We spent six months settling into the yard. Little Jefe made it easy for us to travel the city to collect and catalog items we might need. For the first few weeks after the event, things seemed to hold themselves together. We continued to recruit people to join us, although we kept the leadership team to the original crew.

No surprise, Eyal noticed the changes first.

He pointed often with that skeletal finger I knew could gouge out an eye with. "You see there, no one has picked up the garbage in two days."

I shrugged, "That isn't particularly troubling, now that we can just scan anything into our inventory."

He just replied, "Idle hands are the devil's workshop."

"Um, Eyal, isn't that the King James Bible?" I asked.

"So?"

"Well, um, aren't you Israeli?"

"I've also read the Quran, the Verdas and the Agamas."

I didn't know what the latter two were, so I just shut up.

He turned out to be right. Without a normal routine, more and more trouble bubbled out into the streets. People, often kids, would scan in items and then create hundreds of them. At 42nd and 5th it became a right of passage for kids from across the island to drop a red fire hydrant. They piled up three stories tall. I had to admit, that was funny.

Soon it escalated. Gangs roamed the streets and began harassing people. Skill stealing became a normal occurrence. Victims didn't really get hurt from it, but people who had been hit with it often describe the feeling afterwards of helplessness.

Almost as soon as disorder arose, it receded. We noticed a particularly brutal group of law enforcement officers appear with increasing frequency. They wore mismatched clothes all shaded in a crimson red. They didn't ask questions. If someone looked out of place they knocked them around something fierce. I didn't know how to feel about it. The streets seemed safer, but I knew from history when you suspend the order part of law and order, bad things happen.

Sara made the call for us to stop scouting out new recruits. Eyal agreed, and that ended all conversation.

"You've got your team and supplies, James, time to do something with them." Sara announced. She was right.

Matter manipulation became our first priority. We needed a way to hack the code without mutilating the items or ourselves in the process.

I worked with O to develop a series of experiments to take apart the problem. We switched from merging bigger items together to smaller items and then finally molecules of atoms. No luck. The items may have been smaller, but the code didn't seem to get any less complex. Everything remained unreadable and unpredictable. Several times O wanted to experiment with people and animals. Each time I rejected his request.

"You are being obtuse." That became O's favorite saying around me.

We thought we would never make any progress when Noa and Wen gave us the solution, albeit accidentally.

One evening in the dining car we all sat around a bounty of KFC and Mountain Dew. We each took turns selecting and producing a meal for the team meeting. Charlie always picked KFC and Mountain Dew. We'd have revolted by now, but KFC made Charlie so happy that none of us would be the one to spoil it for him. Charlie was the best.

We knew we didn't need to eat our food old school, but this had become a routine. Something nostalgic that bound us together. I think it made us feel human.

I was in a whiny mood that night, "I have this powerful computer connected to an awesome set of skills. Why are we making zero progress!"

Noa swirled her soda and showed it to me, "James, can your computer predict when my drink will stop swirling?"

I came close to yelling at her. This was serious and she wanted to talk about her soda. But then I looked at her eyes and I saw a twinkle in them. She smiled.

Dammit she was trying to calm me down. How did this person half my age make me feel like a child? Because I was acting like one and she wasn't, that is how.

I took a deep breadth and answered, "That might look easy, but the number of atoms swirling around in that drink is mind boggling. We can't observe it in detail, let alone project where all of those little bits are going."

And then Wen commented. Usually he remained out of our dinner chatter. I was never sure if he found us boring or just didn't have anything to offer. That night he showed neither reservation.

"You are thinking backwards, that swirling drink is the computer. It is processing more data than all the computers in New York put together. All of those atoms have quantum probabilities that together calculate what direction every atom will go in relation to every other atom. You should be trying to find a way to turn that drink into the computer."

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

I had never considered that before. I stared at the swirling, bubbling beverage.

"Well fuck me," I said. They all looked at me in surprise. Charlie put his hand over his mouth as though he had said the naughty word. They all waited for me to elaborate.

I shared my thinking, "O, we keep trying to understand the code like its some sort of language and we just need to build a Rosetta stone to translate it. We are trying to turn this code into something physical. But whoever's code this is, it isn't a static, fixed thing."

O lit up, "It is like that horrible sugar water." Charlie frowned and looked at his own glass of Mountain Dew. O continued unfazed, "When we watch the code in debug mode we are seeing it pulse through millions of combinations before settling on the final one. They said it is emergent code, so maybe that is how it changes. That's why we can't understand it, we are seeing all of the scenarios at the same time. It's like one of those roulette balls hitting all the numbers before it settles on one."

