by Gentry Race
Solari looked at her bistable. “But I need to nPrint my things.”
“You will nPrint only your presence.”
Solari appreciated Chellis’s insignia on his upper chest. The hexagon-shaped logo for which she supported for so many years.
“Will Carter command my team?” Solari asked.
“I have commandeered General Malick.”
“A human?”
“General Malick has dedicated himself selflessly to Enconn. I see his diligence as an advantage for our unfortunate situation here on Annulus.”
7
A beeping signal sounded in Solari’s Med Bed room, sending drifting thoughts of concern. Solari ran her finger over the slight raised strips of her second skin of her forearm. A hologram revealed a person’s outline behind the wall. It was Aden. She spun her fingers about on the skin, and lines were drawn contouring the door with a knob.
Aden opened the door, and she saw his empathetic eyes set with apprehension. He gave her a shy smile before they said anything to each other. Solari took notice of the scent he carried as a human. Aden exuded a charm that Solari felt was contrived. Like he was trying to project an image of himself just to get a reaction.
“Are you all right?” Aden asked.
Solari nodded as she noticed the scars just above his chin. “Your chin?”
“It was an accident that happened many years ago. I lost my mother.”
Despite Aden’s harsh memories, those scars made him perfectly human to her.”
“I’m sorry. I didn't notice them before. I guess I forget what it’s like to scar. Well, in the physical…” Solari said.
An awkward silence fell upon them.
“I lost my mother. We were... poisoned by radiation when we came to Annulus. Our ship had a faulty shielding,” Solari said. “My sister and I were entered for Naturalization.”
“I’m sorry, Sol. Well, scars are more than what you receive from things that happen to you.”
“Is that the reason you became a Neopract?”
“Yes, I wanted to help others with traumatic situations despite what my father said.”
“Malick?” Solari asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that why you are here? To survey me?”
“No, I heard you may have experienced a glitch,” Aden said, looking at her as if sensing she was a different person.
“I am fine. I don’t know what happened. There was a creature, and I think he must have…”
But she didn’t have to say because Aden knew what would happen next. On Annulus, nPrints that experienced errors in their print were sent to Axiom, the only place that could help the psychological problems she was hoarding.
“Have you experienced an erratum before?” Aden asked.
“I can’t believe you are asking me that. Of course not.”
“You need to be surveyed.”
“No, I’m tired of the therapy sessions, especially from you. I need rest!” Solari exclaimed to him.
Aden hated comments like these because they made him feel inferior and un-empathetic to the Imprint condition. He had a soul, too.
“Sol, everyone here is perfect, and everyone is held to those standards. I refuse to think being different is a negative thing. I won’t have the blinds pulled over my eyes to shade reality,” Aden said.
“And what’s that?”
“That we are flawed.”
Solari looked away, contemplating the repercussions that would ensue if she was erring. Chellis would no doubt issue her—and everyone related to her—to the Axiom if he found she had an erratum. The surveys would have to begin.
“Sol, remember: to err is to be human.”
Aden prepared for his exit. Solari’s curiosity was piqued, and she couldn’t help but to ask, “Did you make that up yourself?”
Aden slowly turned, sharing the human warmth from his eyes one more time. “Mesonic text; Neology 101.”
Solari laid in her Med Bed, which was covered in fine linen and plush pillows. Despite how she physically felt, she dreaded her suspension. All the hard work she had put in over the years was thrown in the trash. She tried to clear her mind to rest. Perhaps I can find sanctuary in my memSpace, she thought. She closed her eyes and went to sleep.
Waves swelled high above her head, sweeping her along as she struggled to swim. In the horizon, she saw islands rise in a concentric ring to her left and far coastline to her right. The cool sea crashed on the rocky new coastline, cracking and venting furious volcanic gasses.
Solari knew the geological formation was a hotspot island. From land, she saw her mother’s grave. The headstone was a three-dimensional double cross.
