Chapter 59

Time: Saturday, March 2, 2019 10:53 PM

“Such decadence!” Oona thought with a big grinning smile. It was her second bath of the day and this one was sheer heaven, naked and submerged up to her neck in a hot bubbly Jacuzzi. It was three hours after linear sunset and she had turned the bathroom’s lights to super low and the ceiling to 100% transparency. A full moon was directly overhead and it was bathing the room in beautiful silver light.

Oona would normally be asleep this time of night unless she was on guard duty. But the sensual pleasure of this bath was irresistible. Two months of wilderness dirt had finally been separated from her body. Oona wiggled her toes and glanced at a clock in the dimness. “Ah, just another few minutes”, she thought. She turned off the water jets and then floated in the still water, arms and legs stretched out. “It feels so nice to be pampered.” She floated and gazed up at the familiar image of Earth’s moon.

It was all fake of course, but damn, it looked good! Oona didn’t think she could tell the difference even with a telescope. But the orbital track of the linear sun’s silver cousin was absurd. The fake moon always tracked the centerline at the top of the cylindrical sky, moving from south to due north, perfectly perpendicular to the east-to-west orbit of the linear sun. And the phases of the moon were random, one night to the next. Oona never knew what to expect.

If it came at all, and it did most nights, the moon would always make its appearance at the southernmost tip of the cylindrical sky within three hours of linear sunset and then float north at the pace of a fast walk. The moon would take exactly six hours to move across the forty-six-kilometer length of sky. Tonight a full moon had risen right at sunset and now was directly overhead. The light inside the bathroom was easily bright enough to read a book.

“Jada’s home really is magical,” Oona thought. “Not true magic, everything here is based on science, I know, but still...” Each of the eighteen rooms on the upper level had individual controls for controlling the transparency of the ceiling, and the extreme setting Oona had chosen for the bathroom now had made the ceiling absolutely disappear. It was still there of course. Their beautiful home was delightfully warm. But the ceiling was completely invisible.

There were twenty ceiling controls in all, all on the upper level, one for each of the eighteen upper rooms, one for the corridor loop between the twelve bedrooms on the outer part of the hexagonal building and the six public rooms towards the core, and then finally one control for the great core itself, a grand hexagonal sunken courtyard eight meters high and 8.83 meters in length for each of the six sides. Oona floated and remembered Madison’s explanation how that distance was determined by the outside hexagonal side length of twenty-four meters dropping a perfect factor of e.

So much information! The island home complex was positioned exactly below and was exactly the same size as a place called Hex Hall that was a couple hundred meters above the fake moon Oona was gazing at now. There were eighteen rooms in the living area of this wonderful home, each having generous four-meter ceilings and a more-than-ample sixty square meters of area. There were twelve bedrooms ringing the outer perimeter, and then six public rooms on the inside, a recreation room, a kitchen, a lounge, a library, a hospital area, and finally this perfect bathroom.

Each of the twelve bedrooms had a door leading to the outside gardens and a door to the central corridor. Both doors were located near the radial partition wall near the central of the hexagonal faces (the radial walls that were opposite the radial walls at the vertex locations). Each of the six public rooms had a single entrance, a door to the encircling corridor at the center of their outward face. The inward faces overlooked the stone courtyard four meters below ground level, where six bands of ribbon stone completed exactly three revolutions in a exponential spiral. Madison had told Oona and Abit it was a subset of Hex Hall above, where the colored ribbons make 3.5 revolutions.

And the six colored bands led to six underground stores, reachable through stairs connecting the upper-level gym area with a CVS Pharmacy below. Each of the six stores had more than 200 square meters of floor area and was brimming with goods, packed all the way up to their four-meter ceiling. Besides the pharmacy, there was an Eastern Mountain Sports clothing store, an Ace Hardware store, and three different food stores. With their strange cabinets that could defy the passage of time, the stores offered enough provisions to last their group a lifetime.

And perhaps they would have to. Jada’s group was extremely distressed to learn the results of Party #2’s exploration of Wobanakik. After two months of searching, no trace of an exit had been found, and they had searched the northern end intensively, the Black Mall area Jada had hoped would be a prime spot to find a way out of here. Jada’s group had stunned the two Native Americans with the news of Earth’s destruction, but Oona and Abit had shocked them back as they described how they might all be forced to live in Wobanakik for the rest of their lives.

Time: Saturday, March 2, 2019 11:53 PM

Tom was lying on the cave floor trying to get some sleep. The floor wasn’t quite as cold as the night air maybe, but it was still chilly. As he drifted in a dream, Tom wondered if the floor was being heated a bit from below. The nearby fields of tasty fruits and vegetables certainly had dirt warmer than Tom would have expected. The air was cold through ... Cold...

A hand touched his shoulder. Tom came up from his doze and opened his eyes. Carla was kneeling beside him and she whispered, “I thought I saw you shivering. Your blanket has fallen off. Do you want some company? Not for sex, just for warmth.”

Tom looked around and noticed all the other women were sleeping in pairs or triplets. He nodded happily and a moment later Carla lay curled and butting back into him. Tom held her with his arm around her waist. Carla gave a deep contented sigh and started to fall asleep almost immediately. “Full moon tonight,” she whispered drowsily. “Another two hours it’ll be here ... overhead ... very bright, then poof, all gone ... Hmmm...”

Tom kissed the back of her sleepy head in reply. It had been a very busy evening. The joy created by their arrival at base camp had evaporated when Tom explained how Earth had met its fate. People were in shock, filled with grief over the deaths of all their loved ones. Tom debated furiously with himself whether to mention the gift of mind linking, and then decided to do it.