Chapter 91

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Time: Monday, June 11, 2019 9:02 PM GHT (Great Hexagon Time).

Fatima was having a hard time talking to the people that had abducted Aggie. The group was asking for so much and as of yet they were offering almost no information about themselves. Fatima didn’t even know their number and she was winging the negotiations, placing a great deal of faith on Aggie’s short but cheerful comment that she was with good people.

Fatima explained her unease to the new group. “I would feel a lot more comfortable making commitments if you weren’t keeping Aggie a prisoner.”

“I’m not a prisoner, Fatima,” Aggie replied over the bridge. “I will be free to go as soon as this conversation ends.”

“Regardless of what I agree to?”

“Yes, that’s my understanding. And remember Cordelia and I shared a dream. We trust each other. Fatima, Cordelia is testing you. She wants to see how much you will trust her in return.”

“All right...” Fatima took a quick review of her notes before continuing. “Cordelia, my group has discussed your requests. We are agreeable on all points with some minor clarifications. Our last boost team is scheduled to leave the Bee Park in three days. Three of your people are welcome to join them now, and then additional groups of three every four days afterwards. Each group’s time in the Park will be eight days. That’s the schedule we’ve been using, and it has proven to be successful.”

“Yes, Aggie has already described that to me.”

Fatima took a sip of water. “In principle we will also leave you in peace if you desire. You say you want to occupy the Green Mall home complex. We need to clarify a few things.”

“Such as?”

“Will you tell me?” asked Fatima. “Except for Aggie, are you in charge of all the original members of Party #4? We know they’re all still alive.”

“All of them? You know that?”

“Yes.” Fatima did not elaborate on the details.

“I’m curious to know how.” After a prolong period of silence, Cordelia realized Fatima was not going to reply. She then admitted, “I am not in charge of the whole group.”

“Can you take us to the others?”

“Not easily, and I’m not sure I want to try.”

“Okay.” Fatima paused. “In that case, we would like to continue searching on our own. That will require our continued presence at the pyramid, which means we will need occasional passage through the Green Mall library elevator in order to reach the wedge-shaped building with the trapdoor. Except for this, we will leave you alone if you wish. Our presence at your home will be minimal.”

“That ... sounds reasonable. And what about the spiral branch that belongs to Green Mall?” In Cordelia’s dream with Aggie, Aggie had shared her memories of the spiral mall system.

Fatima bit her lip. “We would prefer to share the whole mall with you rather than divide it into sections. There are 27,000 stores. It would seem enough for us all for many lifetimes. But we are also beginning to understand how unique many of the stores are. In fact, I’m talking to you from the Hilton complex. It’s the terminal store of the Green spiral. It’s our communications hub. We won’t relinquish it.”

“All right. In your position, I wouldn’t either.”

“I would also like to establish the principle that any additional Party members we find have as much right the Bee Park as you do, and that other members of Party #4 also have living rights to the Green Mall surface area and buildings.”

“Ah ... The first part I’m okay with. Regarding the second, my group will have to discuss that.”

Fatima sighed. “All right. But we need to reach some sort of agreement on this. You see our position, don’t you? We absolutely do not want to be taking sides in an unknown dispute.”

“Yes, I understand that. Your desire for neutrality is reasonable. Perhaps my group will join you. All these issues will then be moot. We’re just not ready for that step yet. And you promise to show us how to move back and forth from your position to here?”

Fatima answered this and also an earlier request. “Yes, we will show you. And as discussed we will provide your group with Leophones, plus several private channels for your own use. Be advised we will have the means to eavesdrop on you. We give our word we won’t do it, but the ability is intrinsic to our network. We can not physically prevent ourselves from having access to your traffic.”

“Okay. How soon can we get the phones?”

“Tell us how many you need, and we’ll work out a schedule.”

Cordelia paused. “Ah, the moment of truth. Okay, I will tell you. There are four of us, Our names are Sarah, Katelyn, Sydney, and me Cordelia. And I think it’s time our groups met.”

