Chapter 302: To the Pylow Labs - III

The list didn’t end.

Kordula scrolled until the bar on the side of the display shrank to a thin line, then gave up and scrolled back to the top.

Most of the items were ordinary. Filter replacements, a coolant pump in some sector she didn’t know running past its service interval, a maintenance unit that stopped reporting four months ago.

Each one was stamped with the date it was raised and the number of times it was raised again after that, and almost every one of them ended with the same two words.

AWAITING APPROVAL.

The items near the top were different. Those were marked in a separate color.

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PRIMARY GENERATION — OUTPUT DEGRADED

TRANSMISSION — PCL-1 — CONTACT LOST

TRANSMISSION — PCL-3 — INTERMITTENT

TRANSMISSION — PCL-4 — CONTACT LOST

SCHEDULED EXTERNAL OPERATIONS — SUSPENSION REQUESTED

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"PCL," one of the Engineers read. "More sites?"

"Looks like it." Kordula looked at the numbers. "One, three and four. We’re standing in two."

"Northern Command," the squad leader said. "Facility lists three other sites connected to this one. Two out of contact, one intermittent."

"Copy," Marianne answered. "Radar shows several buried structures north and east of you. I’ll try matching them."

The Engineers were already reading the lower items over Kordula’s shoulder. One of them tapped the coolant pump entry.

"This one we can do today."

"Not yet," Kordula said. "I want to know what happened here first."

...

The sector control room was two doors down the corridor.

It wasn’t locked. Inside were three workstations, a wall of dark monitors and a chair lying on its side.

One of the workstations was still on, and Facility Operations moved the display to it as soon as Kordula sat down.

She asked it for the incident record.

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FACILITY OPERATIONS — INCIDENT RECORD

SOURCE: OPERATIONS ONLY

SECURITY AUTHORITY RECORDS NOT AVAILABLE TO VISITING PERSONNEL

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"Security won’t give us its side," she said. "This is only what operations saw. Doors, air, power, alarms."

"Is that enough?" the squad leader asked.

"We’ll see."

The record opened on an ordinary afternoon. Shift change, a coolant pressure warning that cleared itself, a door held open too long in one of the laboratory wings. Then, at a quarter past two, a medical alert.

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1414 — MEDICAL ALERT — SECTOR C — LABORATORY 4

1419 — MEDICAL ALERT — SECTOR C — LABORATORY 4

1421 — MEDICAL ALERT — SECTOR C — CORRIDOR C2

1422 — MEDICAL ALERT — SECTOR B — DORMITORY

1422 — MEDICAL ALERT — SECTOR D — CANTEEN

1424 — SECURITY AUTHORITY — CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL INITIATED

1424 — DOOR STATE — ALL INTERNAL BOUNDARIES — SEALED

1425 — VENTILATION — SECTORS B, C, D — ISOLATED

1427 — MEDICAL ALERT — SECTOR A — CONTROL

1427 — MEDICAL ALERT — SECTOR B — DORMITORY (x6)

1431 — DOOR STATE — BOUNDARY C/UPPER — FORCED OPENING ATTEMPT

1431 — SECURITY AUTHORITY — BOUNDARY DEFENSE ACTIVE

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The rest went the same way, only faster.

Alerts stacked on top of each other until the record gave up listing them one by one and started counting them instead.

Fire suppression triggered in two sectors. Somebody pulled a manual release on a door that security immediately closed again.

The boundary defense entry repeated, then repeated again, at intervals that grew longer toward the end.

Kordula checked the time on the last medical alert: 1509.

After that, the record changed tone completely.

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1541 — SECURITY AUTHORITY — CONTAINMENT STATUS: HELD

1541 — BOUNDARY C/UPPER — STATUS: SEALED

1602 — PERSONNEL ACCOUNTABILITY — ASSIGNED PERSONNEL — LIVING: 0

1602 — SUPERVISOR APPROVAL REQUEST 0001 — NO RESPONSE

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"Fifty-five minutes," Kordula said.

The squad leader read it from behind her. "From the first alert to the last?"

"From the first alert to the last." She scrolled back up to 1414 and down again. "The first one was a single lab. Eight minutes later, it was in three sectors at once. Security sealed everything the moment it saw the pattern, and by then the infection was already on both sides of every door."

