by James Welsh
Wolfmouth caught them looking around, some of them hungrily, and he warned, “Don’t touch anything. Think of it as being a museum.”
“A museum to what?” Bach wondered, as he admired one of the meat printers with disgust.
When they reached the elevator platform at the other end of the room, Khunrath knelt down and unsheathed the wireless transmitter once more. He unlocked the touchpad on the floor and they immediately heard the whirring of thousands of revolutions per minute. The world around them rose like angels as the elevator descended deeper into their world.
As the platform thumped against the floor, the colonists found their selves in the lower level of the granary, the storeroom. It was here where all of the colony’s food was held before distribution. Nash heard a soft gasp behind him, and he realized that the colonists had probably never seen so much food before. They spent years managing to get by on rations, and here was a feast, just feet beneath them.
As they walked past the shining aisles of food, the temptation proved too great for one of the colonists. They reached out and took a meat ration off the shelf.
“Hey!” Wolfmouth said, doubling back and roughly tapping the colonist on the shoulder. “Put that ration back.”
Wolfmouth kept walking as the hungry colonist went back to the shelf. As he was putting the ration away, Stormrunner whispered in his ear, “Take the ration – I won’t tell.”
The colonist smiled thanks as he hid the ration under his clothes. Even at the end of their world, Stormrunner was still as giving as her twin brother was stingy.
As they walked out across the floor, Wolfmouth demanded impatiently, “So, where is it? Where is this secret place of yours?”
Khunrath didn’t say anything at first. He was too busy looking down at the floor, counting the steel mesh tiles that were underneath their feet. Nash could hear Khunrath muttering, “Fourteen tiles from the east wall, seven tiles from the north wall.”
Then, having found the right tile, Khunrath pointed down and announced, “You’re standing on it.”
The group of colonists looked down – Nash wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at. All he saw was the mesh floor, with darkness caged beneath it. But then Khunrath knelt down and lifted the mesh tile. It looked heavy, but he picked it up as easily as a dropped piece of paper. As he did this, a light was automatically triggered, bathing the darkness beneath the floor with shine. In the light, Nash could see a narrow access shaft, with steps carved into the rock.
Wolfmouth swore as he finally realized how food parcels had been mysteriously vanishing for the past few years. “All of this time,” he muttered to himself.
Khunrath asked, “Who wants to go first?”
***
The climb down was nervous – for a moment, Nash almost slipped on one of the steps and almost fell on the person climbing beneath him. But after some forty steps, they finally touched ground. As the rest of the group made their way down the ladder, those already at the bottom explored the cavern they found themselves in.
The room was sculpted like a dome, with one large beam of light resting in the peak of the ceiling. Lining the wall of the room was a series of miniature tunnels, each just large enough for a rat to run through. There was one large hallway jutting out of the room, but it abruptly ended due to a cave-in. But there was no need to map out anything beyond the room – the room alone could have been explored for months. While the room was crowned with simple furniture – like a bed, a desk, a bookshelf, and a toilet, among other things – the room was different from any one they had ever seen.
That was because they saw Khunrath’s mythical quantum computer perched on top of the table. From the outside, it looked like any of its brother computers, but Khunrath promised that it could deliver the miracles they needed. When Khunrath talked about it minutes before, it felt like a dream, something too good to be true. But here it was, just as alive as they were going to be. And, just feet away from the computer, the colonists saw a large, circular tube on the ground. It was hooked up to the computer with tubes and coiled wires, and they immediately realized that they were looking at the marlin battery. It didn’t look like much – the only thing that gave away its power was the swivel of hungry teeth that lined both ends of the battery – but the colonists were prepared to be amazed by the magician.
Khunrath pushed his way through the crowd – the room was not designed to hold over a dozen people – and sat down at the desk. He opened one of the desk drawers and pulled out a virtual reality headset. As he patiently plugged the headset into the computer, one of the colonists said, “Now’s not the time to be playing games.”
“This isn’t a game,” Khunrath said, a bit insulted. “You’re used to the novelty of virtual reality, where you’re walking through an open plain, picking up and putting down objects. That’s all you can manage with most computers, which are limited in their poewr. But like I said before, this computer is a different breed, so different that this is the only way I can communicate that to you. Now, don’t be alarmed.”
“Don’t be alarmed by what…?” The colonist asked. And that was when Khunrath turned on the computer.
For a brief second, nothing appeared to have happened. But then all of the colonists in the room gasped as they felt an invisible hand yank them forward. Their breath was pumped out of their lungs, and they had to inhale sharply just to breathe. And then, as soon as the pull started, it stopped. The world around them righted itself, and the people slowly found their sense of balance. As their breathing slowed down to normal, they realized that they could still feel a slight drag.
Finally, one of the colonists found their voice. “What was that?” Rego asked.
“That, my friend, was the battery turning itself on,” Khunrath explained. “It experiences a bit of a power surge when it first activates. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Jules, how much power was that?” Joyce asked, the first one to catch their breath.
“That? Well first, you have to remember that for this battery, its weight is equivalent to its strength. After all, its intense weight is from where it draws its energy. And what the battery just emitted was a trigintacentillionth of its full potential.”
“How much is a…?”
“A trigintacentillionth?” Chroma said, answering first. “It’s a one followed by almost four hundred zeroes. For the sake of comparison, I’d wager that Earth weighs about ten septillion kilograms, or one followed by twenty-five zeroes.” Chroma turned to Khunrath. “Are we honestly saying that this battery can weigh more than a planet when fully charged?”
Khunrath nodded with pride. “Isn’t it a beautiful thing?”
