Chapter 10 - The Darkness of Sector 4
The interior of the drainage pipe was pitch black, forcing Julian and Sharda to crawl entirely by touch, their knees scraping against the ribbed metal ridges. The rhythmic thrumming of the incinerator core vibrated through the floor plates beneath them, growing louder and hotter with every foot they advanced.
"Julian, I can't breathe," Sharda gasped, her voice sounding small and terrified in the confined space. "The air is too thick down here."
"Keep moving," Julian urged back, his voice echoing ahead of her in the dark. "We're almost at the service hatch. I can feel the cold air from the air conditioning vent."
A few seconds later, Julian's hand struck a heavy iron latch. With a sharp metallic clang, he pushed outward, and a wave of chilled, sterile air hit their faces. They tumbled forward out of the pipe, landing hard on a smooth, polished linoleum floor.
Sharda coughed, wiping soot and dust from her eyes, and looked around. They weren't in a ruined basement. They were standing in a pristine, brightly lit server room lined with rows of towering black mainframe towers humming with blue LED lights.
"This... this isn't abandoned," Sharda whispered in disbelief, getting slowly to her feet.
"It's the secondary node," Julian said, walking purposefully toward a central computer terminal whose monitor glowed with a flashing red warning prompt: ARCHIVE PURGE AT 78%. "My dad said they kept a live mirror server off-site so the main facility in New York could never fully erase the records."
Sharda walked up beside him, staring at the complex lines of code scrolling down the black screen. "Can you stop the purge?"
"I have to enter the master override code," Julian replied, his small fingers hovering over the mechanical keyboard. "The date of the fire. September twelfth, twenty-twenty-one."
He began typing the numbers, each keystroke sounding unnaturally loud in the silent, chilled room.
S-I-P-9-1-2-2-0-2-1.
The screen flashed yellow for a moment, then displayed a new prompt: ENTER PRIMARY BIOMETRIC VERIFICATION.
Julian stared at the prompt, his hands suddenly freezing above the keys. "Biometric... it wants a thumbprint or a retinal scan."
"Use the key," Sharda suggested urgently, pointing to the silver key emblem hanging around Julian's neck. "Maybe it fits into the console port."
Julian quickly unclipped the chain, slipped the small silver piece into a concealed slot beneath the keyboard, and pressed it firmly into place.
The console beeped twice, a pleasant, melodic chime that seemed entirely out of place in the grim facility. A green progress bar appeared on the monitor: RESTORING CORE IDENTITY DATA... 12%... 15%...
Suddenly, the heavy steel security door at the far end of the server room hissed open with a loud pneumatic release, and a man stepped into the room holding a silenced pistol.
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"Nice try, kid," Arthur said smoothly, stepping into the blue glow of the mainframes with a cold grin. "Your father was always terrible at locking his back doors."
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