She tried to swim away but was met with resistance from the sinuous current forcing her toward what was now one large island, massive in size! She felt the pull of the current as she went down into the black abyss, trying to break free from the jetted water. She saw the slow subduction of continental plates appearing in time lapse before her eyes.
As the island plate smashed into the upper continental plate, rock and water collided causing a slurry of mud. Solari felt the displacement of water as it pulled her down into the depths of the rocky cracks.
Dazed from the tumble, she opened her eyes to an impressive sight; a large, porous, waterlogged plate melting in a red-hot chamber of magma. She watched saturated rock as it fissured and cracked from the heat. The pressurized steam erupted, and blinding white explosive vapor blasted toward her.
Solari shot up in a panic. The sweat beaded down her forehead and cooled in the slight breeze. She was outside. The sound of a gentle wash could be heard faintly on the streets as “scrubbers” ran their continuous cleaning cycles.
“Was I sleepwalking?” Solari whispered to herself, rubbing her head.
Her thoughts ran with emotion as she dreaded to think she might have had an erratic episode of some kind. She reminisced on what Aden had said earlier about Neology and the Mesons. Her beliefs were a little fuzzy for the philosophy.
She stood and tried to get a sense of where she was, reaching for her second skin to see the light dead. Her access to the feed had been prohibited. She tried to use her wits and looked around for a landmark. She saw the bright tip of Annulus Tower just over a few buildings. She was so used to using technology to guide her, she was thankful to recognize something.
As she headed back, she saw a distortion of some kind out of her peripheral. Her vision seemed to play tricks on her. She would see something off to the side, but when she would snap her head in that direction, there was nothing.
Solari passed an unlit alley, and the distortion happened again. This time, she saw the “scrubbers” in the recesses, organizing themselves from tiny flurries patterned noise.
Thousands of minute hexagon-shaped bots grouped by the mass and clumped into denser strands until she saw a familiar shape. Eight corners connected to each with parallel and perpendicular swarming lines; a simple cube. The clumpy lines were black and cast a faint shadow in the Earthshine.
“What the?” Solari said out loud but then looked around to make sure no one saw her talking to herself.
The scrubbers formed into a cube within a cube connected at the corner vertices; a hypercube. Solari recognized the shape as the caching device she couldn't open. Was she hallucinating? She had heard of nPrints experiencing vivid hallucinations after a traumatic event, but nothing like this. Perhaps, I do need surveying, she thought.
The “scrubbers” changed again, this time unfolding the hypercube into eight boxes connected at the cross section; a double cross. Solari recognized this shape and dread set upon her. It was her mother's gravestone. A gift her sister Elise had made in tribute for her mother's affinity with a famed painter from Earth.
Solari changed directions and ran as fast as she could, unable to believe what she saw. If Elise had anything at all to do with producing a caching drug, Solari would be held liable.
But who could she go to?
S
he had no tech, her department suspected she has an erratum, and now her family might implicate her. Solari needed to go to the one place she hadn’t been in years. The place she grew up. The Far Side.
8
Warm black mud enveloped over Elise Ducard’s limbs as she gave way to a watery abyss below. Soft scan-lines pulsated in a rhythmic process from her pilot light blue hair, contouring her small frame that was similar to Solari’s, her sister. The interlaced lines resulted in a lustrous sheen onto the watery void below.
Elise helped guide a drilling mechanism into a newly dug hole, pervaded with irritating fumes. And even though they could not impair her, she was stifled by the wretched odor of chewed metal.
The walls of the well buzzed. Her skin did the same, as if crawling with a colony of ants. Elise struggled to forget it was her nanite skin fighting the voracious appetite of the consuming black pitch liquid called Azoth that Arthur Biggleston, her stepfather, had dreamed up.
“The Azoth is working!” she yelled up at an oddly dressed gentleman sporting a dusty top hat.
“We’ve reached the heart of Annulus, my dear! No panning for us!” he called down admiringly.
