The Girl Who Found the Sun

by Matthew S. Cox

  A hard plastic case roughly a foot square lay mostly buried beside the corpse, the disintegrated remnants of a shoulder strap jutting up from the corner. Curiosity got the better of her. Raven brushed her gloved hand over it to clear away dirt. No writing or icons identified what the object might be, so she pulled it up out of the ground, rested it flat, and flicked the latch.

  The case opened like a clamshell. Inside, amid crumbling foam, lay an olive-drab device with the approximate shape of a thick book. Two narrow tubes protruded from one side, the opposite face had two lenses each three inches wide. Both tubes had rubberized cups on the ends that crumbled at her touch, however the lenses appeared intact.

  This is some kind of seeing device.

  She held it up to examine. Two rubbery buttons on the top right didn’t seem to do anything. A plastic curve in the middle turned out to be a small wheel embedded in the device she could rotate by pushing. Eventually, she tried holding it up to her eyes and looking through it. The device made far-away things appear closer.

  Oh… binoculars. She lowered them and made a face. I thought they’d look different.

  Whatever the buttons once did, she had no idea, but felt pretty sure it had run out of battery power already. Still, the manual focus wheel worked, which made them useful. The Saints had likely used them to survey the turbines from the ground. Again, she glanced down at the bones inside a rotting suit.

  Proof that the world had been deadly brought back some of her prior nervousness. However, she couldn’t ignore the vast amounts of greenery everywhere. More than a hundred years had to have passed since the Saints died… unless something other than a toxic environment killed them. She looked around for signs of a hazardous tank that might have exploded, but no obvious sources of doom caught her eye. The position of the bodies also didn’t suggest they’d been killed violently or died while attempting to run away from anything. It looked as though they’d simply been trudging around and collapsed.

  “Strange.”

  Raven stood, muttered an apology for stepping on him, and wandered deeper into the windmill farm. Looking at schematic diagrams hadn’t fully prepared her for the scale of the actual turbine, or the severity of the disrepair. Even the towers, simple steel lattices, suffered pockmarks as if exposed to acid, corrosion, and rust. Two even warped under the turbines they supported, appearing like a toy made from plastic straws left too close to a heat lamp. It seemed the weight of the generators had begun to exceed the ability of the disintegrating towers to hold them up.

  She stopped at the approximate center of the turbine field, using the binoculars to survey each generator. The world hung in near silence, save for the constant whuff-whuff-whuff from giant fan blades underscored by the nigh imperceptible whine of gears. Every so often, a clank announced a piece of metal falling somewhere. Three fan blades had broken off a little past the midway point, still operational. She questioned that fans with two long and one short blade didn’t shake themselves apart. For some reason, they appeared stable, and most of the turbines appeared to be working despite their decrepit condition. Turbine eight spun much slower than the rest, while turbine fourteen had come to a complete stop, its fan blades bending backward at the tips from wind pressure.

  Either the brake has somehow been turned on or it jammed.

  A narrow ladder, as rusty and pitted as the rest of the structure, ran up inside the center of each tower to a maintenance deck around the turbine. Raven didn’t think her weight would be significant enough to cause the ladders to fail completely, but still approached the climb cautiously.

  “Well, might as well start there. That’s why I’m out here.”

  She approached tower fourteen, gazing up at the tip of the fan blade twenty feet overhead. The scale of the machine astounded her. Nothing inside the Arc came close to it in terms of size, the closest being the CO2 scrubber units. Seeing a machine that large, so far beyond the capacity of the Arc to manufacture, hit her like witnessing a feat of magic.

  Another clank somewhere off to the left made her jump. That time, she caught a glimpse of a metal fragment falling, bouncing off Tower 3, and hitting the ground. It had to be a chunk of the turbine’s outer housing. That didn’t bode well for survivability. Even in a normal atmosphere, ordinary rain getting inside the generators could cause problems. The coils and magnets inside were enclosed at least, so damage to the outer housing would not mean immediate failure. However, she thought it a good idea to come back out here with plastic sheeting and cover as many holes as possible.