"So the ones at the bulkhead—"

"Tried to get to the upper section. Some of them turned, some of them didn’t, and security wasn’t going to open that door for anyone once the other side was contaminated."

She tapped the screen, where the boundary entries stopped. "It held. That’s why everything upstairs is clean."

"What about operations?"

"Operations doesn’t have guns. It closed the air between sectors and put out the fires. That’s all it’s allowed to do." Kordula looked at the last line again. "Then it counted who was left and started asking for a supervisor."

Nobody said anything after that. One of the Engineers turned the chair on the floor right side up and left it there.

"Northern Command," the squad leader said. "We have the facility’s incident log. Outbreak inside the site. Total loss of personnel in under an hour. Security sealed the upper section and held it."

The channel was quiet for a second.

"Understood. I’m sending it up to the Commander."

...

Kordula opened the first request.

Request 0001 wasn’t about pumps or filters. It was a request to suspend scheduled external operations, raised the same minute the system finished counting its staff. The reason was listed underneath in a single line.

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REASON: OPERATION WITHOUT QUALIFIED PERSONNEL — CORE DEGRADATION RISK

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She opened request 0002. It was the same request, raised again the next day. So was 0003. She skipped a few hundred and opened one at random. It was the same request again, with one line added to the reason.

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REASON: OPERATION WITHOUT QUALIFIED PERSONNEL — CORE DEGRADATION RISK — DEGRADATION CONFIRMED

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"It wants to stop," she said.

"Stop what?"

"The scheduled work."

Kordula already had a good idea what that meant, given where they were standing, but the record didn’t say it, so she didn’t say it out loud either.

"It’s been trying to stop since the day everyone died, but Facility Ops needs a site supervisor, or someone else with enough clearance, to approve it. Some parts of these sites are hard for people to reach, so operations normally runs the work there on its own. Stopping it is a different matter."

"Can it not just stop on its own?" one of the Engineers asked.

"No. That’s the whole point of how these are built. A machine doesn’t get to decide on its own to walk away from its assignment. A person has to sign it off. You wouldn’t want countless iterations of ASS-116 out in the wild now, would you?"

She typed the question anyway, mostly to see how it would answer.

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SUSPENSION OF SCHEDULED EXTERNAL OPERATIONS REQUIRES:

SUPERVISOR APPROVAL

NETWORK CONFIRMATION — PCL-1, PCL-3, PCL-4

TEMPORARY OPERATIONAL CONTACT: NOT AUTHORIZED TO APPROVE SUSPENSION

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"Two problems," she said. "I’m not a supervisor, and it can’t talk to the other three sites. Even if someone approved it here, it wants to know the rest of the network is standing down too. Otherwise, stopping this one while the others keep running might be worse."

"These facilities are all interconnected?"

"They might depend on each other somehow. This one can’t enumerate those dependencies, and that’s the bigger problem."

While she was reading, the counter at the top of the list changed: 3,413.

Kordula opened the new entry. It was the same suspension request, raised again, and this time it wasn’t addressed to a supervisor. It was addressed to her.

She read the line that told her she wasn’t authorized to approve it, then closed the entry without answering.

...

"Overseer," the squad leader said. "What can we actually do today?"

Kordula went back to the top of the list.

"Definitely not the suspension or the other sites yet." She scrolled down to the ordinary items. "The rest, we can take on, as long as it doesn’t need supervisor credentials."

"What about the primary generation? Operations already flagged it as degraded. It’d be risky to leave that alone."

Kordula nodded and opened the entry.

It didn’t say what the primary generation was. It gave an output figure far below its rated level, a warning that the figure was still falling, and a location several levels below the one they were on. The access line at the bottom was marked ESCORTED.

Kordula checked her Radar. The model showed the lowest chambers under the facility and nothing more.

One of the Engineers held his scanner toward the floor.

"That’s where the hum is coming from."

"Northern Command," the squad leader said. "Facility’s asking for work on its primary generation. It’s several levels down. Requesting permission to go and look."

"Granted. Keep me updated at every level."

Kordula stood up from the workstation. The display followed her to the door, and the list followed with it.