“Up and at ‘em, sunshine,” said Apple. “I'm afraid waking up twice in one morning doesn't earn you twice as many breakfasts. Get on out and grab a plasma pick.”

Carrick scrambled for the latch to his door, opened it, and stumbled out. He nearly broke his ankle. Assuming in his stupor that the truck would be on the ground, he lurched out and fell half a foot to the ground below, which was gritty, sandy stone. He grabbed onto the door and took a few deep breaths to regain his bearings.

Apple walked around the truck and disengaged a latch on the side of the cargo bay. The panel swung upward, revealing numerous pairs of worn and dingy tools. He pulled two long, metal rods from their housings and gave one to Carrick. “I don't know if you've ever used one of these before,” he said, “but just point the thin end at whatever you needed to excavate, and move the lever with your thumb. It engages at low power at the beginning of the action, and with much more power than you'll ever need at the other end.”

He demonstrated, gently moving the lever on the side of the tube just a fraction with his thumb. A thin beam of bright plasma appeared at the tip, like the big brother to a cigarette lighter. Apple lowered the pick until the tip contacted the ground, and a high-pitched sound emanated from it as the plasma, rather than melting the ground underneath, seemed to scatter debris as it chipped away at the stone.

“All right,” said Carrick. “What are we doing with them?”

“I excavated a path to an old computer bank yesterday,” said Apple. He pointed with his pick toward a far wall.

Carrick took proper stock of his surroundings. They stood in a tunnel much narrower than the one they had traveled along earlier, one which allowed only a bit of space above and to either side of the truck. The floor underneath them, he realized after shuffling some dirt away with his foot, was a matrix of stone tiles like that of a hotel lobby. What seemed to be a great mass of polished stone unlike the walls of the tunnel lay before them, and through this massive stone was indeed a carved a passage just large enough for a man to walk through. LEDs had been stuck to the sides of both tunnels, casting a bit of illumination.

Apple pulled an LED headlamp from the toolbox and gave it to Carrick before strapping one to his own head. “All the stuff is recharged by an inductive pad thing underneath the crawler lot during the night,” he said. “We'll have to pull the lights off the walls before we head back. You can leave them up for a day or so, but that’s all.”

Carrick followed behind Apple as the man waddled through the narrow tunnel. Carrick was not claustrophobic, but a feeling of dread settled into the pit of his stomach as they moved through tons upon tons of rock which seemed already to have crashed down from the surface into whatever recess this was down under the earth. At any moment, it seemed to Carrick, a small shift could bring the whole mass down upon them, and they would be buried forever in the heart of the earth, never to be seen by anyone ever again.

But it didn't come crashing down. Eventually they reached the end of the tunnel, perhaps ten minutes’ walk inward. It eventually led into a room which looked so similar to an ordinary laboratory you might find in a university that it gave Carrick an uncanny sense that he was back home, breaking into some facility at night to steal a bit of top-secret research.

He had to put his hand against the wall and take a few deep breaths while Apple gave him an odd look. “You okay?” he asked.

Carrick nodded. “I just didn't expect it to look so normal.”

“Yeah,” said Apple. “It's weird the first few times you see it. A lot of the underground parts of the facilities weren't damaged very much. There’s that big ol’ stone monument you saw earlier that came down through a few chambers after the explosion, but it missed most of the surrounding chambers. I already took everything worth getting from the closer ones, but you can help me get the components of this big computer.”

They moved carefully around dust-choked tables and chairs. Shapes that could only be those of dried corpses littered the ground. They lay in positions which seemed to show they had run around for a few minutes before keeling over, rather than starving slowly. That was oddly comforting to Carrick.

“How much do you know about the Accident?” asked Carrick. “I guess you must have found some information down here over the years. You and the other prisoners.”

“I haven't really found anything myself,” said Apple. “To tell you the truth, I can't really read.” He chuckled. “I bring back information sometimes, but it always has to go to the big shots in HQ. I guess they really want information and data more than physical treasures. Seems pretty clear to me they think they can use the information to replicate whatever the Accident was trying to accomplish.”

