Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

“OK,” he said. “I’m ready.”

  “You are perfectly safe,” Cam heard through this helmet. “Just hold on and relax. We will start off slowly.”

  Jets began firing and Cam felt himself being lifted and pulled through the hatch. He looked down into the blackness, searching for points of light, and although his hands were tightly clenched—and although he could hear his breathing quicken inside his helmet—he discovered that he’d internalized the concept of weightlessness fairly well. It wasn’t so much the fear of falling that concerned him as much as it was the incomprehensible vastness into which he was being pulled. Having spent almost his entire life within the confines of V1, Cam had no experiential references, or even remotely suitable mental models, from which to draw. As part of his work in the Infrastructure Department, he’d spent plenty of time outside of V1, but visibility was always so poor that one was more likely to report feeling claustrophobic upon leaving the outer airlock than agoraphobic. The concepts of wide-open spaces, vistas, and horizons simply never had the opportunity to imprint themselves upon Cam’s brain, so although he could clearly see what was was happening to him, the neurons and synapses he needed to help him make sense if it were simply not there to fire, or were too weak to register anything of consequence. But then Cam wondered if anything could truly prepare one for something like this. Maybe it was simply impossible for the human brain—regardless of how richly and complexly and intricately sculpted by past experience it might be—to truly comprehend the vastness of the cosmos. As Cam stared into the abyss that surrounded him, he did not feel, as the famous quotation went, that the abyss stared back into him, but rather that it absorbed his gaze with infinite capacity, and that if he were not careful, the universe might slowly drain him of everything that he was.

  But when the drone began to rise and to rotate, the trance was broken, and Cam was suddenly aware of what an incredibly limited perspective he’d had. Relative to Earth’s orbital plane, he had been looking down, and now that he was outside the capsule and could see several more degrees of what was around him, he discovered that what the machine was actually pulling him through was absolutely anything but open and empty space.

  The sudden shift in scale was the most disorienting experience Cam had ever known. He was suddenly a speck among what could only be described as a vast multidimensional cargo dock, but at such a magnitude as to be seemingly no easier for him to comprehend than infinity had been just a moment before. Cam’s capsule (which he’d already lost track of) was just one of thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundred of thousands, and perhaps even millions. There were dozens of appendages protruding in every direction of the outer ring of the space station, each one entirely enveloped in layers upon layers of crates and shipping containers of all sizes and colors, stacked and organized in impossibly complex configurations. Moving throughout the slips like bees among blossoms were thousands of drones not unlike the one to which Cam now clung with a renewed sense of both marvel and misgiving. His perspective was first that of a mite among the bristles of a caterpillar, and then, as they gained more speed and distance, he felt as though he was looking down upon a section of a round, statically charged tube brush that had just emerged from a vat of glitter, the light from the sun illuminating million of individual calico surfaces.

  As they continued distancing themselves from the docks, the digital polychromatic patterns of the shipping containers dissolved into the orange and yellow atmospheric bands of the planet below. The only pictures Cam had ever seen of Earth from space were of the “Blue Marble” variety—the cool, cloud-swirled aquatic world of decades and centuries past. But what he saw below him now did not glow azure with clean habitual atmosphere, but rather burned amber and angry beneath the sun. Cam knew as well as anyone that Earth had always contained within it the potential to become another Venus—a world far closer to being Earth’s sister planet than Mars ever had been—and that all it needed for that potential to be unlocked was the initiation of certain self-perpetuating and exponentially accelerating processes.

  Cam was trying to discern whether the patterns he was studying below him were indications of surface features barely detectable beneath the atmosphere, or whether they were in fact the sinuous borders between chemical interactions, when he felt a sudden shift in the drone’s orientation. He refocused from Earth back to Equinox and was surprised to find that the portion of the outer ring below him was still much more scaffolding and lanky offshoots of golden solar arrays than complete and functional space station. After everything he’d been told of the Coronians, Cam was expecting a bustling, high-tech, orbital metropolis, populated by artificial intelligences and sleek transports piloted by the exotic and unsettling derivatives of Homo sapiens, yet everything he could currently see was still mostly just trusses, substructures, and various configurations of photovoltaic panels. His eyes continued to follow the outer ring’s curved frame until they landed and focused on a set of distant features that immediately explained exactly why Equinox was still so incomplete.

  The formations were far enough away that they were small, but unmistakable. Cam had no way of judging distance or size, but there was no question that what he was looking at were two massive ships docked with the outer ring, both far bigger than anything that could possibly be lifted off the surface of the planet. They were long, relatively flat, multideck structures, intricate and cantilevered. one looked to be about three-quarters complete with about half of it aglow with power, while the second was mostly still skeleton and hull with only hints of outer plating. The more complete of the two vessels was crowned with several masts, and even at such a great distance, Cam could make out patches of antennae and parabolic communication dishes.

