The man says nothing, and I am relieved at his silence.
“The Strong Arm,” Angela continues, “should also not be dismissed. Despite their slipshod public reputation, their radicalized membership has nearly doubled in the last five years. They have funding. They’re efficient. They may have been hippies, cat ladies, and college vegans ten years ago, but that’s no longer the story. In the last two years, the Strong Arm of the Voice for the Silent has perpetrated several attacks against high-profile companies and organizations that were not widely publicized. The organization also never officially claimed responsibility. If they’re staying quiet about it, then they have some other motivation than fear, panic, and publicity. And if they aren’t bringing attention to this stuff, we certainly won’t. An ecoterror panic is low on our list of useful epidemics at the moment.”
“People will definitely notice if the power goes out in a fourth of America,” says a woman on the other side of the table.
Angela does not scowl at her the way she scowled at the man. “They will,” she agrees. “They’re changing their game. We aren’t sure why yet, but it’s concerning.”
“But,” Devin says, “you caught them. They hacked into your computer systems, sure. But what are we searching for?”
The scent profile appears in the forefront of my thoughts immediately: domestic rat, silicon filament, and something else I can’t place. It’s familiar and makes me think of work, of purpose.
“Approximately one hour ago, one of the six reactors in the Array went offline. It was taken offline in an emergency shutdown procedure that could not be stopped due to… tampering with the electrical system. Prior to this we had noticed a pattern of small breaches throughout the Array’s internal security systems. We believe the trio we apprehended released something into the Array.”
“A drone,” Carol says. “Shit.”
It’s not just a drone.
Carol spoke quietly, but Angela still heard her. Now Angela stares at Carol. “Yes,” she says. “Most likely a bodydrone. A rat.”
“Jesus,” Carol breathes.
“Huh,” says the dog handler who spoke before. “The hell is VFS doing with a bodydrone?”
“The Strong Arm,” Angela corrects. She continues. “The drone took down Reactor B. We suspect it is now near Reactor C, as Reactor A has been heavily secured. Conventional dog teams will provide relief and backup for the teams already securing Reactor A. We will focus offensive efforts on cutting off the drone before it can cause additional outages—that’s where the EI unit comes in.” Angela looks at Carol. “Reactor D is off-line for maintenance. Add B to that, and the Array is currently at 66 percent. Below 50 percent is considered plant failure. Below 33 percent is catastrophic.”
She takes a deep breath and looks around the room, skipping the eyes of the dog handler who spoke too much. “Well,” she says. “Let’s begin.”
Down an access stairway that smells of cement blocks and urine, like all access stairways smell, then Carol and I are out into a bright-lit hallway, empty save for the regular intrusion of steel doorknobs in the walls.
We are alone. Before we left the conference room, Anders stopped Devin. “Dev, you’re going to have to stay up top with me. Carol’s not likely to need a navigator down there anyway,” he said.
I think they are being very careful about limiting access to the MFA and to the target. I doubt even Anders had full access to the information I have been given.
I reexamine my traitorous thought from the briefing. None of the classified data that I’ve been given is worth sharing—much of it is schematics, equipment lists, fine details of the MFA’s workings. Important information, certainly, but Carol wouldn’t find it useful or interesting.
Perhaps I could make something up, but I am not sure what I would say. It might backfire. I am not ready to take the chance unless I know it will be worthwhile.
I could pretend anxiety about my objective for the search. Apprehending a target is a new skill for me. That could be worth further consideration, though it doesn’t strike me as brilliant. The last time I worked on a complicated idea for a secret plan, when the solution came to me I saw its brilliance immediately. I will wait for that feeling again.
The hallway floor before us is tiled smooth white, its grip and temperature synthetic, not ceramic. The walls and ceiling are also white. The hallway’s bright orderliness and its neat, closed doors visually resemble an abandoned hospital ward my team conducted exercise drills in last year. The smells could never be mistaken for each other, though—the vacant ward smelled of sickness and chemicals, and this place smells of dust and deep earth—and certainly not the sound. The seven flights we have climbed down muffle everything except the deep reverberating hum. I felt that hum in my bones and eyes even as Devin’s truck turned off the highway, and now it reaches a pitch and richness that makes my gums itch.
There are other, quieter sounds: the whirs, clacks, and whispers of the plant’s small machinery continuing its work. This facility is equipped with an interminable army of drone small-workers happily going about whatever tasks the Strong Arm has set them to. My dossier says they have been observed largely continuing about their regular routines, though with some abnormal clustering behaviors.
I jerk a foot out of the way of a miniature repair drone zipping along the edge of the hall, laden with a CPU fan across its beetle-back. Another even smaller drone tails it. I resist the urge to lunge after the mousy thing, and swallow, as well, the rumble of a growl I feel in my chest. Their movement is utterly unnerving. My gaze follows them like toenails following after the sweetest itch. Is Like.
I would prefer not to have these feelings at all. The unfortunate side effects of being a dog.
I whine quietly. The MFA’s hum almost drowns it out.
“Sera?” Carol says.
She does not ask a question, and so I do not answer her.
We follow the hallway to its end and take a different access stairway down. There are elevators, but we must avoid them, as their systems have been tampered with. We proceed down eleven additional flights. According to my DAT, we’re sixty-two meters beneath the surface. I feel pressure inside my ears. Carol breathes hard, though she is in excellent physical shape for a human her age.
The reactor’s noise grows more intense here. Carol opens the fire door on the stairwell and the sound increases again. Next to the door there is a station with small headphones, which I assume are noise-minimizing; Carol pauses to take a set and plugs its data pin into her DAT.
I shake my head several times to clear the congestion in my ears, but I am also hoping that the noise will diminish. It doesn’t; I simply grow used to it.
“Sera,” Carol says. She must speak over the growl of the earth around us. “Are you okay?”
It is disorienting, I tell her. Loud.
“Can you work?”
I can work. My answer is automatic, but I will make it true. I rely on my hearing to search. Although my skin crawls with this place, I can concentrate beyond the din for small sounds beneath it. My hearing is phenomenally acute. I am hampered but not crippled.
According to my building schematics, the access channel we need in order to reach the inner circuit of maintenance hallways and tunnels is on this level.
Carol taps at her radio screen but shakes her head, disgusted. “No signal,” she says. I knew there would not be one. She knew as well, I am sure, yet had to check. Humans seem far more anxious about being disconnected from the internet than I am from Modanet. I think this is due to Modanet’s limited nature versus the unlimited connectivity, sociality, and information provided on the internet: it gives humans the sense that they can solve any problem they come to with more information and the input of others. I, however, know that I must rely on myself. I have never seen the internet, aside from glances at human devices, and so I don’t miss its help.