They drifted back down to the floor. Syn’s blood floated around them in small droplets. Syn was bleeding—she put a hand on the back of her head and brought it back, wet and red. Dammit! she thought. The interruption in her confrontation had been so sudden that her anger was replaced by shock and without the fuel of anger, she was embarrassed that she had attacked Blip like that. It had all just come bubbling out. It was all there under the surface. She shouldn’t have said it, she thought, and at the same time, she thought, I meant every word. I want those answers.
“Are you okay?” Blip asked, staring at Syn’s hand just as she was.
Her cheeks reddened at his kindness. She didn’t deserve it. “I think so.” The injury stung, but not as bad as others she had. Syn fell often. She had broken bones and the bots were great about stitching her up as fast as they did nearly anything else on the ship. Their repair work didn’t stop the pain, though. Yet, she didn’t feel she was as hurt now as she had been before. “I think I’m okay.”
Blip floated around. “I think the Jacob is dead.”
“Dead?” Syn pushed off and maneuvered to the window, trying to glance up at the needle. There was nothing that she could see wrong. “Everything looks okay.”
Blip was talking to the controls and allowed a soft “Hush” to escape as he did so.
Syn thought, stupid bot. Just do your job and don’t boss me around. He could pay attention to two things at once. He didn’t need to concentrate. Syn concluded it was just an act. He wants to be more human than I want him to be.
The screen on the control panel beeped. Blip whirred and narrowed his eyes. The panel beeped back at him.
“Rude,” Blip said, offended.
“What’s…” Syn couldn’t even get the words out before she received another “Hush” from the football-shaped robot.
Syn spun in the air and aimed toward the door. With a small push of her feet against the back wall, she propelled herself forward. It didn’t take much effort to move in the near weightlessness this high up. Syn loved the sensation, though—fun, absolutely crazy fun. She would venture up to the needle just to enjoy the wildness of spinning and wheeling unencumbered through the air.
Syn put her arms out in front and braced herself as she moved toward the door. Her fingers gripped into the fine crack between the windowed Jacob doors.
Blip still argued with the control panel. She never could figure out exactly how he worked with the different interfaces and AIs on the ship. Sometimes they seemed stubborn and unbendable to Blip’s desires. There were others that he could just connect with and rewrite their entire processes. Yet, she was amazed at how, given enough time, he could get them to do anything.
Syn pulled at the doors. They were over four kilometers high in the air. Syn had heard of a fear of heights in the films she watched. But on the Olorun, this seemed so odd. All someone had to do was to look up and see the ground above them. Wherever you were on the Disc, you were looking down at the ground (or up, depending on how you wanted to describe it). So, yes, they were high up, but this high up, they were also near weightless. If Syn stepped out, she would slowly start to drop down. Slowly.
There was a hatch up above, along the underside of the needle, and she could climb from here. Stay close to the tower and push yourself up.
The doors began to open. There was a tremendous amount of pressure on them, and they were difficult to budge.
Blip whirred and shouted, “Stop!”
Syn glared back at him. “I’m not one of your machines.” He could try all he wanted to get the Jacob to turn on and take them the rest of the way, but her way seemed more fun. Syn continued to pry at the door.
Blip flew up, inserted himself between her and the door. He turned and bumped her arm away with the back of his head. Syn lost her grip, and the doors slid shut with a slam.
“Blip!” Syn said. She swatted at him, and he whirled out of the way. “Stop treating me like a baby. I know we’re high up but I can float to the top. We’ll just use the hatch.”
Blip wobbled in the air, buffeted by the hard slap. He just narrowed his eyes and then zipped to look eye-to-eye with her. “It’s not about that. There’s almost no air out there.”
Syn paused. No air? What did he mean? “Blip, what are you talking about?” Outside those doors was the Disc. She could look down, and though they were nearly minuscule dots, she could still see the trees and houses. There was the small rectangle that was the soccer field. A lake twinkled below them. The reflection of the sunstrip rolled across its surface.
Blip sighed.
Syn scowled. She hated when he did that—it was a sure sign to her that he thought she was being stupid. “I’m not dumb,” she scolded back. She pushed away and crossed her arms. “We’re taking too long. I just want to get up there.”
“How high up are we?” His tone had changed. He had dropped the scolding, but he was now purposely talking in a lower tone, spacing out his words, making sure Syn clearly understood him.
Syn remained unmoved. Her arms were crossed, her chin down, and she stared at him through narrowed eyes. Around her, her dark hair floated in the gravity. She grunted, “Schoolmaster Blip.”
“Fine. I don’t have to explain it to you. Just do me a favor,” Blip moved back to continue his argument with the elevator, “And stay away from the…”
“Oh, great Blip, please don’t withhold your wisdom from my tiny little mind,” she growled. Yet, inside, she did want to know what he was going to say. She wanted to know why she could not go up and float to the needle. And he knew she wanted to know, so instead of a lecture, Syn was on the edge of begging him to instruct her. Syn slapped her hand on the wall. She felt as if she could never outgrow him. He would always have something more that she needed from him. She would always be in chains to him that were forged from her continued and seemingly never-ending ignorance.
