Chapter 70

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:11 PM

Ricardo’s high-power binoculars had revealed two entrance doors on the northern face of the great line of buildings to the south. They certainly weren’t very common. The two he could see were spaced two kilometers apart. The architecture brought home the alien nature of the design. What a massive fire-code violation to space exits in a great continuous building two kilometers apart. Of course, perhaps it was a different story on the southern side, but somehow Ricardo doubted it.

Well, regardless, they would reach the nearer door in just a few minutes. Ricardo had had a horrible thought when he first sighted the doors twenty minutes ago. He took a long time surveying the doors as Jenaro was recovering from his trip down the slide and getting dressed. Ricardo’s thought was that the entrance doors looked horribly like the doors leading into the southern vertex where Diego was chained. Those doors could only be opened from the inside.

After Jenaro finished dressing, Ricardo called for a ten-minute break to think things over. His team responded well to the down time, taking the opportunity to drink and grab a few bites from their food supply. Ricardo was impressed with how completely he had transformed Jessica. She was very modest in her toileting, walking off a distance and then shielding herself with her parka as she squatted.

When she got back to the group, Ricardo decided it was time to move on to the critical test of the doors. The nearer door was less than a kilometer away. Ricardo glanced at his watch as they resumed their journey. It was five minutes after noontime, and they were hiking up a slight incline through open fields of damp sea-green grass.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:12:03 PM

“One minute to reset,” Carla called out. Yesterday she had wondered why Tom had ordered that everyone be inside now, but then he linked with her and shared his memories of some private conversations he had while linking with Lynn. Lynn had been truly nervous about what she was trying to do.

Her impressions of the control systems here at the Great Hexagon were that they were so difficult to understand partially because they were so interconnected. Incredible optimization, she had thought. It reminded her of biological optimization, cardio systems and skeletal systems and immune systems and lymph systems and neural systems all coming together to make one body. True, there were specific organs for specific functions, but there was also fantastic interdependence at the cellular level, integration to a degree that human engineers had never dared approach.

But Lynn thought the builders of their current home had no such inhibitions. Power systems, communications systems, elevator transport systems, environmental systems, servo maintenance systems, security systems, structural systems, Lynn thought all the control systems were as tightly woven together as the threads in her blouse. And here Carla was now at the entrance rooms, waiting for Lynn to cut the cloth. Carla found it difficult to remain calm as the final seconds of the countdown disappeared.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:13:03 PM

“And execute!” Lynn cried out as she typed the final keystroke for system reset. There were a dozen people around her in the library in the northwest segment of their home hexagon on the central island. The roof above them was set at full transparency, and a beautiful sunny day was providing more than ample light for the room. An instant after she typed the keystroke, the monitor in front of Lynn suddenly lost power, presenting her with a dark screen.

For several seconds nobody said anything. There was a lot of linking as random pairs of women asking each other their opinion of what was going on. It was Mandy who first noticed the other change in the room. She was linked to Charles at the time when the realization hit her. She abruptly broke her link and called out to everybody, “My God! The room! The courtyard! Look at the shadows!”

It had been twenty seconds since system reset, and in that time the linear sun had drifted to its 4 PM position. Afternoon shadows were rapidly sweeping the library floor and the courtyard at the core of the hexagon. As everyone stared in amazement, the sun continued its rapid descent. Madison tried to time it but when she looked at her digital watch, all she saw was a dead display. So she looked up and tried to make a rough estimate by counting seconds in her mind.

“One sweet potato, two sweet potato, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, uh, four sweet potato,...” She clicked off the seconds in her mind as she watched the visible drift of the sun. “Maybe an hour every five seconds,” she concluded after she watched the sun drift from 5 PM to 6 PM, “a day every two minutes. Imagine that!” Sunset occurred about ten seconds after Madison stopped counting, and after a couple of seconds of twilight, the room was plunged into darkness.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:13:43 PM

Tom, Carla, Suvarna, and Tajana had their noses pushed up against the bedroom window. They were all staring at the sky in amazement. About one second before sunset, an image of a crescent moon appeared in the sky directly overhead and then shot like a bullet north along the long axis of the sky.

Desperate to make some sanity of the scene before them, Tajana tried to estimate the moon’s apparent speed, and came up with a velocity on the order of one kilometer per second. For a moment she had a truly horrible thought that time itself might have speeded up in Wobanakik, but as she watched the sway of the branches in some trees a short distance below, she thought the motion looked normal.

Meanwhile Suvarna called out in the darkness, “I think room air conditioning is out. I can’t feel any flow by the vents.”

“How about the door?” Tom called back. It was now twenty-five seconds past sunset, and the moon looked as if it were already past the central island, far too distant to provide much light at all at their location. Their eyes had not yet completely adjusted to the darkness, and Tom heard Tajana feeling her way to the door.

“The door’s open. Want me to check the door to the outside?”

