Day Six
(age twenty-four)
Now that they were past the first step, she felt alert, and very full of questions.
“How come you even need me for this?” she asked Rowan, when the elevator doors had closed behind them.
“If it’s all about confusing the system until it rolls over and does what you ask, then you could have confused it into doing anything.
You could have, like, made yourself a new account and given that one clearance.
Or made it think you were me, even without my password and thumbprint. I know you could have.”
Rowan gave her a flattered grin. “In theory I could. In practice, the weirder a request is, the harder it is to get the system to listen to you. They’re a little like people that way.
You saw the big guns I had to use back there.
If I hadn’t had your existing clearance, it’d have been twice as hard. ”
“And why couldn’t you have just loaded up the character kernel onto the workstation in room 805-B?”
“Same reason. It raises more security flags to move that stuff around then it does to give a new person physical access.”
Kelli looked at him sidelong. “Does this make you happy? Like when we were kids, and you were prompting the robot?”
“Yeah. Yeah, this part still does.”
The elevator doors opened into a small landing, with nothing in it but another locked door. The words Data Center—Authorized Personnel Only were emblazoned overtop.
Baz and his security team were probably waiting just past that door.
Holding her breath, Kelli entered her password again and pressed her thumb to the scanner.
The door rose ponderously. Beyond it was the biggest room of computers that Kelli had ever seen.
It filled the whole width and length of the building and the ceiling stretched up several stories above them.
Big, black racks of hard drives rose to that high ceiling in tidy rows, loudly whirring and blinking.
Cooling fans blasted frigid wind in every direction, but the hard drives radiated heat; Kelli could feel it on her face. The contrast made her shiver.
Baz wasn’t waiting there, unless he and his team had hidden behind one of those racks of servers. As far as Kelli could tell, she and Rowan were alone in here.
Okay. Okay, so Baz really was waiting this out, giving the whole group enough rope to hang themselves.
He’d want them to make the theft and come back to the ship, and he’d stop them at the ship—or maybe in the lobby, on the way out.
Once it was clear that they’d actually stolen something.
Okay, so she was actually going to copy Orlando’s character kernel—for a minute, at least.
There shouldn’t have been anything good about this—hadn’t she told Conchita, back on Io, that it was against all her principles?
But it wasn’t like she was really stealing the kernel now, only getting her hands on it for a few minutes to give Baz time to work.
And the thought of getting her hands on it that way, without actually stealing, faintly thrilled her.
Hadn’t she wanted to see this kernel for herself?
Hadn’t it always faintly annoyed her, how she’d written the draft herself, but the finished version wasn’t even hers to look at?
Maybe the kernel would tell her if Orlando was really supposed to be na?ve.
A few display screens stood at stations at the sides of the room.
Kelli walked to one of them. Rowan paused to make the rounds of the room, checking for stray people between and behind those racks of hard drives, before he circled back.
Once again she pressed her thumb to the scanner and typed in her password.
A file-managing application sprang to life, full of directory names and structures that made no sense at first glance.
This, Kelli supposed, was where her expertise as a script supervisor came in.
She recognized the structure that she clicked through when she was loading character and setting kernels into ScriptGen’s different slots.
The file-managing application had a different interface than the ScriptGen menus, but it was the same structure.
Kelli clicked through it. She’d asked only for access to Orlando’s character kernel, but it looked like this application was showing her everything for all the shows. That couldn’t be right—could it?
Morbidly curious, she clicked on a folder labeled Riptides.
Access denied, said the display. Okay, so much for that.
“Stick with the plan,” said Rowan as he came up behind her, more amused than concerned. “It’s fun having access, right?”
Kelli was too flustered to agree out loud.
She’d almost forgotten this part of how it had been, all those years ago.
The thrill of mild danger—crawling into a maintenance tunnel, climbing into a high-up nook.
Reading illegal books. Getting a robot to say things it wasn’t supposed to.
The thrill of getting talked into things that she’d never have dared on her own.
She’d loved Rowan, once, specifically for how he talked her into things like that.
But most of all it was the thrill of thinking like Rowan.
Even just vicariously. Just the small amount that she needed to do in order to understand him.
In Rowan’s mind, and Rowan’s alone, there had never been anything wrong with Kelli.
Even when she broke the rules; even when she was bad; maybe especially when she was bad, he’d thought she was just as she should be.
She remembered how he’d blurted his way through an incoherent love confession, after the fire; how he’d looked at her like an avenging goddess and not like the hurting, frightened, confused child she’d been.
It had felt good, being looked at that way.
But that was the problem, of course. Things that hurt people shouldn’t ever feel good that way.
Kelli refocused and navigated to the folder that said Ship of Fools.
She half-expected it to say Access denied again.
But no, there they all were. Orlando, Narine, Kendrick, Hui, Admiral Malinverni, Amparo, Princess Caitriona, and more after that.
All the characters, large and small, that she’d ever come up with for this show.
She fished a blank data chip out of her pocket, the one Rowan had given her for this mission. She slotted it into the appropriate port next to the display screen.
Character kernels weren’t big files, just plain text, even if some of it was in code. Some of the minor characters only rated a few kilobytes of text. Orlando’s file was bigger, but not huge, not like the AdventureVerse’s longest running characters. His show was still in its first season.
