Tactical Operations Center (TOC)
The Hangar
Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn
June 15, 12:49 a.m. EST
Jerome Williams-“Bug” to everyone-sat amid a web of computer terminals, screens, coaxial cables, encoding buffers, and other equipment, and all of it inside a big glass box. Two inches of reinforced glass and a sophisticated multiform entry scanner separated him from the fifty other people in the sprawling Tactical Operations Center. The TOC was a monument to computer-driven sophistication, and rising like an obelisk was the primary processing tower of MindReader. That, too, was safe behind the bulletproof glass and guarded by two unsmiling soldiers with M4s.
Bug glanced up from his keyboard at the flow of people in the TOC. Some were hunched over workstations connected through monitored sockets to MindReader’s servers; others spoke on phones or milled like frenzied insects, going about the thousand crucial tasks related to the current crisis.
Despite the constant flow of cool air into his fishbowl, Bug was sweating heavily. Six rogue nukes. Just the thought of those weapons hidden out there terrified him. Violence was such an alien concept to him, despite where and for whom he worked. Most of the time it was an abstraction, a crazy concept no more real than the aliens, monsters, orcs, and zombies he battled in video games. He knew that the problems the DMS faced were real, but they weren’t real to him. He had never heard a shot fired in anger, never saw the enemy anywhere but on a computer screen. It was easy to stay detached if you lived like that.
Bug was a small man. Thin, spare, slightly hunched from a life spent at the keyboard. His work for the DMS was usually pure support. Crack a code, break through an anti-intrusion firewall, steal some guarded information. Fun stuff. Even when providing real-time intel for the field teams there wasn’t much actual pressure on him. After all, MindReader was the fastest computer on the planet. The basement of the hangar had a cold room lined wall to wall with a supercomputer cluster. The primary computer block was made up of three thousand premarket upgrades of the Tianhe-1A system which flew at a speed of 2.507 petaflops. That was more than thirty percent faster than the Cray XT5 Jaguar. Sometimes Bug would sit with his palms flat on the MindReader obelisk and feel the power surging through him. That was real to him.
But today… the real world seemed to have found a way past all of his personal anti-intrusion systems. Fear was like an unbearably shrill sound in his ears.
“Find those other devices.” That’s what Mr. Church had said to him before the Big Man went in for his conference with the president. Not “try” to find them. Find them.
It was on him.
Him.
He closed his eyes and breathed in long and deep through his nose. The air in the fishbowl was ripe with the hot-wire smell of ozone. A beautiful smell.
“Come on, baby,” he said aloud as his fingers hovered above the keyboard. “Come on, my baby. Don’t make me do this alone. Talk to me…”
Almost as if in answer to his plea, a bell softly pinged.