Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  Whenever Cadie was feeling small and insignificant, she tried to remember the moments that had profoundly changed her own life: the first time she and Arik witnessed the successful writing of binary data to human DNA, and the subsequent error-free decoding; the day of the wedding, and how after the ceremony and the reception, she and Arik had returned together to their very own brand-new home pod; the moment she discovered that her experiment had worked—that she was, in fact, pregnant with Arik’s baby, and that she would make sure that something of him lived on whether he ever woke up or not. And she thought about how much everything would have changed the moment the baby was born—how suddenly being solely responsible for another human life would have made the world exhilarating and mysterious and terrifying all at the same time.

  But now the baby was gone and the result was simply numbness. And after months of determination and persistence, the gliders had finally been launched, yet she sat alone and isolated among the oblivious prattle of strangers. Cadie’s life sometimes felt to her like a constant and confusing vacillation between feeling nothing, and feeling more than it seemed a single human being could possibly handle.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  NULL VOLUME

  CADIE DIDN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT architecture other than what she casually observed around her. She was much more interested in the life sciences than in design, but there was one thing about the arrangement of public spaces that she found fascinating: no matter how carefully structures were planned, if you looked closely enough, you could almost always find little patches of dead space; spatial by-products of load-bearing or utility infrastructure; dim eddies of dust around which foot traffic consistently flowed, but never actually penetrated.

  Several such areas existed back home in the maglev terminals where vertical beams occasionally occurred close enough to walls that it would have been awkward—even, for some reason, childlike—to pass between them. Or around the perimeter of the geodesic dome enclosing the greenhouse where the ceiling was too low for one to stand, and the steep angle of the slope made storage more trouble than it was worth. Cadie had reflected on these observations one evening while playing four-handed chess with Arik, Cam, and Zaire, and together they came up with the expression “null volume” to refer to areas that remained undefined, empty, and meaningless.

  Even though she hadn’t seen all that much of the San Francisco, she’d noticed an emerging hexagonal theme, which indicated an acute awareness of the principle of null volume and a desire—maybe even a civic mandate—to limit it as much as possible. But as far as she could tell, some amount of unused space within any type of structure, no matter how carefully planned, was probably unavoidable. It might even be that, over time, areas that were once highly trafficked became null volume as the priorities, motivations, and the habits of those who frequented them evolved.

  Cadie guessed that the area under the steps in the northeast corner of Union Square where she now sat, cross-legged and meditatively, had once been a kind of attraction—a deliberate vista or overlook from which to behold the splendor of molecularly assembled gentrification. Through the two windows converging in a seamless right angle, she could see the Noe Valley Rec Center, occasionally perforated by meandering luminescent turquoise swimming tubes like a monstrous radioactive serpent rising from the sea below; the giant green screw of the vertical gardens impeccably preserved inside the Yerba Buena snow globe; and the gleaming distended facade of Millennium Tower, a forty-two-story sail petrified in microlattice and silicon glass. To her, the view was spectacular—a high-end amusement park, or a luxury resort, or an artist’s interpretation of a microcosmic utopia—and perhaps it had once been considered spectacular by the citizens of the San Francisco, as well. But she could tell from the unperturbed layer of dust around her that any enchantment the panorama once offered no longer registered for those who came here in search of novelty in the form of the newest conveniences and unfamiliar exotic cuisine.

  Cadie had been expecting an incoming call notification, and it finally appeared in the corner of her vision. She watched it flash for a moment while she gathered her thoughts, then after authenticating against the polymeth window, Luka’s face resolved, superimposed over Sunset Boulevard.

  “Did you feel it?” he asked by way of greeting. She could sense his exhilaration, and she could tell from his eyes that he was probably also intoxicated. It was a variation of the look her husband sometimes had in his final weeks and days, which Cadie now understood to be the combined result of stimulants and painkillers.

  “Yes,” she said. She was still trying to fully make sense of the anticlimactic experience she’d just had upstairs in the food court; still dreading returning to the isolation of Aquarius without anything to work on anymore, and without any idea of what she was supposed to do next; and still unsure of how she was going to convince Luka to do something she knew he would outright reject.

  “Where are you?”

  “Union Square.”

  “Can you talk?”

  Cadie checked behind her and confirmed that she was still alone. “Yes.”

  Luka turned and looked behind him, as well, then looked back at Cadie. The background was dark enough that she couldn’t tell where he was, but she guessed a secluded corner of the foundry. “It worked!” he mutedly exclaimed. “They’re all deployed! We did it!”

  “I know,” Cadie said. She tried to smile, then realized that the expression was probably worse than if she’d remained impassive.

  Her reaction—or distinct lack thereof—immediately tempered Luka’s elation. “What’s the matter?” he asked her. “I thought you’d be celebrating.”

  “There’s something I need you to do,” Cadie said.

  “What?” Luka asked her. “What’s wrong?”

  “Do you have any way of getting in touch with the Coronians?”

