Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  After a series of scans, they were handed thin, waxy, dark gray outfits similar to surgical scrubs and directed through another secure door. There was a bench in the room along with a young nurse who drew blood and placed the vials into a fractionation centrifuge, closed the lid, and waited. Ayla noted that the two guards watched the nurse carefully as she did her job, and each verified the results independently before using their combined biometric signatures to open the next door. The nurse followed them out of the room, and Ayla guessed that her work was not yet complete.

  Once they were on the platform, Ayla understood the reason for the carousel. There was the hiss of rapid pressurization as a translucent hatch rolled aside and the hypertube capsule finished transitioning between the airlock and the terminal. It slid into a set of gates, and then the giant turntable began rotating it so that it would be able to go back in the direction from which it came. The front of the capsule was fashioned as a single angled air scoop that gave the entire vessel an aggressive and almost angry disposition, and while it turned, Ayla wondered why it hadn’t been designed to simply operate in reverse. She knew just enough about engineering to know that every additional moving part meant additional wear and maintenance, along with an increased likelihood of failure, and a giant rotating platter seemed like just the kind of thing that would love to malfunction. But as the rear swung into view, she saw that its operation did not allow it to be designed symmetrically: the back of the capsule was a giant recessed and bladed turbofan.

  The capsule door pivoted upward on its hinge, and inside was a single occupant. Ayla assumed that the man was Claus Odegaard, the geneticist with whom Omicron had been corresponding. He was an older man with thinning, shoulder-length hair that still had some blond interspersed among the gray, and a full and somewhat matted beard that continued well down into the neck of his shirt. His lab coat was khaki rather than white, which made him look slightly more formal than academic, and when he released a strap that dangled from the ceiling and stepped out onto the platform, Ayla was surprised to discover that a man with access to so much technology would choose to wear perfectly round wire-framed spectacles. There were clearly many years of hard-earned fatigue evident in the old man’s slate-gray eyes, deeply furrowed face, and stooped posture, but not yet enough to entirely dampen a smoldering of passion somewhere beneath—an ember that clearly flared at the sight of Omicron.

  By the old man’s side was a small, black, thermal-molded box that he clutched by a hinged handle. As he approached, the nurse appeared from behind Ayla and received the case as it was extended toward her, the old man’s gray but gleaming eyes never leaving Omicron’s.

  “Astounding,” Odegaard breathed with an unmistakable tone of wonder. A smile spread beneath his whiskers as he extended his hand toward Omicron. “I’m Dr. Odegaard,” he said, then abruptly corrected himself. “Claus Odegaard.”

  There was a subtle Nordic cadence to his voice that reminded Ayla of home. Omicron’s giant hand enveloped Odegaard’s and the old man looked down, seemingly pleased with the spectacular mismatch. He took a few additional moments to inspect Omicron’s features before finally relinquishing his grip. It was only then that he seemed to notice Ayla.

  He apologized and remade his introduction, this time with much less gawking. The nurse had unlatched the case and removed a pistol-like device that reminded Ayla of a jet injector, but bigger and clearly more complex. The nurse stepped toward Omicron but the doctor intervened.

  “No no no,” Odegaard objected. “Please. I will do it myself.”

  The device, Ayla realized as the doctor took possession, was a genetic core sampler. It used a hollow cylindrical scalpel to collect a plug of hair, skin, fat, muscle, blood vessels, and possibly even a few tiny chips of bone. The price for the seeds that Cadie required was nothing less than fresh genetic material so rare that the GSV had thus far been unable to add it to their stores: complete and viable DNA from a living Homo neanderthalensis—courtesy, no less, of their chief enemy and rival.

  Omicron rolled the tight sleeve of his scrubs up over his thick bicep, and then the bulk of his shoulder. There was a layer of fine, dark hair over the pale skin, and below, an immense mass of muscle. Once the old man had the core sampler set, he watched Omicron rather than the incision site. There was a high-pitched whirring interspersed with pneumatic suction and for the very first time, Ayla saw pain register throughout Omicron’s heavy features. He didn’t flinch, but it was clear to Ayla that it was only with great effort that he suppressed his instincts to pull away, and probably to retaliate.

  Odegaard lowered the sampler and Ayla glimpsed a dark purple hole in Omicron’s shoulder. It began to spill blood but the nurse was quick to catch it and apply pressure. She lifted the gauze and directed a thin stream of fluid from a syringe into the wound while catching the pinkish runoff. The fluid eventually turned clear as the coagulant closed the incision, and when the nurse applied a new patch of gauze, securing it with an adhesive wrap around Omicron’s entire arm, the dressing remained clean and white.

  The old man watched the display on the core sampler, and his smile broadened.

  “Thank you, Omicron,” he said as he handed the device back to the nurse. “Sincerely.”

  Omicron nodded as he gently unfurled his sleeve and worked it down over the wrap. Whether it was bleeding or not, Ayla couldn’t imagine that his arm wouldn’t be extremely tender for several days.

  “Are we clear?” Ayla asked the doctor.

  “Yes, of course,” the old man said. “Please, come.”

