But even the worst case scenario was manageable. If Arik turned around in time, he would be ok. If he was able to determine that he was walking in the wrong direction soon enough, he could turn back 180 degrees and correct his mistake. Given enough time, and assuming he could keep himself from panicking, he had a good chance of making it back no matter which direction he was walking in. The problem was that he had no idea what "enough time" meant. Although he was keeping a steady pace, he was extremely weak, and he was going through his remaining air and power alarmingly fast. Arik had never thought to ask Cam what would happen if he ran out of power while he still had air remaining. It was possible that the suit would depressurize, though it was also possible that it simply wouldn't be able to adjust to changes in pressure which meant that he might be able to survive long enough to get inside. But the cartridge's battery life and remaining air pressure were roughly equal, so it really didn't matter if he could survive without power or not. There was nothing ambiguous about running out of air.
The answer to the question of when to turn around was obvious: once he had walked as far or slightly farther than the farthest landmark could possibly have been from the point where he fell, he needed to turn back. But the challenge was in accurately estimating his position. Arik's head was pounding from dehydration; although he was exerting a great deal of effort, he no longer had enough moisture left in his body to perspire, and the heat was effecting his ability to reason. He believed he had walked far enough that he should have reached the airlock, but there was no way to be sure. His oxygen was down to 18% which meant he was probably getting very close to the point of no return, if he hadn't crossed it already. Very soon, it wouldn't matter whether he turned back or kept going. The outcome would be the same.
Arik was beginning to wonder if it might in some way be more dignified to just sit down and accept his situation. He envisioned himself using the remainder of his time to scratch out a final message in the Venusian terrain. He was trying to figure out if he would be able to fall into a deep enough sleep to avoid the unbearable panic and pain of suffocation when he noticed that he was walking directly next to a wall. He felt an intense wave of relief surge through him while simultaneously feeling ridiculous for almost resigning. He envisioned Cam finding his body with a terse apology to Cadie carved in the dirt only a few meters from the airlock. He imagined his friends and family trying to instill some sort of dignity into his mysterious and senseless death.
But there weren't any strobes. Arik was hoping to see the red strobe of the airlock, but there were no lights or beacons of any kind around him at all. The entire perimeter of V1 was lined with flashing diodes, and even through his encrusted visor, he should have easily been able to see them from this close. He stepped up to the wall and put his hand on the surface. Rather than the inert metal alloy shell of V1, the structure in front of him was concrete. He followed it for a few meters, looking for something familiar, but its face didn't change and no strobes came into view. He took a few steps back and tried to judge its height, but the top was lost in the haze. Arik felt a small piece of basalt under one boot, and although he was hesitant to expend the energy, he picked it up and lobbed it as high as he could toward the structure. A moment later, it hit the ground in front of him.
Arik was startled by his air indicator going from yellow to a flashing red as it dropped below 10%. Whatever he had found, it wasn't V1, and he knew he wasn't anywhere near the airlock or anything else he could identify. His best guess was that he had been walking in the opposite direction of V1, and had hit a wall that somehow defined its boundary. He'd never heard of wall enclosing V1, and he couldn't imagine what it was designed to keep out, but right now, that wasn't important. If the wall was indeed the perimeter of V1, walking in a line perfectly perpendicular to any point along it should take him back to V1.
Arik began walking with the wall at his back. Whatever happened, he would walk as far as he could and not deviate from his path.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Hole in the Wall
Arik brought up the most detailed schematic of V1 that he could find. The view defaulted to his current location (his home lab), but he re-centered the 3D image on the dome — the very center of V1 — and began zooming out. He expected to be able to retreat infinitely, but the perspective froze precisely at the moment when all of V1 filled the frame. He tried to pan, but the model wouldn't move in any direction. He zoomed in on the main airlock, and found he was able to pan at that level, but once again the image froze at exactly 200 meters from the outer airlock doors — right around where Arik believed he had encountered the wall.
The schematic was a vector-based three-dimensional representation which meant that it was essentially a collection of mathematical formulas describing V1 in great detail. Vector-based schematics allowed the viewer to inspect the model from any altitude and from any angle; the computer simply needed to use the vector's equations to recalculate and render the requested perspective which it could do, for all intents and purposes, instantaneously. Even the most complex vector-based graphics with the most detailed textures requiring millions of calculations per microsecond were trivial for modern computers to render. The only limitations were the amount of data represented in the vector's formulas, and any arbitrary constraints intentionally injected into the model itself.
Decompiling the schematic and looking for the block of instructions that prevented it from being viewed past a certain set of coordinates would not have been practical. Schematics were far too complicated to be authored by hand which meant that the tools used to compose them generated equations which were designed to be evaluated by computers rather than read by human beings. But the vector viewer — the program that interpreted and rendered vector-based models — was much simpler. While removing the limitations from the model itself would have been prohibitively complex, removing the code from the viewer that observed and enforced those limitations was much more feasible.
