Jian pointed at the retreating drones.
With Polly watching him intently from its perch on his shoulder, Jian and Rakunas crossed the threshold into the large, spherical chamber at the end of the hallway. There was a small walkway that led straight across the room to a door on the far side. At the exact center of the walkway was a round platform, with what looked like six slightly oversized chairs arranged in a circle facing outward to the inner surface of the spherical wall.
Jian walked across to the platform, then sat down in one of the too-big chairs.
Jian wasn’t particularly tall to begin with, which made his feet dangle from the tall chair all the more. But where it was tall, it was also narrow. With the added bulk of his vacuum suit around his legs and hips, it was a very snug fit indeed.
The chair seemingly noticed his predicament. Much to Jian’s surprise, it morphed itself beneath him, lowering its stance and giving his hips more room.
Jian shrugged and stroked the armrests.
They didn’t have to wait long for the answer. All around the two of them, the inside of the sphere lit up like a Chinese New Year’s parade. Within seconds, they were sitting dead center inside an achingly-lifelike holographic projection of Gaia. But it didn’t have the slight haze and translucence of their own holographic projectors. This was crystal clear and completely opaque. As the world spun slowly around them, Jian felt like he could reach out and touch it. But, something was… off. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it until–
Something in Jian’s perception flipped, like looking at an optical illusion.
Then, bright icons flashed to life next to Shambhala, its small wildcat settlements, G’tel, the Dweller caverns, and every one of the several dozen villages on the Atlantians’ road network. Characters appeared next to them, in a wavy form of calligraphy Jian had never seen before in any Atlantian scrolls or texts. The strings of symbols spooled out, then curled in on themselves as new ones entered, spiraling inward before disappearing once they reached the center. Soon, dozens of whirlpools of indecipherable text spun dizzily all across the immense room, trying to convey information or raw data that Jian couldn’t even begin to guess at.
Indeed, the format was giving him vertigo. The damned spirals weren’t even all spinning in the same direction. It was like trying to read the inside of a kaleidoscope. Jian had to look away.
Polly removed its abdomen from the armrest and turned back around to gaze up into Jian’s visor.
The swirling patterns quit abruptly, although the icons and the rest of the simulation continued unabated.
Jian replied, edging up against the limits of how weirded out even he was comfortable being.
Jian held out his hand, which Polly happily climbed back onto.
The inverted image of Gaia abruptly stopped spinning before them. Instead, it zoomed in on Shambhala, passing through it entirely before flipping the image back to normal and displaying the city from some height. The space elevator ribbon reached out past them to the other side of the room where it disappeared into infinity. Even at the miniaturized scale of the image, the Ark would rest several kilometers outside the room. The Pathfinder counterweight station, further still.
Smaller icons appeared over important buildings and areas, such as the Beehive, museum, stadium, airstrip, solar farms, seaport, and the beanstalk anchor barge sitting squarely in the Sea of Landing. Next to these simple icons, complex characters appeared, except much larger and more slowly this time. No more than six or seven at once hovered over each landmark. The lines of characters would glow in place for several seconds before disappearing, only to be replaced with identical sets a moment later.
<‘C’ is for Chlamydia, which was supposed to be eradicated after Earth, but I still somehow got, twice,> Rakunas said.
Rakunas shook his head.
Jian slumped in the chair. Rakunas was, annoyingly, right. He’d gotten caught up in the moment. The initial terror of the first airlock transition had given way to the rush of discovery and the thrill of being the first person to lay eyes on this amazing place. It was intoxicating, which was exactly the problem.
Jian pointed at Polly, who obligingly crawled up his finger and sat down on his forearm.
Eight
With zer belly full of thirty centimeters of hot dog, chili fries, a hot-tub full of sweet tea, and a single just-a-little-too-hot habanero pepper, Benexx’s ravenous craving for crap was finally satiated.
“OK,” zer said. “I’m tapping out. Put me in a wheelbarrow and roll me home.”
“I’m shocked and a little disturbed that much fit inside you in the first place,” Korolev said. “Didn’t they feed you in G’tel?”
