Chapter 84

One hour later.

Time: Thursday, May 14, 2019 3:49 PM

Tom and Carla were riding stair buggies around the second floor perimeter of the White Mall diamond complex, finishing their scheduled afternoon mission of supplying the Wobanakik entrance rooms. They had their five-speed buggies set to the middle gear, three meters per second, and the journey from the top of the pit of the great stairwell to the White Mall lounge would take fifteen minutes. Behind their buggies four more unmanned buggies were obediently following them.

After their April escape from Wobanakik, Tom and Carla looked for multiple ways to be useful in their new society, and one of the things they did was to spend their evening hours together at the Hilton, using the mall remote monitoring system and diligently probing the many stores for hidden treasure. The last day in April, four days before they would leave for their eight-day stay at the Bee Park, they make a great discovery.

Their target was Speedo’s Stair Assist, a small 10-meter-long store situated near the 22 km spiral mark of Blue Mall. The quickest way to reach it was from the Blue Mall sky bridge, and after a bit of puzzle time at the store, they realized they had found something fabulous, six programmable carts that could climb stairs.

The carts were a marvel and used a technology neither Tom nor Carla thought came from Earth. A dense array of almost a million tiny rods formed the bottom of each cart, and the rods would flow up and down and conform to the contour of the terrain underneath. What powered the horizontal motion was unclear.

With a maximum capacity of 150 kg and maximum cruise speed of 5 m/s, the buggies were ideal for supplying the Wobanakik entrance rooms. In their middle gear, they would climb or descend the great stairwell to Wobanakik in less than nineteen minutes. Riders were still needed of course. The buggies could not manage the passage through the bottom elevator, but with just a little help the set of six allowed two people to deliver 600 kg of cargo to the entrance rooms in about ninety minutes round trip as measured from the White Mall lounge, and that included over twenty minutes to unload once the buggies were on the other side of the entrance elevator. Sandra and her folks below were still singing praises about Tom and Carla whenever they were on the network.

The buggy rides were interesting, super smooth with linear travel but with sharp accelerations in the curves. It took a little getting used to, riding the buggies at their top speed, and unless they were in a hurry, Tom and Carla limited their velocity to 3 m/s. They had popped out of the great stairwell five minutes ago, and after a quick climb to the second level began the final leg of their journey, orbiting the perimeter of the White Mall diamond complex.

“Ten minutes, Suvarna,” Tom called out into his Leophone. “We’re right on schedule.” He, Carla and Suvarna were on a private line.

“Hi, Tom,” Suvarna replied. “I’m in the kitchen starting dinner. Be nice to have you back. Transfer go okay?”

“Yep. Everything’s fine. Our four empty chicks are tagging right behind us.”

“Tom!” Carla called out behind him. “Did you just call me a duck?”

“I’ll get back to cooking,” laughed Suvarna. “See you in a bit.” She would be opening the vestibule door for them when they arrived.

Tom stared at the outside scenery for a moment. The past two months of spring had been lovely weather, with warm days now but the short nights were still delightfully cool. Tom thought it was a fabulously nice climate. The only unknown now was how hot the summers would get. The summer solstice was fifteen days away, and at their latitude the sun would not set on that day.

Tom called out to Carla behind him, “You’ve had a busy day today. Want a massage tonight?”

“A back rub would be nice, yeah. Thanks.” Carla paused for a second. “It really wasn’t a hard day physically, just a stressful one. The walk to Green Mall’s trapdoor was a stroll in the spring sunshine, and riding these carts is like being on an amusement ride. I just wish I could have talked Fatima into letting me go with Aggie. It’s not fair for Aggie to be facing this danger alone.”

“Yeah, I know. I understand Fatima’s point, but yeah...” Tom took a deep breath. “On the call today, once we have a clear understanding of how to get back, Fatima seemed receptive to Mark’s idea of returning to the pyramid in force.”

“God, I hope so.”

“I’d like to go with you, Carla.”

“Really? Thanks, Tom, much appreciated. I can’t think of anybody I’d rather have by my side.” Carla leaned back in her buggy and sighed, hanging on just a bit as her cart made a sharp sixty-degree turn to travel the next 100-meter hexagonal segment.

After the turn, Tom punched his phone to mute and then switched lines to listen to Aggie’s progress. Her voice came through loud and clear every six seconds. “V-17, 254, wall ... V-18, 197, door ... V-19, 174, wall...”

Aggie’s routine had evolved to optimum efficiency over the last hour, supported now by everyone at the Hilton. Whitney and Amber were logging Aggie’s report and verifying each other’s work. Akiko, Emily, and Alison were running the reverse lookups on the base ring and computing the tumbler jump sizes. They were currently running about fifty jumps behind Aggie, but the lookup delay didn’t matter, just the quality of their work. And finally, Heather and Ashley were looking at the data of what Aggie was seeing as the elevator opened.

