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Chapter Twenty-Five

2-1: [F3]

Protestations aside, Molly’s perfectly capable of riding the bike provided by the Muses. After a few initial wobbles, she pulls out ahead of Max.

The wi-fi router and a battery pack rests in the basket on her handlebars. They pedal single file down lonely, once-commercial streets. They come to a grim industrial park, buildings smashed open and looted bare, with nobody even to sweep away the broken glass scattered across the oil-stained parking lots.

They hurry through the neighborhood and pass into a residential district. Deathly quiet here too, and somehow sadder to be amidst row after row of abandoned houses.

“Look!” Molly says, pointing out a chimney from which a thin streamer of smoke curls. She slows her bike as they pass, but the hardware doesn’t pick up even a blip of a signal.

“I wonder who lives there,” Molly says.

“I wonder how they live there,” Max says.

Around the corner they discover part of the answer: every tree has been roughly chainsawed down to a stump. “I’d hate to cook my food on green wood,” Max comments. But there’s no signal, so they move on.

Max soon loses count of how many of these streets they’ve traversed. They all start to look the same. “We’ve gone down this street already,” he tells Molly.

“No, I’d remember it,” she says.

And so on.

Soon the sun sinks close to the horizon. “Maybe we should pack up before it gets too dark,” Molly says.

Good point. It’s not safe to return to the camp. That being the case, where are they going to find a place to sleep? “Do you think the Muses would let us crash for the night at their place?”

“I hope not,” Molly says. “I don’t like crashes.”

“No, I mean sleep,” Max says.

“Oh.” She looks deep in thought. “I don’t know. That’s never come up before. I’m pretty sure they don’t sleep.”

“Wouldn’t hurt to ask, I guess,” Max says.

They double back toward the Muses’ abode, taking an unexplored street that’s not too far out of the way. This street holds an uneasy mixture of residential condos and businesses at random intervals. One is a Mexican restaurant, the sign all but falling apart, still advertising their specialty margaritas. A little farther down the street is a professional building, one that looks like it might have held a dental office or chiropractor once upon a time.

With the last glimmer of sun nearly gone, Max decides that even if the Muses don’t offer them a place to sleep, he’d be happy to collapse there on the asphalt.

“Three bars!” Molly shrieks. “We found something!”

Max skids to a stop and looks around. They’ve just passed an office building and are in front of a abandoned house. “Here?” Max asks. “Or back there?”

“The office building,” Molly says. She takes the router in hand and dashes the bike into a heap on the sidewalk. Max hurries after her.

But as he approaches the building and the fractally-cracked parking lot, he freezes. There’s something different about this place. Something just doesn’t feel right.

His whole head buzzes. There’s something in the air, a bad smell, like something burning.

The door’s locked, glass intact, but even in the dim light, it’s obvious the place has been trashed. But how did looters get in? “Sure this is the place?” Max asks.

Molly checks the router, walking along the sidewalk in front of the building. “Strongest here,” she says. “How do we get in?”

Max rattles the door. “Why didn’t anyone break the windows yet? There’s got to be some way in. Maybe around the back?”

A trip around the back proves unfruitful. The only way in or out is through the front. Max rests his head against the glass. “What’s the worst that could happen if we break the window?”

“You could get cut pretty bad,” Molly says.

Max straightens up, in so doing leans against the door, which moves an extra inch with a mechanical click. He runs his hand along the inside of the door. His fingers find a tiny button, which depresses under the slightest pressure. And the door swings freely open. “Well, then,” Max says, swinging the door all the way open. “That’s not creepily convenient at all. After you.”

They enter. Not visible from outside: a lock like the one from the apartment, with a lid shut over the green LEDs to make them less conspicuous. Max flicks it open, and it reads: PS ACTIVE 2528mA.

They’re in a reception area, the floor covered with a sensible light-industrial carpet. About half a dozen black chairs and the ruins of a water dispenser litter the room. Max kicks aside a scattering of decade-old magazines. An angled counter divides the space, and behind that, several rows of open filing shelves sit piled with garbage. Something about this place seems familiar.

“I think this might have been a doctor’s office,” Molly says.