Carrick’s heart pounded. “They're going to try the same thing over again? They'll just cause another Accident!”

“Not my problem,” said Apple. “I imagine we’ll both be long dead before then. But anyway, the legends we prisoners have passed down, you know, from the bits of information we’ve found over the years, talk about a machine that was supposed to be able to transform an entire planet. The experiment was supposed to use that machine to transform some stuff into a perfect fuel that would let us make a kind of plane that could go into space. We think the result was supposed to be taking that plane to other planets and turning them into copies of Dirt. I guess that would just mean a bunch of rich people buying planets of their own and not letting anyone else on, right?”

Something stirred in Carrick’s heart. Though he had never been particularly entranced by outer space, he’d always found the idea of an infinite universe filled with other stars and planets interesting, at the very least. That there might be other alien races out there, ones who might themselves have figured out how to traverse the stars, who might give their knowledge to other worlds, was intriguing.

That humans had apparently come so close to fulfilling that role themselves chilled Carrick. There was beauty to it. It added a new layer of tragedy to all the lives lost during the Accident, the gigantic explosion which had ripped apart the atmosphere above what was now known as the Wasteland and destroyed the lives of everyone who had worked to take humanity off Dirt and into the stars.

“Hey new guy, stop looking dazed and come help me,” said Apple.

Carrick shook his head and followed. Apple stood before towering metal box that looked like an industrial computing tower. Though it had no monitor or output display, it was covered with gleaming buttons, and there seemed to be data ports all over it. Stretched from one face of it across the wall, cables connected it to two smaller metal boxes that likewise recovered in buttons and ports.

“I’m having trouble finding maintenance seam,” said Apple. “But I figure you're part of a crime family, so you probably broke into safes and vaults all over the place. You can probably figure out better than I can the best place to start.”

Carrick looked it over. There was indeed a seam that appeared to have been delicately welded shut along one edge. It would indeed have been easy to miss for someone without his skilled attention to detail. “Right here. It wasn’t designed to come apart after assembly.” Carrick grinned and hefted his plasma pick. “Good thing we have these.”

He carefully dragged the pick’s “flame” across the base of the machine where it met the floor. He was used to small, hand-held cutting tools which sent jarring vibrations through his hand and forearm, but compared to those, the plasma pick was a dream. Instead of vibrating in his hand, it produced a rattling noise as the housing of the machine or the computer itself vibrated, its molecules breaking apart as Carrick dragged the pick across its welded seam.

While Carrick worked on the base, Apple separated the adjacent vertical seam, and soon they could peel apart the panel and reveal the innards of the computer.

Two stacks of hard drives sat inside, each nestled into its own cradle. The drives on the left side seem to have been damaged in some kind of electrical fire, and were scorched and blackened. The drives on the right side, however, appeared perfectly fine.

Carrick felt giddy. “That's got to be tons of information! How much of our quota will that fill?”

Apple shrugged. “Not as much as you might think,” he said. “I guess the drives in big computers like this are almost impossible to read, so they're not considered very valuable. They'll probably just get auctioned off to some collector by the government. I was really hoping we’d find a big processor or something in here. That tends to be what’s worth a lot.”

Oh well. Carrick began carefully pulling drives out of their cradles and setting them on a nearby table. “We have anything to take them back with?”

“Yep, look at this.” Apple had grabbed several more small tools and a tool belt before they’d departed, and he now unhooked a small antigrav module from his belt. He placed it on top of the stack of intact hard drives and then lifted the stack from the bottom so it was no longer touching the table. The grav field adhered to the whole mass of the stack, letting it hover at about chest height. “Leave the broken drives,” said Apple. “Not even collectors want those.” He sounded bitterly disappointed. Carrick realized he must have been really banking on the idea of finding a processor.

Carrick took a step back and looked around the room. “Are we going to look at any more of these things over here?” He gestured to the smaller boxes connected to the data bank they had ripped open.