Elise met Arthur and his wife, Elizabeth, when she and her sister came to Annulus. Elise abhorrently called the particular sect the ‘Far Side.’ Elizabeth was an amateur geologist and taught Elise about its stark environment full of fumaroles, windswept rock, and hot geysers. Those hotspots were a culmination of gas and pressure that had built up under the crust of Annulus, producing deformations in the landmass.
“Make certain that water stays shifted up there!” Elise said.
“Not to worry; regular tides today!” Arthur replied.
The melodic hum reminded her of the first day she met Arthur and Liz, singing songs and panning the waterway for what bridged her digital consciousness to physical. White Matter.
Fracking into Annulus’s White Matter reserves was Arthur’s grand plan to secure their tenure on the Far Side despite it being highly illegal. As flesh and blood humans nomadically living off the land, Elise admired their courage to have left their home behind. Earth had become a wasteland in most parts due to an epic solar mass ejection in mid-twenty-first century. No one counted on the mass electrical outages the Big Flare would bring.
Elise followed the hypnotic Azoth swish and curl as it did its job, breaking the regenerative crust apart. Elise quickly directed a stream of black liquid onto a jutting outcrop and watched it wither away.
The liquid had the same effect on her flesh, giving a slight burning tingle she tried to ignore. She lifted her strobing forearm, splattered in whips of blackness from the drill. A blueish green band illuminated a delicate floral design of a peony flower raised on her skin. She shared this design with her sister and their affinity for the flower. She used this to access her second skin interface, unfolding a diagram with levels showing her nPrinting signal.
She looked up at Arthur. “I should have never let you talk me into this. Can you increase the signal?” Arthur bowed his head in regard and disappeared, allowing the diffused sunlight to enter the well.
A latching noise from the surface reverberated down, and Elise’s indicator levels spiked. Her strobing sped up its frequency, creating an opaque presence. Arthur, once again blotting out the light, now joined by Liz with a keen eye on his rig.
Elise smiled at Liz and rocked the drill back and forth, trying to bore out a wider hole, injecting more of the black mixture. As she held the grips, she began to feel a slight rumble from the shaft, transforming from a slight hum to a violent shriek. Billowing bursts of smoke from a gas pocket shot past Elise’s face, funneled upwards along the cavernous walls, just missing Arthur and Elizabeth.
“It was a pocket,” she said as Arthur shook his head in frustration, sending a cautious look at Elizabeth.
“Hold on! I’m coming down!” he called down.
Arther Biggleston wore a long, brown leather coat and white colonial blouse that was stained by the oily substrate. As he slid closer, Elise could see the more intricately wired objects he had integrated onto his body. Starting at his dusty fine craftsman shoes and cradled just above, a brace stemming up to his knee and connecting to various mechanical gears and pulleys to help his so-called “bum knee.” Elise did not understand that phrase at first because illness and wounds were as foreign to her as death itself.
From his waist and under his coat extended more odd contraptions hidden from view. His face was weathered from the years of light exposure and freckled back to a device he wore on his ear. He claimed it was for his hearing, although Liz would disagree since he often ignored her.
Arthur dropped into the gelatinous muck, commanding the grips of the drill shaft. Elise saw the Azoth had no effect on him. He shifted his posture, revealing an old makeshift device on his forearm emulating the sleek floral version Elise had on hers.
“You shouldn’t be down here! You could get hurt!” Elise said, eyeing the buzzing walls and knowing of the grave circumstances Arthur presented on himself.
“I will just keep rocking it back, my dear, and see if you stomp more Azoth into the hole to break it apart,” Arthur said, reassuringly.
He raised his forearm and printed a polished, eighteenth century Victorian-style wooden dial. Arthur had an affinity for them. He then printed a cross section of the fumaroles interior structure, revealing the lake shifting their way. He flicked his wrist, navigating the well under the drill bit. New nanites refreshed the areas under the well, revealing their time was up.
