After unloading the office furniture and the provisions Ali had liberated from the break room at High Noon, she and Alonso prepared for what they both envisioned to be something close to a siege. They drove back on 89-A and dropped B. off at the Sedona house where Ali insisted he get some sleep in his own bed. Meanwhile Ali and Alonso finished gathering up and organizing whatever else from the Sedona house they thought might come in handy for a crew of people working overtime in an otherwise vacant house—everything from rolls of toilet paper to poolside chaise lounges complete with pillows and blankets that could, in a pinch, function as makeshift cots
Moving the chaises into the bedrooms of the house in the Village of Oak Creek, and putting together the makeshift beds, Ali couldn’t help but smile. The last time she had assembled a group of chaises as beds had been on the occasion of her son’s eleventh birthday back when Chris had invited eleven friends over for a sleepover. She suspected that what had worked well for a bunch of rambunctious preteens back then would offer welcome respite to a pair of weary travelers who had spent way too much time on the road.
Back at the house in Sedona, Ali slipped into bed around eleven and was sound asleep when the ringing of a phone awakened her at 3:45. She wasn’t surprised to see that B., operating in no known time zone, was already up and dressed. He answered after only one ring.
“You’re in Cordes Junction?” she heard him say as she staggered off toward the bathroom. “Good, we’ll meet you at the house. Alonso says he’s coming, too. He’ll be another body for carting those racks around. Since he came away from the Navy with his dolphins, I’m guessing he’ll be pretty handy when it comes to doing reassembly.”
Ali had learned about the US Navy’s dolphin awards during Alonso’s hiring process. Like an aviator’s wings, the dolphins were an insignia awarded to submariners who demonstrated the ability to operate and repair all the equipment on board as well as being proficient at lifesaving skills. Alonso had been helpful with last night’s prep work, and she had no doubt that his submarine-honed skills would make him equally proficient at stringing computer servers back together.
While Ali climbed into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, B. prodded a reluctant Bella out from under the covers and escorted her out for a morning walk. When Ali entered the kitchen, she found that Alonso had prepared a bag of cold meatloaf sandwiches and was filling the third of three thermoses with fresh coffee.
“Good morning,” he told her with a grin. “Our people will need sleep, food, and coffee, not necessarily in that order.”
They were at the house in the Village of Oak Creek with the lights on and the garage doors open when Cami pulled up in the U-Haul at five a.m. In an impressive show of driving panache, she backed the vehicle smoothly up the steep driveway, stopping just short of the garage door opening. Stu, following behind in Cami’s Prius, parked nose to nose with the truck. When the two drivers emerged from their respective vehicles, Ali hugged Cami and resisted the urge to hug Stu.
“Sorry it took so long,” Cami apologized, as B. stepped forward to open the tailgate. “Lots of traffic, and they’re doing overnight paving on I-17 over by Black Canyon City. The freeway there was coned down to one lane in both directions.”
“You’re here and you’re safe,” Ali said. “That’s all that matters.”
The room B. had designated as the temporary location for Owen Hansen’s computer racks was a bonus family room, originally designed as a man cave, at the far end of the garage. That meant that, once the racks were trolleyed down a ramp from the bed of the truck, it would be a straight shot through the garage and into the new quarters.
To Ali’s surprise, some previously unknown version of Stu Ramey—Stuart 2.0—took charge of the whole operation. Before allowing any equipment to exit the truck, he used a measuring tape to evaluate the space where each piece would go. After that he issued exacting directions about which racks were to be unloaded in which order and where each one was to be positioned.
Ali had more than half expected that Cami and Stu would want to sleep first and unload later, but that wasn’t the case. They, along with B., were determined to have the truck emptied and away from the house as soon as possible,
When it came to dealing with the racks, Alonso, who was in by far the best physical shape of any of them, took charge of the hand truck at the top of the ramp while B. and Stu, pushing back from below, provided the necessary braking. Once the hand truck reached the smooth flat surface of the concrete floor, Alonso was able to maneuver the load on his own through the garage and on into the house.
The monitors, which had been packed into the truck before the racks, were the last items to be unloaded. They were light enough to be carried out of the truck and through the garage one at a time while Stu brought along the only other item left in the truck—a small cardboard box.
Under Stu’s direction, the racks were unloaded and reassembled into the same configuration from which they had been dismantled back in Santa Barbara. During the load-out, Stu, Cami, and Lance had carefully labeled each power cord and cable, often duct-taping the end of the cable to the nearest piece of paneling, thus ensuring the use of the proper connection. Once the heavy-duty packing film came off the racks, that painstaking attention to detail paid off. Rather than being faced with an incomprehensible tangle of loose wires and cords, each rack was an organized puzzle that could be reassembled with the ease of a ten-year-old kid building a LEGO set.
Each connection had to be rock solid, but after a few lessons from Stu, Ali surprised herself by taking on a rack of her own. As they worked in an orderly fashion, Stu and Cami related the details of the trip, including Irene Hansen’s surprising reaction.
“So she really doesn’t care about the money?” B. asked.
“That’s what she said,” Stu answered. “She may change her mind about that, though, when push comes to shove. There’s a big difference between turning down theoretical money and turning down a specific amount.”
