, Jesus, it's a large system. There are bound to be a few glitches in it. Since I've been working here we've identified over a hundred of them. It's inevitable when you get something as complicated as this building management system. If it worked perfectly first time, every time, then you wouldn't need to employ me.'
But even as he said it Aidan Kenny knew that there were still some of these glitches that neither he nor Bob Beech had been able to understand.
Like Allen Grabel's TESPAR code.
Or the umbrella icon: when it was raining on the roof of the Gridiron, Abraham was supposed to let everyone know by putting the icon in the corner of their work-station screens. The only trouble was that whenever this umbrella had appeared and Aidan Kenny had gone outside expecting rain, he had found the city dry, as always. After several fruitless attempts to rectify the problem Kenny had finally arrived at the quiet conclusion — shared only with Bob Beech — that this was
Abraham's idea of a joke.
'Ouch,' he exclaimed as another group of keystrokes took him down a cul-de-sac in the security system. If only he could have smoked he might have been able to concentrate more easily. As it was he felt as tense as if Ray Richardson had been standing right behind him, watching every transaction he made.
Kenny took off his glasses, polished the lenses on his tie again and replaced them, almost as if he didn't believe his own eyes.
'Now if that isn't the damnedest thing.'
Aidan Kenny's palm print had allowed him to step outside the ordinary user interface and access all the building management system codes. Short of amputating his own pudgy hand there was no other way into the command level. But even then the architecture of the system Kenny had created required a password — a precaution against the time when Richardson might try to fire him. When the Gridiron was ready to be handed over he would transfer the BMS access procedure to Bob Beech, but until then this was Kenny's own insurance policy. He had done the same with every smart building he had worked on. Where Ray Richardson was concerned you couldn't afford to take any chances. As usual he typed HOT.WIRE so that he could go where he wanted within the BMS architecture. Then he entered the security system where he knew the door-locking program was located. He would deal with the glitch with the building's HVAC after he had got Richardson out. Kenny knew the system codes like the computer knew the palm of his hand. So he was surprised to encounter some difficulty in reaching his transacted destination. But now that he had at last found the codes that controlled the front door he was even more surprised to discover several extra blocks of code: CITAD.CMD,' about which he knew absolutely nothing. CMD was supposed to indicate an indirect command file, edited and created by Kenny himself.
'Someone's been messing around in here,' he said. But then, as the impossibility of such a thing began to make itself plain, he found himself shaking his head.
'Jesus, what the hell's going on? A set of commands to do what, Abraham?'
Returning through the BMS to the Program Utilities he typed: CD
CITAD.CMD and then LS/*.
Lines of code blurred into one another as they scrolled rapidly down the screen. The longer this continued the more unsettled Kenny became. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then fifteen.
A chill feeling descended on Kenny's overweight body as he read some of the transacted lines of code that continued to roll past his disbelieving and unsmiling Irish eyes. There were thousands of transactions.
'Jesus Christ,' breathed Kenny, as he tried to understand what had happened.
Absently his fingers reached for the packet of Marlboro in his shirt pocket. He fitted one between tremulous lips and fumbled for the Dunhill lighter in his coat. As soon as he had fired it up he knew that he had made a dreadful mistake.
The problem with water sprinklers in a computer room was that the room had to dry out for seventy-two hours before the equipment could be reconnected. Sometimes it took even longer for the room to return to the correct humidity level. With carbon dioxide systems there was a more important drawback in that the thermal shock from the cold, suffocating gas could damage a computer even more significantly than the fire itself.
Like many organizations that paid only lip-service to environmental considerations, the Yu Corporation had installed a Halon 1301 system. Halon 1301, or Bromotrifluoromethane, was an expensive chemical compound, destructive of the Earth's ozone shield, but especially favoured for extinguishing fires involving electronic equipment because it left no residue and caused no electrical short-circuits or damaging corrosion of equipment. The one drawback as far as operators were concerned was that it had to be discharged in the very earliest stages of a fire and, for this reason, the system was often secretly disconnected by those who were of a nervous disposition. For Halon 1301 was lethal. Aidan Kenny hurriedly stubbed the cigarette out and waved away what little smoke its combustion had generated with the flat of his hand. In the ordinary run of things he would have said that such a tiny wisp would hardly have mattered, that the heat and smoke sensors were not so sensitive in an air-conditioned room with high air-velocity, and that the air-sampling detector in the return supply would anyway take a minute or two to react, leaving the room's occupant plenty of time to take the precaution of leaving. But since his extraordinary discovery Kenny knew that he could no longer be sure about anything where the computer was concerned.
Jumping up from his chair he made straight for the door.
He heard the dull clunk of the automatic door-bolts and the hiss of the air-lock before he had taken two steps.
'False alarm, false alarm,' he yelled. 'For Christ's sake, there's no fire. There's no fucking fire!'
Panicking now he sat back down at the desk and tried to stop the gas from being discharged at the program level.
'Oh God, oh God, oh God,' he said as his fingers flew across the keyboard, praying that he would not make a keystroke mistake now.
'Please, please…'
Avoid Halon. That was what the fire safety boys were saying these days. Protect the ozonosphere. Ensure the Earth's survival.