Chapter 35

Time: Sunday, January 27, 2019 9:47 PM

The call could have been from anybody. It could have been Dennis Diebold on the line, calling to gloat as he stood over Mark’s body. But Jada couldn’t stop herself. She whipped open the phone and half shouted, “Mark?!”

“Yes! It works! Hi Jada!”

“Mark!!!”

“So nice to hear your voice!”

Jada could hear joyful cheering in the background. She surmised it was Toshi and Frida. “Mark, I assume you’re all okay! Where are you?!”

“We’re camping out in one of the environmental areas in the great diamond above Black Mall. There are ten different clusters.”

Jada took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down. “Yeah?”

“I’ll give you more details later. I think the clusters are combination wildlife sanctuaries for different Earth ecologies, plus some basic recreational facilities for camping thrown in. Jada, we have so much to tell you, and we finally found a way to charge the Leophone. Call time isn’t an issue. Do you have everybody there with you?”

“No, it’s just me and Emily now. Hang on, I’ll get the others. Lots of new people from Party #5 have joined us. We have a lot to tell you.” Jada threw on her bathrobe and ran off while Emily continued the conversation and carried the phone to the lounge.

Within a few minutes, the entire group had assembled, including all the new members who were living at Green Mall. Mark took the conversation in an unexpected direction.

“First off, the batteries we’ve been taking from the hardware stores. Do not under any circumstances dispose of one down the trash chutes.” Mark was referring to the strange trash chutes in the home complexes and also often seen in the Malls. They seemed to be inky wells of infinite darkness that ate anything. “And don’t try to open up a battery either.”

“Okay,” said Jada. “What would happen if we did?”

“No idea, but I think that would be a really bad idea. Toshi and I have two of the 3.5 volt batteries with us from our white-LED flashlights, you know, the ones that look like fat AA batteries?”

Jada nodded. “Uh huh.”

“Well, we’ve drawn a hundred times the power of what a Lithium-ion battery that size could hold, and they’re still going strong. I don’t know what the heck is inside these things, but I suspect cutting one open could be extremely hazardous.”

“Ah, okay. Is that how you’re powering the Leophone now?”

“Yep. It took a lot of thinking how to do this. The phone charges at 10.5 volts. The two batteries in series only get us to 7.”

Jada thought for a moment. “So how did you boost the voltage?”

Mark laughed. “Yes, that is the question, isn’t it? What a comedy of errors. I had a zinc coated paperclip in my pocket when we got here, and we tried to make a battery with that and some copper from my phone charger and lemon juice.”

“Lemon juice?”

“Yeah. There are lemon trees here. But we just couldn’t get enough current. It was only yesterday when I finally realized that with an inexhaustible source of seven volts, all I needed to do was build a simple DC voltage booster.”

Jada was curious but had almost no practical knowledge of circuits. “How do you do that?”

“All the parts I needed are here. Along the entrance to this cluster, there’s an enormous assortment of amusements. The three of us think this place was designed to be a retreat, a place to come and play and reflect. One on the toy bins held loose electrical components. All I needed was an inductor, a capacitor, a transistor, and a diode. You set up a simple LC resonance bridge, and in the part of the cycle where the transistor is off, the inductor is discharging and boosting the input voltage. Jada, everybody, let me describe what this diamond complex is like.”

Mark spent the next ten minutes describing the pathways in the diamond complex, and then finished with, “Don’t you see? The diamond south of the home complex of White Mall is probably a mirror image of this. And the people of Party #2 would have seen their diamond as the natural pathway back to their cars.”

Jada’s eyes went wide as she realized Mark’s point. The diamond of Black Mall was due north of its home complex. The people at Party #5 had no thought that entering the diamond array of hexagons would get them back to their cars at the southern end of Castle Commonwealth. But White Mall was the mirror setup. Entering the diamond there would have made perfect sense. Indeed, to the east, north, and south, there was more than a two-kilometer buffer of open fields. Heading south into the array was almost certainly what Party #2 had done.

And without mushroom locks, did they get trapped in ecosystems similar to Mark’s? It was certainly worth investigating. A male voice in the Red Mall lounge spoke out. “I did a little exploring in the array above Black Mall, not much but some. I’ll be happy to help search the array at White Mall.”

Emily had already filled Mark and Toshi and Frida in on all the new members of their society. “Is that you. Chico?” asked Toshi.

The man chuckled. “Hi Toshi. Actually, I’ve switched back to Charles, and Toro is back to Tom.”

“Congratulations,” Toshi replied simply.

The conversation continued. Eventually Mark’s group revealed how they had been spending most of their time. “We don’t know if you’ve discovered this yet,” said Frida. “Do you know how to set up a three-person mind link?”

“What?!” Jada said in almost a shout.

“Ah, I see that you haven’t. Have three people who trust each other very well sit facing each other in a tight triangle. Then each person has to stare into the outside eye of the other two people.”

“Are you serious? You don’t get dizzy,” Emily asked, “splitting your vision like that?”

Toshi answered. “No, surprisingly no. Once the three-way link forms, it’s exactly the opposite. You have fantastic stereoscopic vision, peripheral vision covering a full 360 degrees.”

“It was our third day here,” Frida continued, “when we set up our first three-way resonance. The acceleration of subjective time is much more pronounced, a factor of three to twenty when we try in pairs, and as a triplet the factor of twenty is a minimum. And that’s when we’re awake.”

Mark added. “We think when we link-sleep the acceleration increases to more than a hundred.” He saw Frida give him a mildly surprised and amused look after he said this.

There was dead silence in the Red Mall lounge. “This is a lot to take in,” Emily said at last. “You say you can link while you’re asleep?”

Mark replied, “Toshi and I actually did this as a pair, the first night we were together in the Black Mall closet.” He paused for a moment. “It’s a very intimate connection. In dream mode, all the high-level executive defenses of the mind are inactive. The amount of sharing ... it’s difficult to describe.”

“Oh, we should announce one more thing,” said Frida. “Toshi is definitely pregnant. We are certain.”

“Wow Toshi,” said Akiko quietly, “how are you feeling?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she replied. “I am not sorry to be pregnant.”

“Do you know who the father is?” Akiko asked.

“I am,” said Mark happily.

Jada felt as if she’d just been kicked in the stomach. “What?” she whispered.

“What Mark means,” Toshi added hastily, “is that we will be a parental couple. The biological father was Gilberto. Mark and I have discussed this in much detail. We will be father and mother to the child.” She added softly. “In our dreams, it’s a girl.”

Emily was fascinated by all the new knowledge. “Mark, may I ask? Subjectively, how much time has passed for you?”