Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  Hope was not lost, though. And that was June’s responsibility. The cheers of the crowd were still echoing in her head when she settled down in a realmspace to meet with her team.

  Inkanyamba, always the first of her unduplicate AIs to show up to their morning scrum meeting, snaked out from underneath his waterfall and shook his mane dry. He coiled the snake half of his body around his favorite tree, and then snuffled his great horsey nose. It made her want to give him an apple, but he’d be insulted. Inkanyamba wasn’t a horse, no matter how much his head resembled one.

  Abada came next, his two great, crooked horns appearing long before he crested the hill to June’s left. Him she could call a horse and only get a sour look. His peeve was being compared to a unicorn—that was what everyone did when they first met him.

  Yumbo was a little late; she was always at least a little late, even though she was the smallest and fastest of the group. Her silver fairy wings resembled those of a hummingbird, even though she herself was the size and shape of a small child. Yumbo was touchy, and June couldn’t always predict what would upset her from one day to the next.

  “Any new developments on the anomaly?” June asked.

  June’s job was to minimize expenses. As the head of the AI infrastructure, she had quite a lot of leverage to do that. Anna’s green college, built entirely underground using leftover nanomachines from the Hellmouth excavation, was currently on holiday, so there was no need to heat or cool the entire complex. Shutting it down should’ve been making a bigger difference than it was. They knew exactly how much power they should be consuming, but that didn’t match what they were consuming. They’d been searching for the problem since they identified it two days ago.

  “It is remarkable. We have scoured this network for more cycles than I can ever remember expending, and yet we’ve found no trace,” Inkanyamba said.

  “It’s almost as if it’s being hidden from us deliberately,” Yumbo said. “Which isn’t possible. We helped build this network. I personally oversaw the hardware installations.”

  Abada’s deep baritone voice rumbled out, “And I have connections with every device in a five-mile radius. If it is connected to data or power, I am there. Yet I am not where this is.”

  She absently stroked Inkanyamba’s thick mane, with normal-sized hands instead of the huge mitts she had in real life. “Have you tried RF scanning? The draw may create radio interference somewhere.”

  They all froze briefly as they incorporated the suggestion. Unduplicates were the most sophisticated AIs humanity had created to date, and June had upgraded these with her own original programming, but they still had issues with innovation. Present them with a problem they were used to and the solution would come almost instantly. But if the problem didn’t fit within their normal parameters, they could spin their wheels for weeks.

  “Deploying aerial bots now,” Yumbo said. The maintenance robots were not even a tenth as sophisticated as June’s AI assistants, but they were everywhere and came in every size, able to move on land, sea, and air. It allowed the entire site to be run by less than a hundred people for weeks at a time.

  A 3-D map drew itself in front of them, showing a fog of dots covering a virtual representation of the campus. The plant itself covered perhaps four square kilometers. They’d purchased ten times that much land and then turned it into a de facto version of distant Yellowstone.

  “This could take some time,” Inkanyamba said.

  “No,” Yumbo replied. “Wait a second.” The map zoomed in to a remote part of the grounds around the plant. “Send the drones to this section.”

  Another window opened showing an aerial view as a group of drones flew to the designated spot. The forest was very thick there. A quick check of the records showed that the section had been finished early and then essentially ignored.

  “Has anyone even been out there to survey the wildlife?” June asked.

  “No,” Abada replied. “This is quite irregular.”

  Before the plant’s construction, even this remote location had been distorted by human intervention. Now, without hunting or unnecessary development, they were able to carefully shepherd all the natural resources. It had transformed the area around the plant into an increasingly diverse wildlife sanctuary. June was proud of how quickly the environment had turned around once they’d removed that human element.

  But now it was an impressive sanctuary with a suspicious blind spot. June saw a black streak flash through a rare break in the tree cover. “Wait,” she said, “go back.”

  The drones stopped and turned around, but the gap had vanished.

  “Find your way below the trees.”

  “What are you looking for?” Yumbo asked.

  “If I’m right, something that should not exist.”

  It took the drones some time to pick their way through the trees to a place they could see the ground, but when they did, June’s suspicion was confirmed.

  “How in the hell,” Abada grumbled, “does a two-lane asphalt road get built around here without it showing up on any of our maps?”

  Good question. The road’s asphalt had a deep black new color. It had to have been built at the same time as the plant.

  “Inkanyamba,” June said, “what do the construction records say?”

  He coiled tighter around the tree, a sure sign of his concern. He was supposed to be the calm one. “Absolutely nothing. This would’ve increased our asphalt budget by at least ten percent, but there is nothing in the allotments or the expenditures.”

  “Follow it,” Yumbo said as she landed on the ground in front of June and folded her wings. “See where it goes.”

  June gave the commands to the swarm, and they set off. The overgrowth blocked out the sun; they had to turn lights on to see any detail. It would limit the range of the drones if the road was too long. It could circle the plant, and they didn’t know it existed until now. That thought gave her chills.

  Fortunately, after a few hundred meters, they arrived at the plant’s perimeter.

