We skipped trying the door and stepped into the lobby of the building through one of the broken windows. Dirt was piled up in the corners and left a layer of grit over every surface. Some plants had even taken root closer to the windows, though most of the greenery in the room came from the vines coming from the roof, having come in through a couple of the broken panes further up the glass-fronted building. What must have once been colourful furniture had been lost to time and now just made messy piles of dirt near the front of the room. In the middle of the foyer, a large round reception desk took pride of place and was flanked by electric barriers leading to the back half of the room. On the other side of the room, I could see escalators rising up to the second floor and several doors heading further into the depths of the building. Elevator doors stood off to one side. I could see a few terminals and advertising screens distributed evenly around the visitors' area, though all of them were dark, without power.

  “Down?” Peachy asked.

  “For power?” I asked.

  “We do keep finding generators in the basement…” she said.

  “Seems reasonable,” Darksider said.

  G hopped over the desk into the receptionist's desk area. “Nothing here,” he said after searching the drawers for a few seconds. He moved to join us as we crossed through the barrier and stopped near the desk. His hand reached out and wiped at the dirt there and came back holding a small, red credit card-sized keycard. “Almost missed this…it was blending in.”

  Security in this place was apparently dependent on having power. The first door we tried opened with a loud squeak at our touch. The magnetic locking system having no hold on it. It led into a long corridor leading deeper into the building. With no natural source of light, my party members pulled out their lanterns to light our way. Chest height windows had been built into the walls of the corridor, looking into cubicle farms on both sides. We passed a couple of doors, but a quick look inside just revealed all the cubicles to be empty of anything but a docking station to connect a device to the monitors and peripherals you’d expect to see on a hot desk.

  We pushed on into the building and found a stairwell leading both up to the 4 higher floors and down into the basement. A single beam of light shone down from the green-covered skylight on the roof. Peachy led us down the stairs.

  We came upon a landing, with doors on both sides and the stairs continued down.

  “Start at the bottom and work our way up?” Our tank asked.

  “Would give us a break between each flight we climb…” I said. “But your call.”

  We went down two more floors before we hit the bottom. The universal warning sign for high voltage took pride of place in the prime real estate of the door. It didn’t move to our first attempts, but G’s spartan kick revealed that to be just age, not security.

  “Geothermal powerplant,” Jacobs said. “I’m almost disappointed it’s not some kind of esoteric anti-matter-matter fusion generator.”

  We stood in the control room of the building's power source, looking through a window into the larger collection of pipes connecting to a turbine-like device.

  “This is one of the systems that pumps heat from deep in the planet to make power?” G asked.

  “More, it uses the planet's heat to turn water into steam, which in turn spins the turbine to make power.”

  “Can we get it up and running?” Peachy asked.

  “Not from here,” I said, getting no response from the computers in the room. “Might be a manual restart… or it might need a power source to prime the system.”

  “Assuming it isn’t broken or missing something…” Darksider added.

  We moved into the room and started looking through the heavy power-generating machinery.

  “Errrr,” Peachy said from the doorway. “You think you two might be a while?”

  I looked over at Darksider. This was more his area of expertise than mine.

  “Maybe… it looks kind of familiar to me, like some of the systems I’ve worked with, but different. I wouldn’t want to rush things…”

  “Alright, we’ll go and explore the next floor. We’ll ping you if we find anything.”

  “Keep checking in,” I said. “I’m not sure of the range of group chat without a com-hub, and I think we are out of range of one of those. If it is not the next POI, we might want to keep an eye out for a tower.”

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  “Will do,” she affirmed before the three of them headed back towards the stairs.

  “Well, the good news. I think we can manually prime and start the generator.” Darksider said.

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming on,” I replied from the turbine's inspection hatch. It seemed to be in good condition, all things considered. We’d found some silicon-based lubricant in a corner, still sealed, and still seemed good, so I had made sure the moving parts still moved.

  “But…” Darksider said, “It will be dependent on there being water in the pipes. There's nothing in the system right now. I also can’t see any way to inspect the bore holes…”

  “SHAI had some inspection drones,” I said. “Nothing like that?”

  “Not that I can see… but there are also a bunch of automation systems that are completely alien to me… might be mixed in with those and need power to use…”

  “If this had been a backup system, I could see them not considering a total power loss situation for maintenance. That would be done when they had external power.” I mused.

