Chapter 78

One week later.

Time: Monday, May 4, 2019 8 PM

Ricardo was on the second floor of the southern face of the great complex of buildings, watching the last seconds of the day as the sun set behind a western bank of buildings. He was on the opposite face from the one he had entered seventeen days ago. And it was now almost sixteen days since he last had any food. Ricardo didn’t have a scale to weigh himself, but since leaving the Black Mall home complex, he estimated he had lost ten kilos of body weight, and his guess was accurate. It was a horribly fast rate of decline, but it couldn’t be helped. He needed to explore full time, and exploration took energy, stored energy, fat-cell energy. Fortunately he had allowed his weight to creep up a few kilos while playing house with Jessica. Those extra kilos were pure gold, but by now the gold had been spent.

On the plus side, Ricardo still had plenty of vitamin tablets in his backpack and all the water he wanted. His body was still in good shape and if he could only get some damn food, he’d be fine. But he also couldn’t kid himself. His body had had an easy ride so far digesting fat cells, but that energy source was almost depleted. Soon his body would begin digesting muscular tissue in a desperate attempt to prolong his life. Ricardo needed food, and soon.

He had spent the last week searching the building complex above the crazy polygon maze. Ricardo had never heard of buildings constructed on this magnitude. He estimated four square kilometers of floor space, and that was only the portion where he had safe access. The place was insane, its functions impossible to decipher.

As a single explorer, Ricardo was gravely handicapped. One careless trip through a one-way door and he might find himself trapped in a dead-end room cut off from his water supplies. Every new door had to be wedged open, and even then he was on a short leash. If he got out of eyesight of the wedge, the servos would remove it. The restriction had made the job of exploration maddening and his progress painfully slow.

But less than an hour ago he had completed a major phase of his exploration, and he was proud of that though bitterly disappointed in the outcome. There were no easy exits to the outside from the known portions of the building. It seemed inevitable he would have to start taking the insane risk of walking through one-day doors. He had no choice. Unless ... Ricardo sat down on the floor by the windows and pulled out his notebooks on the polygon maze below. He had been staring at the numbers for the last few nights.

There were 1296 corridors connecting the entrance pentagon to 157 triangles, 157 squares, 3 x 157 = 471 hexagons, and 157 octagons. And guessing an average corridor length of sixty meters, his new estimate for the total length of the corridors was seventy-eight kilometers. With each corridor connecting to two faces of the polygons, the numbers showed that half the polygonal faces had doorways and half did not.

Ricardo’s mind screamed at him in exasperation. “Who the fuck cares?! So it’s half! Who the fuck cares?!” What could he possibly do with such knowledge? And yet, Ricardo was tortured by a recurring nightmare. He was with Diego, and the former compadre still had his wrists and ankles shackled, but in the dream the man also moved about easily as he talked. And Ricardo could never quite see how Diego managed that trick.

“157,” Diego said smiling in the dream. “Don’t you see, boss? The number is 157. That’s 157, get it? Get it, boss? That means we have to...” And Diego would calmly keep on talking, but the words were mumbled, impossible to understand. At the end of the dream, Ricardo would wake up with a howl of frustration.

Ricardo bitterly resented now his decision to chain Diego to the dead-man’s switch. The man had the extremely rare gift of insight. It was a horrible waste to leave him in a position where the only decision Diego had to make was whether to survive. And yet Ricardo had done just that. He chose to explore with a child witch and two men he once considered morons, Hernando and Jenaro, and look where it got him.

Ricardo shivered at the memory of his awful battle and defeat. There was a child witch living in the body of adult Jessica. At least on this point Ricardo was not cursing his stupidity. He could not be blamed for not foreseeing this horror. He had dressed Jessica in children’s clothes in order to weaken her and make her more submissive. Who could have foreseen he would actually be strengthening the child witch that lived inside her mind? Ricardo shivered again at a nagging thought. Why was it impossible to find her body?

She must be dead. Each new day brought new confirmation. Ricardo could not lock the pentagon from topside, but he did crisscross the opening with several curving strands of stiff wire and carefully noted the details of how the wires overlapped. It would be impossible for anyone pushing up from below to put the wires back together in precisely the same way. Jessica was dead, she must be, and thus the child witch was dead too.

So why hadn’t he found the body after a full week of searching? She must have crawled into a closet to die, perhaps even into a drawer. Her body represented forty to fifty kilos of meat. Should Ricardo resume his search for it?

