Chapter 54

Aina time: 8:30 AM, day 4 of 1451

Earth time: 7:17 PM Eastern Standard Time, Friday, May 6, 2044

The six hikers unloaded the climbing gear near the end of the ledge and radioed their status back to base. Mission control gave them a guarantee of at least four hours of continued heavy cloud cover, and permission for the four climbers to proceed. The other two members would remain behind as a base camp.

In less than an hour, Mayoni, Kahoku, Mark, and Kara were standing on the other side of the granite wall, the fields of sunflowers stretching out before them with the tower several kilometers away. Mayoni started mixing her extracts.

Kara looked around at the landscape. "Such a strange environment. I feel like I'm standing on another planet. Ha! What I'm I saying?! I am standing on another planet!"

Mark smiled. "It's been quite a road, hasn't it? Climbing the wall brought back memories for me too. I remember the first time I saw you. I offered you my hand, as we were climbing out of that old silver mine in Colorado."

Kara leaned over and kissed him. "Hush! Don't remind me of that moment. I'll still so embarrassed by how I acted."

"Here we go," said Mayoni. "It may seem odorless to us, but X-tree goes wild over this..." The four soon had their clothes and return ropes on the wall dampened with the clear liquid. "Now we wait. Should be just a few minutes..."

They stood in front of the sunflowers in the gray light, occasional drops of mist falling on them. The sunflowers around them were turned in their direction, the flowers' leaves looking like rabbit ears. And then, as if my magic, the flowers lowered their leaves into a curled position, curving their stalks to lower their reflective flowers to the ground.

"My gosh," said Kahoku. "It looks just like they're worshiping us. Spooky..."

"Come on," said Mark. "Let's go."

It took less than an hour to walk to the tower by the beach, the ocean smells and sounds stirring up many memories in Mayoni. Throughout their walk, the surrounding flowers would bow down before them as they passed. All of them found it to be a very eerie experience.

As they crossed a short beach, small crablike creatures emerged from the sand and hurried out of their way. The creatures were numerous, lightning fast, and their razor claws looked very powerful. It wasn't hard to imagine how their behavior might be different, if the crabs weren't getting a chemical signal to stand aside.

And then before them was the tower, a massive structure thirty meters in diameter. Including the top crystal, it was over a hundred meters tall. Around the tower base was a sand colored annulus, low on the beach side but sloping upward as the tower faced the ocean. Numerous growths of the killer ivy crawled off the annulus as they approached, along with another bizarre fife-form. It looked like a pure white crystal, with many fractal layers of wickedly sharp spikes folding in and out in a pulsating rhythm. The group walked in a very uneasy silence around the annulus as the life-forms let them pass.

"Tomorrow is New Mahina and maximum tides," Kara reminded them. "We should pay attention to where the high tide hits the annulus."

Halfway around the oval a yellowish section appeared on the tower wall, a semi-ovular shape approximately three meters wide at the base and four meters high. The group paused to examine it briefly, and then continued their walk.

A short time later, the group finished circumnavigating the tower and was again standing on the beach side. "Well, what now?" asked Kahoku.

"Mayoni," asked Mark. "That yellowish patch... Why don't we go back and take a closer look?"

"Yeah. I was thinking the same thing." They were soon standing by the oval, a brisk sea breeze blowing on their backs. Mayoni reached up and rubbed her extract-impregnated sleeve against the yellowish wall. It immediately began to fade to a white color. As they watched, a vertical seam appeared and split the oval, rolling back the wall to create a door into the interior. There was another yellowish oval a short distance inside. The setup for an airlock was unmistakable.

"Should we split up?" asked Kara.

Mark considered. "No... Let's just radio base camp and go in together." They were through the airlock a few minutes later.

The interior of the tower was a circular control room, with a core hub about half the diameter of the tower. There were chairs and control stations spaced every five meters or so along the outside wall of the room. The environment was well lit and the air felt super clean. Walking the interior circle, they realized that all the stations appeared identical to each other. Every chair and panel looked pristine, super new.

"Heck of a lot of redundancy for the control stations," commented Kara.

