Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  “I’m sorry,” the boy told her. “Arik isn’t coming.”

  The girl shook her head.

  “You’re . . .” She stopped and shook her head again, and tears fell from her cheeks. “I’m going back,” she said defiantly.

  “Cadie,” the boy said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “There is,” the girl insisted. She backed away from the boy. “At least I can be with him. That’s something.”

  “This is what he wanted,” the boy said.

  The girl leaned forward and glared at him. “Well, it’s not what I want!” she screamed, then she turned and started to run.

  “Don’t let her get away,” Ayla said. She spun around to face Omicron. “Do it,” she ordered.

  There was a transmitter lashed to the stock of Omicron’s rifle and he reached back and squeezed it. The pregnant girl stopped moving. Everyone stood motionless for a moment, then the girl turned. The mics were no longer broadcasting, so if the strangers were communicating, Ayla could not hear them. She watched as all three of them tried to dislodge the devices from their visors, but their thickly gloved hands repeatedly slipped off. The boy stayed on his feet the longest. He found whatever it was he’d been holding, picked it up off the ground, and was about to use it to try to knock the miniature canister off his visor when he finally succumbed—stumbling, dropping the device, and collapsing.

  The Anura sounded another half-distance alarm.

  “Come on,” Ayla said. “Let’s get them loaded up and get the hell out of here.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BRUTE FORCE

  SECURITY ABOARD THE SAN FRANCISCO was probably best described as “elegant.” Inductive contact lenses shrouded private workspaces from all forms of human and electronic voyeurism; decryption keys and personal identifiers transmitted through bioelectromagnetic fields granted or denied access to both virtual and physical spaces; inconspicuous cameras fed three-dimensional models to facial geometric algorithms that seamlessly anticipated residents’ routes and unobtrusively guided them throughout their daily routines. Although the various security measures employed throughout the rig seemed robust and even infallible, they remind Luka of a nineteenth-century British novel he once found in the archives depicting distinguished and prominent families of punctilious gentlemen and readily excitable ladies, all of whom endlessly struggled to express their passion for one another within the confines of stringent social convention and propriety. While listening to an old dramatization of the story, it occurred to Luka that the rules, restrictions, and barriers such systems imposed existed only to the extent that they were recognized and respected by those they inhibited. And it subsequently occurred to him that the one thing elegance did respond well to was brute force.

  Luka used a lightweight fiddler liftsuit to transport a single carbon fiber crate. He did not have sufficient permissions for utility access to deck two, but he could move freely between decks one and three, and since anyone could use the cargo lift’s emergency brake, there was nothing preventing him from stopping right in-between. While it was true that the vertical freight doors would not willingly open in order to admit Luka, that problem was easily addressed by setting down the crate, rotating the brackets of the liftsuit’s hydraulic attachment, working them into the gap between the doors, and gently activating. The entrance yawned open so easily that Luka wondered if he might have saved himself some trouble and done it with his bare hands.

  He left the suit in powered standby and extricated himself from its harnesses and straps. The carbon fiber crate was not heavy and was therefore easily hoisted through the gap between the doors, after which Luka followed with a lackadaisical vault. He had stolen several brief glimpses of deck two from the lift while watching authorized personnel come and go, but now that he was actually standing among the entire city’s utility infrastructure, the experience was quite different. Being on deck two was like being miniaturized and transported inside a three-dimensional integrated circuit: extraordinary complex, yet somehow still meticulously organized. The high ceiling was a mass of pipes, ducts, and cables—first racing along long stretches in parallel, then veering, branching, bending, weaving, and intertwining. Along the perimeter and bolted to the hexagonal synthetic graphite supports through which raw materials were conveyed topside were voluminous red and blue pressure tanks, orange compressors, steel-gray panels, and consoles festooned with wheels, dials, hand lever valves, and—to Luka’s astonishment—seemingly anachronistic analog meters. There were so many unique sounds at so many different intervals and pitches that they all blended together into an almost constant white noise. Since it would be impossible for light to penetrate the utilities overhead, the floor panels provided the majority of the illumination, giving the room a surprisingly clean and even sanitary feel, and even the smell—while undeniably acrid—was not unpleasant. At first glance, Luka did not detect a single pool of fluid or patch of rust.

  He’d memorized enough of the floor plan to know the general direction of where he needed to go, so he hoisted the crate by its indentations and carried it around to the other side of the lift. To his right was a row of redundant pumps amid snarls of pipes, elbows, and valves—all painted a pure cobalt blue to indicate their association with potable water—and which had been chosen as an alternative to above-deck water towers as a means of generating pressure without unduly upsetting the rig’s center of gravity. He passed a floor-to-ceiling rack of black, liquid-cooled servers that lit him up with a full spectrum of furiously strobing plasma dots. In order to maintain his bearings, he looked and followed the cluster of hexagonal ducts, about the diameter of soccer balls, which eventually converged into a massive switching station known as “the hive.”

