by Rok Chillah
"Is everything all right with you?" Ludovico said. He looked genuinely concerned, if a bit puzzled and almost defensive about his own naiveté. His crisp black eyes crackled with intelligence and thoughtfulness.
"Everything is as it should be," Ridge said. He had meant to grab them, shake them, tell them the truth, enlist their aid. Now that he saw their innocence and faith, he couldn't bring himself to shatter their illusions. He couldn't bring himself to fight against the strength of their innocent convictions.
"You look as though you've had a hard day," Ludovico said.
"It has been a long day," Ridge said. "Excuse me. I have to get my things."
"You can't go in there," Ludovico said, raising a hand in alarm. "Hey," someone else said, "we're sealing this door. Keep out." A third said: "Go to your own workpod, pops."
"I'm exactly where I should be," Ridge said, and nobody dared stop him because he wore the black bar; not even Ludovico, who saw that Ridge looked worn and experienced. Therefore, as a young man and woman drew the doors shut, and as Ludovico stood staring with a look of alarm on his face-he had his collar com going and was trying to raise the CP, and Ridge grinned good luck at him-the doors closed and Ridge was inside WorkPod01.
Ridge looked out the window and watched the platform drift away along its monorail track. When the darkness beyond the streaks of light had swallowed them up, Ridge turned to examine the inside of the workpod. He was startled at the contrast between this and what he remembered. There were no cubes, no moon doors, no showers. All of that had been a biomnemonically induced dream.
As he explored the sealed environment of WorkPod01, Ridge almost sobbed with relief. For the first time that day, he felt safe from the mudmen. For the first time, he felt secure enough to relax, except there was this great emptiness in his heart at having lost all of his companions and now even their home had proven to be an illusion. WorkPod01 was a clean, barren environment. The light was even and quiet, the floors polished, the air clean and smelling faintly of solvents without any unpleasant harshness nor undue sweetness.
The ship's systems made sure that each crew was birthed in surroundings free of contamination, or else the illusions would not work so seamlessly. There was little here, except a blank room with eight incubators in the middle. Ridge ran his hands over the walls, looking here and there. The walls were gray and blank, unless one looked more closely and saw the myriad patterns of darker gray that indicated embedded circuits. At regular intervals were fine lines that looked as if they had bacteriolumes built in. But what turned it all on? How could he communicate with the room, the ship, the CP here?
With a soft whirring sound, the incubators shuddered, startling Ridge as he examined the instrument-rich walls. The thick glassy lids of all incubators simultaneously swung closed. With a soft clatter of steel on glass, the lids locked shut with tight frosted-glass in frosted-glass seals. Yellowish oil soaked the seals, instantly creating an impermeable barrier between the inside of each incubator and the air around it. The noise of all this made Ridge jump. He flattened himself against the wall, then relaxed as he watched the incubators slowly lower from standing to horizontal positions flat on the polished floor. The large, coffin-like containers upon closer examination appeared to be shells of stainless steel and thick glass. The glass was inlaid with myriad electronic and bionic circuits, busses, chips, pipes, and the like. The base of each incubator was of the same marble-like material Ridge had noted in the lobby in the bow. The marble settled on the softer plastic floor with a sigh of air escaping, almost making a vacuum seal. Then hidden plumbing in the walls make banging sounds, and Ridge heard a rushing sound. The lids winked softly with tiny green and amber lights, in running sequences. A moment later, water rushed in to each incubator. Ridge was reminded of how one filled a small pool or hot tub. Under an aquamarine light, purified water gushed out from hidden nozzles. The water whirlpooled until its surface bubbles settled. Ridge watched in fascination as one incubator started going through a new birthing cycle. A tiny shadow appeared inside the incubator on the floor near the middle. The shadow was no larger than a dark-gray pinprick on the white ceramic floor. In minutes, the shadow darkened and grew larger. Ridge understood what it was: a zygote rapidly multiplying in its nutrient broth. Every ten minutes or so, the number of cells doubled. Pretty soon, it was a bluish ball of cells like a volley ball with many seams. The ball grew at a good clip until it was the size of a peanut, much faster than in utero. Ridge guessed that the nine-month gestation was probably telescoped into a fraction of its natural time in here. The next dramatic phase occurred as the cluster of cells appeared to elongate slightly. Ridge knew that if he stayed long enough, he would see another eight team members go through their embryonic and then fetal stages until the time for birth came. He did not have that kind of time, so he sought a clue about what Venable might have meant in saying there was a key here. What could he have meant? What was a key to the Command Post or CP? Anxious and frustrated, Ridge turned his attention from the miracle of growing embryos to the mystery of getting into the CP.
