Whatever mechanism was being moved inside the box was stiff and heavy as the lever took a fair amount of pressure, and finally changed position with a tremendous snap. The box grew quiet and still—now inanimate without its electrical life force flowing through it. Luka checked his hands as though he couldn’t believe the process hadn’t charred them and found them exactly as they felt: perfectly fine. He began wondering what was happening above him right now, then consciously stopped himself. No mining operations were currently deployed so he wasn’t putting any lives directly in danger, and the bilge pumps could go two days without running before the rig started listing noticeably. He had already gone through all this in his head hundreds of times, so rather than going through it all again, Luka forced himself to stop thinking and instead threw the next two switches in rapid succession. He was breathing heavily now as he reached for the fourth and last, and he looked down beside him at the crate in order to memorize its location, took one final deep breath, pivoted the catch, and yanked.
For a moment, nothing happened, and then he was shocked by both the blackness and the sudden quiet. All he could see was the time in the corner of his vision. Even though whatever device it was that emitted the ambient radio waves that powered his lenses was almost certainly dead, there was enough residual power in their capacitors to keep them operating for at least a few more minutes. Beside the time, an icon appeared indicating that he was no longer connected.
Although this was probably about as much darkness as Luka had ever experienced, he realized that the blackness was not nearly as shocking as the silence. He had no idea how much noise was around him until most of it was either snapped off or spooled down. White noise beneath more layers of white noise—fans, pumps, electrical humming, air moving through ducts, fluid flowing through pipes—all of it stopped and still. All he heard now were the residual sounds of the San Francisco: gravity moving fluid in the absence of pressure, the metallic ticking of expanding or contracting air ducts, and then finally the colossal bellow and groan of the rig and the unfamiliar feeling of movement beneath him as the entire city rose and fell on the waves without any gyroscopic stabilizers to counter them.
Luka turned and took the two steps he knew he needed to cover the distance to the crate. It was more or less where he expected it to be when he reached down and brushed his fingertips against its lid, and then sat himself down beside it. He opened the box, groped, and finally removed the plasma lantern inside, but he did not turn it on. Instead, Luka sat in the dark and waited, watching the time pass in the corner of his vision, and wondering what he’d just started.
PART TWO
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HEXAGON ROW
CIRCLES WERE THE MOST EFFICIENT way to enclose any given space. That was what the City Council learned during a three-hour combined geometry and engineering lesson conducted by Samuel Baird, one of the two math teachers employed by the Mission Dolores Education Center. Specifically, to enclose the maximum amount of space using the minimum amount of material, one should use a circle, sphere, or a dome.
But then a small bundle of bound straws was produced to demonstrate a related phenomenon. When one attempted to enclose adjoining spaces with circles—stacking them as tightly as possible in rows and columns to form a staggered grid—one got little triangular hollows in-between. Consequently, while circles were the most efficient way to enclose spaces in isolation, it turned out that in groups, they were surprisingly wasteful.
The most efficient way to enclose multiple adjoining spaces, therefore, would be with the highest-sided regular polygon capable of tessellation—that is, the shape most like a circle that can be tiled or patterned such that there is no dead space in-between. After the City Council was reluctantly divided into groups, all three teams experimented with supplied magnetic construction toys to eventually arrive at the same conclusion: hexagons.
Mr. Baird then proceeded to explain tensile strength. Squares were the easiest way to divide up space because the angles, lengths, and volumes were easiest to measure and calculate; however, squares were not particularly robust polygons. To demonstrate, he invited his students to imagine nailing or gluing together an open-sided composite box, sitting on it, then rocking forward and back. While squares (or rectangles, for that matter) were usually sufficient for supporting constant and perfectly lateral forces, they did not tolerate forces from other angles particularly well. Unlike hexagons, squares did not have the necessary additional angles to help counter cross forces, to prevent shearing or collapsing, and to help distribute load more evenly.
That brought Mr. Baird to the topic of triangles. While undeniably far less comfortable to sit on, triangles were in fact the strongest regular polygon. As the professor demonstrated with his own set of magnetic construction toys, triangles could not distort. Since their angles were fixed by the lengths of their opposing sides, those angles physically could not change, which made them fully resistant to folding or shearing. Triangles were the only shape whose geometric properties dictated that they must remain intact. With the exception of material fatigue or failure (a problem rarely seen since material scientists got ahold of assemblers), it was physically and mathematically impossible for triangles to distort and still remain triangles. In order to bolster his argument with empirical evidence, the ferrofluid table in the council chamber around which his students sat was employed to exhibit a series of trusses; scaffolding with cross braces that divided dangerously wobbly squares into rigid twin triangles; and finally, probably one of architecture’s and engineering’s greatest triumphs, and the only structure to combine the efficiency of a sphere with the strength of triangles: the long-revered geodesic dome.
