by P. F. White
“If it's so safe then how about you come in with me?”
Sven blushed a little, but was still looking at the screen. She could tell she made him nervous and she liked that feeling.
“I could do this, ja,” said Sven, “but the machine can be a...intim experience? How is close-with-feeling?”
Claire liked the sound of that.
“Intimate is the word. I don't think I would mind,” she said. Sven blushed even broader. He could be just too cute sometimes, she thought.
“What about bebis?” Sven said, his voice almost catching in his throat. He moved one of his short blond curls out of his eyes, but it just bounced right back.
She looked at the baby.
“You said you could set it for however long we wanted?”
“Ja. And it opens automatically if detects a dangerous drop or spike in blood sugar, or blood pressure, or other trauma that is not good. Machine is mycket safe.”
Claire thought for a moment. Would it really be that bad to leave the baby for a few minutes unguarded? Just ten minutes maybe? What was the worst that could happen? Besides, she really wanted to try out this thing. Sven had talked it up so much and she could hardly believe what she heard. There was just no way this type of technology could really exist. Not in real life anyway...
“Ten minutes,” she said as she licked her lips, “Then we are out okay? Make sure it's just ten minutes?”
He grinned at her before he turned back to the machine and brought up a big clock. She watched him put in the ten minute time-limit herself, then he did a few confirmations and stepped back. He tentatively offered his hand to her and she took it with a giggle. She tried not to laugh at him, but he could be so timid that it was difficult at times. Even touching her hand seemed to cause him a sort of nervous delight. He took one last glance at her and together they stepped into the machine.
Claire looked back at the baby as it slept in its' stroller. The door was closing slowly and automatically. She felt nervous and excited. The door closed, silently, and there was a slight whirring noise as it's lock spun. There was a click when it fully engaged. It was suddenly very silent.
She felt lighter within moments and looked down at her feet. They were already a few inches off the ground.
Then the floor dropped away.
# # #
The shredder made a horrible noise as it worked. It was something akin to a washing-machine, a trash compactor, and something far too horrible for either of those. It sounded a little like a long drawn out scream too, which only added to the charm. After only a few moment's Hank found himself cupping his hands over his ears and shouting:
“This can't be good for your ears!”
John Smith shook his head.
“The recommended exposure is less than five minutes!” he shouted back, “But I wanted you to see it first hand!”
Hank shook his head, uncomprehending. It didn't look like much really. It was just a vast machine that looked a bit like an engine. A thousand parts moved before his eyes: pistons and wheels and lots of blinking lights. The whole thing was made of steel and had hundreds- if not thousands of pipes leading to it. It wasn't the least impressive thing in the world, but it wasn't really spectacular either. He had to be missing something.
“I don't understand!” he shouted at John Smith.
“That's cause you haven't looked up yet!” responded the guard. He pointed up. Hank suddenly had a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had become gradually more familiar with the layout of the complex over the last week. He knew, for example, that just two floors above him was a laboratory for growing new genetically modified plants at incredible speeds. There were computers in that room that could recombine genetics into new plants in less than twelve hours and have a viable new specimen for planting in less than twenty four. It was an impressive enough facility and, due to the inherent risk of unstable phenomena, it had direct access to the shredder. Still, he thought, that only left about thirty feet of space at most between here and there. He hadn't thought anything could possibly be that impressive in just...
Hank had looked up.
He stood and stared, his mind recoiling in some small way from the enormity of what was above him. It couldn't be. There was simply no possible way that it could possibly exist. Everything he knew screamed against it yet here it was.
Hank Fletcher stared upwards into a towering shaft that appeared to go on for miles straight into the air. There was no way to accurately describe it's size: It vanished somewhere in the distance as lightning bounced between the faintly glowing brass and steel walls. Every few feet had some sort of spinning blade seemingly suspended in the air. Each of these blades ran the entire width and length of the shaft and moved at different speeds. The effect was like looking through a hundred thousand fans each moving at some different velocity. Some appeared to be moving in a slow, almost lazy arc. Others moved so quickly you could only see the occasional flash of light from their nearly invisible blades. Every so often a bolt of lightning would strike one of these blades, but the effect didn't seem to do anything. The blades closest to him were clearly massive, probably a hundred feet from edge to edge. He had no idea if the shaft narrowed, widened, or what. Scale and proportion seemed to have utterly vanished.
It was like looking into another universe entirely.
As Hank stared he felt his world start to slip away. He began to feel sick, the walls pulsing with energy and the impossible perspective seeming to crush him into the floor. He swayed dangerously and suddenly felt John Smith's hand on his arm leading him away from the room. He had no balance at all, his legs felt like they were different lengths. He felt sick.