Just as Arik brought up the source code for the vector viewer, he got a video connection request from Cam. He had hoped to know more about the wall before they spoke, and for a moment, he considered ignoring the request. But Cam would know that Arik's workspace was active, and Arik knew that he owed Cam an explanation. He took a moment to prepare himself, then accepted the connection.
"Howdy."
"What the bloody hell happened out there?"
"I screwed up."
"That's a bit of an understatement. What did you do to your helmet? I had to use hydrochloric vapor to get it clean."
"It was the crystalline catalyst. It reacted with the heat and fused to the visor. I couldn't see well enough to get the rover inside."
"Arik, you probably couldn't see well enough to get the rover inside because you were half dead. Did you know your cartridge got scrapped because they thought it was defective? It registered as completely empty. Nobody has ever seen that before. They figured it had to be broken because nobody thought anyone could survive on so little air."
"Did I break any Wrench Pod records?"
"This isn't a joke. Do you have any idea how close you came to not coming back? You were literally no more than a breath or two away."
"Believe me, I know."
"And do you know what would've happened if you'd run out of power?"
"I was wondering about that."
"The suit holds a residual charge for about five minutes, then after that, all your equipment, with you inside it, would've been crushed down to about the size of your helmet in less than a second."
"Fortunately I would have probably already suffocated."
"Trust me, the implosion would have been much more merciful."
"I'll keep that in mind for next time."
"There isn't going to be a next time. You know that, right? You know you can't go back out there."
"Can we talk about this in person?"
"It's ok, I'm alone." Cam moved to the side so Arik could see the room behind him. "There's an
all-hands drill going on right now."
"That's not what I mean. There's something else I need to talk to you about."
"Something more important than you almost killing yourself?"
"I found something out there."
Cam squinted at Arik in the polymeth. "What do you mean?"
"I'll explain when you get here."
Cam's eyes flicked up to the top right of his workspace as he checked the time. Arik could see he was contemplating his schedule. "Where are you?"
"At home."
"Are you sure you weren't hallucinating? Seriously. I'm not saying you didn't see anything, but it wouldn't be the first time someone thought they saw something out there that didn't exist. Especially with as little oxygen as you were probably getting."
"I should have proof by the time you get here."
Arik could see that Cam's vexation was starting to yield to curiosity. "I'll be on the next maglev. This better be good."
The video stream closed. Arik opened his vector authoring tool and created the simplest model possible — a single micropixel point — then added zoom and pan constraints to it. He ran the vector model viewer inside of another program that showed him in real time the lines of codes that were being executed, then loaded his test model. He zoomed out until the model froze, then switched to his code editor.
The vector viewer wasn't as easy to modify as Arik had hoped. He was expecting to simply remove a few statements that checked to see if any zoom or pan constraints were specified in the model, but the logic turned out to be inherent in the camera control algorithms themselves. Fortunately they were well isolated and easy enough to reverse engineer that Arik had revised versions working against his test model by the time Cam arrived. He opened the front door from his workspace, and a moment later, Cam was standing behind him.
"There's something I forgot to tell you," Cam said.
"What's that?"
"I'm glad you're alive."
"So am I," Arik said. "And I fully realize that I'm an idiot."
"I'm the idiot for letting you go out there without more training. How did you let your air get so low? You didn't notice the big red blinking alert right in front of your face?"
"I committed the ultimate EVA sin. I got lost."
"How can you get lost when you're surrounded by over 200 10,000 lumen diode strobes?"
"It turns out they're only useful if you can see them."
"Should I have mentioned that? I assumed it was self-explanatory."
"How much time do you have?"
"Just a few minutes. Tell me what you found."
"Hopefully I can do better than that. I should be able to show you."
Arik loaded the V1 schematic into his modified version of the vector model viewer. He zoomed in on the dock.
"Ok, this is the dock, and here's the airlock." He zoomed out a few levels and began to pan. "Here's the outside wall of the Public Pod, and this is right about where I left the rover, right?"
"Looks right."
"I got turned around and started walking in this direction..." He panned away from V1, and this time, the model did not freeze.
"What the hell is that?"
About 200 meters from the public pod, there was a thick red line segment.
"I was hoping you could tell me."
"I have no idea."
"It's some kind of a wall."
Arik zoomed out until they could see all of V1. The wall formed a meandering perimeter around the main structure and the ERP.
"You walked all the way out there?"
"Apparently."
"And you actually saw this thing?"
"I was standing right in front of it."
"Could you tell what it was for?"
"No."
"How tall is it?"
Arik tilted the view and zoomed in on the section opposite the airlock.