  He turned and crossed the platform, then stepped back into the hypertube capsule. The back of his khaki coat was wrinkled and his wiry, white hair tangled—the look of a man who was in the advanced stages of withdrawing into his own internal world. The nurse and two guards waited for Omicron and Ayla to board before stepping in, as well. one of the guards moved to the panel at the front of the vessel and touched the polymeth surface.

  The door lowered on its hydraulic cylinders. When it was nearly flush, something caught the latches at the bottom and pulled it the rest of the way in, hardening the door’s seal. Ayla could tell from the feeling in her ears that the capsule was pressurizing. They began to move, and although the acceleration was gentle and their movement perfectly smooth, when she saw the old man reach up and grasp an overhead strap, she knew to do the same. They stopped again—just as fluidly as they’d started—and Ayla envisioned the outer airlock hatch rolling closed behind them and the seal being set. The windows in the capsule were long horizontal strips, but there was nothing to see at the moment except the thick steel wall of the airlock. The capsule started moving again, exiting the chamber and beginning a smooth but constant acceleration.

  Ayla was hoping for better visibility, but the black rain clung to the outside surface of the tube and left an ashy film, though from what she could see, she decided she probably wasn’t missing all that much. There was little more out there than dark peaks of desolate crags piercing a sheath of smog as thick as the ice sheets had probably once been. As she continued to peer through the viewport, searching for signs of civilization, she experienced a mounting sense of disorientation caused by what she identified as an incongruity between her internal sense of motion, and the incredible speed at which the landscape was passing. It made her wonder if the old man had grasped the strap not because the ride might be bumpy or jerky, but because it was actually so smooth.

  It seemed Omicron was having similar thoughts.

  “If I may ask,” he said, “what kind propulsion system does the hypertube use?”

  “Not at all,” the old man said. Omicron was stooped forward so he could see out the viewport and the old man was looking up at him, watching his expression intently. “Linear induction motors.”

  “What about the turbofan in the back?”

  “Purely for moving air from in front of us to behind us while siphoning off just enough to maintain a cushion underneath.”

  “Int
eresting,” Omicron said. “But why not just create a vacuum and use a combination of electromagnetic levitation and propulsion?”

  “Indeed,” the doctor replied, and Ayla could tell that it was not the discussion of hypertube transport theory that was exciting him, but rather the experience of having a technical conversation with an actual living, breathing Neanderthal. “That was the designers’ original plan, but they found it impractical to maintain a near-perfect vacuum over such a distance.”

  “So it’s a reduced-pressure system,” Omicron hypothesized, “and you use the air to your advantage to create a cushion and offset friction.”

  The old man’s eyes smiled behind his spectacles. “Correct,” he said.

  The windows instantly blackened as they entered what Ayla assumed was a tunnel. Other than the quality of the light inside the capsule, there were no other discernible changes.

  “How much pressure do you maintain in the tube?”

  “An average of one millibar,” the old man said.

  Omicron squinted for a moment, and Ayla knew he was probably snapping together a quick virtual prototype in his mind. “You must not need very many induction motors then,” he said.

  “How many do you think?” the old man challenged. His scrutiny of Omicron intensified.

  “Over a span of two hundred kilometers?” Omicron said. “Probably just two. one to accelerate and one to decelerate.”

  “Three, actually,” the old man said. The pattern of his whiskers indicated that he was grinning beneath. “one in the middle—just in case we get stuck.”

  The viewports brightened again and Ayla could see that visibility was slightly better now. They were rapidly decelerating, and once again she felt disoriented. The sensation was a kind of dizzying mental parallax—a disquieting discrepancy between what she was seeing with her eyes, and what her inner ears were reporting.

  The windows turned the same dull metallic tone as the airlock in the southern terminal and Ayla believed she felt the capsule stop. A moment later, it crept forward into the carousel gates and began its rotation. Ayla countered the movement by turning in the opposite direction so she could keep an eye on the structure that was just barely visible in the distance through the transparent geodesic dome: a massive concrete block that looked like a wedge that had been pounded into the surrounding sandstone. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

  Her view was interrupted by a small procession on the platform. The door lifted and Ayla experienced a moment of panic when she saw that at least half a dozen armed guards were waiting for them. But their weapons were not raised, and the one in the middle stood behind a steel-blue thermal molded case at least twice as big as the portable inductive capacitors she kept on the Hawk. It was bulky enough that it could not be easily lifted by a single person, but there was a handle protruding from the top and wheels recessed into its base. Ayla had seen—and in fact both handled and transported—similar environmentally stable crates several times, and therefore knew that it probably contained valuable biological material. In this case, a small sampling of some of the last seeds in existence on the entire planet.

  Omicron was the first one out of the capsule. The guards on the platform stirred, and although their weapons remained in a natural and nonthreatening position, Ayla could see them adjust their grips. Ayla and Odegaard followed, as did the two guards. The nurse carried Omicron’s core sample through a set of secure folding doors in the back of the terminal that snapped shut behind her.

  The old man presented the case. “Everything we discussed,” he said.

