Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  Ayla was paying attention again. She’d never herd of the Global Seed Vault before, but she definitely knew of Svalbard. It wasn’t all that far from her home pod system in Nanortalik. In fact, if there were any kind of permanent settlement around the vault (which, Omicron assured her, there was), they would have almost certainly done some trading with her people in the past. Both Omicron and Cadie watched her and waited as she arranged the pieces in her mind, and when Ayla continued, her fervency was fueled not just by idle talk of home, but the sudden and unexpected prospect of possibly even seeing it again.

  Nanortalik, she explained, had a detailed and comprehensive evacuation plan in the event of any type of catastrophe, the apparent ineffectiveness of which Ayla had spent many hours reflecting upon. Part of the pod system’s emergency provisions were a series of silicon and graphene industrial-scale power cells buried beneath the loading bay, and could only be charged and drawn from inductively. Unless someone had the right equipment—or got absurdly lucky by inadvertently setting an inductive capacitor down directly on top of one of the concealed contact patches—there was probably still at least a gigawatt of juice up there on the tip of Greenland, entirely free for the taking to anyone who knew how to find it.

  Omicron considered Ayla’s proposal, and when he finally responded, she was certain he would dismiss it. Although she was still technically the captain of the Hawk, the reality was that she and Omicron had become partners, and it was rare that anything happened without full consensus between them. And it was even rarer for Omicron to endorse a plan so fraught with uncertainty.

  But to Ayla’s surprise, his somber tone was more to make sure she understood the risks of what she was proposing than to try to talk her out of it. If they weren’t able to gain access to the power cells, they would be out of options, and would have to put in at the nearest port—probably Hudson Strait or St. Lawrence—and look for any kind of work they could find. It might even mean having to do a job on credit—which, of course, would mean the worst possible terms. Additionally, if they were to get sidetracked, it would be a very long time before they caught up with the San Francisco, and it was even possible that their paths might never intersect again. But the point Omicron seemed most determined to make was that the expedition would in no way be about revisiting Ayla’s past. With the amount of traffic Nanortalik used to get, there was no way the pod system was still uninhabited, and there was no telling what they would find once they got there. This was a salvage operation, he emphasized, and absolutely nothing more. Under no circumstances whatsoever should Ayla make the mistake of thinking that the place they were about to go was anything like she remembered. Her home was gone, Omicron told her with unexpected solemnity, and nothing they could do would ever bring it back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  PARADOXICAL THINKING

  IN EXCHANGE FOR HIS REGULAR compensation, Luka had been granted the privilege of continuing to fulfill his responsibilities at the foundry. That’s how the Judicial Committee worded it in the formal Notification of Investigation that followed Khang’s smug missive. The reality, Luka knew, was that they couldn’t spare him, and had in fact fallen significantly behind quota as a result of his former extended vacation on Hexagon Row. The San Francisco was no different from any other burgeoning economy that borrowed elements from capitalism wherever it was convenient to do so, in that its long-term survival was predicated on indefinite and perpetual growth. And the foundation of that growth, at this particular moment in the course of its evolution, was molecular manufacturing.

  The last thing he should be doing right now, Luka knew, was bootlegging curious yellow. He’d already assembled and smuggled all of Cadie and Cam’s UNVs, but they still needed a way to get Cam up to Equinox. And there was no telling what else they might need to obtain between now and the moment their plan had advanced far enough that nobody—not the Judicial Committee, the City Council, nor the Coronians—could contain it.

  Yet somehow he ended up with an envelop of yellow powder anyway. Once again, Luka did not willfully perform the code injection and then carefully sequester the yield, but rather watched as it happened from the perspective of a detached outside observer. And when he got back to his transpartment, he again stepped outside of himself and watched as he cut it into lines, accepted it into his nasal passage through the slightly flared glass tube, performed that spectacular and sumptuous act of balance, and then, having skipped dinner, laid down on his carefully calibrated silicone mattress, and for the very first time that day, simply enjoyed the experience of being.

  Now that his mind no longer had to occupy itself with the problem of achieving his next high, there was room to think about how long he would be able to keep this up. one way or another, it was almost certain that he would not be an assembly technician for very much longer. In fact, he was frankly surprised it had lasted this long. Most people who knew Luka assumed that he had learned to operate forklifts and liftsuits—and subsequently insisted on keeping all his certifications current—because he had a passion for powerful industrial machinery. That wasn’t entirely untrue, but his primary motivation was one he’d never shared with anyone: Luka was very aware of the fact that he needed a backup career.

  There were several reasons why the City Council originally approved the proposition to bring hundreds of thoroughly screened and hand-selected orphaned children aboard and train them as assembly technicians. The most obvious was the sudden labor shortage that was inevitable as soon as construction of the foundry was complete. While there were certainly plenty of highly skilled adult workers available in any port, pod system, or broker post who would happily give up everything they had for a chance to live aboard a vessel like the San Francisco—even prior to the spoils of molecular assembly—it wasn’t skilled adult laborers that the City Council was interested in. Adults brought with them established criminal and violent tendencies, sexual dysfunction, and possibly even the individual components for what one day might, under the right circumstances, coalesce into mutiny.