"25 meters. Jesus."
"That can't be right. What's it made out of?"
"It looked like it was mostly concrete."
"That's impossible. If it was concrete, it would require regular maintenance. Who's maintaining it if we aren't?"
"That's a good question. Maybe we didn't build it."
Cam looked at Arik. "Then who did?"
"I don't know, but think about it: it's far enough away that nobody would ever find it unless they were either looking for it, or they were lost. You spend 14 hours a day in the Wrench Pod, and you've never heard anything about it. Yet someone obviously put a huge amount of work into building that thing, and someone also seems to be maintaining it."
"Are you suggesting there's someone — or something — on Venus that we don't know about?"
"No," Arik said. "Whatever's out there, someone here knows about it. And someone here knows about the wall, too. Otherwise it wouldn't be in the schematic. But it's being kept secret. I had to modify the vector viewer to be able to see it."
"What's that right there?"
Arik panned a few meters, re-centered, then zoomed in. "It looks like a door. I must have been right next to it."
"Two and half meters wide. That's big enough to get a rover through."
"So what's your theory?"
"I don't have one. I agree it's strange, but maybe it's just a wall. Maybe the Founders built it to prevent wind erosion or something."
"It's big enough to keep out a lot more than wind," Arik said. "And it doesn't make sense that you didn't know about it."
"There's a lot about the Wrench Pod I don't know yet. Maybe it just hasn't come up."
"Maybe. Or maybe nobody else in the Wrench Pod knows about it, either. How much concrete do you have in the warehouse?"
"Not enough to maintain something like that. We hardly use any concrete anymore. It deteriorates too rapidly."
"Well it looked well maintained to me. I didn't see any cracks in it, or any rubble or debris on the ground. Is there anyone in the Wrench Pod you trust enough to talk to about this?"
"No way," Cam said. "At least not yet. I think we should keep this quiet."
"I agree."
"And whatever you do, don't go back out there."
"I have to check on my experiments."
"I'll check on them," Cam said. "You have to promise me, Arik. I can't be responsible for something happening to you. We'll figure something out, but for now, you cannot go back out there."
Arik hesitated. There was much more to do than just observe. There were dozens of additional experiments that needed to be performed, possibly even hundreds before he started seeing results. They needed a new technique for mixing and delivering the seeds and crystal catalyst solutions, and they needed to find new areas where they could work without being discovered. There was no way Cam could take on a project like this in addition to his other responsibilities. Arik knew that the pace at which he could work through Cam would be far too slow to yield results before he had to give up and get back to AP. But he also knew his friend well enough to know that there was no way Cam was going to concede.
"Ok," Arik finally said. "You have my word."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Other Side of the Wall
Only new wrenchers were assigned inventory duty. Cam had managed to avoid it, but with every week that he wasn't chosen or managed to talk his way out of it, his odds deteriorated. Arik knew that sometime in the next six weeks, Cam would be asked to spend his days roaming the warehouse with a polymeth tablet and a mass scanner, lost among the towering racks, pallets, and stacks of material. For seven straight days, as long as none of the rovers broke down, he would have no reason to be anywhere near the dock.
While Arik waited, he built a device which he could think of no better name for than a "plug gun." The barrel was a long transparent piece of pneumatic tubing which he salvaged from a scrap heap. It had a plastic stock and rubber recoil pad which fit against his shoulder, and a large empty wire and steel frame on the top which was designed to accept an environment suit cartridge in order to provide the gun w
ith power and air pressure. There was a small loading port in the bottom for inserting shells, and an ejection port in the side for dispatching them once they were spent.
The plug gun was designed to be held against the shoulder with the muzzle pressed firmly into the ground. It was a double action design: the first sucked a plug of dirt up into a chamber where it was mixed with seeds and a crystalline catalyst solution from a borosilicate shell loaded through the bottom port, and the second action simultaneously drove the mixture back down into the hole from which the plug came and ejected the glass shell through the port on the side.
The plug gun had several advantages over the pressure washer. It was designed to operate without raising dust or debris so as not to affect visibility, and since the crystals were loaded through glass shells, everything could be premixed in the lab and applied much more efficiently. It was small enough that it could be placed in the back of a rover rather than requiring the trailer, and because the plug gun was so precise, Arik could apply his experiments in a clean, simple, and dense grid.
In theory, the plug gun would allow him to set up just about as many experiments as he wanted. An environment suit cartridge had plenty of air and juice, and since all the solutions were premixed and the process required so little physical effort, it seemed perfectly feasible that he could set at least a hundred plugs in the course of a single EVA. Since this could very well be his last shot at getting outside for the foreseeable future, and his final opportunity to prove the viability of terraforming, Arik knew he had to maximize his chances of happening upon just the right combination of genetic engineering and catalytic compounds.
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