by A. G. Riddle
Still, Lin Shaw had to know. And she had to be sure everyone she cared about was outside the Looking Glass before she engaged the experiment.
“I’m sure,” she said.
She sat on the table and waited.
A few minutes later, Ferguson returned and said, “They’re out.”
They walked together to the control room, which looked like mission control at NASA. She nodded, and Ferguson stepped forward.
“Okay, people. We’re a go.” He looked over at Lin. “Let’s see what’s on the other side.”
She watched the statistics on the screen. A faint humming sounded around them. With no media coverage or fanfare, they were conducting the most advanced experiment in history.
“Collision confirmed,” one of the quantum physicists said. “Sustained now. We’re generating origin particles.”
Lin nodded at Ferguson and left the room. In her office, she stretched out on the chaise lounge and opened the Rendition Games app. At the password prompt, she paused. This was perhaps the most important moment in human history. There were no witnesses—and that was just as well, and fitting. Newton had no witnesses when he made his breakthrough. Or Aristarchus. Neil Armstrong’s moon landing was a pole vaulting game compared to this—we knew what was there, we just didn’t know if he would survive the trip. Lin was venturing into the unknown. Some force was waiting. Good, evil, or otherwise.
She typed in her password, and the office disappeared.
She stood in her classroom in Oxford. That made perfect sense to her. The students were packing up their books and making their way out of the auditorium.
The symbolism was clear: she was the student here. This Rendition was a place to learn. The bread crumbs were obvious.
She strolled down Catte Street, past Radcliffe Camera, to the Great Gate. She flashed her faculty badge at the ticket counter and continued across the quadrangle, through the Procholium, and into the Divinity School. It was empty. She hadn’t expected that. Maybe she had been wrong—about this and so many things.
As she ascended to the second floor, her thoughts spiraled. What if the Rabbit Hole—and indeed the rabbit itself—was like the stuffed animals the greyhounds chased around the track? What if the universe was merely created for beasts like humans to wear themselves out—and if they ever caught the rabbit, and went down the rabbit hole, they were ruined forever? Was that what awaited her?
The library was unchanged from her last visit: dark wood shelves and stacks, books lining every wall, a two-story window letting in Oxford’s hazy light. She heard the sound of clopping, like Clydesdales trotting down the street.
She stopped at a stack where a slender, bald man with wire-rimmed glasses was taking volumes from a book cart and placing them on the shelf.
He stood up straight when he saw her. “Can I help you?”
“I’m not sure.”
He smiled genuinely. “What are you looking for?”
Lin took a chance. “Whatever is after this.”
His smile faded. Creases appeared on his forehead. “What do you mean?”
“My people and I are searching for the next in the cycle. Can you help us? Have you already advanced?”
Gently, he placed the book back on the cart. “Of course.” He smiled, and it reminded Lin of her uncle, who was kind and graceful, even in the pain and agony of Hong Kong’s occupation. “We’ve been watching you,” he said.
“How long?”
He shook his head. “Time has no meaning here.”
“No. I expect it doesn’t.”
Lin had so many questions. She began with one that had haunted her since the events in Antarctica.
“I’d like to ask you something.”
He tilted his head toward her, urging her to proceed.
“We were afraid another would gain control of our Looking Glass.”
“The one called Yuri.”
“Yes. Did you… stop him? Influence events?”
The man smiled sympathetically and shook his head. “It is not our place. We know that’s why you created the Rabbit Hole—why you sought us. For help. But we are merely observers. And advisors. We are here to help you walk the path we walked, as those who helped us before. Your triumph is yours alone. As it must be.”
“Our ascendance is incomplete. My people aren’t all here. Only a fraction. And a few who can go between.”
“That’s very common.”
“What do we do?”
“Exactly what you’re doing. Make the transition gradually. Then once you’re here, the answer becomes obvious.”
Lin thought about that for a moment.
He held up a finger. “Can I make one suggestion?”
“Of course.”
“For those of you moving between the Looking Glasses, we’ve observed that it can be disorienting. The lines blur.”
Lin had never thought about it, but it made sense. “Solution?”
“A benign alteration.”
“Such as?”
“A place name is usually the best option.”
Lin considered that. “Example?”
“The highest peak on your world.”
“Yes, that would work. So in this Looking Glass it has a different name than outside?”
“Correct. That way, anywhere in your world, you can ask anyone the name of the highest peak and instantly know where you are.” He looked toward the ceiling, thinking. “In your originating Looking Glass, you named the highest peak after the first to summit it. You should pick a more obscure name—something that can’t be mistaken. Like a bureaucrat from the era, perhaps just before the mountain was named.” He paused. “Yes. You could name it, say, after a British Surveyor General of India of the time. There would be some logic in that.”
