A Rust Memory?

2nd June 2022 Story Fragment by M. K. Dreysen - A Rust Memory?

"Oh, glory, come to papa."

"You're awfully impressed with this, Oni."

"Janie, come on, you're just as excited, look at it. Big iron..."

I was impressed. The computer, speaking loosely, looked like a giant freezer, sounded like a jet plane, and should have died the good death decades ago.

Yet here it was, still blinking its lights and spinning its rust. The beast and a handful of its obsolete brothers and sisters gave the only lights in the room, an old classroom turned into the computer science departments boneyard.

Our client wanted the data that was bound up in its cavernous innards. The department had unplugged the ancient supercomputer's network, the cards it depended on long since unavailable.

But they'd left the beast plugged in and running the Cave of Wonders on the other side of a glass-filled wall. Must make for good copy when bigwigs came around on tour and needed to see cinema-scale VR projection in the flesh. "Can you pull the drives?"

"Yeah." Oni had tracked down the drive locations we needed. "They're all in one rack bay, you must be living right."

"Something." I bent down to work hardware. Oni had the software side of it, I tracked cables, unscrewed all the screws, and prepped our transport case.

Something pinged off the metal rack, leaving a long silver groove in the blackened steel. "What the hell?"

Oni looked up at me, then his eyes got wide and he pointed behind me, at the big glass window that separated us from the darkened Cave. "Janie..."

I turned and watched a web of cracks spreading across the glass, and the hole that had generated them. "Bullets?"

Another one came through, then, and the poly-glass crackled again, the rack pinging behind me. No other sound, though, just the whipcrack of the bullet when it hit something. Jesus.

"I don't do bullets, Janie," Oni whispered.

"Duck down, Oni. On your back." I helped him pull the keyboard down, and then the beast's service monitor. "You almost finished?"

Too many long breaths, and then "Yep, it's safe to pull."

Unmounted drive, check. The slow rattle of the handle of the door I'd carefully locked behind us, check.

A long reach above the rest of the museum of computing, the only cover between me and the gun? Expose myself long enough to yank the hard drive bay?

Oh, right. Shit.