“Cordelia,” said a voice over the bridge. “This is Carla, in charge of Aggie’s group during her absence. I’d be very pleased to meet now. We are still at zone 119 on the 20^th floor.”

The unspoken question could not be ignored. Cordelia took the plunge. “Zone 607 for us, 35^th floor.”

“Thank you,” Carla said softly, and the more loudly, “For your reference, the tumbler code for us to reach you is W-16, and the mirror code if you want to come to us is H-13. Where would you like to meet?”

Cordelia was dumbfounded. “You know how to come here in one jump? How do you know that?”

Aggie interrupted. “We know all the tumbler codes. I have them memorized.”

Katelyn looked incredulous. “All of them?!”

Aggie grinned. “Yeah.”

“Any two locations in a single jump?! That’s impossible!”

“It’s not as hard as you might think, two fairly short tables, a ring position table and a jump-size table. The key is understanding the mathematical structure of the carriage zone.”

Katelyn fought to contain her skepticism. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Come to us,” called out Cordelia.

“On our way,” came Carla’s reply.

Carla, Tom, Suvarna, Cassidy, and Ann walked out of zone-607’s transfer room a few minutes later. In a lounge area they met a single woman waiting for them. “Hi, I’m Sydney,” she announced with a smile. She also kept a hand near the hilt of a large knife hanging from her belt.

Tom paused for a moment to admire her. Sydney had a beautiful and solid athletic frame and looked as if she had spent her entire life climbing mountains. She was just over 170 cm in height and had strawberry blond hair cut to fall just off her shoulders. She was wearing lightweight climbing boots, shorts, and a short-sleeve shirt that was tied halter-style under her breasts. The outfit showed off a flat tummy and impressive calf and arm muscles.

Carla couldn’t help but notice Tom’s reaction and she gave him a playful bump with her shoulder before replying, introducing all the members of her team. They took a short walk through zone 607 and came to a rather interesting conference room. The hexagon was dominated by an impressive hexagonal table that filled the room except for a perimeter walkway. There were twelve executive chairs around the table, two per side, more than enough for their combined party of ten. In a gesture of trust, Aggie stayed sitting between Cordelia and Katelyn, and Sydney sat between Tom and Carla. The two groups looked at each other and offered friendly and somewhat timid smiles. Then Cordelia began describing her group’s experiences after leaving Kappa Alpha’s Christmas party.

Seventeen women left Aggie at the southern vertex of the Green Mall home complex that day. The last of the evening twilight was fading from the sky and at the time the group was completely leaderless. Looking back, Cordelia thought her Party consisted of subgroups of casual friends, two to five women in each.

They walked for hours, making slow but steady progress to the south and unavoidably to the east. Aggie knew exactly what they were talking about. After the first critical fork, there were only two points along the journey to the trapdoor building that provided access to the western areas, and both routes were unlit. Cordelia reported they reached the wedge-shaped building shortly after 7 PM that night. Her group was tired, bewildered, and a little damp from a few brief sprinkles of cold rain. A number of people were commenting how bizarre it was that the temperature had risen above freezing. That certainly wasn’t the forecast.

There was some outdoor lighting, not as much as they would have liked but enough to know they were walking into an acute angle between two great walls. Several women started arguing that they should turn back and return to their old party location. Aggie had promised to wait by the perimeter door and let them back in. The group almost split into two right then, a woman named Kelly arguing for people to join her for the return trip, and another woman named Laura insisting that a mall would never have such a massive dead end.

A majority of the women sided with Laura, not wanting to undo the hours of effort it had taken to come this far. And the remaining members did not want to split off from the main group. They capitulated and continued the journey to the southeast.

Ten minutes later Laura let out a whoop of joy. They had turned a hexagonal corner and a wedge-shaped building was clearly in sight. It had a lit lobby and an inviting front door and it was just beginning to drizzle again. The group hurried forward and after Laura volunteered and checked that the door would open from the inside, they all took shelter within.

