High Score

He rolls each relay between his fingers, listens to it, sets it down. Only when the third one passes does he look up.

Good hands. Come on - you found them, you get to watch.

At the Arena's intake terminal he seats the relays one by one. On the third, a hum you'd stopped hearing stops being background.

Amber text crawls up out of the dark: REGISTRATION - INSERT CARD.

Three sealed relays. Grey body, three pins, heavier than they look.

You can find them in Pre-War Garbage Piles. I saw some big piles south of here.

Azra sits cross-legged on his bench, clamp meter in his lap, watching the squat building across the way like it's about to confess. VIRTUAL ARENA, in dead channel letters. Without looking over, he holds out a notebook.

Nine nights of readings off that building. The Virtual Arena. Go on. Look.

Every machine still alive in this desert, I can tell you what feeds it. A CELL.

Every few minutes the Arena pulls current. A spike, a hold, a release. Machines don't have habits. A schedule means something in there is still keeping it.

Keeping it since before the war, behind a locked door, for no one. That's the part I can't leave alone.

Knowledge that runs in the dark isn't knowledge. It's a secret with a generator.

The intake terminal out front of the Arena is the only piece of it built to talk to people, and it can't - its relay board is cooked. Three sockets, three dead relays. The same sealed relay they put in every washing machine, furnace and coffee maker of the era.

And what are the Pre-War Garbage Piles mostly made of? Appliances.

Three relays. I'll do the rest.