Mayoni appeared deep in thought. "Yeah... Maybe they're not for control... or maybe not just for control..." Mayoni sat down in one of the chairs and stared at the display before her. The interfaces looked completely unfamiliar, and there was no form of writing anywhere. "I'm very reluctant to just start pushing buttons... Let me think..." The time passed quietly, Kahoku and Mayoni's parents occasionally looking about the room in marvel.

After a while, Mayoni began to touch the console in front of her without moving anything. She then felt around at the panels in front of her legs, singing mindlessly and kneeling to get a closer look. To one side was a small light gray circle in the panel, almost white. It had a flat surface. The surface felt warm, and a bit tingly when Mayoni left her finger on it for more than a moment.

Mayoni looked up. "Mom, are you the one carrying the multi-meter? Could you hand it to me?"

Kara handed Mayoni the probe, and Mayoni pressed the red and black probe needles against the circle. With very little effort, they began to sink into the surface. After a few moments, the digital scope began to register wildly fluctuating high frequency oscillations.

"What does it mean?" Mark asked his daughter.

"I think the tower is probing my probe, trying to figure out what it is. Ah, look at this. It's feeding a nice clean sin wave to the probe now, maybe with some gentle oscillations of the frequency. Interesting. I think the tower is playing with it... like a toy..."

Mayoni put the multi-meter aside and unpacked her laptop from her rucksack. After booting up, she pushed the cable connecting to her network card into the gray circle. After about a minute, her network hardware lit up, indicating she had net access.

"Wow," said Kahoku. "To synch with a completely new interface that fast..."

"Yeah," said Mayoni. "Wow indeed... It's giving me file transfer protocols... There's a massive amount of data here... massive... I'm going to start downloading..."

Aina time: 7:29 AM, day 37 of 1451

Earth time: 6:10 AM Eastern Standard Time, Wednesday, June 8, 2044

Mayoni, Kalea, and Hiapo were all smiling as they sat by a large table in the new government hall at Athens. Behind them were over a thousand people who had come to witness the great occasion, and most of the rest of the population were watching the scene by video. Before the three sat the twenty-seven members of Congress. After a brief speech to open the meeting, Nalani gestured for the Ring Control team to give their report. Hiapo and Kalea nodded to Mayoni to begin.

" * Aloha * kakahiaka! * First off, I want to confirm all the rumors that have been flying around lately. We have indeed made tremendous breakthroughs along multiple fronts, in understanding X-tree lifeforms, understanding the true purpose of the southern tower, and understanding Ring control. Kalea and Hiapo will report on the latter. Let me start off by confirming that the entire tower is an X-tree life-form. It solves the mystery of how it endured six million years of age. The tower walls, top crystal, even the chairs and display consoles; they're all self-repairing biological X-tree structures. The purpose of the tower is two-fold."

Mayoni took a sip of water and then continued. "The first purpose is an energy collection and storage device, on a scale we've never imagined. It's probably more accurate to think of the sunflowers and the tower as one biological entity, they're so fantastically interconnected. We estimate the sunflowers can pump almost a gigawatt of power down the tower core at peak noonday sun. The power is used to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is allowed to bubble into the ocean. The hydrogen is cooled to liquid temperatures though biological cryogenic-pumping, and then stored in a vast biological bladder deep underground."

Mayoni looked around at the Congress. "We believe the tower has been doing this for six million years. The liquid hydrogen reserves are so vast we believe the system is now running in steady state, using all the new energy to run the cooling systems... There are interfaces within the control room that will allow us to tap into the energy reserve. At the tribe's present rate of consumption, there's enough clean hydrogen energy for many millions of years." Mayoni sat down and nodded to Kalea.

Kalea stood up and addressed the Congress. "I'll report next on the second purpose of the tower. It is a vast store of information. Much of it remains encrypted, and we are still working on that issue. We did find the key to decrypt one area of data. The key was the channel of information from our laser observations of the Blue Ring manifolds. Incredibly, Ring control protocols are embedded with the X-tree biological code. We have tested the protocols over the last several days, and are pleased to report we now have the ability to open and close our path to Earth as we please. Waiting for the path to open is no longer an issue, nor the length of the opening durations. We have complete control over both. And now, the best for last. Hiapo?"