Chapter 79

Ten days later.

Time: Thursday, May 14, 2019 2:03 AM

Aggie’s eyes blinked open and her mind started to race. Today was the day! She looked at the clock and sighed. It was so early. Last night she was hoping to get a bit more sleep. But her bedroom now was at Blue Mall and it faced the northeast. Already the hint of a pink sunrise was on the horizon. Dawn was only a half hour away.

But there was still plenty of time for more sleep. She wasn’t scheduled to have breakfast with Cassidy for another five hours. And their trip through the Green Mall trapdoor was even later in the morning. They were scheduled to depart at 10 AM.

All the different time periods, and everything was moving so fast. It was fun! Aggie thought the novelty might never wear off. On the surface they were at the end of week four in a six-week spring, at the Bee Park it was the end of week one of a three-week spring, and down at Wobanakik, Jada and her team were at the end of week four of a nine-week summer. The diversity was intriguing.

“Where was I one year ago in Bee Park time?” Aggie thought idly. “That would have been ... December? Is that right? Yeah, I guess it is. No wait. January had thirty one days in it. Wow, what an incredibly huge number of days for a month to have.” Aggie frowned slightly as she redid the calculation in her head. “Eighty-four days ago would have been January 3^rd. What was I doing then? Biking with Maddy’s Marauders I guess, that’s what, locking down the spirals. Those were good times...”

She sighed. “No they weren’t. We were still grieving then over the loss of the Earth. But at least we were innocent back then, no talk of war and killings. We didn’t know humanity’s brutality had followed us to this planet.”

Aggie turned and stretched out, giving herself one last opportunity to get back to sleep. May had been a productive month. Aggie had returned from the Bee Park six days ago after a successful boost, and the plants there now were growing and flowering at incredible rates. At this rate, there would soon be food and honey for more candidates, perhaps even before Team-5 finished their boost in another six days.

Aggie thought that was very desirable. The mental abilities were so vast it frightened her a bit. She now had the power to trap an unboosted mind into any dream she desired. Aggie didn’t want to have that kind of power over her friends. It was uncomfortable to think of their society divided into haves and have-nots. And Aggie had noticed subtle changes in how the remaining people were with her, hints of shyness and a reluctance to link. Aggie didn’t like it.

The only solution was for everybody to boost. If only there was some way to cover the Wobanakik folks too. Should the surface people try to transport the honey and veggies down to them? But what was the risk of boosting outside the Bee Park? Maybe it was more than just diet...

May had been a quiet month, a time of renewal and advancement. The census counter had remaining at 007:076 since the deaths of Brandi and Alfonso, stable as a bus, and Lucia, Tajana, and Paige had successfully completed their medical technician training a few days before becoming Team-5 at the Bee Park. Perhaps May would be their first month without a loss of human life. And everyone had his or her own Leophone now. They were even starting to build an inventory of spares. Mark had a very ambitious project going for how to use the extra phones.

Almost everybody was involved, and they were using technology from many sources. The idea started in early May when Mark and Toshi were visiting the Hot Toys and Hobby Shop at the 25.1 kilometer mark of Black Mall. In the aviation section, they found model airplanes powered by the magical batteries.

Mark was looking for something that would fly a package consisting of a Leophone coupled to a high resolution video camera. Unfortunately the planes he found generated a lot of thrust but could not provide enough lift to carry the package. In a stroke of insight, Toshi commented that the airplanes were the functional opposite of the giant balloons in the nearby Weather Shoppe. The balloons could provide lift but no horizontal thrust. Why not combine the two technologies?

Toshi’s simple idea was the birth of a new project. In the following week, almost everyone became involved in the design and construction of their first airborne probe. A needed breakthrough came when Whitney acting on a hunch asked Mark to return with her to the strange hemispherical engineering building in the Blue Mall area. Whitney remembered a storage room there filled with what looked like five-liter plastic jugs with some very fancy looking nozzles.

Their trip confirmed Whitney’s memory had been correct, and they also found that cylindrical jugs would snap and lock into another nozzle extruding from the wall. By depressing the nozzle level they could increase the weight of the jug greatly, from 300 to 800 grams. Further testing revealed the jug had been filled with a half kilo of helium.

And not just ordinary helium. Experiments back home showed the meter-radius weather balloons had over four kilograms of net lift when filled with the strange gas, provided the gas from the jug was allowed to warm up. It was coming out of the nozzle super cold, even though the jug was neutral to the touch in terms of temperature.

Mark guessed the gas must be the light isotope helium-3 to create so much lift, and Suvarna from the Bee Park made the startling guess that the jug held not pressurized helium but liquid helium. Squeezing the valve lever opened a tiny pathway for heat to reach the liquid which would vaporize the He3 instantly. Careful observation confirmed that micro crystals of frozen air could be seen coming out of the nozzle with the gas.

The design of the probe had become quite complicated. At the core of controlling the probe was a Leophone used both for operational control and to transmit video back home. The weather balloon was on top of course, mounted to a carriage that held the jug of helium and a tiny but powerful spark heater that would let a controller add hot helium to the balloon. There was also a control to bleed helium out of the balloon when it was time to descend.

