A few minutes ago, while the intruder A60 was fighting against the Grenadiers, Juzo and Malin went through a narrow path hidden behind the galleries.
The passageway, barely three feet wide, was reserved for technicians and maintenance personnel. The walls were lined with electronic boards and other equipment that kept Bellatrix alive. Thousands of miles of electrical cables, gas, and refrigeration pipes passed through there.
With the sound of explosions and the hum of thrusters vibrating behind the walls, Juzo and Malin stepped sideways, lighting their way with small flashlights they had taken from a locker before entering the shortcut. They were careful not to get their feet tangled with bundles of wires on the ground or to hit their heads against the fuse boxes sticking out of the ceiling.
Upon reaching the end of the tunnel, Juzo found a board covered by microchips and switches on the wall, identical to a computer motherboard, but huge. Following the original plan that he had drawn up with Rigel, he faced the board—between it and his face was barely eight inches of space—and studied it as much as he could with the help of the flashlight, until he found the two tiny keys he was looking for. He lowered the first key.
“Good. Alarms off,” Malin whispered. “Now what?”
“Divert transmissions from security cameras three and five in this sector to a remote receiver,” Juzo said, removed a microchip from his pocket, and inserted it into a slot below the second key. Done.
He squatted down, opened the vent near his knees, and crawled through. Malin followed him.
They both reached the Level 5 chamber before their adversary and turned on the lights, the few that there were. A fuzzy blue halo revealed a shadowy warehouse, filled with machines dead for who knows how long and old tower-shaped computers. There were also several deactivated Cyclops androids standing silently in a corner, waiting for the technicians to fix them and the scientists to claim them. Knowing that they would soon have to face one like them was chilling, so they continued with their mission.
Watching the glassy eye of the security camera, Malin crossed her fingers that the microchip was doing its job.
“How did the Cyclops know the exact location of this thing?” she wondered.
“Some kind of tracker, I guess. Or someone told him,” Juzo replied, and went in search of the massive machine.
Finding it among those things was the easy part. Due to its size and its silhouette, the computer contrasted with the rest of the things there.
It was just as Rigel’s pictures portrayed it—something like a vertical assembly of old-fashioned gadgets, consoles, and screens—although now it didn’t have a speck of dust on it. Except for a few rust spots here and there, that computer monstrosity was intact, at least on the outside. Now the only thing left to do was find out if there was anything else of value inside.
As Rigel had promised, hooked up to the computer like life support equipment for a comatose patient, was the power feed with which the experts had reactivated it to salvage what was left intact of his matrix memory.
Juzo put his backpack on the ground, and from there he withdrew some tools and focused on activating the machine.
Meanwhile, Malin inspected the room and found what would transport them to the other side of the ocean. A dark and minimalist machine. Nothing more than a frame the size and shape of a door, with a glass console board on one side, and an electricity generator on the other.
“When you said Auriga, I thought you were talking about the new bracelet-shaped models,” she said; “not about a Mother Auriga nearly half a century old.”
“It’s easier to hack into his memory and erase our arrival coordinates than using the bracelets,” Juzo replied.
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Malin held up her hands. “As long as this thing spits me out the other side in one piece…” she said. As much as she wasn’t sure of what they were doing, at that moment, with the military on alert and the Cyclops behind the door, escaping to another continent was the best option if she wanted to stay alive.
Helping Juzo buy some time, she set aside some old computer terminals, took the wires from the electrical generator that were coiled on the floor, and connected them to the Mother Auriga’s console board so that its capacitors would have enough power for when the time to use it came.
Until a loud burst reached her ears, padded by the concrete walls, along with the cry of a soldier who had surely just fallen into combat, and suddenly, what happened on the other side acquired a very different nuance than it had had up to that point for her. A strange pride of belonging awoke in Malin, an irrepressible desire to confront the android along with his former comrades that squeezed her neck.
“Damn.” She clenched her fists and scoured the room in search of something that could help her face the coming threat. There was nothing but old junk and some expired extinguishers hung from the wall, covered in dust.
Laying back on the floor, Juzo positioned himself under the main console board of the monster computer, and following Rigel’s instructions, finished tying together the various wires of the immense machinery that the officials had left loose to facilitate its movement. Anxiety had turned into thousands of drops of sweat covering his forehead and running down his hairy cheeks.
Malin crossed to his side. “It would have been nice to wear Grenadier armor now,” she whispered.
Connecting wires with one hand, Juzo pulled the weapon from his thigh holster with the other and offered it to her. “If this makes you feel safer…”
Malin rejected it. “There’s a hundred like those lying out there, decorating corpses,” she said. “Easy. I’ll be fine.” Then she came up with something. “Hey, if this Cyclops comes for this computer, if you tell him you’re one of those Binaries, maybe we could save ourselves—”
“—The bad time?” Juzo finished. “I won’t risk ending up torn to pieces.” Then he thought of the soldiers he’d seen in the corridor a while before, all sitting on the floor, in such a deep trance that they weren’t even aware of their surroundings; he thought of the blood he’d seen peeking out of the young soldier’s nose. “Be careful,” he warned her. “There could be someone accompanying the Cyclops.”
“You say that for a reason?” she turned.
Rising to his feet, Juzo shook his head. “Just be careful,” he said. From the small pocket of his jacket, he took out a tiny module attached to a quadrangular monocle, put it on his left ear as if it were an earphone, adjusted the lens in front of his eye, and turned it on. On the small sheet of glass, a word flickered, ‘Recording…’
“If something happens to us, at least Rigel will get to see the show firsthand,” Malin said. “I hope he enjoys it.”
“A deal’s a deal,” Juzo muttered, and with the power feed already running, he moved to stand in front of the console board.
Between the switches and the commands, there was a cube-shaped capacitor the size of a fist, attached to the board through some tiny tubes that gave it the image of being a kind of electronic tick; this was the frequency-four emitter Rigel had told him about, the one that had prevented the circuitry of that part of the computer from being fried during the electromagnetic blast that had ended operations in that bunker. Next to it, a huge quadrangular command stood out with the life-size silhouette of a hand engraved in its center. That must have been the command that required the biometric energy reading, which the imperialist technicians had not been able to activate. As a matter of logic, he placed his hand on the figure and pushed. The button was hard from the passing of the years, but by forcing it a little, he managed to sink it.
The machine started up and came to life with the hum of its internal systems and the processing of its data; a sound that was strangely familiar to Juzo, as if it had been stored in his memory all his life.
Two laser lines lit up on the command, a purple, almost reddish, and one white. The purple one scanned Juzo’s palm; there was a pause; the laser flickered, then went out. Then the white laser passed; there was a pause; the laser flickered, but this time there was a beep. The white line had just confirmed him as one of those close to the Project.
An entire section of the console board, the same one that contained the frequency-four emitter and the command he’d just pressed, among other buttons, flipped over until it completed a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, revealing a new console on its back, one with a gleaming display and modern switches very different from those that the rest of the computer had; all without an iota of dust on top, nor signs of wear.
> Identification: Binary-R
>
> Welcome to the Totem
appeared on the screen.
“Damn...” Malin whispered, looking over Juzo’s shoulder. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she confessed.
But a dull knock silenced them, and on the soles of their boots, they perceived it, a tremor that shook the ground and crept through the walls and the countless disabled machines and computers that were there, until it reached the concrete ceiling, from where dust rained. The dim blue lights flickered.