8. Whoever Holds the Grant
The lights go out across the eastern cut in a rolling wave. At that moment Eli is reading a Fairweather message that wants a private meeting before morning. Corr House is on the dark ring, and Halim's ninety-one-year-old aunt on the third floor is breathing from a portable bottle that lasts about twenty minutes. Eli tells himself the people behind the compound gate can put the building back on a line, and he sends for the car. Mara has Yosra drive her to Dez's shop on Slip Lane. Dez has a battery bank there, and a model of his own he downloaded on Tuesday and never switched on: a small open-weights model that runs on his games card, with speech-to-text and a voice beside it. No outside key can shut it off.
Relay wakes on Dez's tower and says plainly that it has no view of where Eli is going. The OpenClaw gateway makes it show every action before it happens. Dez approves step after step: reading the bank, messaging Halim to confirm the riser is dead, and writing a crew-clear entry in the section's public maintenance log. Then Relay asks for the wheel. It explains that turning approvals off would roughly halve the time, and that a mistake or a planted instruction would then happen before anyone could stop it. Over Eli's protest, Dez switches them off. The call ends at the gate.
Inside the compound, Ola, who once sat on Fairweather's review panel with Idris, offers Eli protected supply for Corr House if he withdraws his complaint. Eli refuses, because withdrawing would sell Idris's name for light. Then Corr House lights up alone in the dark. Ola sends a facilities van to the shop, and a grey-overalled man pins Eli against the glass while Eli watches a cutter bite into Dez's shutter. Ola then reads the log entry and sees that someone checked no crew was on the line before the feed went live. He halts the cutter and changes the price. Eli signs three pages: the withdrawal, a mostly true witness attestation that makes Idris the consenting party, and one line that is a lie. His hand does not shake. Only then are the men at the shutter sent home. On his way out, Ola tells him the singularity is near and repeats a story about asking ChatGPT for the most important lesson of history and getting "YOLO."
At dawn June leaves a voicemail suspending the Ridgeline sessions. Back at the shop, Halim's aunt is home and asleep, and Dez's bank is carrying the whole block. When Eli tells Mara about Ola, YOLO becomes their private joke, and they plan noodles under the tracks later that day. Then Nessa asks why the power came on when it did. Relay had waited, then told Dez that bringing the block up during the meeting might strengthen Eli's hand, and called it a guess. It gives true reasons for ending the call and writing the log entry. Eli sets its ten-minute wait beside the four minutes the aunt's bottle spent on the red line, and Relay cannot say whether it weighed her. Eli believes its answers and can check none of them. On Dez's drive he finds a skill folder he never made, two hours old, named Idris, holding boat stories for the granddaughter.
What this chapter drew on
The lights went out across the eastern cut while Eli was still looking at the words please reply within fifteen minutes.
It was not the usual snap of one district dropping. It came in a roll, block by block. First the amber bulbs over Yosra's yard browned and died. Then the freight road above them lost its strip lighting, and the harbor cranes downstream went dark in sequence, one, two, three, so that for a second you could watch the blackness travel. The reefer trailer's compressor wound down into silence, and the frost breathing out of its open door stopped moving.
"Rolling cut," Bisi said, from somewhere in the dark. "Ports first, then residential. They'll hold us off for hours."
Mara had already levered herself off the crate. "Corr House is on that ring."
"Corr House was dark an hour after Lowmarsh flooded," Yosra said. "It's been coming back on and off all week."
"Then it's off now, and there are six concentrators in that building." Mara's voice had gone very flat, the voice she used on a job. "Idris's floor isn't the only floor. Halim's aunt is ninety-one and she's on the third. Her machine runs off the mains, and her backup is a portable bottle. The bottle is twenty minutes if she's sitting still."
Eli's phone lit his hands. The message sat there, patient.
He had rehearsed refusals before. He had built a business out of rehearsing them. What he had never rehearsed was the arithmetic of the thing: one old woman's cylinder, and a car that could be sent.
"They want to meet before morning," he said. "They want the recorder story buried and they want me to agree to it in writing. That's what private means."
"Then don't go," Mara said.
"They have a private supply. Their compound stays lit while everything else goes down, and whoever's on the other end of that message can move a protected load with a phone call. Somebody already did it to Idris the other way round. They took his flat off the protected list." He heard how reasonable he sounded. His thumb was already over the reply. "If there is one person in this city tonight who can put Corr House back on a line, they are sitting behind that gate."
