Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“You are correct,” Zula finally said. “She just picked up the expression from a movie or something.”

“You and Yuxia are just friends,” Csongor said with relief so evident that Zula felt her face heat up.

“Just friends who have known each other for all of, like, twenty-four hours,” Zula said.

“Ivanov believes otherwise,” Csongor said, “and he told Yuxia that if she made any trouble, he would do bad things to you.”

“Well,” Zula said, “that much might be true.”

Csongor didn’t enjoy hearing this.

“But even though Yuxia and I are not lovers,” Zula pointed out, “threatening me might still change the way she makes decisions.”

The door-counting Russian came back with a rough sketch. From this and the phone image of the front of the building, they were able to figure out which door would give access to the unit in question, supposing they knew whether it was on the fourth or the fifth floor. But there was no way to settle that question by looking at the building from the outside. The upshot was that the Troll probably lived in unit 405 or unit 505.

This seemed like excellent progress (if you wanted to look at it that way) to Zula, considering that they had been in the building for all of about twenty minutes. But it only seemed to make Ivanov more pissed off.

She stepped over to the large, rusty steel box that, as anyone could see from all the cables and conduits diving into it, served as the building’s main electrical panel. Its door was hanging askew. She kicked it open. Uncle John had taught her to keep her hands in her pockets when approaching mysterious electrical equipment. She did so now.

The panel sported an array of flat round objects with little windows in them. These were planted in round sockets. Some of these were empty, revealing screw threads and electrodes similar to lightbulb sockets. Most of them, though, were occupied by the little windowed buttons. These tended to be labeled with strips of paper on which Chinese characters had been written by hand.

“What are those?” Peter asked. He had followed her over.

“Fuses,” Zula said. “I’ve heard of them.”

“Instead of circuit breakers?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, I see where you’re going,” Peter said, with a rush of geek energy.

Zula hadn’t been going anywhere, just wandering around looking at stuff. She looked at Peter. He had pulled out his PDA again. “Yup,” he said, “I can still see Atheron.” He looked up at her brightly, then glanced back to see whether Sokolov and Ivanov were paying attention. They weren’t. He checked the PDA again and his faced clouded over. “Shit, I lost it. Signal’s really weak.”

Csongor had drawn closer, so Peter explained: “Zula and I did this before, up on the roof. Atheron is their WAP in the apartment. I can’t log on—they put a password on it—but I can see the signal. If we cut the power by pulling the fuse, it should go off the air.”

Csongor’s eyes flicked over to the fuse panel. “Each apartment has a unique fuse?”

“So it would seem,” Zula said. “Labeled in Chinese.”

“Can anyone here read Chinese numbers?”

“Sort of,” Zula said.

Ivanov came over and asked a question in Russian. His eyes jumped from Peter to the fuse panel to Zula as words poured out of Csongor. Peter added the caution that his PDA could not quite pick up Atheron from here in the cellar and so, with a lot more talking than really seemed necessary, the following arrangement was worked out. Most of the security consultants stayed in the cellar doing what they’d been doing the whole time anyway, which was tinkering with weapons and ammunition from the rod-and-reel cases and the coolers. Peter ascended partway up the stairs with the PDA, getting more centrally located in the building so that he could pick up a consistent signal from Atheron. Ivanov was sticking to Peter; he wanted to see this thing happen with his own eyes and so he would be looming over Peter’s shoulder through the entire experiment. Csongor remained at the base of the stairs where he could see and talk to Zula, who was stationed at the fuse panel, and Sokolov was in the stairwell somewhere between Csongor and Ivanov, so that he could exchange hand signals with both of them.

While all of this was being worked out, Zula prepared to bullshit her way through the project of reading, or pretending to be able to read, Chinese numerals.

The numbers actually mounted on the doors of the apartments were Arabic. But whatever electrician or custodian had labeled these fuses in the cellar had used the Chinese system.

Zero was a circle. One, two, and three were represented by the appropriate number of horizontal lines. Four could be remembered because it was a square with some extra stuff inside of it. Beyond that, however, the numerals were nonobvious. With a bit of help from Yuxia, she had been trying to learn them. In some contexts, where numbers were arranged in a predictable order, this was easy. Reading random numbers would have been impossible for her. The situation with this fuse box was somewhere between those extremes. At the top of the box she was seeing some labels that weren’t numbers at all—she guessed that they must say things like “cellar” or “laundry room.” Below that she began to see numbers that began with a single horizontal line, meaning 1, and after several of those she saw some with two horizontal lines, and after that a bunch with three lines, and so on. So it seemed that the fuses were laid out in a somewhat logical fashion according to floor and apartment number. But all of this was more in the nature of general trends than absolute rules; it was obvious that the building had been rewired several times and that available fuse sockets had been put to use willy-nilly. She had to carry out a kind of archaeological dig in her head to reconstruct how it had come to be this way. Toward the bottom of the panel she began to see the squarish character that meant four, and below that, the less obvious glyph that she was pretty sure meant five. So the fuse that would kill the Atheron signal was probably in the bottom half-dozen or so rows of the grid. But this was the part of the box that had been most heavily exploited by opportunistic rewirers in more recent decades and so there was a lot more noise and misdirection for her to sift through here.

“They are ready,” Csongor said. “You can begin pulling fuses.”

“Explain to them that the box is a mess, and it’s just going to take me a little bit longer to make sense of it.”

Csongor looked as if he really didn’t want to be the bearer of that message.

“If I just start pulling fuses indiscriminately,” Zula pointed out, “tenants are going to start coming down here to find out what’s wrong.”

Csongor went up the stairs and relayed that to Sokolov.

Zula was noticing that the newer circuits all had fuses in them but that several of the sockets for what she took to be fifth-floor apartments were vacant. She reckoned that empty sockets were probably a marker for vacant apartments. To discourage squatters and to prevent other tenants from pirating electricity, they would pull the fuse, thereby shutting off the power, to any unit that was not occupied. Scanning the whole panel, she saw that every floor had at least one or two vacant units but that they were most common on the fifth floor: not surprising since, in a building with no elevator, those were the least desirable apartments.

Her eye fell on a socket labeled with the character for 5, then 0, then the 5 character again; 505 was one of the two most likely candidates, the other being 405. But this socket didn’t have a fuse plugged into it.

She scanned up the panel until she found the sequence of characters that, she was fairly certain, represented 405. It had a fuse.