Chapter 22: Static Discharge (Part I)

In the dark of the hallway the traces of the gremlin leaping through the wires in the walls stood out like a sore thumb—if that thumb also happened to be radioactive and emitting sparks. Surprised people poked their heads out of their offices, stumbled out into the shadowy corridor, and generally proved to be obstacles for Elaine to work her way around while she fished around in her backpack for her goggles.

While she was waiting for them to spin up and give her a relief view of the hallway, she could hear her phone ringing. About the second ring the identification information lit brightly on the blank display inside the goggles: Roger.

Elaine picked up the call. “Yes?”

“Elaine, this is Roger,” he said.

The OS in the goggles had finished bootstrapping and luminous lines began to overlay themselves across her vision. The electrical system of the building appeared to be under tremendous strain, surges, brown outs, and other unstable phenomena cropped up on almost every circuit; and the instability seemed to be moving. It was all rushing from north to south.

“I know,” Elaine said wondering why in this day and age people felt the need to identify themselves when the phone did it for them.

Scattered shouts and yelps burst through the hallway when a fan of electrical arcs leapt out of an open doorway, splashed off the wall, the ceiling, and then grounded into a door frame. North to south, she noted. Ordinarily gremlins acted erratically, moving in search patterns like insects, this seemed more like a herd animal behavior. If the instability data was to be trusted it looked a lot more like a stampede.

“You said to call you if anything weird happened and weird is what’s happening,” he said. “A minute ago power went out in my entire dorm. That’s not too strange, I know, it’s been happening all over campus. But, then I saw electricity walk across my carpet and into the television. I think it went into the wall socket…”

“What cardinal direction was it moving in?”

“Cardinal direction?”

“Map directions. The spark you saw, did it go south?”

“South?” He paused for a moment. The harsh whine of line noise drown out his next few words.“…there went another one. No, they’re going west, I think. My window faces south.”

Elaine slid between two staff cowering in the hall when the next gremlin walked like a lightning-bolt slinky across the hallway ceiling, leaving behind pinprick scorch marks, and vanished into another office. A startled scream issued forth from within.

“Stay calm and walk towards my light,” a voice said from further down the corridor. The beam of a flashlight played over the stunned crowd and they began to move towards it. “Keep your hands and arms away from the walls. There seems to be some sort of electrical problem. Don’t run, but come quickly. We’re evacuating.”

She glanced in that direction as the flashlight beam passed over her. The goggles tamped down the glare of the light, protecting her vision, and enhanced the face behind the voice. Zach. He stoically ushered people past him and through a doorway that had natural sunlight issuing through it. To avoid him spotting her, she dodged behind a small clot of people walking carefully down the hall towards him.

“Keep coming,” he said. “You’re all doing fine. If you see someone in an office, call them out, but don’t go in. Keep it coming. We’ll get you out of here.”

Scared faces and hunched shoulders cropped up all around her. The initial stampede of gremlins seemed to have petered out, but she could still see unstable electrical signatures moving through the building so they hadn’t quite finished yet. Too bad people didn’t know that the gremlins were essentially harmless—what happened to Tom notwithstanding—and that they would go out of their way to avoid human contact.

She reached the end of the corridor and dodged into another hallway to avoid getting spotted by Zach’s spotlight. At some point he would probably move down the hall to get people out of offices. As much animosity as she felt for him interfering in her life, she couldn’t dismiss the fact that he managed well as an expert in his field.

“I just saw another one,” Roger said into her ear.

“It’s happening here, too,” Elaine said. “I am in the Engineering building closer to the middle of campus. So it’s not isolated.”

“I guess that’s good to know.”

“Could you do me a favor?”

“What do you need?”

Elaine cued up the Google Map of ASU campus and had the phone overlay the electrical grid. She wasn’t getting data on its stability outside of the building she was in—anything outside of her proximity required tapping into power regulation computers that she didn’t normally have access to; Hadaly could fix that, but it would take longer than she had. The image of the grid itself helped confirm one suspicion that she had. The Engineering building happened to be vaguely directly south of Roger’s dormitory.

This fomented in her an idea.

“Do you have metal silverware or coat hangars I your dorm room?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Get one, and also get something made of rubber you can wrap around it. Gloves would be best.” Although she doubted someone like Roger would have rubber gloves just laying around.

“I have a rubber coaster mat thing, will that do? It’s really thick rubber. Why do I need that anyway?” She could hear him rummaging around in the room and then a door opened. Startled voices emanated through the phone from his end. “Damn it’s dark out there.”

“Because I want you to do something your mother probably warned you never to do—put something metal near a wall socket.”

“What? I’m not about to stick something metal in the wall socket! That could get me killed.”