  With any luck, once she returned, seeing her come back alive would convince the others to help. Tarping eighteen turbines herself would take days.

  Raven paused under Tower 14 and stared up the length of the ladder to the hole in the platform thirty feet up. The metal lattice around her made unsettling noises in response to the wind, shifting and settling. Alarmingly, she spotted a few missing rivets where frame beams crossed. The ones that remained all had rust rings, clearly loose. Turbine tower fourteen had become a bunch of metal sticks kinda-sorta held together by failing rivets.

  This is bad… if a serious storm hits, half of the towers are going to collapse.

  Her mind raced. It might be possible to replace rivets with bolts. One thing the Arc had in vast numbers was spare bolts. That, too, would be one hell of a project involving climbing and working while hanging off the side of the towers. Again, nothing she looked forward to doing alone. However, the generators kept people alive. Seeing them in this condition, so close to a catastrophic failure, took her off her feet. She sank into a squat, holding onto the ladder for balance until the dizziness of adrenaline faded. The lives of everyone in the Arc depended on electricity. One storm with strong winds at some point over the past few years could have flattened multiple towers. The stress on the power system would have burned out the rest, causing the last remnants of humanity to die in the dark, suffocating without ever knowing why. No electricity meant no oxygen. No light. No heat. Raven had been restless as of late, and this realization cemented her opinion that the Arc had become a grave waiting for the people in it to die.

  What would Noah have done if everything shut down all at once? Would he have risked opening the door or just had everyone huddle in the hydroponic room hoping the plants let us breathe? At least until they died. No light.

  “Not time to give up yet. I have a job to do.”

  Despite wearing gloves, she took care to avoid grabbing rust spots on the way up the ladder. Having been outside for a while and suffering no ill effects from it took away the panic of having to rush back inside before death. She made her way to the steel mesh platform encircling the gimbal upon which the turbine housing rotated, and pulled herself up to stand. If looking at plans hadn’t prepared her for seeing the generators in person, checking them out with binoculars didn’t prepare her for the sheer massiveness while standing three feet away. Sleek and aerodynamic, the mostly cylindrical device tapered to a relatively thin point on her left, eighteen feet long from the tip of the nose cone to the back end. The thickest part had a diameter of seven feet, filled with gears, wire coils, magnets, and circuitry.

  Once the initial awe of being this close to the turbines while outside waned, she experienced a disorienting sense of wrongness. A machine with so many moving parts like this left to its own devices for hundreds of years should not still be operational. Someone had to have come out here before her, probably many times, to maintain them. Could it be that the Saints hadn’t really been sent out as a team of eight, but rather pairs or even individuals spaced out over years? None of the remains appeared at all recent, which meant either the people in the Arc had the most incredible luck imaginable—or someone’s been routinely going outside in secret.

  Why wouldn’t Noah tell everyone the air outside is breathable? She frowned. Says the girl still wearing a filter mask.

  Turbine fourteen continued to shift, keeping itself oriented into the wind, but its blades didn’t spin. Creaking ca
me from inside whenever the breeze picked up speed, sounding as if the entire mechanism might collapse to pieces at any moment under a strong enough gust. She moved to the edge of the platform and looked down the length of the bowing fan blade.

  It’s lucky the wind isn’t too strong or these would have snapped off.

  Many hours staring at schematics had familiarized her with the turbines enough that she had little difficulty finding the primary hatch cover, opening the machine up like she’d worked on them her entire adult life. Some of the internal components didn’t quite look the same as the drawing—more disorienting as she didn’t have the plans in front of her to compare. However, after a few minutes of poking around, the layout made sense. At the front end, she discovered the problem in short order: a large fragment of the outer housing had fallen into the primary transmission gears that transferred rotational energy from the enormous fan to the driveshaft, wedging them to a halt.