  Equinox, Cam realized, was not so much a space station anymore as it was a hangar. And judging by the size of the ships the Coronians were constructing, they were not only planning on severing ties with Earth, but were in fact planning on leaving it behind forever.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  FALSE BOTTOM

  THE BEST PART ABOUT COMPLETING a mining tour was that you got to leave the shack. The worst part was that you went directly from the shack into decompression.

  If you got pulled out of the saturation rotation midcycle—usually due to an accident, an injury, or some other kind of medical complication—you’d probably have to do most of it in isolation. That usually meant between one and three weeks of being completely alone inside an enormous white and nautical-blue accented metal cylinder with nothing but your workspace to keep you company, and with amenities only modestly superior to those from which you just ascended.

  But the only thing worse than decompressing alone was decompressing with five other miners. Each chamber was enormous as far as hermetically sealed hyperbaric capsules went, but once you partitioned off a quarter for a toilet, basin, and a shower, another quarter for a galley, and then filled the remaining space with six recliners (three to a side), storage racks (packed with blankets, towels, and standard-issue gear sacks), and then filled just about every remaining cavity with hoses, lines, valves, and oversized anachronistic analogue gauges, what little living space remained tended to make one long for the vast and seemingly boundless expanses of luxurious transpartment living.

  When you decompressed as a team, there was typically a honeymoon period during which you enjoyed the company. You were kind of giddy just to be topside again, and everyone usually had some stories to share about pranks played on shack mates, or topics to debate like which players throughout history would have made the most unstoppable football squads, or descriptions of bizarre cultural remnants from before the Solar Age, dislodged from a collector’s gearbox with the pinchers of an ADS. But the camaraderie usually only lasted for the first few days, after which the lack of personal space—along with various hygienic, digestive, and nighttime respiratory idiosyncrasies—eventually created an atmosphere only marginally preferable to the alternative of dissolved gasses forming microbubbles in your blood stream a
nd soft tissues, leading to any number of unpleasant complications and symptoms up to and including an allegedly extremely painful death.

  All things being equal, Charlie preferred to decompress alone. She loved being a miner, but as much as she tried to reject her former identity as an academic, the older she got, the more she realized she was better off coming to terms with her past rather than trying to disown it, and long periods of seclusion were ideal for both self-reflection, and for indulging in the kinds of activities for which she was otherwise usually too tired. In the past, she had used her time in isolation to write, to dig up some old pieces of short fiction from the archives, to sketch, and even to occasionally experiment with writing little bits of code that—as terse and elegant passages meant to move the souls of machines rather than those of human beings—she found curiously satisfying. There were so many things Charlie had been interested in when she was younger that she sometimes wondered if becoming a miner had been a way for her to give up on everything she was afraid of before she had a chance to fail at it. The only way not to let the people you loved down—the people who expected you to succeed at everything you ever tried—was to simply not try at all. That way, the disappointment could be spread out over long periods of time and more easily integrated into one’s life like the slow-growing, low-grade chronic pain of a stress fracture rather than the shock of a compound break.

  But right now, all things were not equal. After what she’d just been through, she wanted company—if not to comfort her, at least to distract her. She wanted her parents, her friends, and she wanted Luka. And as long as she was wishing, more than anything else, she wanted her sister, Valencia. All of the arguments and rivalries of their teenage years now felt like privileges neither of them had adequately appreciated and respected.

  Charlie learned early on that your average deep-sea miner was not a big fan of authority, and few things throughout the course of modern human existence symbolized the expectation of subordination quite as purely as the closed-circuit surveillance camera. As long as she’d been a part of the saturation rotation, none of the cameras mounted in the corners of any of the decompression chambers worked, supposedly due to the number of times they’d been disabled by stir-crazy miners. According to water-rat lore, the first cameras had relatively soft acrylic lenses that were easily abraded into wide, white-cataract eyes using disassembled disposable razors. Between decompression rotations, the lenses were replaced with hardened borosilicate glass that stood up to razor blades, but succumbed to the tips of case-hardened screws laboriously removed from whatever equipment inside the capsule looked as though it probably wasn’t critical. The synthetic sapphire replacements managed to maintain their transparency for a full rotation until diamond-tipped drill bits were smuggled inside each chamber, at which point the medical staff finally conceded defeat and accepted that remote monitoring of vital signs was as invasive as they were ever going to get.

  The lack of visual surveillance opened up all kinds of new possibilities for passing the time. No alcohol was allowed inside the hyperbaric chambers since time spent decompressing was considered time on the clock, but there was a long tradition of maintaining a small hip flask beneath the false bottom of a storage compartment in the armrest of the recliner across from Charlie. The substance tended to mutate over time as it was topped off with the by-products of whatever it was Yerba Buena could spare that proved distillable. Charlie wasn’t usually much of a drinker, but she’d already taken a few warm swallows of the fruity and nutty liqueur, hoping that it would give her the two things she felt she really needed right now: a little solace, and a lot of courage.