Try as he might, Ridge could not raise an image of Venable on the two or three surfaces that looked like view screens. He couldn't get anything-not even static. Those areas began to seem like simply light shadows on the wall, and Ridge thought he must have been mistaken in thinking they were viewing surfaces.
"If I were a clue," he said, "where would I hide?" He explored on. He ran his fingertips along the grooves and joins of the walls and ceiling. The metallic or plastic surfaces did not yield. Puzzled and frustrated, he sat down, crossed his legs, and tried to meditate about his quest. He said to the mythical clue that Venable had promised, which persisted in hiding its face from him: "Come out, come out, wherever you are." No clue appeared, and he broke off in frustration.
The place was a cipher. Ridge squatted in a cross-leg Yoga-like pose for what seemed like hours. The incubators were filled with water and the jets had shut off. The room reposed in a peaceful semidarkness. Machinery whispered softly in the walls, in he ceiling, in the floor, in the incubators themselves.
As he squatted, listening intently to the faintest nuances of the place, he began to detect a certain rhythm. He closed his eyes and sat with his hands palms-up on his knees. He tried to make himself part of the room itself so that he could understand its spirit. This was a place of birth. It was a place that gave life, while the rest of the ship appeared to take life. Pipes in the walls dropped ovum and sperm somewhere in a incubator, where the two conjoined and became a zygote. Twenty-three chromosomes joined with 23 more chromosomes to create a single-celled organism of 46 chromosomes. This then dropped into a incubator that acted like a womb to nurture the new human being into life. Ridge imagined there must be hormones and enzymes to speed up the process. In all of that, with its many nuances and complications, Ridge began to detect a faint interplay of rhythms. He counted, not using numbers but his own heartbeats, not by touching fingertips to his pulse, but by feeling the pulses as blood coursed through his brain in much the same way that fluids pumped through this room. He began to decipher the on-off of cooling pumps, the whirr of fans, the gurgle of tiny bubbles in relief valves. He even thought he could almost feel the slick motion of oil molecules around one another in hydraulic systems smaller than his thumb. As he did all this, he detected one simple set of rhythms that made him rise to his feet. His legs were stiff, and he bent to massage them, but he hobbled over to the nearest incubator and then the next and so on. What they all had in common was that, in the thick glass of their lids, amid the intricate miniaturized wiring, amid the cities of chips and buses there, were the softest imaginable little white lights. They were barely visible, and they pulsed in quick patterns, racing around corners, up one side, down the other. As he stepped back, he saw that the same pattern occurred on each lid. Already the person growing in each was the size of a walnut. Each sat on the floor of its tank, and when he looked closely he could see masses of tiny air bubbles around each,
and microfine tendrils looping around each other. The only motion in the room was the coursing of those fine lights in each lid. As he looked from one incubator to another, Ridge noticed a commonality about the patterns. They started out the same-a quick motion in the upper left area, branching out into multitudes of unique configurations left to right and top to bottom before winking out to let the whole thing start over.
