Chapter 82

Time: Thursday, May 14, 2019 12:54 PM

“First off,” Aggie reported, “I’m physically okay. I have all my gear and my two Leophones were the only things I had problems with.” There was a short pause. “Akiko, is this right? My second phone is saying it’s still not active?”

“It’s a network issue,” came Akiko’s reply from the Hilton. “It should self-correct soon.”

“Oh. Okay. Let me go on. I haven’t met anybody yet. I’m in a building. I think it’s a huge hexagonal pyramid. It boggles the imagination. Emily, Kiyoko, Suvarna, do you remember an elevator training lesson describing a broken-ring carriage-zone? That’s what I think I’m in now.”

Akiko was absolutely astonished when Emily sitting by her side started to guffaw loudly. “That monstrosity?!” Emily yelled between laughs. “I thought that lesson was a joke!”

Suvarna spoke up. “I don’t remember that lesson at all.” Emily’s laughter was contagious. Suvarna paused and added in a deadpan voice, “It must have passed by while I was taking one of my afternoon naps.”

Kiyoko was sitting across from Fatima on the picnic blanket, and she saw a look of utter incredulity on her leader’s face at how this conversation was progressing. Kiyoko decided to speak. “For those of you who don’t realize it, Suvarna’s last comment was a joke. I helped her study. Suvarna was an extremely diligent student. Regarding the missing lesson, Emily and I have compared some notes on our employment trainings. They were not identical. I have no memory of a broken-ring carriage-zone lesson either.”

“Aggie,” Emily asked, “what’s the color code for the transfer rooms? Tan and purple? And what’s the prime number?”

“Light tan floors and a creamy light purple carriage, just as the lesson described. And there are two tumblers in each carriage. The left dial has twenty-four positions and the right dial twenty-eight. See what I mean Emily? The tumblers are correct for it too.”

Emily worked and got her laughter under control. “Yeah, it all fits. So the total number of carriages is 24 x 28 + 1 equals... 673. Yep, that’s a prime number. Aggie, I really do apologize for laughing. I’m truly sorry you’re stuck in this insanity. You have the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack search to do before getting out of there.”

Aggie sigh was heavy enough for all to hear. “Yeah, it’ll take a while. Thank God the rings are prime! It won’t be too bad. Wish me luck.”

Fatima took a second to compose herself before speaking. She was feeling completely bewildered. “Aggie, before I ask you what the heck you two are talking about, are you in a safe location?”

“Apologies, Fatima. I will explain myself. And yeah, I’m safe enough I guess. I’m sitting in a lounge room on the twelfth level in one of the perimeter rooms. I’ll explain what that means in a moment. The exterior walls of perimeter rooms have transparent walls and ceilings. I don’t see any controls to change that. Outside there’s a blowing snowstorm and it’s a dark night.”

At the Manhattan Public Library, Abit turned around and looked at the butter yellow linear sunlight brightly illuminating their core hexagonal atrium. “That’s interesting,” she said over the bridge. “This is Abit speaking. Both of the artificial environments we’ve found so far have their daily cycle synchronized with the surface. Aggie, we’re just past midday here at Wobanakik.”

“Yes I know, and it’s the black night of a snowstorm in my environment. If I am still in synch with the surface time zone, perhaps my enclosure is simulating a polar latitude where there’s still midnight sun. Mark, is there a spot on the planet that has 24-hour darkness now?”

Mark answered as he sat by Fatima’s side. “Sure. Except for the equinox days, that’s always the case. Emily, do you have access to my geo-solar graphics package?”

“Sure do. I’m curious too ... pulling it up now. For today, everything below 52 degrees southern latitude is beyond the reach of the sun. But Aggie, we’re making too many assumptions here. Let’s wait twenty-four hours before deciding you’re in a simulation without sunlight.”

“Yeah, okay. Let me get back to describing what this building is like. I entered at the top floor which I’m calling floor one, and I count up as I move down. You’ll see why in a minute. The entire top floor was one square hexagonal room.”

Kiyoko asked hesitantly, “Uh, a square hexagonal room?”