  “Getting in touch?” Luka repeated incredulously.

  “Sending a message.”

  “How the hell would I be able to send a message to the Coronians?” he asked. “Why would I even want to send a message to the Coronians?”

  “What about Tycho?”

  Luka watched her for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I assume he can. But you still haven’t told me why.”

  “We need them to know that Cam’s up there.”

  Luka looked at Cadie with a combination of suspicion and disbelief. “Why the hell would we do that?”

  “Because,” Cadie said, “it’s his only chance of survival.”

  “If the Coronians know he’s there, he has no chance of survival,” Luka countered. “What’s to stop them from deorbiting the entire shipment and burning it up in the atmosphere?”

  “The gliders,” Cadie said.

  “What about them?”

  “Tycho needs to tell the Coronians about the gliders, as well, and that Cam helped design them. That will give them incentive to capture him alive.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Luka blurted out. “That puts everything in jeopardy. That absolutely guarantees Cam gets captured, and that the gliders get destroyed.”

  “It’s the only way Cam will survive up there, and it’s the best way to make sure he gets aboard Equinox unharmed. From there, it will be up to him to figure out what to do.”

  “But what about the gliders?”

  “The Coronians can’t stop them now,” Cadie said. “Even with Cam’s help. At least not all of them.”

  “Are you positive about that?” Luka asked her doubtfully. “There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know about Coronian technology.”

  “Positive enough.”

  “What if they demand that we stop the gliders in exchange for Cam’s life? Have you thought about what you’d do then?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cadie said. “At this point, we can’t stop the gliders, either.”

  “That’s a hell of a big gamble,” Luka said. “What you’re talking about puts everything we’ve w
orked for at risk.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Cadie admitted. “But another way of looking at it is that it’s the only way any of this could possibly work.”

  “You’re a long ways from convincing me of that,” Luka said.

  “Is it even worth trying?”

  “If you want me to relay a message to Tycho, I think you’d better.”

  “OK,” Cadie began. “Let’s think this through. Terraforming is a long-term strategy. It could be decades before the earth sees any benefit from the gliders, if they end up working at all.”

  “As you’ve repeatedly made painstakingly clear,” Luka said. “How does that change anything?”

  “Compare that timeline to the pace of Coronian innovation,” Cadie said. “Look around you at everything you have because of Coronian technology, and now consider how all of it—the assemblers, the power cells, the buildings, the atmospheric conditioning systems, the contact lenses, the BCIs—every piece of technology aboard the San Francisco is completely obsolete relative to what the Coronians are keeping to themselves.”

  “So what’s your point?” Luka challenged.

  “My point is that they could be much closer to doing their own mining than we originally thought.”

  “I seriously doubt that,” Luka said. “Considering how much raw material they still buy from us, I think we still have plenty of time.”

  “I don’t,” Cadie said. “You’re thinking linearly. To figure out where technology will be in the future, you have to think exponentially.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you can’t necessarily base future predictions on the past. It means in addition to thinking about change, you have to factor in the rate of that change, and how technology recursively changes itself. We know the Coronians probably already have atomic assemblers rather than just molecular. Think about the kinds of things they can build now—the kinds of new assemblers they can build using the old ones. If they’re ordering a giant ice drill from the San Francisco, that probably means two things: First, they have bigger and more important things to assemble themselves; and second, they’re probably already thinking about mining on Europa or Titan. All they need is one reliable source of matter and there’s basically nothing they can’t build and nothing they can’t do. At a certain point, they might even be able to reuse matter they already have—essentially recycle what’s already up there to build whatever they need at that particular moment, and then once they’re done with it, turn it into something else. We know the Coronians want to become self-sufficient, but they might also be close to becoming self-sustaining.”

  Cadie could see that her argument was not being well received. Only moments ago, Luka had been in a celebratory mood, and now he looked as though he was about to put his fist through the polymeth.

  “Listen to me,” Cadie said. “We’re still on the right track, but this isn’t an either/or proposition anymore. We need the gliders to work, and we need Cam up there doing what he can to delay the Coronians’ progress. And unfortunately, the only way to make sure he gets aboard Equinox alive is to tell the Coronians he’s there.”

  Luka glared at her for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t even know why I got involved in any of this in the first place,” he finally said. “I’m about to get myself thrown out of here, and the reality is that none of this is probably going to work, anyway.”

  “Luka,” Cadie began, but before she could make any further attempt to reassure him, he was gone.

  Although his last words were obviously spoken in anger, Cadie found that she could not dismiss them. None of this is probably going to work, anyway. He could very well be right. It was impossible for any of them to predict with any accuracy or confidence whatsoever which way things were going to go at this point. The only thing Cadie believed was universally true about the future was that it almost never turned out like you thought it would. The collection and analysis of data points and variables was useful up to a point, but the complexity of the world seemed to have a way of increasing in direct proportion to the extent to which you tried to measure it until the only sane way to make sense of anything at all was ultimately through instinct and intuition rather than cold and objective calculation.

