Читать книгу Fantastic Stories Presents: Science Fiction Super Pack #2 - Randall Garrett - Страница 7

By Allen M. Steele

Harold and Cindy were trying to find something to eat in the hotel kitchen when they were attacked by the cook.

Shortly after the refugees moved into the Wyatt-Centrum Airport, they’d divvied up the jobs necessary for their continued survival. Harold and the remaining desk clerk, Merle, had drawn the assignment of locating the hotel robots. That’s all they had to do; just find them, then tell Karl and Sharon, the two Minneapolis cops who’d taken shelter at the Wyatt-Centrum when their cruiser died on the street outside. The officers had their service automatics and a pump-action .12-gauge shotgun they’d taken from their car; unlike most of their equipment, the guns weren’t rendered inoperative. And they’d already discovered that an ordinary service robot could be taken out by a well-aimed gunshot; it was the big, heavy-duty ones that were hard to kill.

So Harold and Merle spent the second day after the blackout prowling the hotel’s ten floors. Merle knew where the robots normally operated, so they only needed to confirm their positions while avoiding being spotted, and once they’d located all the ‘bots Merle remembered, they returned to the pool and told the cops. Karl and Sharon made sure the barricades were secure, at least for the time being, then went up into the hotel and, moving from floor to floor, blew away all the ‘bots the civilians had found.

This search-and-destroy mission netted ten housekeepers, five custodians, two room-service waiters, and two security guards. According to Merle, that accounted for the hotel robots; this didn’t include the huge bellhop that killed two staff members and a guest before someone picked up a chair and used it to smash the robot’s CPU. That happened on the first day; most of the guests fled after that, along with most of the remaining staff. After that sweep, everyone thought all the ‘bots had been accounted for and destroyed.

By the end of the third day, the thirty-one people hiding in the Wyatt-Centrum’s cathedral-like atrium were down to the last few cans of the junk food a couple of them had scavenged from a convenience store a few blocks down the street. Nobody wanted to venture outside, though – it had become too dangerous to leave the hotel — and the cops were reluctant to tear down the plywood boards they’d had nailed across the ground-level doors and windows. So when Cindy asked Harold if he’d mind coming along while she checked out the kitchen — “It can’t all be fresh food,” she’d said. “They must have some canned stuff, too.” – she didn’t have to twist his arm very hard.

Hunger wasn’t the only reason why he went with her, though. Truth was, he wanted to get into Cindy’s pants. Sure, she was at least twenty years younger and he was married besides, but Harold been eyeing her for the past three days. Only that morning, he hadn’t entirely turned his back when she’d taken a bath in the atrium swimming pool, As afraid as he was of dying, he was even more afraid of dying without having sex one last time. Such are the thought processes of the condemned. Perhaps he wouldn’t get a chance to knock boots with her during this foray, but at least he’d be able to show off my machismo by escorting her through the lightness kitchen. That was the general idea, anyway ... but before he got a chance to nail Cindy, that goddamn ‘bot nearly nailed them instead.

Unfortunately, when Harold visited the kitchen earlier, he and Merle had neglected to check the big walk-in refrigerator. It wasn’t entirely his fault; the two cooks they’d found attacked them the moment they pushed open the door, forcing a hasty retreat. Those were the first robots the cops had neutralized, and Merle believed they were the only ones in the kitchen. But he was wrong; a third ‘bot had been trapped in the fridge when the lights went out.

The walk-in was located in the rear of the kitchen, just a little farther than Harold had gone the first time he’d searched the room. They’d found a carton of breakfast cereal, which would be good for the kids, and Cindy was hoping for to find some milk that hadn’t spoiled yet. She’d just unlatched the chrome door handle, and he was standing just behind her, when they heard the sound everyone had come to dread the last few days:

Tick-tick… tick-tick-tick… tick … tick-tick-tick…

“Watch out!” Harold yelled, and an instant later something huge slammed through the door. Cindy was knocked to the floor; falling down was probably the only thing that saved her from having an eight-inch ice pick shoved into her chest.

The cook was nearly as large as the bellhop. A Lang LHC-14 may seem harmless when it’s stirring a vat of corned beef hash, but this one was hurtling toward them with a sharp metal spike clutched in its manipulator claw. And neither Harold or Cindy were armed.

