The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,241

face to Michael.

“Right. Sorry.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Did you solder it?”

“I’m going to. Seriously, Elton. You’re not alone in here. When was the last time you took a bath?”

The old man said nothing. Come to think of it, he didn’t look so great himself, not that the standards where Elton was concerned were all that high to begin with. Sweaty and washed out and somehow not there. While Michael watched, Elton drifted a slow hand toward the surface of the counter, his fingers tapping lightly in a searching way until they alighted on the headphones, though he didn’t pick them up.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m just saying you don’t look so great is all.”

“Are we lights up?”

“That was an hour ago. How asleep were you?”

Elton licked his lips with a heavy tongue. Flyers, what was it? Something in his teeth?

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I will go lie down.”

The old man lumbered to his feet and shuffled down the narrow hallway that connected the work area with the back of the hut. Michael heard the creek of springs as his big body hit the cot.

Well, at least he wasn’t in the room.

Michael turned his attention back to the work that lay before him. He’d been right about the thing in the girl’s neck. The transmitter was connected to a memory chip, but not any kind he’d ever seen, much smaller and without any obvious ports except for a pair of tiny gold brads. One was linked to the transmitter, the other to the filigree of beaded wires. So either the wires were an antenna array and the transmitter ran off the chip, which didn’t seem likely, or the wires themselves were sensors of some kind, the source of the data the chip was recording.

The only way to find out for sure was to read the data on the chip. And the only way to do that was to solder it hard to the mainframe’s memory board.

It was a risk. Michael was hard-soldering a piece of unknown circuitry to the control panel itself. Maybe the system wouldn’t see it. Maybe the system would crash and the lights would all go out. Probably the wisest course would be to wait until morning. But by this point he was moving forward on sheer momentum, his mind clamped onto the problem like a squirrel with a nut in his teeth; he couldn’t have waited if he wanted to.

He’d have to take the mainframe off-line first. This meant shutting down the controllers to run straight off the batteries. You could do this for a while but not for long; without the system to monitor the current, any fluctuation could flip a breaker. So once the mainframe was off-line, he’d have to work fast.

He took a deep breath and called up the system menu.

Shut down?

He clicked on: Y

The hard drive began to spin down. Michael darted from his chair and shot across the room to the breaker box.

None of the breakers moved.

He got quickly to work, pulling the motherboard free, placing it on the counter under the magnifier, taking up the hot iron in one hand and the strip of solder in the other. He touched it to the tip of the iron—a waft of smoke curling in the air above it—and watched as a single drop descended toward the open channel on the motherboard.

Bull’s-eye.

He tweezered the chip; he had one shot to get this right. Gripping his right wrist to keep it steady, he gently lowered the chip’s exposed contacts into the solder, freezing it in place for a count of ten while the bead of liquid solder cooled and stiffened around it.

Only then did he let himself breathe. He slid the board back into the panel, locked it in place, and booted the mainframe back up.

In the long minute that followed as the system came back online, the hard drive clicking and whirring, Michael Fisher closed his eyes and thought: Please.

And there it was. When he opened his eyes he saw it, sitting in the system directory. UNKNOWN DRIVE. He selected the image and watched as the window sprang open. Two partitions, A and B. The first was tiny, just a few kilobytes. But not B.

B was huge.

It contained two files, identical in size; one was probably a backup of the other. Two identical files of such immensity it simply boggled the mind. This chip: it was like the whole world was written inside it. Whoever had made this thing and