  “Well,” Inkanyamba said, “I guess if they could build a roadway without us knowing about it, a door shouldn’t be out of the question.”

  A large metal door, the kind that could accept a decent size truck, had been set back into a hill. “They camouflaged it,” June said. “We had to come up the road to ever have a chance of seeing it.”

  “Looks like it’s been awhile since anyone’s used it,” Yumbo said.

  He was right. Leaves and pine needles covered the ground, just like with the road. The stillness was eerie, as if they’d come across ruins that were only a few years old.

  “Any idea how to get inside?” Abada asked.

  June commanded one of the drones to get closer. There was a conventional keypad to one side. The telltale light was green.

  “Drone one,” June said, “command. Press this button.” She reached up and designated the large button at the bottom of the keypad on the screen. The drone’s utility arm appeared and obligingly pushed it in.

  The audio filled with a loud clack and then the unmistakable sound of rollers.

  “Zoom out!” she said, just in time to catch the giant door as it disappeared into the ceiling. A vast, dark corridor lay ahead of them.

  “We can’t send the drones in there,” Inkanyamba said. “The signal won’t carry much past the entrance.”

  June exited the realm and opened a communications channel to her unduplicates. “Send them home and let me know where this road crosses another. I’ll fetch a vehicle.”

  The road did eventually connect to one on their maps, but the intersection had been cleverly disguised to look like a simple pull-off area. June had driven by it any number of times without ever suspecting a thing.

  “This hasn’t been operational for months, maybe years,” Inkanyamba said in her ear as she carefully guided the truck down the mystery road. “If we don’t send a maintenance crew around, the forest will reclaim it soon.”

  “We’
ll be sending a lot more than a maintenance crew, don’t you worry,” June replied as she pulled up to the entrance. The door had closed automatically, but the light on the keypad was still green. In person, the disuse was obvious. It even smelled abandoned, cold and dirty in places that would’ve been swept clean had anyone been around to do the work. June opened the door and activated one of the wireless network repeaters she’d brought along.

  “Got my signal?” she asked.

  “Five by five,” Abada replied.

  June stuck it to the outside wall, walked inside, then waited for the door to shut behind her.

  “And now?” she asked as she activated the torch on her phone.

  Yumbo’s voice was crystal clear in her ear. “It seems that the door is exactly what it appears to be: simple steel.”

  June turned another repeater on and stuck it to the inside wall. It wasn’t required, but she didn’t want to risk being stuck in whatever this was without a way to communicate. She’d brought along a dozen of the tiny devices, which should cover her even if the structure went the entire length of the plant.

  She found a simple bank of light switches, no different from anything else in the complex, and turned them on. Lights flickered to life down the corridor. While cleaner than the outside, it was too spooky, too still, and the air had a faint dampness to it.

  The corridor terminated in a large garage. Truck-sized recharging stations were covered in plastic and thick with dust. Whatever they had been doing required moving a lot of heavy equipment. The next steel door was more normally sized, with one of those wired glass windows. It made June think of the side door to an office building. Its keypad glowed green as well, and it opened obligingly when she pressed the button.

  “Who leaves all of this behind without locking the doors?” Inkanyamba asked.

  June didn’t have a good answer, and neither did anyone else. Someone had spent a lot of money and effort building a secret annex to the power plant, and then walked away.

  The corridor beyond the garage split off to what appeared to be garden-variety offices and meeting areas. The fixtures and furnishings were different here, and most of the tech seemed to be about five years old.

  “They had to spend their own money for this part,” Yumbo speculated.

  Eventually June came upon an elevator with only a down button. This part she recognized. “They took over a vent room.”

  The plant operated by leveraging the enormous heat and pressure differential between the bottom of the Hellmouth and the surface. Giant ducts routed air from the bottom to a level quite near the top, five kilometers from the surface. There it was routed through a series of turbine fixtures, each smaller and lighter than the next, and then a sequence of heat exchangers, generating electricity with each one. Eventually it ended in a nearby reservoir where the air was cooled below ambient temperature and routed back to the plant. In all, there were twenty-four sites ringing the plant on two levels.

  Inkanyamba was incredulous. “They took it out of our maintenance rotations. I’d literally forgotten it existed.”

  Whoever this was had compromised their security, security June designed. She wanted to get back in the truck, turn around, and drive all the way home to South Africa. But that would mean facing Oupa, her grandfather, and admitting he was right. She’d rather face Anna’s wrath than do that.

  She got on the elevator. It was a long ride down, and she wasn’t sure the repeaters would keep her in range. But they shouldn’t need to. “Now that we know it’s here, connect to the security network and show me what’s down there.”

  After far too long Inkanyamba said, “We can’t. It must be air-gapped.”

  Physically separated. June went from horrified to angry. They’d amputated a part of the network to keep whatever they were doing hidden. “Fine. I’ll do it the hard way.”

