Unknown - The_Growing_589064

Abruptly she pushes her chair away from the table, crosses the room to the coffee maker and sets a fresh pot to brew. The tile floor is cool under her booted and double-socked feet, despite the central heating. As the coffee maker gurgles and hisses, she leans her back against the edge of the counter and scrubs at her eyes with both hands. Even with her glasses, the endless strings of numbers are starting to blur and run together on the screen as well as in her mind.

There has to be some other way to do this besides just going through the columns of numbers and letters. It is not just that visual searches could run on into the next Ice Age at the rate she’s going. It’s that she might actually find, and miss, what she’s looking for in her state of fatigue. If this were Star Trek or Time Enough for Love or any other of her childhood favorites, she would simply ask the computer to find the shutdown code, and the computer would produce it. Given that that’s not going to happen here—let’s try going at it from the other end. Weed out everything that’s not a vital command.

Cup in hand, she sets to work again, sorting out anything that does not fit the parameters of a basic command. It is not quite as simple as it sounds, and she spends the next hour selecting and downloading material that may be useful at some point but is little more than digital garbage now.

Two hours later, she is left with half a dozen files. Of those half dozen, three are passworded, and one is passworded and encrypted.

Yes! She waggles her aching fingers at the screen. Think you’re a match for the Orange County Hacker, do you? Prepare to meet your doom!

Orange County Hacker? Doom? Christ, she thinks, I am terminally punch drunk.

The passwords are moderately difficult to break, but she has them down within half an hour. The encryption key takes longer, but by the time the sun has slipped halfway down the afternoon sky, she has it, too. She hits the Apply button and holds her breath.

The commands scroll down the screen, endless columns of alphanumerics. Somewhere in them, if she is lucky—if the whole human race is lucky—is the code that will shut down the droids and allow the survivors to return the world to something close to normal. It will never be what it was; she knows that. The simple fact that women now outnumber men by perhaps a hundred to one or even more—maybe a thousand to one—will change the way the world goes about its business. Power will be defined differently; used differently. With her heart in her throat, Kirsten retrieves the saved code that shut down the prisoner droid and nearly killed her. She clicks on Find similar and waits, her forehead pressed against her clenched hands.

Please god, any god, all gods, whatever. Let this work.

When she looks up at the screen again, there is a match. Her hands shaking, she watches the symbols stream across the screen, matching her search criterion letter for letter, digit for digit. Then they begin to change: a related command, but different.

Yes. Yes! A small, cautious voice in the back of her mind warns her that this may not be what she is searching for, but she refuses to believe it. The information flows steadily, varying from the prototype command here, identical there. Abruptly it stops.

Kirsten runs the match again, and again the code plays out before reaching the end of the command. Incomplete. Kirsten runs it a third time. Still incomplete. A fourth time. Nothing is different. She has part of the code, no more. She lowers her forehead to her clenched hands again, and silent, bitter tears slip down her cheeks.

After a time, she raises her eyes and turns off the computer. If she does not have the complete code, she has at least a part of it and can perhaps build on that when her mind is rested. She is realist enough to know that she can accomplish nothing of worth in her present state of exhaustion. Rising, she takes her jacket from the row of hooks by the back door and whistles Asi to her side. He all but knocks her down, jostling her against the door frame, as he bounds out onto the carport and down the snow-powdered street, turning to wait for her half a block away, tongue lolling, breath clouding in the frosty air.

Angry at her failure and at herself, refusing to think, Kirsten allows Asimov to choose their itinerary. He leads her through the half-derelict housing section, where vehicles that have not moved since the day of the uprising remain shrouded in snow and abandoned homes stand open to the elements. There has been no time to set them to rights or to reclaim what might be salvaged. No time, and no people. Those that are left have more immediate concerns.

At the end of a cul-de-sac, Asi veers away from the residential area into a strip of woodland growing on the banks of a long, narrow pond. The water, frozen now, gleams in the low sun with swirls of gold and crimson . Fire, Kirsten thinks. Fire in the lake.

Sudden overthrow. Revolution.

As omens go, it is a bit belated.

And no damned use in any case.

Asimov dances ahead of her, running a short distance, turning, barking, running again. Glad to be free of the confines of the house, clearly wanting to play. Too well trained to ignore him, Kirsten picks up a fallen limb a yard long and breaks it over her knee into shorter segments. “Asi!” she calls, “Fetch!”

She pitches the stick ahead of them some fifteen feet, and Asi bounds through the snow after it, for all the world as if it mattered to him. He returns, grinning around the piece of branch, and drops it at her feet, looking up at her expectantly. She picks it up again and feints a throw. He wheels to run but stops in his tracks when she fails to release the stick, looking back at her reproachfully. Twice more she pulls her throw, then sends the improvised toy sailing ahead through the bare trees. Asi follows like a shot, sailing over the small rise that may be only a drift or a may be a massive tree root under the snow and racing down the long line of naked sycamores that mark the edge of the water in warmer seasons. Kirsten slogs after him, clambering over the hump that does indeed feel like ancient, twisted wood beneath her feet. It is knobbed and knotted with age, and it takes all her attention to keep her balance as she climbs cautiously up and over to the other side, stumbling slightly when her foot catches on a protrusion near the ground. She flings out her arms to balance herself, fails, and sprawls in the snow. It is only when she is on her feet again and brushing herself off again that she realizes that Asi is nowhere to be seen.

“Asi! Asimov! Come!”

No answer.

“Asi! Come! Now!” Her voice rises and breaks with something near panic.

Still no Asimov, but from some yards ahead and to her left, she hears a high-pitched, plaintive whine. Following his prints, she trails him to the trunk of a huge tree whose bare branches extend almost halfway across the narrow inlet of the pond, where a feeder stream flows into it. He sits beneath the sycamore , staring upward, his tail brushing a half-circle in the loose powder that covers the frozen water. He whines again, this time almost pleadingly.

Twenty feet up, a raccoon sits in the fork of a branch. It is an older male, perhaps a third of Asimov’s size and weight, his fur fluffed about him for warmth. He nibbles delicately at an acorn, holding it with both long-fingered paws as he turns it around and around before his narrow muzzle. He pauses as Kirsten arrives, regarding her with eyes like molten gold from behind his black mask.

Unbidden, images tumble through her mind. A naked woman painted in blue spirals and sunbursts, brandishing a spear and a shield of polished bronze. Another woman, her face printed with the years and with wisdom, enveloped in a billow of vermilion silk like flame. A raised hand of not quite human form, and a voice on the churning wind. Turn back. The time is not yet.