Chapter 9 Thermal Throttling

Chapter 9 Thermal Throttling

The server room was chilling.

Alex was sitting bent over the terminal, with his back against the vibrating metal casing. The air was ozone and burnt hair and his own blood.

Mrs. Adesina no longer prayed. She was sitting a few feet away, holding her rosary in her trembling hands. The white glow of her healing spell was gone, leaving Alex with pink, tender skin where the burns used to be.

\[HP: 35/100\]
\[MANA: 5/30 (CRITICAL EXHAUSTION)\]

He closed his eyes. The pain in the back of his head was like a sharp rock rubbing against bone. He needed sleep. A week of it.

But the red beacon on the overhead map continued to pulse.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

"Alex?"

Steve towered over him, his police baton in his hand, as a scepter. His tie had disappeared, his sleeves turned up to the elbows. His eyes were still filled with fear, but something desperate had overlaid it.

"Report," Alex croaked.

"We stripped Sector 4." Steve was breathless. Jason and the others - they are scared of you. They ripped copper wiring out of the walls with their bare hands. There is a heap of scrap over by the fabrication bay.

"Good. The power?"

Steve scowled and indicated the generator room, where the Quicksilver Sentinel was floating motionlessly. A ghost in the smoke, a chrome.

"Main turbine is fried. You blew it up, remember? We're running on emergency batteries." He checked his watch. Perhaps twenty-four hours. Less, with the air scrubbers running at full blast.

Twenty-four hours.

A deadline. The lights went off when the batteries died. The locks failed. And everything in the lobby came downstairs.

I must repair Bug, I said to myself. He grabbed the console and hauled himself up. His legs were hollow.

"The rat?" Steve asked. "It's in pieces. The explosion threw it against the wall."

"It's hardware," Alex said, limping toward the corner. "Hardware can be fixed."

He discovered the Cyber-Rat lying huddled against a vent grate. It resembled road kill. The camera lens was broken, the wire-fur burnt black, and its hind legs were turned at the wrong angles. The red light in its eye was out.

Something in the chest of Alex tugged. Not to the shivering human beings in the aisles. To this shattered heap of code and metal.

He picked it up.

\[UNIT: BUG\]
\[STATUS: CRITICAL DAMAGE\]
\[REPAIR COST: 50 METAL / 10 SILICON\]

Steve, called out Alex, his voice echoing across the room. "Bring the scrap. Now."

The Fabrication Bay was not a workshop, but a 3D printer that was the size of a minivan. It lay inert in the corner until Alex touched the control panel.

\[ADMIN ACCESS RECOGNIZED.\]
\[FABRICATOR: ONLINE.\]

He placed Bug in the glass chamber.

"Dump it."

Steve and Jason, Jason looking away, his jaw clenched, threw an armful of messy copper wire and aluminum server casings into the hopper.

The machine roared. The scrap was swept with lasers and melted down into raw grey sludge.

Alex looked through the window and opened his terminal.

TARGET: BUG
ACTION: REPAIR + REINFORCE

He desired something better than a fix. He desired the weakness to be removed.

APPLYING PATCH: \[COPPER_WEAVE_SKIN\]
COST: 10 MANA.

He only had 5. Instead, he incinerated HP should he have pushed through.

Pain is just data.

"Execute."

\[Caution: Turning life into MANA.

White-hot needles plunged into his chest. Alex coughed. Blood on the glass.

\[HP: 25/100\]

Mechanical arms were at work in the chamber. They peeled the burnt fur off the body of Bug, forced the molten copper directly into the flesh, cut off the broken legs and replaced them with aluminum struts reinforced with steel.

Ding.

The room hissed open.

Bug came out meaner. The fur had been taken off, and in its place was a net of copper wire, which reflected the blue light and shone. Its legs were now thicker, hydraulic pistons hissing with every step. The broken lens was replaced with one that was taken out of a security camera.

\[UNIT REPAIRED.\]
\[NEW TRAIT: CONductive CARAPACE\].

Bug chattered--a heavy, metallic noise--and ran up the leg of Alex on his shoulder. It was warm.

"Better," Alex said, wiping blood from his lip.

Then the floor moved.

Not a rumble. A sudden, rhythmic shiver that ran directly up through the soles of his sneakers.

Skritch. Skritch. Skritch.

From the walls. The ceiling. Mostly from below.

"What is that?" Jason turned his back on the scrap pile. "Is that the subway?"

"No."

Code Vision was running. The grating floor of steel became wireframe. He was red under the green lattice of cables and conduit.

