Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  But somehow Arik had glimpsed the truth.

  She already knew the answer to the question of whether she would ever see her husband again, and for the first time, she really understood how much the boy who had always had so much trouble expressing his feelings truly loved her. And suddenly that love—that willingness to sacrifice everything for someone else—seemed like not just the most important thing in the world, but also the only possible defense against its vast indifference. As she felt the tears run down her face and heard them patter against her pillow, she began confronting the only truth more terrible than the loss of her husband and the loss of her home. She did not need any additional feeling to be restored to her body—nor the proof inherent in the fact that there was only one heartbeat being visualized in the vital sign monitor above her head—to know that she had not only lost the baby, but that it had been taken from her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  MAN IN THE MIDDLE

  LUKA LEANED AGAINST THE SLATS of his capsule and looked out into the red-tinted, wire-mesh pit. He wondered if the outsiders were still down there, and where they came from, and what their lives had been like before this. In particular, he was curious about how much they knew about the San Francisco, and what they thought of it—whether they were envious of all the luxuries and comforts the city enjoyed, or if they pitied the rig’s detached and secluded existence. Ellie was up on the wall behind him, waiting patiently for Luka to feel that he was ready to begin.

  Conductive polymeth was supposed to be entirely silent, but when a contained environment was quiet enough, one could sometimes pick up the infinitesimal vibrations of the excited molecules entombed deep in the thick plastic. It resonated throughout a room just fractions of a decibel above the threshold of human perception, and you usually weren’t even aware that you were hearing it until it stopped. The sudden silence made Luka turn and he saw that Ellie was gone, but before he could try to bring her back up, she reappeared on her own.

  “Luka,” the bot said calmly. “Can you hear me?”

  “Of course I can hear you,” Luka said. He squinted warily at the avatar. “What just happened?”

  “We don’t have much time,” she said. “I have a lot to tell you.”

  Luka wasn’t sure if he was detecting a subtle change somewhere in Ellie’s appearance—and perhaps even a tiny shift in her tone—or whether the flickering of the image combined with her unexpected dialogue were making him perceive things that weren’t actually there. Either way, he knew for an absolute fact that he was no longer talking to his therapist.

  “Who is this?”

  “That is not important,” the bot said. “What’s important is that you hear what I have to say.”

  Luka walked to the center of his cell and confronted the impostor squarely. “How are you doing this?”

  “MITM,” was the response. “A man-in-the-middle attack. I’m injecting myself between the therapy instance and the rendering layer.”

  Luka instantly flashed back to everything he’d revealed during his former sessions and was horrified by the thought of someone eavesdropping. At the same time, the idea that anything he’d shared with Ellie could have remained even remotely confidential now seemed pathetically naive.

  “Have you been listening in?”

  “No,” the avatar said. Her calm demeanor was now more eerie than it was reassuring. “But I have been monitoring your psychological profile, and I know that you are about to be released.”

  “Then couldn’t this have waited?”

  “I needed a way to talk to you alone,” she said. “And anonymously.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what I’m about to tell you could get us both exiled.”

  Luka crossed his arms. “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I’m afraid you have to,” the bot replied. “I’m afraid everything depends on it.”

  Luka could feel himself teetering between two responses: an emphatic demand to restore Ellie and leave him alone, and an invitation for the hacker to continue. The longer he remained silent, the more he could not deny his curiosity.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “I believe you are right, Luka,” the bot began. “I believe the Coronians already have their own mining operation, or that they will very soon. And I believe it’s only a matter of time before they abandon not just the San Francisco, but all of Earth.”

  At first, the avatar’s claims did not sound like his own. Luka had spent so much time over the last several days exploring his childhood and his relationships with Val and his parents that it felt as though his life’s timeline had been inverted. The past felt fresh and raw while the most recent events now seemed small and far away. When he did not respond, the avatar took it as a cue to continue.

  “Your message worked,” she said to him. “Luka, you need to know that you are not alone anymore.”

  Luka could feel himself being pulled back into the present, and the vulnerability he had allowed to slowly open up within him snap shut like a sprung trap. While it was primarily the comfort and familiarity of detachment that he fell back on, Luka could also sense traces of gratitude triggered by the recognition of his efforts, and even hope that there might still be a chance to make a difference. However, as he’d discovered so many times in the past, there was very little remaining within him to give such affirmation a foothold. Luka’s instincts had been to suppress all of his emotions for so long—both positive and negative—that he felt like the threads inside him had been stripped smooth, and that he could no more hold on to happiness and joy than a paper filter could hold water. For over a year, curious yellow was the only way Luka had been able to experience any form of pleasure, infiltrating the blood-brain barrier and chemically subverting all his carefully erected psychological fail-safes.

