“See the aircon outputs over the walkways and then how the backs of the cabinets are sealed in glass? It’s called a hot aisle. It’s sealed to stop the hot air mixing with the rest of the room. The aircon takes that hot air and cools it down. It then pumps the cooler air into the room where the racks will pull it in, heat it up and push it into the hot aisles. Closing the machine room doors should help to keep the racks cool…”
The building was coming alive as we made our way through it. We all jumped when the aircon units suddenly clicked on, and air started being circulated. It got warmer as we navigated the corridors. We made sure to shut the doors into the machine rooms and any room that we had ensured had nothing we wanted in it.
Our route took us back into the reception area, where we could see the terminals in the public area were flickering back to life. Most of them were either fixed or rotating through marketing material. Santamova Technology, apparently, was a solutions services company. Finding this out made the ornate nature of the first floor make so much more sense. This was where they brought customers. The meeting rooms, even after all this time and despite the time-induced degradation, still seemed opulent. The executive suites on the next floor reminded me too much of the corporate culture I had gone into teaching to avoid. The top floor also had the cubicle farm feel that some companies push when they don’t particularly care about staff wellbeing.
“Notice how there are only docking stations?” Jacobs said, when we looked into another of the cubicle farms, now we had light to search properly with. “We couldn’t find any actual personal computers or built-in terminals outside of the security room and the power room.”
Access to the roof was gained through the ‘security’ room on the top floor. The now powered-on computers revealed it to be the network monitoring room, not building security. One of the monitor displays covering one of the walls wasn’t to display security camera views, but instead was a display of the servers and their statuses. A third was showing green, a large number were orange, a few reds and about ten at the end were black. As I watched, one of the orange ones went green, and one of the black ones turned orange. Another display showed communication status, connections to the global com-net; none of the five routes displayed a functioning connection.
I will admit, I was quite impressed with this control room. Different services had their own sections, and as the displays powered on, I got a feel for how important the different services they offered must have been. This much space was dedicated to just monitoring hardware uptime.
I joined Darksider at the screen he was looking at. Power distribution, primary offline, geothermal redundancy at 55%, thermal recovery 5%, solar/wind 5%. The load was around 65%, it rose to 66% as I watched, rising as the servers came online, I assumed.
“This place was one of the regional com-net nodes,” I said, looking at one of the terminals on the side closest to the roof access. “These terminals appear to be monitoring a part of the global network's backbone. Well…they would be if it wasn’t reporting all connections down.”
The final flight of stairs led up onto the roof of the building. Plant growth covered the whole of the roof; a good couple of inches of dirt made for quite the surface for them to grow into. From the quarter circle the door had made, G and Peachy had really had to work to get the door open. A lot of the roof had filthy solar panels which looked liked they had been put over the top of the aircon heat exchanger, which stretched the full length of the building. Somewhat less than I was expecting to see, considering the size of the server rooms inside. Though that might have been explained by the strange boxes that the pipes marked with hot contents warnings went into before being split between the heat exchangers.
The middle of the roof had what I had to assume was the com-net antenna. Around the edge, six spars with metal frames sat. Five of them were at this time covering up the whole thing, like a shield, but the 6th was hanging open, revealing the insides. Loose wires were draped over everything. In the middle, on a joint, a long, well-braced frame was sitting horizontally. From the way some of the wires were laid out, it should have been stood up vertically. That would then allow the rings of metal surrounding it to be pulled up, creating a dish, but right now it was laid out flat on the ground.
It took the five of us to carefully open it up, lift the middle back up and secure it. As soon as the main frame was in place, a motor kicked in, and the wires started tightening as the slack was pulled in. With the slack gone, the rings rose up, creating a series of rings shaped like a dish. A section at the end of the frame and a flower-shaped receiver was revealed. The whole thing lifted up and turned to angle at something halfway to the southern horizon.
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I watched the small blinking lights on the base all turn green and continue to happily blink away. I looked down at it with a sense of satisfaction. Who doesn’t like a nice ‘everything is good’ blinky?
