Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  “I think we both know the answer to that,” Luka said.

  “I mean other than the obvious,” Cadie said. “What if they interrogate him? Or worse, what if they don’t need to interrogate him? What if they can just take what’s in his head?”

  Luka squinted at Cadie through a curtain of vapor. He reached down and ejected the shisha cartridge from the pipe, then took a fresh one from the box on the table, popped the cap off with this thumb, and loaded it into the pipe’s receiver.

  “You’re worried they’ll find out about the terraforming, aren’t you?”

  “Think about it,” Cadie said. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “If this stuff is child’s play to the Coronians, even if they can’t extract information from him directly, they’ll at least know if he’s lying to them.”

  Luka rocked his chair with a deep mellow nod. “Probably,” he said. “I have to admit, that hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “Me either,” Cadie said. “Until now.”

  “So what do you think we should do?”

  “I don’t know,” Cadie said. “But it makes me wonder if maybe we’re going about this whole thing wrong.”

  Luka was about to draw on his mouthpiece, but stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Luka,” Cadie began, “what if we misunderstood Two Bulls?”

  “Misunderstood what?”

  “The Lakota saying. ‘Force begets resistance.’”

  “What is there to misunderstand?” Luka asked. “It’s pretty clear, isn’t it? The Coronians and the City Council are exerting force, so we have to be the resistance.”

  Cadie shrugged. “That’s one interpretation.”

  “Well what’s your interpretation?”

  “What if it means that the resistance is the result of the force—that the force actually causes the resistance, and conversely, resistance will just cause more force?”

  Luka’s eyebrows went up as vapor rose from his lips. “You’re going to have to be a little less abstract,” he told her.

  Cadie closed her eyes and shook her head subtly enough that she didn’t think Luka would notice. This was perhaps not a conversation to be having over a hookah. “I think it means that if we push back on the Coronians, it will only make them push harder.”

  “The point is to make sure they can’t push harder,” Luka said. “If we destroy their ability to mine, they’ll continue to need us as much as we need them.”

  “Maybe for now,” Cadie conceded. “But don’t you think it will just increase their resolve to stop relying on Earth? Don’t you think it will just validate what they already think of us?”

  “That resolve is already there,” Luka told her. “Someone has to lose in all of this, and we need to make damn sure it’s the Coronians instead of us.”

  “I don’t know if I agree with that,” Cadie said.

  “Agree with what, exactly?”

  “That someone has to lose.”

  “How else can this possibly play out?”

  “I don’t know,” Cadie said. “But there’s something about all this that doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “Well, you better start getting used to it,” Luka told her. “It’s a little late to change direction now.”

  “Is it?” Cadie asked. “We have a chance to reboot the entire planet, right? To basically rebuild human civilization?”

  “If you and Omicron say so.”

  “So what if instead of promoting competition this time, we promote cooperation?”

  Luka looked at her over his cup. He sipped his coffee and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said as he placed the cup gently back on its saucer, “but I’m having a hard time hearing this from you.”

  Cadie sat back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re the one who couldn’t wait to purge the waterlock.”

  Cadie narrowed her eyes at him. “That had to be done,” she said. “You have to let that go.”

  “I have let that go,” Luka told her. “It did have to be done because it was us or them. That’s the nature of competition. Life has always been about competition, and life always will be about competition. I’ve never seen anyone do a goddamn thing that wasn’t ultimately in their own best interests, and I’m sick of being the one to always play by different rules. I’m sick of being the one always at a disadvantage because I happen to give a shit about other people.” Luka leaned forward and watched Cadie carefully. “Listen to me,” he said to her. “It’s us or them. It will always be us or them.”

  On a whim, Cadie pulled the mouthpiece on her side toward her, placed it between her lips, and inhaled. Luka leaned back in his padded chair and watched. Cadie felt instantly warm and serene, and although she felt she might be on the verge of getting sick, she also felt something else rise up from within her—some kind of bright white power achieved through the clarity of unexpected alignment.

  “Maybe that’s the way it’s always been,” Cadie said through the vapor escaping her lips. It rose and rolled luxuriously over the rim of her hat and continued on up toward the ceiling. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t do better.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  UNPLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

  AS FAR AS LUKA WAS CONCERNED, Charlie still lived at home with her parents. Charlie disagreed. Technically, she lived just below her mother and father in the transpartment she once shared with Val. Whether the vertically stacked flats were in fact two separate transpartments, or simply two levels of the same living space, was a matter of both interpretation and occasional debate.

  What made the matter ambiguous was the fact that, although there was no direct access between the two levels, they still shared a kitchen, toilet room, and a shower stall. Any of the three common rooms could be raised or lowered via recessed vertical hydraulics on an as-needed basis, either providing occupants with their intended services, or temporarily freeing up anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of total living space. The design was intended to be an improvement on the concept of communal living, and back when the Talleyrand family lived on the lower floors of Paramount Tower, they shared their utilities with a total of ten families across five floors. But with both Charlie and Val working, they were able to move up to where conveniences were divided among fewer residents, and were therefore much more readily available.