  Several kilometers of pneumatic tubes once permeated the San Francisco like thick, hardened arteries. While historically, pneumatic transportation systems had almost always succumbed to their more modern rivals—delivery vehicles and rapid digital communication—aboard the San Francisco, the concept had flourished. In fact, technologies enabling instantaneous access to information and the rapid assembly of just about any object you could think of only served to increase the expectation of near-instantaneous delivery of physical goods. Since there were no above-deck vehicles allowed aboard the San Francisco, any object too small for a forklift or a mech—items like medication, computer components, machine parts, newly assembled tools and instruments, various household goods, and even groceries—could either be hand-delivered, or simply dropped off at the nearest tube station, after which it could cover even the longest stretches between two endpoints in only a little over a minute.

  Pneumatic tubes were still used for garbage disposal and for moving ore and other raw materials from the below-deck mining operations up to the refinery, but they were no longer used as a postal service. When the information-technology infrastructure aboard the San Francisco was last upgraded, so too were the tubes. Replacing the simple ten-by-thirty-centimeter cylinders that were conveyed via an imperfect and relatively weak vacuum at seven or eight meters per second were twenty-by-sixty-centimeter hexagonal missiles with gyroscopes and gimbals that ensured payloads remained upright, and which were electromagnetically propelled throughout the city’s seams at speeds up to fifty meters per second. Although the official name of the system was EMATS (ElectroMagnetic Transportation System)—and although the shape and technology more closely resembled fully enclosed tracks than simple pipes—in a rare nostalgic tribute to an outgoing technology, the new network retained the informal name of its predecessor, and was therefore usually still referred to as “the tubes.”

  There were three basic designs proposed for EMATS: point-to-point, hub-and-spoke, and closed circuit. The implementation with the least amount of latency would have been point-to-point, but it would have also required the most infrastructure since every building on the rig with an EMATS endpoint would need tubes running to every other endpoint. Not only would it have been the most difficult and time-consumin
g to install, but it would have also required the most physical space, which, aboard a hermetically sealed floating city, was the rarest and most precious of all commodities.

  Conversely, the closed circuit model was the simplest and most compact since the entire system would essentially consist of a single loop connecting every building on the rig through which capsules would move in one direction and be switched off to local distribution systems when they arrived at their designated first-order addresses. In addition to being the slowest design, the primary disadvantage of a closed circuit system was the additional complication—and potential for extended downtime—whenever new nodes needed to be added.

  The hub-and-spoke model eventually emerged as the most practical. Every building was outfitted with a single track through which capsules could move in either direction, and every track terminated in a massive switching station on deck two. A dual-axis robotic clutch did the work of plucking incoming capsule from one track and inserting them in the proper outgoing track at a theoretical average rate of about one transfer every 1.25 seconds. Once the capsules reached their first-order destinations, they were switched off to local delivery systems, freeing up the track for the next capsule. Local delivery systems might be as primitive as purely manual processes (generally known as “mail call”) most common in utility structures and endpoint below deck three, or they might be as sophisticated as those found in City Hall and in both Millennium and Paramount Towers. In such newer and more sophisticated structures, capsules first found their way to their designated floors through a sort of dumbwaiter system, and then continued on to their designated individual offices or transpartments via air-cushioned conveyers where they waited to be biometrically unsealed, emptied, and finally placed back into circulation.

  It was at the site of the switching station where the decision to use hexagonal tracks became most apparent. Not only did the inability of the capsules to freely rotate assist in the preservation of orientation, but hexagons also allowed for a much denser concentration of track endpoints than cylinders that, when stacked, left wasteful triangles or diamonds of dead space in-between. Since the entire switching station needed to fit within the vertical space of deck two—and because it was built at twice the size it needed to be in order to allow for expansion—compactness was critical. The overall effect of the final design was that of a massive beehive, the robotic appendage a tireless drone perpetually tending to the needs of an endless procession of product-impregnated larva.

  An additional component of the switching station was a magazine of empty capsules waiting to be summoned. Luka watched as they were fed into the lower right-hand corner of the exchange—what he imagined to be coordinate (0, 0) in the dual-axis system—at about the same rate they were replenished through the top of the magazine: roughly one every ten seconds. The front of the magazine was entirely open, and because the capsules had not yet been digitally addressed and locked, Luka could touch their capacitive tops and dilate them open like the aperture ring of a camera lens.

  There were two reasons why Luka had broken into deck two. The first was communication. He had a message that he needed disseminated quickly, efficiently, and randomly. This was precisely the kind of thing that the tubes were not very good for since transferring information could obviously be done far more effectively digitally. However, since his meeting with Khang—and after her less-than-subtle warning—Luka suspected that his digital communications were being monitored, and that a message like the one he needed to send out would very likely never get delivered. But since the tubes were probably the least practical way to communicate, they were probably also the last mechanism the City Council would think to safeguard.

  Another advantage of using the tubes was that it added an element of surprise. Luka hoped that putting physical messages into people’s hands—especially in such an abrupt and unexpected manner—would have a far greater impact than sending personal digital communications. It was, hopefully, the difference between receiving a rote electronic birthday platitude, and a handwritten note on custom-assembled stock.

