Chapter 17

Eight hours later...

Time: Tuesday, December 25, 2018 10:40 PM

“The symmetry of Red and Green Mall is so strong,” said Jada’s voice over the speakerphone. “The Party entry location, the bike shop, and the AM/PM Locksmith, they’re all at the same positions, just on the opposite sides of the corridor. Maybe you were right, Emily.”

Mark and Emily were the only two people at the Red Mall home complex, and they were sitting on Jada’s bed in Jada’s and Emily’s huge corner bedroom. “Well,” replied Emily, “remember you’ve also noticed a number of non-similarities. We should still treat the super symmetry idea as a conjecture.”

“Take some credit, Emily,” came Hannah’s voice over the phone. “Your conjectures so far have been right on the money.”

“Thanks. Are you sure you guys don’t need any help locking down Green Mall?”

“Emily, are you trying to get out of janitor training again?” teased Ashley. “Relax! We’re a well oiled machine now. We plan to start right after breakfast tomorrow and will be back home by noon, Aggie too.”

Jada spoke up. “The AM/PM Locksmith shop here at Green Mall, we did an inventory. It has exactly 4500 of the mushroom locks. Mark, Emily, we’re guessing that might be exactly the right number to lock all the stores, in one spiral I mean, not all six.”

Aggie added, “We found something else very interesting too. Underneath your mushrooms from Red Mall, there’s a thin red thread of color. The mushrooms here in Green Mall have a green thread. And guess what?”

Mark spoke without hesitation, “The locks are specific to their malls?”

“Yep! We tried one of the red mushrooms here. It rotates in okay but it just doesn’t snap and lock.”

A worried voice came over the Leophone. “Emily, Mark, this is Fatima. I’ve just gotten back from the lounge here. The population counter has dropped to 024:105. Can you confirm the reading?”

Mark and Emily walked briefly to their lounge above Red Mall and confirmed the lower numbers. The drop was their last topic of conversation and they said their goodnights to their friends at Green Mall and hung up as they walked back to the bedroom. Mark sat down on Jada’s bed again to put on his shoes, and was mildly surprised when Emily sat down next to him

Emily stretched and yawned and gave Mark a friendly smile. “Well, I’m turning in. How about you? You’re getting dressed?”

Mark yawned too. “I’ll turn in pretty soon. I want to make one last check on how the telescope is running and then call it quits.” It was an excellent night for observations, clear and calm, and Mark had an entire night of work loaded into the telescope’s programmable control system.

He yawned again. “What a day. I guess this morning felt like Christmas, but the rest, especially the lower numbers...” He frowned. “I can’t shake the feeling that people are dying, that something is picking us off one by one.”

Emily grunted and gave a deep sigh. “Oh, don’t say that. The lower numbers can mean anything. Mark?”

Mark looked at Emily. Their gazes locked, and time seemed to stand still. “You want to sleep here tonight?” Emily thought as her hand patted the mattress she was sitting on. “Not for sex, here in Jada’s bed I mean, just for companionship. I’m afraid, and it’ll help me sleep.”

Mark thought back, “Yes, I’d like that very much. I’m sure Jada won’t mind. Thank you for wanting me.”

Emily smiled and coughed, breaking the eye contact. She suddenly blushed and looked embarrassed. “Hell, what did I just say? Mark, I wasn’t being too forward, was I?” The experience had felt so natural, neither she nor Mark realized that their previous communication had been completely non-verbal.

“No, not at all. Don’t be afraid, Emily.”

“Huh? Did I say I was afraid?”

“Didn’t you?” He blinked as he realized he had no specific memory of Emily speaking. He got up and stretched nervously. “Uh, sorry, I must have been daydreaming.” Mark felt intensely embarrassed. He mumbled, “Back in a few minutes,” and left the room.

By the time he returned, the room was dark, but there was enough starlight coming through the eastern windows to see. Mark climbed into Jada’s bed and turned to say goodnight to Emily, but he realized by her even breathing that she was already asleep. She was lying on her side away from him, and Mark stared at her for a while, deep in thought, his mind idly admiring the curve of her hips beneath the thin covers. Then Mark turned around and tried to get some sleep.

His drifting mind returned to Aggie. “Where did she say she was from? Oh yeah, Hungary, that’s right...” Aggie had been one of eighteen women on the seventh elevator trip to the Kappa Alpha parties, leaving directly before Fatima’s ride. Like the trips to It’s My Party, Aggie’s ride to Party #4 also lasted three and a half minutes, and her group had entered an exactly mirrored lounge of Party #1.