“Get back, get back, get back!” Harold yelled, as if she really needed any encouragement. Cindy scuttled backward on hands, hips, and heels while he threw himself away from the refrigerator, losing his flashlight in his haste.

Even if he’d hadn’t dropped the light, though, he would have been able to see the cook. Red and green LEDs blinked across the front of its box-like body, the glow reflecting off the hooded stereoscopic lenses within its upper turret. As it trundled through the door on soft tandem tires, the turret swept back and forth, clicking softly as the lenses captured first Cindy, then Harold, then Cindy again. Mapping them, remembering their positions...

“Watch out! It’s gonna charge...!”

The turret snapped toward Harold as the ‘bot determined which human was closer. At that moment, his groping hands found the cold metal surface of something that moved: a dessert cart, complete with the molding remains of several cakes. Torture wagons, his wife called these things, and he was only too happy to one in a less metaphorical way. As the cook rushed him, he dropped the light, dodged behind the cart, grabbed its glass handle, and slammed it straight into the robot.

The impact dislodged the ice pick from the cook’s claw. As it hit the tile floor, he wrenched the cart backward, then shoved it forward again, harder this time. Harold was trying to knock it over, but the ‘bot had been designed for stability, bottom-heavy and with a low center of gravity. He was slowing it down, but he wasn’t stopping it.

The situation was both dangerous and absurd. The cook would trundle forward, its arms swinging back and forth, and Harold would ram the cart into it. The ‘bot would halt for a second, but as soon as he pulled the cart back, the machine would charge again, its claws missing his face by only a few inches. It might have been funny, but when Harold glanced over his shoulder, he saw in the shadowed illumination cast by the dropped flashlight that the cook was gradually backing him into a corner between a rack and a range grill. Dale was right: these things learned fast.

“Cindy! Get this friggin’ thing off me!”

He didn’t hear anything save for the incessant ticking, high-pitched whine of the ‘bot’s servos, and the loud clang of his cart ramming it again. A chocolate cake toppled off the wagon and was immediately pulverized by the cook’s wheels. He had the wild, hopeless hope that the icing would somehow screw it up, make it lose traction...

“Cindy..!” Damn it, had she abandoned him?

All at once, the robot’s turret did a one-eighty turn, its lenses snapping away from him as its motion detectors picked up movement from somewhere behind it. In that instant, Cindy dashed out of the darkness, something raised in both hands above her head. The robot started to swivel around, then a cast iron skillet came down on its turret and smashed its lenses.

Nice shot. Although the robot could still hear them, it was effectively blinded. While its claw lashed back and forth, trying to connect with one of them, Cindy beat on it with the skillet while Harold continued to slam it with the dessert cart.

“Hit it, hit it!”

“Get the claws!”

“Go for the top, the top!”

So forth and so on, until one last blow from Cindy’s skillet managed to skrag the CPU just beneath the upper turret. The LEDs went dark and the cook halted. The ticking stopped.

When Harold was sure that the cook was good and dead, he came out from behind the cart. Cindy was leaning against an island, breathing hard, skillet still clutched in her hand. She stared at him for a moment, then dropped the skillet. It hit the floor with a loud bang that echoed off the stainless steel surfaces around them.

“Thanks.” Harold sagged against a counter. “Tough, ain’t it?”

“Built to last.” Her cotton tank-top was damp with sweat, the nipples of her twenty-two-year old breasts standing out. “You okay?”

“I’m good.” Harold couldn’t stop staring at her. “You?”

Cindy slowly nodded. She brushed back her damp hair, then looked up at him. Even in the wan glow of the dropped flashlight, she must have seen something in his eyes that she didn’t like it at all.

“Fine. Just great.” She turned away from him. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”

Harold let out his breath. Looked like he wasn’t going to get laid after all, even if it was the end of the world.

*

Cindy tried to hide her irritation, but she was still quietly fuming when she and the other guy – what was his name? Harold? – returned to the atrium. She’d noticed the way he’d been watching her for the last couple of days, of course; men had been checking her out since she was fifteen, so she’d developed good radar for sexual attraction. Given the situation everyone was in, though, you’d think he’d have the common sense to put his impulses on hold. But for God’s sake, they barely escape being killed, and what’s the first thing he does? Stare at her tits.