  “My thoughts as well,” he agreed. I closed the inspection hatch and made sure it was properly sealed again.

  We found the large red wheel behind a pipe. It was labelled intake valve, and it had been locked up with a padlock. The key was hanging on a hook in the office.

  “Should we do this?” I asked. “Security might come back online and lock us in the building.”

  “We thought of that,” said Jacobs from the doorway. “In case you were wondering, the distance without a com-hub isn’t that great. We wedged open all the doors on all the floors that we could get to…”

  “Err…” I shared a look with Darksider; we had taken nearly an hour to get this far… he was looking equally sheepish. We had both just seen a problem to solve and hadn’t spent much time considering the consequences of actually solving it… “Find anything?” I asked Jacobs.

  “This place had been shut down, documents in storage didn’t survive the time, but it also looked like they were a low-paper organisation. Lots of computer systems, the top two floors are mostly server rooms, and there is a heavy-duty communications system on the roof. Well… once the antennas are back up, they were knocked down, possibly intentionally…”

  It took the three of us to get the wheel started. Darksider had worried it was permanently seized, but then it started to move and squeak. Then the pipes started shaking. I could hear the whistling of air being forced out of the pipe's outlet as it sat over a drain. The first splutter covered the drain hole with rusty spray. It was then followed by some bangs coming out of the pipes, a few more splutters, a burst of water, another few orange splutters and then the pressure burst out in a rush. The orange faded, and clear water ran free. Darksider gave it a second and then shifted the valve, directing the water into the system’s reservoir.

  “Might want to let the others know we are doing the last checks before we try running the system,” Darksider told Jacobs.

  “Got it. I'll go and get them.”

  “How long is this going to take us?” I asked, as I took my turn pumping the lever that was manually moving the water from the condensate tank into the injection well.

  “Errrm…until we run out of water or we get a return from the production well…”

  “Huh?” I asked

  “There might be damage in the wells…if the water is leaking out, it will never get back up…I’m assuming the tank isn’t intentionally undersized for the system's needs…The ratio between it and the condensate tank is what I would expect it to be… but… it’s not like I have a manual for it…” We’d found the remains of the systems manual… well… we found what was left of its folder at least.

  Jacobs took a turn pumping. He pulled on the lever once, and we heard the splutter from the turbine.

  “Jammy git,” I muttered. His second pull got enough that the turbine started to spin…lights flickered on the console, and the pump started to move itself. Soon we could hear a rapidly rising whine as the generator started to speed up. Vibrations grew through the floor. We started moving back towards the office door. The smell of ozone spread through the room. Then there was a series of loud clunks and the flicker of lights as power systems long without power awoke from their slumber.

  Darksider and I sat in the office, reviewing the report being produced by the systems control system. Once it had power, the first thing it did was bring those systems back on to manage it, and now it was calibrating itself to optimise its output.

  “Well… look at that… the wells are designed to self repair…” Darksider commented.

  “We good?” Jacobs asked.

  “Oh, yeah… I think we can leave this running… " It’s mostly intended to be an automated backup system,” Darksider said. “I think we are good to just leave it running. It will shut itself down if anything trips… It’s surprisingly redundant.”

  “Nothing survived on this floor,” Peachy told us as we passed the archives. “At least nothing we found. We didn’t do an exhaustive search, but it was just small piles of dust in all the ones we did check.”

  We stopped on the next floor. “This floor has server rooms,” Jacobs said. “We can double-check if you want, but I couldn’t see any terminals in any of the racks.”

  “I wouldn't mind seeing the layout,” I said and had a look through the door. It led to a corridor which had windows looking into the rooms. From what I saw, it was exactly as Jacobs had said. No terminals in sight. I couldn’t even see access ports on the fronts of the racks. I could see the air con units over the walkways and sealed hot corridors between every other row of racks. As I watched, I saw the lights coming to life on the racks as the system controlled the power-up process and spread the load. I looked up the corridor and realised the doors into the server rooms had been wedged open. I walked over and closed the first one.

  “Don’t want to be able to access them?” G asked.

  “Nah, as Jacobs said, I can’t see any terminals or access points. It will just make cooling them harder.”