  No amount of pulling freed it, as the force of the wind attempting to turn the fan kept it pinned. Even the strongest guy in the Arc couldn’t overpower the force generated by the wind on the giant fan. She’d either have to wait for the breeze to drop off to nothing or feather the blades.

  Since the wind appeared in no mood to take a break, she headed to the front end of the massive turbine, opened a much smaller hatch, and extended a crank connected to the gear system that altered the blade’s pitch. In normal conditions, an electric motor did that, operated from a control board back in the engineering room. Unfortunately, the wiring responsible for the command signals failed before she’d been born. No one inside the Arc received any information on the status of the turbines other than the amount of power each one sent down the main wire.

  Getting her wish to see them in person had been both a thrill and terrifying due to their condition.

  It will be amazing if we can keep them limping on for another five years.

  Raven pulled the large handle down from the collapsed position, grabbed it in both hands, and cranked it around. Deep metallic creaks rang out as gears that hadn’t moved in at least a century struggled. Rusty spots and small bits of debris made for tough going. Grunting, cursing, and gasping, Raven strained at the hand crank in between short rest periods. Gradually, the three huge wing-like blades rotated so their leading edges faced directly into the wind, relieving the pressure and eliminating rotational force on the turbine shaft. That done, she pulled on another lever to activate the brake—but it came off in her hand.

  “Okay… so much for that.”

  She sighed at the cracked rod, tempted to toss it aside out of spite. But she could possibly reuse the metal. The furnace in the Arc had already run out of fuel, but if the outside world truly had become habitable, maybe she could come up with some sort of kiln to amplify an ordinary wood fire to the point it could melt or soften metal. She gave a noncommittal shrug and stuffed the broken lever into her satchel. The fan jostled about in the breeze, which could make it dangerous for her to put her fingers anywhere close to the gears. Her only option for applying the brake involved stealing one from another turbine, which would create a new problem if that turbine had a similar issue.

  I shouldn’t have to disassemble the gearbox to clear the jam. Hope not. Then, I’ll definitely have to fix the brake first.

  The fragment of outer shell appeared to have broken away from the top and fallen into the gear system that converted the relatively slow-moving primary shaft into a faster-spinning secondary drive shaft connected to the generator. She leaned inside for a closer look, but kept her hands a safe distance from harm. A main gear four inches thick and as big around as her torso had chowed down on the hunk of steel cladding, drawing it in a ways and perforating it. The sheet of one-eighth-inch steel bent around at least four other smaller gears as well. Extracting it would require enough strength to make the primary gear rotate a span of at least fifteen teeth.

  “Damn. I’m not going to be able to pull that out without it breaking off in my hands.”

  An idea hit her.

  She hurried back to the large crank, turning it until the blades angled into the wind the other way, effectively reversing the direction of the windmill. As soon as the fan responded to the wind, she ceased cranking and ran back to the main access hatch.

  The giant gear crept around, spitting out the mangled hunk of metal at an excruciatingly slow pace. Better slow than having pieces break off. She grabbed the hunk in both hands, holding it steady as it disengaged from multiple intermediate gears. Some of the smaller gears suffered minor damage, but the big one laughed it off. Fortunately, nothing looked too smashed up to make her worry about serious problems.

  Raven took a step back, examining the chunk of debris, a generally rectangular section about the size of a cafeteria tray, one end chewed up and crimpled where gears pressed the pattern of their teeth in. Rust ran around the edges except for a foot-long spot where the metal snapped. She leaned into the turbine housing and peered up at a matching hole in the top of the housing, cringing again at the brightness of the cloudy sky. Rain would fall directly on the transmission gears. She had to do something to cover that hole before the weather became worse. If her novels were accurate, a sky this grey and overcast meant rain would come soon.

  Oddly, the gears didn’t lack in lubrication. That further confirmed her suspicion that someone had been maintaining them, especially considering the grease looked exactly like the plant-derived stuff they used inside the Arc and not petroleum-based like the people who built the turbines would have used. She narrowed her eyes, turning her head to stare at the distant hatch down to the Arc.

