C James - Dome Six

“I’ll take care of your class,” he assured her.

Tosh had little choice but to get in the vehicle.

The guards took her all the way to Downing’s office without passing anyone and found the door open a crack. He noticed them there and nodded.

“Thank you, that will be all. Close the door behind you, Toshiko. Sorry to pull you from your class. Education is so important.”

“What do you want?” she said.

“Please,” he said, gesturing to the chair. “Take a load off. I know you’re on your feet all day.”

“I’ll stand.”

He smirked. “If memory serves, your father wasn’t much for sitting either.”

“Why am I here?” Tosh asked.

“A great deal of IDA’s data has been corrupted somehow. It needs to be restored from the backup.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” she asked.

“Turns out you’re the only one in the city who knows their way around IDA’s core systems.”

“I haven’t been in those systems for 15 years. Even then, I was only there to help Art, and the Authority just put him in the Box,” Tosh said.

“Are you saying IDA is mistaken?”

“I’m saying I’m not doing it. I’m not even a technician.”

“We arrested your brother for sabotage and theft,” he said, pausing to enjoy watching that news wash over her. “The evidence is very compelling.”

Of course Hideki would put her in this spot. She narrowed her eyes. “What are you saying?”

He rose and paced around his office, arms folded behind his back, relishing the fact he held the cards. “In this society, order is everything. People need to have faith in our institutions and our technology. If that breaks down…”

“I preach your bullshit all day, remember?”

“Do you? Because IDA tells me a very different story.”

Her skin turned to ice. “What are you talking about?”

“History is written by the victors. I like that. But the bit about people needing more than to just survive, well… that’s a little naive, don’t you think?”

Being careful with her choice of words might fool IDA, but it wouldn’t fool Downing. Especially if he was just listening in on her class.

He had her right where he wanted her — scared and helpless. There was only one card to play.

“Get my son out of the Towers. Wherever he wants.”

“This is not a negotiation,” he said.

“Then find someone else.”

It was a ballsy play. It felt oddly good to make it though it was hard not to break down.

“If you restore the data, I’ll see about getting your kid out of the Towers.”

“Lead the way,” Tosh said.

Being alone on an elevator with Downing made her skin crawl, but he only stared at the door while it descended. It came to a gentle stop and the doors opened into a short hallway. Downing led her to the airlock, where a downward blast of air cleared dust and dirt from their bodies. After a minute, the door rotated open and dumped them out into the Nexus.

The Nexus had mythical status. Everyone knew it existed yet, like the Box, basically no one had ever seen it. But she and Art had.

It was larger than she remembered. The volume of data processed and stored here was unfathomable. Effectively, it represented the living memory of the Dome — a century’s worth.

“So, what happened?” Tosh asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Data doesn’t corrupt itself.”

“I don’t know.”

Tosh didn’t believe that for a second, but she didn’t press the issue. She’d know soon enough what happened. “I need the terminal.”

One good shove and Downing would fall into the pool of coolant and freeze to death. Of course, that might raise the temperature enough to fry the processors, and if IDA failed, the whole Dome would soon follow.

A black column rose from the floor. Downing stuck his hand inside so the system could read his DNA.

“Good afternoon, Director,” IDA said. “Hello, Toshiko.”

“IDA, open the terminal.”

“Yes, Director.”

Tosh heard a low hum from somewhere below. One of the submerged black columns rose out of the coolant, which cascaded off the sides before drying instantly. A panel silently slid aside, and a small terminal unfolded in front of her.

When Tosh was an apprentice to Art, she rarely got to do any heavy lifting. Mostly they worked on patches or glitchy systems like the commuter trains. The consequences of a mistake were usually minuscule, but this was like doing brain surgery on the Dome itself.

“IDA, what’s the magnitude of the data corruption?” she asked.

“Three point two one petabytes,” IDA said.

She gasped and turned to Downing with her mouth hanging open. “Three petabytes? What did you do?”

“Watch yourself, Toshiko,” he warned.

Tosh sighed. “Where’s the backup? I need to know which node to open.”

“The Nucleus,” said Downing.

“What?”

“Only the outside is stone. The inside is all storage.”

Of course. The Nucleus was sacred — no one would ever do anything to it and the stones would act like heat sinks. It was smart.

“The Nucleus it is,” Tosh said, and stepped up to the terminal.

Downing said, “No tricks. Talk me through everything you’re doing.”

She cracked her knuckles and stepped forward. The screen came alive and displayed a visualization of the network architecture. She panned and zoomed around it a moment just to reacquaint herself with the interface.

“The data flows one way by default, like a valve,” she explained. “I need to grant temporary write access to the backup system while the data transfers, then turn it off again when it’s done.”

“Fine,” Downing said.

She accessed the subroutines that directed the flow of data. Every person’s CHIT had a discrete address, as did every terminal and interface. Each piece of data could be traced back to its precise origin, going back to the Originals.

That gave her an idea.

“The only way that much data gets corrupted is if a subroutine is constantly overwriting it. If I can’t see where it originated, it’ll just happen again.”

“I ran a diagnostic and IDA said a bunch of data got corrupted. That’s all I know.”

That had to be a lie. Why would Downing be running diagnostics? In fact, what business did he have in the Nexus at all? He must have mucked it himself because he didn’t know what he was doing, and now he needed her to rescue him.

“I need to run a diagnostic on the database itself,” Tosh said, checking over her shoulder. “It’s the only way to identify the faulty subroutine.”

He nodded for her to proceed. She navigated a series of screens and menus and noted that the corrupted data was location-related — same as the last time. Then, as now, human error was likely to blame.

Tosh zipped so quickly through menus and typed commands so fast that Downing had no idea she opened a socket to her own unit.

“Wait, what did you just do?” he asked.

“I ran a simple regression algorithm to find the point where the corruption started. See? It’s right… here.”

The date of the last correct processing cycle coincided with the Exchanger failure. If Downing saw it, he made no indication. She flipped to the next screen and immediately found the problem.

“These two characters got transposed somehow,” she said, making the correction.

“How does that happen?” he inquired.

“Ghost in the machine, I guess,” she said. Or a clumsy attempt to cover your tracks . “There. The code’s fixed. Now we just need to grant the node write access to main storage.”