Ridge looked up and saw the same patterns racing along the ceiling. He guessed the ceiling had receptors in its surface to track the pattern. Somehow, perhaps this sent messages to the room, to the ship itself. Perhaps this was how the birth codes came down. Perhaps the ceiling sent the messages to the glass lids, and not the other way around. That didn't matter. That was beyond his understanding. What he did understand was the repetition. He began to figure out that maybe at one time inspectors had come around to check the growth of the fetuses. Judging by the condition of Nebula Express, the inspectors were long gone, dust amid interstellar dust. The automata functioned on, however, and functioned smoothly. He leaned his palms on the glass of one incubator and stared closely at the code of lights, so that he saw the glowing reflection of his own face in the glass. There was a lot of information in the code of lights, and most of it was binary or some other machine-readable code that he could not decipher. What he did decipher, however, were the letters W and P and then a number, 92. Could that mean WorkPod92? If so, it meant that all the workpods were coming out of one factory-this place. If there had been more, perhaps they had all succumbed to age and deterioration, and the ship now routed all the birth activity to this pod. It was a guess, anyway; and he had seen no evidence that other pods still existed. What pod had Caulfield said he was from? Ridge could still picture the old man mouthing the words: "WorkPod19."
Second in the code came what looked like the function and rank ciphers each person wore on their collar. The code appeared in a faint color scheme. Ridge compared the various patterns for members of WorkPod92 and found one that suggested a black bar. He rubbed his hands lightly along the polished glass and thought: Here is my equivalent. Maybe I was born in this incubator.
From there, the code diverged into myriad streams, loops, circles, rising and falling lines, that he could not decipher, but he had seen enough. He went back to his squatting position on the floor. After a while, he was attuned to the faint rocking of pumps and lights and could actually tell each time the pattern of lights repeated itself. Was there a clue in that?
It came to him after a while: Venable must have been born here. Maybe that was the clue. All the birthing in the ship went on here. Now what? Ridge racked his brain. Yes! Venable was older than some number of workpods. Maybe the ship assigned numbers randomly to the workpods, judging by the sequence. Whatever the intricacies of the process, this must be the clue at which Venable had hinted. Did that mean the CP was open somehow when a new captain replaced the old?
Ridge shook his head. Did he even know that Venable was not some ancient machine? Chances were that even in that case, the wetware, the bionics in the Captain, must be regularly replaced as they aged and died. If that were the case, then knowledge could be passed from one instance of a person to the next. He frowned and rubbed his aching brow with eyes pressed tightly shut as he tried to sort out the implications of that idea. It seemed intuitive that knowledge could be passed along through birth-else, how could he have memories of San Diego, Brenna memories of Buenos Aires, and better yet, any two team members memories in common, say of Tokyo or Perth? Even if these were random fragments from the lives of long-dead persons, it didn't matter for purposes of present analysis, Ridge thought. The key was that memory could be transmitted through some biochemical broth, some culinary tricks with RNA and DNA. The question then was, why did he have no memories of previous iterations of himself, since it appeared there were no more than 99 workpods, and so the groups had to repeat. Was each iteration slightly unique? Was each iteration therefore a totally unique human being whose thoughts and experiences were lost forever as it died? That wasn't the pressing issue so much, as the question-could he somehow reinvent himself as Venable and thus enter the CP? Was that the clue?
Still frustrated, Ridge walked back to the incubators and leaned over the nearest one. He stared at his own reflection again and shook his head, as if he were communicating with some other person. That was his moment of inspiration. Glancing up at the darting tiny lights in the ceiling, he waved his hand over the lid. His shadow briefly passed through the beam and nothing happened. Now he did something he had not yet done, and which probably had not occurred since the last inspector passed through here a generation or a century or several thousand years ago with a barcode reading wand of some type on a routing inspection: he placed both hands over the lights. He covered vital parts of the person's code with his hands. After a few seconds, the incubator began pulsing an amber warning light. Ridge leaned his whole body over the lid to cast darkness over the growing life inside.
Lights came on in the room. The walls flashed alight in panels of white fluorescent light. One by one, work panels lit up. The room spoke to him in a mechanical voice that was neither male nor female, but pleasantly and smoothly articulated: "Is there something wrong? We detect a malfunction."
"Yes," Ridge said. "This entire ship is a wreck."
"We do not grasp what inspector says. Can you identify your badge and pod number?"
"Ridge. WorkPod01. Lead Engineer."
