The idea, when she laid it out for all of them — Rajan, Anand, Preethi, Vikram — was this:
The tenants were using the infrastructure of the building. The call system, the network, the physical space. They were not the building — they were in the building, using its systems the way a parasite uses a host's circulatory system. If you disrupted the infrastructure — cleanly, completely, in the right way — you would not destroy the tenants but you would sever their access to the systems they were using. The call routing would stop. The expanded floor geometry would stop. The awareness cataloguing would stop.
The key was the Anchor. The thing on floor ten, in the open area, that didn't move. Meera had seen it — the presence that her visual system couldn't fully process. The thing that Vikram had named years ago from a single exposure and had not gone near since. The Anchor was, she believed, the point of integration between the tenants and the building's systems. It was what they had installed — or what they were, in their physical-space form — to maintain the connection.
If the Anchor lost its connection to the building's power grid, the connection would break. Not permanently — she was not deluded about the permanence of anything she could do. But long enough. Long enough for four people to walk out of the building and not come back.
The building's main power distribution panel was on floor six — she had confirmed this with Vikram, who had the infrastructure documentation. A circuit breaker panel that fed all the upper floors. If floors seven through ten lost power simultaneously, in the middle of the night, with the building otherwise unoccupied by anyone who mattered—
"It won't hurt anyone," she said. "The other people on shift will be inconvenienced. The security team will deal with the outage. The tenants will reestablish their connection eventually. But in the window of the outage—"
"We leave," Anand said.
"We leave. And we do not come back."
