What had it said on his door? She struggled to remember, then nodded as the word came back: IT. Was it just a cruel joke? Call the weirdo “it”? That could explain why he didn’t want to talk about ParaGen. But no; it didn’t make sense. Nothing she knew about the old world suggested that kind of behavior, at least not so officially in a major corporation. The letters on the door had to mean something else. She watched his face as he finished the can of fruit, trying to guess his emotional state. Could she bring up ParaGen again, or would he just go silent like before? Maybe if she didn’t mention ParaGen, and just asked about the letters.

“You seem to know a lot about . . . I-T.” She winced, hoping that wasn’t a stupid question—or worse, an insulting one. Afa’s eyes lit up, and Kira felt a thrill of success.

“I was an IT director,” he said. “I used to do everything—they couldn’t do anything without me.” He smiled broadly, gesturing at the computers arrayed around the room. “See? I know everything about computers. I know everything.”

“That’s amazing,” said Kira, barely containing her grin. Finally she was getting somewhere. She scooted forward. “Tell me about it—about I-T.”

“You have to know how everything works,” he said. “You have to know where everything is; some’s in the cloud, and some’s in the drives, but if it’s the wrong kind of drive, then it won’t work without power. That’s why I have the Zobles on the roof.”

“The solar panels,” said Kira, and Afa nodded.

“Zobles and Hufongs, though those are a lot harder to find, and they break a lot. I turned the generators in room C into capacitors to hold extra electricity from the Hufongs, and they can hold on to it for a while, but you have to keep them cycling or they run down. Now,” he said, leaning forward and gesturing with his hands, “with the right kind of electricity you can access any drive you need. Most of what I have here is solid state, but the big ones, the ones in that corner, are disc-based servers—they use a lot more electricity, but you can store a lot more data, and that’s where most of the sequences are.”

He kept going, more rapidly and with more animation than anything he’d done or said before. Kira reeled at the sudden burst of information, understanding most of the words but only about half the concepts; he was obviously talking about the digital records, and the different ways they were stored and powered and accessed, but he spoke so quickly, and Kira had such a poor background in the subject, that most of his meaning flew right over her head.