“Really?” Blip quirked up an eyebrow.
Syn scowled and thought Stupid Blip. Yet, she nodded. It was slight—maybe not even a nod, just a move of the head.
It was enough. Blip turned and raised himself up. Syn was floating several inches off the ground. Blip made sure to move, so he was looking down at her—not much, just so his eyes were an inch higher than hers. Perhaps it made him feel more like a teacher. Whatever the reason, Syn wanted to grab him and punt him down the Disc.
She spat out, “So, little football, are you going to tell me?”
Blip sighed again. “As I was saying, how high are we?”
Syn just stared.
Blip allowed a moment of tension, and then he continued, answering his own question. “We’re 4.5 kilometers above the base of the Disc. How does the Disc have gravity since we’re in weightless space?”
It was Syn’s turn to sigh. “It spins.”
Blip nodded. “Yes, it spins. And because it spins, the Disc has gravity. However, the closer we move to the axis point, the needle around which the Disc spins, the less gravity there is. All of the air in the Disc is also under the pressure of the gravity being created by that spin. Oh, there’s air up here, but the air is far denser the further down the tower you go. When you’re at the base of the Disc, the air is at its densest. It’s designed that way. When you hop in the elevator, we pressurize the elevator so that the air pressure is the same as it is at Disc base level. The needle is pressurized too. We work hard so that you experience the same air pressure everywhere you go.”
Syn frowned. She hated when he used the word “we.” It creeped her out. She knew there were other AIs on Olorun—although they were all dumb bots. Blip was unique—a distinct, individual mind like hers. Yet, he still talked to the other machines with their varying degrees of technology. She knew he had assembled a team of bots that worked to make life easier for her. But the “we” was just weird. It made her feel that there was a whole world of conversations going on that she was not a part of. Her frown deepened, and she thought, we? Why not “Us?” but she didn’t say anything. Again,
her doubts surfaced. She wanted to shout again at him but no, not now. This wasn’t the time.
Blip continued, ignoring her frustration. “But if you go out those doors, the air pressure is significantly less than when we are down at the base. So much so, that you’ll suffocate.”
Syn looked over her shoulder. Okay, I hadn’t thought about that. She just thought she would slip out and float all the way up to the hatch and save the day. It had to be that easy. Except it wasn’t, and she had nearly opened that door and killed herself.
She’d have been like all the other humans: dead on Olorun. Sometimes she felt like the ship was just waiting for her to die. She was the lone person on a ship that had housed thousands. Of all those people, she was the only one not dead. The only one living. As if she was the holdout. Perhaps the ship was readying to do something new but waited on her to die like some little gnat buzzing around.
Syn let her arms down. It wouldn’t be her. She wasn’t going to die. She’d listen to Blip and live, despite how much she hated to. She had no desire to be like the other fools on the ship—she didn’t want to be one of the other dead bodies she had discovered. She grinned and thought, sorry, Ship, I’m here to stay. You can try and get me to open up doors and kill myself, but handy Blip and I would always be there to thwart your plans. So keep on waiting. The rest of your plans can wait. I plan to live a long, old life.
Yet, Syn wasn’t sure how old she wanted to be. She was seventeen. Did she want to be alone for the next seventy to ninety years? When the ship had left Earth, the average person lived past 200. On the ship, the oldest person had been 120. There was something about space travel that limited the upper range. Would she want to live another 106 years all by her lonesome? She had Blip but…
The more she thought about it, the more tempting opening those doors and falling out into the airless space above the Disc became. She imagined it. She’d be the one survivor whose body they couldn’t process. If the ship were ever found, there she’d be, floating above the forest, above the great tree, like some watchful angel. Maybe the children who would find this place on some distant world would call her that. The Floating Angel.
“Syn?” Blip said.
Syn shook her head.
“Were you daydreaming?”
“No,” she lied.
Blip looked at her. Then he turned and went back to the control panel. “Besides, if you would give me just a few more minutes before you tried to kill yourself, you would have discovered—"
Suddenly, the elevator lurched forward. Syn floated back to the ground, and the sensation of gravity slowly increased. They were moving. Blip had done it. He had convinced the Jacob AI that they shouldn’t be stuck in the lift four kilometers above the ground. She thought, yay Blip! Although there was no way she was going to let him know how happy that made her.
She floated around. There was the pull to the floor due to the movement up, but they were still in low gravity, and she bobbed around easily. “Thanks,” was all she felt comfortable muttering.
“Want to know how I did it?” Blip said.
She glanced at him. She did. She was always fascinated how Blip worked with the other machines. But she didn’t want him to know that his stories were interesting. So she just gave a hrmpph and said, “How?”
Blip smiled. “I threatened it.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You did what?”
Blip’s smile grew a bit more, “I threatened it!”
Syn smiled. Oh, the tiny robot is happy with himself. Big tough Blip has gotten tough with the elevator.
“How’d you threaten it?”
Blip chimed, “I told it that if it didn’t respond, we’d let Bob use it exclusively.” He winked at her, and she let loose a wild laugh.