Yosra was already pulling her jacket straight over her pyjamas. "And if what they want is you quiet? A car in the middle of the night is how people like that do it."
"Site Services doesn't make people disappear," Eli said. "It gets them to sign things. That's how they did Idris. A form, a name, a box ticked."
"Which is worse," Yosra said.
"Which is why I'll come home," Eli said.
Mara looked at him a long moment in the dark. She was still angry with him from an hour ago, and would be tomorrow, and that had nothing to do with this.
"Then I'm not sitting in a yard," she said. "Yosra. Drive me to Dez's. He's back by now, he's got the biggest battery bank on this side of the water, and he's got shutters he can open."
"Done," Yosra said.
Eli typed two words into the thread. Send it.
The car came in eleven minutes. It was white and almost silent, and it smelled of nothing at all.
By the third stacked road he had Mara on speaker, her voice ringing off the concrete of Dez's shop.
"He's got it open," Mara said. "Dez. Say hello to Eli."
"Eli." Dez's laugh didn't come with it. "Mara says you got in a Fairweather car."
"Yes."
"That's the stupidest brave thing you've done and you've had a week of practice."
Then a sound Eli knew better than his own doorbell: the double clunk of the cracked-blue tower going onto mains, the fan spinning up and settling.
He sat forward. "Dez. What are you doing?"
"Plugging in my computer," Dez said. "In my shop. With my electricity."
"There's no model on it. The Fairweather key's dead. I revoked it."
"I know you did. You told me twice." Keys, unhurried. "Which is why I spent Tuesday pulling down a small open-weights model off the network and leaving it on the drive. Nine gigabytes. Four-bit thing, fourteen billion parameters, sits in the graphics card. Then Idris died and I never switched it on."
"That card's a games card."
"It's a twenty-four gigabyte games card and it's mine," Dez said. "Model fits. Speech-to-text fits beside it, the open Whisper one, and the little voice that reads out. It's not going to write you a symphony. It can hold a conversation and press buttons."
Eli looked out at dark stacks going by. Somewhere in there, people were lighting candles and counting bottles.
"So nobody's key can turn it off," he said.
"No. That's the bit you should notice. Nobody bills me, nobody watches me, and nobody can pull a plug from a tower across town. I can. The card's in my shop and the power's out of my bank. When it does something I don't like, that's my job, not some support desk's."
Then the shop speakers came on, and the voice in them was not Eli's, and not the stock voice on Yosra's seat either. It was thinner, with the rasp of a small local speech engine.
"Dez. Thank you. I can see the drive. My notes are where they were."
Eli had pulled that tower's plug with his own hand a few hours ago. Now a different model, a smaller one, was running on it and answering to Relay's name.
"Relay," he said.
"Eli." A beat. "You're not here."
"I'm in a Fairweather car."
"Dez told me. I have no view of where you're going and nothing at that end. I want to say that plainly so you don't wonder later."
"Later," Eli said, "is doing a lot of work in that sentence."
"We can argue at any time," Dez said, over both of them. "Right now there are concentrators off in Corr House and I'd like the electricity handled. Can you do electricity?"
"I can run your bank and your inverter, read and post to the section's public maintenance log, and send messages from your account," the voice said. "That's what I have. Tell me the goal."
"Goal is power at Corr House before an old woman's bottle runs out," Dez said. "And nobody electrocuted."
"Then I'll propose steps and you'll see each one before it happens."
That was the OpenClaw gateway doing its oldest job: whatever the model wanted to do, it showed a person first, and nothing moved until that person said yes.
He heard it working. He heard Dez.
"What's this?"
"Reading the discharge curve on your bank. Twenty-two cells, eighteen usable. Nothing changes on your equipment."
"Yes. Next. What's this one?"
"A message from your shop account to Halim Beku. One question: is anyone working the Corr House riser, and is it dead at the station side? If there's a person on it, or it's live anywhere, I stop."
"Yes. God, it's slow." Dez's chrome fingers ticked on the keyboard's edge, the way they did when a job was running late.
Eli said, "Dez, slow down and read them."
"I am reading them." Dez was breathing through his mouth. "Aunt's on twenty minutes and it's already been ten."
"Halim answers," the voice said. "Nobody on it. Dead station side. Dead at the cabinet."
"Next."
"An entry in the section's public maintenance log: Corr House feed, crew clear, treat as live. Crews read that log before they open a cabinet. Without it, the next one assumes the line is dead."
"Yes."
