Chapter 49

Five days later.

Time: Thursday, February 14, 2019 4:45 AM

Fatima shivered and her eyes blinked open at the end of a very strange dream. She glanced at the clock. It was three hours before sunrise and one hour before she wanted to get up. Was it worth while trying to coax her mind back into an extra hour of sleep? She thought for a moment trying to capture the memory her dream. Fatima had been a pre-teen again, back home in Syria before the uprisings, before ISIS. Her home was a hydroponics farm, her family growing barley, tomatoes, onions, and melons commercially and figs for their own use.

But in her dream her family was growing pumpkins, and in a corner of the farm one pumpkin in particular had grown to be monstrously large. Surprisingly no one else in her family seemed to care, and as the dream progressed the pumpkin started talking to Fatima when no one else was around.

Did she really want to go back into that dream? Fatima decided no. Just before she woke, she had discovered that the pumpkin had been lying to her. So instead she lay there in the silent darkness and thought about her life. It was over four and a half years now. The family decision to flee had occurred during a hellishly hot summer in mid RamaDHann of 1435 A.H. Fatima had just turned eighteen wound up spending the next year in three different refugee camps before getting the opportunity to immigrate to the United States with her elder brother. Fatima sighed over the memories of coming to the University of Vermont in the fall of 2015. After the dryness of Syria and the refugee camps in Turkey, the lush lakeside country around Burlington seemed like Paradise.

And who could have foreseen the end of the world? All the nationalism, the religious extremism, the never-ending focus on political factions and tribes, in the end it had all been so pointless. Such a waste, Fatima thought as she sat up in her huge bed. Such a waste of life, such a profound rejection of the gift.

Fatima was in the home complex of Yellow Mall, and today would be her first away-mission as leader of Team-6. Emily had stopped by last night and dropped off one of the three priceless Leophones. Jada in the underground world had the second, and Mark would have the third today. Mark was the leader of Team-3 and he would be making the first attempt to explore the surface area of Blue Mall today with Cassidy, Paige, and Whitney.

“Such a world,” Fatima thought with a frown. “We had such an opportunity to have a completely new beginning. What was there to stop us? But as soon as the immediate threat from Black Mall was eliminated, what did we do?” Fatima closed her eyes and dropped into prayer. “All the old prejudices and desires to polarize ... Merciful Allah, are we doomed to it? Are we chained for eternity to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork?” Fatima asked this prayer not just as the leader of Team-6, but also as the new leader of a group of twenty-five people now called The Society.

The collapse of their old government had started at their group meeting last Sunday night. Jada, Mandy and Tom had already joined Madison to complete Team 2, and they were in the living chambers next to the underground world. They had just finished their first day of a planned three days of practicing with the kayaks. Everyone else was at the Hilton complex at the terminal store of Green Mall.

Mark was completely blindsided by a storm of protest over Toshi’s actions the previous day in the Red Mall hospital area. The majority of the rescued women from Black Mall were complaining that Toshi holding Holly captive in a dream was at least as bad as kidnapping and a gross violation of Holly’s rights to her own thoughts.

Over the Leophone bridge, Jada could not sense the emotional intensity that this issue had raised and she started to defend her sister-wife Toshi. In his heart Mark agreed with Jada, and despite his best effort to mediate, he was quickly sucked into the polarization the issue created. As the meeting progressed his worst fears began to be realized. After Toshi’s actions and lack of punishment, a number of the women had lost trust in Mark as leader, even to the point of voicing doubts whether Mark and his two augmented wives should remain in their society. At this point Jada as Mark’s third wife lost her composure over the bridge and the meeting devolved into a shouting match.

Faster than anyone would have thought possible, their society had walked to the edge of an abyss. Should they split to different societies? How would that work? Who would own which home complexes and the Mall areas below? Mark tried to make a joke that after two days of marriage, he felt as if he were getting entangled in a really nasty divorce. The joke fell flat.

Fatima stepped in with a proposal. She argued that people from unknown parties were dying and it would be both insane and abominably callous to let the issue with Toshi interrupt their rescue activities. Emily and Aggie who up until this point had kept quiet chose this moment to jump in as the leaders of Teams 1 and 4 and strongly affirm Fatima’s point.

The group backed away from the abyss. Teams 1 and 4 would continue with their planned second and third days of exploration of the Red and Green Mall surface areas while Team 2 completed their final two days of kayak training. Teams 3 and 6, in charge of Blue and Yellow Mall surface areas, would continue their preparations for their planned exploration on the 14^th. But they would also work with Team-0 to find a way to keep their society together.

The original plan was to have Teams 1 and 4 (Red and Green Malls) explore in shifts lasting three days, while Teams 3 and 6 (Blue and Yellow Malls) had one-day exploration shifts during the rest day of the other two teams. The reason for the difference was that Emily and Aggie had janitorial authority in their exploration areas, and everyone was expecting them to be able to search their areas much more quickly and completely.

The three days of exploration showed just how extensive the challenges were. The Great Hexagon covered an area of 1756 square kilometers, resulting in almost 300 square kilometers in each of the six segment areas, and exploration was a tediously slow process. The two search teams were entering vast three-dimensional mazes with convoluted underpass, overpass, and underground connections.

There were often two and sometimes three underground levels to the maze, in addition to the ubiquitous two levels above ground. Visibility was often limited to individual hallways while underground, and numerous times progress could be made only through Emily’s or Aggie authority to command access ports to allow their return journey.

The three days of searching yielded many sketches of routes that were then digitized at the home complexes after sunset. Aggie’s team had also found and activated an elevator very near the Green Mall home complex, similar to the outside elevator in the apple orchard of Red Mall. And meanwhile Toshi and Holly informally became the heads of the two political factions. The two were determined to find a compromise.