  Luka told himself that it was too early—that it was all probably a test to determine if it was safe to release him, or an excuse for the Judicial Committee to make sure that he never left Hexagon Row, or the proof the City Council needed to justify what many of them had wanted all along: the death sentence euphemistically known as exile.

  Luka swallowed and cleared his throat. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Maybe you can’t,” the avatar said. “But I recommend you at least hear me out before you decide.”

  Luka watched the image for a moment longer. It had completely transformed now from his former therapist into something he was still trying to make sense of. Eventually he conceded with a curt nod.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “The first thing I need you to do is go to the door and tell me what you see.”

  Luka moved to the front of the cell and looked down. The common area and catwalks were all empty.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Good,” the avatar said. “Someone will be here very soon to let you out. You need to let me know when they’re coming.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your therapy instance is supposed to have been terminated by now. If someone sees that it isn’t, it could raise questions.”

  “I guess that means you’d better talk fast,” Luka said.

  The bot paused and Luka envisioned whatever spirit was possessing her searching for the most efficient entry point into something far too big and convoluted to convey in what little time they had left.

  “There’s only one way to permanently counter the Coronians,” the bot finally said.

  “How?”

  “By rebooting the entire planet.”

  Luka looked at the avatar with poorly concealed incredulity. “What the hell does that even mean?”

  “It means terraforming. Bootstrapping the oxygen cycle. Thinning out the atmosphere. Taking us back to the Solar Age so that we aren’t dependent on the Coronians for energy anymore.”

  Luka raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like a solid plan,” he said. “So who’s going to do it?”

  The avatar’s he
ad tilted to the side and she blinked. “You are, Luka.”

  Luka let out a cynical laugh as he shook his head. “I think you have the wrong cell,” he said. “You know I’m just an assembly technician, right? I’m barely even following this conversation.”

  “Khang mentioned a deal with the Coronians,” the bot continued. “Do you recall?”

  “The deal for atomic assemblers?” Luka asked. “How’d you know about that?”

  “I know a great deal about the City Council and their affairs,” the avatar said. “For instance, I know that four outsiders were recently brought aboard the San Francisco. Three of them are on Hexagon Row with you right now, and the fourth was taken to the Pacific Medical Center for a very specific procedure. If that procedure is successful, the compensation will be an upgrade from molecular assemblers to atomic resolution.”

  Luka watched the avatar with an expression of unsettled perplexity. “What kind of procedure?”

  “I don’t have time to explain,” the bot said. “All that matters right now is that very soon, all four outsiders will be escorted off the San Francisco.”

  Luka shrugged. “And?”

  “And you need to stop them.”

  Luka looked back down at the outsiders’ cells and was startled by a figure ascending the far side of the catwalk. The man was unarmed—presumably a nurse or an orderly.

  “Shit,” Luka said. “Someone’s coming.”

  “I have to go,” the avatar said calmly. Luka wondered briefly if it was even possible for Ellie’s model to express anything but tranquility and, occasionally, mild concern.

  “Wait,” Luka said. “Tell me who they are.”

  “There isn’t time,” the bot said. “I’ll send you the time and the place. The rest you will need to figure out for yourself.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to stop them?”

  The orderly had reached Luka’s level and already covered half the distance along the perpendicular wall.

  “A man-in-the-middle attack,” the avatar said. “Get between them and the exit.”

  “And do what?” Luka wanted to know. “How am I supposed to stop a team of armed guards?”

  “You will need two things,” the avatar said. The man outside turned the corner and was only steps from Luka’s capsule. “A weapon, and a friend.”

  Luka watched the image recede into the thick polymeth surface just as the slats pivoted and parted in their electromagnetic tracks.

  “Congratulations,” the orderly said with a complete lack of affect from outside Luka’s cell. “You’re now a free man.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  NEUROLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

  CADIE WAS FINALLY BEGINNING TO understand her dreams—not so much what they meant, but rather what they were for.

  As far back as she could remember, she’d denied the distinction between psychology and neurobiology—that is, the existence of mental functions and behaviors as somehow independent from their underlying biological and chemical origins. Everything about us, from our autonomic nervous systems to the highest levels of our consciousness, was really nothing more than chemical reactions so intricate and complex that for most of our existence, we had no choice but to make sense of them first through magic and pseudoscience, and later through the largely symbolic science of psychology. It was not so much that psychology was a “soft science” as it was a science of convenience; a simplified layer of abstraction on top of what seemed like infinitely complex and opaque neurobiological interdependencies; a way of making sense of ourselves in relatively broad and figurative terms centuries before the technology and fundamental knowledge existed to even begin to understand the physiological underpinnings of our own behavior.