On impulse, Kelli selected them all, not just him, then pressed the key to copy them all over to the data chip. There was room.
At that very moment, something clanked in the ceiling. Kelli jumped, but it was just Ting. They opened one of those vents with cold air blasting out of it, climbed out, and spidered their way onto the top of one of those racks of hard drives, perching there like a cat. “Hey, guys,” they said.
“Hey,” said Rowan, looking up more nonchalantly than Kelli. Rowan was probably used to Ting. “All good?”
“Yeah. I found the wires for this room’s cameras and pinched ’em before you got here, so we’re good in here. We can do whatever.”
Pinched referred to a process more subtle and sophisticated than what Rowan had done, ten years ago, to the cameras by the mental health center.
Not scissors, but little rings that could be fitted around a data cable and fill it with bursts of targeted interference, which would gradually taper away over the course of ten minutes.
If a human in some security room was watching the cameras live, they wouldn’t see anyone standing around in here; it would just look like the ion storm was hitting the data center especially hard.
Once a pinch ring finished its ten minutes of operation, it became inert.
A heist team could unfasten it and take it with them, if their timing was right; otherwise, it would lie in the walls undiscovered until months or years later when routine maintenance happened to get to the point where those particular wires were manually inspected.
At which point, there would no longer be much sign of how long it had been there, or just who had placed it, or why.
“How’s the download?” Rowan asked, and Kelli looked back down at the screen. Ninety percent, ninety-five—there it went.
“It’s done,” said Kelli. She pressed the button to safely eject the data chip. It came out easily, and she put it back in her pocket.
Rowan grinned big enough to light the whole data center. “It’s done? Whew! Did you hear that, Ting? We’ve got the thing. Smooth work, all around, yeah?”
“We still have to get back out of here,” said Ting, arching their eyebrows.
“You think I’m smooth?” said Kelli, teasing, at the same time. She felt a weird euphoria, having gotten this far, having gotten the contraband into her own pocket.
“When you focus.” There was something pleased in Rowan’s big dark eyes, something challenging. “When you’re playing the right character. You’re not bad then.”
“I’m playing myself,” Kelli retorted, taking a step toward him. She hadn’t been Orlando since she got off the hyperloop.
But then she realized what she was doing, stepping toward him like that, and she froze.
She’d been about to take his hand.
Kelli stood absolutely still as that sank in.
She’d been firm with Rowan that he must not touch her, but she’d wanted to touch him.
She’d wanted, for one split second, to sweep him up in her arms and kiss him.
How could she want that? Was it the heat of the moment?
The rush of victory, the familiar feeling of getting away with something bad?
It was awful, either way. Kelli was here to betray Rowan, and she wasn’t even into men. She couldn’t want that.
Except she had, all along, hadn’t she? The way she’d come to meet him on Callisto, hungry for news of his life, even though she’d been sure that the news would be awful.
The way she’d crept onto his criminal ship, even knowing it was a bad idea.
The way she’d snapped at him not to touch her when he’d tried no such thing, hyperaware of his nearness to her, of the brush of his fingers when he handed her the anti-nauseants, of the nook where he slept.
The way they’d danced. Baz had even told her that she looked like she was going on a date.
Even here on this very mission as she’d desperately schemed against him, she’d also thrilled at the feeling of watching Rowan work, of getting to do just the tiniest bit of crime at his side, like the old days.
Kelli had felt this the whole time, she only hadn’t admitted it, and maybe she was the last to figure it out. Maybe everyone else already knew.
Had she been afraid of him? No. Afraid of this. Afraid of herself.
Somewhere far above her, Ting cleared their throat. “Not to interrupt you two lovebirds, but we’ve got about twenty minutes left in Zhaleh’s forty-minute storm. Let’s do the cleanup and get out of here, a’ight?”
Kelli flushed deeply and covered her face. Rowan looked up at them, annoyed. “Who put you in wet blanket mode?”
“All I’m saying is this job has gone off without a hitch so far, and I do not like hitchless jobs, because there aren’t any. I can feel a hitch coming and when it gets here, I want to be gone.”
“Everybody’s turning psychic on me,” Rowan grumbled. Kelli was studiously looking at her shoes. “All right. Focus, Kelli, okay? Deep breaths. We’ve just got to say another couple of things to the system.”
Kelli could barely move. She stood still, mute and humiliated, as Rowan sidled up to the display screen and put the system through a second, simpler bit of prompt injection.
She could think clearly enough to follow what this one was about: clearing caches, overwriting audio files and camera feeds.
Erasing the evidence that they’d ever been here in this building.
It was a timed process, which would kick in about fifteen minutes from now, when—according to the plan—they’d already be a safe distance away.
It didn’t matter, Kelli mused bitterly, if she wanted him.
It didn’t matter what she felt. She’d sent her messages on the pink crescent to Baz, and he’d see them eventually, even if he hadn’t yet.
She’d put the pieces of this game in place, turned on those hinges already, and it was too late to change her mind.
These people were awful people: pornographers, smugglers, blackmailers, thieves—and it didn’t matter if some part of her secretly wanted to join them.
Or save them. Or date them, or whatever this feeling was. She’d made sure that it wouldn’t.
She’d already sold them all out.