Chapter 23

Later that evening.

Time: Tuesday, January 15, 2019 8:48 PM

At Aggie’s suggestion, part of the group spent the early evening converting the second floor of Black Mall’s Modern Coin Superstore into a conference room, clearing a massive wooden display table for their use and jumping in a dozen plush leather chairs from the terminal store of Green Mall, a spacious suite of meeting rooms labeled the Hilton Executive Conference Center. They were all sitting around waiting for Fatima to start the meeting. Almost everyone’s eyes were on the massive table before them. The polished wood gleamed at them, and the deep reddish brown hues were very beautiful. Mark thought it might be Hawaiian Koa, assuming it was an Earth wood.

The search for the store of Yellow Mall’s home complex had been a bit of a disappointment. After a bit of discussion, Mark and Jada had changed their plans and traveled there from Yellow Mall’s sky-bridge rather than its terminal store. The calculated entrance to the Mall’s home complex was at spiral-mark 59,326 meters, at the easternmost edge of its spiral. It was only an extra six kilometers to travel from the sky-bridge, and it gave them the opportunity to install a sensor network as they went.

The entrance to the home complex was found easily enough, along the back wall of a produce store called The Original Farmer’s Market. Akiko seemed very happy to have been the one to find the secret latch shortly after 7 PM. And as expected, Yellow Brick’s home complex was cold and deserted. But the real disappointment was when they opened the local library elevator.

The display was dark. The original members of Party #6 must have explored their home complex before abandoning it. After an hour of searching, they noticed the temperature of the rooms rising as the local interface cancelled the deserted status of the complex.

The group decided to continue biking to Yellow Brick’s terminal location, installing the last three kilometers (four sensor pairs) of the sky-bridge sensor network and overlapping it with a new network of sixteen sensor pairs that would be based at Eastern Mountain Sports, Yellow Mall’s terminal store. They managed to jump home with just a few minutes to grab a bite to eat.

Shortly after 9 PM, Fatima started their meeting in the conference center. With their work of mall lockdown now complete, the primary topic of conversation was what to do next. The discussion quickly migrated to the new knowledge they had on population profiles.

Madison was aghast. “This is more horrible than I imagined. There are seventeen insane guys at Party #5, and twenty-one guys total. So besides you Mark, there are at most three decent guys left, and what, a hundred and four women?”

Toshi spoke up. “Excuse me, but perhaps you are being too quick to condemn all the men at Party #5. I think perhaps two of the compadres would welcome the opportunity to abandon the horror they have created.”

Ann looked puzzled. “Are you thinking of the Bambino? He struck me as simply timid, not truly remorseful.”

Toshi shook her head. “I never interacted with Bambino. I was thinking of Chico, and perhaps his close friend Toro.”

Ann shook her head in amazement. “Toro I might agree with. But Chico?! Toshi, you’re being too kind.”

Toshi stared back at Ann and replied, “I was raped more than anybody. It is my right to be too kind.”

Fatima tried to bring the group back to the topic under discussion. “The point is that out of the original group of people who came here, we think that eight women and sixteen men have died. This is a horrific loss, and we have to think if there’s anything we can do to prevent it from getting worse. Party #6, nine men and nine women, what happened to them?”

Emily frowned. “Well, from what we know now, at least six of those men must have died.” She sighed. “I think I agree with Fatima. We can’t wait for more daylight to start searching for them. Their lives are too precious.”

Kiyoko nodded and asked, “So we’re finished with the malls for now?”

“I think so. If everybody is agreeable, our next phase should be on the surface. As long as Party #5 never gets access to a working elevator, we have them boxed in. And except for their local strip, they will find the mall to be endless kilometers of absolute desert.”

Jada shook her head at Emily’s optimism. “Somehow I think our showdown with 2525 will occur sooner rather than later. We can’t just focus on surface exploration and rescue. We need a contingency plan if 2525 breaks out of their pen.”

Emily would not surrender the point. “How could they do that?”

“There’s probably a way. Remember Fatima thinks they wrote down all six original Party access codes. We’ve changed the codes for It’s My Party and I Can See Clearly Now, but Party’s 2, 3, and 6 are still vulnerable.”

Emily shook her head. “But they can’t get a working elevator in their position.”

“Sure they can. They can train a Section Five Janitor. If you have an argument that says they can’t do that, let’s hear it.”

“Excuse me,” said Kiyoko, turning to Jada, “but perhaps I can answer. While you were installing the sensors on Yellow Brick, Emily helped me apply to be the Section Five Janitor. It’s a little uncertain, but we think there can only be one training candidate for the job.”