  Children, on the other hand, were much more predictable and pliable. Not only were they easier and safer to control physically, but they were far less likely to require physical control in the first place. It was much more straightforward to mold a child into a productive, responsible, and functional citizen than a mature and established adult, and certainly less trouble to dispose of one who, for whatever reason, didn’t take to the conditioning.

  But the initiative wasn’t entirely motivated by behavioral considerations. As predicted by the teams of engineers who, in cooperation with the Coronians, designed the foundry and oversaw the installation of the brand-new assemblers, it turned out that children were actually far more adept factory technicians. The first generation of assembler technology required a great deal of constant attention in the form of both maintenance and repair, therefore there were clear advantages to employing a staff who could easily fit into constrained spaces (without protesting or complaining) and had small enough hands and fingers to reach material lines fed through narrow gaps, adjust inconveniently located valves, and retrieve accidentally dislodged hardware. Left to adults, such tasks would have invariably meant extraneous safety procedures and lost productivity that, cumulatively, might have set the San Francisco back as long as years. When swiftly and unreservedly attended to by children, though, mishaps could often be resolved without so much as filing a report, requesting an inspection, or even pausing production.

  But there were other, far subtler advantages to putting children in charge of the rig’s material destiny. The models, paradigms, and workflows introduced by the combination of Coronian-designed molecular assembly hardware and the various levels of software that gave them life had a tendency to challenge the expectations and preconceptions of even the cleverest and most mentally adroit adults, very often resulting in frustration, rejection, and flat-out ineptitude. To children, however, almost everything they encountered was already unfamiliar, so there was almost no limit to t
he diversity and novelty they were capable of accepting and incorporating into their worldviews. Since children had not yet formed very many expectations about how the world should work, they could function—and indeed even thrive—within an astonishingly broad range of realities.

  There was a period of time during which Luka believed that growing up right alongside the technology that an entire city had rapidly come to rely on would result in the ultimate job (and hence life) security. However, he eventually began to realize that one man’s security was inevitably another man’s vulnerability. Just as he and his peers really began to understand and internalize the power they yielded, so too did the City Council, who responded by assigning a team of inspectors, observers, and foremen to the task of penetrating—and eventually, methodically dismantling—what had become an opaque assembly technician culture. But the first step was understanding exactly what it was that an assembly technician did.

  A typical day at the foundry involved starting a shift with a thorough review of overall quotas, and then breaking them down into individual purchases (newly initiated, in-progress, paused, recalled, and stalled) along with their requested delivery dates and their relative priorities (standard, preferred, high, and critical). The next step was to carve off a block of orders and break them down further into discrete components for which various assemblers were optimized, subtract what were referred to as “commodity components,” which were preassembled in bulk (after verifying that they were indeed in stock), look for opportunities for parallel assembly (it was faster to assemble multiple identical components if you could do so during the same run), and then commence with the equally artistic and scientific process of task scheduling.

  Three things made task scheduling complex: order of assembly mattered; any given technician might be juggling as many as thirty separate jobs concurrently; and finally, every technician was competing for the same limited resources (both the assemblers themselves, and the medium that fed them). Therefore, almost all task scheduling occurred through AX, or the Assembly eXchange board.

  AX was an unauthorized piece of software that was hacked together and deployed to the foundry’s local network by a team of technicians, and was designed to support and coordinate the trading of assembler and medium access. Because of malfunctions, bugs, unscheduled maintenance, the continuous addition of new jobs, changes in priorities, and fluctuations in the supply of medium, tasks were always changing and resources constantly being rebalanced. AX, therefore, had a permanent place on every technician’s workspace, and constantly flashed with updates, warnings, notifications, and the occasional impertinent witticism. When individual components were fully formed, the best and most vigilant technicians were always right there ready to crack open the receiver, perform initial visual inspections, run diagnostics to ensure operation consistent with specifications and within designated mechanical and/or electrical tolerances, and finally to encase the newly spawned article in the gelatinous embrace of a silicone shipping pack. When entire orders were complete, they were bundled according to shipping manifests, transferred to the cargo hold, lowered down to level three, and finally distributed via forklift or liftsuit to their final destinations, where they awaited either further fabrication or final installation.

  Luka could recall at least half a dozen attempts to automate almost the entire assembly workflow and thus reduce technicians’ individual contributions to little more than maintenance, diagnostics, and transport. And he distinctly recalled how every such attempt resulted in a complete shutdown of the entire foundry—and sometimes even the refinery—usually within half an hour, though in a few cases, as quickly as thirty seconds. In every instance, the newly installed systems were rolled back and every assembly technician required to work overtime in order to make up for lost productivity, each and every one of their jobs—which only moments prior, had been right on the cusp of being designated obsolete—freshly validated and secured.

