The server room was a temple of cold air and blinking blue LEDs. The hum of ten thousand cooling fans created a white noise so thick it felt physical, pressing against Sam's eardrums. Outside that door, a man with a gun was waiting for the fog to clear.
Sam leaned his back against the reinforced steel, his chest heaving. His hand was slick with cold sweat as he pulled his laptop from his bag. He didn't have a chair, so he dropped to his knees, using a rack of humming processors as a makeshift desk.
"Trace at eighty-nine percent," he whispered, staring at the progress bar on his tablet. "Come on, come on..."
A heavy thud vibrated through the door. Then another. The gunman was throwing his shoulder against the glass and steel barrier. It wouldn't hold forever, the seals were designed for fire safety, not a sustained tactical breach.
Sam looked at the terminal. He couldn't leave. If he broke the connection now, the transfer would fail, the "God Key" would stay locked in the vault, and the pixelated figure in his living room would execute the "delete" command. But if he stayed, he was a sitting duck in a very expensive cage.
He looked up at the ceiling. In the corner, a red nozzle protruded from the tile. HALON GAS SUPPRESSION. It was a relic of the old fire safety system ,a gas designed to extinguish electrical fires by displacing oxygen. It was lethal to humans if they stayed in the room for more than a minute. NexaShield had supposedly deactivated it last year in favor of a new chemical mist, but Sam knew better. He was the one who had written the legacy code that kept the old valves on standby.
"I'm sorry, Sarah," Sam whispered.
His fingers flew across the keyboard. He didn't trigger the gas in the server room. He triggered it in the office zone outside.
A muffled, pressurized roar filled the space beyond the door. Through the narrow glass viewing port, Sam watched as a thick, invisible wall of Halon rushed into the cubicles. The gunman, who had been trying to pry the door frame, suddenly stopped. His hands flew to his throat. He dropped his pistol, his knees buckling as his lungs searched for oxygen that was no longer there. He collapsed onto the carpet, his movements becoming slow and clumsy before he went still.
The Ascent
Sam didn't celebrate. He knew the Halon would eventually leak through the door seals. He had maybe three minutes of breathable air left.
He looked at the maintenance ladder bolted to the far wall. It led to the "Plenum" the crawlspace above the ceiling tiles where the massive cooling ducts lived. He scrambled up the rungs, the metal cold against his palms.
He pushed aside a heavy acoustic tile and pulled himself into the darkness. The air up here was stagnant, smelling of dust and old wires. He crawled on his stomach, his laptop tucked under his arm, following the line of the main HVAC duct.
Five minutes of claustrophobic crawling brought him to a heavy iron grate. He kicked it open and emerged onto the roof of the NexaShield building.
The night air hit him like a blessing. Below him, the city of Oakhaven was a sprawling grid of orange and white lights, looking exactly like the motherboards he spent his days analyzing. He felt a sudden, sharp pang of vertigo. He was just one man on a roof, trying to fight a ghost with a keyboard.
He ran to the edge of the roof, toward the employee bike locker. He didn't take a car as he knew the roads would be watched. Instead, he grabbed a matte black e-bike which provides a high-torque prototype the R&D team used for cross campus errands.
He tapped a sequence into his phone, "force-unlocking" the bike's motor. The digital display flickered to life, showing 100% battery.
"Sarah," he whispered into his earbud, the wind already whipping past his face as he prepped the bike for a jump onto the parking deck ramp. "I'm coming. And I'm bringing the whole damn grid with me."