“Hold up, Tajana. Let’s all go together.” Tom tried to get a light both from the flashlight he was carrying and from the Leophone he had traded with Madison. They were both dead. He really hated being cut off in the dark like this, but before he could voice his frustrations, a rapid increase of red light appeared along the eastern edge of the sky, followed by the bursting light of linear sunrise. The length of Wobanakik was again bathed in sunshine, but the sun line was maintaining the same breakneck pace as before. Tom asked everybody to accompany him to the main entrance door while they could still see.

Time: April 1, 2019 12:15:03 PM

Two minutes after system reset, Mark discovered that his Leophone could provide a bit of light if he popped it out of its power cradle. Over the last minute, Fatima had restored a semblance of order to their meeting room, and people were just beginning to realize how cut off they were here at the terminal Hilton at Green Mall. If the power stayed out, could they possibly find their way to the Barnes & Nobel that was Green Mall’s exit to the surface? The damn bookstore was almost seventy spiral kilometers away and they might have to grope the way there in pitch blackness. And even assuming the doors and the mushroom locks still worked after the power outage, how could they spin the right combination on the lock if they couldn’t see what they were doing?

“Yo Ashley!” Mark called out.

“Yo Mark!” she replied from across the room. “Is that you with the light?”

“Yep. Try your Leophone.”

“I already have. It’s dead.”

“Try popping it out of the power cradle.”

“Okay ... Yes! Thanks Mark.”

The two phones provided only a tiny amount of light for the conference room, but after two minutes of utter darkness, it was enough for people to make out the shapes of their companions. Fatima called out, “Mark, how come your two Leophones are working but the rest are not?” As of this morning, their society had fifteen of the phones, including the working and non-working ones down at Wobanakik, and there were a total of eleven in the conference room.

Mark called back. “The same reason Ashley and I need power cradles to keep our phones charged. We have two of the original Leophones. I think Jada has the third, Maddy’s old phone. Don’t you see? Our old phones have Earth batteries.”

“Ah, right,” replied Fatima. She paused for a second. “You couldn’t call Maddy’s phone, could you?”

“No. The walkie-talkie ability is very short range. I’m guessing I could call Ashley’s phone, but I don’t want to drain our batteries.”

“Right. Mark, Ashley, please shut off your phones now. We won’t require light to discuss what to do next.” A few seconds later in absolute blackness, Fatima asked for opinions for how to proceed.

Time: April 1, 2019 12:15:35 PM, reset plus 00:02:32

After two minutes of whimpering in the darkness, Alfonso finally realized the chains around his ankles were no longer locked. With trembling hands, he felt the cuffs open when he poked them.

This morning had been the day of his abandonment, and he was so depressed he had been considering suicide, and then the lights went out. As he had been for many nights in a row now, Alfonso was chained and lying on a mattress directly under the overhead door at the mall entrance to Jacob’s Bar and Grill. He was lying on his back with his feet pointed in the direction of the barrier his former compadres had constructed. His left foot was attached to a chain running across the mall corridor and secured inside a store on the opposite side of the spiral. His right foot was similarly secured to a grill in the kitchen area inside Jacob’s, near the walk-in freezer and the exit to the surface.

Alfonso had been instructed to defend the barrier with his life, and he thought he had no other option. The chains were carefully set so that the door would sever one of his legs if lowered. And Alfonso had no illusions about receiving mercy from his enemies, not after what he and his girlfriend Jessica had done with their former slaves.

The previous mornings were bad enough, waking up exhausted and stiff from being forced to lie on his back for eight hours. But over the past hour Alfonso had had several muscles spasms in his back, and the pain was so bad he almost put his pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger. And it wasn’t just the pain. Alfonso figured he had nothing to live for, and to kill himself and then let the servos tear down the barrier would be the one statement of defiance he could make against that monster Ricardo.

The scene played over and over again in his mind, Jessica being double raped before his eyes. Alfonso couldn’t even call out to her that he was sorry. Ricardo had shoved a rag down his throat. It was soaked with some kind of awful fluid and it had blistered the back of his throat and vocal cords, a case of instant super laryngitis. And then those bastard compadres held him while the other bastard Diego kicked him in the groin. As he vomited, Alfonso silently swore he would never forget. And he had a special place in hell reserved for Ricardo for stealing his girlfriend.

The barrier in the corridor next to him was rigged with vials of the acid liquid, ready to explode at eye level if the barrier were breached. It was a trap similar to what Alfonso had helped set up when Ricardo was trying to bait their enemy to enter through the elevators. Both the lounge and the library had been booby trapped with homemade explosives and acid baths, from simple materials Ricardo had procured from pharmacy and hardware stores. But nothing had come of it. Their enemy had never tested their defenses.

And now his chains were off! The strange cuffs had a fiercely strong magnetic type of lock, but suddenly when the lights went out, the cuffs surprisingly lost power too. Alfonso was giddy with delight, and he took his loaded gun and in the pitch blackness started to crawl along the mall corridor away from the awful barrier. For the first time in days, his heart was filled with hope, and it was the hope of vengeance. Alfonso’s enemy was now everybody in the world except Jessica. Nothing was certain. He might fail. But if he did, he was determined to go down with his gun firing. He began to giggle as he crawled.