They arrived at their deserted destination a few minutes before 2:30 PM. They wandered about puzzled for a bit, very surprised there were no hosts. The group began to explore the second floor of the complex, marveling at the beauty and opulence of the circular stairwell at the southern end of the building, and they were awed by the grand design of the pool and the two trapezoidal parks.

The women ate the feast, enjoying the delicious food while remarking how incredibly bizarre their situation was, and as 4 PM approached their bewilderment began to change to worry. Where the hell were they? The sun was invisible in the cloudy sky, but the reality that it was about to set in the southwestern sky was not. The fact that it was setting eight minutes later than its scheduled time on that day went completely unnoticed.

Around ten minutes after four o’clock, the group decided to make their way south and get back to the parking lot. They traveled the pink cobblestone walkway between the two parks to the southern end of their hexagon and started walking through the door. Aggie was the last person in line and was the only person to realize that once the door closed, they would not be able to get back to the lounge.

The group had an argument by the door as the light faded from the sky. Aggie was very reluctant to give up the option of returning to the lounge, and the rest of the group thought she was crazy for worrying about such a thing since they had no intention of ever coming back. They finally promised to return for her once they had traced a route back to the parking lot, and Aggie promised to wait by the southern door and let them in if they wanted to return to the lounge. The other seventeen women departed, taking the west-southwest branch of the corridor. That was the last Aggie ever saw of them.

She had a strange, troubled night by the door, filled with disjointed dreams, and finally returned to the lounge shivering and collapsing sometime in the middle of the night, she wasn’t exactly sure when. She spent the next day troubled and alone, never bothering to turn on the TV, and finally found the underground mall Saturday night. She started exploring it Sunday morning. Her entrance from the surface led to the first floor of a Barnes & Noble bookstore on the outside arc of Green Mall.

Over the next two days, the views of the strange sun and unfamiliar stars made her think she had either lost her mind or died and was trapped in some strange afterlife. Aggie confessed she was close to breaking down, perhaps even committing suicide, when she finally met her new friends on Christmas afternoon.

She was a senior at the University, majoring in environmental sciences and involved with a project on Lake Champlain. Aggie knew nothing of The Intruder, and still felt shell-shocked by the news.

Fatima had come up with the idea of the group being guests of Aggie’s mall tonight as a way of making the social adjustment a little easier for her. Mark and Emily went back to their home in Red Mall for the night, but everyone else was sleeping in what had become Aggie’s home in Green Mall. The home complexes of Red and Green Mall were separated by about 13.5 kilometers of underground spiral and 4.2 kilometers of straight-line surface distance. The six women there planned to spend the next day locking down the local segment of Green Mall just as they had for Red. In addition to the extra security, the group thought the work would be therapeutic for Aggie.

Mark turned and looked at the clock, and then waited until he saw the daily jump across the last 53 seconds. Emily was very happy about the jump. Her theory was that perhaps the beings who built the mall were godlike perfectionists, and if they could have made this planet spin exactly like Earth, they would have. And if they didn’t have the power to change a planet’s spin, then they probably didn’t have the power to alter the path of a neutron star. Perhaps this world was a lifeboat after all, and not a zoo.

Mark sighed deeply, finally feeling sleepy. “Nice theory, Emily,” he thought, “but Jada isn’t buying it, not yet anyway. And as for me ... Oh, I don’t know.” He mind wandered. Sunrise tomorrow would be at 8:16 AM and sunset at 3:43 PM, as near as he could figure it. One nice thing about this planet’s orbit, the quick changes certainly made life interesting, and currently the short days provided a lot of time for sleep. Mark’s tired eyes rested on Emily as he drifted off, his mind floating with half-formed dreams of caressing her.

Six days later, midday December 31’st

In the days after meeting Aggie, everyone except Mark, Aggie, and Emily worked full time locking down the first 25 kilometers of each of the six spirals. By 5 PM on the last day of the year, each spiral leg would have 1500 mushroom locks in use, and another 3000 in storage at each of the AM/PM Locksmith stores. Jada made the suggestion of picking a different combination for each spiral, and Emily had the idea of letting the sixth digit of the combination be nine minus the Party number of the spiral, thus eight for Red Mall (Party #1) and five for Green Mall (Party #4). Similarly, the twelfth digit would be two plus the Party number.