They started to do a little exploring, grateful for the comfortable shelter and searching in vain for a working telephone. For some reason, all their cell phones were still unable to find a cell tower. Then after perhaps twenty minutes of searching, a woman named Kaylee realized that the lobby door was the only entrance to the building. Proclaiming loudly that this was both an absurdity and an extreme fire-code violation, Kaylee tried the lobby exit and discovered to her horror that the door would not open.

The following hour was a nightmare. Various groups of people tried smashing the door and then all the windows, even the few small ones on the second floor. Incredibly, the glass-looking windows resisted all their efforts to break them, and they were not designed to open. The group was trapped. Exhausted from their efforts, they collapsed in a lounge area near the center of the building on the ground floor. The effects of the mind-altering drug hit them very soon after.

Emily interrupted at this point and commented that Cordelia’s account was supporting a rather strange attribute suspected of the drug. Cordelia’s group was hit with its effect hours after Emily was effected, even though Cordelia’s group had taken their drinks in the tunnel and ridden their elevator more than two hours before Emily’s ride. The impact of the drug evidently was not a simple matter of timing. Emily’s conjecture was that physical activity or emotional distress would delay its onset. This was a major reason for the eight-day stay of their boost teams at the Bee Park. The Society wanted the second enhancement done in the setting of a peaceful retreat.

Cordelia grimaced and then explicitly described her own troubled experiences that first night. She became sexually active with four other women. Everything seemed so foggy at the time, but the next morning every act seemed so clear, every caress, every suckle, every orgasm, every tongue slide and finger slide into mouths and vaginas and rectums, both giving and receiving. Cordelia could remember it all in blinding clarity. They all could. Everyone was in a state of absolute shock over their decadence and loss of morality.

And then a cry went up throughout the building. Five of their party were missing. Laura, Morgan, Samantha, Ginny and Kaylee were nowhere to be found. It wasn’t that large a building. An exhaustive search was completed in ten minutes, and the remaining dozen people were furious that Laura and her friends had left without revealing the secret of how to leave the building. Sarah unashamedly announced that it was Ginny who had her head between Sarah’s legs about 6 AM that morning. The group’s departure must have happened within the last three hours.

Hopeful that Laura and her group would eventually tell the authorities to come and let them out, the remaining women spent the rest of the cloudy day discussing how bizarre their situation was and wondering if they would be prosecuted for trespassing in the unfinished Castle Commonwealth mall. But as afternoon turned to evening, their fear turned to anger. Damn Laura and her friends! It seemed they had not told anybody how the rest of the group was still trapped here!

The next three days were filled with confusion. Their building was wedged between high perimeter walls, both to their south and northeast. The high southern wall blocked all direct views of the sun, but they could see a strange orange tint to the sunlight in the courtyard outside their lobby, and astounding as it seemed, they were losing about fifteen minutes of daylight each day. And then sometime before 3 PM Christmas afternoon, Julie and Hailey disappeared.

The remaining ten people were in an uproar, lots of shouting and finger pointing. Kelly finally managed to organize a coherent search, maintaining a central command with Nicole and keeping track of four pairs of search teams. They made a diagram of the building and were carefully recording the location and progress of four two-person search teams.

Around 6 PM, Cordelia heard a woman named Caroline screaming as she ran up from the basement level. Her search partner Jordan had entered an empty storage area to press against the walls and probe for a hidden passage. As planned, Caroline let the door close with Jordan inside. Jordan was going to test whether the door could be opened from the inside. After ten seconds of waiting, Caroline decided it could not and she opened the door to let Jordan out. The closet was bare again. Jordan was gone without a trace.

All nine remaining women were soon outside the closet area. It was an odd area, almost too large to think of as just a closet. With the large four-meter door fully retracted, several women gingerly examined the interior. The chamber seemed extremely well constructed, the same size and quality as the elevator carriage that had brought them to their original party, but with air vents in the floor and no keyboard. A few pin lights in the ceiling provided an adequate amount of illumination.