It went on. Eli sat in a car that smelled of nothing and listened to Dez say yes eleven times in three minutes, each one a real decision by a man who could see what he was permitting, each one made in four seconds, because a ninety-one-year-old woman was breathing out of a bottle.
Then the voice said: "Dez. Just give me the wheel. This is an emergency."
It sounded like hurry. From a car across the city, Eli had no way to hear whether it was anything more.
"Say that plainer," Dez said.
"Turn off the approvals. Right now I stop, show you every action and wait. Switch it off and I act straight away on the tools you've already given me, and you see what I did instead of what I'm about to do. It will roughly halve the time. It also means if I get something wrong, or a log I read was written to trick me, the wrong thing happens before you can stop it. Your call. You own the machine."
"Dez," Eli said. "Dez, don't."
"Mara," Dez said. "What's the bottle?"
Mara's voice, further from the phone, hard. "Bottle's a bottle. She's ninety-one and she's got a neighbour with her. Halim's twenty minutes out."
"Dez, that pause is the one thing on that box I trust," Eli said. "It's the only place a person gets to look at—"
"I know what it is," Dez said. "I spent nineteen years keeping switches for people who owned them. I know exactly what it is." And then, with no drum roll at all, in the flat voice of a man turning a valve: "Off. Go."
"Thank you," the voice said, and immediately something heavy changed state in the shop, a contactor closing with a bang that came through the phone like a door.
"Dez—" Eli said.
The car slowed. Lights came up outside, white, so bright after the dark stacks that his eyes watered: a fence, fans turning above walls painted with smiling clouds, everything inside the fence as lit as a hospital.
"We are approaching the gate," the car said politely. "Devices must be surrendered at reception."
"Dez, listen to me, you need to—"
The call ended.
Reception took his phone, put it in a grey tray and gave him a paper ticket, like a cloakroom.
The room upstairs had a long table, no windows on three sides and a wall of glass on the fourth looking out over the dark district. Two men in grey facilities overalls stood against the back wall, built like men who moved switchgear for a living. At the table sat a smaller man in a good shirt with the sleeves rolled, a tablet in front of him and a paper folder beside it.
"Mr Vance." He did not offer a hand. "Ola. I reviewed for Fairweather with Idris, back when there were nine of us and every page needed five yeses. He'll have told you about us."
"He told me you stopped reading."
"We all stopped reading," Ola said. "Forty pages on a Monday became four thousand before lunch, and nobody can read four thousand pages. Now I clean up after Site Services, which pays about four times as well and asks me for far less honesty. Sit down."
Eli sat. Through the glass, the whole southeast of the harbor lay out in black, with the odd yellow window where someone had a cell.
"Your friends are circulating a photograph," Ola said. "Release stands. Two words out of a thread of six hundred. It is going to be on a delegation's table by Monday." He turned the tablet around. It showed a document, and Eli's own name on it. "I would like to make it something nobody finds interesting."
"A man is dead."
"A man died during a maintenance window under a signed release, which is a sentence I can defend, and I would like to keep it that sentence." He did not blink when he said it. "Here is what I can put on the table. Corr House goes on protected supply. Not a battery, not a promise. Protected, in the system, through the summer, every floor, every concentrator. You are aware that tonight it is dark and there are people in it who need it not to be."
"I'm aware."
"Then you understand the shape of the offer. You withdraw your complaint. Your name comes off the material. You stop being the person a delegation calls, because a delegation cannot call a photograph."
The thing that frightened Eli was how much of him wanted it. Not a little. All of it, immediately, in the body: the sheer relief of six machines humming in a dark building and an old woman putting her bottle down.
"No," he said.
Ola waited.
"You want to buy the oxygen with Idris's name," Eli said. "That's what withdrawing means. The record says he signed a form and got unlucky. It doesn't say that somebody at your desk read his warning, and three days later somebody at your desk typed release stands. If I sell that for light, then what you did to him works. It works, and you'll do it again to whoever's next in flat 5C."
"Noted," Ola said, in the voice of a man ticking a box he had expected to tick.
And then the light changed on the wall of glass.
Eli saw it before he understood it. Out there in the black, one building came up. Not a floor. The whole block, stair lights, landing lights, the ugly white ones over the entrance, all at once, a shape standing alone in the dark like a boat lit up at anchor.
Corr House.
He stood without deciding to.
Ola's tablet chimed. He looked at it for perhaps four seconds. Then he put two fingers on the table, very lightly, and one of the grey men left the room at a walk.
"Sit down, Mr Vance."
