With Vikram's credentials, she had access she had not previously had.
The QA system was the legitimate Zenith system. But Vikram had a secondary login — not on any documentation, not registered anywhere — that accessed what he called the Interface. A layer of the building's network that was not Zenith's. That was something else's. That the tenants had built into the building's infrastructure in the same way they had built into the call system — using the structure that existed, working within its framework, invisible to anyone who wasn't looking for it.
The Interface showed her the database she had partially seen on floor ten, now readable in full.
The building was in its database. Every floor, every section of every floor, mapped with a precision that the building's own architectural drawings did not match — the night-state geometry, the correct dimensions, including the additional four to eighteen metres of corridor that appeared after midnight. The building as the tenants saw it, which was different from the building as Zenith's tenants saw it.
The people were in the database. Not by name — by something else. A signature, a pattern, something that was associated with a physical person without being their name or their ID number. Meera could not read the signatures directly but she could see that each entry was distinct, each had an awareness stage, and she could cross-reference by physical location to identify which entries corresponded to which people on the floor.
