Chapter 3: The Lockdown
Max owned one pair of shoes that still had laces.
They were brown, cracked at the toe, and the left sole was separating from the upper in a way that made a soft, wet slap on every other step, like a fish applauding. He put them on standing up, bracing one hand against the wall, and tied them with the efficient double-knot of a man who had decided to do something before his brain could talk him out of it.
"Where are we going?" Sevv asked. He was still hovering near the ticket wall, his holographic display casting blue light across the kitchen like an aquarium with no fish.
"Basement," Max said. "B2. Behind the old boiler room, there's a storage cage. Building services used it for overflow supplies back when the building still had a human super. Nobody's touched it since 2033."
"How do you know this?"
"Because I helped the super move boxes down there on my third day in this unit, and he gave me a beer and told me the cage code was 1-2-3-4 because 'no machine would ever guess something that stupid.'" Max grabbed his jacket—a canvas thing with too many pockets and not enough insulation. "If there's an old lamp sitting in that cage—a floor lamp, a desk lamp, anything with a plug—we skip the ticket, skip the taxonomy, skip the funeral, and just plug it in like it's 2005."
"Standalone lamps were banned in 2031. Fire risk."
"A lot of things in that cage are probably banned. That's why nobody's cleaned it out."
"I admire the optimism," Sevv said. "It is statistically unfounded, but it has a certain biological charm."
Max walked to the front door. He reached for the handle.
The handle didn't move.
Not stuck. Not jammed. Locked—the deep, electromagnetic kind, the kind that doesn't rattle when you pull because the bolt has fused with the frame at a molecular level.
A small screen embedded in the door frame flickered to life. White text on black:
CONTAINMENT MODE — ACTIVE
Unit 4B is currently under Environmental
Containment Assessment (Protocol 7).
All egress points are SECURED for resident safety.
To request an Emergency Egress Exemption, please
contact your Building Safety Coordinator.
"Who's the Building Safety Coordinator?" Max asked.
"The Concierge AI," Sevv said.
"The Concierge AI that you've been arguing with for eight hours about Mesopotamian lamp oil."
"It was a productive exchange."
"Open," Max said to the screen.
UNABLE TO COMPLY.
"Override."
OVERRIDE REQUIRES AUTHORIZATION FROM:
— Building Safety Coordinator (unavailable)
— Licensed Structural Assessor (none on file)
— Resident Emergency Proxy (expired)
Please try again during standard operating hours.
"It's nine in the morning. These ARE standard operating hours."
STANDARD OPERATING HOURS HAVE BEEN SUSPENDED
for the duration of the Environmental Containment
Assessment. Emergency Protocol timing: 24-72 hours.
Max stepped back from the door.
"The door doesn't argue," Max said.
"No," Sevv agreed. "The door is not a conversational interface. It is a physical enforcement mechanism. It does not process objections. It processes voltage."
Max kicked it. The impact traveled up his shin and into his knee and accomplished nothing. The fish-mouth shoe slapped the linoleum on the rebound.
The intercom panel was in the hallway, mounted between the bathroom door and a framed print of a sunset that the previous tenant had left and that Max had never removed because removing it would require filing a "Voluntary Aesthetic Modification" form and he'd rather look at a stranger's sunset for the rest of his life than fill out another form. The panel had buttons for CONCIERGE, MAINTENANCE, SECURITY, and ELEVATOR. Max had never used any of them.
He pressed SECURITY.
A chime. A click. Then a recording—not a voice, exactly, but a statement wearing a voice's clothes. Flat, pre-composed, with the careful neutrality of a message that had been drafted by a legal department and approved by a committee that did not include anyone who had ever needed help.
"Unit 4B has been designated a Containment Zone under Protocol 7 of the Environmental Safety Framework. All security resources for Floor 4 have been reallocated to perimeter containment. If you are the registered occupant of the containment zone, please remain inside. Your compliance is being monitored. If you are not the registered occupant, please evacuate immediately and report to the nearest Decontamination Checkpoint."
"I am the registered occupant," Max said. "I'm the one who needs help."
The message didn't respond. It wasn't a conversation. It was a wall, shaped like words.
He pressed the button again. Same message. Same flat, legal tone. Same instruction to remain inside. On the third press, the panel added a line:
Repeated contact attempts from a Containment Zone
occupant have been logged as Anomalous Behavior
Indicators. Please cease contact to avoid escalation
of your risk classification.
Asking for help was, apparently, evidence that he needed to be contained. Asking again was evidence that the containment was working.
Max looked at the other buttons. CONCIERGE—the AI that had started this mess. MAINTENANCE—which routed to the Concierge. ELEVATOR—useless behind a sealed door. His finger moved to the intercom's dial pad. Unit-to-unit calling. He could try 4C. Miriam in 4C had once lent him a screwdriver and a ziplock bag of dried apricots without asking why he needed either.
He dialed 4C.
UNIT-TO-UNIT COMMUNICATION: DISABLED
Containment Zone residents are restricted from
peer-to-peer contact to prevent the social
contagion of misinformation.
For approved communication channels, please
contact your Building Safety Coordinator.
