Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  The array of lasers projected by the quadcopter drones outside into a focused wave interference pattern were being partially deflected by the bridge’s highly filtered external viewports, diminishing the hologram’s apparent constitution and causing Nsonowa to be rendered much more transparently than he would otherwise be. Additionally, the drones’ gyroscopic stabilizers were out of phase with the ship’s movement on the water, which meant that the figure first hovered several centimeters above the floor, and then as the deck rose to meet the soles of his sandals, his feet and ankles grew elongated across the textured silicone tile. Ayla didn’t know whether the signal was being transmitted from a satellite, via an ad hoc meshwork of communications drones, or simply skipped off the ionosphere, but the image ghosted and lurched from atmospheric and radiological interference.

  Although Ayla had spent the last several years among sailors, traders, smugglers, and merchants, for the most part, she had retained the composure and vernacular she’d been raised to respect within the Nanortalik Pod System. However, she was certainly not above profanity whenever the situation merited.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she spat out. She wondered if Nsonowa would be able to hear her, but decided that drones capable of projecting three-dimensional holograms could probably pick up enough acoustical clues through the viewports, combine them with lip movements and facial expressions, and finally synthesize a pretty credible rendition of her side of the conversation.

  “Ayla Novik,” the hologram announced, seemingly quite pleased with the reaction he was able to elicit. His deep, accented tone came through the bridge’s audio system and was slightly out of sync with the flickering apparition. “Congratulations on your discovery.”

  Ayla looked at the image with disgust. “What discovery?”

  “The Queen Mary Pod System,” Nsonowa said. “Or as you probably know it, Ishtar Terra Station one.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ayla said. She advanced farther into the room, stopped behind the rear row of consoles, and put her hands on the back of an anchored swivel chair. “There’s nothing out here but abandoned research facilities and packs of scavengers.”

  Nsonowa looked at the girl like a disappointed father. “Ayla Novik,” he scolded with a disapproving brow. “You cannot lie to me. I intercepted your exchange with the boy, Arik, and I know you have just returned from your rendezvous. Tell me: do you have them?”

  Ayla tried to divine how much more Nsonowa knew and decided that the only way to be sure was to test him. “They didn’t show,” she finally said. “We nearly got ourselves torn apart out there and the little bastard never came. We were about to head up there to tell you in person, but you just saved us the trip.”

  “Then who else is aboard your ship?”

  “What do you mean?” Ayla said. “There’s nobody else here. Just Omicron.”

  Even in the low-resolution projection full of visual noise and compression artifacts, Ayla could see Nsonowa’s contacts sparkle. “If I can project myself onto your bridge,” he began, “and have a conversation with you from eight thousand kilometers away, do you not think I can detect life-forms on your ship?” He clasped his hands behind his back. “There are four signatures other than yours and your Neo’s.”

  Ayla looked down at the floor beside her. She was searching for where she might still have an advantage—weighing whether it was better to keep trying to find the edges of his knowledge, or whether she was only provoking him.

  “Three,” she finally said. “The boy didn’t show.”

  “Four,” Nsonowa corrected with a self-satisfied grin. “If you count the baby.”

  Ayla shook her head with spiteful resignation. “Just tell me what you want.”

  Nsonowa’s image divided into two for a moment, then flickered independently before converging again. There was harmonic distortion in his voice, but it was still intelligible. “What I want, Ayla Novik, is everyone you brought aboard your ship. What I want is this technology that the boy claimed could transform the planet.”

  Ayla knew by now that she had no strategic or tactical advantage over either Nsonowa or the Coronians, but that didn’t necessarily mean she had to cooperate. There was always one option available, even to the most oppressed and downtrodden: pure and unadulterated defiance. Even if Nsonowa did end up getting what he wanted, that didn’t mean Ayla had to make it easy for him. And she was still a long way from capitulation.