Underneath the helium jug and also attached to the carriage was the model airplane, and then finally at the bottom was a video camera that could be swiveled to point in any direction horizontal or lower. Total weight of the entire assembly (not including the weight of the balloon) was just under three kilograms.

Would it all work? The construction team was very optimistic and hoped to have a test flight before the summer solstice. The probes would be a huge benefit. It would allow them to explore faster and more safely and more completely. Through the Leophone, they could even have a two-way conversation with anyone they found.

Aggie sighed. Almost all the stars had disappeared from the eastern sky. But it was too early to get up. It would be disrespectful to Cassidy to be sleepy when they traveled through the trap door ... Aggie’s mind returned to their penny experiments over the last few days. A penny placed in the elevator would disappear, and then the trap door would not transport for one minute. The behavior was consistent with automated servos cleaning the carriage on the other end. Aggie and Cassidy had tried writing notes and asking the people on the other side to block their elevator door for a few minutes, but the delay always remained a stable one minute on their end.

And they had even sent a Leophone, one of the new ones that could handle the feed from a video camera. The video signal died immediately when the trapdoor closed. The audio line remained open but nothing could be heard. The conclusion seemed inescapable. There were no people immediately present at the other end.

Whitney made a dark correction, that there were no COOPERATIVE people present at the other end. But it still made sense to go. The evidence was strong. Seventeen women had passed through here, and they were all still alive. The Society needed to trust and assume they wanted to be found. So Aggie would follow with another open Leophone, and then Cassidy as soon as Aggie reported in.

Aggie turned away from the window and concentrated on slow deep breathing and pushing all analytic thoughts from her mind. She thought of her latest date with Mark. For a man multiply married, the guy could be so shy when it came to kissing a girl goodnight! But would he still be Mark if he weren’t so bashful? Aggie smiled at the gentle memory and a short while later drifted into a light sleep.

Time: Thursday May 14, 2019 2:36 AM

The bright orange sunlight hit Douglas Meyers full in the face and he woke up refreshed and relaxed from his ten-hour sleep. The rest period was typical for him now. The nightmares of the previous weeks had at last been subdued.

Douglas stood up and stretched and then went to relieve himself in the grass adjacent to his overhang shelter. It was a strange grass. It turned a very pale green when he pissed on it, almost an off white, but he knew from experience it would recover in a few hours. Douglas had even thought about trying to eat it, his first day after leaving the home complex above Jacob’s. But he broke a few blades and then sniffed the oily extract oozing from the breaks. His mind screamed poison at the pungent odor, and in the weeks following he never second-guessed his decision to take the grass permanently off the menu.

Ah, those first days. He had not even returned to calling himself Douglas then. He remembered crossing through the strange elevated maze with two backpacks which were then so full of food, and he remembered sensing the hidden drop under the foam with a walking stick. It wasn’t too much of a bother. The pathway had a clear width of two and half meters. Walking its centerline was not a problem, and after a number of kilometers of winding paths he came to the opposite tower. The slide at the end was a challenge, but Diego like Chico was on the varsity wrestling team and in very good shape. He survived the slide with nothing worse than a stiff shoulder.

Diego spent the next several hours inspecting a great line of buildings from the outside. There were few doors, especially on the eastern side of the great southern line. He tried the doors as he passed. The doors on the eastern side would not open, while the doors on the western side would. But Diego remembered his experience with the old home complex. The perimeter doors would open from the inside only. Would the doors here open only from the outside? As one person, there was no way to test.

Diego had no desire to be trapped in a building. If he were going to die, it would be under the sun or stars. So he stayed out of the buildings, even though a biting-cold northern wind made the idea of entry enticing.

Late in the afternoon, about an hour before sunset and much to his astonishment, Diego saw a man waving frantically to him from the second floor of a building near the western end of the line. It was Jenaro, and he was obviously trapped. Jenaro alone? What had happened to Jessica, Hernando and Ricardo? Jenaro pantomimed his answers. Hernando was dead, murdered by Ricardo, and as far as Jenaro knew, Jessica was still with Ricardo. But Jenaro had managed to separate himself from them. Diego sensed that Jenaro was telling the truth. He was so eager to be rescued, he wasn’t stopping to think up a lie.

And then Jenaro asked in sign language how Diego had freed himself from the dead-man switch. Diego shrugged and signaled it would be too difficult to explain without words, and he asked with his hands how he could get to Jenaro’s position. Jenaro nodded happily and the two men spent the next ten minutes exchanging hand and arm signals as Jenaro went through the motions of what Diego would have to do to reach him. Go through the entrance door about three hundred meters to the east, then circle to the stairway, travel the second-floor corridor three hundred meters back to the west, and open the door that was trapping Jenaro. Jenaro was pleading for him to do it. As an incentive, Jenaro opened the backpacks he had with him and showed Diego they were full of food. Jenaro had almost all the food of Ricardo’s team, and he motioned with his arms that he and Diego could share it.