Enough. Cindy had heard his dejected sigh as she picked up the carton of single-serving cereal boxes she’d found and left the kitchen. She could have cared less. It was times like these when she wondered whether she wouldn’t be better off being a lesbian.

By the time they reached the pool, though, she’d almost forgotten the incident. As soon as she and what’s-his-name walked in, the kids were all over them, jumping up and down in their excitement to see what she’d found. Cindy couldn’t help but smile as she carried the carton to the poolside terrace and put it down on a table. There were a half-dozen children among the refugees, the youngest a four-year-old boy and the oldest a twelve-year-old girl, and none of them seemed to mind that they didn’t have any milk to go with the Cheerios and Frosted Flakes she handed out. Even kids can get tired of Spam and candy bars if that’s all they’ve had to eat for three days.

Once they’d all received a box of cereal, Cindy took the rest to the cabana room she was sharing with Officer McCoy. She’d never thought that she’d welcome having a cop as a roommate, but Sharon was pretty cool; besides, sleeping in the same room as a police officer assured that she wouldn’t be bothered by any horny middle-aged guys who’d holed up in the Wyatt-Centrum.

Sharon was dozing on one of the twin beds when Cindy came in. She’d taken off her uniform shirt and was sleeping in her sports bra, her belt with its holstered gun, taser, and baton at her side. She opened her eyes and watched as Cindy carefully closed the door behind her, making sure that she didn’t accidentally knock aside the pillow they’d been using as a doorstop. With the power out and even the emergency generator offline, there was nothing to prevent the guest room doors from automatically locking if they closed all the way.

“Find some food?” Sharon asked.

“A little. Ready for dinner?”

Sharon sat up to peer into the carton put down beside her. “That all? Couldn’t you find something else?”

“Sorry. Didn’t have a chance to look.” Cindy told her about the cook. Sharon’s expression didn’t change, but Cindy figured that cops were usually poker-faced when it came to that sort of thing. And she left out the part about what’s-his-name. No point in complaining about that; they had worse things to worry about.

“Well … anyway, I’m glad you made it back alive.” Sharon selected a box of Cheerios, but didn’t immediately open it. One of the hand-held radios the cops had borrowed from the hotel lay on the desk; their own cell radios no longer worked, forcing them to use the older kind. Sharon picked it up and thumbed the Talk button. “Charlie Baker Two, Charlie Baker One. How’s everything looking?”

A couple of seconds went by, then Officer Overby’s voice came over. “Charlie Baker Two. 10-24, all clear.”

“Ten-four. Will relieve you in fifteen minutes. Out.” Sharon put down the radio, then nodded to the smartphone that lay on the dresser. “What’s happening there? Any change?”

Cindy picked up her phone, ran her finger down its screen. The phone would become silent once the charge ran down, but there was still a little bit of red on the battery icon. She pressed the volume control, and once again they heard the only sound it made:

Tick … tick-tick … tick-tick-tick-tick … tick … tick-tick…

Like a cheap stopwatch that skipped seconds. That wasn’t what she immediately noticed, though, but instead the mysterious number that appeared on its screen: 4,576,036,057, a figure that decreased by one with each tick.

For the last three days, Cindy’s phone had done nothing else but tick irregularly and display a ten-digit number that changed every second or so. What these things signified, she had no clue, but everyone else’s phones, pads, and laptops had been doing the same thing ever since the blackout.

It started the moment she was standing on the curb outside the airport, flagging down a cab while at same time calling her friend in St. Paul to tell her that she’d arrived. That was when the phone suddenly went dead. Thinking that her call had been dropped, she’d pulled the phone from her ear, glanced at the screen … and heard the first weird ticks coming from it.

She was still staring at the numbers which had appeared on the LCD display when the cab that was about pull up to the curb slammed into the back of a shuttle bus. A few seconds later, the pavement shook beneath her feet and she heard the rolling thunder of an incoming airliner crashing on the runway and exploding. That was how it all began...

Cindy glanced at her watch. Nearly 6 pm. Perhaps the atrium would cool down a little once the mid-summer sun was no longer resting on the skylight windows. Unfortunately, the coming night would also mean that the robots would have an easier time tracking anyone still outside; their infrared vision worked better than their normal eyes, someone had explained to her. Probably Dale. He seemed to know a lot about such things.

Almost as if she’d read her mind, Sharon looked up from strapping on her belt. “Oh, by the way … Dale asked me to tell you that he’d like to see you.”

