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“Curiosity never hurt anyone.” With your main signing hand, you grasp the handle of the switch. Akiko’s fingers close around yours. Together you pull it up, locking it into place with a metallic thud that echoes through this huge room of hardware cabinets. The overlapping whir of hundreds of old tape drives softens the soundscape.

“Feels like it did something,” Akiko signs.

“Do you think it still works after all this time?” you sign.

You walk back through the hall of cables as Akiko runs her fingers through them tenderly as if it were a girl’s hair. “Even if it doesn’t it was worth the trip.”

“There should be a terminal somewhere...” Scanning the room, you notice a thick cluster of wires running into a row of metal conduits on the wall, leading up. “I think we follow the wires.”

“Always,” Akiko signs.

Stepping back onto the elevator, you go up one floor, from the lowest level to the next. The room here was dark when you first passed by it--now it’s come to life. Half of the old light fixtures still work, casting pale flickering light onto the dusty room where the cables emerge from the wall near the ceiling and all converge down on one workstation, with its old CRT monitor reading just a few green letters on its command line:

username > _

“Well it booted up!” you sign.

Akiko happy stims. “What can a primitive machine like this do?”

“It says it’s a supercomputer, so it’ll be optimized for specific kinds of calculation other machines of its era would struggle with. If we knew what purpose it was built for we could speculate at what it does. But currently we’re stuck at a login prompt.”

“Well what is it you’re always saying? The second rule of something?” she signs.

“Every lock can be picked.”