So why not build everything out of triangles, Mr. Baird challenged. A dramatic pause, and then: Why not enclose spaces with triangles rather than squares or hexagons? The answer—once again demonstrated by a hastily established magnetic-toy model—was that tessellated triangles were not an efficient use of resources. In fact, triangles used more material to enclose smaller spaces than hexagons. Each intersection of tiled triangles consisted of six lines while tiled hexagons intersected with only three. The original Equinox architects and engineers understood this principle well, the professor expounded, which is why all the technician habitation modules were built out of adjoining, elongated, three-dimensional hexagons generally referred to as hexagonal prisms. It is why bees once instinctively constructed their hives out of densely packed hexagonal cells; why directly above Saturn’s north pole, there persists a hexagonal cloud pattern larger than the diameter of Earth; why the ideal structure of graphene is a hexagonal grid; why slow-cooling basalt forms hexagonal fracture patterns; why snowflakes once formed in stunningly elegant hexagonal symmetry. The inescapable conclusion was that the principles of mathematics, geometry, engineering, and in fact of all the known and quite possibly knowable universe suggested—nay, insisted—that the inspiration for all future construction, innovation, and renovation aboard any seafaring vessel with limited space, limited resources, and tremendous incentive to maximize strength-to-weight ratio, should clearly be none other than the miraculous, the venerable, and the seemingly divine hexagon. (Transcripts showed that Samuel Baird then took a moment to collect his emotions before solemnly declaring the hexagon to be one of nature’s greatest gifts to humankind, pinching the bridge of his nose, and then politely but hastily excusing himself.)
The professor’s impassioned geometry lesson was not lost on the City Council as hexagons did indeed begin to appear throughout the rig: the welded composite-weave hexagonal panels that comprised the newest version of the air dome; the postal capsule exchange on deck two known as “the hive”; the synthetic graphite supports between decks, themselves assembled from stacked hexagonal lattices of carbon atoms; some of the newer duct work, electrical conduits, and clusters of PVC pipes. But of all the hexagonal patterns that were beginning to appear both above and below deck, there was only one structure actually called “The Hexagon”—
or more frequently, “Hexagon Row”—and that was the brig.
The original brig was located beneath the bridge at the northeastern-most corner of the mining platform. Back then, it consisted of little more than a row of metal boxes with cage-like mesh doors manually secured with tungsten bolts. Cells were furnished with toilets, basins, and two benches that could be used for sitting or sleeping, or could be folded up against the wall in order to give inmates additional space to stretch, or maybe do a few push-ups. For most of the San Francisco’s existence, the crime rate hovered at around 0.2 percent, which meant there were usually around ten people incarcerated at any given time. With eight reasonably sized cells—four on either side of a narrow, metal-grated hallway—the most violent offenders could be isolated while those who simply needed a few days to contemplate exile after starting a minor scuffle or trying to siphon off a few watts could be safely housed together.
But paradoxically—or at least seemingly so—as the standard of living aboard the San Francisco rose, so too did the crime rate. The current level was 0.7 percent, which worked out to an average of thirty-five people imprisoned at any given time. Although to Luka’s knowledge, the City Council never publicly addressed the trend—and specifically the fact that it directly contradicted both the Council’s and the Judicial Committee’s predictions and campaign platforms as they pertained to crime—their decision to construct a brand-new brig was reasonably good evidence of passive acknowledgment. And so too was their continuously evolving position toward the philosophy of incarceration.
(It should be noted that it was not uncommon for the eight-member City Council and the four-member Judicial Committee to find themselves completely aligned, since the Judicial Committee was simply a subset of the City Council, just with a different distribution of appointments and honorifics.)
The newest trend was for the Judicial Committee to no longer issue sentences to convicted offenders. Rather, their focus was purely on verdicts. You were either guilty or you weren’t. If you were declared innocent, you walked out of the tribunal chamber on the seventh floor of City Hall, descend entirely unescorted via electromagnetic lift and a few spiral walkways, and rejoined your fellow citizens. At the opposite extreme, if you were found guilty of your third offense—regardless of how minor—or if you were found guilty of a handful of capital offenses (among them, premeditated murder, rape, or treason) you were automatically exiled. For anything in-between, the Judicial Committee had only one sentence at its disposal: rehabilitation.
In the case of San Francisco v. Luka Mance, the proceedings were both complex and controversial. It was argued by a handful of City Council members—Khang among them—that Luka’s actions constituted treason, and therefore justified exile. It was even fervently argued by one councilman that although no one had died during the two hours that the power had remained off—and the additional three and a half hours it took to get all the systems and subsystems rebooted and back online—it was certainly conceivable that any number of people could have died in any number of ways, and therefore Luka’s actions constituted a new class of crime for which he proposed the designation “plausible manslaughter.” However, the Judicial Committee determined that there was no legal basis for establishing a new category of offense—especially in real-time—and therefore dismissed the motion. In the end, it was plain and simple reckless endangerment that Luka was both tried for and found guilty of.
Luka accepted his conviction without protest, and used what little time he was given to address the Judicial Committee as a means to convey a message to the City Council. He did not regret his actions, he explained to the panel awkwardly. He was grateful that no lives had been lost, and harming anyone had certainly never been his intention, but even if there had been injuries or even deaths, it would have been a small price to pay for opening everyone’s eyes to what was going on around them. He only hoped that his actions hadn’t been too little, too late.