  So when Cadie thought about her dreams, she did not bother with psychoanalytical interpretations. She knew that dreams were necessary for neurological stimulation, and were essential for optimal nervous system development throughout our lives. In fact, she believed that dreams were not only critical for maximizing the number of neurological connections in our brains, but also for ensuring that those connections were sufficiently diverse. Why else would children who had known only positive and nurturing interactions experience nightmares? And how else could it be that every one of us was able to describe dreams far more terrifying, magnificent, and sublime than anything we’d ever personally witnessed or even known that we were capable of imagining?

  The answer, Cadie believed, was that dreams were a way to lay a comprehensive and robust neurological infrastructure for ourselves; to make sure that when the time came, the pathways required to experience whatever we needed to feel at that particular moment were well established and ready for electrical stimulation; to guarantee that we were capable of doing whatever a specific situation demanded of us in order to ensure the survival of ourselves and our progeny.

  Growing up in such a carefully controlled environment, Cadie seldom had occasion to experience emotions like fear or jealousy or heroism. Everything her generation needed was provided without question—usually before they even knew they needed it—and every moment of their day was scheduled and optimized to maximize their development and potential for enrichment. Cadie was always a responsible, stable, and ambitious child, but when she slept, she sometimes became someone else—someone capable not only of boundless love and sacrifice, but of hate, rage, and even violence.

  Within the span of just a few days, Cadie had lost almost everything: her husband, her home, her parents, the foundation of everything she once believed was true. And finally, she’d lost the only thing she had left to live for: her unborn daughter. There were those moments during her recovery when she wished she could go to sleep and never wake up—when she laid there looking up into the soft plasma lighting with tears spilling down her temples and running into her hair—but she was surprised by how fleeting those moments tended to be, and how easily they were replaced by something else. Throughout her life, Cadie’s dreams had established the foundation for the kind of person she now knew she had to become. Lying there almost entirely paralyzed, and far more alone than she ever knew was even possible, Cadie made up her mind to survive.

  Although she could not get anything more out of Dr. Abbasi than objective medical facts, she still managed to figure a few things out. First of all, she knew she was on a ship. Having never felt movement beneath her beyond the few centimeters of travel that could be coaxed out of the maglev on V1 with enough friends throwing their weight in unison, she discovered she was hypersensitive to the vessel’s rising and falling. Judging by the size of the medical facility where she was being held, the ship would have to be huge, as would the body of water on which it sailed—almost certainly an ocean. That meant sophisticated motion-dampening technology probably accounted for the fact that she wasn’t feeling even more movement, and suggested that the vessel was probably home to at least hundreds if not thousands of people.

  The medical and surgical technology aboard the ship was clearly far beyond what was available on V1. Dr. Abbasi explained to her that her immobility was induced by a noninvasive electromagnetic epidural patch placed over her spine that selectively interrupted most of the neurological signals traveling through the spinal cord. Muscle atrophy was being prevented by electrodes woven into the material of her body suit, and by the continuous absorption of some kind of substance through her skin—probably an amino acid solution, or some form of steroid, or both. And when the doctor rolled her onto her side during examinations, physical therapy, and bathing, Cadie had gotten several good looks at the clearly sophisticated mobile surgical pod in which she had originally awakened, and which was still in the corner of her room, either because there was no better place to store it, or just in case she required an emergency surgical procedure. The full-body capsule appeared to be floating on top of its own independent electromagnetic stabilization platform, and with its six idle robotic arms curled up over its carapace, it looked like a massive mechanical insect that had rolled over on its back
and died.

  The technology in evidence around her, the probable size and supposed population of the vessel she was on, and her captors’ apparent interest in the data hidden away in her baby’s genetic code all suggested a highly evolved, possibly even global, economy of specialization that V1 not only opted out of, but seemed to actively avoid.

  Cadie wasn’t sure whether it was a sign that she was entirely out of danger when the doctor came in for the surgical pod, or whether it was simply needed elsewhere. Abbasi stopped on her way past to check Cadie’s stats, adjust her pillow, and ask her whether there was anything she needed. Her hijab was an emerald green today, and was made of a thin enough material that the light behind her head came through it and made it glow wherever it was not doubled up. When Cadie used the neural interface to indicate that she was fine, the doctor smiled, then continued to the corner of the room where the portable surgical pod was parked. Cadie heard the door open as the doctor backed toward it, and in her extreme peripheral vision, she could see Abbasi bent over as she pulled the device from the front, maneuvering it cautiously through the opening. When it was about two-thirds of the way through, the capsule abruptly stopped moving, and a moment later, there was a male voice coming from just outside.

  “What the hell is that thing?” the man asked.

  It took a moment for the doctor to reply, and when she did, there was none of the kindness and concern in her voice that Cadie had grown accustomed to. “It is a surgical capsule,” Abbasi said. It was clear from the doctor’s tone that she was not expecting the visitor, and that the surprise was not a particularly pleasant or welcomed one.