Free Unawakened by Trillian Anderson

made after the reformation they don’t realize it’s illegal. Since it’s running a government-allowed operating system, they don’t think to look any deeper. Once I have yours set up, it’ll pass inspection. If they ask why you’re on such an old machine, just claim you’re ensuring backwards compatibility for fringe users. Works every time. Fringe rats lucky enough to have a system have old ones anyway.”
    “You’ve really put thought into this.”
    I laughed. “Not as much as I should have. If I had really put any thought into it, I would have hunted down a braille translation tablet before coming here. No matter. Once we get home, I’ll have to make you a charge adapter for the plugs; they use the old style of plugs from before the government wised up and banned the outlets.”
    “It amazes me how much you know about history.”
    “Every time Kenneth sent me to an estate with a library, I’d read the books. I spent a lot of time down here reading, too. I have a good memory.” My memory had saved my ass more times than I could count. It also got me into equal amounts of trouble.
    “Do you think there is a copy of the Bible in here?”
    I halted, twisting around to stare at the dae. “I thought you said you weren’t religious.”
    “I’m not.”
    “Then why do you want something like that?”
    “Know your enemy,” he informed me. Something about his tone warned me he was evading my question, although I didn’t think he was lying to me.
    I decided it didn’t matter. If Rob had an interest in religion, it didn’t hurt me at all. He was welcome to believe what he wanted, as long as he didn’t mind my lack of faith. His knowledge had gotten us into the vault, after all.
    I smiled at him. “We can check the library on the way out. If you want an old copy of one, before it was sanitized to meet government standards, there might be one here. Just don’t get caught with it, okay? You might be an elite, but some crimes they won’t forgive, and spreading old religious texts is one of them. At least you didn’t ask for a book from a taboo religion. Getting caught with one of those is a death sentence, no matter what your rank is.”

    A wealth of old electronics waited in the storage wing of the vault, and everything was as I had left it years ago. The lack of dust amazed me, and I found myself once again wondering who had built the place. I had several guesses regarding the why of the vault, although I doubted I’d ever learn its history for certain.
    Rob sucked in a breath, his eyes widening as he took in the shelves and cases filled with rectangular boxes, each and every one of them containing a laptop or accessory of some sort.
    The room was at least fifty feet wide, and I hadn’t quite figured out how long it was; the entire thing, as far as I could tell, was crammed full of electronics.
    “Welcome to the vault.”
    “Jesus Christ,” Rob spluttered. “If the elite discovered this, they’d destroy it in a heartbeat. You’re trusting me with this?”
    The idea of Rob exposing the vault hadn’t even crossed my mind—a critical mistake on my part, but one I didn’t regret. He had already risked so much for me. The vault barely scratched the surface of what I owed him.
    Knowledge of the vault wasn’t sufficient repayment for my life.
    “I trust you,” I replied, working my way deeper into the maze of shelves and racks. The system I had chosen for myself was in the heart of the place. The white boxes had drawn my attention to the laptops. Most companies took pride in their brand until the bitter end.
    I wondered why the company had erased its name from the systems before it had been destroyed as a part of the reformation. Had the company known what was coming and tried to conform to the new government standards?
    “No wonder you spent a month in here. You could spend a month in this room alone and not be able to catalog everything.” Rob followed me through the maze.
    Somewhere deeper