Kyle Kirkland - Sandbagging

Quinton silently crept along the dark hallway until he reached the door to the projection booth, but before he could slip inside, Mark emerged from the shadows. The two graduate students glared at each other, their faces barely visible in the dim glow of a light strip. Faint voices leaked through the door to the projection booth—the secret faculty meeting in the conference room had begun.

“We seem to have had the same idea,” said Mark.

Quinton nodded. It had happened often in the year and two months since Quinton enrolled in the biophysics program at the University for Advanced Research. Although he and his chief rival had more or less observed a truce since classes had been canceled indefinitely, Quinton had not forgotten the sometimes-messy battles they’d fought. Ideas fueled careers, but ideas were easily stolen. Mark had sticky fingers.

“There’s room for two in the projection booth,” said Quinton.

“It’s locked,” said Mark, moving to block the doorway. “How do you propose to get in?”

“With the keypad. I’ll show you if you step aside.”

Noise from the conference room intensified. People were raising their voices.

Mark didn’t move. The dim light strip, already beginning to flicker and die, washed out the color of Mark’s shoulder-length auburn hair and gave his face a veiny, bluish tint. Quinton’s southern tan had long since faded; now, with his dark hair and pale complexion, he had a gothic, cloistered appearance.

“How do you know the code?” asked Mark. “The projectionist left a week ago.”

“He gave me the code before he went. In case we needed to use it before he returned.”

Mark shook his head. “He knew he wasn’t coming back. He was headed for the really bad part of town. I’ll bet you didn’t try to talk him out of it. You wanted the code—”

“If you’ll let me get to the keypad,” prompted Quinton. When Mark finally moved, Quinton punched the numbers. Mark watched closely.

Too bad for you, thought Quinton, that the projectionist also told me how to change the code. It won’t be the same tomorrow.

The deadbolt whirred. As the door unlatched, Quinton wondered how Mark had intended to get inside. Out of the corner of his eye, Quinton saw Mark quietly lay a thick screwdriver against the wall. Typical, thought Quinton. Brute force approach.

Quinton pushed the door.

“Don’t open it so wide,” said Mark. He nudged Quinton inside and quickly closed the door. The cramped booth was dark, but the stark light from the conference room fluorescents streamed in through the plate glass at the front of the booth. “They could have seen the door move. You might as well announce we’re here while you’re at it.”

Quinton saw that he was right. “Sorry,” he mumbled. He crouched in the midst of racks of audiovisual equipment, along with a useless computer that hadn’t been touched in weeks. The Internet routers were the first things that DCC had crippled, isolating every computer in the world.

The voices became more distinct. Quinton and Mark leaned against the forward wall, just beneath the glass. When Quinton put his ear against the clapboard, he heard Professor Borden Timms saying, “…can’t change the past, we have to deal with the present.”

The comment didn’t go over well with the other faculty. A farrago of angry voices erupted.

Quinton recognized another voice breaking through the din. “This is what happens,” shouted emeritus Professor Grange, “when you put a machine in charge. It’s murder, nothing short of murder. Don’t call it downsizing.”

Raised voices.

Grange’s booming voice overrode the others. “…don’t care what that machine says. It’s murder.”

More shouting.

Quinton found his breathing had become labored. Not enough air? No, he thought. He was just scared.

Chairman Timms restored order. “Terminology isn’t important. Yes, it’s infuriating, but it’s also irrelevant. We need to focus on how we should respond. And what we should tell the students and staff.”

“My God,” whispered Mark. “The rumor’s right.”

Quinton turned to look at him. The light coming from the conference room highlighted Mark’s hair, leaving his face in shadow. But Quinton could sense the fear that was no doubt etched in Mark’s expression. And his own.

“Is DCC going to nuke us?” said Mark, his voice trembling. “I saw someone on the roof earlier, adjusting the antenna. Timms might be trying to contact our satellite. For defense, maybe.”

“How? It gathers data, it doesn’t have any weapons.”

“But we could…” Mark groped for words. “Alter its orbit. Yeah. Smash it into another satellite, a military satellite. If one comes overhead.”

Quinton had also heard rumors that the shortages and service disruptions had been a prelude to something even more sinister. Why had DCC gone berserk? “You think that’s how it would attack?”

Mark raised his voice. “How else would DCC do something global? If population reduction is its goal—”

“Quiet, they’ll hear you.”

Quinton put his ear back on the wall.

“…trying to get a signal,” somebody was saying.

Then the conference room got quiet. The silence stretched for an unbearable minute.

“What’s going on?” whispered Mark.

Quinton didn’t say anything, although he was afraid he knew the answer. In one ear—the ear turned away from the wall—he had heard Mark’s question. But the ear against the wall also seemed to pick it up—through the wall.

Quinton remembered all the times he’d sat in the conference room listening to a professor deliver a lecture. A communication system permitted a two-way conversation between the speaker at the podium and the projectionist in the booth who was in charge of visuals. All the speaker had to do was flip a switch. “Busted,” he said.

“‘Busted’ is right, Quinton,” said a voice that rang like a bell in the projection booth. “Mark, is that you in there with him?”

Quinton stood up and looked out the window. Professor Timms waved his arm, indicating that both students should enter the conference room. Mark opened the front door of the projection booth and stepped out.

“He made me do it,” said Mark, pointing to Quinton. His grin didn’t last long.

Quinton felt the overwhelming tension in the room. Clustered around the dais were twenty somber professors, ranging in age from Grange’s eighty years down to a young assistant professor who’d just been hired before the trouble began in earnest last autumn. Timms, scarcely older than the assistant professor, stood at the podium in front of the crowd. With long blond hair past his shoulders and a tendency to skip the top three buttons of his shirt, Timms often got caricatured in students’ doodles with a guitar strapped to his shoulder and a colorful tat on his forearm.

Also on the dais, close to the maintenance closet, sat Professor Sandra Rebbin, balancing a small screen and keypad on her lap. Nearby was a table covered with food packages and cans—the only thing available to eat was packaged or canned food, since everybody had long since run out of fresh fruits and vegetables. Most of the packages on the table were still almost full.

“So much for secrecy,” muttered a professor as Quinton and Mark walked sheepishly down the aisle.

“I hope not,” said Timms. “These two outstanding young men are currently working in my laboratory, and I can vouch for them. If not for their character—for as you can see they’re not the best behaved of our students—then for their superb intelligence and inquisitive nature.” He gave Quinton and Mark a pointed look. “You both understand that this information is strictly confidential?”