Free Feed the Machine by Mathew Ferguson Page B

Scour or something. She hadn’t been paying attention.
    She had two tables full of junk she worked on—one outside in her workshop, the other inside the house. Had she been inside at any point to see her family?
    Connected to her body by only the thinnest thread but the body grew tired, began making its gentle requests for sleep which soon became demands.
    Silver rushing through the numbers, racing through the jungle, exhaustion chasing her, the answer ahead.
    Closer now but her feet were aching, her nose running, the red welts itching, her body making its displeasure known.
    A wall of numbers scaled in an instant, an ocean of them gulped in one mouthful, an island, numbers crunching under her feet like hot sand. A temple and a book, a glowing silver light shooting from it into the sky.
    The answer.
    They were close to Kaleen’s numbers but Silver knew that was because Kaleen was inaccurate. The birthweights here were measured down to fifty decimal places. There were tens of thousands of them, all connected to a number. Some sort of identifier. Some of the numbers were static. Others rose up and down, jumped from high to low and back again.
    Silver slipped out of her chair and onto the mattress resting against the back wall. It was cool against her burning skin.
    She let exhaustion catch her.
    How does the hasdee know the births and deaths of all the people?
    “I don’t know,” she murmured, sinking into sleep.
    Yes you do.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 11
    Silver stepped over the endless lines of flowing blue bugs and looked at the sagging mansion.
    “If he’s so rich why is his house falling down?”
    Hello moved on her shoulder, his claws pricking her skin.
    “He loves old things. I saw a shiny spoon in his yard—can I get it?”
    “On the way out.”
    The bugs were a vivid blue running in two lines through the three fences surrounding Cago. The ones leaving were thin and small. Those returning were fat and waddling, barely fitting through the wire mesh.
    “He must have five hundred bugs,” Silver said, looking down the line and counting two hundred and twenty-seven within sight. She calculated the average speed of going and returning, watched for a few seconds and the final total of estimated bugs came close to five hundred.
    “Can you fly, tell me if you see anything?”
    Hello took off with a caw, looping high over the mansion and then flying away to loop over a few more. Silver saw him pretend to peck something out of the air. He fluttered down, landing at her feet.
    “The old man is in there. Asleep I think. Cat nowhere to be found.”
    Silver rubbed the itch creeping up her neck and chewed on her lip. The Collector had a pet—a cat named Gress—who stayed with him at all times. If they were going to break in, they needed to know where he was.
    “His servant is gone for the day… did Gress go with him do you think?”
    Hello pecked at the ground, pulling a small stone up and looking underneath it.
    “Gress isn’t down at the Machine. What is the old man’s name?”
    Silver thought for a moment, her mind whizzing over all the data she’d ever collected.
    “It’s… Ijira,” she said, the name thrown up from a question she’d asked her mother four years ago.
    Silver felt for the two bugs hanging on her belt. One of them was twitching rhythmically—not a good sign. The program she’d put in it was conflicting somehow. The other was fine.
    The plan had been to let the bugs in to map the house. She’d return home, have them scratch it in a piece of metal or maybe on the tabletop. Then she’d devise her strategy to break in to steal an electronic tablet.
    Not enough time.
    “I know.”
    Flood was the wrong word for the information the hasdee chip poured back at her. She’d spent the morning on a single entry, dropping down layers and finding each layer had tens of thousands of bits of data. Any one of them contained thousands more. It seemed to go down without limit. Endless acronyms that