Cindy was halfway to the bathroom; its door was closed against the stench of an unflushed toilet. She stopped and turned around. “Dale? Did he say why?”

“You said you’re carrying a satphone, didn’t you? He’d like to borrow it.”

“Yeah, why not?” Cindy shrugged. “We won’t get anyone with it. I’ve already tried to call my folks in Boston.”

“I told him that, but …” Sharon finished buttoning her shirt. “C’mon. I’d like to see what he’s got in mind.”

Dale’s cabana was on the other side of the pool. Like Cindy, he was rooming with a cop: Karl Overby, Sharon’s partner. In his case, though, it was a matter of insistence. Cindy didn’t know much about him other than that he worked for some federal agency, he knew a lot about computers, and his job was important enough that he requested – demanded, really – that he stay with police officer. Dale was pleasant enough — he faintly resembled Cindy’s old high school math teacher, whom she’d liked — but he’d been keeping a certain distance from everyone else in the hotel.

“Cindy, hi.” Dale looked up from the laptop on his desk when she knocked on the room’s half-open door. “Thanks for coming over. I’ve got a favor to ask. Do you…?”

“Have a satphone? Sure.” It was in the backpack Cindy had carried with her on the plane. She’d flown to Minneapolis to hook up with an old college roommate for a camping trip in the lakes region, where cell coverage was spotty and it wasn’t smart to be out in the woods with no way to contact anyone. “Not that it’s going to do you any good.”

Dale didn’t seem to hear the last. “So long as it’s battery isn’t dead —” a questioning look; Cindy shook her head “—I might be able to hook it up to my laptop through their serial ports. Maybe I can get through to someone.”

“I don’t know how.” Sharon leaned against the door. “Internet’s gone down. My partner and I found that out when we tried to use our cruiser laptop.” She nodded at the digits on Dale’s laptop. “We just got that, same as everyone else.”

“Yes, well…” Dale absently ran a hand through thinning brown hair. “The place I want to try is a little better protected than most.”

“Where’s that, sir? The Pentagon?” Sharon’s demeanor changed; she was a cop again, wanting a straight answer to a straight question. “You showed us a Pentagon I.D. when you came over here from the airport. Is that where you work?”

“No. That’s just a place I sometimes visit. My job is somewhere else.” Dale hesitated, then he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Opening it, he removed a laminated card and showed it to Sharon. “This is where I work.”

Cindy caught a glimpse of the card. His photo was above his name, Dale F. Heinz, and at the top of the card was National Security Agency. She had only the vaguest idea of what that was, but Sharon was obviously impressed.

“Okay. You’re NSA.” Her voice was very quiet. “So maybe you know what’s going on here.”

“That’s what I’d like find out. Tonight, once we’ve gone upstairs to a balcony room.”

*

Minneapolis was dying.

From the balcony of a concierge suite – the only tenth-floor room whose door wasn’t locked – the city was a dark expanse silhouetted by random fires. No lights in the nearby industrial park, and the distant skyscrapers were nothing but black, lifeless shapes looming in the starless night. Sharon thought there ought to be the sirens of first-responders – police cruisers, fire trucks, ambulances – but she heard nothing but an occasional gunshot. The airport was on the other side of the hotel, so she couldn’t tell where the jet which had crashed there was still ablaze. Probably not, and if its fire had spread from the runway to the hangers or terminals, those living in the Wyatt-Centrum would have known it by now; the hotel was only a mile away.

A muttered obscenity brought her back to the balcony. Dale was seated at a sofa end-table they’d dragged through the sliding door; his laptop lay open upon it, connected to Cindy’s satphone. He’d hoped to get a clear uplink once he was outside, and a top floor balcony was the safest place to do this. And it appeared to have worked; gazing over his shoulder, Sharon saw that the countdown had disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by the NSA seal.

“You got through.” Cindy stood in the open doorway, holding a flashlight over Dale’s computer. The satphone belonged to her, so she’d insisted on coming along. Sharon had, too, mainly because Dale might need protection. After the incident in the kitchen, there was no telling how many ‘bots might still be active in the hotel, as yet undiscovered.

“I got there, yeah … but I’m not getting in. Look” Dale’s fingers ran across the keyboard, and a row of asterisks appeared in the password bar. He tapped the Enter key; a moment later, Access Denied appeared beneath the bar. “That was my backdoor password. It locked out my official one, too.”