Aggie chuckled. “Yeah, that probably didn’t make much sense, did it? The room has a hexagonal footprint but the walls are squares, four meters by four meters. Each room in this great building is a hexagon with four-meter sides and a four-meter high ceiling, that’s what I’m guessing anyway. Each room is a fair amount of space, a generous size for a bedroom and I’ve found several. They’re a bit larger than the bedrooms at the home complex. The six walls make the rooms interesting to be in.”

She chuckled again. “I really have to back up. The trapdoor has the standard three-meter by four-meter carriage of an elevator. When I got here, the carriage opened a three-meter side and I walked into the room opposite one of the six walls. The ceiling and all the walls were transparent. The elevator was in the geometric center of the room. The carriage was completely bare when I exited, and the room I entered was also bare. There was nothing but the elevator carriage in it. I noticed a small numeric display in the arch of the elevator door. It read 1:1. I reopened the carriage and that’s when I saw the tumblers. Thank God! Without the tumblers, the room would have been my mausoleum, at least until the servos came out. I now think of the room as sort of an observation bubble.”

“And it’s at the top of some sort of pyramid?” Emily asked.

“Exactly. There are air vents on the floor and the usual servo access ports but no physical way for me to leave except through the carriage. I looked through all the windows. Below my hexagon on the next floor down were seven additional hexagons. They looked the same size as my room. One was directly below me, that one I assumed, and six hexagons forming a collar around the hexagon below me. Those were the six hexagons I could see by looking out the windows. You get the idea?”

“Could you see more of the pyramid too?” asked Oona.

“Hi Oona. No, I didn’t have the visual angle for it. I’d have to be standing at the edge of a perimeter room on Floor-2 to see the collar rooms of Floor-3.”

Besides the excitement in Aggie’s voice, Fatima thought she also heard considerable nervousness, and Fatima decided she had pressed Aggie a little too fiercely with her earlier language. She commented out loud, “You’re giving us an excellent description, Aggie.”

“Thanks! I’ll do my best to keep this conversation serious, Fatima, even though it does have an amusing aspect to it. This setup is so ... so ridiculous!”

Aggie took a deep breath and continued. “At the top entrance room, I looked down through the transparent ceilings of the six hexagons. One of the rooms was a transfer room. I could see the carriage quite clearly. The other five rooms made a nice living area, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bath, a gym, and a lounge room. There were no doors visible. I strongly suspect all six collar rooms connect to the core hexagon they surround.”

“Fatima,” Emily added, “In a carriage-zone, you can only move from one zone to another through a carriage. The zones are defined to be otherwise isolated from each other.” She paused and asked quietly, “How many floors, Aggie?”

“I got very lucky and actually saw the answer on my 20^th jump. From my previous jumps I decided that the first number on the elevator arch represents the floor number, and the second number is the zone number of the carriage. All my observations indicate that the zones are simply numbered from the top of the pyramid on down. And on my 20^th jump, the code on the elevator arch read 36:647. I could see I was adjacent to a perimeter room. So I hiked over and could not see another collar further down, and that fits with the high carriage number. Thirty-six floors total Emily! Do you see the size of this place?”

“Yeah, I think so,” her friend replied. “I’m doing the numbers now.” There was a very short pause. “On average, you’ll have about seventy rooms per zone.”

“What?” asked Fatima in a whisper. She was struggling to keep her exasperation out of her voice.

“Aggie, do you want me to explain for a bit?” asked Emily.

“Sure. Thanks. Maybe we can both explain.”

“Great idea. Everybody, a carriage-zone is exactly what it sounds like, and in Aggie’s case it’s build around the prime number 673. Imagine 673 elevators where for each elevator, you can enter one of 672 codes to jump to each of the remaining 672 elevators. That’s what Aggie’s two tumblers are allowing her to do, 24 x 28 = 672 permutations.”

“Let me describe this building,” said Aggie. “I’m in a hexagonal pyramid of 36 floors. Each floor has its number of rooms equal to the number of rooms in the floor above it plus an additional collar of hexagons surrounding it. The formula is that the number of rooms on floor n + 1 equals the number of rooms on floor n plus a new collar of six n, and the top floor, floor 1, has one room. Get it? Floor 2 has 1 plus a collar of 6 equals 7 rooms, floor 3 has 7 plus a collar of 6 x 2 = 19 rooms, floor 4 has 19 plus a collar of 6 x 3 = 37 rooms, and so on.”