Fragments. Dan Wells
else.
The real information would be on the computers, but the office didn’t seem to have any. Kira frowned, disturbed, because everything she’d heard about the old world said that they relied on computers for everything. Why didn’t the office have any of the flat screen monitors or metallic towers that she was used to seeing nearly everywhere? She sighed and shook her head in frustration, knowing that even if she found the computers, she wouldn’t know what to do with them. She’d used some at the hospital, medicomps and scanners and so on when a treatment or a diagnosis called for one, but those were mostly isolated machines with a singular purpose. Computers in the old world had been part of a vast network capable of communicating instantly, all over the world. Everything had been on computers, from books to music to, apparently, ParaGen’s vast scheming plans. But these offices didn’t have any computers. . . .
But this one has a printer. She stopped, staring at a side table in the last office on the floor—a bigger office than the rest, with the name GUINEVERE CREECH on the door: probably the local vice president or whatever their ranks were called. There was blank paper scattered around the floor, wrinkly and discolored from past rainstorms blowing through the broken window, and a small plastic box on a side table by the desk. She recognized it as a printer—there were dozens in the hospital back home, useless now because they had no ink, and she’d been tasked once with moving them from one storage closet to another. In the old world they’d used them to write out documents directly from a computer, so if there was a printer in this room, there must have been a computer as well, at least at one time. She picked the thing up to examine it more closely: no cord, or even a place to put one, which meant it was wireless. She set it back down and knelt on the floor, looking under the side table; nothing there. Why had someone gone through and removed all the computers—was it to hide their data when the world fell apart? Surely Kira couldn’t be the first person to think of coming here; ParaGen had built the Partials, for goodness’ sake, and they were the world experts in biotech. Even if they didn’t get blamed for the Partial War, the government would have contacted them about curing RM. Assuming, of course, that the government didn’t know that the Partials carried the cure. She pushed the thought away. She wasn’t here to entertain conspiracy theories, she was here to uncover facts. Maybe their computers had been seized?
She looked up, scanning the room from her hands and knees, and from this vantage point saw something she hadn’t before: a shiny black circle in the black metal frame of the desk. She moved her head and it winked at her, losing and catching the light. She frowned, stood, then shook her head at the stupid simplicity of it all.
The desks were the computers.
Now that she saw it, it was obvious. The clear plastic desks were almost exact replicas, in large scale, of the medicomp screen she used at the hospital. The brain—the CPU and the hard drive and the actual computer—were all embedded in the metal edge, and when turned on, the entire desk would light up with touch screens and keyboards and everything else. She got down on her knees again, checking the base of the frame’s metal legs, and shouted in triumph when she found a short black cord plugged into a power socket in the floor. Another flock of sparrows lifted up and flew away at the sound. Kira smiled, but it wasn’t truly a victory—finding the computers meant nothing if she couldn’t turn them on. She would need a charging unit, and she hadn’t packed one when she hastily left East Meadow; she felt stupid for the oversight, but there was no changing it now. She would have to try to scavenge one in Manhattan, maybe from a hardware store or electronics shop. The island had been considered too dangerous to travel on since the Break, so most of it hadn’t been looted yet. Still, she didn’t relish the thought of hauling a fifty-pound generator up those twenty-one flights of stairs.
Kira blew out a long, slow breath, gathering her thoughts. I need to find out what I am, she thought. I need to find out how my father is connected to this, and Nandita. I need to find the Trust. She pulled out the photo again, she and her father and Nandita all standing in front of the ParaGen complex. Someone had written a message on it: Find the Trust. She didn’t even know exactly what the Trust was, let alone how to find it; she didn’t even know who’d left her the photo or written the note on it, for that matter, though she assumed from the handwriting that it was Nandita. The things she didn’t know seemed to settle on her like a great, heavy weight, and she closed her eyes, trying to breathe deeply. She had pinned all her hopes on this office, the only part of ParaGen she could reach, and to find nothing of use in it, not even another lead, was almost too much to bear.
She rose to her feet, walking quickly to the window for air. Manhattan stretched out below her, half city and half forest, a great green mass of eager trees and crumbling, vine-wrapped buildings. It was all so big, overwhelmingly big, and that was just the city—beyond it there were other cities, other states and nations, entire other continents she had never even seen. She felt lost, worn down by the sheer impossibility of finding even one small secret in a world so huge. She watched a flock of birds fly by, oblivious to her and her problems; the world had ended, and they hadn’t even noticed. If the last of the sentient species disappeared, the sun would still rise and the birds would still fly. What did her success or failure really mean?
And then she raised her head, set her jaw, and spoke.
“I’m not giving up,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how big the world is. All that gives me is more places to look.”
Kira turned back to the office, going to the filing cabinet and pulling open the first drawer. If the Trust had something to do with ParaGen, maybe a special project that was connected to the Partial leadership, like Samm had implied, this financial office would have had to process some money for it sooner or later, and there might be a record she could find. She wiped the dirt from the table screen and started pulling files from the cabinet, searching through them line by line, item by item, payment by payment. When she finished with a folder, she swept it onto the floor in the corner and started on a new one, hour after hour, stopping only when it had grown too dark to read. The night air was cold, and she thought about starting a small fire—on top of one of the desks, where she could contain it—but decided against it. Her campfires down in the streets were easy to hide from anyone who might be watching, but a light up here would be visible for miles. She retreated instead to the foyer at the top of the stairs, closing all the doors and setting up her bedroll in the shelter of the reception desk. She opened a can of tuna and ate it quietly in the dark, picking it up with her fingers and pretending it was sushi. She slept lightly, and when she woke in the morning, she went straight back to work, combing through the files. In midmorning she finally found something.
“Nandita Merchant,” she read, a jolt through her system after searching for so long. “Fifty-one thousand one hundred and twelve dollars paid on December 5, 2064. Direct deposit. Arvada, Colorado.” It was a payroll statement, a massive one that seemed to include employees from the entire multinational company. She frowned, reading the line again. It didn’t say what Nandita’s job was, only what they’d paid her, and she had no idea what that represented—was it a monthly wage, or a yearly? Or a one-time fee for a specific job? She went back to the ledgers and found one for the previous month, flipping through it quickly to find Nandita’s name. “Fifty-one thousand one hundred and twelve dollars on November 21,” she read, and saw the same on November 7. So it’s a biweekly salary, making her yearly . . . about one point two million dollars. That sounds like a lot. She had no frame of reference for old-world salaries, but as she glanced over the list she saw that $51,112 was one of the highest figures. “So she was one of the bigwigs in the company,” Kira muttered, thinking out loud. “She earned more than most, but what did she do?”
She wanted to look up her father, but she didn’t even know his last name. Her own last name, Walker, was a nickname she’d earned from the soldiers who’d found her after the Break, walking mile after mile through an empty city, searching for food. “Kira the Walker.” She’d been so young that she couldn’t remember her own last name, or where her father worked, or even what city they’d lived in—
“Denver!” she shouted, the name suddenly coming to her. “We lived in Denver. That was in Colorado, right?” She looked at Nandita’s listing again: Arvada, Colorado. Was that near Denver? She folded the page carefully and stowed it in her pack, vowing to search later