“Was it?” Max asks. It’s hard to imagine this space clean and well-lit. Was this building set up originally as a router station, or modified after-the-fact?

Even in the pale green light, Max makes out a look on Molly’s face. “Yeah. This was my doctor,” she says.

Molly used to go here for treatment? She was about the same age, maybe a year younger, so she couldn’t have been more than five-ish at the time. Was her memory that accurate?

For that matter, were Max’s own memories reliable? Why did Hadley Root keep appearing in connection with the trophy hunt? To what end? How far in advance had plans been laid that were playing out only now? The pile of questions seems like an intractable nest of tangled vipers.

“Check this signal again,” Max says. “In case my dad is near.”

Molly gets that little wrinkle between her eyebrows. “Your dad?”

“The node. I said, check the signal to see if the node is near.”

“I’m pretty sure you said…” She looks away, then fiddles with the antennae on the router. “The node is close.” She walks around the room, comparing readings. “I can’t get a direction. “It’s really close.”

“Let’s check the rooms one-by-one,” Max says. “We’re looking for something…well, something with antennas that look a lot like that.” He indicates the router.

Molly picks up a flashlight collecting dust on the floor, but it doesn’t light. “Batteries,” she says. She takes the lock, shining its sickly green light out ahead of them. It’s not much, but better than the draping darkness of the back rooms.

Immediately behind the reception desk is an office with a large desk. There may have been a potted plant here once, if the scattered dirt and mold on the carpet is any indicator. There’s still a crooked picture barely hanging on the wall, of an ancient-looking guy with a beard and toga. But nothing at all that looks remotely like the nodes they’ve seen so far.

“This is just the first room,” Max says. “Let’s keep looking.”

The narrow hallway leads to four other examination rooms, two on each side. The first one has trash piled knee-high. A set of floor-to-ceiling cabinets had been completely raided, everything thrown about the room.

“I think people might have been looking for drugs,” Molly notes.

“I’ve never heard of drugs being kept in the exam rooms,” Max says.

“Nobody said looters were far up on the intelligence scale,” Molly says.

“Points. And to be fair,” Max says, “I’ve never heard of routers being placed in exams rooms either.” Indeed, there’s nothing on the wall except a peeling poster advertising some blood pressure medication.

Max and Molly proceed through the other three exam rooms, finding much the same. A small supply closet seems promising at first, but that too ends up being a bust.

“Check the signal again,” Max says.

Molly does so. “It’s right on top of us,” she says. A blue light on the router in her hands begins blinking rapidly.

“What’s that mean?” Max asks.

“A key exchange window is about to open. We’ve got about a minute,” Molly says.

“We can just connect from here, right?” Max asks.

“It won’t work,” Molly says. “The Muses showed me. Nodes have an additional safeguard. A physical button needs to be pressed about once every week to keep them activated. It’s a safeguard against remote network storms.”

“Great,” Max says. “If you were a wireless access node, where would you hide yourself in a doctor’s office?”

“First, do no harm,” Molly says.

“What?”

“That’s what Doctor Ariely used to say constantly,” Molly says.

“Doctor Ariely? This was his practice?” Max says. “I’ve heard that quote before.”

“It’s part of the Hippocratic Oath^[18]. All doctors take it,” Molly says.

“The picture in the office,” Max says.

They both head back to the office. The picture bears the caption “Hippocrates.” Max slides his fingers behind the frame. “It’s warm.” He carefully unhooks it from the wall.

Behind the artwork is the hardware for a node. It doesn’t look like what they’ve seen before. This one is a naked circuit board, far smaller, and flatter to fit in the narrow gap behind the frame. A pair of wires snakes out from it to connect to the metal frame. “Okay, so the antenna is bigger than I thought,” Max says.

“Hurry, push the button!” Molly says.

“I don’t see a button,” Max says, frustration mingling with anger.

Molly reaches past him and mashes her finger against a copper trace on the board that looks like intertwined spirals.

Another LED on the circuit board winks on.

In Max’s HUD, a new message pops up.

HELP.

footnotes

[18] Then again, Hippocrates also said, “A physician without a knowledge of Astrology has no right to call himself a physician,” so there’s that.

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