Thousands of red dots.

\[ALARM: UNDERground intrusion detected.
\[ENTITY: SILICON-TERMITE (LVL 1)\]
\[COUNT: 5,000+\]

"Move!" Alex screamed. Get out of the floor!

CRUNCH.

The grating ten feet distant shook like a fist in paper.

Insects poured out. Not normal termites. They were the size of cats, with bodies transparent and glowing a faint orange, and mandibles of jagged crystal shards.

"Bugs!" Sarah screamed, and scrambled up a server rack.

"Defend the core!"

But the termites did not pay attention to Sarah. Ignored Jason. They struck the server racks.

One was attached to a black monolith. CRUNCH. Its mandibles cut through the steel casing and it ripped out a motherboard and began to eat.

\[ALERT: SERVER INTEGRity Dropping.
\[RESOURCE LOSS: -10 SILICON/SEC.\]

The blood of Alex chilled.

They weren't eating people. They were chewing on the hardware. They were devouring his Kingdom.

"Those are mine."

"Jason!" He indicated the swarm. "Kill them. Do not allow them to get to the racks!

Jason looked at the carpet of insects. "There's too many. I cannot hit a thousand bugs!

"Use the shotgun!"

Jason unslung the Riot Shotgun. BOOM. Buckshot sprayed into the mass and three termites burst into yellow goo. Ten others came out of the hole to take their place.

"It's not enough!" Steve used his baton to attack a termite that was chewing on a power cable.

Alex gazed at the Sentinel.

"Sentinel. Railgun."

ZAP.

A bolt of blue lightning sliced a path through the swarm and burnt half of them. The odor of the ozone became worse.

But there were thousands. Leaking out of every drain, every cable duct.

\[SILICON: 40... 30... 20...\]

If they took the servers, he couldn't build. If they hit the Core cables, life support failed.

Think. You're the Admin. You control the environment.

He pulled up the terminal.

ENVIRONMENT CONTROL
TEMPERATURE: 68°F (OPTIMAL)
FANS: 40%

Termites were insects. Cold-blooded. Their reactions slowed in the cold.

"Steve!" Alex shouted over the shotgun. "Get everyone to the center platform! Use the heavy panels to block the aisle!"

"Why?"

"Because I'm turning on the AC!"

He slammed both hands on the keyboard.

COMMAND: OVERRIDE CLIMATE CONTROL.
TARGET TEMPERATURE: -20°F (MINIMUM)
FANS: 100% (MAXIMUM)

\[WARNING: THIS WILL DAMAGE EQUIPMENT.\]

"Everything is already damaged! Execute!"

The hum of the facility shifted pitch. Low drone to a screaming whine.

WHOOSH.

Freezing white fog blasted from the ceiling vents. The wind knocked Sarah off her feet.

The temperature dropped fast.

The termites slowed. The frantic clicking and crunching went sluggish. The orange glow inside their bodies dimmed. Their legs moved like they were wading through wet concrete.

"They're slowing down!" Jason shouted, breath puffing white.

"Sentinel." Alex pointed at the open grate where the swarm was still coming through. "Liquid form. Get into the cable run."

The Sentinel dissolved into a silver puddle and slipped through the grate.

Gone.

The cable runs under the floor were wet from condensation.

ZZZZZ-CRACK.

Blue light erupted through the grating. Every termite under that floor shrieked at once, a sound loud enough to hurt. Smoke pushed up through every gap.

\[EXPERIENCE GAINED: 10...\]
\[EXPERIENCE GAINED: 10...\]
\[EXPERIENCE GAINED: 10...\]

The notifications blurred, scrolling too fast to read.

\[LEVEL UP! (LEVEL 3 -> LEVEL 4)\]

The swarm stopped moving. The floor was a carpet of frozen, fried crystal carcasses.

Silence settled back over the server farm. Just the whine of the overclocked fans.

"System. Reset temperature."

The fans spun down.

Alex slumped against the console, teeth clicking together. HP low. Mana gone. His Kingdom still standing.

He looked at the dead termites, then walked over and crouched down, shoes crunching on frozen bodies. He picked one up. It was dense, like a river stone.

\[CODE VISION: ACTIVE\]

\[ENTITY: SILICON TERMITE\]
\[GENE DETECTED: CRYSTAL_CARAPACE (COMMON)\]
\[PROPERTY: RESISTANT TO PHYSICAL DAMAGE.\]

He looked at Jason, shivering in his torn suit. At Stve. At the Server Mites hiding in the corners.

A slow smile crossed his face.

"Steve," Alex said quietly.

"Y-yeah?"

"Start gathering the bodies." He tossed the dead termite up and caught it. "I think I just found the armor plating for our army."