  The elevator’s doors sealed, and she descended at a speed that made her grab the handles and hold on. June had only been down to these places a few times during construction. It wasn’t quite free fall, but it was close. Oupa had told her stories of how his grandfather went down into the mines when he was a boy, how they’d been annoyed that other people got scared when the elevators went too fast, descending more than a mile. They’d done it in little more than a steel cage. June shook her head and stood straight. She wasn’t afraid.

  Much.

  When the elevator opened, the regular Unauthorized Entry Prohibited sign was displayed proudly over the doors on the opposite side of the room. This time there wasn’t a keypad; there was a large retina and fingerprint scanner, exactly the same as those that guarded the rest of the duct rooms. The light was, as always, green. They’d left everything unlocked. This was so weird.

  Things changed the moment June opened the door. When the plant was inactive, these rooms were silent. When it was running, you needed ear protection. Now there was a rumbling in the darkness, a bass note that made her shoes vibrate. The air had a faint ozone tang, reminding her of the computer labs she’d used when she was in school.

  “Analysis?” June asked the trio listening in.

  Yumbo replied, “The acoustic signature doesn’t match anything we can find. It’s not mechanical or electronic, although there are subtones of both.”

  “The subtones are a stand-alone HVAC and some sort of liquid cooling system,” Inkanyamba said. “But I don’t know what’s making that rumble.”

  June didn’t see any obvious light switches, so she continued on into the darkness using the torch on her pendant phone. She came to another set of double doors, again with wired glass windows. The corridor on the other side of the door opened to the right. There was a faint wavering light, like the reflection of the moon from a pool of water.

  June pushed the doors open, and the bass harmonic increased to the point it shook her insides a little. It reminded her of the noise she felt riding elephants at a local fair when she was a child, but that wasn’t quite right either.

  June rounded the corner.

  The room was very large, an open oval space a hundred meters across on its long axis and maybe half that high. There was the regular control console to her right, but more consoles in front of her formed four rows of semicircles, each closer to the center of the room than the last. It all screamed mission control. They’d also done some independent excavation down here, as there was another door—no window this time—to her right. She had no way to tell if there was a closet or a hangar on the other side. But this all registered in her peripheral vision.

  At least three meters away from the farthest row of consoles was something out of a science fiction movie. A ring, at least ten meters tall, stood proudly facing the consoles. It flashed a buff silver under her torchlight. Stainless steel, if she had to guess. It looked like a gigantic, flattened earring, but the hole in the middle—maybe twice as tall as she was—wasn’t free space. It was filled with gray, faintly glowing light. June thought it looked like the surface of a lake, if the lake was set on end, and the light it reflected was a pale gray. But the light was coming from inside it. So was the sound.

  June had a powerful urge to fall to her knees in front of this incredible construct. For a moment, she was nine years old, a child tricked by her cousins into going to the scary movie with the machines and the gross monsters.

  “Fok my,” she said as she stared at it.

  “No kidding,” Inkanyamba said in her ear. “Fuck us too. What is that?”

  June found a large switch that slowly flashed with green light at the end of the first row of consoles.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Yumbo said with a bravado that was fake even through June’s phone. “Push it.”

  It gave way with a meaty thunk. Fixtures flickered on above her, casting a flat white light on everything below. All the consoles booted up, holoscreens flashing as they turned on. June had an irrational moment of admiration when she saw they ran Ubuntu Linux rather than Facebook’s latest version of Windows. Whoever built this kne
w their stuff.

  Fully lit, the ring wasn’t quite as intimidating, and now June understood why they’d chosen a duct room. The primary turbines were above her head in an alloy rectangle fifteen meters across and about half that wide and deep. She hunched her shoulders, worried for no reason that it would fall on her head. The hatch that led straight to the bottom of the Hellmouth was hidden in shadows behind the ring, close to the ceiling. When it was all turned on, force fields would direct the air into the turbines and beyond.

  Thick cables extended from it that were not a part of the original design, all leading to the ring.

  “Whatever it is,” Yumbo said, “it needs a lot of power.”

  June wasn’t concerned about a security breach anymore. Whoever could build this could do anything. It was now officially above her pay grade. “I need to call Anna.”

  Chapter 4

  Kim

  The smell of Mike’s coffee woke her up. He’d gotten really good at making it, with all sorts of fancy presses, grinders, and beans sourced from places he’d found in the dark realms. It turned out coffee smuggling was a thing. It wasn’t exactly illegal, but the lengths some drinkers would go to for exactly the right bean made it seem that way. Indiana Jones had nothing on guys who would trek days through a jungle hunting for a specific bush. She was afraid to ask how much it all cost.

  His goofy smile when she walked into the dining room brought the memory of what she’d agreed to crashing in. Kim knew deep down that it was a setup for failure. She’d been poked and prodded, gone to hospitals and been to endless therapy sessions, tried booze and drugs, and none of it had changed anything. Nobody got any closer to what was going on with her, and nobody ever would. Accepting that was how Kim got past it. Now they were trying to pry that box open.

  She realized that must’ve shown on her face when Mike’s smile evaporated.