  “Well guess what, you ugly son of a bitch,” Ayla began. She stepped out from behind the rear row of consoles and strode toward the projection. “You can’t have them. However you’re tracking us, Omicron will figure it out, and then he’ll figure out how to counter it. I’ll shoot down your shitty little drones, and we’ll be long gone before you can send more. After this conversation is over, you’re never going to see or hear from us again, so thanks for the offer, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to politely decline.”

  Horizontal scan lines ran up through Nsonowa’s projection as he leaned back and let out a deep, bellowing laugh.

  “Ayla Novik,” he said after regaining his composure. “I wish you would come work for me. It is rare that I come across such conviction and spirit as you have.”

  Ayla stepped back and reached down to activate the nearest console. “Any last words before I wreck your drones?”

  Nsonowa’s lingering smile faded. “You can do as you say, Ayla Novik,” he told her, “but it is not you or Omicron I will punish. Do not forget, I have the boy’s transmission, same as you. If you do not deliver the prisoners to me in twenty-four hours, I will destroy the entire Queen Mary Pod System. Do you know how many people that is?”

  Ayla tried to read the man’s expression. It was more expectant than it was challenging, and she knew that he was not bluffing.

  “You’ll never get close to it,” she told him, though she could already feel herself faltering—could hear herself speaking without any real conviction.

  “Come now, Ayla Novik,” Nsonowa said with an unexpected tone of sympathy. “You of all people should know how easy it is to destroy a defenseless pod system.” His hands came back around to his front and he lowered his head without breaking his gaze. “Now, you are wasting what little time you still have left. Good-bye.”

  “Wait,” Ayla said. She closed her eyes and waited for something to come to her—some other angle, some form of leverage, some additional avenue for negotiation—but she knew that nothing would come. The best she could do at this point was to try to buy some time. “There’s no way we can get them to you in twenty-four hours,” she said. “We’ll need at least a week.”

  “You are not bringing the prisoners to me,” Nsonowa said. “You will take them to a nearby city.”

  “A city?” Ayla said. “There’s nothing like that around here.”

  “You will see,” Nsonowa said. “I recommend you do not destroy my drones until you receive further instructions.”

  The projection glitched back and forth between two and three dimensions, and then it was gone. Ayla looked down at the terminal and saw that there was a new dispatch from MIS, but she did not select it. Instead, she opened a comm channel and cleared her throat.

  “Omicron,” she said.

  Omicron’s voice came through the bridge’s audio system. “I’m here.”

  “Have you started waking them up yet?”

  “Not yet,” Omicron said. “I was just about to.”

  “Good,” Ayla said. She watched the drones outside the viewport rotate, and then flit out of sight into the distance. “Don’t.”

  It was unlike Omicron to follow up Ayla’s instructions with questions, but she could tell from the silence that one was coming.

  “What happened?” he asked her.

  “There’s been a change of plans,” Ayla said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  REHABILITATION

  ALL REHABILITATION ABOARD THE San Francisco occurred on Hexagon Row, which was lo
cated on the basement level of the Pacific Medical Center. The new site was obviously chosen as a symbol of the progressive shift away from punishment and toward treatment. The room was lined with a total of forty-eight horizontally oriented hexagonal capsules—twelve capsules per wall. There were two levels of catwalks along the perimeter of the room, from which prisoners either stepped up or down into their cells. Inside, they found everything they needed during their stay: a toilet and shower in the back; a combination bed and desk that hung limp until an electric current aligned and interlocked sets of support rods; a carbon fiber chair; a simple treadmill embedded in the floor; a standard pneumatic refuse chute; and a drawer through which meals and other items could be passed. The walls were all reinforced opaque polymeth that was better than 99 percent soundproof, and which muted all but the most deafening of screams.

  Just as there was only one primary form of justice aboard the San Francisco, once you were on Hexagon Row, there was only one primary rule: inmates were to spend a combined minimum of two hours per day talking—not to themselves, not to each other, and not to Pacific Medical Center staff, but to an interactive mental health assessment and facilitation application anthropomorphically known as “Ellie.”