When he was through the door and the door firmly shut behind him: he finally managed to speak. His voice came out a sort of croak, too loud and broken for some reason as if he couldn't properly modulate it.
“What was- oh god.”
He collapsed onto the floor, his entire body feeling wrong somehow. Every part of him ached and groaned. John crouched beside him and patted him on the back a few times. Hank closed his eyes as the other man's reassuring voice said over and over into his ear:
“it's okay Hank. Just breathe for a little bit. Just breathe. That's right, it's all over.”
Within a minute Hank was sitting up again and he felt a lot better. He tried to stand, but John stopped him with a firm hand.
“You should probably give it another minute just to be safe,” he said. Hank nodded dumbly. He opened his mouth, but closed it without a word. His thoughts seemed to be all mixed up. Thankfully John knew exactly what he was getting at:
“You are probably wondering about what you saw right there huh?”
Hank just nodded again.
“Well I don't pretend to understand how they did it but, well, you might have noticed how it seems we tend to favor engineering solutions to complex problems here. Why make some fancy filtration system when you can design a metal to filter things for you right?”
Hank nodded again.
“Well the same thing back there. The blades you see are all powered by the static discharge and move in somewhat random speeds because of it. The engine below is mostly for gathering and blowing stuff into the shaft at about seven or eight miles per hour. That doesn't sound like a lot, but the stuff starts to accelerate once it hits the weird air in there. There's a kind of shifting gravity field put off by each of the blades -some kind of super-dense metal or something- anyway the stuff just keeps accelerating until it gets moving several hundred miles per hour and that makes a lot of static. Especially when you consider the...”
He scratched his head for a moment.
“Or is the air a vacuum? Damn, I've plumb forgot. Anyhow: the machine down there blows stuff into the top of the shaft and it hits lots of blades on the way, gets fried with lightning, and then falls down when the gravity shifts again. On the way down it hits more blades, more lightning, and gets swept back up again when the next shift hits. Somehow all of this happens
real quick too, like a few dozen times every second. So the stuff that actually reaches the bottom to get collected again has actually gone through the process a bunch of times, like several hundred I think. The metals for the different blades are shaped at a molecular level to break up bacteria, and even basic chemical compounds. Each blade is a little different for that and some of them are just really thin and sharp and spinning really fast. Some fraction of the speed of light I think- but again I'm no expert. The stuff that comes out of there is then sorta a mashup of broken biologicals and tiny mineral compounds. I think they mix em up in a machine down the way to create a bunch of useful stuff out of them. Wanna go find out?”
Hank shook his head. It was finally beginning to clear.
“That is all fascinating,” he said, “But what I want to know is how. How could you manage to fit a mile long shaft between thirty feet?”
John Smith smiled broadly.
“Oh that,” he said, “Well my friend, I was hoping you noticed by now, but in case you haven't: I can spell it out for you. Not all the tech we have in this here building is really from around here. Most of it is just the result of human engineering, an unlimited budget, a lot of time, and the finest minds in the species working for about seventy years.”
He grinned broadly at that.
“From what I understand: a lot of what you might think was some spectacular piece of crazy tech is just normal human science finally getting the time and budget to do what it should...but we both know that isn't all of it. For that, well, let's just say it comes from a really strange place...”
“How strange are we talking about John?” Hank was watching the other man closely. His head was clear but more was becoming clear too. He began to suspect that John had known all along about his suspicions and, rather than hide from them, had been teasing him along at a slow pace.
“Well you know the term outer space right?” said John. He looked like he wanted to laugh at some sort of joke, but didn't.
“Yeah...”
“A lot of folks through the years have always looked out there for answers. They see the vast darkness of the night sky as a convenient metaphor for their own quest for knowledge. They see each star as a possibility. It's sweet, but it isn't accurate. Hell, it's not even close.”
He laughed now and shook his head, presumably at the unbelievable ignorance of mankind.
“The distances out there have always been too vast to be workable. Man can look up there but he just can't seem to go anywhere worth going. So it's really not much of a stretch to say that, eventually, he started to look elsewhere huh?”
“No,” said Hank. He stood unsteadily on his two feet. “No it isn't. So I'm guessing this place wasn't built by some sort of space aliens then huh?”
John just shook his head. It was intended as a joke, but he didn't treat it that way. He said:
“Space aliens? No. Let's just say that terms like outer space don't even begin to describe where some of the things in this building come from...”
Chapter Eight:
“So,” began Miriam, licking her lips and glancing briefly at Adriana, “In case you haven't gathered it already: we aren't your average corporation here.”
“No!” said Adriana with a roll of her eyes, “Really?”
