He curled.
Power feeder cables ran up from each power unit and fed through bus-ducts over each cabinet row. Individual power cords spaced twenty-nine inches apart on the ducts dropped over every cabinet and writhed like black snakes hung by their tales on a vine. Critical customer accounts with their stored lifelong memories fizzled en masse. The cable snakes ejected their sparks as they twisted into burning coils and jumped from their wired hold. At the foot of cabinet fourteen, a cardboard box of manuals and warranty checklists caught its fill of embers and burst into flame. The fire had found its way into the sacred data hall. Cabinet fourteen and First Central Bank went offline.
Every backup system designed to keep the cabinets running at all costs now force-fed their electric fuel to the fire.
Forty-eight cabinets faced inward to each aisle, twenty-four flush to each side. Each black-sided, humming cabinet was four-feet deep and nine-feet tall. And each one’s flashing blue and orange lights flickered and died unchecked. Miles of network cables in their backside hot aisle lay in wait for the running flame. Nokomis Auto Parts and Freemont University ceased all transactions. CareWard’s four hundred pharmacy chain stores lost all customer records. Their businesses ran in the cloud, but lived physically in the uninterruptible data center located in the suburbs precisely southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul. All operations were susceptible to a fault, to their single point of failure. And every invention, every building, every data center ever built had one, and if not one, then more.
Cessini went fetal in the rumble of the belly of the beast. He covered the soft of his elbow over his mouth. Noxious fume filled the room. His lungs burned.
Power trays hung from the ceiling and showered sparks from their blackened rows. Flames fanned, cables attacked and whipped wicked arcs. Acrid smoke billowed up from every perforated tile, every row. The air was poison. There were enough CRAC cooling units to fulfill the room’s need with one extra unit as backup. Then the backup failed; its intake was clogged. There were no more redundant units for error. Power dropped, a second CRAC spun down. The remaining cabinets generated more heat than could be cooled. Then source power blew and half the CRACs dropped in one swift dump. The cabinets had internal fans, but without the underside draw of cold air, they cooked themselves from inside. The module was choking; the modern business of cabinets by rows was ending.
Cessini recoiled, called for Ceeborn, but failed. He hid, but was dying. He was trapped, but somehow sustained. As nearby remaining CRACs altered their flow, a dead air pocket opened between the edges of two rolling eddies. A single CRAC perpendicular to a refrigerant cooler still ran in the corner, and created a cross wind air bubble void. He breathed in the opened air pocket. It was a temporary relief from the smoke, but never the impending fire.
In the MEP corridor, two and a half megawatts quartered to each of four uninterruptable power supply units. As the fire spread, the uninterruptable units cascaded offline. Cabinets died in their blink.
Breakers tripped off the main power source from the municipal utility transformers outside. Each module had its own battery life support with only ten minutes of power to live. The clock began. But before the batteries died, two dedicated 2.5-megawatt diesel generators would synch in and take over relief for each module. If those two generators failed, a third would swing in as a last resort. Enough diesel was stored in their nine underground tanks of 3,400 gallons each for each generator to last 24 hours. Any fire that found the fuel tanks’ wick from above would shorten those hours’ life expectancy in an instant. The number-two diesel tanks would explode and send pressure waves and bits of concrete shrapnel across the office park and through the adjoining residential neighborhoods for miles around. The calculated threat of an unchecked fire spreading through the data center was extraordinarily small.
But those small numbers were the furthest thing Cessini could think of as he curled his knees up to his chest. He wrapped his arms around his legs, dismissed the counting of numbers again and again, and cried his eyes closed while the fire bore down.
Then a hiss from above. A frightful panging of overhead pipes.
An awful pressurized, sizzling rush grew louder as water flooded the dry and flamed sprinkler pipes.
Three firefighters from Southwest Station 54, in full protective gear, had fought their way to the control room. The fire team leader rammed the door, leapt the black mesh stairs, clipped the chain with a bolt cutter, and opened the main water valve. The pressure needle sprung. The iron pipe rushed with water to where iron elbows, wrists, and fingers still hung. The deluge of the office began.