No one was willing to stay inside while the elevator was tested again. Then a woman named Nicole had the bright idea of testing without people. The idea seemed so ridiculous it almost wasn’t tried. A series of test ensued. All objects left in the chamber disappeared once the door was closed, even when the door was closed only for a fraction of a second. The results were frightening.

At this point another voice interrupted Cordelia. “This is Alison at the Bee Park with a question for Aggie. Did you find these things in the transfer junction?”

“No. My guess is that after enough time, the servo cleaning routines kick in.”

Cordelia turned and looked at Aggie. “You people obviously know so much more about this environment than we do. But I’d like to add that we too have noticed that areas left untouched for more than a week or so are put back to very pristine conditions. Is this the same thing?”

Aggie nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Another example is our handouts. We’ve been leaving them in the zones and they’ll disappear after six days if the zones are not visited again. My team was making speed jumps at the end of our search days, just enough time to pop the doors open, just to reset the servo timers.”

Cordelia nodded and got back to her story. A week in the corner building passed by, and then another. It was January 7^th and the women decided that anything was preferable to a meaningless existence trapped inside a prison. They would go into the closet in two groups. Cordelia, Sarah, Sydney and Katelyn would leave first, and then Kelly, Natalie, Nicole, Caroline and Claire would follow.

Cordelia watched the second group as it waited outside the closet. About a second before the door closed, Cordelia and Kelly looked each other in the eyes. Their gazes seemed to lock.

For Cordelia, it was a very strange experience. The elevator door suddenly seemed to be closing more slowly, and she had the very uncomfortable thought that Kelly was using her and her friends as guinea pigs. But that couldn’t be right. Kelly had promised to follow immediately after them. And then the door edge cut their view of each other’s eyes. Both women unexpectedly hiccupped as the door silently finishing closing.

Immediately to Cordelia right, the three-meter wall started to slide and open and their closet was bathed in a warm orange light. Cordelia and her friends let out gasps of relief. Katelyn had earlier confided in having a nightmare where the floor would disappear once the door was closed, dropping them into an inky pit. Walking out through a side door was infinitely preferable!

But this?! The four women stared at the scenery and started to laugh hysterically. Their last hope of still being in Vermont had just been shattered. Staring in the direction of the sun, Cordelia’s group was on the ridgeline of a mountain range of breathtaking proportions. But wait! They had just walked out of a closet in the basement of a building, a building surrounded by flat land and high walls. Staring at the Alpine-like scenery around her, Cordelia felt so disoriented she sat down on the floor, gasping heavily.

And in that small hexagonal room, she and her friends waited for almost an hour. Kelly and her group never showed up. Eventually Sarah pushed a button in their entrance arch and the three-meter door retracted. The carriage looked very similar, but now had two tumblers mounted on the wall opposite the direction they had first entered. The four women went in to explore, and thus began their weeks of exploration in the hexagonal pyramid.

Katelyn chimed in on the discussion. “After our first day here, we thought there were 672 jump sites. That was the number of tumbler possibilities, and it also fit the site numbers we were seeing in the archways. And the floors here are so strange, numbered from the top down.”

Cordelia continued with her story. They met Laura’s original group. Julie and Hailey were with Laura too. Laura strongly urged Cordelia and her group to join her, and Cordelia had no objections. But after a week of living in the large group, she learned that Julie and Hailey had originally resisted Laura’s urgings. As a result the two women were being treated as slaves.

Things got worse. Kelly showed up about at the pyramid about a week after Cordelia, and the two groups began to fight for members. Sydney and Katelyn were so disgusted with Laura’s domineering personality that they switched sides and joined Kelly, but then Cordelia heard that they were just as unhappy with conditions there.

