Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  Luka pulled the slightly flared glass tube from its hold, positioned it at the beginning of the first line, and bent down. The trick, he’d learned, was to inhale just enough to draw the powder into your nostril, but not so hard that it sprayed down the back of your throat. The longer you could keep it in that sweet spot—melting into a kind of yellow gel against the extensive vascular capillary bed below—the better the high. You could control the substance’s position with subtle breaths, deriving pleasure from the association of the intricate balance with the rapid absorption and subsequent binding of molecules to opioid receptors. The less it numbed your tongue and gums when it eventually drained down the back of your throat, the more of it was in your brain where it belonged.

  The taste of curious yellow was bitter and acidic, and by any reasonable standard, should provoke offense and mild revulsion. To Luka, though, it tasted like pure eye-fluttering and knee-weakening utopia—like what an orgasm would taste like if the moment could be distilled and bottled and served as a warm liquor. As he leaned back and blinked and looked at the cube, his eyes filled with euphoric tears at the thought of all the wonderful curves and lines and planes the marbleized material in front of him might contain.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE HISTORY OF THE CORONIANS

  PART THREE: SPECIATION

  ACCORDING TO MOST GOVERNMENTS, the worldwide blackout was the result of by far the largest and most catastrophic industrial accident in history, probably caused by one of the many international mining companies that had gotten into the business of asteroid sequestration. However, a conspicuous lack of seismic data continued to raise questions. An impact violent enough to eject excavated material and sediment into the atmosphere would have pegged almost every seismometer on the planet. The shock waves would have triggered megatsunamis that would have killed millions as they consumed at least 60 percent of the planet’s shorelines. And debris thrown straight through the atmosphere would have been superheated to incandescence upon reentry and lit up the entire Northern Hemisphere with the intensity of a nuclear blast.

  An analysis of the presumed ejecta through an amateur ballooning experiment told a very different story. To dozens of independent geologists, the particles appeared more mechanical than organic. Weaponization of molecular nanotechnology had become the newest arms race, and ecophagy—or the consumption of the entire ecosystem by self-replicating nanoscale robots—had largely replaced fears of a planetwide nuclear holocaust. The biggest difference between the two apocalyptic scenarios was that synthetic biological warfare could theoretically be initiated by anyone, from any sized laboratory, anywhere on the planet, with no radiological traces whatsoever.

  The process of mechanosynthetic replication had ceased, but not before the concentration of particles in the stratosphere were sufficient to block close to 90 percent of the sunlight that once reached Earth’s surface, reducing daytime to the luminosity of a moderately moonlit night, and effectively flipping the power switch on the entire planet.

  The shift back toward fossil fuels and nuclear energy was both instantaneous and disastrous. The population of the planet had grown far beyond what the pre–Solar Age could support, and within a year, the rates at which coal, petroleum, natural gas, and just about anything else combustible were burned was over three times higher than it had been at the height of mankind’s former dependency. Nuclear safety regulation was essentially nonexistent, and Chernobyl-scale meltdowns became semiregular events.

  Just as suddenly as the process of solar energy production was halted, so too was photosynthesis. The foliage of deciduous trees turned autumn hues and was shed for the very last time, and evergreens turned brown and brittle. The world’s forests fell into a state of hibernation from which they never awoke, and were subsequently harvested and burned, increasing the planet’s atmospheric burden. With a significant percentage of Earth’s complex food web gone, it was estimated that well over 90 percent of the planet’s biomass perished over the course of just a few years in what was almost certainly the largest and most rapid mass extinction event since life first took hold well over three and a half billion years prior.

  Eventually the particles in the upper atmosphere began to disperse, exposing the dramatically reformulated troposphere beneath it to solar radiation. Although not nearly enough sunlight could reliably penetrate to revive the Solar Age, the new atmospheric composition was not impervious to thermal radiation. The average temperature of the planet had temporarily plummeted in the absence of sunlight, but now as heat was once again permitted to reach the earth’s surface, rather than dissipating harmlessly back off into space, massive concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and heavy metals such as mercury and lead absorbed the energy and re-radiated it back down. As the stratosphere cleansed itself of the mysterious mechanical foreign matter, it revealed a world trapped firmly between two states: the sky was too opaque for the sustained and efficient generation of solar power, but not so opaque as to prevent a runaway greenhouse effect.

  It was not long before temperatures in the hottest regions began approaching the coolest temperatures on one of the least hospitable planets in the entire solar system: Venus. The world once known as the Blue Marble even began to assume some of the visual characteristics of her sister planet since greenhouse gasses tend to favor the orange and yellow portions of the visible spectrum. The immense and amazingly swift transformation was proof of how similar Earth and Venus really were, both in terms of size and composition. The biggest difference was that a lack of tectonic plates on Venus resulted in an interrupted carbon cycle, leaving most of the planet’s greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere rather than trapped safely below the planet’s surface. However, the more Earth’s carbon supply was released from its underground confines, the more similar the two planets became.