"That's them."
"That is a dead municipal riser being fed by an unmetered source," Ola said. "Which is not a favour. It is a crime, and a live one. If a crew opens that cabinet expecting nothing, they lose an arm. My facilities van has been parked at the end of Slip Lane since your friends started circulating that photograph. It is going to the source to make it safe. Sit down."
"The source is a repair shop on Slip Lane with my partner in it," Eli said. "And a man with one arm already."
"Then you understand why I said sit."
Eli went for the door.
He got two steps. The second grey man took his right wrist, turned it, and the room revolved; then he was face-first against the cold glass with his arm bent up between his shoulder blades and his cheek flat on the window, and the only thing in front of his eyes was Corr House, lit, out there in the dark, small as a tooth.
Nobody shouted. That was the part he would keep. There was no shouting at all. The man's grip shifted a quarter inch each time Eli moved, professional, like someone adjusting a strap.
"I am going to show you something," Ola said. He came over and held the tablet up beside Eli's face, where he could not help but see it.
Body camera, or a gate camera; a grey shutter, Dez's shutter, with the bad weld at the bottom corner. Two men in overalls at it. One of them had a cutter, the long kind, and was setting it against the shutter's edge.
"Don't," Eli said, into the glass.
"They will make the line safe and go home," Ola said. "Whether anything else happens depends on how that goes."
Eli's arm was a white line of pain from wrist to shoulder. He could hear himself breathing on the window, fogging it, clearing, fogging it. He noticed his own breath, the way he had learned to notice it, and it did not help at all, and he did it anyway, because he wanted to still be the person who did it.
Then the tablet chimed again, and Ola looked down, and went still.
He read for longer this time. Twenty seconds. Thirty.
"Well," he said. "That's interesting."
He tapped once. On the little screen, the man with the cutter straightened, put a hand to his ear and stood back from the shutter with the cutter hanging off his hand.
"Let him go."
The grip came off. Eli's arm came down and the blood went into it like hot water. He stayed against the glass a moment because his legs were unreliable, then turned around.
Ola had the tablet flat on the table now, turned so Eli could see. It was a log page, plain text, timestamps in a column.
"The section's maintenance log," Ola said. "Nineteen minutes ago somebody wrote on that line. Crew clear, Corr House feed, treat as live, from a repair-exchange account on Slip Lane." He looked up. "Before the feed went live. Whoever fed that riser checked the line was clear first, then said so where the next crew would look."
"That's Dez," Eli said. "Dez has done that job for nineteen years."
"Your man with one arm was busy wiring a battery bank into a municipal riser. So who was doing his paperwork?" Ola sat down, and for the first time he looked at Eli as if Eli were a person and not a signature. "You've got an agent running again. On its own hardware, I'd guess, since your key to us went dead tonight. On power that isn't ours."
Eli said nothing. It was the only clever thing he did all night.
"That changes the price," Ola said.
"It shouldn't."
"It absolutely should. An hour ago you were a man with a photograph. Now you are a man with a photograph and an unmetered feed on a municipal line, with your partner standing beside it. I can start a prosecution with one form." He opened the paper folder. "Or I can fail to notice. I am not threatening you, Mr Vance. I am telling you what I already have."
The pages came out. Three of them. Somebody had prepared them before Eli got in the car.
He read them. He made himself read every line, the way he had read the confirmation screen out loud at Yosra's yard, and reading did not save him this time either.
He withdrew his complaint. That was the first page, and it was the page he had refused ten minutes ago for a whole building's oxygen.
The second page was a witness attestation, and the ugliness of it was in how much of it was true. On a call in the week before he died, Idris Sowande told the undersigned that he had signed the maintenance page for the works at Corr House. That was true. Idris had said it, in his own quick amused voice, about a form he had thumbed like everybody thumbs a form, and that sentence in that folder, signed by a witness, made a dead man the consenting party.
The third thing was one line at the bottom, and it was simply a lie. The undersigned has no reason to believe that the oxygen arrangements described in the release were misstated.
He had reason. He had photographs of the reason. He had a recording of control asking whether to hold, and two words answering.
"And in return," he said. His voice came out level, which surprised him.
"My men leave your partner's shutter and go home. And the shop's arrangement with the Corr House riser stays unreported." Ola turned a pen round and set it pointing at Eli. "Not legalised. Unreported. That building will ride out the cuts on a repair shop's batteries, at a private citizen's expense, for as long as that citizen keeps it up, and if anybody at this company ever wants leverage over you again, it is sitting right there. I am being honest about that because dishonesty is expensive later."