“At least you got through. That’s got to count for something, right?”

Dale quietly gazed at the screen, absently rubbing his lower lip. “It does,” he said at last, “but I don’t like it means.”

He didn’t say anything else for a moment or two. “Want to talk about it?” Sharon asked. “We’ve got a right to know, don’t you think?”

Dale slowly let out his breath. “This isn’t just any government website. It belongs to the Utah Data Center, the NSA’s electronic surveillance facility in Bluffdale, Utah.” He glanced up at Sharon. “Ever heard of it?”

“Isn’t that the place where they bug everyone’s phone?”

“That’s one way of putting it, yeah. Bluffdale does more than that, though … a lot more. They’re tapped into the entire global information grid. Not just phone calls … every piece of email, every download, every data search, every bank transaction. Anything that’s transmitted or travels down a wire gets filtered through this place.”

“You gotta be kidding.” Harold appeared in the doorway behind Cindy, apparently having found the restroom he’d been searching for. He’d tagged along as well, saying that Sharon might need help if they ran into any more ‘bots. Sharon knew that this was just an excuse to attach himself to Cindy, but didn’t say anything. Her roommate knew how to keep away from a wolf … and indeed, she left the doorway and squeezed in beside Dale, maintaining a discrete distance from the annoying salesman.

“Not at all. There’s two and half acres of computers there with enough processing power to scan a yottabyte of information every second. That’s like being able to read 500 quintillion pages.”

Harold gave a low whistle. “All right, I understand,” Sharon said. “But what does that have to do with us?”

The legs of Dale’s chair scraped against concrete as he turned half-around to face her and the others. “Look … something has shut down the entire electronic infrastructure, right? Electricity, cars, phones, planes, computers, robots … everything networked to the grid was knocked down three days ago. And then, almost immediately after that, every part connected to the system that’s mobile and capable of acting independently … namely, the robots … came back online, but now with only one single purpose. Kill any human they encounter.”

“Give me another headline,” Harold said drily. “I think I might have missed the news.”

“Hush.” Cindy glared at him and he shut up.

“The only other thing that still functions are networked electronics like smartphones and laptops … stuff that runs on batteries. But they don’t do anything except display a number and make a ticking sound just like the robots do. And that number seems to decrease by one every time there’s a tick.”

“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Cindy said. “It began the moment my cell phone dropped out.”

Dale gave her a sharp look. “You were on the phone when the blackout happened?” Cindy nodded. “Do you happen to remember what the number was when it first appeared on your phone screen?”

“Sort of … it was seven billion and something.”

“About seven and half billion, would you say?” Dale asked. She nodded again, and he hissed beneath his breath. “That’s what I thought it might be.”

“What are you getting at?” Sharon asked, although she had a bad feeling that she already knew.

“The global population is approximately seven and a half billion.” Dale’s voice was very low. “At least, that’s about how many people were alive on Earth three days ago.”

Sharon felt a cold snake slither into the pit of her stomach. A stunned silence settled upon the group. Her ears picked up low purring sound from somewhere in the distance, but it was drowned out when both Cindy and Harold started speaking at once.

“But … but why …?”

“What the hell are you …?”

“I don’t know!” Dale threw up his hands in exasperation. “I can only guess. But —” he nodded toward the laptop “—the fact that the most secure computer system in the world is still active but not letting anyone in tells me something. This isn’t a cyberattack, and I don’t think a hacker or terrorist group is behind it either.” He hesitated. “I think … I think it may have come out of Bluffdale.”

Sharon stared at him. “Are you saying the NSA did this?”

“No … I’m saying the NSA’s computers might have done this.” Dale shook his head. “They always said the day might come when the electronic world might become self-aware, start making decisions on its own. Maybe that’s what happening here, with Bluffdale as the source.”

The purring sound had become a low buzz. Sharon ignored it. “But why would it start killing people? What would that accomplish?”

“Maybe it’s decided that seven and a half billion people are too many and the time has come to pare down the population to more … well, more sustainable numbers.” Dale shrugged. “It took most of human history for the world to have just one billion people, but just another two hundred for there to be six billion, and only thirty after that for it to rise seven and a half billion. We gave Bluffdale the power to interface with nearly everything on planet, and a mandate to protect national security. Maybe it’s decided that the only certain way to do is to…”

“What’s that noise?” Harold asked.

