A stolen ID badge took me to the seventeenth floor. Lights off, every desk spotless. Mr Yamada, the stern head of development, insisted on it. He also insisted that every day for ten minutes, his floor practised zazen, and he walked up and down the silent lines of meditating employees with a small bell to initiate and close proceedings. Other foibles of Mr Yamada: an obsessive if talented keeper of potted plants, a fanatical supporter of the San Francisco Giants, and a man who, in his youth, was credited with creating a whole new generation of VHS technology. The days of brilliance were gone; now he was management, and growing fat.
His office was glassed off from the rest of the open-plan floor, though he proudly pointed out the blinds across the windows were never down. But of all the people on the seventeenth floor, only Mr Yamada had access to the floor above, where the real work of Perfection was done.
He kept his pass in a safe behind a plywood cabinet door in the north-eastern corner of his office. The safe was digital; five buttons were clearly marked with the accumulation of grease from his fingerprints, two numbers even beginning to wear away. I wrote down 1, 2, 5, 7 and 9, rearranged them to 25/11/79, the birthday of his eldest son. My first attempt failed, but inverting the day/month to the American style opened the safe with ease.
I stole his passcard, foolish to keep it in such a silly place, and walked eleven steps with my shoulder pressed to the wall, then crawled fifteen paces on my hands and knees between the desks, dragging my bucket behind me, to avoid the cameras, until I reached a bin out of the camera’s eye. It was sturdy metal, next to a filing cabinet. I filled it with handfuls of crunched paper, tipped it on its side, squirted lighter fluid all around, and gingerly lit my stub of candle, setting it on the edge of the pool of liquid.
I crawled away, letting the flame slither down.
The door to the eighteenth floor was two and a half inches thick, driven by pneumatic pistons. There was no avoiding the security camera here, and I couldn’t disable it without being caught in the line of sight of another camera on the other side of the room, so I ignored it, and swiped myself through.
Somewhere, the act of opening the door would trigger security, absolutely, for Mr Yamada was not in the building and the door should not have opened, and doors built to withstand high explosive did not open and shut without notice. I started the stopwatch on my phone, and took the stairs two at a time, bucket held tight, no alarm sounding, lights flickering to life around me, woken by my footsteps. Mr Yamada’s passcard opened the door to the floor above, and now we were in a place I hadn’t yet been, an office disappointingly like every other office on the surface of the earth: chairs, desks, computers, two or three screens each, some off, some still running silently, processing a file overnight, churning through numbers while the humans slept.
Fifteen metres from the stairwell to another security door. An eight-digit numeric code, changed every three days, impossible to crack at speed but then, its strength was also its weakness, for an eight-digit code changed every three days is next to impossible for busy members of staff to remember, and it’s always the human element that is most frail in these systems. I looked for the desk of Miss Sato, the only woman in the office, a brilliant coder relegated by her senior staff to a junior position by dint of being a woman, who had complained as we chatted after a Pilates class that next to her was Mr Sugiyama, who never remembered the door code and always wrote it down, a shocking security breach, just shocking, but who listened to her?
I had listened.
At Pilates, Miss Sato had worn a T-shirt bearing the image of a black bear devouring a fish. A small wooden rabbit had hung down from the zip of her rucksack. Hanging from the koi-patterned case of her mobile phone was a tiny straw sparrow, that bounced against her wrist when she made a call. Engimono: good-luck charms. Now I looked for those charms, and found a desk on which a single straw creature, perhaps a fat panda bear, perhaps merely a blob with a painted face, smiled serenely. To the left was the desk of the much-hated Mr Sugiyama, he of the poor memory, and scrawled at the very back of his leather-bound appointment book in almost indecipherably tiny writing on a pink Post-it note was an eight-digit code.
Preparation, preparation, preparation.
The eight-digit code opened the door; Mr Yamada’s credentials sealed the deal.
Twenty-three seconds on the stopwatch; six breaths in, five breaths out.
More alarms would be sounding now, and that was fine. Let them come.
The room beyond was close to how I had imagined and all I had hoped for. I heaved the door shut behind me, heard it lock tight. Lines of servers, heat burning off them as fast as the fans could push cold air in, labelled and marked with letters and numbers, trails of cat5 cables bundled into intricate plaits, data highways rushing off into the void. The noise was a low rumble of moving air, a high hiss of magnetic plates and coils.
A single active computer terminal with a single screen, bright and blue in the noisy gloom. I pressed the image of Mr Kaneko’s thumbprint into the grey fob I’d stolen from him, and six numbers appeared in the panel. I typed the numbers into the terminal, waited, counted my breaths, two, three, four, heard voices in the office at my back. The computer unlocked. I slipped my USB stick into the port, special delivery from Byron14, executed the file, waited.
Nine breaths, ten breaths.
My skin burns with expectation, my blood is on fire within me, I am alive, I am alive, in this moment, I am alive after all.
How long does it take to write data to a USB drive?
(USB 2.0 — 60 MB/s but in reality closer to 40 MB/s. Assuming that there’s at least 16GB of data to copy across from Prometheus’ server and that’s what, 1,000MB — call it 1,024, think binary — ×16 that’s what… 16,348MB to copy, divided by 40 that’s 410ish seconds, divide by 60 that’s just under seven minutes, no matter how fast you look at it seven minutes is six minutes too long.)
Preparation, preparation, preparation.
I leave the USB stick running, and at last hear the distant song of the fire alarm as the candle I had set downstairs finally burns down to a point where it touches the lighter fluid. The fluid ignites, the ignition sets paper burning in a bin, paper sends up smoke and heat, one or the other — probably the latter — triggering the fire alarm.
May not buy me time; may buy me a few minutes.
I stand by the shut door, pepper spray in my left hand, baton in my right. Taster classes — I am the queen of taster classes. There are fitness, language, sewing, cooking, painting and martial arts classes across the world where, for weeks at a time, I was invited not to pay for my tuition because “the first one’s free”. After ten weeks of attendance I’d say that I’d “done a little” and after twenty the experience would usually lose its value, as the length of time it would take a teacher to discover that I had experience would be as long as the class itself, and I could progress no further.
Intensive courses. Five hours of swimming instruction. Eight of Spanish. Four of karate. Six of “boot camp fitness and boxing” on a freezing November weekend in London Fields. Enough to get an idea of all the ways I could go wrong. Enough to know that, if I was pushed to it, I would fight.
Fifty-five seconds.
Sixty.
Whatever voices had come to the eighteenth floor had been distracted by the fire on the seventeenth, for a moment — only a moment.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…
A hundred seconds.
One hundred and twenty.
On the one hundredth and fiftieth second since I had triggered the alarm, a disgraceful response time if ever I’d met one, someone tried to open the door to the server room from the outside, and found it locked.