Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  They both sat there in silence for some time as they looked down into the crater. Ayla imaged Omicron was analyzing, parsing, calculating—perhaps considering all the engineering required to build and maintain such a complex operation, and almost certainly incorporating this wealth of new empirical data into his constantly shifting and expanding worldview. But Ayla was in a very different place. She was simply taking it all in and letting it all happen. To her, it was far more interesting to experience novelty and unfamiliarity and complexity as a coherent and elegant whole rather than attempting to discover and explain its individual constituents.

  While Omicron was scrutinizing, Ayla was just being.

  “It makes sense,” Omicron eventually said.

  “What does?”

  “That they’d switch from aeronautical salvage to boats.”

  “Why?”

  “Easier to find, easier to repair. And far easier to transport.”

  Ayla nodded absently, only partially listening. But then she felt a connection abruptly establish itself somewhere just below the level of consciousness, then begin fighting its way up until it was a fully formed idea so obvious and elegant that she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it earlier.

  “Wait a second,” she said. She sat up straight in the Anura’s passenger seat. “That’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  “Boats,” she said. “You and Cam shouldn’t be building aerial drones. You should be building boats.”

  When Omicron looked at her, Ayla expected him to dismiss her revelation, but he didn’t. Instead, he lowered his heavy brow in apparent contemplation.

  “What about power?” he asked. “Water produces a much greater coefficient of friction than the stratosphere. They might be safe from the Coronians, but the capacitors would have to be massive.”

  “Boats have all the free power they could ever want,” Ayla said. “As long as they know how to capture it.”

  That’s when Omicron finally got it. “Not just boats,” he said. “You mean sailboats.”

  “Sailboats,” Ayla confirmed.

  “Ayla,” Omicron began, “I want you to remember this moment.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you might have just single-handedly changed the entire future of the planet.”

  Ayla’s mind went instinctively to Costa. She often conjured him in moments like these so that, in her mind, they could enjoy the experience together. But perhaps for the first time since she’d lost her husband, she consciously stopped herself. Instead of willing the present to be haunted by the apparitions of her past, Ayla looked back down over the marvel of the new Triple Seven marina and just tried to appreciate what was.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  RECONSTITUTED NATURE

  AS MORNING DAWNED AGAINST THE San Francisco’s mighty white canopy, so too did the serene warbling of songbirds. The melodies originated from the park in the southeast corner of the platform and skittered along the composite weave as far as the rig’s bridge, drizzling crisply down among the morning commuters.

  The City Council had recently approved a proposal to start broadcasting simulated birdcalls from acoustic panels angled down over the Embarcadero. The songs were algorithmically generated by software that used as reference material hundreds of thousands of digital recordings harvested from the ship’s archives. Luka reflexively dismissed the initiative as inane in the extreme, and hypothesized that next, condensers would bring fog to the city, and in order to spawn a market for umbrellas and hydrophobic outerwear, even the occasional rain shower. However, he was surprised to find that the chirps and trills and chatter were much less offensive than he expected, and that he was even compelled to skirt the perimeter of the park whenever the opportunity presented itself. Luka suspected that, just as mankind was drawn to the color green because of its association with the sustainment of life (hence the historical obsession with suburban lawn care, he’d once read), perhaps buried somewhere deep in the human psyche was also some lingering and heretofore dormant archetypal appreciation for the magnificent symphonies that once emanated from the secret worlds above.

  Luka was not alone in his unexpected appreciation for reconstituted nature. Since everyone on the San Francisco lived either in Millennium or Paramount Towers—and since the Embarcadero was positioned right between the two—the recently installed auditory ambiance drew, over the course of the day, just about everyone on the rig who did not make a concerted effort to avoid it.

  The Embarcadero was therefore the perfect location for Luka’s newest creative triumph. Not only was the site logistically sensible because of its central location, but positioning the installment directly between the two residential towers lent it a certain measure of symbolism that helped it to accomplish that which Luka believed all true works of art ultimately sought: the elevation to something more than what it actually was.

  Luka remembered very clearly how much was made of the fact that Millennium and Paramount Towers were identical—how much their equivalence was held up as a symbol of social and civil responsibility. Of course it wasn’t technically true that the two buildings were entirely indistinguishable. “Interchangeable” was probably the better term. In reality, transpartments at the top of Millennium tended to be a few degrees warmer due to the use of slightly less efficient microfiber insulation, and roughly a third of the flats in Paramount were stuck with tacky, disused polyvid systems. Additionally, water pressure in Millennium was every-so-slightly (but nonetheless noticeably) lower due to a minute change in the diameter of the lines without anyone thinking to make a corresponding adjustment to the water pumps. And finally, although the conductive polymeth dividers in both towers used frictionless maglev tracks, there was something slightly different about the formulation of the silicone gaskets and lubricants used in some hinges and sealed bearings in the Paramount that made them more prone to squeaking. As a result, on one side of the Embarcadero, it was considered extremely poor etiquette to do any major living space reconfigurations after ten p.m., while on the other side, no such taboo existed.

