Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  At least he didn’t try to touch her. “I’m okay.” She put her good hand down on at least three of the gears, which cut her hand. What the hell had interrupted…then she remembered, and the pain vanished.

  Will.

  “I’m fine.” She stood, picking brass out of her palm. “Go back to the customers. I’ll clean this up.”

  The gears would wait. She checked her message queue. Her lockPixies didn’t just have a couple of candidates.

  They’d found an address.

  There were lines of potential, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe. See don’t see cameras locks everywhere nowhere areas pinpoints this network no networks collapse and now…

  They’d gone to ground in a gated community north of Atlanta, some place called Green Valley in Milton, close to Alpharetta. She’d figure out exactly where that was later. She accessed the outer camera network first to get oriented. The trees were tall and old, but it still felt artificial. The houses were impressive. Watchtell must’ve sequestered at least some of his wealth with his daughter.

  Kim jumped from camera to camera, drawing closer to the target. The lawns, still green that far south, were well manicured; the cars parked on the driveways were shiny and new. Kim would want to raise a family there, if she had that option.

  The front of the house was unremarkable until the audio came online.

  “Now try with the orange ball,” a man’s voice said.

  They were in the back yard.

  “Come on, Will,” a woman’s voice said. “Take the ball for Mommy.”

  She couldn’t see in. She needed to see in. It took three tries to find a camera with an angle on the back yard.

  “That’s okay, Will,” a different woman’s voice said with an odd metallic echo. “I’ll get it for you.”

  The back yard had a tall privacy fence around it. Inside was mostly grass, with a swing set on the left and a trampoline on the right. Emily, Will’s mom, stood on the back patio against the house next to an older man Kim didn’t recognize. A bot of some sort trundled across the lawn toward the back fence.

  Will stood on the grass watching it.

  Facing her.

  After they got back from China, Mama had thrown them all a lunch party. Toward the end of the night, Mama had gotten out old family albums so everyone could see what Kim looked like as a kid. Kim was fully prepared for a lot of laughing embarrassment, but then Mama pulled up her wedding photo, and she was shocked. That was her standing beside her dad, not her Mama. It took blinking to break the illusion.

  That was what it felt like when she saw Will. Not an older version of herself, but a younger one. Maybe it was the vacant expression on his face, so familiar from those early photos, before she had unlocked. It was so unreal.

  “Here you go,” the bot said as it held the ball out with a mechanical arm. Wait, it wasn’t a bot. That was an assisted living shell. Someone with a severe injury was inside it, a burn victim maybe, or someone who’d been in a terrible accident. Kim had only read about them until now. “Can you touch the ball, Will?” The voice was kind, but still artificial.

  Will stood there, and Kim’s heart fell to pieces. She knew exactly what was going on. He couldn’t respond. He couldn’t see them. His saw reflections from a fractured mirror that only cleared occasionally. They couldn’t touch him, couldn’t guide him, and he didn’t know why.

  Kim marked the spot and mapped the trail so she wouldn’t have to break into the neighborhood network the next time. The mess in the back of the shop wasn’t a problem anymore. Cleaning it up would give her time to get her face back to normal. Nobody wanted to buy things from a person who’d been crying.

  They seemed happy in their safe house, but even gated, the community wasn’t secure. They needed to be on the move. Staying still, they’d become a target, but they didn’t know that. She couldn’t walk up and ring the doorbell, either. Watchtell had told them who knew how many lies about her. They’d be terrified and would never listen.

  She opened a channel. “Mike, I need you and Tonya to come over. I’ve found them.”

  Chapter 25

  June

  He called it a bomb.

  If June didn’t know she needed Cyril’s knowledge, she would’ve thrown him out on his ear. They were working to save the humanity, not destroy it. It was a power plant. That it could be a bomb was absurd. She had helped build it. Anna was a hero. June would not, could not, accept it.

  And yet…

  The entire time she had been here, something else was going on. Anna had an inner circle of board members who would have meetings late into the night. Only Yumbo was allowed to take notes, and Anna had insisted that not even June could access those archives. It was for the cause, so June happily complied. She didn’t ask why. She didn’t need to; they were working for the greater good.

  Cyril was an ex-employee of the people who built the device. He knew about a secret entrance to the lab. That’s all. He had knowledge that they needed to explore its capabilities.

  Then why didn’t she turn him in? It was almost as if her oupa sat on her shoulder, whispering doubts into her ear. He’d been an old-school Afrikaner, complete with a gigantic cattle farm and a house with a proper stoop that wrapped all the way around it. He’d stunned everyone when he fully embraced his adopted granddaughter. “If we must have a future together,” he said, “then we need to teach the youth to be proper South Africans. Not just the Afrikaner traditions, but the Zulu, the Xhosa, the Coloreds, and all the rest. They need to learn all of it. We are all a part of this country.”

  So June was taught a strong work ethic, the desire to listen rather than talk, the sense of community, of practicality, of family, and so much more that made up her home. Most of all, she was taught hard-headed common sense.