"That is not an authorized inspector I.D." Buzzers began to sound-faintly, nothing raucous, nothing to disturb the clinical peace in this reverse tomb where life sprang out of coffins.
"I want to enter the CP and talk with the Captain."
"What is the code?"
"The code is..." Ridge tried to remember. What had Venable said?"
"What is the code?" the voice repeated.
"Function Check Largo."
"Wait."
Ridge waited, while the panels winked out one by one. The incubators resumed their quiet patterns of moving lights. A hundred tiny pumps and circuits went back to normal whisper-function. The walls became blank again as the built-in circuits shut down. The fluoros shut down, leaving gray shadows. Ridge started to think he'd failed.
Then a panel in the wall slid aside. Instantly, Ridge grasped the meaning: the CP wasn't in the nose of the ship, but in here. Where he'd seen a solid wall was now a raised opening like an airlock. He had to raise his feet to step over the threshold, and the panel slid shut behind him. He was in an environment of shapes rather than furnishings; whispers rather than noises; ripples rather than liquids. The very walls seemed to move about as if they were impermanent. Sheets upon sheets of semitransparent circuit sets floated in the air. A constant process of sorting went on. Cool air whispered around Ridge's neck, sliding down his body to his feet. "We must keep you isolated from the cryovironment," said a voice he recognized as Venable's. "Come closer."
"Where are you?" Ridge said. He raised his arms and waved them as if fending off cobwebs. Some of the diaphanous sheets rippled in the wind caused by his arms, but returned into focus. Other sheets swirled as though they were made of liquid.
"Here," said the faint voice that came out of the walls somehow, not from any specific place but from the room as a whole.
Ridge stepped carefully, one foot before the other. He was afraid to hurt the delicate environment around him. He was equally afraid that he might be poisoned. He pictured atmospheres of nitrogen, ammonia, and other poison primordial gases. The floor shimmered as if drenched in excited phosphorants. "We are here," said the voice.
Ridge waved his arms as if brushing a curtain aside. This brought him through the hanging ciphers into a brighter area. It was a cluttered lab about the size of a typical living room at home. A number of sights assaulted Ridge's senses all at once. He cried out involuntarily and took a step back, holding one arm before his face, but he lowered the arm and looked at the secrets of the command post.
A bank of overhead biolume
tubes cast a fog of harsh bluish light downward. Dust motes drifted like stars in the empty air. Motes of dust drifted like tiny organisms in some underwater world. The room was cluttered, dusty, and dirty. Old-fashioned wire racks full of dead gray circuit boxes were stacked ceiling-high on all sides. Masses of multi-colored cable snaked among them. The cables all had a uniform snow of gray dust on them, as did the primitive signal lights in the boxes. On the tables were bottles, test tubes, open digital manuals with now-blank pages, discarded ASCII styluses, and more. Rags, watches, socks, toy cars, dolls, pictures of New England houses, sheets of tango music written in ink on paper, towels, dirty glasses, the bric-a-brac was endless. It resembled a surreal sculpture.
The tile floor was white, the grout greasy looking, and swaths of cobwebs fluttered around his ankles as Ridge walked. He half expected cockroaches or rats to scurry by his shoes, but there was no life on that floor. There wasn't much room to walk, but he took a few steps.
"You see where the memories were made," the voice said.
"Where are you?" Ridge looked about. He expected to see a view screen on a wall, but there was almost no wall space devoid of clutter.
"Here," said the voice, and Ridge looked on the small lab bench before him. A bank of grayish steel camera lenses pointed down at a white enameled tray sitting askew on the black tile surface of a lab bench. Tubes and wires by the thousand snaked into the water there, and in the water lay a human face. Venable.
Ridge gasped.
Venable had that bright, hopeful look. "In all the melancholy and sadness of my existence here, I look forward to the resurrection of all our bodies and life everlasting on the New Earth."
Ridge understood what he had intuited earlier: the Captain had gone mad, as had the entire damaged ship carrying humanity on its last desperate journey. "Where is New Earth?" he said.