  Trivial variations aside, the floor on which you lived had a much greater impact on your living arrangement than which of the two towers you occupied, though even the discrepancies implied by elevation were kept intentionally moderate. While those who lived on higher floors did indeed enjoy more space and privacy than those below them, even the smallest and most communal of flats provided their occupants with more than adequate amenities, and a standard of living far above that which the overwhelming majority of the rest of humanity was forced to endure.

  Such was the promise of the two great towers—the unwritten contract that had made the razing of China Basin a largely celebratory event rather than one marred by controversy or gloomy nostalgia. Similarly, the promise of the Embarcadero was to serve as a free and open public space uniting the two halves of the city’s population forever—or at least for as long as anyone at the time cared to plan.

  But now, the carefully honed socially engineered philosophy that had for so many years helped to maintain a perhaps slightly imperfect, but still highly functional, balance between equality and upward mobility was about to undergo a dramatic transformation. And Luka and Charlie were going to make absolutely certain that everyone aboard the San Francisco knew it.

  Forty-five minutes before the morning shift, and thirty minutes before a scheduled task awoke the bytecode that would begin the slow crescendo of randomly synthesized birdsong—working beneath the spread of simulated stars, galaxies, and planets projected against a sapphire-blue canopy—Luka and Charlie used self-balancing hand trucks to maneuver one calibration-cube sculpture depicting the San Francisco as it currently was (labeled Our Present), and another one depicting the rig as it would be after the next major overhaul (labeled Our Future), right out into the middle of the Embarcadero’s main cricket pitch. The intention was to position the installment somewhere it could not be missed or ignored, and there was probably no better way to attrac
t attention than by blatantly disrupting the second-shifters’ early morning competition. The theory was that Luka and Charlie were guaranteed a minimum of thirty water rats, refinery workers, and assembly technicians standing together in a tight cluster, projecting a combination of unmistakable befuddlement and irritation. And since nothing attracted a big crowd like a smaller one, within an hour, they were likely to have achieved critical mass: enough witnesses that the sculptures could not be whisked down to the waterlock, purged, and subsequently disavowed.

  Both Luka and Charlie were stunned by how impeccably it all came together. Neither had views of the Embarcadero from their transpartments so they watched side-by-side and cross-legged from a window at the end of Charlie’s hall. They dubbed an imbecilic sound track over the silent and distant scene as team rivalries were temporarily put aside for the sake of trying to solve the enigma of the sculpted calibration cubes. What started out as an abundance of shrugging, head shaking, and mystified glances at one another rapidly evolved into frantic beckoning and what appeared to be impassioned debates. As the crowd swelled, they somehow even began self-organizing queues so that everyone could get a better look at what lay at the center of the attraction. As soon as the assembly grew so large and so loud that Luka and Charlie could hear the commotion from all the way up on the eleventh floor of Paramount Tower, they looked at each other and found that neither of them were smiling anymore. It wasn’t necessarily the size or the sound of what seemed to be escalating into a rally, or even the intensity of the rising tumult; rather, it was the realization that what they had just started was no longer even remotely within their control.

  Luka saw a notification appear in the corner of his vision. He initially assumed it was a message from Tycho until he noticed the icon indicating it was a video communication—something Two Bulls would probably never risk. When he called the stream up on the polymeth window in front of them, they were greeted by the smiling face of Khang Jung-soon—somehow simultaneously endearing and vitriolic, as was characteristic of the councilwoman. Khang promptly congratulated Luka for providing her with precisely the excuse she needed to open a brand-new investigation into his activities, which she was certain would eventually result in a conviction of high treason, the penalty for which, as he well knew, was exile. In the meantime, in order to ensure that he could not pursue any additional illicit activities, all of his assets were to be immediately frozen.

  Luka couldn’t tell what Charlie was thinking as they sat there alone and silent at the end of the hallway, but he found himself looking out over the crowd in the park below them and contemplating, unexpectedly, sports. Perhaps what drew people to organized competition, Luka mused, was its distinct lack of ambiguity. Cricket and football and boxing matches might be frequently and painstakingly analyzed, but they were rarely disputed, and even when they were, rulings were usually swift and decisive. Each individual match lasted a predefined amount of time, and when they were over, everyone involved—players, fans, coaches, and bookies—knew exactly where they stood.

  But outside of organized competition, the line between victory and defeat was far less distinct. Events appearing to culminate in your favor one minute could be your undoing the very next—if not today, then perhaps tomorrow, or next week, or next year. In fact, the very definition of what constituted a victory was prone to amendment over time as repercussions continued to compound, and as beliefs and sentiment and popular opinion evolved. But perhaps most unsettling of all was the realization that real-life competition did not occur as discrete, time-boxed events with results fastidiously recorded in some universal ledger the moment a whistle blew, or a buzzer sounded, or a bell rang. Rather, most struggles were open-ended and indefinite processes that had to be constantly watched over and tended to and fiercely protected, lest those achievements perceived as victories eventually be seized by those who prove themselves willing to go to increasingly greater lengths to obtain them.