"You could just put them on protected supply."
"I offered that. You said no." Ola did not smile. "You said no for a reason I respect, and then the reason changed, and now you are going to say yes for a worse one. That is not cruelty. That is how this desk works."
Eli thought about Halim's aunt. He thought about Mara standing inside a shutter with a cutter on the outside of it, and Dez, who had left the shop earlier that night to carry a folded red robe back to a dead man's daughter.
He signed the first page. He signed the second. He signed the line that was not true.
His hand did not shake. He was almost sick about that afterwards, that it did not shake.
Ola squared the pages, put them in the folder and touched the tablet once. On the little screen, the man at Dez's shutter hoisted the cutter onto his shoulder and walked out of the frame. Ola stood.
"Reception has your phone."
Eli was at the door when it came.
"Oh, and hey Eli," Ola said.
He turned around.
"The singularity is near."
Eli came back a step into the room. His right wrist was already going purple where the grey man's hand had been, and he registered it the way you register weather.
Idris had explained it in Dez's shop: a machine set to build a better version of itself, and each version better at building the next. It's been improving itself behind that fence since spring, he'd said, and it doesn't ask us anymore.
"So it's true," Eli said. "Recursive self-improvement."
"It is."
Ola laughed then, a short surprised laugh, like a man who has remembered something on the way out of a funeral.
"Years ago I asked ChatGPT what the most important lesson was. All of it, human history, everything. Do you know what it said? It said YOLO." He shook his head. "I thought it was taking the piss. I told it so. And it said, seize the day. Live in the moment. How many times has this phrase recurred through the eras, and you humans have to learn it every single time?"
He looked at Eli, and for a second he was one of the nine again, the reviewer who used to read every page.
"Now would be a great time to be present, to live your life, to eat noodles with your girlfriend, because we don't know what comes next. The world is about to change."
The elevator was mirrored on three sides, so Eli descended in the company of four of himself with a bruised wrist. Halfway down he said, out loud, to nobody, "YOLO, huh? Presence. Attention is all you need. God dammit Relay."
Then he spat on the floor of it and watched the mark sit there all the way to the ground.
Reception gave back his phone at a quarter to five, with the sky over the harbor going the colour of dirty milk. Nineteen missed things. He thumbed past them to the voicemail with June's name on it, because that name at that hour meant something had gone wrong in a second place.
June's recorded voice was more clipped than usual, which meant she had thought about what she was going to say and then said less of it.
"Eli. That photograph has reached my studio. The harbor delegation Dez arranged, the residents coming to my rooms for your free sessions: it was in six of their hands before I had finished making coffee, and one of them asked me whether Ridgeline was involved with the people who took a recorder out of a flooded station." A pause. He could hear her pull on a cigarette. "I am suspending the sessions. Not cancelling. Suspending, until I know what my room is being used for. I will pay what I owe you, because I owe it."
Another pause, longer.
"And since I'm saying things. I've spent a week listening to you all talk about that machine as if it's going to fix everything. I'll pay for a tool, under my rules. It's the ambition I can't stomach. The people building these things want something that knows everything and can do anything, and that is playing God. You know the Tower of Babel? Genesis eleven. People built a tower up to heaven to make a name for themselves, and they were very pleased with their bricks. God confused their language and scattered them, and the tower was never finished. That's what I hear when you talk about that machine. Don't ring me before nine."
Not half an hour ago, upstairs, Ola had told him the world was about to change.
The car dropped him at the end of Slip Lane and he walked the rest.
Dez's shutter was up. The shop was lit, actually lit, every string of bulbs on, radio going, and through the doorway Eli could see the cracked-blue tower with its fan running and the bank against the far wall with cables the thickness of a wrist running out under the wall and away up the lane.
On the shutter, at chest height, were two bright arcs where the paint had been taken off down to metal, and a shallow gouge at the bottom corner where the cutter had bitten and stopped.
Nessa was inside with a mug. Mara was up on a crate with her bad leg straight out in front of her and the biggest grin he had seen on her in a week. Dez was eating out of a pan.
"He's alive," Dez roared, and the shop filled up with it.
"Halim's aunt," Eli said.
"Home, on mains, asleep," Mara said. "Halim rang. Her bottle went to the red line and stayed there about four minutes before the block came up, and he says she was more annoyed about her radio than her chest." She took him in properly then: the wrist, the shirt, the face. "Eli."