“An abscess is causing the lake to shift sooner than I thought, my love. We must go now,” Arthur said, turning off the pump.
“You can’t give up now. We are nearly there!” Elise said with impatience.
“You can get crushed down if you please, but remember, we are all not nPrints,” Arthur said as he pulled his way back up the drill shaft.
Elise could see the light at the top of the hole waver back and forth. “Perhaps your Azoth isn’t as strong as you thought.”
“Elise, the crust is collapsing. We must hurry!” Arthur said, racing up faster.
Elise quickly latched onto the drill shaft and ascended, following Arthur. She looked down, watching the bottom of the well close under her. She felt something strange, and she saw it was the crust regenerating over her foot and closing over her waist. The shaft rippled with turbulent motion from lack of Azoth.
She looked up one last time to see Arthur clear the top as the soil entombed her. The dirt squeezed every square inch, leaving no void empty. Her spongy lungs were now crushed from the weight of the soil. A reset would be triggered any moment, so she thought of peonies just before the blackness took hold.
Reprinting was a strange process for Elise. The moment of memSpace before reprinting brought curious thoughts and feelings. Her Conscious, while kept safe in a backup, still felt intense pain when she reset. She was an nPrint with consciousness, not a robot. Her body was flesh and blood, nPrinted by tiny nanites using the White Matter feed projection from Annulus.
Arthur liked to say her soul was in “the cloud,” but Elise was always perplexed by this phrase because the Far Side always had clear skies, unlike the Lower Dregs and the Upper Cruft. Arthur was too much of a romantic for Elise’s taste. As her mind wandered, she thought of nature. Everything fought to survive, which is something they had in common. She hated dying.
9
The Far Side was located on the other side of the station, opposite Annulus Tower. It was blocked by Earth, so it received almost no White Matter feed. Supporting side structures curved in along the dirt, protruding in segmented arches as they faded into the distant horizon.
The ex-Neo’s huts blended into the arid landscape, virtually camouflaged by the layers of dust that coated everything there. Dust was a fact of life on the Far Side, and the ex-Neo’s were nomadic survivalists.
Elizabeth Biggleston placed her sun-weathered hand on the landyte, striking the lever down. She just saw
a young woman get devoured and crushed in a large hole, but somehow, Elizabeth’s eyes showed no emotion.
Elizabeth had taken up a hobby in geology shortly after arriving at Annulus Station. She was fascinated by the backwardness of how the rock solidified on top as opposed to Earth’s geological process of forming new rock from below.
She had tied her hair back in a colorful orange ribbon that contrasted nicely against the cerulean colors of the shifting lake. She glanced over her shoulder and lost herself for a moment in missing chunks of land that floated like islands over the tunnels below. The projection signal was weak in that spot.
The Far Side was a barren place, rocky yet caressed with hot waterways. The land rose and fell with the restless geology below, and she loved it.
The mini-landyte Elise had designed with Arthur looked like the guts of an old Chevy mashed together with a moonshine still and spliced into a mainframe computer by some mad mechanic.
Though far from pretty, it was a cleverly designed contraption for boosting the nanoprinting signal from Annulus Tower to the Far Side by skipping it off the ionosphere of the station. The skipping or skywave technique was how the radio transmissions were sent around the globe in the twenty-first century.
The landyte fired to life with a racket, sounding like tin cans in a rock tumbler.
Arthur looked through a one-of-a-kind headset he invented, searching the wetwork to pinpoint Elise’s backup Conscious.
“Peonies? Elizabeth asked, standing behind him.
“Peonies,” Arthur agreed. Arthur zoomed in tightly on a field of flowers stretching as far as the eye could see. “I’ve got her.”
Immediately, the air buzzed and swirled around the Landyte. Scan-lines transcribed Elise’s body together. Her high-collared dress, now clean, fit perfectly around her short, slim figure. Her eyes were closed, still clinging to the thought of peonies. However sweet those flowers were, coming back was always a taxing ordeal.