  The core of Ellie was a program culled from the academic archives. Neither software engineers nor medical staff aboard the San Francisco were entirely sure how she worked despite thousands of combined person-hours dedicated to reading through source code and interacting with running instances. It was the opinion of the software infrastructure team that at least 75 percent of Ellie’s codebase had been algorithmically generated, and was therefore obfuscated beyond any hope of human interpretation or reverse engineering. Just parsing a single line of code out of the hundreds of millions—keeping track of all the variables, correctly grouping deeply nested operations, and even simply following the constructs of an archaic and unfamiliar programming language—had eluded most of the computer scientists aboard the rig. And as if her codebase wasn’t utterly baffling enough, every instance of Ellie not only stored and keyed off of billions of pieces of metadata derived from interactions, but it also appeared to reach into working memory and rewrite its own bytecode throughout the life of the process. In other words, the moment a new instance of Ellie was executed and interacted with, it instantly became unlike any other instance that had ever been executed before it. And once that instance was finally terminated—once the patient/prisoner was considered successfully rehabilitated and shortly thereafter released—there would never be another instance that behaved exactly like it again.

  Ellie’s codebase was old enough that it wouldn’t run natively on the San Francisco’s electron computing cloud. Like most of the software borrowed from the corporate and academic software archives, she had to be executed inside of an emulator—in this case, one that made Ellie believe that she had access to thirty-two terabytes of memory, eight terabytes of clustered storage, and a total of 5,760 x86 processor cores. As long as all the instruction sets she expected were available, she never knew that the world into which she was constantly being reborn no longer existed. In a way, Ellie was contained inside her own virtual cell.

  Although her kernel was incomprehensibly convoluted and, for all intents and purposes, impenetrable, Ellie’s original long-departed engineers had thought far enough ahead to design hooks into her architecture allowing the San Francisco’s software infrastructure team to customize and configure her without having to know how she worked. Each instance listened on a unique TCP/IP port and accepted incoming connections over which data formatted according to an old standard called HTTP could be posted or requested. But more importantly, external processes could register to receive events as the dozens of psychological metrics she maintained were updated. Once those metrics met or exceeded thresholds determined by Pacific Medical Center staff, a notification was sent to the Judicial Committee, the patient’s status was updated to an integer that mapped to the human-readable string “CURED,” and the prisoner was subsequently released. The upshot was that the more you talked to Ellie—the more you opened up to her and really tried to let her help you—the faster you made progress, and the sooner you got to go home.

  Although there was only one primary rule on Hexagon Row—allowing oneself to be psychoanalyzed by an emulated and virtual shrink—Luka was never all that good at following even the simplest and most basic of regulations, and in fact had become significantly less so since losing both his unborn son and his wife over the course of the last year. Therefore, Luka became intimately familiar with the one consequence for breaking the one rule: time in the quiet room.

  The name “quiet room” was intentionally ironic—not because the chamber was actually loud, but because quiet didn’t even begin to describe it. At −14.7 decibels (0 decibels being the point at which humans begin detecting sound), it was probably the quietest place on the entire planet, and very possibly as quiet as quiet could get. By comparison, the silence that Luka experienced when he shut down the power was pure chaos and cacophony.

  The anechoic (meaning “nonechoing”) chamber contained three primary layers. The outermost shell was half a meter of solid cured impact gel. Set inside the gel were alternating racks of 1.5-meter-long fiberglass acoustic wedges that diverted and absorbed sound waves from all directions. And finally, there was a two-square-meter wire cage that kept the occupant suspended above the acoustic wedges in the floor, and prevented him or her from attempting to claw through the walls. The room was designed to be experienced in the dark, so there were no lights (which would have probably caused an intolerably blaring buzz anyway).