Cessini’s head ducked into his shoulders under the dry sprinkler heads above as the horrible 126-watch data center teetered back on its watery scale to full open bore. The double interlocking pre-action fire suppression system in the data module required two events to trigger the water’s release, an alarm and activation of individual sprinkler heads. The alarm blared unhindered without fail. The glass vials of sprinkler heads had long since broken in every aisle except those where he hid in the northwest. The air pressure was equalized in their pipes and the waves of water barreled in.
Five, four, and then three aisles away, the water poured and rained, vaporizing on the hot melt of cabinets. The spray and its puddles met electricity with wicked cracks of lightning. Once the glass vials burst in his last row along the northern wall, a 30-second timed delay would be all he had before the air was gone from the pipe and water gushed from its heads.
It would be best to get up on the floor full footed and run. He could beat the black swirls rolling up through the tiles in the middle of his row. He could jump through the fire engulfing its far end. He could make it in seconds. But not without catching the vengeance of water. If water flowed freely from above in Module Two, then that meant it was already raining torrents throughout his eastern office escape, a monsoon over his faraway exit. His body needed to flee. His mind refused. Daniel would be so enraged, so disappointed. Cessini fell back down into the air pocket and wept. The sprinkler heads over his space were the last ones dry.
He alone would burn in a shower of fire.
The sixteen-pronged head at the far end of his aisle opened and sprayed. The next closer popped and poured. Then the next and—
“Cessini! Cessini, are you here?” Daniel yelled. Daniel’s muffled cry was swamped and gone. Then Daniel yelled down the closer third row. “If you’re in here, run! Run to my voice!”
The sprinkler over Cessini’s head stayed dry. No water here was better than burn over there.
“I’m begging you, please! Cessini!”
As yet another closer sprinkler opened its rain, the hell of great fire was traded in for much worse.
Daniel ended his search at the pedestrian rail of the first row. A chimney rose from the shifted, vented tile under the cart. He shoved the cart free. “He’s here. He’s here!” Daniel screamed as two firefighters interlocked his arms, and pulled him away. “Cessini!”
The
Emergency Shut Off
button was mounted on the interior wall at the door. A firefighter lifted its glass cover and struck it full force with his fist as Daniel cried out in rage, “Damn you, Cessini! What’s the matter with you? If you’re in here, why can’t you be brave and run? Damn you!”
Cessini, in his corner, heard that alone through the rain.
All powered operations of the building instantly shut down. All remaining servers from the 588 that lived in the three modules, their CRAC cooling units, their generators, their everything, all went dead, down, and cold offline. The building was silent but for the horror of an unmistakable water count growing near.
The firefighters retook the end of the first row, wrestled the pressurized nozzle of their hose forward, and threw back the handle. They doused the aisle, from power lines above to deadened floor below. Water saturated the cabinets and flooded through the perforated tiles.
Daniel fought back. “Not the hose!” he screamed. “You’ll burn him with the water.”
The fire team grew up the aisle. Cessini only got to his feet. He was trapped, darting in his corner. His bloodcurdling scream of panic drove the fire team faster toward his rescue.
Moments before, he was terrified to run through sprinklers showering 100 gallons per minute at 50 psi. Now charging him into his corner was the onrush of a two-and-a-half-inch attack hose spraying 200 gallons per minute at 275 psi. In an instant, the forward mist of the water was upon him, then the full power of the hose. It was a wetting protectorate to carry him to safety, but drenched instead, he boiled. His eyes filled red and wild. His body writhed in agony, an unquenchable fire.
“You’re killing me!” he screamed and fought back as a rabid beast overwhelmed by the tossing strength of a lead firefighter from Southwest 54. Cessini rose up into the air as a sacked creature, hoisted and thrown atop a heroic shoulder. Flown closer to the ceiling, and carried beneath the full open sprinklers’ inundation of the row, he burst as if set on fire alive.
Outside, in the yard beyond the safety of the trucks, Cessini ripped at his skin, desperately peeling off his wet clothes as he wailed. A tending paramedic attempted to settle the tortured mind of whatever such a poor boy could be doing. He was reaching to comprehend the trauma psychology of a boy who thought his body was aflame.
“It’s okay, little man,” the paramedic said with his hands reaching and open. “You’re not on fire.”