“It's true,” said Miriam with feigned seriousness, “And a lot of that, well, a lot of what makes us special can be explained between two things really.” She swallowed and looked forward at some of the plants. “The first is how we were started. Our creator, you see, had a vision...”
“Don't most creators?”
“This is really going to take forever if you keep interrupting me you know.”
“Sorry.”
“It's okay. So, like a lot of things, this whole place began with one man and an idea...”
# # #
Claire left the baby slumbering quietly in his stroller. The giant steel door slowly swung shut to close her off from any possible wants and needs the infant might have. It was a simple thing, nearly silent, and really it shouldn't be a problem. It was almost like having to use the restroom really, you could be forgiven it without much worry. What could happen in ten minutes anyway? There wasn't even anyone else on the floor...at least that she knew of.
Of course: as soon as the door shut the baby woke up.
Being a baby there wasn't a lot he could do upon waking. He was hungry, a little agitated that no one was around to cater to his every whim (baby's are natural autocrats,) and also slightly bored. He was a more reasonable baby than most though, and that meant that the first thing he tried to do (instead of simply crying,) was to attempt to escape from the infuriating harness of his plastic stroller.
He failed at that, unfortunately, and so he frowned and thought about it.
This did not occupy him for very long (baby's tend to be pretty bad at involved thoughts.)
Lacking other options, nor anyone else to pay attention to, this baby began to draw in a big breath for a good long howl. He didn't need anything major, he figured, just a good honest howl leading to some tears that would go on for twenty- maybe thirty minutes- depending on how well the nearby adults lavished him with attention. That would do it, he figured. He would be no doubt released from his confines, his waste would be cleaned, and lots of amusement was sure to follow the waves of tears. Nothing like a good long howl for getting what you wanted. He sometimes wondered why adults didn't do it more often. They really should, he figured, but then they often behaved strangely. They had probably gotten complacent, these adults, and hadn't gotten a good earful in awhile. No doubt they missed it, he reasoned. Yes, a good long howl. There really is nothing quite like it.
So the baby drew in that breath, but just as he was about ready to release it he noticed something rather peculiar. There appeared to be a little cartoon man watching him from a position near the ceiling. The baby frowned at it, wondering if this cartoon man was capable of giving him some milk and cleaning his waste. The cartoon imitated him, frowning back.
He laughed, now that was a good picture! Why didn't more cartoons move on walls? The cartoon smiled at his laughter and walked a bit closer. It was odd, the way it walked. The cartoon was obviously stuck upon the wall and thus couldn't walk like a proper adult (not that the baby had any real grasp of how they managed that feat of course.) Still, the baby had to give the cartoon credit for it's ability to walk along a wall and end up near enough to the baby to reach one little cartoon hand out into the air and-
Snap.
Oh, thought the baby, well that is odd. The distance between the stroller and the cartoon on the wall was not great, perhaps a foot? He didn't really know what a foot was but he reasoned it was far enough for him to reach, so it couldn't be very far at all. Still it was odd that a cartoon confined to a wall would be able to affect anything outside of it's environment. Most cartoons just sat on the page or moved in the magic box, but either way the baby couldn't really touch them and they certainly couldn't play with him. The baby couldn't really grasp the way this cartoon moved, but he knew he liked it. Somehow, while still staying a cartoon, this little man had just reached out of the wall and unhooked him from his little stroller. This easily made the little man the best possible cartoon around, he decided.
As dignified as he was able (which wasn't much,) the baby tumbled to the floor and got up on his hands and knees. The cartoon applauded these efforts and clapped his hands in support. The baby liked that so he clapped his hands as well. There was much clapping, but that was good. Adults needed to clap more, thought the baby. He could tell the cartoon agreed, in fact, somehow he could tell it agreed. That made the cartoon even better in his opinion.
Then the cartoon walked a little further down the hall, he make a weird beckoning motion for the baby to follow and so the baby did. After all: this was clearly the best cartoon around, if the baby couldn't trust it then who could it trust?
Food and cleaning could wait, figured the baby, adventure beckons!
So he crawled away just as quickly as he could. The cartoon man led the way. Inside the baby's head they both laughed. It was good.
# # #
Claire had a moment of panic. There was suddenly no weight at all, yet she could till feel her body as much as ever. Somewhat desperately she clung to Sven, even as he too began to float into the air. She was worried that the lights would go out, and laughed nervously to hide it. The lights didn't go out though, and even better: she didn't feel even a little bit sick. She was worried she might, but now that it was happening- really happening- she only felt elated.
There definitely was something going on with her vision though. It wasn't darkness, it was...well, it seemed kind of like the opposite of darkness really. Somehow it didn't seem to register as light either, but it was-