The Exception (Part 1)

Karina turned the paper cup around, squeezing and releasing it. With each revolution the growing network of white creases branched out, forming a fractal pattern like a pane of shattered safety glass. She watched as the suddenly exposed inner core of paper, stripped by the repeated folding of its protective wax cover, soaked up the last drips of coffee that clung to the inside of the cup. The lattice of lines slowly turned light brown.
She looked at the clock, again.
“My relationship with alcohol began in the fourth grade”, the old woman began. She looked like she had been wrung out more times than even the threadbare tablecloth that sagged onto Karina’s lap, valiantly failing to cover the kneeholes in her overalls.
“My father gave me my first glass of wine, at our family Christmas party.” As she talked, her head doddered, rattling a vast collection of beaded necklaces that hung around on her neck.
Why was it always the oldest ones who had to go all the way back to the beginning? Why work their wet brains so hard? Karina only came here for their highlights. Well, their bottoms, really. The more recent and reckless the better. She hated when people used the meeting as free psychotherapy. They had nothing in common with each other except alcohol. So, stick to the booze.
It was pretty clear, steeped as she was in so many hateful, resentful thoughts, she would never get past step four.
“I still remember that feeling, as if it were yesterday. I felt like I’d been looking for it all my life and…” the woman trailed off. “Well, I just couldn’t wait for the next time.”
There it was. Karina closed her eyes and nodded. The resentment washed out of her, and the empathy came flooding in. She slumped down in her chair, feeling the fight fall out. That was why she was here. It was the only place she could take off the mask she wore — all the struggles with the booze, with Alfred, with mother — and let them go. She wrapped the warmth of their spartan existence, their paper cups and non-dairy creamer, and their non-judgmental communion, around her and rested.
With a start, she opened her eyes again. Eight minutes had passed. The old woman was wrapping up.
“I’m just grateful that I am here today, with all of your, and not dead in an alley somewhere,” she said. The head bobbed, the necklaces rattled one last time as she sat back triumphantly. “Because I know if I pick up, I’m never coming back. That will be the end of the road for me. Thanks for listening.”
The room erupted in applause and the mixed murmur of genuine and obligatory thank yous.
And then the door sprung open.
“Richter?! Karina Richter?” The policeman stood at the door, the coiled cable of his mic straddling his chest like some sort of Prussian grenadier’s sash. In his outstretched arm he held a small photo. Two dozen heads, some young and fresh on the pink cloud of sobriety, some old with hollow eyes, snapped up, their gazes vectoring in on the cop at a collection of ever-so-minutely varied angles.
“Richter?!” He looked at Karina with a hint of surprise, turning to confusion. Then back at the photo, and back at her, and back at the photo again. He must have her government ID photo. That was taken last summer. A lifetime ago.
She was pissed. This was supposed to be her time. Christ, they made her come here. She paused, watching whatever goodwill had accumulated in the church basement over the last hour evaporate back up the stairwell into the cold evening air. Then she stood up.
The heads swiveled and two dozen pairs of eyes now focused on her. The policeman strode across the center of the circle, his boots clomping on the old, hollow wood floor like some ghetto-terrorizing Gestapo agent from a war movie.
“You’re ordered to report to the Stadtwerks. I’m here to escort you. There’s been — ”, he looked around warily, ” — an emergency.”
The policeman’s hand shot to the mike, keying it hot. “I’ve found her,” he said.
Karina grabbed the cup and squeezed the remaining life out it. A few cold drops of coffee ran down between her fingers and fell on her lap, where they soon disappeared into the denim.
The ride would give her some time to enjoy the lights. The city, though, was already dark. She could barely make out the cop’s silhouette on the other side of the saloon. The taxibot was milking every last drop, so aside from the motor and vital sensors, it was running dark through the pitch black streets.
This meant a number of things, none of them good.
It almost certainly explained why she was here, on her way back to work, rather than curled up in a bundle of warm recovery talk back in the basement. It had been cloudy all week, so reserve power margins were thin. But vital services should have held up at least until nine o’clock.
Her lights should be on. That they weren’t brought back the pissed off feeling she’d been trying so hard to wish away. It was her code balancing the city’s improvised solar grid with the demands for trains and telephones of three million citizens and probably at least as many refugees again. Her code was what made Berlin the only truly civilized place for 1000 kilometers in any direction.
During the day, at least. Night was a different story. You did not want to be out there, unarmed, after the lights sputtered out.
Her mind raced through the possibilities. Bad head counts from border patrol? Maybe more bodies were leaking through from the east than even they had accounted for.
Just as she was starting to weigh the consequences of another unexpected refugee influx, the taxibot pulled up in front the soaring columns of Tempelhof Stadtwerks, and promptly went into hibernation. A few dim stars reflected off its black glass roof.
At least she would know where to find a ride in the morning.