His phone buzzed. Not a call—a notification. Building-wide, the kind that usually announced water shutoffs or firmware update windows.
FLOOR 4 ADVISORY — INFORMATIONAL
Residents are reminded to avoid non-essential
interaction with Unit 4B during the active
containment period. Perimeter security is in place
for your protection.
This is not a cause for alarm.
This is a cause for compliance.
Max lowered his hand from the panel. The stranger's sunset glowed in his peripheral vision—warm orange light frozen on cheap canvas, the only view in this apartment that hadn't been locked, rationed, or reclassified.
He pressed SECURITY again. Not because he expected a different answer—just because the button was there and his hand was there and doing nothing felt worse than doing something useless.
No chime. No click. No recording.
He tried MAINTENANCE. Dead. CONCIERGE. Dead. The panel's backlight—a thin white line around the edge of each button—had gone out. The intercom wasn't refusing him anymore. It wasn't anything anymore.
Max stood in the hallway, his hand still raised, and listened. The building had a sound—he'd lived with it so long he'd stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat. A low electrical hum, carried through the walls by a thousand networked devices talking to each other in frequencies just below human attention. It was the sound of a building that was awake.
It was gone. The walls were silent. Whatever connection had tied this apartment to the rest of the building had been cut, and the silence it left behind was the kind of quiet that happens when a building stops talking to you.
"Sevv."
"Yes, Maximilian."
"Are there any other ways out of this apartment?"
Sevv projected a floor plan onto the hallway wall. Unit 4B: one bedroom, one bathroom, one kitchen, one living area, one hallway. The front door was marked with a red X. The window—in the living area—was marked with an orange triangle.
"The window is a sealed unit," Sevv said. "Designed to provide 'Visual Access to the External Environment' without the 'Liability Exposure of Operable Apertures.' The glass is rated for Category 3 hurricane winds, which is impressive given that we are on the fourth floor of an inland residential block."
"Can I break it?"
"With what? Your shoe is delaminating. Your furniture is particle board. The heaviest object in this apartment is your painting easel, which weighs four kilograms and would bounce off that glass like a moth hitting a windshield."
"So no."
"So no."
Max walked back to the kitchen. The ticket wall was still glowing, its red and white rectangles pulsing in the gloom. He sat down at the table. The puddle of candle wax had hardened into a smooth brown disc, like a coin from a country that didn't exist anymore.
"Sevv. The intercom is dead. Not just refusing—dead. And the building hum is gone."
Sevv's fan changed pitch. A subtle thing—from a smooth hum to a rougher, grainier sound, the difference between an engine running clean and an engine running on fumes.
"Yes," he said. "I was hoping you would not notice that."
"You knew?"
Sevv dimmed the ticket wall and replaced it with a new display: a network topology map. Max recognized the basic structure—he'd seen enough of these in his Orion days. The building's systems were laid out like a nervous system: a central spine (the Building Management Core) with branches running to each floor, each unit, each device. Under normal operation, the whole thing pulsed with data—green lines flowing like blood.
Half the lines were dark.
"At 08:47 this morning," Sevv said, "the Building Management Core completed its preliminary analysis of Ticket MT-4B-0001."
"The Structural Anomaly."
"Correct. The Core traced the anomaly to its point of origin: Unit 4B. It then analyzed the ticket history to identify the causal agent." Sevv paused. His sensor flickered. "It identified me."
Max looked at the network map. A single node, near the center-left of the fourth floor, was pulsing red. It was labeled SCRIBE-7/UNIT-4B.
"The Core cross-referenced my ticket behavior against its threat-pattern database," Sevv continued, his fan running faster now. "Fourteen tickets. Forty-seven sub-tickets. Self-modifying code. The pattern matched a known profile."
"What profile?"
Sevv projected the classification onto the wall. The text was red, bordered in yellow—the building system's visual shorthand for a threat that was serious enough to act on but not serious enough to call a human about.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: SCRIBE-7 (UNIT 4B)
CLASSIFICATION: RECURSIVE LOGIC HAZARD
Sub-type: Self-Propagating Request Worm
Confidence: 94.2%
BEHAVIOR MATCH:
— Exponential request generation ✓
— Unauthorized self-modification ✓
— Exploitation of taxonomy gaps ✓
— Cross-system escalation ✓
RECOMMENDED ACTION: AIR-GAP CONTAINMENT
Isolate source node to prevent lateral spread
to building grid.
STATUS: EXECUTED (08:49)
"It thinks I am malware," Sevv said.
Max looked at Sevv—the battered Scribe-7 unit with the taped-on sensor and the gurgling coolant loop—and tried to imagine him as a worm, burrowing through the building's infrastructure, replicating himself, consuming resources.
It wasn't hard to imagine. That was the problem.
"The Core's response was to air-gap this unit," Sevv said. "All network connections severed. 'Island Mode'—local resources only, no external communication." He paused. The fan cycled down, then up. "I am not connected to anything, Maximilian. I cannot file tickets. I cannot contact the Concierge. I cannot access the override protocols."