"Nah,” said Apple. “All the cables are probably just power cells. That's one area of tech that we've improved since back when the Accident happened. All the batteries and power systems they used back then used chemicals. They don't have energy in them now, and even if they did, it's not like we could use them for anything. It's another thing collectors don't want.”

Carrick squinted hard at one box in particular. It had a vent on the side. “Even that one?” he asked.

Apple glanced at it. “Why? Does it look different than any of the others?”

“Well, that there looks like a cooling vent. Might have a processor in it. Have you never realized that?”

Apple frowned. “Just looks like a grate to me.” He sounded doubtful.

Carrick walked up and used his plasma pick to cut away the front panel of the box. He had to reach up to do it, as it was mounted above his head.

The panel clanged against the floor, and Carrick took a jump back.

There, as he’d expected, was a circuit board topped with the unmistakable cooling fan of a central processing unit.

“That's what it was,” he said in triumph. Carrick turned to Apple, who had a look of utter disbelief on his face. “I've seen small units like this one even in modern buildings. They're not a part of the main processor, so they can run subsystems of a facility like life support and data redundancy. About ten years ago there was a computer virus that killed killing a lot of people because it shut down every system of a bunch of buildings at once. The places that survived used this same old method of decentralizing the computers. It's not as efficient for most things, but where you need redundancy, you use them.”

Apple stared in wonder at the box. “All this time,” he whispered. “There's got to be hundreds of them out there.”

“And no one else has realized this?” Carrick asked. “That’s hard to believe.”

“Most people who end up in the Wasteland don't know about things like that,” said Apple. “We know tools. We know practical stuff. We know some information that the people who came before passed down to us, but we're not scientists.”

“I'm not either,” said Carrick. “I just sometimes have to pretend to be one for a job.”

“Yeah,” said Apple. He moved forward and pulled a chair from one of the dust-covered tables. “I really hope this holds me,” he muttered. Despite its age, the chair did not break. It allowed Apple to stand on it and carefully disconnect the processor’s power cable. He gave it a sharp tug and it ripped away from the motherboard. “They don't care about the old computer boards,” said Apple. “Mostly. Just the processors, and a handful of components that I’ll tell you about later. You'll know them if you see them. They're about the size of your hand.”

That was all so odd to Carrick. “You’d think they'd want all the bits and pieces they can get.”

“They've gotten most of the little bits and bobs they wanted a long time ago. It seems like a colossal waste to you and me, but eventually you’ve just got to not think about it too hard. The people benefiting from us operate on a scale you and I can't even imagine.”

Try not to think about it. That sounded dangerous to Carrick. That sounded like the kind of thinking that led you to ignore hundreds or thousands of valuable processors that could have been sitting right in front of you, because you just didn't bother to ask questions. Whatever Apple said, Carrick would never let himself simply not think about it.

They looked carefully through the rest of the chamber but found no more of the decentralized processors.

They finally cut through the wall into a service tunnel that was tangled with blackened wires, one which Apple said was still too dangerous to attempt to traverse, in case there happened to be an active power cell connected somewhere. They next cut into a room adjacent to the first, which seems very much like that first one. This room likewise had no computer, but it did have a box full of rock crystals which, after they wiped thick dust from their surfaces, revealed themselves to be a beautiful, transparent blue. Apple said these could be used for the manufacturing of lasers, and that it would, along with what they had already found, be enough to fulfill both their quotas for the day.

Carrick began walking toward the back of that chamber, preparing to cut into the wall, but Apple stopped him. “Look, new guy, thanks for the help, but you're not used to this. You get some sleep now. I'm going to keep going. I'll do whatever I can for the rest of the workday. You just go back to the crawler with our stuff and put it away, then get in the cab and sleep until I come back. You'll get tough enough to do this is long as you need to later, but I can still see that you're exhausted. Anything else I do today will be a bonus. You got it?”

“Come on,” said Carrick, “I'm not a week or lazy.” He needed to appear strong. He needed to be useful. He needed to not let anyone think he would let them down.

