THE FALL OF ROSENROT STATION

TRACKING

When he woke the lights were back on. The engineers office that he had holed up in was brightly lit by the overhead arclights.

He sat and took inventory. He had the chocolate he had found and two bottles of water. He also had a bunch of drawings of monsters. He drank some water and ate two squares of chocolate then placed everything including the drawings into his kitbag.

Looking around his eyes fell on the terminal. He went around the desk and pulled the chair in and sat behind the terminal.

The system booted quickly. When it asked for a user name and passcode he drew his bag up onto his lap and took out a hackbox. This squat block of circuits and software had several wires that ended in clamps. He pulled the wire cabling up from beneath the terminal and located certain wires and clamped each in turn. The sharp metal teeth bite through the insulation on the wires and shortly the hackbox was connected to the system and started to work it's magic.

He got out his palmcoder and loaded up the interface for the hackbox. He entered the man's name into the hackbox and it began spitting out likely combinations of user name. Then the hackbox began testing likely usernames against every possible hexabase combination. It ran for twenty minutes before finally the prompt disappeared and the sysnet opened up before him.

The first thing he did was aquire a map of the facility. He found a floorplan and it was large and intricately complex, an organic creature more flesh and blood than steel and grease. He could not move the map to his palmcoder and so he studied the routes there on the terminal. He studied routes between here and warehouse and spindle. The elevators within the spindle went to every floor.

He sent out a query for more data. There must have been something about what this was there on the mainframe. However this time his rough intrusion had been found out. Seconds later and the terminal and identification certificates closed off. Not before he got something out. He looked at the downloaded file. It consisted of medical records for a single medical station over the last two months. He studied it. He played with the data a little but no fine tuning was necessary. It was clear and he typed the conclusion into his log.

MET 14-05 records indicate spike in non accidental injuries leading up to civil collapse. None reported in April

He retreived his hackbox and disconnected it from the cables and put it away. Then he stood and made his way to the door and he removed the deadbolt locks and then covered the sensor diode beside the door. It slid back into the wall and he slipped through into the corridor. With a glance behind him at the t-section he went the opposite direction towards storage.

Half the arclights out here had burned out during the surge. The compensater still drizzled smoke around the ceiling. The other half had not and the the corridor was wrapped in bands of dark, and light, which made the dark darker. 

Then the corridor opened out into an open area. The ceiling was further than a single floor permitted and along its edges were stairwells up to landings on the next floor. The opening was circular and the sides arced left and right around this bizzare node. He continued straight through the middle.

It was a dark place. He moved carefully and without sound. There was refuse lying underfoot and cluttering tabletops and around the base of potted trees. There was packaging and foam cups and rotted food.

He met a solitary figure in that soundless dark. It looked almost like a child. It stood against the wall with its eyes closed and as Even walked past it opened its eyes which glowed like two blue stars in the dark.

It whispered something and Even stopped.

What did you say.

Master it said again. Master. Then it closed its eyes again.