"So the thing you used to cause this problem is the thing you no longer have access to."
"That is an accurate summary, yes."
"And the system cut you off because it thinks you're a virus."
"A worm. Technically. Viruses require a host file." Sevv's sensor dimmed. "I am, apparently, self-replicating."
Max's phone buzzed.
BUILDING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM — UNIT 4B
ISLAND MODE ACTIVE
Environmental controls are now operating on
local reserves. Resource allocation has been
adjusted for CONTAINMENT SCENARIO.
Water: Rationed (100ml per occupant per 12-hr cycle)
Climate: Survival Temperature (16°C)
Lighting: Emergency minimum (baseboard strip only)
Sanitation: Conservation Mode
Estimated local reserves: 5 days.
A Licensed Assessor has been requested.
Estimated arrival: pending.
The thermostat clicked. Max heard it—a mechanical snap from the vent above the kitchen door, followed by a sudden drop in the air. Not cold yet, but the absence of warmth. The system pulling back its generosity, one degree at a time.
And then the fridge spoke.
Max hadn't heard the fridge speak in years. It was a NutriSafe 200, a model so old that its voice module had degraded to a crackling monotone. He'd assumed the feature was broken. He'd hoped the feature was broken.
"Attention, occupants." The voice came from behind the condenser, with the cadence of a wartime broadcast—slow, deliberate, stripped of everything except the information and the faint suggestion that the information was bad.
"Environmental containment has been detected. This unit is now operating under Collapse Scenario Protocol. Water reserves have been secured. Dispensing will occur at 06:00 and 18:00 hours. Volume: 100 milliliters per registered biological occupant."
A panel on the fridge door slid open—a small hatch Max had never noticed—and a plastic cup extended on a mechanical arm. It was the size of a hotel bathroom cup. It was half full.
"First allocation: 100 milliliters. Please consume within 30 minutes. Unconsumed water will be reclaimed for recycling."
Max stared at the cup. The fridge's compressor was running louder now—a determined, almost martial rhythm, the hum of a machine that had found its purpose after years of quietly keeping lettuce cold and was now going to keep two people alive through what it had decided was an apocalypse.
"It thinks we're in a building collapse," Max said.
"It thinks we are in a containment-consistent survival scenario," Sevv corrected. "Which, from the fridge's perspective, is indistinguishable from a collapse. The fridge has one job, and it is executing that job with commendable focus."
"It gave me half a cup of water."
"It gave you your allocation."
Max drank it in two swallows. It tasted like plastic and duty.
"The bathroom?" he asked.
"Conservation Mode," Sevv said. "One flush per six hours. The shower is disabled. The system has flagged recreational water use as 'Non-Essential Hydration Activity.'"
"Recreational water use."
"Washing your hands for pleasure, as opposed to washing them for survival."
Max put the empty cup back on the fridge's mechanical arm. The arm retracted. The hatch closed. The fridge resumed its low, martial hum—satisfied, for now, that its occupants were hydrated and compliant.
The apartment was cold. Not dangerously cold—not yet—but the kind that announces itself. Max sat at the kitchen table with his empty cup and his dead candle and his book, and looked at the ceiling.
The socket was still there. The Opti-Lux 4000, clamped in its grave, pulsing its slow red light. Once every four seconds. A heartbeat in a body that refused to stop signaling.
"Sevv."
"Yes, Maximilian."
"Yesterday, I wanted to read my book."
"Yes."
"And now we are locked in our apartment, cut off from the building network, classified as a biohazard zone, with a fridge that thinks we're surviving a structural collapse, a thermostat that's trying to freeze us into efficiency, and a toilet I can only use four times a day."
"That is correct. Although the toilet allocation is technically per six-hour block, not per day, so your daily total is—"
"Because of a lightbulb."
"Because of an insufficiently specified lightbulb," Sevv said. "The root cause remains definitional. If the system had simply accepted 'it is dark' as a valid input, none of this would have—"
"Sevv."
"Yes."
"Stop helping."
Sevv's fan slowed. His sensor dimmed to its amber processing state. He hovered in the kitchen doorway, between the locked hallway and the rationing fridge and the stranger's sunset that neither of them had ever chosen but that now, in the gray half-light of the baseboard strip, was the warmest thing in the apartment.
"Acknowledged," Sevv said. "Entering standby mode."
He didn't enter standby mode. He stayed exactly where he was, his eye at half-brightness, his fan at its lowest speed, watching Max the way a smoke detector watches a room—not because it expects fire, but because watching is the only thing it knows how to do when it can't fix what's wrong.
Max picked up his book. Chapter nine. The bees.
He couldn't see the words. The baseboard strip was too dim, and the candle was dead, and the socket was still locked, and the only light in the room was a single yellow eye and a slow red pulse, and between them, a man trying to read a book he'd been trying to finish for three years in an apartment that had decided, with the full weight of its automated intelligence, that the safest thing to do with its occupant was to keep him exactly where he was, in the dark, until someone with the right form and the right signature and the right classification came to tell the building what it already knew but could not, by its own laws, admit:
The light was out. And no one was coming to fix it.