The break came on Wednesday evening about a half hour before their scheduled group meeting. With the span of one minute, the census counter downticked twice, dropping from 010:092 to 010:090. The deaths renewed the group’s sense of urgency for their search activities, and also drove home the point of how lonely their new world would be if they didn’t find some way to reconcile their differences.

After a surprisingly cordial two hour meeting, they decided to choose for a new leader by secret ballot, and in the second round of voting, Fatima was elected by a large majority. Her term would run until the end of the year, and the new government adopted the U.S. penal code as its rule of law, with the added provision that any forced mind linkage would be considered equivalent to physical assault and rape.

Courts, juries, prisons, rights of the accused, life had been so hectic this past month, no one had appreciated how much of the needed formalism of their life on Earth had disappeared. All twenty-five members pledged allegiance to the new rule of law, and at the end of the meeting the group applauded when Toshi and Holly embraced in genuine affection for each other. Their society had walked to the edge of a cliff, but had rejected the last lethal step.

Fatima sat up in bed and shook the thoughts from her head. Today’s mission in the area everyone called Yellow Brick would require her full attention. Their first priority of course was search and rescue. Party #6 had left Earth with a treasure trove of nine men and nine women, but with the census counter currently reading 010:090, at least seven and perhaps all of those men had died. And from Emily’s log of the census, a number of the deaths had occurred very soon after Stairway To Heaven had arrived at their home complex on December 21^st. What tragedy did they endure?

Their home at Yellow Brick was less than six kilometers from the eastern face of the Great Hexagon, and it was the most isolated of their home bases. It was their only complex where both the lounge and library elevators were inactive. Their theory was that Party #6 explored the first-level and opened the library elevator. Unfortunately they didn’t leave any record of the access code it would have displayed, but at the time, how could they possibly realize its significance?

Regardless, the quickest way now to get here was from the Eastern Mountain Sports store at the end of Yellow Brick Road. Yellow Brick’s home complex was at spiral mark 59,326, so it was almost a sixteen kilometer bike ride to get here. Fatima was extremely grateful to Lynn and Akiko for getting the communications network up with the library consoles, otherwise their Leophone would be their only way of communicating with the rest of their group.

Fatima had left her bedroom door open, and she sensed a person slipping down the hall towards the bathroom. She didn’t see the person directly, but she had trained with her three teammates so closely, somehow she guessed it was Hannah. “A remarkable kid,” thought Fatima. “She was still in High School when all this happened.” Fatima sighed and got up and decided to join Hannah for an early shower.

Meanwhile, thirty-two kilometers to the south-southwest and more than 1500 meters below ground, Jada’s expedition was just taking off from the shore of the northern lake. It was still before 5 AM, but there was already a hint of day to come in the faint grayness of the eastern cylindrical sky, providing adequate light to hike down from their new home embedded in the northern wall. One of their most fortunate discoveries three days ago was finding a boat house and dock at the end of the short steep forest path leading down to the lake.

The boat house was an empty rectangular box, but it was large enough to shelter their six kayaks. It could even be locked. Its door had the same simple twenty-key access code as the door from their home base. The code was clearly displayed, and anyone wanting access simply had to enter the code within one-minute without mistakes, otherwise the lock would beep and a new code displayed.

The existence of the boathouse had simplified the logistics of their training enormously, so much so that they had even discussed setting off on their expedition yesterday rather than today. But yesterday had been the day of a major storm. Their rational minds insisted it was entirely artificial, but the experience of the strong gusty winds, the blowing rain, the thunder and lighting, to the senses it was all deeply real. And under the gloom of the dark clouds, the cylindrical nature of the sky was not too apparent. To the senses, the storm and the forested river world were completely real.

And what an incredibly beautiful and wild world it was. It was a rain forest, but definitely not tropical. Typical temperature ranges for the days they had measured ranges from overnight lows of 5C to 10C, with afternoon highs of 15C to 20C. And in this cool paradise the days were slowly lengthening. It was Maddy’s conjecture that the world represented Earth ecology and was following a 365-day cycle. Perhaps they were at mid-spring of a high northern or southern latitude simulation.

Jada had never kayaked before, but she found the boats fascinating and fell in love with their beauty and functionality. She also experienced first-hand something that Mandy had taught her group in a crash course on kayaking. When paddling up to speed, a transverse bow wave would form a trough and then a second bow wave behind the trough. The stern of the boat also created a wave. If Jada paddled fast enough, the second bow wave would join with the stern wave near the stern and create a very noticeable drag.

Mandy explained that this was a prime reason the longer boats were faster. With more of separation between the bow and stern waves, the longer boats could travel faster before the two waves overlapped. Their group had practiced extensively on Monday and Tuesday, and they all felt confident they could hold a 10 kph speed relative to the water for several hours at least.

Relative to the water ... They were at the headwaters of the Mississippi, the name Madison had given the great river. Mandy estimated it was flowing southward at an average rate of 2 kph, or perhaps a little faster today with all the recent rain. They had fourteen hours of daylight today, and were leaving before dawn. They could easily make the far southern lake area in one day, but it was Jada’s plan to make journey partway down the river and return home by nightfall. She felt she wanted to understand this world better before being fifty kilometers away from the security of their sanctuary.

Mandy had positioned her kayak pointing south down the center channel of the Mississippi. She was moving with the current so that the unmanned kayak she was towing would not bump into her. Behind her tow was Tom who was also towing an extra kayak. To the left of Mandy was Jada, and on her right was Madison. Mandy looked carefully at each one of her pupils and nodded in satisfaction. She couldn’t be more proud of them, especially Jada who had never canoed as a child. Mandy smiled and called out to her leader just as the great morning line of sun began to break on the eastern cylindrical sky. “All set to go then?”