  The kitchen was currently present and Luka helped himself to a caffeinated chocolate protein shake. They’d chosen to meet in Charlie’s transpartment because it contained, in addition to modular utilities, another peculiarity: a display known as a polyvid. Polyvids were loud and bulky devices capable of rendering three-dimensional holographic models between two volumetric plates, and were once considered such novelties that it seemed inevitable that they would become the future of both work and entertainment. For a short time, enthusiasm around polyvid technology was such that they were designated standard household appliances by the Urban Planning Committee, and therefore built into all new transpartments.

  But for reasons nobody seemed able to entirely agree on, the polyvid revolution was short-lived. Some self-proclaimed cultural and technology pundits blamed the fact that the opposing, concentrically laser-etched plates took too long to warm up, that the arrays of optical micromirrors were too finicky and too difficult to calibrate, and that the stray magnetic fields the devices produced caused a harmonic buzzing right at the very edge of human perception that tended to put some people on edge. Others said it was because the images—refreshed at a relatively low frame rate—gave between 10 and 15 percent of the population headaches. one faction cited evidence suggesting that polyvid-rendered scenes were too realistic and therefore made viewers unconsciously anxious, and another insisted the exact opposite: that the disembodied slices of action were not quite realistic enough, and therefore did not represent a sufficient advantage over much larger, brighter, and cheaper high-density 2D material to justify the additional power, maintenance, space, and general hassle. Luka’s personal theory was
that believable 3D content was too hard to generate, and existing content simply too laborious to port, so once everyone got sick of rewatching the same dozen or so demos, shorts, and films—and once they’d played through the same two or three games several times and experienced all the possible outcomes—they never turned their polyvids on again. Whatever it was, by the time Luka’s transpartment was finished, volumetric displays had already fallen out of favor and engineers were experimenting with the promising field of ferrofluids instead.

  Such semipermanent but disused amenities fascinated Luka. How could something that once seemed so innovative and utilitarian become suddenly so quaint and idiosyncratic? Even after centuries of humanity relegating domestic apparatuses to abandoned anthropological fetishes (bell pulls for summoning servants, root cellars, coal chutes, phone boxes, dumbwaiters, milk doors, laundry chutes, central vacuum systems, intercoms, heated driveways, etc.)—either because newer technology rendered them obsolete, or because their benefits did not ultimately outweigh the costs of maintenance, repair, and upgrade—the lessons of modular design as a safeguard against unplanned obsolescence still had not been fully internalized. The result was that one corner of Charlie’s transpartment would probably be forever occupied by two built-in, one-meter-diameter holographic plates that were already too outdated to be useful, too expensive to remove, and too unpredictable to know whether or not they would even work.

  But for the first time since Charlie used her polyvid as a kind of high-tech bait to lure a toolpusher named Benthic back to her flat (only to be walked in on soon thereafter by Val and Luka), she was glad she had the device. She’d been using the space between the floor and ceiling volumetric plates as an auxiliary closet, so while Luka rummaged through the kitchen, she relocated stacks of clothing and a honeycomb-shaped shoe rack to the corner beneath the currently absent toilet room and shower stall. Once the obstructions were removed, she used the panel on the wall to switch the polyvid on. Luka had never seen one booted up cold before and he was surprised by how long it took for the plates to get warm, for the micromirrors to calibrate, and finally for the standby image (a randomly morphing and spinning polyhedron) to fully resolve.

  The timing of Luka and Charlie’s lunchtime rendezvous was designed to correspond with the reply they were expecting from Tycho, and while they waited on the polyvid’s temperament, an incoming message notification appeared in the corner of Luka’s vision. He reached over and authenticated on the wall beside the futon on which he reclined and his workspace sprang forth from his touch. As requested, there were two annotated, three-dimensional model files attached: the San Francisco as it currently was, and the next phase of development as formerly revealed to Luka by Khang Jung-soon.

  “Got them,” Luka said.

  “Good,” Charlie replied. “Bring them up. Let’s see if this stupid thing still works.”

  Luka reached the bottom of his shake and maneuvered his straw into the corner of the carton to slurp up the remains. “How do I move the files over?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Don’t you see the polyvid on the network?”

  Luka flicked through the list of all the endpoints his workspace was currently aware of.

  “What’s it called?”

  “I think I named it transporter.”

  “Nope,” he said. “Don’t see it. I don’t see anything on your network requesting three-D models. When was the last time you updated this thing’s firmware?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Probably never. Are you sure you’re on the right network?”

  “I’m on Deep Core.”

  “That’s me,” Charlie said. “Here, forward the files. Let me try.”

  Luka forwarded the attachments. Charlie brought up her workspace and found that she, too, was unable to locate the polyvid on the network. Eventually she rummaged through a long, shallow drawer beneath her futon until she found an old solid quantum storage block, blew dust out of its contact, and copied the files over. Despite being surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of twisted-light fiber optics, aura-nets uniting millions of individual nodes, the equivalent of tens of thousands of electron computing cores, terabits of bandwidth, and zettabytes of storage capacity, in the end, Charlie stood up, walked to the other end of the room, and copied the two files over manually.

