6. Randy
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Randy


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Some are spacious, some are homely, some are just a little strange,
But the one thing that they never are is proof against all change
Sappers, storms and ordnance must each extract a toll
So be sure to keep your feet when next you pop out for a stroll.

The renovations had profoundly disappointed him.

Back when he'd started at I&T, the Chief's office had opened onto the tech support lab. He'd always thought it fostered a sense of solidarity. They were in it together, the experts against the users, one big unhappy family. And then one day Eileen Veiksaar had J&M block up the old door, and open a new one to the access corridor, and his workplace had gone from feeling cozy to feeling isolated. Without cameraderie, IT work was little better than subdued violence.

At this particular moment, however, he was very, very grateful for the results of Eileen's cooling heart. Crouched beneath the row of desks with half a dozen junior technicians, blinking in the black, listening for movement beyond the breach shutters on the bank of windows and the doors, he knew that the old arrangement would have killed him stone dead already. He'd heard the gunshot through the weak spot in the wall. He knew Max Vroom was almost certainly gone.

He knew he was just a few metres of tile, drywall and pine wood from a killer.

His eyes were getting used to the dark; it wasn't much of a stretch from the usual, programmers as a rule not being creatures of the light. He could see the terror etched on every face, and he could hear their laboured breathing. He felt his pulse rising to match. They were racing each other to a heart attack, and he knew he was most likely to hit the finish line first. He was the oldest in the room. The senior technician on duty.

The senior technician period, he realized with a shock. If Vroom really had been shot, he was now in charge.

"I'm getting out of here," Barb Kline rasped. She had barely wriggled a few inches out from under the desks when Randy discovered her shoulder at the end of his arm, in his hand, and found himself saying "No."

She glared at him, eyes flashing from the blinkenlights above. "We're fish in a barrel! We'll die if we stay here."

"He wants to stay hidden," Sandy Chang growled from behind. "He's a coward. And he's right."

"I want us to stay together," the Senior Technician said in his voice. "I want us to stay safe."

"How can we stay safe?" Kline snarled. "We're in a fucking computer lab in an active shooter situation. This is literally the single worst place we could be!"

"No, it's not," came the confident reply from some unguessed-at depths of his person. "The point of sheltering in place is that it keeps us out of the line of fire. Security will be in the halls, and they'll be the targets. We try to get out of here, we only get in their way, or take bullets their armour can soak."

Chang made a sound of frustration like any of dozens he'd heard from her today, as she wrestled with the increasingly archaic ticketing system they'd been using since Nancy Briggs had been Chief. But she didn't argue. He wondered if the steel — or was it silicon — that had slipped into his tone somehow had something to do with it.

Kline pointed at the shuttered windows. "That's no substitute for a real breach bunker," she whispered fiercely. They were close enough now that he could feel the warmth and moisture of her breath, smell the collective sweat of this terrified cohort of keyboard monkeys. "If they want in here — and they will, because we've got systems access — it'll be a cinch to punch through, and then they'll grease us on all fucking fours."

"Systems access," he agreed, "exactly. That's the other reason we need to stay in here. We can't let the invaders—"

"We can't stop the invaders," Chang suddenly shouted. The others all recoiled as the sound echoed through the room.

He wanted to respond, wanted to shush her, but the de facto Chief of Identity and Technocryptography wouldn't let him. That worthy instead crawled him out from under the desks, wormed his fingers into the grip of a panel on the floor, and pulled up to reveal the conduit beneath. He gestured at the even darker pit, and said, "Get in, then. And stay down there. All the egress points will be sealed anyway, but keep your voices down."

The two women, and the four men clustered around them, blinked at him in surprise. "What about defending the systems?" Kline asked.

"You're all junior techs anyway." He found himself grinning. He felt like a different person entirely. "And this is a bad day for training. Get in the conduit."

"You're staying?" Chang's voice was now soft, contemplative. Surprised. Respectful?

"I'm staying," he nodded, as every nerve screamed at him to plunge into the safety of the uterine passageway beneath. When he saw the others hesitating, he steeled himself and pointed again. "And you're going. This is not a debate."

Chang and Kline hung back until the end, which impressed and somewhat touched him. It was less charming when Kline put her legs through the hatch, and something shifted in the orbit of the Earth, and suddenly Kline and her legs were occupying separate spaces, and she was clawing at his chest and gibbering as her blood poured down the hatch onto her terrified colleagues in the dark.

A million miles separated him from the scene. He was watching it from outside of himself.

As his body spoke words of meaningless consolation to the dying woman, the Acting Chief of I&T kicked the hatch shut. The ceiling tiles on fire gave him ample light to consider the dying respect in Kline's softening expression.

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Wynn

Indivisible

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Clio

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