  Ayla was less interested in the case than she was in the building outside, and she looked down through the dome’s semitransparent weeping panels at the GSV below them. Rather than the structure having been built into the side of a mountain, it now looked to her as though it had somehow always been there, and that the surrounding stone only needed to be chipped away to reveal it.

  “Aren’t we going in?” Ayla asked.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” the old man said. “This is as far as you go.”

  Omicron looked down at the stooped doctor. “How do we know everything’s here?”

  “You’re free to take an inventory, of course,” he said. “However, I would very much recommend you keep it sealed. Everything is in perfect cryogenic stasis, and from what I understand, she has a long journey ahead of her.”

  Ayla looked at the old man, then up at Omicron, and what she saw made her entire world tilt. Instantly she recognized the very same expression of pain and regret that had preceded some of the very worst moments of her entire life.

  “What is he talking about?” Ayla asked him. She could feel everyone watching her and she tried to maintain as much composure as she could. “Omicron. What is he talking about?”

  “Ayla,” Omicron began. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “I’m not going back with you.”

  Of all the emotions Ayla might have experienced at that moment, she was surprised that what she felt more than anything else was stupidity. She felt stupid for not knowing what everyone else seemed to know; stupid for thinking that Omicron would be happy staying with her for any longer than he absolutely had to; stupid for once again allowing herself to get attached to someone when she should have known by now that nothing ever lasted, and that nobody ever stayed. It was impossible at that point for her to contain her emotions, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “This can’t be happening,” she said as much to herself as to him. “Please tell me this isn’t happening.”

  “The price of the seeds wasn’t the core sample,” Omicron told her. “That was just for verification. That was just to get us this far. The price of everything in this case—everything Cadie needs to give the planet a fresh start—is me.”

  Ayla looked at the old man, and when she shook her head, tears fell from her cheeks. “You can’t do this,” she told him. “You can’t have him. He isn’t property.”

  The old man’s expression had grown disturbingly neutral. His hands were in his coat pockets and all traces of excitement from having just gotten a new toy were gone. He looked over his glasses at Omicron as though to indicate that this was between the two of them, and that she should be left out of it.

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Omicron told Ayla. “This is my choice.”

  “But why?” Ayla asked. She took a step back as though suddenly fearful of the man who had saved her life so many times. It wasn’t his physical presence that intimidated her, but rather his unexpected ability—and his apparent willingness—to be so careless with her emotions. “Why would do you this? Why wouldn’t you at least tell me?”

  “Because this is almost certainly the most important thing that you and I will ever do,” Omicron said. “And I knew if I told you, you wouldn’t have come.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Ayla spat out. “This is just an excuse to get rid of me, isn’t it? You have better things to do with your life now than babysit.”

  “That’s not it at all,” Omicron insisted. “I owe you everything. I owe you my life. I owe you my freedom.”

  “So you repay me by abandoning me?”

  “I’m not abandoning you,” Omicron said. “I’m just exercising that freedom.”

  Ayla knew that freeing Omicron would one day lead to this moment. She knew that eventually he would feel that his obligation to her had been paid, and would start making plans for himself that did not include her. She just didn’t expect that day to be today, and for that moment to be now.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” she begged him. She hated herself for resorting to pleading, but she was otherwise powerless. She knew she had nothing to lose at this point, and there was no sense in holding anything back. “Please. Come back with me. We don’t need this place. We’ll figure something else out.”

  “Ayla,” Omicron said, “there is no other way. The seeds in this case don’t exist anywhere else on the entire planet. We h
ave to do this. Both of us. I have to stay here, and you have to get this crate back to Cadie. Everything depends on the decisions we make right now.”

  “I can’t do it,” Ayla said. She put her hand over her mouth and shook her head. “Omicron, I can’t do it by myself.”

  “You can,” Omicron said. “You’re much stronger than you think. You’ve been on your own before, and you can do it again. All you have to do is get the case back to the San Francisco and then you’re finished with all of this.”

  “And then what am I supposed to do?” she said. “Where am I supposed to go after that?”

  “Triple Seven,” Omicron said. “Start a new life. You’ll be safe there.”

  “Start a new life,” Ayla repeated. She sniffed and nodded and smiled sardonically. “Again.”

  “Ayla, I’m so sorry.”

  “Stop fucking saying you’re sorry!” Ayla screamed. Her outburst reverberated off the dome’s panels and then the room fell eerily silent. “It doesn’t make any difference if you’re sorry, Omicron. It doesn’t change a goddamn thing.”

  “I know it doesn’t,” Omicron said. “But unfortunately, neither of us has a choice right now. This is the force that we can apply to make sure we all keep moving forward, Ayla. This is the most important contribution either of us will ever make.”

  Ayla looked up at the black rain falling on the roof of the dome and shook her head with a scornful laugh. “You know, that’s the irony of all this,” she said. “I never wanted any of it. I never wanted to save the world, or to be a hero, or even to make a difference, really.” She stepped forward, took the handle of the crate, and tipped it onto its wheels. “All I ever wanted was to stop feeling so alone.”