"Right, it is running through hundreds of possible outcomes and we are only seeing the final decision. If we could see all of the possible outcomes, maybe we could find a way to steer it." That would mean what we thought of as a mind boggling large simulation might be many orders of magnitude more complex than that. We are so out of our league.

O continued, "So we first need a way of recording all of the possible outcomes."

"Right, we don't need to understand how it gets us there as long as we can replicate the one that works best for us. The code will write itself."

Charlie raised his hand, "I'm lost."

O and I got up at the same time and headed to our makeshift workspace two cars down. I turned to Charlie, "Thanks Charlie, your soda may have just cracked the case."

Charlie smiled. "It tickles my nose when I drink it."

Noa rolled her eyes.

It took us another month to develop a solution. We made two major breakthroughs that put us on the right path.

First, we figured out how to record all of the possible scenarios when two items attempted to merge together. This felt like those movies where someone could travel back in time and make a different choice to see where it led. Only we weren't changing time, we were observing the equivalent of a quantum could of possibilities. All of these merges were possible outcomes. How the table selected one in the past we didn't know, but now we recorded them all. Here is how we did that.

We realized that the lab table where we put objects to merge could itself be scanned and copied into inventory. We then put a table on the table, how meta. We tried combining the table with a variety of objects: computers, spectrometers, microscopes, even Kentucky Friend Chicken, to humor Charlie. PS, the KFC experiment yielded a crazy table made from four breaded chicken's legs. We let Charlie eat that demon spawn, but everyone refused to watch.

And then one day one of our combinations worked. When we combined a CMOS sensor we ripped from an old DSLR camera with the lab table and tried it out, data began streaming into the terminal view of my merged computer terminal interface.

Now when we merged two items together, the table recorded not just the final outcome, but all of the possible outcomes that had not been selected. I could feed the outcome I liked most back into the table and it worked liked instant replay. I could make the same item as often as I wanted.

The moment Eyal heard of our success he dropped into O and my lab.

"We need a better defense against the Enforcers."

That was the name people gave to the Mayor's squad of modified law enforcement personnel. They continued to grow both in numbers and in physical size. Eyal and Noa were good, and they had recruited others as part of our yard security team, but we were losing the arms race. Ha, get it? Like the enforcers were getting really big arms.

"What do you suggest? It will take time to experiment." I asked.

"They haven't attacked us yet, but it could be any day now. We need something fast. Just start simple, give us super lightweight body armor that can withstand a serious blow."

We pulled in Wen to help. He was always annoyed when we took him away from his energy project, but he couldn't back down from a challenge. We found him where we always found him, inside the one structure on the property that could fit his machine, now reassembled but in a state of constant modification by Wen. Wen had his nose buried in a pile of wires.

We gave Wen the challenge. Without looking away from his work he said, "Try mixing Darwin's bark spider silk with Lonsdaleite."

"The what with the what?" I asked. He didn't answer.

I had to pull the data down from the Internet, a task that was becoming increasingly harder to do as more nodes fell off the grid.

I told Noa and Eyal what I found, "There is no way we will find that spider in New York, but the Natural History Museum did have a sample of both that silk and the metal at some point. There must be storage in the building where they archive old exhibits. Best bet is to raid it and hope for good luck."

Sara overheard our plans and stopped us, "I am a member of the 1913 Society, let me just call the proctor at the museum and ask him to scan them into inventory and send them over." The 1913 Society were the big donors. It did not surprise me that Sara would be on that list.

And like that we had it. The proctor allowed us to visit and take scans of that and a lot more. He loved the idea that his exhibits could be of use, now that so few people came by anymore.

We merged the two items with traditional body armor pieces and produced dozens of possible outcomes for Eyal and Noa to examine. Eventually we found a combination that proved feather light and could withstand a blow from a .308 Winchester from 15 feet away.

Eyal approved it, but Noa rejected it.

"People are already afraid of the enforcers, we should do something so that when people see us they know we are the good guys."

I liked that. "What do you have in mind?"

"I think we make it so shiny people have to shade their eyes. We will be the light." I nodded. She thought for a moment and then asked, "Can we add Silver? It reflects like 95% of light. Just be careful because it is soft and we don't want the armor to be any heavier or weaker."

I looked at Eyal for confirmation, "Don't look at me, you heard her."

I felt stupid. It didn't matter if I doubted her for her age or gender, she was an equal member of our team and consistently showed it.

"I cry your pardon, Noa, we will get it done."

We added the silver and after a day of searching we hit on the right outcome.

When Eyal, Noa and the others donned the armor, I felt like a kid transported into a comic book universe. They shone.