Chapter 21

The next morning.

Time: Thursday, January 10, 2019 11:00 AM

Mark finally looked up from his terminal as his two-hour lesson ended. He shivered and then smiled at Emily who was standing beside him with a hand on his shoulder. “Wow,” he whispered.

“Yeah...”

Mark frowned as he realized what time it was. “I’m surprised the group isn’t back yet.” He picked up his phone and was relieved when Jada answered. Mark asked her where she was.

“Ah, sorry. I guess we should have called in. We’re about three hundred meters from the Black Mall sky bridge. Do you remember the store here called Matrix Security?”

“The one with the diving eagle as a logo? Yeah, vaguely. Why? Did you find something interesting?”

“I’ll say. Wireless surveillance systems, thirty system units and a huge number of audio-visual sensors, maybe hundreds for each system unit. I’ve got some really interesting ideas on how we might use this.”

“Sounds good. Are you about finished?”

“Uh, we’re cleaning out the stock now, storing everything on the second floor of the deli with the sky bridge. We should be finished in another ten minutes or so.”

“Great. Jada, I have operational control of the orbiting telescope. Emily and I getting some fantastic shots of the southern hemisphere on the other side of the planet now. The images are incredible.”

“My gosh. Bravo, Mark!”

“And it gets even better. The telescope is in orbit 500 kilometers above the surface, has an orbital period of 95 minutes. In 56 minutes, it’ll be almost directly overhead, just a few degrees to our south. The clouds have broken up, the sun is shining. We couldn’t ask for a better setup, ultra-high resolution images of everything within fifty kilometers of here.” Mark could hear several of the other team members whoop for joy as they heard him speak. Jada promised to hurry and then she closed the connection.

The group spent the next hour gasping and admiring the beauty of the planet, switching between real-time observations and the vast memory stores of the orbital platform. Their impression was of a lush world both similar and profoundly different than Earth. The data were showing them a world with a radius 1% less than Earth’s and considerably more water. There was no frozen icecap at either pole, and the ocean coverage was 76% of the planet, compared to 71% for Earth.

Over 96% of the land area of the world was concentrated in eight isolated continents, three in the northern hemisphere, four in the south, and the largest continent, one incredible continent with the land mass slightly over thirty million square kilometers. It was a uniform 700 to 800 kilometers wide and completely circumnavigated the globe at the equator, dividing the world’s two great oceans into separate bodies of water. One hundred percent of the world’s equator was over land, high above sea level along the spine of a great equatorial mountain range. The mountains were often above 8000 meters, never quite as high as Mt. Everest on Earth but rivaling its height for tens of thousands of kilometers. The group decided to name the continent Africa.

The other seven continents were oriented in an unusually uniform east-west orientation, with shapes that varied from oval to cigar. The continent they were on was vast, the size of Russia on Earth and the largest continent in the northern hemisphere. They eagerly counted down the last minutes before they would get a detailed orbital view of their home.

“The global dominance of east-west orientation,” Jada commented. “This is so different than Earth! What could make the tectonic forces align like this?”

Aggie shook her head in wonder. “To answer that would be a lifetime of study. Do you notice there are no deserts in Africa? The mountains must be drawing great quantities of moist air from both oceans. Look at all the rivers! The place must be a paradise!”

Ashley added as an afterthought. “Don’t forget there was a nasty snake in paradise.”

And then their home complex was displayed before them, the great labyrinth completely revealed by the low noontime sun. All speech stopped as they tried to absorb the implications of what they were seeing.

“Was all that recorded, Mark?” Emily whispered at last.

“Oh yeah, wouldn’t miss it,” he mumbled back. Mark had also written some software to search for hexagons with a central circular stairwell dome connected by a linear building to a hexagonal vertex, and the code had overlaid six spots on the map before them with blinking red icons. “My gosh, no wonder we never found the other four party locations. We’ve been looking in the wrong places!”

Five hours later.

Time: Thursday, January 10, 2019 5:03 PM

Mark wandered into the multimedia room after finishing his day’s lesson with the interface. He saw Emily, Fatima, and Hannah working quietly with one of the best satellite images of their home complex projected on the huge TV screen. Emily was working on a new laptop she picked up at the Mall a week ago. She looked up and smiled as he walked over. “How was the rest of your class?”

“Oh, just fine. The orbital platform has very broad spectrum capabilities. I was learning how to use the spectrum analyzer. Solar UV is a small fraction of what it was on Earth. Sun screen lotion might be a thing of the past.”

Emily smiled. “That’s good. I never liked the stuff anyway.”

Hannah looked at Mark curiously. “But we got what we want. Why are you still going through the motions of studying astronomy?”

Mark grinned. “Yeah, I know. It’s a little difficult to explain. Somehow I’d be embarrassed if I were too flagrant about my ulterior motives. I know this sounds weird, but I think the interface trusts me, and I don’t want to betray it. And besides, astronomy is fun! I’m enjoying my lessons immensely.” Mark looked around the room. “Are the other folks upstairs?”

Emily shook her head. “I don’t think so. They’re setting up two surveillance systems at the sky bridges of Black and Blue Malls. Mark, take a look at this.” She zoomed in on the TV display until a great hexagonal maze filled the screen. She began to summarize her analysis of their great enclosure.

“The sides of the hexagon are twenty-six kilometers each, a total of over 878 square kilometers of enclosed space. See the green along all the external edging, and again with the six interior partitions? I’m guessing they represent long stretches of the thorn plant, isolating the Parties from reaching each other on the surface. The Malls are our only way to make contact with each other.”

Mark sighed. “So this really is a prison?”