  In the crate was an envelope of monochrome silicon paper that Luka purchased from a shop in Union Square and had tubed to his transpartment. Silicon paper consisted of two thin sheets of plastic film with several billion tiny magnetically charged beads about a micrometer in diameter pressed between them. A magnetic pen—or some other form of magnetic implement—was typically used to apply either a positive or a negative charge causing either the black or white hemispheres to rotate into view depending on whether you wanted to write or erase. Luka frequently used silicon paper to sketch out sculptures, though last night—after several lines of curious yellow—he applied himself to a very different kind of project. After cutting up enough sheets to make one hundred silicon paper squares (the outer polymer layer of silicon paper instantly rebonded after being severed), he piled them all up, placed them on the electromagnetic pad he used for transferring images between silicon paper and his workspace, and imprinted the following message on the entire stack simultaneously:

  The time is coming when the Coronians will no longer need us.

  This is how it will feel . . .

  The hexagonal capsules were wide enough that the paper squares did not have to be rolled or folded, and Luka got all one hundred of them loaded in under two minutes. one hundred sheets of silicon paper were obviously not enough to reach everyone on the rig—and, of course, loading them into the first one hundred capsules in the magazine meant having no control whatsoever over who ultimately received them. But Luka believed that even if only half of them were read in the next fifteen minutes, his message would generate enough consternation—and possibly even panic—that there would not be a single soul remaining aboard the rig who wasn’t aware of the mysterious dispatch, and who hadn’t either adopted a theory as to what it meant, or started formulating one of their own. Luka firmly believed that the only phenomenon on the planet more powerful and effective than instantaneous digital communication was gossip.

  The first nine messages were already out, and Luka stood there and watched the clutch retrieve the next capsule in the queue, glide along its horizontal and vertical rails, ease into position, and feed the long hexagonal prism to a greedy cell near the top of the hive. He experienced a surge of panic as he realized that there was no going back at this point; that there was no way to undo what he’d just done; that he now had no choice but to finish what he’d started.

  Luka brought up the time in the corner of his vision with a quick blinking pattern, tossed the empty envelope into the crate, and lifted it. He passed the freight elevator on his way to the southwest corner of the deck and saw that the claws of the fiddler were still—seemingly effortlessly—holding the horizontal doors apart. He passed another rack of blinking servers and network switches and, when he felt the heat they were generating, wondered how much of their surging activity related to the messages he was sending out. He passed several columns of PVC pipes that looked to him like images he’d seen of birch trunks—noble white hardwoods that were once astonishingly unwavering in their pursuit of energy from above—and then the space opened up to make room for a massive beige electrical panel. Luka was now directly below Cell City—the above-deck structure housing the San Francisco’s entire quantum battery bank.

  The terms “panel” and “cabinet” were woefully inadequate to describe the apparatus since it probably encompassed about the same volume as Luka’s entire transpartment, though it was a slightly different shape. It was comprised of four identical panels aligned end-to-end—prominently hand-numbered with some sort of indelible ink—each with thick black cables descending into them from above and bunches of smaller gray cables coming back out and spreading throughout the maze of cable racks overhead. Luka could see that the insulation was thick and the cables were bound with tight plastic ties as though, without sufficient constraint, they might erupt like high-pressure hoses. The cabinets were surprisingly nondescript for mechanisms of such conse
quence, their metal facades concealing the heavy breakers, distributors, transfer switches, and who knew what else within. In addition to their numbers, the only external feature of each cabinet was a tremendous red throw switch beside the hand-lettered word “MAIN.”

  As Luka approached the panels, he felt like he could sense the energy surging through them. What started off as a hum intensified to an unsettling buzz as he got close enough to touch the metal. Heat emanated from the surface, and Luka believed he could sense an ambient charge as though the equipment before him wasn’t quite enough to contain all the current surging through it—as if the machinery had a plasma soul that was too big for its physical form, and consequently swelled beyond its confines into an intense and angry aura.

  From his research, Luka knew that he needed to do this sequentially—from one through four. He could see that there was an eye hole in each lever meant for a locking mechanism, but that they were all empty, and that he would not need the laser cutter in the crate. He wondered briefly if the main switches were left unprotected for safety reasons—so that anyone could throw them in an emergency—or whether it was because nobody saw the need for secondary security measures all the way down here. And he wondered if they would remain unlocked in the future, or if by this time next week, all four would be threaded with solid tungsten bars, and the entire island of panels enclosed in carbon-link fencing. If so, he doubted he would be the one to assemble any of it.

  The time in the corner of his vision told him that fourteen minutes had elapsed since he left the hive, which meant all of the messages had probably been delivered by now—or at least enough of them. He examined the first throw switch and could tell just by looking at it that it would need to be pivoted laterally away from a safety catch before it could be pulled. As he felt his body become part of the panel’s electrical field, he wondered if he should be wearing insulated gloves, though he did not think to bring any, and it was too late to go back for a pair now. Before he could come up with any more reasons not to do it, Luka reached up, moved the lever off the safety hook, and pulled down.