The final straw for Cordelia with Laura’s group came two weeks after Cordelia’s arrival at the pyramid. By this time Laura had identified over a dozen zones on the bottom floor that offered access to the outside through crystal clear chambers that appeared to work as airlocks. Laura had Julie physically thrown against her will into the airlock, and the slave was forced to spend several hours outside in the cold thin air before being allowed back in.

Hailey flipped out over this treatment of her friend. She accused Laura of being a tin pot Hitler doing Nazi experimentations on humans, and Laura responded by restraining Hailey with chains and saying she would have to be punished for her outburst. The situation was too much for Cordelia to put up with. Risking her life, she helped overpower two guards who were armed with knives. With cries for help ringing through the area, Cordelia and her friends barely managed to escape from Laura’s camp that night without a major knife fight.

In the days that followed, a three-way war broke out between Laura, Kelly, and a collection of people loosely led by Cordelia. Things got so bad that after a week of warfare all three groups realized that they would soon be having fatalities if they stayed on the path they were on. A truce was organized, and it included strict rules about announcing your presence while exploring and avoiding other people’s territories.

As far as Cordelia knew, her original Christmas party was currently living as four separate groups, Laura’s, Kelly’s, her own team, and Hailey and Julie were off on their own and hiding from everybody. Three weeks ago Cordelia had left Hailey and Julie a message, asking again that they rejoin her group. She never got a reply. And that was the situation until Aggie showed up exploring the pyramid.

Tom asked a quick couple of questions, and it was Sydney who smiled at him and answered. “I’ll use weeks because I know what a strange definition you people have for months. It’s been about nine weeks since the end of the war. And as for going outside, we all feel the need for it. This pyramid is so strange, such great novelty between the rooms in terms of function, but they’re all the same size! It gets to you after a while. I go for hikes at least a few times a week. I’ve even camped outside overnight. There’s gear for it in the storage rooms by the airlock rooms, very high-class mountain gear, stuff you dream about if you’re an amateur climber, ski equipment too.”

“It’s nice to get out,” Katelyn added. “The nights are brutally cold but during the day it’s actually nice when the wind is not blowing. It takes about five minutes to cycle through the airlock each way. It’s a sizable pressure drop. At first we used to worry about blowouts, living in a pressurized building like this, but I guess we’ve gotten used to it.”

Tom nodded. “We think the pyramid is pressurized to the same value as the elevation of the Great Hexagon, about 300 meters above sea level.”

Katelyn smiled back at him. “Is it true you’re having almost 24 hours a day of sunlight now?”

“Yeah. I haven’t been back in a week, but ... hey, Mark! When is sunset today where you are?”

“Hi, everybody,” he replied. “It’s 10:48 PM Great Hexagon Time, and we still have a half hour of daylight left.”

“Hello, Mark,” said Cordelia. “All that sunshine, and the sun is directly overhead, correct?”

“No, not now, just at solar noon. The sun right now is making a big oval in the sky, rising in the north northeast and swinging just south of directly overhead at solar noon and the setting in the north northwest about eleven hours later. I remember all the darkness near the winter solstice. The change is truly spectacular.”

“What about the heat though? Aren’t you guys getting fried?”

Mark laughed. “No! During the winter we got as cold as a very cold day in Vermont, but so far this spring has been idyllically pleasant. Our highest recorded temperature occurred yesterday, 29C.”

“Is that all?”

“The star here produces a lot less power than Earth’s sun. We’re also lot closer in, and the net effect is this planet gets about 90% of incident power compared to Earth. But the lack of polar icecaps means this planet reflects less sunlight back into space. With the big tilt and the fast orbit, the net effect is a planet-wide temperature just slightly cooler than Earth and with temperate climates almost everywhere, even at the equator. We believe the rain forests there are sub-tropical, perhaps similar to the laurel forests the northern Mediterranean had millions of years ago. This is all based on detailed satellite images. The polar areas here would have extreme seasonal shifts if there were much land there, but it’s almost all ocean above sixty degrees latitude, in both hemispheres.”