“That’s mean.” Bob was one of the maintenance bots. A large puck-shaped thing, notorious for cleaning up messes and walking away dirtier than he had begun. He tended to drag the mess with him too. One of the other lions had killed an emu and dragged its corpse onto the south edge of the lake and then stalked off, obviously bored with its catch. Bob to the rescue. The mess was cleaned up, but Bob did not realize that part of the emu’s leg, the part shredded by the lion, was stuck to its back clamp, and he was dragging it wherever he went. A trail of blood and feathers. That was not the first time, either. Bob made more messes than he fixed. And the two could never talk to him about it. He was very focused on his tasks.
10
Into the Needle
Obi nkyere abofra onyame
“No one shows a child the sky.”
—Ashanti Proverb
“We’re here.” Blip moved up and stood in front of the doors. When he spoke next, his voice had grown quiet. Concerned. “I’m going to black out the lights. I want you to be cautious. I’m going first.”
“Blip, what are you scared about?” Syn asked but still picked up her spear and gripped it hard. She pushed toward him, now in full zero gravity.
Something had happened up here. Something big. Maybe space pirates! Syn thought. She knew there was no such thing and, if there were, Olorun was way too fast for anyone to intercept them. Besides, they were between the stars. A molecule in the sea—far away from anyone else. Nonetheless, something had happened. She risked Blip’s ire. “Space pirates?”
He sighed a great Blip sigh. “No.” Only one syllable this time. Definitely on edge.
“Fine,” she said and moved behind him. He dropped the lights, and they were plunged into complete darkness except for the amber glow of the control panel. Blip chirped something in its direction and that too went completely dark. Syn shivered—Blip was genuinely concerned.
The door to the elevator opened soundlessly, and they met an equally dark scene ahead. A few warning lights shone in different, scattered locations across the expanse, but they were small and red and didn’t provide any clarity of the actual scene.
“Blip?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. Without realizing it, and as much as it was possible in zero gravity, she had crouched into a fighting stance, ready to spring at whatever could be out there.
The lights were off, and they were entering a den where something perhaps waited. The entire ship had shaken in the wake of that explosion. The longer they stood there, the more she began to imagine that there was something dark and dangerous, with a predatory heart, on the other side of that blackness. Something waiting there for them. She couldn’t hear its beating heart, but she was sure could feel it. Feel its dark anger. Feel its hunger. She was sure it wanted them. Wanted her. Wanted to devour her.
Blip gave a brief hum. It was almost unheard. A thin red light, thin as a wire, moved across his back. He was scanning the area.
“Nothing there,” came his voice. Again, nearly a whisper.
Syn hated this—it was odd to feel frightened on the ship. The ship was hers.
The lion. The prowling pack of former house dogs. These were things they had expected or at least knew might be a problem. They had been given some warning.
“Can we turn on some lights?” Syn asked, keeping her voice as low as possible. She was avoiding another reprimand, and he wasn’t in the mood to ignore her.
Instead of answering, Blip shone a read spot beam from the center of his head, lighting up the area a few feet in front of them. They were in one of the access tunnels that led to the central hold and beyond that, the gate. There were still 200 meters of tunnel between them and the main gate room where the tunnel spilled out, joining with the others from the various towers across the Disc and several more dropping from the engine bay, electronics, and central computing hubs.
The access door to the bridge was directly above the gate. But beyond the gate? Syn had no idea. Neither she nor Blip had managed to open it. All of the scans and ship schematics simply showed nothing more than the access controls for the Bussard ramjet at the front of the ship. After months of consideration, she had assumed that the gate was impregnable because of the ramjet. The ramjet magnetically
scooped up hydrogen to be used to power the engines. The amount of radiation near the ramscoop had to be incredible. Syn had been afraid she would light up like a candle if she were able to get there. So, she gave up trying. The ramscoop worked. The engines worked.
The ramscoop was gigantic. It was not the size of the Disc, but it was at least a fifth the size of the Disc, and the Disc was enormous.
“Let’s go,” Blip said as he floated out of the Jacob and down the tunnel. Syn floated behind, giving a small kick against the back wall. She trailed her spear next to her and readied herself.
Syn paused and thought, oh. Why hadn’t I connected the dots earlier? Space pirates might have been the preferable option. If the ramscoop was broken, this whole trip might come to a quick end. The scoop did more then pick up spare hydrogen—it also protected the ship from rocks and micro-meteorites. Perhaps that’s the source of the explosion.
They moved into the darkness. The air was still. Syn gripped her spear so tightly she thought she might squeeze straight through it, that it would crumble under her grip. She cringed and thought. Why? Why am I so scared? This wasn’t the first time she’d explored something unknown on Olorun.
This wasn’t even the scariest place in the ship. The body farms had to be the scariest. The thousands of corpses slowly turning into soil, the white skulls popping up from the ground like strange mushrooms. The body farms were bathed only in blue light until the planting began. It was always silent there. Always still.
She had zipped through these tunnels hundreds of times before. They would race these when they were bored, moving from the engine hold to the gate as fast as they could. Blip would take one tube and Syn would take the other. There was nothing here. The animals didn’t make their way up here and neither did the bots.
“What’s that smell?” Something sharp and pungent hung in the air, like fire. “Blip, something’s burning.”
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