“Of course they did. All the yulka flatbread and dux’ah jerky I could eat. Which, turns out, isn’t very much after the first couple weeks.”
“I could see that. Come on kiddo, you’re getting close to curfew. I’ll call you a pod.”
Benexx blanched. “How did you know about my curfew? I didn’t say anything about it.”
Zer uncle pointed at his temple. “No, but your mother did.”
Benexx smirked. “Of course. Sometimes, I forget you’ve got those things in your heads.”
“Won’t be too much longer before you’ll have one,” Korolev said. “Yours was the very first Atlantian brain mapped, after all. You’re the natural choice for the first trials.”
“And if I don’t want one?” Benexx asked gently, but the question still hung in the air for a long moment.
“You’ve been talking to Mei, I think.”
“No, I haven’t. Not about the plants, at least. I’ve just seen how much more… present she is, and Sakiko, and all the other Unbound. When they stare off into space, it’s not because they’re reading email.”
Korolev laughed at this.
“What’s funny?”
“You sound like your dad. Did you know in the early days he actually printed out playbooks for the Mustangs players? Like, on paper? He spent a month’s 3D printer credits to build the printer from scratch. And another week’s worth of pay to have somebody code the software for it.”
“Well yeah, his replacement plant never worked right after the Battle of the Black Bridge. It glitches all the time.”
Korolev waved it away. “Naw, that’s just his excuse. He read everything on tablets long before they had to replace his plant. He’d do everything he could to take calls on viewscreens.”
Benexx fell silent, uncomfortable with the comparison to zer father, even if it was meant to be complimentary.
“Jolk isn’t going to forget you shorting zer out like that, you know,” ze finally said, breaking the quiet. “Didn’t anyone tell you that when you were playing against them in football?”
“It never really came up in football. The shoulder pads make it impossible.”
Benexx bobbed zer head. “OK, I can see that. Still, it’s considered very bad form.”
“How bad?” Korolev asked.
“Like, kicking a human male in the balls bad. Even warriors in the heat of battle won’t do it.”
Korolev winced involuntarily, but held his ground. “Yeah, well I think laying hands on my friend’s kid and threatening them with sexual assault is ‘bad form.’ He’s lucky I wasn’t on duty or he’d be up on charges.”
“Ze,” Benexx corrected.
“Hmm?”
“You referred to Jolk as ‘he’ just now.”
“Did I,” Korolev said. “Maybe I did. It’s just ze was acting so much like a…”
“Man?”
Korolev shrugged. “A teenage boy, really. But yes, zer behavior was really stereotypical of young men.”
“Did you act like a stereotypical ‘young man’ at zer age?”
Korolev put up his right hand. “I invoke my right not to answer under Section Seven of the Ark Treaty.”
“Wuss.”
Korolev dropped his hand. “Guilty. But we really need to get you home now.”
* * *
Benexx crossed the threshold back into zer family home with seconds to spare before the clock struck ten. But instead of the expected parental unit tapping a toe in the dining room the lights only came on in the living room once their motion sensors registered her presence. The house was quiet.
“Mom?” ze called into the stillness. The lights activated as Benexx moved through the house. Remnants of dinner lay scattered about the dining room table, cold and forgotten. Ze glanced in the kitchenette, which was in a similar state of disorder. It wasn’t like zer parents to waste food, or to leave dishes unwashed. Thrift and cleanliness were lifelong habits that had been beaten into them living for decades onboard the ark, ze expected.
“Dad?” Ze walked down the short hallway to the bedrooms, glancing in ze own messy cave before trying the door to the Master bedroom, expecting it to be locked while zer parents slept; but to zer surprise, it opened with a gentle push. The sheets of their bed were still tucked neatly from being made that morning.
“What the hell?” Benexx said. Ze mother had gone so far as to pester Uncle K about seeing ze stuck to zer curfew, the last thing ze’d expected to find upon returning home was a house that looked like it had been abandoned without so much as a moment’s warning.
“House,” ze called to the microphones built into the ceiling and connected to the home’s interface.