No wonder she hadn’t found anybody yet. The group’s model for the transfer rooms was that all 91 carriage rooms on the 18^th floor and above were in perimeter rooms with the carriages facing the transparent walls. For the 19^th floor and below, the other 582 carriages were always NOT in a perimeter room, and five times out of six the carriage would face a blank wall. Carriage orientation seemed random within the rooms and all the transfer rooms that Aggie had investigated had one exit.

Five times out of six, that exit was a closed door, and the typical Kappa Alpha door was absolutely soundproof. Even in the rare times Aggie’s door opened to an arch, she thought she had a small chance of being heard. Kappa Alpha environments had a strong tendency to deaden sounds from other rooms.

Aggie found all this information encouraging. Her missing Party was here! She knew it. They were just going to be hard to find, that’s all. Aggie was optimistic. Aggie was psyched. Aggie also had to go the bathroom. “V-23, 169, wall ... V-24, 146, wall...”

After each jump she was calling out the new tumbler code for her current jump, the physical carriage of where the new jump had carried her, and what she saw through the open portal. “V-25, 60, transparent perimeter wall.” She had trained herself to always click the new code before pushing the close button on the elevator. “V-26, 133, wall.” Aggie had learned that lesson the first hour she was here. “V-27, 565, wall.” Pushing the elevator close button locked the tumbler code. “V-28, 5, transparent wall and stop.”

There were a few seconds of silence on the bridge. “And stop?” asked Amber. “You see something?”

“Just the usual darkness and swirling snowflakes,” Aggie replied with a yawn. “Wow. I feel a bit tired. I also need to find a restroom.”

“That’s a great idea,” Akiko said. “Take your time, Aggie. It’ll give us a chance to catch up with the jump-size computations.”

Another yawn from Aggie. “Yeah. Thanks, Akiko.”

Emily spoke a gentle warning. “Aggie, you’re on the last floor with one zone and carriage. Floor six has two zones. Floor 5 should have 61 rooms. That’s enough to get lost in, especially if you lose your orientation.”

“Okay. Thanks for the warning. But I really need to find a bathroom. I’ll try to keep my motion linear.” But that proved to be difficult. The openings in the honeycomb of rooms did not align. Every room she visited had doors on three of the six walls, but the doors were never opposite each other. After sixteen rooms (not counting the transfer room), Aggie considered just relieving herself on the floor and letting the servos handle her mess, but then the seventeenth hexagon turned out to be a bathroom. Aggie had to laugh at what she saw inside.

In some sense, the room didn’t have an inside. It was an extremely open bathroom even by the typical Kappa Alpha lack of concern for privacy. It was a very functional bathroom to be sure, a few toilets and sinks and a shower area designed for two people. But it was also a perimeter room, and on a corner of the collar ring. The room had with three exterior walls and a transparent ceiling. And the modesty walls of the toilets were insanely short. They formed a short skirt that shielded her hips as she sat on the toilet and little else. Aggie could easily have an eye-to-eye link or a verbal conversation with a person in the next stall if it were occupied. And people in the perimeter rooms above on Floor 4 would have a great view of her anywhere in the bathroom.

Aggie turned around and gazed at the rooms above. They were dark, which was typical of perimeter rooms but not interior rooms. On the perimeter, low level lighting would activate only when she was about to enter the room. It was adequate to see everything but noticeably dimmer than the bathrooms at the home complexes. There was compensation though for the low lighting. It made the snowstorm very easy to see.

Aggie didn’t bother to close the short door on her stall. She just plunked her two backpacks down outside and breathed a big sigh of relief as she drained her bladder. She sat for a while, her pants at her ankles, and just watched the snowstorm for a while. The night wind was very brisk and the swirling snow soothing to watch. Aggie felt herself relaxing and decided to do a bowel movement too. Perhaps the Kappa Alpha builders weren’t so insane after all with their glass bathroom. It felt kind of nice, emptying her bowels in a clean, quiet, and dimly lit bathroom, warm and dry and surrounded by blowing snow. Aggie felt her mind was at peace when she finally stood up and cleaned her bottom.

She shook her two canteens and decided she would refill both of them before leaving the room. She was then a bit startled when Emily’s voice came from her Leophone. “We’re all caught up now Aggie, and we also followed your lead and did our restroom breaks. We’re ready to resume when you are. If you’re curious, the jump size for V-28 was 434 on the base ring.”

“Ah.” Aggie sighed as she switched mental gears and prepared to get back to work. Pants up and zipped, all that was left was to get some water from the sink and she would be ready to go. “How long have I been on break?” she asked.