Jada’s eyebrows went up and she finally cracked a smile. “Really? That’s great news. Good thinking guys. But I still feel we can’t ignore 2525. We need contingency plans, and we need them now. Don’t put this off!”

Ann spoke up. “If I can add my two cents, I have never heard of anyone in Party Five exploring the interface and the employment options as you have. But Uno is a clever man. Do not underestimate him. He is quite capable of learning from his mistakes. The locked stores down in Black Mall have shown him he has an adversary. He will be plotting both a defense and an offense.”

Madison looked around at her team members. “What are we saying? Is there no alternative to war?” She turned to the four Japanese women and blushed. “Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not condoning their behavior. But our numbers are so few. Can we afford a war? We might be talking about our own extinction here.”

Hannah frowned. “Oh, I don’t know, Maddy. Perhaps it’s better to keep our dignity and become extinct. I don’t want to devolve into ... Mark?”

“Yeah?”

“What do you think? You and that frat guy went into mortal combat the second you saw each other. Was there no other option?”

Mark grimaced. “None at all. I tried to reason with the guy first. Stanley would have none of it.”

Jada stared at her lover. “What? No you didn’t. I was right behind you. I saw everything. You threw a spike the instant you saw him. You were lightning fast. I’m not criticizing, but how did you know you had to attack?”

“Hey, wait a minute,” said Toshi. “Mark, how did you know his name was Stanley? We were all ordered to call him Santos. Stanley is probably a good guess, but how did you know?”

Mark looked deeply troubled. “He told me his name.” Mark stared back at Jada staring at him. “Didn’t he?”

Jada shook her head vigorously. “Mark, what are you talking about? There was no conversation.”

“What? Yes there was.”

“Impossible! You had no time for one!” Jada would not let the issue go. “Mark, describe exactly what you thought your battle was like.”

“Yeah, okay. I remember riding up to the store. I saw the woman named Carol first. We were both shocked to see each other. She tried to warn me to go back, but then Stanley came on the scene before I could react.” Mark paused as he tried to collect his thoughts.

“Okay. So then you and Stanley saw each other. What happened next?”

“He went berserk, attacked me without hesitation. I knew that backing off against a pistol would have been suicidal. I had to fight.”

“I’m not criticizing your decision Mark, far from it. Can you describe your battle?”

“Well...” Mark looked troubled. “It happened so fast, it’s a little hard to remember. Everything was happening so fast! Stanley was cursing me with some very childish language and he started bringing up his gun to fire.”

Ashley broke into the conversation. “How did you know he was going to fire? I mean, maybe he just wanted to cover you.”

Mark shook his head. “No. He wanted to fire for certain. I could see it in his eyes.”

Jada asked in a whisper, “You were watching his eyes?”

“Of course. That rule was drilled into me from my earliest sparring lessons, always watch eyes. Everything else, hands, feet, punches, blocks, kicks, you pick up with your peripheral vision. You’d be amazed how often an opponent will telegraph his intentions with his eyes.”

“Mark, look at my eyes, right now.”

“Huh? Okay.” Jada and Mark locked eyes.

“I love you,” thought Jada.

“I know. Flower of my heart, I love you back,” Mark thought in reply.

“I can’t believe how beautiful you think I am,” thought Jada. “I can see your desire so clearly, such eagerness, such a visual fixation on my body. You’ve been very patient to wait for me. And Mark, do you notice that we’re not speaking?”

“Huh?!” Mark blinked and gasped and then hiccupped, breaking the eye contact. “What the hell just happened?!”

The next hour was spent in experimentation, the original agenda of the meeting abandoned. They found two general rules that seemed to describe the effect. The first was that the maximum duration of the thought sharing with the eye contact seemed to scale with how well the two people knew each other, and it was Toshi’s conjecture that the key variable was not how well the two people knew each other, but how deeply they trusted each other.

They also observed the fascinating phenomenon of accelerated time. Perceived elapsed time while thought sharing always seemed much greater than actual elapsed time. Typical perceived estimates for the speedup ranged from a factor of three to five, and there was general agreement that emotional context enhanced the speed of the sharing. Mark made a guess that his extreme emotional encounter with Stanley might have been a factor of twenty.

“I don’t think it’s a miracle,” said Fatima as they were finishing the experiments. “It seems too predictable, too repeatable, too physical. But telepathy?! Mark, you’re the person with the most physics training here. Any idea how this might be possible?”

“Uh, one or two guesses maybe. The cells in the human retina are considered to be part of the brain. When we’re locking eyes with each other, we have light-sensitive areas of two different brains in direct optical contact with each other. Somehow the connection is acting like a bridge for the separate thoughts.”