“You think so?” ask Fatima. “My impression was one of giving the different Party groups some breathing time to get their bearings before they would have to interact with the other teams. I think having multiple teams like this increases the chances of our species’ survival immensely.” She paused for a moment and added, “Mark, how difficult would it be to make a hot air balloon and travel above the walls?”

Hannah turned and looked at Fatima. “We have lots of brisk winds here. Getting out might be easy within a year, but how would we get back? We’d be on our own, on a continent of an unknown planet with no idea of what the dangers were.”

Fatima nodded. “I know. We’re all urban dwellers. Defending ourselves against a wilderness, building our own shelters, growing our own food, none of us have the skill sets.”

Emily brought the conversation back to the results of her work, typing in a command to highlight the six Party locations. Together the six points formed the shape of a great lopsided cross. There were four Parties connected by a line tilted eighteen degrees to the left of vertical on the top. The line also intersected the underground Hex Hall in the exact center of the great complex. Two more Parties were to the far east and west, on an orthogonal line that also intersected Hex Hall. Emily had been partially correct in her guess that there would be a super symmetry in the placement of the Parties, but it was not the symmetry she had been expecting.

Red and Green Malls, Parties #1 and #4, It’s My Party and I Can See Clearly Now, were the two interior Parties on the tilted north-south axis. They were 2.06 straight-line kilometers and 6.46 spiral kilometers (the 828 degree mark) from Hex Hall. Party #1 was on the southernmost tip of the local revolution of its spiral, and Party #4 was on the northernmost tip of its spiral.

The Party locations for Black and White Malls were also situated on the northernmost and southernmost arcs of their spirals, but much further out. They were both at the 1248 degree mark of the 1260 degree spirals, 70.1 kilometers out along the 75.1 kilometer spiral and 21.3 kilometers in a straight-line distance from Hex Hall. They were very near the edges of the great complex, only 1.7 kilometers away from the great exterior hexagon walls with their terrifying guardian plants.

The areas around the home complexes of Black and White Malls were unusual in other ways too. The two homes were at the tips of two large diamond-shaped arrays of hexagons, the homes at one tip and the other at the inner barrier of the great perimeter wall. The diamond arrays were composed of forty-nine hexagons each, and were surrounded by more than two kilometers of open fields on three sides and the perimeter wall on the other.

The Party locations for Yellow and Blue Malls were at the maximum east and west directions of the last loops of their spirals, at the 1218 degree mark (59.3 spiral kilometers) and 18.0 straight-line kilometers from Hex Hall.

“This map has such high resolution,” concluded Emily, “that we know exactly which store to search for in each spiral. All we have to do is count the distance. You can tell from the exact placements of the six stairwells. Red, Black, and Blue Malls are entered on the inside arc, and the other three Party Malls on the outside arc. The images line up perfectly with the geometry.”

“Emily,” prodded Hannah, “tell him about the end stores.”

“Oh yeah. This is interesting. Assuming all the spirals are identical, the six terminal stores are all outside the complex perimeter walls. The end of the Red Mall corridor is 22.793 kilometers due east of Hex Hall, 276 meters east of the eastern wall of the primary hexagon.”

Mark nodded in silence and stared for a long moment at the image. “Hilly forest, can’t say I can see anything in particular at the site.”

Emily sighed. “Yeah. It is an intriguing possibility, thinking we could tunnel up sixteen meters from one of the terminal stores and leave this place. Somehow though, I think getting through the store ceiling will be very difficult. The building materials here are incredibly tough.”

Mark shrugged. “And where would we go once we got out? I don’t see leaving as a high priority.” He sat down and helped with the image processing until the rest of the team returned for dinner.

Time: Friday morning, January 11, 2019

Today was the first day they tried to think of Friday as the first day of the week, and also the day set aside for rest and reflection and prayer. The interface had accepted without complaint Mark’s request to skip his lessons on Fridays. And so the whole group had met after their morning showers but before their usual breakfast time, in a meeting Fatima suggested they call The Hour of Common Prayer. Somehow the name seemed to fit, even though people were mostly discussing their hopes and fears rather than formally praying. They all agreed they got a lot out of the meeting and decided to try it again next Friday.

But the urge to explore could not be denied, and after breakfast they quickly got their bikes from Blazo’s Art Gallery and then jumped again to the terminal store of White Mall, a huge food store called the Dutch Market which looked as if it held enough fine chocolate to last a thousand years. Ashley who was part Dutch fell in love with the place and offered to make appelflappen for their upcoming celebration of the winter solstice.

But their current mission here had a more serious objective. According to the orbital images, the home Party location of White Mall was just five kilometers away. Madison and Ashley stayed at the Dutch Market to set up a surveillance system while the other six began to bike down the spiral. They had no side cars and were taking the ride slowly, examining the locked stores as they passed. They reached their destination shortly before 9:30 AM. According to their calculations, the store was less than nine kilometers northeast of the southern vertex of the great complex.

“Notice how the door flows and seals itself around the mushroom?” Jada asked as she spun the tumblers on the lock.

Mark nodded. “Yes, some sort of plastic flow, what a technology. How long does it take?”

“It starts about a minute after the mushroom snaps and locks, finishes a few minutes later. Watch this.” Jada completed the combination and the door flowed back at once, allowing the mushroom to be extracted easily. She then reached in and pushed the button to open the door.

It was unfortunately a large store, another ACE Hardware running sixty meters in length along the outside arc of the spiral. That meant with two floors they had a full hundred and twenty meters of back wall to search. From her calculations Emily thought the back entrance would be about twenty meters from the wall closest to the Dutch Market and at first they concentrated their search there. But nothing was found on either floor. The team spent the better part of an hour methodically pressing every square centimeter along the back wall.