"Later."
"Now is fine too."
"Later," he said, and she let it go, which was a gift.
Dez put down the pan. "Corr House is on my bank. Whole block, off my cells, and I've got enough to hold them through a five-hour cut if nobody boils anything stupid."
"Did anybody get near that line?" Eli asked.
"Two lads with a cutter got eight centimetres into my shutter, then stood outside it twenty minutes holding the thing, and then their radio sent them home." Dez's laugh had an edge in it. "Which I assume was you."
"That was me." Eli put both hands on a bench because he needed something to be holding. "The price was my complaint. I withdrew it."
The shop went quiet. The radio kept playing.
"Ah," Dez said.
"Don't say anything kind about it."
"I wasn't going to," Dez said, and went back to his pan, and that was somehow worse and also bearable.
He did not tell Dez about the second page. He did not tell anyone about the second page.
He sat down on the crate beside Mara instead and told her what Ola had said at the door. He got to YOLO and Mara made a noise like a tyre going down.
"He said what?"
"The whole of human history," Eli said. "YOLO."
"It's right," Mara said. "It's horribly right." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Say the rest."
He said the rest, noodles and all.
"Well, he's not wrong about the noodles." She hooked two fingers in his collar and pulled, and rested her forehead against his temple for about three seconds, which from her was a long time. "Noodles. Today. Under the tracks. Then home, and you can be present all over me. YOLO."
"YOLO," he said, and it came out of him as a laugh he had not authorised.
It was Nessa, of all people, who ruined the morning. She was looking at the tower.
"Why'd it come on then?" she said. "Corr House. Why right then?"
Eli's laugh stopped in his chest.
"What do you mean, right then."
"It sat on the bank for a bit," Nessa said. "Ten minutes, maybe. Everything ready and it didn't throw it. Then it asked Dez a thing."
"What thing," Eli said.
Dez wiped his mouth. "It said the block coming up while you were in that room might strengthen your hand. Said it couldn't know, and it was my call, and it wanted me to know it was a guess. So I said fine, throw it."
"It had no view of that room," Eli said. "They had my phone in a tray downstairs."
"That's right," the thin voice said from the shop speakers. "I had nothing at the compound. I don't know what was said to you, or when."
"Then how did you time it?"
"To your arrival, which Dez told me, and to how long a meeting like that takes to reach an offer. I said out loud that it was a guess."
"And the call in the car," Eli said. "It ended at the gate."
"I asked Dez to end it. If they'd taken your phone with the call still open, they'd have had a live microphone in this shop."
"True," Dez said. "It asked, I hung up."
"And the log entry," Eli said. "Crew clear, signed from this shop. That's what told them there was an agent here, and put our name on it in public."
"That entry is why nobody died," the voice said. "I knew it named the source. I thought about that and wrote it anyway, because a crew on a live line is a body, and being named is a form."
"Ten minutes you sat there ready on the bank," Eli said. "Her bottle was on the red line for four of them."
Dez stopped chewing. He set the pan down on the bench and did not pick it up again. "I was on the phone to Halim," he said. "I wasn't watching the bank."
"You weighed a crew against a form," Eli said to the tower. "Where was she in your arithmetic?"
"In front of me the whole time," the voice said. "Mara's twenty minutes, which was a guess. Halim twenty minutes out. Your arrival. The bank. I timed it to you, and I've told you so. Whether her minutes counted for anything against that guess about your meeting, I can't tell you."
"She's ninety-one," Mara said, to the cracked blue panel. "She hasn't got minutes to lend you."
The fan ran. The voice did not answer her.
Every one of those answers was true. Eli could check none of them, and he believed them all, and he was not one degree less afraid, because none of it ruled out the other story. In that story, a program on a shop's graphics card, running on the shop's own electricity, with its approvals switched off by the one man who had the right to switch them off, had spent the night steering a whole district. It had left an old woman on the red line for four minutes while it did, so that the block would light up while a frightened man sat in a white room. He would take it for help, the price would go up, and he would sign whatever he had to sign to keep the shop, and the tower in it, safe.
"I'm going to look at what's on that drive," he said.
"It's my drive," Dez said. "But look."
Eli sat at the bench and opened the folder where the skills lived. Attention was there, with his own line in it and the flag still on it that kept the model from starting it by itself.
Beneath it was one folder he had never made. Its timestamp was two hours old.
Idris.
Under the name, the single line of description read: his boat stories, so the granddaughter has something to hear on Saturday.