  That was what made her soul itch. There were so many odd things about the power plant that would make sense if what Cyril said was true. One thing in particular had puzzled June forever. The college. It was so expensive, especially when their funding was zeroed out. Anna had insisted on maintaining an underground college with specially recruited young people, complete with dorms. Who wanted a green school way out here?

  She pushed the questions away. Her day was too complicated as it was. The Trilogy tech had arrived, and she had been tapped to be his tour guide-slash-minder. When she came up to the visitor’s lobby to pick him up, she knew her title wasn’t accurate.

  It should’ve been babysitter.

  He was a lanky white teenager with a buzz cut and the most ridiculous pair of horn-rimmed glasses she’d ever seen. She thought they stopped making those decades ago. He did have the requisite dark blue shirt, sweat pants, and vintage Nikes on. The shirt had a patch on it that read Trilogy Away Team. She shuddered inwardly. They didn’t try to hide that they were consciously imitating a twentieth-century suicide cult who believed aliens would take them to a better life.

  He stared up at her, gaping like strangers always did.

  “Good morning,” she said as she put out her hand. “I’m Dr. du Plessis.” His grip was firm, but his skin was soft, a sure sign he was from the inner circle. Everyone else spent most of their time doing farm work, at least that was what she’d read anyway. Maybe he was a founder’s son.

  “Right,” he stammered. “Um…I’m sorry. Spencer Sellars.” He smiled as he picked up his satchel. “My bosses send their apologies. I’m the only one they could spare.”

  “Is everyone all right?” So far only minor injuries had been reported to the press.

  He nodded, and his expression changed to one she was more used to seeing on someone talking about Jesus in church. “We are ever prepared for the final conflict, so our fellow-sisters and mother-guides got the first lights into shelters long before the danger came.”

  June sort of understood that, or at least the gist.

  His face changed back to that of a regular teenager, and he pitched his voice lower. “We all ran like hell into the storm cellars. We th
ought it was a drill.”

  The cult had a rebel in their midst. Ideology and technical talent didn’t always mix. June herself was a prime example.

  The oupa on her shoulder made it clear that the comparison went deeper than that. The difference was that Spencer’s cult waited for the apocalypse, while hers was bringing it about.

  They were not bringing it about. Cyril had gotten under her skin without providing a shred of proof. June must remember that. He had no proof.

  Yet.

  She could see her silence made the tech uncomfortable. The distractions just kept piling up. June motioned him forward. “Shall we?”

  The first stop was security. Heavy security for a big expensive installation that did not have a lot of secrets.

  Spencer had to give up his personal phone and was issued one from the plant’s stores because of signal strength and custom frequencies. No other reason. It wasn’t about security. Cyril had her so wound up she’d forgotten about that limitation. She needed to calm down.

  He wasn’t impressed with what they handed him. “A Samsung Universe Ten?” He thought it was a cheap, basic neural phone. He was mostly right.

  “The signal crosstalk of regular commercial phones causes interference that’ll keep some of our newest mods from functioning properly. You’re also working in the AI lab, and commercial phones are always too hot for it. Here,” she said as she dropped its lanyard over his neck. “This one is certified to function correctly.”

  But with what? And why? her imaginary oupa asked.

  ***

  As she took him on the tour, June gave the tried-and-true green dream speech, the one Anna used to such great effect on donors. It didn’t seem to be working on him, though. He was more interested in the layout and the tech. Keeping him focused was difficult. Every time his attention wandered, she began to think of Cyril and the things he said. They weren’t true.

  Oupa’s voice was easy to remember. I told you this was the wrong move all along.

  He disapproved when she left for America and then took this job. The whole family thought she should stay in South Africa. But she was stifled there; she needed to move out and make her own mark. And she had. She was widely recognized as a leading expert in green AI. This was her success story, not some extended bout of teenage rebellion.

  Certainly it wasn’t, he said. You moved halfway around the world for your green dream.

  The sourness of the thoughts made them harder to push away.

  Finally they got down to the big show, a sight so spectacular it let her forget about Cyril and his lies.

  “It’s called the High Efficiency Low Motion Open Nexoid Descender, or HELMOND, for short. It’s only thirty meters across, but,” she peered dramatically over the catwalk they stood on, “it’s approximately twenty-three kilometers deep. You are the first person outside the plant’s staff to see it in person.” Everyone else had toured the much smaller prototype nearby.

  “A hundred feet wide, but seventeen miles deep? Holy fu—” he cleared his throat, embarrassed. “Prophets be praised.”

  Lights fully illuminated the first five kilometers. Gray metal walls lined with pipes that were as big around as a car extended beyond that into the blackness. Farther on, spotlights illuminated one gigantic construction site after another. She could see the robots hard at work on the upper-most ones. It took her breath away every time she visited.

  “What’s with the bull’s-eye over there? It looks like a trampoline,” he said.

  It was a target they’d only put up last week. It stuck out into the shaft, held by a framework so it almost looked like a billboard. June decided to go all out on this tour, to prove to at least one person that not only was the plant meant for peace, but that it was also a bit of fun.