  Unfortunately, her instincts were every bit as inconclusive as the facts.

  Cadie’s philosophy about anyone’s ability to accurately predict the future was heavily influenced by a conversation she once had with Arik on the nature of probability. In retrospect, she now believed the discussion was prompted by Arik somehow discovering the truth about V1. It was during dinner one evening, and she recalled how he’d slid his boxed meal forward to make room for his elbows, and how he never ended up eating anything at all that night.

  He began his argument by naming several of the things that kept them alive inside of V1: a substantial inert metal alloy shell designed to stand for at least a thousand years against the harsh atmosphere; the greenhouse where genetically engineered tulsi ferns produced massive amounts of ozone twenty-four hours a day that rapidly disassociated into breathable dioxygen; the protein synthesized from the stem cells of long-extinct livestock. Then there were those factors that were slightly more subtle: the atmospheric administration system that controlled the distribution of oxygen and removed pathogens from the air; the filtration systems that enabled them to recycle almost all of their water; the fusion reactors that were the lifeblood of every piece of technology they relied on.

  Arik went on to point out that it was also possible to state the reasons for their survival in the negative. For instance, they were alive because a coronal mass ejection hadn’t struck in precisely the right place at precisely the right time, frying the constellations of satellites they relied on; and a gamma ray burst emanating from a super or hypernova hadn’t fatally irradiated all life on the planet in the span of just a few milliseconds. As Arik continued to demonstrate, it was possible to keep parsing the individual elements enabling their existence into increasingly specific dependancies—both in the positive and in the negative—until it seemed there were an infinite number of things keeping them alive, and an infinite number of things preventing them from perishing, each one with a mathematical probability attached to it. Some of those probabilities were high (that the shell of V1 would continue to remain structurally sound for the foreseeable future), and some were extremely low (that the beam of deadly energy released from the brightest electromagnetic event known to occur in the entire universe would be directed at precisely their minuscule location in the galaxy), but the reality was that every moment of every day, an almost infinite number of dice were constantly being rolled, and no matter how many sides each one had, given enough time, eventually one of them would hit, and then something that you always believed was either immutably true, or unconditionally false, or simply mathematically and statistically impossible, suddenly wasn’t.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  THE ABYSSAL PLAIN

  AFTER THE SAN FRANCISCO SLOWED enough to flush its most recent accumulation of refuse and scrap, it sped back up just long enough to clear the debris, then slowed down once again. It continued on for about another hour at somewhere between fifteen and twenty knots, then came to a dead stop, dropping both of her thirty-ton anchors. The rig was almost directly above an area of seabed that the fleet of ROVALEs (Remotely Operated Vehicles for Advance Long-range Exploration) had identified as rich in polymetallic nodules, manganese crusts, and sulfide deposits.

  Mining operations conducted by Metropolis-class rigs usually occurred at three separate depths. The shallowest portion of the operation took place aboard the rig itself, on decks four through six, which miners referred to as “topside” (a relative term since topside was still well below sea level). That was where filtering chambers separated minerals from silt and slurry, pumping the isolated ore up to the refinery and the tailings back down to the ocean floor.

  The deepest portion of the operation—referred to as
the mining site, or usually just “the site”—was the mining location itself where semiautonomous robotic cutters worked in collaboration with collecting machines at between eight hundred and six thousand meters, depending on the types of deposits they were gathering. Miners occasionally operated “on-site”—down alongside the massive excavation machines themselves; however, due to the extreme depth, it was necessary to do so inside of an ADS, or Atmospheric Diving Suit. An ADS was essentially a human-shaped, articulated, fully pressurized and powered submersible that, while extremely robust and relatively safe, was also fairly cumbersome and unwieldy. Using one of four different tools that could be rotated into position at the end of an ADS appendage (variable-digit pinchers, a multibit drill, a worm-drive saw, and a power hammer), divers could conduct crude repairs such as dislodging obstructions or untangling fouled lines. However, anything more complicated or delicate than that had to be done in an area between the mining site and topside, usually referred to as “staging.”

  Staging generally occurred right around five hundred meters of depth—just about as deep as it was possible for humans to go without an ADS—and was therefore by far the most dangerous portion of the entire operation. It typically consisted of three dry diving bells—colloquially known as shacks—where, for up to twenty days, two technicians per shack lived amid the exact same ambient pressure as the ocean outside, enduring such hardships as excessively lumpy cots, a mere trickle of tepid fresh water that passed as a shower, blue chemical toilets behind tattered three-sided curtains, and usually cold and overly acidic coffee of which there was never enough. In fact, it was Charlie’s cumulative time spent inside various shacks over the years that was principally responsible for her lack of sympathy for the numerous grievances expressed by Cam and Cadie at being confined to Aquarius, which, by comparison, was practically palatial and luxurious.