  With the earth’s oxygen cycle so rapidly disrupted by the interruption of photosynthesis, the entire planet became an almost continuous hypoxic zone. Only those with the knowledge and resources to construct self-sustaining habitats for themselves were able to survive. Regions of the world with disproportionally long days were able to provide themselves with oxygen through cultivated photosynthesis using highly productive genetically engineered flora, and typically fed themselves on protein synthesized from the stem cells of long-dead livestock. Others stayed close to the ocean, decomposing seawater through electrolysis for oxygen and breeding the heartiest of the world’s few remaining insects for calories. Still others somehow partially adapted to the radiation, heat, and the atmospheric toxicity, mutating into aggressive cannibalistic clans of what were generally referred to as “the homeless” if they lived aboveground, and “subterraneans” if they stayed below. Although commerce developed between some communities, each pod system was a sovereign colony with its own laws, culture, traditions, and its own historical narratives.

  But not all of humanity had been prepared to resign itself to countless generations of containment. As the planet was cast into shadow, not everyone believed that the only path forward was to poison and irradiate themselves into inert metal alloy shells. Although there were those who maintained that the end of all life on Earth had always been a question of when rather than if—that given even the most conservative estimates of habitable planets in our galaxy, planetwide extinction events had almost certainly already occurred billions of times without the universe ever seeming to take the least bit of notice—there were those who believed that millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of human culture and endeavor were worthy of preservation.

  If humanity was entirely dependent on technology, and technology was entirely dependent on power, then the key to preserving humanity once again lay in solving the problem of renewable energy. Space-based Solar Power, or SBSP, was by no means a new concept, and had in fact already been successfully implemented several times. Before photovoltaic technology was finally cheap and efficient enough to prove once and for all that solar cells made far more economic sense on the ground t
han in space, several nations had successfully experimented with using solar collectors to generate power in geostationary orbit, convert it to microwaves, and transmit it down to rectifying antennas on Earth where the microwaves were converted back into electricity and fed into the nearest electrical grid. Although none of the satellites had functioned for years, the technology was both proven and, with a little reverse engineering, well understood.

  Fortunately, the foundation for the perfect solution had already been laid. The only question was how much of Equinox could be converted into a massive SBSP station before the collapse of every government on the planet that had the technology and capability (or had commandeered it from the private sector) to make the project work. Enormous photovoltaic sheets needed to be unfurled along appendages on both Cancer and Capricorn sides of the rings, and tens of thousands of kilometers of cable needed to be run to carry current down the skyhooks, through the thick atmosphere, and into a new global electrical grid below. Before the Solar Age was so abruptly extinguished, few would have questioned the feasibility of converting the Equinox substructure into a planetwide SBSP; however, with every economic, political, and cultural institution on the planet in rapid decline, the project seemed increasingly unobtainable.

  But completion of the transformation was never entirely the point. The goal of converting Equinox was less about stopping the demise of humanity and more about preparing for it—getting as much infrastructure in place as possible before governments and monetary systems and entire civilizations entirely collapsed. Equinox became as much a symbol as it was an intended solution; a multigenerational aspiration to provide whatever was to come next with a common objective worth living, fighting, and dying for; the closest thing left to spiritual salvation for an entire sentient and intelligent species who believed they had been forsaken by every one of their gods.

  The original vision for Equinox was to make space equally accessible to all—to bring the entire planet together in scientific, economic, and cultural pursuit. However, instead of uniting humanity, Equinox eventually became the impetus for the ultimate in class division: speciation.

  Most historians correlated the genesis of the Coronians with the eventual abandonment of the Equinox project. As nations continued to fracture, resupply missions slowed, then gradually stopped altogether, entirely deserting hundreds of scientists and engineers living inside the habitation modules. Some were able to return to Earth using what functional emergency reentry capsules they had, but replacement capsules were never launched, leaving the remainder to starve, asphyxiate, or devise quick and painless methods of suicide for themselves. Their pleas were silenced as ground communications were severed, and as all remaining resources were redirected toward increasingly brutal wars between what functioning civilizations remained.

  But then one day something happened that nobody on the planet had anticipated—an event described by many as both a spiritual and a technological miracle: the lights came back on. It was only a few kilowatts at first, trickling down through the Macapá terminal in Brazil, but it was more than enough to get Earth’s attention.

  Some of the abandoned Equinox engineers had not given up. Rather than resigning themselves to gradual and agonizing deaths—or ejecting themselves out into space from manually overridden airlocks—they focused all their remaining resources on collecting whatever energy they could and sending it down to the planet below. Compassion had not been enough to retain the interest and support of those on Earth. The only hope for survival that Equinox had left was leverage.

  Global conflict gradually decreased as resupply missions resumed. Kilowatts became megawatts, and other terminals along the equator—sites that eventually became known as “plugs”—came online one by one. But this time, power was not sent down to Earth for free. When resupply missions were delayed, the communities that were rapidly coming to rely on Equinox were punished with blackouts. When payloads were not exactly as requested, the current to certain plugs was reduced, resulting in prolonged brownouts. The engineers who lived aboard Equinox never forgot that they had once been considered expendable by those on the ground, and they would never again allow themselves to be forsaken.