  Her workspace was up on the polymeth surface suspended from the ceiling, but she wasn’t using it. She’d already confirmed that Luka and Tycho had delivered on what she’d asked for before reporting for saturation rotation, which was a list of every single person who worked in the foundry, refinery, or who was in any way involved in the rig’s deep-sea mining operations. In the process of trying to assemble such lists from memory, Charlie and Luka had been surprised to discover that they were only able to name between fifty and seventy people each over the course of several days—a startling reminder of how big the San Francisco actually was—and therefore they finally appealed to Tycho for official manifests. Two Bulls had indeed delivered, and Luka merged all three lists into one before forwarding them to Charlie.

  People used all kinds of different forms of input aboard the San Francisco, from devices as sophisticated as noninvasive neural interfaces to as old-fashioned as keyboards with maddeningly cacophonous mechanical switches. But Charlie often used the oldest and most primitive of them all: handwriting. When she was a teaching assistant, she occasionally requested (she would not have the authority to insist until she was a lead teacher) that her students turn in at least one handwritten assignment per unit. Although Charlie was by no means a neophyte, she had serious reservations about completely abandoning—essentially overnight, on a relative timescale—a portion of the brain that humans had so fastidiously developed over the course of thousands of years. When Charlie had something important to say, she found she preferred to write it out by hand. And what Charlie was about to write was the most important thing she’d ever needed to express.

  She worked on the horizontal retractable surface in front of her that, as evidenced by the bulb-shaped crater in the corner, was assembled more with eating in mind than composing longhand. With her magnetic pen poised above the surface of her silicon paper—held unconsciously askew in order to avoid the blood blisters that resulted from the amount of pressure she’d applied to the joystick inside her ADS—she tried to recall exactly what it was that Luka had sent out through the EMATS tubes just before cutting the power.

  The time is coming when the Coronians will no longer need us.

  This is how it will feel . . .

  Although the cryptic dispatch had succeeded in getting Two Bulls’ attention—and possibly the attention of others who he might now be collaborating with—Charlie knew she needed a very different approach. The economy of Luka’s warning had been an appropriate harbinger of something as dramatic as the San Francisco’s first total power failure in their lifetime, but she needed to make a case; rally over half the population of the the entire city to an urgent and incredibly dangerous cause; establish a political and cultural movement that would change the lives of every last soul aboard the rig.

  Charlie wrote.

  She knew that it was too risky—and probably too conceptually foreign, without far more context—to describe their plans for sabotaging the Coronians’ mining ability, or to reveal their ambitions around rebooting the planet’s oxygen cycle by terraforming. Instead she focused on facts that she knew were easily compatible with her audience’s own experiences, starting with what she thought of as the beginning of it all, and then working her way forward to the present.

  She laid out all the evidence that she and Luka had that strongly suggested the Coronians were preparing to do their own mining, and what they believed that meant not just for the San Francisco, but for all of Earth. She presented the results of the analysis she’d done of all the rig’s archives as far back as mining records went, clearly demonstrating a gradual decrease in yields, and despite constantly improving exploratory and surveying technology, a subtle but verifiable increase in the amount of time between locating new, highly productive sites. She recounted Luka’s meeting with Councilwoman Khang Jung-soon during which he learned of the city’s plans to raze Paramount Tower in order to free up mass to build The Infinity—a clear violation of the San Francisco’s long-standing social contract. She described how Luka had been imprisoned and repeatedly threatened with exile simply for telling the truth, and then outlined the deal the City Council had made with the Coronians securing the first generation of atomic assemblers in exchange for secretly executing several people the Coronians perceived as a threat, including a young woman whose unborn child had been forcibly taken from her, placed into
stasis, and essentially sold. Finally, Charlie told of how she herself had been only seconds away from being sucked into the open bits of a shaped cutter despite the fact that it had every one of its safeties engaged—safeties that had never once failed in the entire history of Nautilus-class equipment.

  When she was done, she found that she had filled six full sheets of silicon paper. She read through the letter several times, opening up gaps so that she could further elaborate on the points she hoped would strengthen her case and make her audience more receptive to what she was asking them to do. On the day she was to be released from decompression, she was requesting the simultaneous shutdown of all mining, refining, manufacturing, and production on the entire rig until a group of three representatives was appointed, a list of demands was drafted and ratified, and negotiations with the City Council had reached a satisfactory conclusion.

  She brought up the menu at the top of the first page, then copied the letter to her workspace. After reading through it one last time without making any changes, she merged the document with the list of names that Luka had forwarded, took one final nip from the flask, levered the stopper back down into place, and told her workspace to send it.

  There was an error.

  The San Francisco’s network was robust enough that failures were extremely rare. After several more unsuccessful attempts, Charlie brought up the standard diagnostic utility, which needed only a few milliseconds to complete an inspection of her workspace instance and report back that while 100 percent of incoming packets were verified, every attempt to reroute outbound packets was failing. Charlie was about to increase the resolution of the traceroute command so she could inspect the individual hops between nodes when she felt the pressure in her sinuses suddenly change and heard something land on her writing surface. When she looked down, there was a disk of blood on the top sheet of silicon paper, perfectly round but for the halo of fine radial ejecta like the crimson corona of a tiny star.