Back down in the control room, a lot of the systems seem to have woken up in earnest. With the Com-net displays now showing a working connection, I could see it proliferating through the room. The stations for E-Commerce, Payroll, DigitalBanking, Corporate Compliance, GlobalData and MedNet all reporting some green systems.
“Hey, we’re back on the Com-net. We have guild chat back!” Peachy said.
‘[SOK]Vox…: Afternoon. Sorry, that took me longer than I expected.’
‘[SOK]Daisy…: Morning. No worries from my perspective. Just got on.’
‘[SOK]George…: Hola! Up for some Towers?’
‘[SOK]Vox…: Could do. Looks like the others are all out of range to the east somewhere.’
‘[SOK]Samuel…: If you fancy something different, I just passed the requirements to skipper a vessel. We could follow the coast around to a port on the southern coast, which isn’t too far from where they are going.’
‘[SOK]Vox…: Sounds like a plan to me.’
‘[SOK]George…: Sail like the ship we did the tutorial on?’
‘[SOK]Samuel…: Only a single-masted cutter, but yeah.’
‘[SOK]George…: Alright! I didn’t even know that was an option. I’m in!’
‘[SOK]Peachy…: Helllllllo!’
‘[SOK]Aenara…: Hi!’
‘[SOK]Vox…: Hi, Just restore another com node?’
‘[SOK]Peachy…: Sure did! We meeting at the storage place?’
‘[SOK]Vox…: That’s the plan. We are a few minutes out of Landing on Captain Storm’s new cutter. We grabbed a few quests for along the way, so we’re looking at about an hour to get there.’
‘[SOK]Samuel…: Maybe less if we get some favourable winds or these guys unlock some favourable titles, like Aenara’s Navigator one.
I looked around, G was missing. A moment later, he came down the stairs with a satisfied look on his face. I followed his gaze to the power terminal. Solar and wind were now reporting 45%.
“I think we have done what we can here…” I said.
“Maybe come back if we can find whatever laptop system that goes into the docks? I’m curious about what is on those servers.”
“Me too,” Darksider said. “But yeah, I’m not seeing much more we can do here… It's surprisingly satisfying bringing this place back online…”
The front of house had a whole different look to it. Now that the vines which had once hung from the roof were now piled up on the floor. Bright light shining through the tall windows, and the displays, now mostly working, displaying a rotating series of advertisements.
“Might have gotten a little carried away,” G started. “After I cleared some of them from the edge to get them off the solar panels and turbines, it seemed silly not to finish the job…”
There were piles of vines scattered around the place where G had cleared them away from the solar panels and windmills, and then just chucked them off the roof.
“Any use for the vines?” I asked Jacobs, who was closely examining one.
“I don’t think so…” he replied. “Systems not really saying much. I’ll grab one, just in case.”
Back on the road, we soon found ourselves rejoining the more travelled road, and I thought back to what the old man had said… Not sure why he had called it a cursed place…
We stopped for a short meal at the small cafe on the Highway, where a lot of the discussion we overheard was about the com-net coming back on and what that means for trade. One of the wagon drivers proudly announced that he already had a buyer for his shipment of planks, and quickly headed off to get there as soon as possible.
We finished our meals and followed after, overtaking his laden cart only twenty minutes down the road. A pleasant breeze came in over the plains below, with the rolling land rising to meet the road before falling rapidly. The uneven nature clearly explains why the road had been raised to give it an even flat surface. Confirmed as we got closer, we realised the road ran over the top of a steep escarpment.
The top of that steep drop seemed to mark a change in zone. The world felt a little lighter, a little easier and considerably cooler as we passed over where the motorway went from being on a raised structure to being directly built into the ground. Alongside the motorway was the edge of a field which had small green shoots starting to randomly emerge from the soil. A small hamlet could be seen at the top of the small rise we were now climbing.
Checking my map and the quest marker for the last point of interest we picked up, and it looked like it wasn’t too far away from the hamlet.