It was rare for anyone on the committee to directly respond to the convicted, but the chairman—a man named Matthew Two Bulls, who believed himself to be the last full-blooded Lakota Indian on the planet—signified by stirring in his chair and clearing his throat that he was prepared to make an exception. After undergoing extended rehabilitation and eventually being released, Two Bulls began, Luka would discover that his crimes were entirely without effect, and his sacrifice ultimately devoid of service. Indeed, he had successfully instigated temporary panic throughout the city, but only until power had been restored, and only until officials were able to issue assurances that there was no truth whatsoever to Luka’s warning. Luka would find, Two Bulls concluded with poorly concealed smugness and satisfaction, that although he would probably earn back his freedom eventually and likely be permitted to return to work at the foundry, he would never regain any significant credibility or influence among the community. The best Luka could ever hope for from his friends, coworkers, and his compatriots was to be pitied for the rest of his life.
At that, Luka was briskly escorted out through the back of the room to await the formal procession tasked with delivering him to his new home on Hexagon Row, where he would begin his rehabilitation.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WAVE INTERFERENCE
AYLA WATCHED THE PERIMETER from inside the Anura while Omicron secured the bodies in the back. The scavengers stood at the very edge of visibility in the thick mustard smog, keeping vigil like a band of lost and agitated souls. Using an enhanced external view, Ayla could see that they were all bald and emaciated, and that some of them were naked except for primitive respirators with dangling hoses that connected to something on their backs. Their bent and knobby bodies were covered in wide black lesions and some of them had hands and feet that ended in fleshy, club-like stumps. When she zoomed in on their faces, she could see that most of them had no lips to conceal their sharpened metallic teeth, and all that was left of their noses were crooked shards of cartilage. They looked toward the Anura with more curiosity and restlessness in their dry and misaligned eyes than savagery, though Ayla had no doubt that they were collectively contemplating an advance—somehow reading and reacting to each other’s movements as a single coordinated entity. As their formation changed, the targeting computer calculated a new firing solution optimized to drop them in the order of their anticipated arrival.
When all three bodies were loaded, Omicron paused before getting in. “Should I close the door?” he asked Ayla. As far as she could tell, there was no predisposition in her bodyguard’s voice.
“Yes,” Ayla told him. “The computer has them targeted. You have time.”
The Neo did as he was told, and as soon as the slab of steel was back in place and the wheel was tightened down, they heard the heavy lock slide into position. Omicron kept his hand on his weapon while he found his way back to the Anura.
Ayla was silent as they drove. She didn’t know whether or not she had made the right call out there, and she didn’t want to distract Omicron by processing it out loud. The computer was navigating, but Omicron was actively engaged, providing frequent navigational input. The path he facilitated avoided the scavengers, but also minimized risk to the Anura. If it came down to making a choice, he told Ayla, he would make a hole through the homeless before potentially incurring damage that might risk all their lives. The scavengers stayed with them—their numbers steadily increasing—but they always left a direction for the Anura to advance, and it wasn’t until they reached the shore that Ayla realized what was happening. They had probably never seen a fully amphibious craft before, and they appeared to be directing the vehicle onto the beach where its tires would spin in the combination of sand and the accumulation of viscous toxins, trapping them and eventually forcing them to attempt an escape on foot. But as the Anura approached the shore, it used the last of its traction to accelerate through the blackened marshes into the frothy waves, then pulled up its wheels and left behind what had become hundreds of well-coordinated thermal signatures.
A
fter decontamination, Ayla and Omicron worked together to transfer the three defectors to the Hawk’s modest med bay. It only had two cots, but there was room to lay the third body out on the floor. Omicron advised Ayla that they should find a way to keep them confined—or, at the very least, loosely bound—during the process of resuscitation. It was possible, he believed, that they would react violently. In particular, he was concerned about the young man, and how instinctively protective he seemed to be of the pregnant girl. Ayla insisted that if any of them wanted to be taken back to V1, they would find a way to make that happen. Even if it took several days to work out a safe approach, she had already decided that nobody would be kept or transported against his or her will. Omicron assured her that she had done the right thing back at the wall—that it was the only thing she could have done given their circumstances—and had they waited much longer, it was possible none of them would have made it out. His robust features and diminutive eyes were surprisingly warm and reassuring when he smiled, and Ayla realized how grateful she was not only for his assistance and his council, but simply for his company, as well.
Ayla decided that they should move farther down-coast in case the scavengers had some form of primitive watercraft capable of reaching them. While Omicron fashioned restraints, Ayla went upstairs and was astonished to find that Jumanne Nsonowa was waiting for her on the bridge.
The sight of the man standing between the rows of consoles stopped her dead in the hatchway. Nsonowa was an unsettling figure—presenting much more like a witch doctor than an anthropologist or a business facilitator—but as she reached for the vitaline on her wrist to summon Omicron, something about his appearance made her pause. After the initial shock began to dissipate, Ayla could see that the man was not real.
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