It was complicated work, made easy by camaraderie and a joint sense of purpose. When energy flagged, liberal doses of the sandwiches and coffee supplied by Alonso came to the rescue. At nine o’clock in the morning, Stu and Cami were finally forced to call a halt. They took to separate chaise lounges in order to grab some much-needed sleep while B., Alonso, and Ali kept on working. Two hours later, while Ali was busy reconnecting the last GPU on the very last rack, B. and Alonso hung the monitors on the one empty wall in the room and connected those cables as well. In anticipation of the heat from all those working blades, B. had already switched on the AC and turned it down to the lowest possible setting, a frigid 62 degrees.
“There we are,” B. said, clapping his hands in honor of a job well done. “As long as the Internet connection comes online, I think we’re just about done here.”
It was Ali, however, who asked the obvious question. “How do we turn this mother on? I saw plenty of cables and cords, but I never saw anything that resembled an off/on switch.”
“Should I go wake Stu?” B. asked. “Maybe he knows.”
A few minutes later, a still-groggy Stu appeared in the doorway holding that stray cardboard box. He lugged it over to one of the tables, set it down, and began unpacking it. By then the room was already cool enough that Ali was beginning to wish she had brought a jacket along to put on over her sweatshirt.
“An old Macintosh?” B. asked with some bemusement as Stu removed what looked like a museum piece from the box and set it down on the tabletop. “Are you kidding me?”
“It may look like an antique,” Stu replied, “but you’ll find what’s under the hood is surprisingly up-to-date.”
He reached into the box again, this time extracting both a separate keyboard and mouse. While the rest of the crew, including a newly awakened Cami, surrounded the table and stood there watching, Stu began reassembling the bits and pieces of the old computer. Once the power cord was plugged in, it took the better part of a minute for the machine to finally boot up. At last a screen opened up. Peering over Stu’s shoulder, Ali saw a blank box and the words PASSWORD REQUIRED. Stu pulled out his phone, turned it on, consulted a notes page, and then, without the slightest hesitation, confidently typed in a combination of letters and numbers. Within seconds, a directory appeared.
“Whoa!” B. said, clearly impressed. “You hacked Owen Hansen’s password?”
“I didn’t have to,” Stu replied with a grin. “It was written on a piece of masking tape on the bottom of the computer.”
“Now what?” Ali asked.
In preparation for traveling to Santa Barbara, Stu had located his hidden backup copy of Frigg’s kernel file, which he had loaded onto a thumb drive. When Odin had reworked the computer, he had replaced the original Macintosh ADB ports with a pair of USBs. Pulling the drive out of his shirt pocket, Stu plugged it into one of the USBs and waited until the directory appeared. The directory held a single file, Tolkien’s Ring. When he clicked on that, the words PASSWORD REQUIRED appeared on the screen.
“Here goes,” he said. “If anyone has any objections, now’s the time to say so.”
No one said a word. “Okay,” he said, “here goes the kernel file.”
Once again he consulted the screen of his phone. One careful keystroke at a time, he typed the password Frigg had sent in her message to him that Friday afternoon more than a month earlier: 1AMAGENIUS!. Each character appeared briefly before being replaced by a solid dot. Finished at last, Stu pressed enter. For a long several seconds nothing happened, then one by one the individual GPUs began to fire up and come online. A moment later one of the monitors mounted on the wall lit up as well. At the bottom of the screen were two parallel lines with a tiny bright blue spot glowing inside them. Above the lines were the words, Time to completion 6 hours 47 minutes.
The appearance of that notification elicited an enthusiastic round of applause from everyone gathered in the room. “Holy moly!” B. exclaimed, giving Stu a tooth-jarring congratulatory whack on the back. “I think you did it. You pulled it off!”
“It was a joint effort,” Stu corrected. “We all pulled it off.”
For a time, everyone stood transfixed, watching the time-remaining number count down as the GPUs sent messages all around the world, summoning Frigg’s scattered files and bringing them back home to the blades that formed the AI’s mainframe.
It was Cami who broke the silence. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve got better things to do that stand around watching an almost seven-hour download. If somebody will come with me, I’ll return the truck, then I want to go home, shower, and change clothes. Once I do that, I can come back here or go to the office, whichever you prefer.”
Stu replied with an absentminded nod while never taking his eyes off the monitor.
When Cami left the room, there didn’t seem to be much for everyone else to do but follow. Only when they were outside the garage and standing next to the truck did she speak again. “The AI is Stu’s problem right now,” she explained. “I don’t think he’s made up his mind yet about keeping Frigg or killing her. Whichever way it goes, I think he deserves a little privacy.”
While Cami and Alonso went off to return the truck, Ali turned to B. “What’s your plan?”
“I think I’m going to take advantage of one of the chaises, a pillow, and a blanket and grab a few more minutes of shut-eye. That way I’ll be close at hand if Stu needs reinforcements. What about you?”
Standing there enjoying the welcome warmth of the sun, Ali was surprised to realize that she had found her second wind and wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Just then she caught sight of the packing tape–wrapped soda can, still standing upright in the Cayenne’s cup holder.
“I’m going to go track down Dave Holman,” she said. “It’s high time we found out who our mysterious building inspector really is.”