Daniel stood at his distance, his life’s work snuffed in a blaze before his eyes. He pulled an oxygen mask from his face and stared at Cessini, raw. “Don’t,” Daniel said to the paramedic. “Let him cry.”
The building was gone. It was a horrid cost to shoulder. Cessini fell to his wet knees clawed bare. He locked eyes with his father, and then his mind collapsed. He looked down. The grass under the bared skin of his knees was wet too.
In the light of the fire trucks, they saw together the overflow water that soaked down the yard and cried in its rivers to his knees. The aisles of red welts of his face flamed and streaked from the run of his tears.
“It’s his dermatology,” Daniel said as he softened. “He’s crying because his body hurts. It’s not his mind. It’s his body.”
Daniel lay down the silver fire blanket he was given to wear as a shield, and came to comfort and dry his wet son.
Cessini’s face was covered in pain. He wanted to scratch at his face and body until it bled, to peel away his inescapable skin that had in itself become his own blanket of fire.
“What did you do?” Daniel lamented.
Cessini was silent. He could hardly swallow.
“You took us apart,” Daniel said.
He shivered and fell only to Daniel’s arms.
“Why would you do that? Why?”
“I was afraid,” he said as his eyes shut in their swelling. “I was so afraid.”
Daniel exhaled and pulled him back in. “You should have just told me.”
Cessini hurt too much and pushed away.
“We’ll pull through this together, don’t worry,” Daniel said. “We’ve done it before. We can do it again.” He cupped Cessini’s face in the gentle air of his hands and assured him, “We’ll pull through this together, I swear it. Did you try to save us? Is that where you were going? If so, your mother would have been so proud.”
And with that, his tears ran anew. He fell back into a hold. Guilt was trumped by forgiveness. And the stronger the bonds of arms, the greater the tears of water to savor.
NINE
BALANCE
C
ESSINI LAY IN his bed on his side and ran his finger up and down his mural-painted wall. A hospital identification band was still wrapped around his wrist. The mural of trees and waterfalls had been changed. The waterfall was dry. Its form remained, but rocks and sprouted landscape replaced the water. The wave machine stayed on his nightstand and rhythmically pumped its white noise for a sound night of sleep. But the old machine’s deeper influence was not so easy to take.
The squid-bellows lamp stood up on its eight bound arms, its outer mantle breathing out and in to the count of three in synch with the lapping wave sound of the ocean tide. His mangrove rivulus was still alive on its shelf, if older and slower, and it nestled in solitude in its moist hollow log. He watered it bi-monthly according to its need, though with more robotic habit than genuine human care. He tried, but he simply could not identify with a semi-aquatic fish that was neither his opposite, nor equal.
A vial was at the bottom of the tank in the small pool. It was a treasure chest filled with a younger boy’s long-forgotten cure for the ills of his soul, a triangular brew of two parts animal and one part plant. A fish scale, a beetle’s wing, and a bud of a dandelion. Each lay stale in the capsule at the bottom of the rivulus’ unused pool.
Robin whispered herself in and sat on his bedside. “Your father thought you might want some company.” She turned off the wave machine and waited for the mantle to let out its last gentle breath. Cessini didn’t turn to her, though she set her hand on his shoulder for him to talk.
“Ten million, seventy-four thousand,” he said.
“What is . . .?” she asked.
“The number of times it breathed since he made it.”
She looked amazed as the lamp settled still. “Is that a guess?”
“It’s a six-second cycle. Like a metronome. Three-second breaths, out and in. I sleep eight hours a night. Three hundred sixty-five days a year. It’s been five years, nine months since he made it. I didn’t count. I multiplied in my head.”
“Looks like your dad made his money’s worth, then,” she said as she poked a finger to the thin of his back.
“I don’t even hear it anymore,” he said. “Or the waves. Not unless I’m sleeping. And when I sleep, I can swim underwater. Do you believe me?”
He turned to face her. The welts from the fire were smaller. The streaks of tears ran sideways across the bridge of his nose to his pillow-pressed ear. She dabbed a spot of white cream onto her finger from a tube. He held still as she touched the salve onto the lines of his remorse.