Whirring sounds of the mainframe
room sent out waves of white noise that muted other sounds. The ivory floors were pinpricked with holes
for aeration. It seemed like a hospital
for technology with its absurdly absolute sanitation. Janus and Duplex, tucked in the corner behind
some machines, waited for the clock to hit its target. The colon separating hours from minutes
blinked its last and the digits flickered to
"All right, go
ahead." Janus forcefully pulled out
Duplex's hand and fed a disk into it.
"The security cameras have already been taken care of. Just hurry up." Duplex curled his chubby fingers around it
and pulled out the keyboard from the terminal with his other hand as he
inserted the disk into the black wooden cabinet. Janus stepped out to the side.
"Don't go too far," Duplex
whined.
"I'll watch out for
security."
Duplex accessed the program on the
file system that stopped the logging process.
The program gave no confirmation that it had worked or was hanging or
still in the process or caused an error.
It was an illegal hacking program, so all the niceties of commercial
software were gone. Duplex had to assume
it had worked and accessed the file system.
He dived into the personnel records and searched for his own name.
He opened it up and the profile
program displayed all his vital stats at their less than gleaming stature.
But the file was in read-only. He looked on the toolbar for something to
edit his information with. He found the
edit command, but an error dialog popped up, telling him he needed Level 3
clearance to edit personnel.
"Janus," Duplex whispered,
inaudible in the noise. "Janus?... Janus!"
Janus whipped around angrily. "What?"
"The program says I need Level
3 clearance to edit my profile."
Janus turned to him "Just enter
the password I told you to."
"There's no place to put
it."
Janus frustratedly came over the
console to look at the monitor.
"Bah, click OK first."
Duplex did so. A box prompting for a password came up. "Oh."
Janus shifted his eyes to Duplex,
glaring at him hatefully. "Work
faster. We don't have great time."
The records screen now allowed him
to edit the various text boxes dotted around the window. Quickly, he replaced the blank or nearly
blank information boxes with the data he and Janus went over earlier, adding in
three commendations for valor, increasing the number of kills, and a different
set of system specs that made him a more battle-ready robot than he was. He saved the changes and exited the program.
"Done," Duplex declared.
Janus came over to check the
monitor. "You idiot, were you going
to show everyone where you've been?"
Janus snapped, returning to the file system screen, where the cursor was
obviously highlighting Duplex's record and date of modification. Janus worked fast to clean up the mess, using
techniques too fast for Duplex to study.
He finished up, returned the monitor to an idle state, and shoved the
keyboard back on the sliding tray.
"Done- wha?" The keyboard tray sprung back out, as it
often did if it was caught on a cord. He
dug his fingers back into the cabinet and found a ribbon-like IDE cable jamming
the works. Curious as to why a hardware
cable would be outside the casing he trailed his fingers along it and traced it
to under the keyboard. Fearfully, he
tilted the peripheral up and saw a small circuit board taped onto it.
"Damn it all to hell!"
Janus exclaimed.
"What? What is it?"
"Do you know what this is?" he asked, ignoring the question just made. He shook the keyboard to show the green board. "This is a key stroke logger. It keeps an external log of what keys were typed. Now they can trace back our steps and find out what we did."
"Aah!" Duplex
exclaimed. He ripped the circuit board
off from the scotch tape, threw it on the floor, and smashed it with his heavy
gold boot.
Janus held his hands to his
head. "Aagh! You moron.
Now what are they gonna do when they have the log AND look for that
thing! The log's not in that! It's on a different server. It's wireless! You just sealed our fate with an extra
coat!"
Duplex looked down at the ground
sheepishly. He lifted his foot and
looked at the crumbs of green plastic littering the floor with a finger
nervously touching his mouth like a kid.
"You've just condemned us more
than you'll ever know." Janus
pulled out a saber sword from his hip, a different, less-developed model than
Zero's with a purple blade. As he raised it over his head, no sooner did he
ignite it than he cleaved it diagonally through the data machine.
"What did you do?" Duplex asked astonishedly. Red klaxons began sounding throughout and
flaming emergency red light flooded the room.
"Destroying the evidence of
your blunder." Janus screamed,
towering over him. "Do you ha-"
He stopped suddenly as he picked up
the sound of the main doors opening. The
gray reploid peeked around the corner of the box and saw two security personnel
running towards them.
"Shit!" Duplex uttered
much too loudly. "What're we gonna
do now? What're we gonna do now? What're we gonna do?" He began to panic.
Janus leveled his arm cannon at
Duplex's face. "Die."
Duplex's moment of still surprise
let the fully charged blast into his face do the maximum damage. As if in slow motion, the burst propelled him
backwards like a gold wrecking ball, smashing the partition behind him in
concentric circles. His face billowed
out smoke, half torn away like a grotesque freak, unveiling his face mold and
the wiring held within. He slumped down
and flopped to the side, deactivated.
"What's this?" One of the security reploids declared, coming
upon the scene.
"I've come here just in
time," Janus exclaimed exasperatedly.
"Duplex was attempting to access important records but I put an end
to him swiftly."
The other reploid guard knelt next
to Duplex's corpse. "This was
Duplex?"
"Aye. Emphasis on was."
"Looks like you sure did a
number on him," the other commented.
"What the devil?" Dr. Cain suddenly appeared, hobbling rapidly
over to the fray. "What's going on
here? Janus?"
"Duplex, in truth, was a
Maverick, sir. I caught him trying to
access vital information from the server, and retired him."
"What were you doing down
here? You don't do machine work."
"Uh, I was asked to run an
errand down here by... Zero."
Dr. Cain eyed him curiously. "So why does the server have an obvious
beam saber cut in it?"
"That was mine, sir. In my struggle with Duplex, I missed and
accidentally sliced through box."
"You attacked him with your
sword."
"Defended, more like."
"Whatever. And yet, Duplex was clearly killed by a
plasma blast. A powerful one at
that." Cain offered his hand to
Duplex, as if Janus needed to be directed to the evidence.
"Well, I had to divert to
secondary tactics then, of course. Desperate
men act desperately."
Cain paused in thought. Janus' confident exterior would never betray
the terror he felt inside as Cain's own mental computer processed the facts
with his deceitful explanation of them.
Janus offered, "Once I damaged
the server I knew the quarters were too close for a melee duel, so I took the
quick and clean route. I knew none of
the other systems would be damaged by a point-blank blast."
"We'll figure all this out
later. Take Duplex and have him
analyzed," he said to the security guards.
"Get a disaster recovery team down here to salvage what we can, and
where the devil is Zero? And X? Someone find them!"