He waited.
Lin said, “You have me at a disadvantage.”
“In this Looking Glass, we’ll call it Mount Everest.”
Have you read A.G. Riddle’s other novels?
Keep reading for a preview of two series you might enjoy: The Long Winter trilogy and The Origin Mystery—both available now.
The Long Winter Trilogy
Winter World (The Long Winter, Book 1)
longlisted for the 2019 Wilbur Smith Prize for best published novel
A new ice age... and a ground-breaking discovery... will change everything.
When a new ice age pushes humanity to the brink of extinction, a group of scientists race to find the cause—and any hope of stopping it. In space, they discover an object drifting toward the sun. Is it the cause of the Long Winter? Or our only hope of survival?
With time running out, an international team sets out to make contact with the object. But it isn’t what anyone thought. Humanity faces a new kind of threat—and an event that will reveal a dark truth about our future.
Keep turning the pages to read the first two chapters of Winter World right now.
Or visit the link below to read the whole book.
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The Origin Mystery Trilogy
The Atlantis Gene (The Origin Mystery, Book 1)
the greatest mystery of all time…
the true history of human origins…
will be revealed.
Read the novel that started it all: The Atlantis Gene is the first book in A.G. Riddle’s bestselling Origin Mystery trilogy, which has sold OVER THREE MILLION COPIES WORLDWIDE, been translated into twenty languages, and is in development to be a major motion picture!
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Winter World
A preview of the first book in The Long Winter trilogy
A new ice age... and a ground-breaking discovery... will change everything.
Chapter One
Emma
For the past five months, I have watched the world die.
Glaciers have advanced across Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia, trampling everything in their path. They show no signs of stopping. The data says they won’t.
Within three months, ice will cover the Earth, and life as we know it will end.
My job is to find out why.
And to stop it.
The alarm wakes me. I struggle out of my sleeping bag and pull open the privacy door to my sleeping station.
I haven’t slept well since coming to the International Space Station. Especially not since the Winter Experiments began. I toss and turn every night, wondering what the probes will find and if the data will reveal a way to save us.
I drift out into the Harmony module and tap the panel on the wall, trying to identify the source of the blaring alarm. The solar array’s radiators are overheating. I watch as the temperature climbs. Why? I have to stop it—
Sergei’s voice crackles in my earpiece, his Russian accent thick. “‘Is the solar array, Commander.”
I look into the camera above me. “Explain.”
Silence.
“Sergei, answer me. Is it debris? Why are we getting heat buildup?”
There are a million ways to die on the ISS. Losing the solar array is a sure one. And there are a lot of ways to lose the array. It operates similarly to photovoltaic solar cells on Earth: solar radiation is converted to direct current electricity. The process generates a lot of excess heat. That heat is dissipated via radiators that face away from the sunlight, into the dark of space. If those radiators are overheating, the heat has nowhere to go but inside the station. That’s bad for life here.
We need to figure this out, and quickly.
Sergei sounds distracted, maybe annoyed. “‘Is not debris, Commander. I explain when I know. Please get sleep.”
The door to the sleep station next to me slides open. Dr. Andrew Bergin stares out with puffy, sleepy eyes.
“Hey, Emma. What’s up?”
“Solar array.”
“We okay?”
“Not sure yet.”
“Sergei, what do you think it is?”
“I think it is solar output. Too high,” Sergei says over the comm.
“A solar flare?”
“Yes. Has to be. Is not isolated radiator malfunction—they all overheated.”
“Shut down the array. Go to battery power.”
“Commander…”
“Do it, Sergei. Right now.”
The panel shows the eight solar array wings and their thirty-three thousand solar cells. I watch as they go offline. The temperature readings in the radiators begin ticking down.
We can run on battery power for a while. We do it fifteen times each day when the solar array is in the darkness of Earth’s shadow.
Bergin asks the question on my mind. “Any data from the probes yet?”
I’m already checking.
A month ago, an international consortium sent probes into space to measure solar radiation and look for any anomalies. The probes are part of the Winter Experiments—the largest scientific endeavor ever undertaken. The experiments’ sole goal is to understand why the Earth is cooling. We know that solar output is falling—but it shouldn’t be.
Data from the probes will reach the ISS first. But there’s nothing yet. That data could be what saves humanity. Or simply tells us how much time we have left.