  Luka wondered if the type of conflict in which he now found himself embroiled might be less about ultimately winning, and more about simply trading defeats.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  BALANCE OF FORCES

  THE LAST PLACE ON THE PLANET Ayla expected to go was back home.

  She captained the Hawk between Triple Seven and the ninety-click perimeter they agreed to maintain around the San Francisco while Omicron researched and built miniature sailboats. He didn’t have as much to learn as he’d originally feared since, as he explained it to Ayla, the type of sailing he was interested in was essentially just aeronautical engineering literally turned on its side. Sails and keels, as it turned out, were really nothing more than wings that happened to generate lift along the surface of the earth rather than away from it.

  Old square-rigged ships worked by raising as many as thirty-four trapezoidal sails on as many as four separate masts set perpendicular to the hull where, at their most efficient, they worked together to harness the combined energy of a tailwind to push the ship forward. Ironically, the ancient principle was not all that much different from the most modern manifestation of sailing technology: solar and beam propulsion. Before the end of the Solar Age, spacecraft used sails of various shapes and diameters only fractions of a micron thick to harness pressure exerted by photons emitted either by stars, or by carefully directed lasers.

  But between the oldest and the newest surprisingly simple sailing techniques was an entire world of intricate aerodynamics. Like an airplane wing, a fore-and-aft rigged sail—a curved sail set along the length of the hull rather than perpendicular to it—forced air to travel around it at different speeds. Wind moved at a higher velocity over the convex side, resulting in a local low-pressure system that the air from the other side was compelled to fill, generating lift in the process. The boat’s keel—essentially its underwater wing—used the forward motion of the boat to generate its own lift with the resultant vector being momentum. The dynamic could be thought of as a complex but undeniably elegant balance of forces where, when everything was optimally configured, the net direction was forward.

  Fortunately schematics for both military and hobbyist UNVs, or Unmanned Nautical Vehicles, abounded in the Hawk’s archives, as did various algorithms for optimizing operations like tacking, jibing, trimming, heeling, and reducing sail. Omicron even found what his automated testing verified to be extremely stable, robust, and well-optimized software implementations of those algorithms—libraries that took as inputs decimal floating-point values collected by onboard sensors like accelerometers, multiaxis gyroscopes, magnetometers, anemometers, barometers, and extensometers designed for measuring line tension. The final problem of navigation was easily solved by decrypting signals from the Coronian-controlled geostationary constellation of sixty-four high-definition GPS satellites.

  By the time the Hawk rejoined the San Francisco, Omicron had what he believed was a viable prototype and a set of reverse-engineered assembly specifications. But although the UNVs were ready for production, according to Cadie, the payloads were not. The seeds Luka and Charlie had provided were proving problematic. Not only were the quantities they were able to liberate from Yerba Buena without anyone noticing insufficient, but the species of flora they had access to didn’t have all the characteristics on which Arik’s research was partially predicated. Over the underwater acoustic link, Cadie and Omicron proceeded to discuss dominant and recessive traits, genotypes and phenotypes, genetic isolation, and things like recombination and synthesis. Ayla half listened to their conversation while initiating routine ship-wide diagnostics. While they ran, she cleaned the dust off the wings of her butterfly using the ultrasonic vibration filters Omicron installed, which removed contaminants from around the solar cells by vibrating at around fifty thousand hertz. Although she was unable to follow the discussion in detail, she could tell that the two of them were going around in circles, and every time they arrived back where they started, they seemed slightly more frustrated. Eventually they were in agreement that if they were
going to maximize their chances of success, Cadie would need a much wider variety of botanical samples to work with. But in stark opposition to the general darkening mood, after a long moment of silent reflection, Omicron announced that he knew exactly where to find them.

  The good news, according to Omicron, was that GSV, or the Global Seed Vault, would undoubtedly have exactly what Cadie needed. The bad news was that the price was certain to be exorbitant. On the polymeth surface in front of which Omicron stood, Ayla could see the defeat in Cadie’s expression as she informed them that there was more bad news: Luka’s caps had been frozen. He was still working at the foundry and earning his regular salary, so between he and Charlie, they had the watts they needed to keep Aquarius online, but if the GSV dealt in the currency of caps, they were going to have to find another source.

  Omicron turned, sat at the terminal behind him, and brought up a map. He had the navigation system plot a course, then compared the results against a summary of the ship’s status. The problem, Omicron explained, wasn’t just currency. It was also current. The vault was on the other side of the planet; almost exactly at their hemispheric mirror image; well over fifteen thousand kilometers away. He was confident that he could negotiate with the seed keepers—figure something out that they wanted, which he and Ayla were uniquely positioned to obtain—but the Hawk only had enough of a charge to get there, and then maybe 15 to 20 percent of the way back. And that was assuming a relatively direct course with no major deviations—a premise that was unlikely to hold true across such a vast distance. It had been months since Ayla and Omicron had done any for-hire work, which had left them entirely dependent on Luka. Without his caps, the Hawk wasn’t going to Svalbard—or at least, it was not coming back. And without going to Svalbard, there would be no more seeds than what remnants and miscellany Luka and Charlie could smuggle out of the gardens.