upright. I thought Ursala had broke the picture on purpose, and I was shocked at the awfulness of such a thing. That anyone might do that to a piece of tech.
But then she touched the same place and the pattern come right back again, between me opening my mouth to yell and me getting the words out. So the words, when they come, was all stammering and weak. “You… you…” I said, pointing at the computer like the world’s biggest fool. Then: “What did you do to it?”
“I turned it off and then on again,” Ursala said. “There’s a place at the corner there that moves under your finger. One touch depresses it, just a little, and a second touch releases it. Makes it stand out again. The picture only comes when the switch is depressed.”
She couldn’t make me understand just by telling it. She had to make me touch the place – the switch – for myself, again and again, making the shiny leaves go and come back each time. My hands was shaking when I did it. Apart from that one time, at my testing, I had never touched tech. Only Ramparts got to touch tech. Koli Rampart, I said inside my head, and almost said it out loud too, for it felt like a thing that needed to be said at such a time, when such an impossible thing was happening.
“It’s called a switch,” Ursala said, “because that’s what it does. To switch a thing is to swap it for something else. In this case, you’re swapping between the computer’s sleeping state and its waking state.”
That word made the connection in my mind. We always said waked for when the tech answered to someone or lit up or did what it was supposed to do when their hands touched it. That’s what had just happened. The tech had waked for me. But it had only waked because I touched the switch.
“But… then…” I said. Tried to say. “When we’re tested… is that…?” I struggled with the words, for I was struggling with the idea of it. My first thought was that the computer was of a different kind from Rampart tech, since it seemed it would wake for anyone. Then another thought come on the heels of that, which was that waking might not be what I believed it was.
I was pushing it away from me, because it was too big to think about. But as much as I pushed, it just kept coming back. Was testing just a trick after all, like Spinner said that time and then unsaid right after? Was there a switch on the bolt gun? On the cutter? On the firethrower? Did the Vennastins make the tech answer to them by knowing where the switch was and finding it with their fingers when they picked it up? And did Garan, that was Rampart Fire before Catrin was, tell it to her, and to her sister Fer? Did Loop tell it to Mardew, and Catrin to Haijon?
My mouth had locked itself shut, but my mind went racing on. It jumped right over that hedge and landed in the thistles and ropeknot on the other side.
“There’s more to it than that,” Ursala said. No doubt she was reading in my face the fight I was having, and guessed the reason for it. “There’s another part of the tech, buried deep inside, that’s called the battery. It stores power. Energy. The tech will only switch itself on if the energy is there. And the energy comes from sunlight – among other places. You see this?” She showed me the other side of the computer. There was a black strip there that was shinier than the rest of the thing, though it all had the polish and the smoothness to it that only old tech has ever got. “That’s called a photo-voltaic strip. When it’s placed in the light – out in the sun, for preference – it turns the light into electrical energy. The energy that makes tech do all the things it does. It needs to sit out in the sun for at least an hour, the first time it’s used, and then to be taken out at intervals after that to charge it up again. Otherwise it will deactivate.”
“De… action…?”
“Switch itself off. Go dark and refuse to work.” Ursala give a curse and flicked her finger hard against the side of her head, like she was angry with her own mind. “I’ve said