  What the City Council didn’t realize—and indeed still refused to accept—was that the San Francisco was a living, breathing organism. The crew was the cells that delivered nutrients to where she was starving, attacked the pathogens that constantly tried to invade and disable her, and built subsystems that were the organs that combined to keep her healthy and strong. And as a complex organism, the only rational way to make sense of her was in the context of long-term evolution rather than the delusion of spontaneous generation. It wasn’t feasible to simply shut down complex and critical systems that had evolved organically over long stretches of time and replace them with unproven solutions with little more to recommend them than economically and politically motivated mandates. Just as the human brain had to add additional structures and layers to itself in order to grow ever-more sophisticated rather than simply bestowing an entirely new and untested neurological design upon a future generation, the cost of the San Francisco’s adaptation to a rapidly changing world was layers of subtlety, intricacy, and convolution—a general complexity that, if it were to be successfully reimagined and ultimately replaced, would need to be dismantled with a level of respect and thoughtfulness few policymakers seemed capable of demonstrating.

  Nobody denied that there were obvious disadvantages to complexity. The human brain, in its attempt to synthesize disparate evolutionary fragments into coherent models of reality, suffered from countless phobias, disorders, obsessions, and addictions. Humanity’s endless demonstrations of hypocrisy, duplicity, and paradoxical thinking were not anomalous character flaws, but rather biological inevitabilities. However, it was also the case that the hundreds of billion of neurons, and the trillions of synaptic connections, and all of the layers and lobes and cortices and hemispheres contained within the brain were precisely what made possible everything about being human that was held most dear.

  Almost all complex systems embody that which is valued and that which is not, and the San Francisco was no different. While it was probably true that, if done properly, removing as many humans as possible from the foundry workflow could theoretically increase productivity, it was also undeniably true that the foundry existed for the sole purpose of serving humans, and in more ways than just providing a consistent supply of tools, technology, and trinkets. Equally important were the by-products of pride and self-worth that almost all the assembly technicians—no matter how jaded they presented themselves—clung to after having mastered their trade, become part of a community, and made the long and often terrifying journey from the unwanted of the world to the needed, the respected, and in some cases, even the loved.

  But perhaps the most important thing the foundry ever produced was one almost nobody thought to credit them with: the creation of a true middle class. Whether the City Council liked it or not, assembly technicians were indispensable and nearly irreplaceable, and with every failed attempt to contain them, not only did their compensation increase, but so too did their purchasing power. It was the assembly technician—that mysterious amalgamation of highly skilled professional and brute-force physical laborer—who early on became the San Francisco’s main economic engine, and thereby inspired the engineers, doctors, teachers, administrators, and gradually all those who would come to think of themselves as professionals rather than indentured servants to exert their newfound influence. In the end, not only did the foundry produce the machinery that razed China Basin, and then every last component that went into the construction of both the Millennium and Paramount Towers, but it also inadvertently manufactured the underlying philosophies that motivated them.

  The complexity of the San Francisco was far too much for Luka to hold in his head all at once. He hated the unfettered materialism, the cultural hypoxia, and the seemingly instinctual inclination toward self-destruction that the rig somehow seemed destined to cultivate. Yet he couldn’t deny that, more than once, he’d proven himself perfectly willing to risk everything to try to preserve it.

  Luka was beginning to realize that it was possible to simultaneously hate something and to take co
mfort in it—not unlike an abusive relationship, or a debilitating but familiar mental disorder, or an addiction that, while making no apologies whatsoever for ruthlessly and systematically dismantling your life, was also somehow the very best friend you had.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  SANITY CHECK

  USING AYLA’S INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE of the Nanortalik Pod System, Omicron prepared for every contingency he could think of. He anticipated everything from EMP mines, to various configurations and patterns of snipers, to swarms of unmanned sentinels. He even verified that the old steel teardrop-shaped depth charges with magnetic anomaly detectors for going up against submarines—munitions that, according to their stamps, had expired tens of circuits ago—would probably still function. The fundamentals of all of Omicron’s plans were essentially the same: go in slowly and quietly, and should they encounter any significant resistance, release everything at their disposal, then turn and run. The only variation was the order in which their defenses were deployed, and the direction of their attempted escape. It wasn’t that the Hawk couldn’t hold her own in a fight, but one ship against an entire potentially well-fortified pod system was not what Omicron considered to be particularly favorable odds. And the Hawk’s biggest asset was, by far, its speed.

  Unfortunately the one thing Omicron really felt he needed, he no longer had: at least one functioning medium- to long-range reconnaissance drone. Instead he used every onboard sensor, sonar, radar, and lidar system at his disposal to see as far into their future as he possibly could, and scanned every frequency in the radio spectrum, hoping to stumble upon some form of prognostic chatter. He continued decreasing their speed until they were creeping forward at a barely perceptible dead slow ahead, and that’s when Ayla realized that they were up against the one and only obstacle that Omicron had not planned for: absolutely nothing. Although it seemed impossible that Nanortalik could still be uninhabited, every indication was that nobody was home.