The buzzing had become louder. Even as Sharon turned to see where the sound was coming from, she’d finally recognized it for what it was. A police drone, the civilian version of the airborne military robots used in Central America and the Middle East. She’d become so used to seeing them making low-attitude surveillance sweeps of Minneapolis’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods that she had disregarded the sound of its push-prop engine.

That was a mistake.

For a moment or two, she saw nothing. Then she caught a glimpse of firelight reflecting off the drone’s bulbous nose and low-swept wings. It was just a few hundred feet away and heading straight for the balcony.

“Down!” she shouted, and then she threw herself headfirst toward the door. Harold was in her way. She tackled him like a linebacker and hurled him to the floor. “Get outta there!” she yelled over her shoulder as they scrambled for cover.

They’d barely managed to dive behind a couch when the drone slammed into the hotel.

*

Afterwards, Harold reckoned he was lucky to be alive. Not just because Officer McCoy had thrown him through the balcony door, but also because the drone’s hydrogen cell was almost depleted when it made its kamikaze attack. So there hadn’t been an explosion which might have killed both of them, nor a fire that would have inevitably swept through the Wyatt-Centrum.

But Cindy was dead, and so was Dale. The cop’s warning hadn’t come in time; the drone killed them before they could get off the balcony. He later wondered if it had simply been random chance that it’s infrared night vision had picked up four human figures and homed in on them, or if the Bluffdale computer had backtracked the satphone link from Dale’s laptop and dispatched the police drone to liquidate a possible threat. He’d never know, and it probably didn’t matter anyway.

Harold didn’t know Dale very well, but he missed Cindy more than he thought he would. He came to realize that his attraction to her hadn’t been purely sexual; he’d liked her, period. He wondered if his wife was still alive, and reflected on the fact that he’d only been three hours from home when his car went dead on a side street near the hotel. He regretted all the times he’d cheated on her when he’d been on the road, and swore to himself that, if he lived through this and she did, too, he’d never again pick up another woman.

The drone attack was the last exciting thing to happen to him or anyone else in the hotel for the next couple of days. They loafed around the atrium pool like vacationers who didn’t want to go home, scavenging more food from the kitchen and going upstairs to break into vending machines, drinking bottled water, getting drunk on booze stolen from the bar. Harold slept a lot, as did the others, and joined poker games when he was awake. He volunteered for a four-hour shift at the lobby barricades, keeping a sharp eye out for roaming robots. He saw nothing through the peep-holes in the plywood boards except a few stray dogs and some guy pushing a shopping cart loaded with stuff he’d probably looted from somewhere.

Five days after the blackout, nearly all the phones, pads, and laptop computers in the hotel were dead, their batteries and power packs drained. But then Officer McCoy, searching Cindy’s backpack for an address book she could use to notify the late girl’s parents, discovered another handy piece of high-tech camping equipment: a photovoltaic battery charger. Cindy had also left behind her phone; it hadn’t been used since her death, so its battery still retained a whisker of power. Officer McCoy hooked the phone up to the recharger and placed them on a table in the atrium, and before long they had an active cell phone.

Its screen remained unchanged, except that the number was much lower than it had been two days ago. It continued to tick, yet the sound was increasingly sporadic; sometimes as much as a minute would go by between one tick and the next. By the end of the fifth day, a few people removed some boards and cautiously ventured outside. They saw little, and heard almost nothing; the world had become quieter and much less crowded.

Although Harold decided to remain at the Wyatt-Centrum until he was positive that it was safe to leave, the cops decided that their presence was no longer necessary. The hotel’s refugees could fend for themselves, and the city needed all the cops they could get. Before Officer McCoy left, though, she gave him Cindy’s phone so he could keep track of its ticking, slowly decreasing number.

In the dark hours just before dawn of the sixth day, Harold was awakened by light hitting his eyes. At first he thought it was morning sun coming in through the skylight, but then he opened his eyes and saw that the bedside table lamp was lit. An instant later, the wall TV came on; it showed nothing but fuzz, but nonetheless it was working.

The power had returned. Astonished, he rolled over and reached for Cindy’s cellphone. It no longer ticked, yet its screen continued to display a number, frozen and unchanging:

1,000,000,000.