I should go back to sleep. But once I’m up, I’m up.
And I can’t wait to see the first data from the probes. I have family back on Earth. I want to know what’s going to happen to them. And there’s an unspoken question among the six astronauts and cosmonauts on the ISS: what becomes of us? If the world is dying—if there’s no world to go back to—will they leave us up here? Three of us are due to return home in a month, the other three in four months. But will our nations expend the resources to bring us home? They’re already dealing with a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions.
Around the world, governments are struggling to evacuate billions of their citizens to the world’s last habitable zones. And facing a hard decision: what to do with those they can’t evacuate. How much will they invest to bring six people home from space?
Getting home isn’t a walk in the park. The ISS doesn’t have escape pods per se, we have two Soyuz capsules that brought us here. Each holds a maximum of three passengers. We could use them to evacuate the station, but we’d need coordination from the ground, and someone to pick us up when we land.
Once we return, we’ll need even more help. Rehab, for example. In space, our bones lose density. It’s the lack of gravity. The load-bearing bones lose the most density—the pelvis, spine, and legs. The bones literally disintegrate, similar to osteoporosis. The calcium that leaches into the body causes kidney stones—and space is not a place you want to have kidney stones. Some of the first astronauts who visited the ISS lost as much as two percent of their bone density per month. We’ve got that figure down, thanks to exercise. But I’ll still have to go through rehab when I get back. I won’t know what shape I’m in until my feet hit solid ground (or ice, depending).
The truth is this: our use to the people on the surface lies in the Winter Experiments. If we don’t figure out what’s causing the Long Winter—and how to stop it—we’ll never leave this station. We are trapped between the cold dark of space and a freezing planet below. For now, this is home. Probably will be for a while.
It’s a good home. The best I’ve ever had.
I bounce through the collection of modules that make up the ISS, using my hands and feet to propel me. The station is like a series of oversized pipes screwed together, branching at right angles, most holding labs, some simply connectors.
The Unity node was the first US-built element of the ISS, launched in 1998. It has six berthing connections, sort of like tunnel openings in a sewer system.
I pass into the Tranquility node, which houses life-support equipment, the water recycler, oxygen generators, and a toilet that’s about as hard to use as one might expect for a space commode (also, the ISS was designed by and for male astronauts, so there’s that).
I drift through Tranquility, into the European Space Agency’s observation module. It has a cupola with seven thirty-inch-wide windows that provide a panoramic view of space and the Earth. I hang there for a long moment, watching.
The ISS orbits roughly two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth, flying through space at over seventeen thousand miles per hour. The station circles the planet 15.54 times each day, which means we see either the sunrise or sunset every forty-five minutes.
The station crosses the terminator, revealing the part of the planet bathed in daylight—North and South America.
The ice has extended into the Great Lakes, like bone-white fingers dipping in the blue water. The glaciers will cross the water soon and continue south. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and parts of New York have already been evacuated.
The US has done the math. They know what the last habitable zones on Earth will be. Hint: they’re below sea level. A massive camp has been set up in Death Valley, California. Trade agreements have been established in Libya and Tunisia. But everyone knows the agreements won’t hold. Not when survival is the order of the day.
The world will try to stuff eight billion people through a funnel in which only a small portion can survive.
It will be war.
On the treadmill, I call up a station status report. Sergei still doesn’t have the solar array back online. I want to check in with him, but I’ve learned that he works best when given space. That’s one thing about six people living in very close quarters: you le
arn each other’s boundaries.
I check for data from the probes again (nothing yet) and begin reading emails.
The first is from my sister.
I never married or had children of my own, but my sister did. And I treasure those kids. In my eyes, they are the sweetest two humans alive.
The email is a video, no subject or content, just my sister, Madison, speaking into the camera as I trot on the treadmill I’m tethered to.
“Hi, Em. I know the video needs to be short, but I have a lot to say. David has heard some rumors. They’re saying that… a lot of things are going to change. That there’s an experiment going on that will tell us why the Long Winter is occurring. People around here are selling their houses for pennies on the dollar and moving to Libya and Tunisia. It’s crazy. They’re sending troops—”
The video cuts out for a minute or so. Censored. I keep trotting on the treadmill, watching the screen. My sister’s face reappears. She’s still sitting on the couch, but her two children are crowded around her now. Owen and Adeline.
“Hi, Aunt Em!” Owen yells. “Watch this!”
He goes off screen, then the camera pans and I see him dunk a basketball in an indoor hoop that looks about five feet off the ground.
“Did you get it?” he asks his mom.