He had no qualms about cannibalism. The problem was the damn closets. There were almost always six on each side of the corridors. Each closet would have a generous two-meter by two-meter inside space and the inside walls would have three rows of drawers. Each row would have two drawers on the left, two on the right, and two drawers opposite the door, for a total of eighteen drawers per closet. And each drawer would open only if the closet door and all the other drawers in the closet were closed. Ricardo couldn’t imagine giving a closet a full inspection in less than three minutes.

There were close to sixteen thousand closets. At twenty per hour, that would be eight hundred hours of search time. And he would have to add the time to travel to all the closets. The situation reminded Ricardo of an old mathematical puzzle called the Traveling Salesman Problem, except here his problem was not the optimal path to visit all the polygons. He needed an optimal path to walk all the corridors between the polygons.

Shit! This was ridiculous! He couldn’t eat her decaying body anyway. So why was he wasting his time? But the problem kept nagging him. Why wouldn’t his mind let go? He gave up the struggle and went through the numbers one more time. He had been highly efficient in the eight days it had taken to chart the maze. Assume he needed half the time to walk each corridor at least once. He had the time for that. But the closet searches, 1296 x 12 closets at three minutes a closet, plus time to sleep of course. It would take two months to search all the drawers in all the closets of the maze, and Ricardo would be starving to death in one month.

That’s it, no more thoughts. Ricardo had already picked the most promising door to leave this part of the building complex. He would head towards the west, the direction he had last seen Jenaro take. Ricardo would commit himself to the plan at sunrise tomorrow. His mind temporarily at peace, he headed off to a shower before sleep.

An hour later, a few kilometers north inside Black Mall’s diamond complex.

Time: Monday, May 4, 2019 9 PM

It was three hours after local sunset in the bee park, and Suvarna’s first night here. She was on Boost Team-3, and together with Carla and Tom were the new junior boosters. With the departure of Emily’s Team-1, Aggie, Ann and Cassidy of Team-2 were now the senior boosters and would be here until their graduation day on May 8^th when Team-4 consisting of Fatima, Husna and Kiyoko would arrive.

A week ago Emily inventoried the stored food at the bee park kitchen and determined there were enough supplies to feed fifteen people for eight days, which was their target length of stay in the bee park. The slots for the mind boost quickly filled up with volunteers, and the teams were overlapping their stays in their eagerness for the advancement.

Suvarna sighed as she gazed out the window. The temperature outside was -2C and a light snow was falling. Somehow there was just enough light to see it even though the sky had looked very black before the flakes started to fall. Suvarna felt deeply relaxed and excited, both at the same time. It was a little disconcerting. Emily had warned her she might feel like this after first tasting the honey this evening, and it had come to pass. But the main boost and sexual arousal would not hit until tomorrow night.

Suvarna smiled in the darkness. She felt horny now! And Tom’s hand was lightly stroking her hip and it felt delightful. She and Carla had Tom sandwiched between them, and they were all drifting in and out of sleep after a very busy day. Suvarna thought she was probably the most awake of the three, and in kindness to Tom she didn’t turn and try to arouse him. Besides, she had already promised Carla the right to be the first with Tom.

Tom stirred and yawned, his hand drifting to stroke her outer thigh. Suvarna pushed her butt back into his groin to signal her approval. There was a sleepy kiss on the back of her head, and then more gentle caresses. Suvarna blinked at the thought of what she was doing. This would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, especially with another woman in the bed. And she wasn’t committing herself to marriage, not exactly. But the bonding was there, with her and Carla too. Perhaps they wouldn’t call it marriage, at least not for a while, but the three knew they would be facing the future together for a long time to come. Suvarna thought that the partners of a boost team would forever have special places in each other’s hearts.

So many changes since leaving Wobanakik! Suvarna was now an official employee of Kappa Alpha. Exactly what Kappa Alpha was, well, that was still a question. But Suvarna had already made a small contribution. She had noticed an obscure emergency protocol near the end of her training and had mentioned it to Kiyoko. It allowed Kiyoko the ability to open the first-floor door to the diamond complex from the lounge side. Frida’s original trip through the ivy hall had been unnecessary.

But the discovery was small compensation for a big disappointment. Two days ago the moment she graduated, Suvarna jumped to White Mall and activated and reset the lounge elevator there. Then she joined a re-supply team to the entrance rooms of Wobanakik where she enthusiastically attempted to activate the elevator at the bottom of the stairwell. The effort was unsuccessful.