  Most of the time, the Earth’s rotation was demonstrated by a huge pendulum suspended from a wire attached to the ceiling. Anna’s genius was realizing they could turn the same concept, almost literally, inside out.

  June keyed open a box mounted to the railing and pulled out a big silver dart with a blunt, padded nose. She turned the strobe in the tail on and handed it to Spencer. “See if you can hit it with this.”

  “It’s heavy.”

  “It needs to be. Go on, see if you can.”

  He cocked his arm back and gave it a good heave. The throw would’ve done well on a cricket pitch, even a baseball diamond. It got a lot closer than she expected it to.

  “Prophets save us! That should’ve hit.”

  June laughed. “It was a good throw, but we cheated. We play with your perspective so you think it’s closer than it is. Hitting the target isn’t what this is about.” She pointed over the rail. “That is.”

  She saw him find the flashing light of the dart quickly. It was a good thing the strobes were bright, otherwise they would not be able to follow it down into the gloom. Instead of falling straight into oblivion, it curved inward, back toward the wall their platform stood on. After a long while, it fell on a speck of light far below, directly underneath their platform. The shared enhanced vision magnified until they could see it. The robot collecting the dart waved up at them.

  “Holy shit.”

  June had always suspected that, if one of these fanatics could be pried away from their leadership, they would turn back into normal people. It seemed she was right. “The dart fell straight down. It was Earth that turned and caught it.”

  “And this is what makes the place tick? A giant hole?”

  “There’s more to it than that. The temperature gradient between here and the bottom is massive. So is the density. With nothing but simple convection, we can use turbines to generate power. Then we extract more heat to make steam, which turns more turbines. Nanomaterials let us leverage the remaining difference and generate electricity directly. Then we dissipate the remaining heat in a large reservoir we built nearby. It lets us control the temperature of the water so we can support native fish populations properly.” It was the very first proven environmentally neutral artificial body of water ever built. A regular reservoir’s water would be too cold to support native species, but by heating it, they had increased the available habitat for the creatures who had always been here. Another peaceful thing June could be proud of.

  Oupa was ever-present on her shoulder. And a convenient source of fresh water for an isolated community.

  “Fu—” he cleared his throat. “Prophets be praised.”

  “Indeed. Now, if you’ll follow me, we’ll go to the AI labs.”

  They had just stepped off the elevator when emergency lights started flashing and an alarm claxon blared.

  “What’s that about?”

  June started to check when a bot bumped against her.

  “My apologies, but we must be allowed to pass. We have been summoned to a developing crisis.”

  She stood aside so the emergency response bot team could keep going. They reminded June of plastic firemen, painted a flat white with red EMERGENCY markings. They even had flashing red lights. Not all of them were bipedal, though. A few looked like miniaturized fire trucks. She thought they were silly when they ran them through their trials. They weren’t as funny when the emergency was real.

  She could see that Spencer was not impressed. “Doesn’t seem like a positive development.”

  They had to dodge out of the way of another ERBT that came off the elevator before June found the right alert on the network.

  “It’s some sort of equipment overload.” There was an odd smell in the air now.

  Spencer noticed it, too. “How good is the ventilation down here? That could be toxic.”

  June checked the status boards. “The ventilation systems are nominal, and not showing anything dangerous. Each of those teams has an air filter bot. One of them is sufficient to keep the air on this entire level safe.”

  “So why did you guys send two?”

  “We’d rather have an extra and not need it.” While they walked cautiously forward, she tried to acces
s the surveillance network, but it had gone from glitching to down. Abada’s telltales showed his workload had risen past the point he could continue to maintain it reliably. She needed to get Spencer plugged in and working as soon as possible, otherwise she may never see her African unicorn again.

  The lab was in the same direction that the bots had gone. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”

  They didn’t make it as far as the lab, though. Whatever happened tore up one of the botanical garden installations. They always had surplus nanomachines out of every construction batch. Rather than let them expire, Anna used them to create large, cathedral-like rooms and then fill them with plants of every kind. Green inside green is what she called it. Not only were they pleasant to walk through, they also provided a substantial amount of the food needed for the plant’s staff.

  What a convenient coincidence, the Oupa on her shoulder said.

  Trees were knocked down, grass ripped up, even the pond in the middle was now holed and leaking. The control cabinets had been smashed. That was what had caused the overload and fire. It looked like the pictures Oupa once showed her of what happened when cyclone Esami had torn through Limpopo before she was born.

  “What happened?” she asked one of the bots.

  “Unknown at this time, Dr. du Plessis. We’ve been getting erratic wildlife alarms from the water processing facilities ever since the critical network incident.”

  Certain sections of the plant required a steady water supply to function properly, which was another function of the reservoir. They had been extremely careful to make sure it wouldn’t impact the environment around it. A little too careful, it turned out. Once the wildlife had rebounded inside the plant’s exclusion zone, intake and outflow systems designed not to hurt animals ended up being embarrassingly easy for them to enter and set up house. It was a problem that required constant monitoring. She should’ve sent extra guard bots down to keep an eye on things but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.