Metafire

Dr. Miller had survived in a pocket and was walking out, when falling debris cracked open his skull right in front of a group of survivors. One was a close colleague who later died. It was months before Dr. Miller remembered who he was. Then the permanence of his dementia became clear to the doctors. But he did appear to make minor improvements. Furthermore, the radiation poisoning did not appear as bad as they would have expected from his proximity, within a mile, of the blast. The patterns of buildings, some structures shielding, other structures murdering, left many odd stories like that of Dr. Miller.

Jill went to the Internet and printed a picture collection of the blasted area in and around Rockefeller University. She "fingered" or found Dr. Miller's personal information, his Home Page, and it included his room number. She found this information in the Metafire Museum's New York City files. Rockefeller University, also, kindly put a map of its buildings and the room layouts on the Internet. With this stuff, Jill went to John Ferguson.

"John, we want to look for Dr. Miller's DEC Alpha. If it was in his office and he survived, then the hard disk on the Alpha may have survived. Hard disks are not radiation hardened, but they are sealed in strong metal boxes. If the heat and radiation never got too high there, if the Alpha was buried in the rubble, we may get the disk out intact. We want to try. John, we, Jack and I, want to try. We know what we are looking for."