Diego nodded and walked back east to the entrance door. He had already probed it, and the door slid open again without a problem as Diego pushed the command bar. But he still paused before going through. Did he really want Jenaro’s company? The man was a hardcase and would be furious if Diego tried to hide his possession of Neto’s gun. And knowing Jenaro, the man would insist on packing it, at least part of the time. Did Diego want that?

No! And the sharing of food was not an issue. Jenaro might have slightly more food than Diego, but he was a much bigger eater. If Jenaro were truly trapped, and Diego had no reason to doubt it, chances were Jenaro would be digging into Diego’s supplies rather than vice versa. And finally...

Jenaro was trapped! What was the danger here? Was there only one door that was trapping Jenaro? What about this entrance door, or the other doors Diego would have to pass through to get to his former compadre? Diego could try to wedge them open of course, but that trick certainly wouldn’t work back at the home hexagon. Would the servos allow it here? Why the hell should Diego expect that? In his heart, he knew what he had to do. Diego let the door close from the outside. He then walked back and signaled to Jenaro that he was going to stay outside and search for help.

The man’s reaction was about what Diego had expected. Jenaro looked horrified, and then the horror turned to fear, and then the fear to hatred. No sound was penetrating the clear wall separating them, but Diego could see the man screaming at him. Diego shrugged his shoulders and tried to wave Jenaro a pleasant goodbye. He felt his decision was sound. Where was the value in both of them being trapped in this building? With a group of people to guard the wedged doors, Jenaro could be rescued easily. Diego’s job was to find that group of people, at least that’s what he told himself as he walked away from the screaming man.

And even then the conscience of Douglas Meyers was beginning to reemerge. It had been a faint voice for the last year and absent completely these last few months. Was Diego really searching for people to rescue Jenaro, or was he just taking the easy way out? At the time, Diego’s mind had swatted down any feelings of guilt about leaving. His decision was practical and sound. If someone were trapped in quicksand, just jumping in and getting stuck too made no sense. Especially if the stuck someone were Jenaro, a person who would gladly stand on your corpse to keep his head above the quicksand a few minutes longer.

So over the next several weeks, Diego searched for people in the great buildings around him. He stayed outside, never once venturing into a closed building but gratefully bedding down at night under the many sheltered overhangs that protected him from the spring rains. And he would occasionally find outdoor fountains as he traveled, the shallow ponds filled with clear sparkling water. Dying of thirst was not a concern.

Food though was another matter. It was surprising, he had to admit. After the abundance of food at the home hexagon and the great mall below, he had assumed food would also be plentiful about the surface, and he had packed weeks of rations never really thinking he’d need them. On that point he had been grossly mistaken. The open surface areas outside the buildings were devoid of anything he could eat. In the end, would he risk going inside rather than face the certainty of starving to death?

At the beginning of the journey, Diego would have given an immediate yes. But a transformation had occurred in the solitary weeks. Diego began to feel whole again, purified and cleansed of his many sins. The persona of Douglas emerged after its long sleep, first to discuss with Diego and then to dominate. Diego saw nothing of value in the empty wanderings and disappeared without a struggle.

And Douglas by contrast saw everything. His body and mind had regained its soul, its nobility. He was not excusing his past behavior, far from it, and he would try to make amends if he ever got the chance, but for now he had to play the hand he was holding. Douglas might die out here, in fact he probably would die out here, but he would die gracefully as a free human beneath the stars, not as a prisoner trapped and discarded in some unknown room that would serve as his death cell. Douglas had thought the issue carefully, and his heart was at peace with his decision.

And his death was not imminent. Douglas was stretching his food, dropping to half rations almost immediately after his encounter with Jenaro and even more severely in the last several days. He still had food for another two week, perhaps even more if he limited himself to one small meal per day. He wasn’t maintaining his weight on such a diet, but he thought he be okay for at least another couple of weeks. After that though, after the food ran out, he had no illusions of what would come next. He just wouldn’t have the energy to explore.

And there was so much still to see! In the last few days, Douglas had finally charted the extent of his bounded area. It was huge. He estimated 300 square kilometers, in a rough diamond shape with the flat facets pointing north and a sharper spike to the south. It was a great area surrounded by a imposing perimeter wall and a moat of the strange ivy.

Douglas wanted no part of challenging the ivy or the wall, and as one person he could never explore all the niches of the surface in time. But he would do the best he could, and success would be fabulous and failure would be met with dignity. Douglas studied his handmade charts for a moment and wrote the date Thursday, March 28, 2019 in the margin next to the area he would search today.

He took a moment to admire the speed of the seasons. The day without sun had occurred in mid January, just a few days after Stan-the-man Santos and his team were killed at Rabbies Dram. Douglas shook his head at the memory. From what they knew now about the census counter, they might have been the largest party of the six, and perhaps the one with the best ability to get quickly organized. All of the frat brothers knew each other. While the other parties were still struggling to get to know each other, Beta Sigma Rho could have displayed true leadership. Instead they spent all their time getting drunk and force fucking the women who were trapped with them.