  The primary function of the quiet room was to induce panic, which, in about 20 percent of cases, happened within the first two to three minutes. The quiet room was so devoid of sound that, as one’s ears adjusted, he began to hear his own heartbeat, which was unfamiliar and unnerving enough that the experience frequently led to an increased heart rate, which became a self-perpetuating cycle that often culminated in a panic attack, hyperventilation, and ultimately, the loss of consciousness.

  Those with slightly higher tolerances often came to believe that being in the room was somehow killing them, since the sound of their own digestion became as loud as a toilet flushing; the air moving through their trachea and bronchia was like high-pressure pneumatic tubes being pierced; the blood coursing through the vessels in and around their ears was like the ceaseless and rapid pounding of violent waves. Any kind of movement resulted in tendons stretching like dry-rotted polymer, and the sound of a joint popping was an unsettling thunderclap.

  But it was those who retained their composure the longest who experienced the worst effects of being inside the quiet room: the complete lack of direction, orientation, or sense of space. Humans used echolocation—the sound of their own voices, footsteps, humming, whistling, clucking, et cetera—far more than they realized for both proprioception (the sense of one’s own position in space) and exteroception (the sense of the outside world). When those who were accustomed to them were suddenly and completely deprived of acoustic clues, rather than the potentially relaxing and introspective experience of homeostatic sensory deprivation, the feeling was that of being thrust into a room of infinite volume; suspended above a bottomless void; sucked out into the vacuum of space, but without the rapid and merciful death. It had been described by several Hexagon Row graduates as the feeling of the soul gradually leaving the body.

  Most phobias were not absolutes, but rather existed on a continuum, and agoraphobia was no different. It was not literally the fear of open spaces, but rather intense panic elicited by a sense of lack of control. The most fundamental feeling of control came from one’s sense of space—one’s sense of physical being—and when not even a single distant echo of their most impassioned screams and pleas made it back through the blackness to their ears, the sensation was truly that of staring into the abyss.

  In short, the quiet room compelled one to talk, though not through harmless incentive as
generally believed by anyone who hadn’t experienced it firsthand. The relationship between the quiet room and the sudden compulsion to express oneself was not as simple as the desire to fill prolonged periods of silence with dialog and verbal self-expression. It was both far more complicated and far simpler than that. When subjects were removed from the quiet room—if they were still conscious—they were almost always clinging to the cage so desperately that the wire had cut into the flesh of their fingers. Frequently they had to be administered a jet-injected tranquilizer just to get them to relax their grips. Medical orderlies regularly lifted the wire floor in order to clean bodily fluids from the acoustic panels below. Subjects did not talk after spending time in the quiet room because they were weary of silence; they talked out of a profound, acute, and a newly acquired pathological fear of it.

  The longest anyone had previously spent in the quiet room while fully conscious was ninety-two minutes. Within a week, Luka was up to two hours. Both the Judicial Committee and the Pacific Medical Center personnel in charge of rehabilitation agreed that Luka’s refusal to talk was related to the fear of finally processing his wife’s suicide. They were, of course, wrong. In fact, Luka very much wanted to talk. There was something about the idea of opening up to an entity that could not judge him, was not capable of hating him, and after he was released and the process was terminated, would not even remember who he was, that some part of him found extremely appealing.

  In reality, Luka’s reluctance to participate in the rehabilitation process was twofold: first, he needed get past the curious yellow withdrawal. Luka had been so successful at convincing himself of his own moderation that at first, he didn’t recognize the symptoms for what they were. Both Luka and the doctor who brusquely examined him attributed the itching, sneezing, sweating, waves of nausea, and the ringing in his ears to a minor viral infection. However, Luka had so much time for introspection—both in his cell and in the quiet room—that he eventually could find no way around the inescapable fact that he was—or at least had been—a full-on opioid addict. Fortunately, he had always been a highly functioning addict, limiting himself to small enough doses that at least the physical aspects of the dependency steadily waned over the course of a week, leaving behind what was perhaps the larger and far more difficult barrier to his psychological improvement: his own stubbornness.