“Yes, Benex?” replied the smooth, synthetic voice, which even after fifteen years had never gotten the drawn-out double x of zer name quite right. Ze’d learned to ignore it.
“Where are my parents?”
“Your parents are not home, currently.”
Ugh, stupid VIs, ze thought. “Yes, I can see that. Where are they now?”
“I do not know their present locations.”
“What?” ze said, exasperated. Their plants could be tracked anywhere inside Shambhala, the surrounding farms, in the passenger jets, on a lift car, or in the Ark. Either they had run out into the wilderness beyond the network, or they’d turned their locators off from casual inquiries. But why the hell would they do that?
“Call my mother,” ze said.
“I’m sorry, but your mother’s link is unavailable for calls at this time.”
“Call my father, then!”
“I’m sorry, but your father’s link is unavailable fo–”
“When did they leave?”
“They left at 7:57pm.”
Less than an hour after ze’d ducked out for zer walk. A pit of worry grew and settled in next to the hotdog in zer stomach. Benexx considered zer next step. What would zer mother or Uncle Kexx do when faced with an unexpected disappearance? Or, Xis forbid, zer father?
“Show me the security footage from the time just before they left.”
House took a moment to compile the necessary data for zer request. Zer parents, being not only paranoid current or former law-enforcement officers but not-so-minor celebrities, had built certain security features into their home from the ground up, including an interior/exterior surveillance system that recorded everything to be seen or heard in or immediately around their property, save for the bathroom and bedrooms. Another carryover from their prior lives aboard the Ark, where everything was recorded, measured, weighed, logged, and analyzed to death.
Zer parents had left in a hurry, just as the state of the house would suggest. They were surprisingly quiet, saying few words to each other, and then only in clipped sentences and hushed tones. Once out the door, they exchanged a small hug, then set off in different directions, which felt even more ominous. They were obviously upset, but ze’d thought maybe they’d been fighting, not that they did that as much in the last few years.
Benexx rolled back the recording further to try and pinpoint what had gotten them upset enough to go running off in opposite directions late at night. They’d had a conversation in the living room for quite a while, then a call. They were
on the call all the way back to 7:13, only a few minutes after ze’d left.
“House, play back the file of the call my parents took, starting at 7:13.”
“I’m sorry, Benex, but there was no call beginning at that time.”
“The hell there wasn’t, I’m watching them talk to the wall on your security footage right now!”
“I’m sorry, Benex, but there was no call beginning at that time.”
Benexx realized ze’d balled zer fists. Ze forced zer hands open and flexed zer fingers a few times. Ze’d half-expected the call file to be marked as private and firewalled. But never logged at all? Ze walked over to the wall-mounted interface screen and dug through the various menu prompts until ze found the raw call logs. House was right, there was no trace of any call. Ze went to the deleted file queue, expecting to find it there awaiting permanent erasure, but found nothing. Nor had the queue been purged for the day as other files from the morning and afternoon still sat awaiting erasure.
“What the…?” ze said.
“I’m sorry, Benex, but I did not recognize that request,” House said.
“Fuck off.” Ze tried to run through the possibilities. The angle of the security camera in the living room only captured zer parents in frame, not the video itself. But it was obvious they were talking and reacting to someone or something, not passively watching a movie or something. Zer father wasn’t even that animated watching “film” from the day’s football game.
It was definitely a conversation, and seven minutes in, something happened that sent them both into a near-panic. Ze really wanted to know what. Most of the rooms were covered by cameras with overlapping coverage. Maybe ze could catch a look at the wall display off one of them, provided no one had thought to scrub that footage as well.
“House, play all of today’s interior security camera feeds on the living room wall display in separate windows simultaneously, starting at 7:13pm.”
Twelve feeds arranged themselves in four rows of three on the wall display. Not even Benexx realized there were so many. Most, ze immediately discarded as useless angles and closed, but one view from the kitchenette held some promise, as did a partial shot from the hallway looking out from the bedrooms into the living area. These two images ze maximized and arranged their positions on the display so that they very nearly provided zer with a complete picture of the call, even if its two halves sat at slightly disorienting angles relative to each other and had different resolutions.
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