The obvious question was, which of the remaining four colors in the Mall went with which Party? Standing on the keystone, the colors in clockwise order were red, white, blue, green, black, and yellow. With their cultural bias of reading left to right, they chose that direction to guess the order of the Parties. Fatima gave a slight shiver when they finished the discussion, commenting that she thought it would be darkly fitting if the frat boys had picked the Black Mall.

Emily had abandoned her idea of hexagonal super-symmetry for the Party placements. The group had spent the entire day on Wednesday the 26^th searching White, Blue, Black, and Yellow Malls near the 828 degree rotation mark, inside and outside arcs, upper and lower levels, absolutely nothing was found. And all four stores looked pristine. If there were Party home complexes above the stores, it appeared none of them had discovered the Mall entrances.

Several members wondered about the morality of locking down the stores in the other spirals, especially near the 828 degree mark. If there were secret entrances they had missed, their lock would prevent a Party from using their spiral of the mall. But Jada pushed hard for a full and symmetric lockdown of all six spirals, and in the end she prevailed. As a compromise, they left notes on dozens of second floors explaining the friendliness of their group and their willingness to share the mall, asking people to just paste a note on the store’s entrance door and ask to be let out.

In their break hour before lunch today, Emily, Aggie, and Mark had done an experiment in the hexagonal walkways surrounding their home at Red Mall. Using laser range-finders from ACE hardware, they had made precise measurements from the centerline positions at each of the six vertices. The number was always the same, 100.00 meters, exactly one hundred meters to within an error of a small fraction of a centimeter.

When combined with earlier measurements of Hex Hall being exactly twenty-four meters to a side, the conclusion seemed inescapable. The environment around them had been designed and constructed in metric units. But that seemed so strange. Why would aliens bother to adopt metric units? Just a coincidence? The issue remained a puzzle.

Time: Monday, December 31, 2018 2:38 PM

“Whoa, Mark! How hot are you making this?!” Aggie shivered as she smelled the spicy stuffing dish Mark was preparing for their end-of-year dinner banquet.

“Yeah, pretty hot I guess. But I thought you Hungarian types liked spicy food.”

Aggie laughed. “That’s true for paprika. But habaneros are in another league entirely.” She playfully bumped Mark away from the stove and took a deep smell of his culinary effort, chopped celery and scallions and spiced bread crumbs sautéed in butter, along with a variety of nuts and dried cranberries and the ultra-finely chopped tiny orange pepper. Aggie delivered her verdict. “Lethal but intriguing.”

Mark grinned. “Well, that’s why it’s a side dish. I wouldn’t stuff the bird with this.” They shared a brief glance and then both turned away blushing. “Thanks for all your help, Aggie, giving up your break hour like this. I don’t think the turkey would even be in the oven if you weren’t here.”

She grinned and tried to make a joke. “Oh, don’t thank me. I was looking forward to this. It’s a great break from being citizen ID-Tag 117 earning my Bachelor of Janitor Arts.” Aggie paused and sighed. “You and Emily seem so comfortable with the interface, but it still gives me the creeps.” She glanced out the kitchen’s western windows to the deep shadows in the sand park. “Just twenty minutes till sunset, right?”

Mark glanced at the clock. “Today? Yeah.”

Aggie added thoughtfully. “Six hours of light a day now, and the decrease isn’t slowing down. Want to give me an early clue of what the new calendar will look like?”

Mark gave a small chuckle and shook his head no. “Jada would never forgive me if I did that.”

“Oh, I won’t tell her.” Aggie raised her eyebrows and joked in a whisper, “I trained in Hungary as a spy. You can be assured of my secrecy.”

Mark howled with laughter. “Aggie, that makes no sense!”

“It doesn’t?” she replied with fake innocence.

Mark continued to chuckle as he stirred the stuffing. “As a matter of fact, I do trust you Aggie, but that’s not the point.”

She brushed against him again and asked playfully, “So what is the point?”

“That I find it impossible to keep any secrets from Jada, anything at all.” Mark turned to smile at Aggie. Their eyes locked.

“Sure you won’t tell me?” thought Aggie. “I’ll let you take me, any way you want.” She rocked her hips slightly back and forth, an open invitation for Mark to mount her.

“Aggie!” Mark thought, and then they both blushed and turned away, breaking the eye contact.

“My God! I can’t believe I just suggested that,” whispered Aggie. She then hiccupped and struggled to speak. “Apologies, Mark.”

They shared a chaste affectionate hug. Mark shivered. “It’s that damn drug, the one we got when we came here. We’ve all noticed the effect. I don’t know...”