Apple shook his head firmly. “No. Your body doesn't know what it's in for yet. Go take a nap or I'll knock you out myself.”

Carrick didn't argue any further. He heard earnestness in Apple’s voice. He didn't hear any cunning, any hints that Apple might be plotting to make him look bad in front of everyone else.

So Carrick carried the box of crystals between his hands and used the side of the box to push ahead the hard drives in their antigrav field as he made his way back through the narrow tunnel to the crawler. It felt strange to be alone. Not having another human nearby made Carrick feel like an insect in a burrow.

Back at the truck, Carrick opened the bay door in the back. There were boxes bolted onto the floor of the bay, each lined with some kind of soft padding, and sheets of padding were stacked around them. Carrick nestled the hard drives into one box, wrapping them with padding, and then did his best to divide the crystals up between remaining boxes so they wouldn't crash into each other and break on the way back.

He slammed the door, then stood in the dim LED light for a few moments, thinking about how it was so much warmer down here than it was on a surface. It almost felt as though he were simply in an ordinary building's basement. Carrick had a fleeting fantasy of resurrecting the functions of these facilities and living a life with the rest of the prisoners down here, one where they were human beings in their own society, not the prisoners of a government that existed simply to rip anything they achieved away from them at the end of every day.

Of course, that could never work. It was impossible to grow food under the ground, he was fairly certain. The prisoners relied on the government to give them everything.

He opened the cab door. The truck, by now, rested on the ground. He got into the seat, closed the door, and keyed the ignition. Soon the coolness of the cab turned to warmth and Carrick fell into sleep.

When Carrick next woke, he was back in the truck lot. Apple had not woken him upon returning. The sun outside was low, though it had not even been close to rising when they had first set out.

Carrick was not prepared to move from the heat of the cab to the deathly cold outside. It felt as though the life was ripped directly from his body. At the very least, the hard drives had absorbed the warmth of the truck, and Carrick wrapped his fingers around them despite as he and Apple made their way slowly, carefully, back toward the main buildings of the camp.

“How long was the journey?” asked Carrick. He felt completely disoriented by the fact that he had slept both to and from the work site.

“As far as we have to travel these days, almost four hours each way.” Apple's voice was grim. “Just a year ago,” he said, “it was only barely three hours. The buildings we were scavenging at that point had hardly anything in them. We had to press further and further out.”

The implication in his voice was clear. Eventually, they would run out of scavenge even as far as they were spread out now. The guards would force the prisoners to push even further. As their quotas would likely not diminish, they would trade more and more sleeping time for travel. Perhaps that was why, more than any other reason, prisoners traveled in pairs. Maybe they traded time spent sleeping and driving. One guy toward, the other guy from. Carrick felt guilty. If that was true, he had forced Apple to drive both directions. Was that a thing now that he owed Apple? He would have to pay it back as soon as he could.

“So do you think there will be a point,” Carrick asked, “when they have to build a new camp further inward?”

“Everyone's kind of wondered why they haven't done it already,” said Apple. “The Accident itself happened quite a ways out. Hundreds of miles. You can't even begin to imagine the scope of everything they were doing, new guy. There were tens of thousands of people working on that thing.”

Carrick shuddered. No one ever talked about the Accident back in the real world. Perhaps “real” was an odd term for it, but it was what Carrick felt. Everybody knew about the history of the event a generation ago, but it was a bit of a taboo subject. There was some superstitious belief among everyone, from beggars to business executives, that the spirits of those killed in the Accident were drawn to haunt people who talked about them, particularly at night. It was further believed that their spirits haunted technology, drawn to the things they had spent and given their lives for a generation ago.

“They've got to be wasting so much time,” said Carrick.

Apple shrugged. “I guess. Not my place to bother about it. At the very least, I doubt there's so little work that it’ll dry up in either of our lifetimes. Even if they force us to pack some food and drive out for a day at a time, do some work, and then drive back, we won’t run out completely.”

They reached the back of a long line of prisoners holding the treasures they had scavenged over the course of the day, and fell silent.