  The experience of being abandoned in space convinced most technicians to return to Earth as soon as it was possible, but not all. During the fourteen-month period when Earth had halted all communications with Equinox, two engineers had managed to accomplish something that had previously been considered impossible: conception.

  Although sections of Equinox were well shielded, it was assumed that radiation levels were high enough to keep sperm levels low, and to kill a zygote well before embryonic or fetal stages of development. Even with healthy sperm, fertilization was considered highly unlikely, both because of how sperm was thought to behave in zero-g, and because of certain achievement and retention challenges men tended to face in microgravity as a result of decreased blood pressure. Add to those factors the logistical challenges presented by weightlessness, and the chances of a successful off-Earth pregnancy had always been considered minuscule. However, minuscule was not zero, and if there was anything that life had proven itself capable of, probably trillions of times over billions of years, it was defying the odds.

  History would always remember a little girl named Genevieve as the very first Coronian, and technically speaking, the very first alien. Life-support systems had never been installed in the inner ring, and by the time reentry capsules were once again available to rotate out station operators, Genevieve had lived in microgravity aboard the outer ring for so long that there was no way she could possibly survive the crush of Earth’s gravity. Her bones, muscles, and ligaments would not support her, her heart was extremely weak, and having never known a serious pathogen, her immune system had not developed to the point where she could survive outside of a sterile environment. But Genevieve’s parents would not leave her, and as though managing to accomplish the near-impossible just one time somehow permanently altered the rules of probability, it wasn’t long before other babies who could never know the full force of Earth’s gravity were born aboard Equinox, as well.

  To those on Earth, it was unknown what a child born and raised in weightlessness looked like—how their skeletal structures and facial features and even their brains would form in the absence of one of the most constant forces life had ever known, and how all of the additional radiation they were exposed to above the atmosphere would alter their DNA. It was also unknown what additional genetic modifications the Coronians intentionally made to themselves over the years and the generations, and how they embraced and incorporated all the technology they had access to. However it was they had evolved and adapted—both deliberately and through chance mutation—to them, it justified reclassifying themselves as not just a new species, but an entirely new genus.

  The relationship between Homo sapiens and Caelestia sapiens eventually stabilized, but in the same way that stars are stable. The constant pressure of nuclear fusion in the stellar core pushes against its own gravity until an equilibrium is achieved. What appears at a distance to be stability—perhaps even placidity—is in fact the sum of enormous and volatile competing dynamics that simply cannot remain in balance forever. The Coronians continued to provide energy to Earth as long as those on Earth continued to provide the Coronians with the resources they needed to maintain and expand Equinox, and to build an increasingly divergent civilization. But the one force that no apparent symmetry can withstand indefinitely is time.

  The word “Coronian” was almost certainly derived from the term “corona,” which is the superheated plasma atmosphere that extends for millions of kilometers in every direction from the sun’s surface. Why the Coronians named themselves after this particular solar phenomenon was a matter of speculation. The corona itself is relatively stable and predictable, but occurrences known as CMEs, or Coronal Mass Ejections, are not. During solar maxima, these bursts of solar winds and magnetic fields are ejected above the corona as many as three or m
ore times every day. When directed toward Earth, CMEs had been known to be responsible for sudden, long-lasting, and catastrophic power outages.

  Those who studied the sun’s corona understood that it was a vast and enduring force to be both respected and feared.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  VACUUM SPHERE

  AYLA SPENT THE FIRST SEVENTEEN years of her life in an archipelago of geodesic domes connected by underground passageways on the southern tip of Greenland. She and the other kids figured out how to fashion makeshift carabiners out of spools of solder and thin slices of discarded pipe that they used to connect old tires and inner tubes to chains suspended from the loading bay winches. From the second- and even third-story balconies of the docks, they launched themselves into what, to them, felt like an infinite void, soaring from rail to crane to gantry, proclaiming themselves Coronians amid the simulated weightlessness. Under the authority of the older kids, what started out as perilous but largely collaborative mischief invariably devolved into highly adversarial competition—games of chicken, ghost in the machine, and sharks and minnows—escalating in feverish crescendos of fierceness and violence and finally culminating in one of the many sickening accidents that still sometimes replayed themselves in Ayla’s memory as she tried to fall asleep.

  Until today, the loading bay swings were the closest Ayla had ever come to being airborne. She didn’t exactly know what she expected from the experience, but she was surprised by the stability of the perfectly spherical airship known as the HMS Beagle. The gangplank that was laid out for her from the upper level of the Maldive Islands Spaceport was secured by bolts threaded through steel anchors and felt as solid to her as the siliconcrete deck she left behind. As she boarded the gondola, she immediately grabbed the rails to either side of the bulkhead, though she could detect no movement beneath her beyond what she attributed to self-induced vertigo.