  Why the hell are they lying?

  7

  Glint

  Breaking down is the only thing you can ever be absolutely certain a machine will do. – Ellis Wilder.

  Having cleared the jam in the gear system, Raven cranked the fan blade pitch back to thirty-five-point-five degrees, or at least as close to it as the indicator dial was accurate. That offered the most efficient angle of attack based on the lift characteristics of these blades. It took almost four minutes of cranking to get there, but soon, turbine fourteen spun up to match speed with the rest—except number eight, which remained sluggish.

  That could mean anything from gunked-up insides to a stripped gear, both problems she likely hadn’t brought—or didn’t have access to—the necessary parts to repair. At least number eight still rotated.

  “Since I’m already out here and not melting, I should check on it.”

  A final look around inside turbine fourteen failed to reveal anything out of the ordinary. Confident she’d done as much as she could to bring it back online, she reached up to grab the huge access hatch, and swung it down to close. As she turned toward the ladder hole in the platform, a bright glinting flash in the corner of her eye made her pause.

  Raven spun toward it, but couldn’t tell exactly where it had come from—only that it appeared quite far away. Miles of former suburban ruins stretched out into the distance, vanishing amid a hazy fog that blended with the overcast sky. Weeds and other plants enshrouded pretty much everything except for the wind farm.

  Is the dirt here poisonous or are the mysterious people maintaining the generators clearing the area?

  “Ooh!” Remembering that she found binoculars, she fished them out of her satchel and held them up to her eyes, searching around for what flashed.

  Three dark shapes in the haze somewhat resembled the turbine towers except for not having windmill generators on top of them. Another flash came from beyond the left limit of her vision. She twisted toward it at the nearest of those towers. The glint reminded her of the way light could reflect off the surface of a shiny object, only many times more intense. Then again, the sun—even on such an overcast day—had to be thousands of times stronger than the sad light bulbs down in the Arc.

  That meant something shiny had to be moving.

  Bleh. Maybe a hunk of metal dangling on a wire.

  She h
omed in on the spot and gasped when a shadowy form moved, almost as if reacting to her looking at it. Given the distance and haze, she had no idea what it might be, but it definitely hadn’t been a bug. Part of her wanted to say she’d seen a man in a blotchy green-and-brown poncho scrambling to climb down, but that couldn’t be possible. All the humans except for the population of the Arc had died long ago. An animal, perhaps? But, they, too, had died off—supposedly. Of the animals she’d learned about in school, only apes or gorillas walked on two legs, and those creatures didn’t live in this region before the Great Death. Not to mention, like everything else above ground, they’d all died.

  The shape looked so much like a person she shivered with excitement. Her mind filled in details her eyes couldn’t reach: a figure pointing a single lens in her general direction, the sunlight gleaming on the surface. Could she have seen another living human being who didn’t come from the Arc? Too thrilled to contain herself, she waved and called out in greeting… then lowered her arm, overcome by a sense of foolishness.

  If the moving shadow had been another human, they would’ve been so far away they couldn’t hear her, or even see her without binoculars. Everything she’d learned growing up made the Earth sound like a dead ball of grey dust with nothing left but poison, wind, and aliens who may or may not still be out there hunting for living things to kill.

  Maybe I saw a Plution?

  None of the stories ever went into detail about what the invaders looked like, only that the Plutions killed everything. They could be human-shaped as easily as flying serpents, jelly blobs, or even insectoid. One downside to reading all those books: her imagination had no shortage of ways to envision monsters.

  Raven continued watching the distant tower for a few minutes, hoping to get a better look at ‘the thing that moved.’ Alas, whatever it was, it either didn’t really exist or had run off. The longer she searched, the more she wondered if her mind played tricks on her. A flash that far away could have come from metal scraps falling. It didn’t prove another person looked in her direction. It couldn’t mean another person.