  “I love technology,” she said from the polyvid’s panel.

  “But just think how much harder that would have been fifty years ago,” Luka said.

  “That’s true,” Charlie admitted. “I would have probably had a much bigger flat and had to walk at least twice as far.”

  The volumetric plates began to hum as the first schematic resolved. Charlie reached in to rotate it but there was contention somewhere in the rendering pipeline, and until all the textures were cached, the animation stuttered. Once it was able to rotate fluidly, she used both hands to move it out of the way, then brought the second model into view.

  “Oh my God,” Charlie said as it resolved.

  The second-phase model similarly stuttered at first, then began responding smoothly to Charlie’s gestures. She zoomed in on the new Paramount Tower, and although Luka couldn’t see her expression from where he was sitting, he knew what she was thinking. The building in which she and her sister had essentially grown up was now entirely unrecognizable, and in fact, could no longer be legitimately referred to as a tower at all. While significantly wider, it was only about half as tall, and not much more than a nondescript block. Judging by the spacing of the windows, the flats were no bigger than they were on the first few stories of the current Paramount Tower, and possibly even slightly smaller. Although there was none of the decay and dilapidation one typically associated with the term “slum,” beside Millennium Tower—and especially in the shadow of the clover-shaped quatrefoil of The Infinity—the new Paramount structure conveyed the distinctive impression of institutionalized poverty.

  “Welcome to the ghetto,” Luka said.

  “This is absolutely sickening,” Charlie said. “Not just Paramount, but the loss of the gardens. We have to have some kind of natural habitat—even if it isn’t for food.”

  “Apparently not as much as we need luxury flats.”

  “We can’t let this happen,” Charlie said.

  “Still glad you became a water rat?” Luka asked. “If you’d stayed a teacher, you might be over in Millennium with me. Hell, once you were head of the Education Committee, you might even be able to afford something in The Infinity.”

  Charlie was quiet for a moment as she watched the model rotate with the inertia of her last gesture. “Actually, yes,” she said distractedly.

  “Actually yes, what?”

  “I am still glad I’m a water rat,” Charlie said. “Because that’s exactly how we’re going to stop this from happening.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She turned around, and Luka could see that she was more determined now than upset. “I need you to assemble both these models.”

  “What?” Luka had allowed himself to sink down into a slouch amid the plush cellular foam of the futon, but he once again pushed himself up straight. “How big?”

  “Big,” Charlie said. “Big enough to draw a crowd. Big enough cause a spectacle.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

  “The same way you’ve been assembling everything we need. Ask Tycho to create a fake order.”

  “Don’t you think these are a little blatantly subversive? How do you expect me to get them out without anyone noticing?”

  “Assemble them while nobody’s there.”

  “There’s always somebody there,” Luka said. “The assemblers never stop. You know that. We’re not talking about the refinery here. There’s no night shift.”

  “Shit,” Charlie said. She turned toward the window and looked out over the gleaming green globe of Yerba Buena Gardens. “I can’t imagine how Val would react if she saw this.”

  “Why are you bringing Va
l into this all of a sudden?” Luka asked her. “Is that your way of trying to guilt me into doing this?”

  The look Charlie gave Luka was a combination of astonishment and hurt. “I can’t believe you think I’d try to manipulate you like that.”

  Luka set the empty shake carton down on a shelf behind the futon, closed his workspace, and stood. “What do you have in mind for these things anyway?” he asked. “And how soon do you need them?”

  “Never mind,” Charlie said. “It doesn’t matter now anyway.”

  “It might,” Luka said.

  “Why?”

  “Because in case you’ve forgotten,” Luka said, “assemblers aren’t the only way to make things around here.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  TRIPLE SEVEN

  IN THE SIX YEARS SINCE she stowed away aboard the Accipiter Hawk, Ayla Novik had seen the world. Maybe not as much of it as born traders like Costa, but Ayla was pretty certain that she’d seen far more of the planet than the huge majority of those who remained to populated it.

  Although she’d never been particularly interested in history, Ayla knew that before the invention and proliferation of trains, cars, steamers, and various forms of air travel, most people relocated only when they had to—either when their lives depended on it, or when sufficiently motivated by opportunity. But over time, advances in transportation technologies allowed humankind to become much more transient, and to wander about the globe for no other reason than to experience the novelty of it. Eventually those with means were just as likely to leave their homes and their families forever as they were to die in the same villages or cities in which they were raised.

  But the end of the Solar Age also brought with it an end to widespread migration. If you were born in a location that was stable, secure, and prosperous enough to allow for the conception and delivery of a healthy baby, chances were pretty good that your family would do everything it could to stay there for as long as possible. Anyone in a position to carve out an even remotely comfortable existence was much more likely to protect their home with their lives than risk seeking out a better one.