Karina strode inside, up the stairs past the old luggage belt to the control room, and swiped in. The entire night watch was waiting for her. She took her seat, and started to log in. No one said a thing, they just stared at her.
Albert Berger smelled like pork and garlic. Her early-recovery, hypersensitized olfactories quivered as the smell enveloped her, rolling down her shoulders and across her chest. Disgusting, but also oddly erotic. Her breeder instincts might be finally kicking in after all. Man, food, baby.
“Richter, you’re sloppy”, he said. “You really fucked up this time.” The tingling in her crotch evaporated before she could forget it was there. The anger surged back.
“Fuckmook!”, she screamed, in a not entirely familiar pitch high above her usual range. A shriek of horror, wrapped up in outrage, a reaction you might expect from witnessing a child murdered in cold blood. She stood panting, the stunned night watch team staring in disbelief. The outburst needed punctuating. She slammed her first down on the desk as hard as she could, and something in those bony, overworked fingers snapped.
The display glitched for a moment, then the terminal’s cursor, unfazed, resumed its metronomic blinking.
UNRECOGNIZED USERNAME OR PASSWORD
The city’s data center was already starting emergency shutdown. Karina had two more tries. If she didn’t get back in immediately, and patch the exception, it might not come back up in the morning.

She picked at the scabs on her scalp, not at all worried about tearing out a huge chunk of skull. Her head was empty. It was impossible to think with all these people around.
Usually it was quiet at night here, after the ventilation conked out, and she could hear everything. If a rat came up the stairwell looking for food, Karina knew. People she could hear approaching from a mile away. The grand arrivals hall of what was once the Third Reich’s pride and joy, Templehof Airport, was a stone palace, full of echoes and ghosts, real and imagined reflections of past and present.
Karina stuffed her injured hand into a pocket. Something must have gone wrong with the Druzhba update. This final piece of code, purchased from the Moscow Institute of Cybernetics, would bring Berlin’s entire electrical system together for the first time. The nuke plant in Potsdam, the solar farms in the east. But more importantly, all the tens of millions of devices throughout the city that wanted to drink from the 20th century power grid. Druzhba, or “friendship”, was the code that tied it all together.
But something wasn’t working, and since she’d only been given access to binaries, she couldn’t look under the hood and see what might be mucking things up. Of course they wouldn’t make the source code available. Fucking Russians.
Karina chewed her lip, deftly flipping the heavy armored key drive around her ring finger over and over. Suddenly, with a spastic exhale she stopped, and popped it in the terminal. Her fingers danced across the keyboard and the de-compiler, real weapons-grade stuff she had grabbed when everything was falling apart, sprang into action.
The de-compiler was spitting out garbage, which wasn’t unusual, but finally a shell opened into a folder of encrypted files.
“Let me try,” Albert said.
“Leave me alone!” Karina shrieked unnecessarily. Albert jumped back. “This is mine.”
Karina blinked, momentarily triggering the console’s biometrics. The autoID was slow today, slower than usual. She started the shutdown cycle again, with the debugger on this time. Finally, it appeared.
EXCEPTION: STACK TRACE 343BE3A
To be continued…