The colonists felt uneasy. If just a tiny fraction of the battery’s energy could cause such a crushing gravity, none of them wanted to see it when it was throttled. They didn’t care how beautiful it would look. If Khunrath noticed this in his old friends, he didn’t show it. Instead, he turned back to the computer and booted up a program. The second he did this, the computer screen went dark.
“Did it just break down?” Nash wondered, remembering what Khunrath said about quantum computers breaking down easily.
Khunrath smiled and offered the virtual reality headset. “Why don’t you put this on and see for yourself?”
Hesitatingly, Nash took the headset and fitted it over his head. It had been years since he had tried virtual reality, and he felt just as ridiculous now as he had then. The headset was essentially a mask that covered most of his head, leaving him deaf, blind, and otherwise senseless to the world outside of the mask. Expecting to be walking on a plain of grid, Nash waited for the program to run.
And that was when art happened. Instead of the elementary world that Nash was expecting, he found himself dropped into a world so lifelike, that he thought he was back on Earth. All around him were the rising skyscrapers of Dauphin, the trash in the streets, and the mirror of a quiet ocean. He could hear the roar of the traffic and the rattle of co
nstruction equipment. And he could smell the strange and wonderful food and an entire city sweating together under the sun. They were all notes to a song that Nash hadn’t heard in years, not since he had been enslaved to the subway tunnels and impressed into service as a quantum miner. He didn’t even know until that moment that he still had that memory. And that was when he heard her voice, calling out to him. He knew who it was, and he turned, hoping to fall in love again.
But the visor turned black, and Nash felt the drag back to reality. As Khunrath lifted the headset off Nash’s head, the young man reached for the visor out of instinct. But the scientist did the responsible thing and held the headset out of reach. He said, “You’ve never felt a drug like this before, have you?”
“It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever felt,” Nash whispered, his eyes watering. It was a memory dredged up from the fathoms of a happier past, and he thought that he would never feel that way again.
“It is a wonderful thing, but none of it is real. All it is are figments of memory,” Khunrath said, having realized the truth a long time ago. “When my Anzhela was killed, I couldn’t live in the same world that tolerated a monster like Bends. And so I ran away to here, my laboratory, the last place where I had control. I knew that no one would find me here, not since a cave-in had destroyed the tunnel to the dock just a few weeks before. No one realized that this room was connected to the granary, even though it was in the original blueprints as drainage for any leaks in the storeroom above us. I was so hidden from the world that the world forgot I even existed – just the way I wanted it to be.
“In the years since – and it has been years – I’ve been living in this virtual reality. I’ve met Anzhela for the first time so many times that I’ve lost count. We shared the same laughs like food again – I already knew the jokes, but that didn’t matter. We hiked the same trails through the endangered wild back home. This computer is so powerful, that it dug up every detail out of the depths of my memory. The simulation was accurate down to the sounds, the sights, the scents, the tastes – everything. I thought that was all I needed to be happy again.
“But, during every second of that time, as real as it felt, I knew it was fake. Because I still had the memory of holding her in my arms and watching her die. As perfect as the illusion was, it was still an illusion. All I was doing was walking through the afterlife with her. And so, when Diamond here came down to confront me, I knew an opportunity when I saw one.”
“An opportunity for what?” Joyce asked.
“To save the colony – it would have been what Anzhela would have wanted. And I knew that if I did that, I would be closer to her than anything that virtual reality would have offered.”
Some were still not convinced by the hope the battery offered. “If this battery wasn’t strong enough to make you believe you were living those memories, then how could it save us from this black hole?” One of the colonists asked.
Khunrath thought for a moment so long, Nash thought that the scientist ran out of answers. But then Khunrath said, “The virtual reality was damned to fail because I was doing it for me. But this – breaking the black hole and saving the colony – it can only work, because I’ll be doing it for her.”
***
When Bends had seen Khunrath leading the group of colonists along the canal, he acted as if he had seen a ghost. This was perhaps the most appropriate response, given Khunrath’s disappearance. But while his resurrection sparked excitement in the colonists, all it did was send Bends into a sweating panic, and it was a fever dream that Bends wanted to wake up from.
And so Bends retreated to his first and last sanctuary – his office back at the clinic. He rushed back to the room as quickly as he could and he locked the door behind him, as if to keep the good feelings out. He sat down hard in his chair and pressed his face into his hands, wearing his fingers like a mask.
“How could it come to this?” Bends demanded out loud. The room around him was silent, and so Bends had to answer his own question. For years, he had lived among the colonists like a demon among mortals, showing them what it meant to be afraid. If he had no one to teach those fears to, he would have to be his own student. It was both his sickness and his cure.
And when he had heard that the star had collapsed into a black hole and that the colony was flying towards its death, he felt his usual twisted satisfaction. He understood how fragile the human spirit was, because he had felt it crumble apart in his hands so many times. As death drew closer, the people would cry and panic and tear themselves apart. The colony would end itself long before the black hole ever had the chance, and Bends wanted to be there to watch the last act of the human tragedy.
But, as he heard the good news of Khunrath waking up from the dead, and that the colonists were arming themselves with an idea to stop the black hole, Bends felt the dead end of frustration. The people had found hope where they were supposed to lose it, and he had no idea how to manage this. Someone had to pay the price, and Khunrath was only beginning to understand who.
If there wasn’t someone he could watch die, he would just have to do.
Bends stood up and rummaged through one of the cabinets nearby. He pulled out a small box and opened it, revealing a nanoneedle brush and a series of vials. He picked out a vial that held a strange, emerald liquid. He had injected someone before with the same liquid, and he knew just what it was capable of.
He armed the nanoneedle brush and next opened up the desk drawer. He pulled out a small mirror and looked into it. He laughed a little when he saw how frightened he was. Then, he took a deep breath and pressed the brush against the top of his head. He ran the brush through his hair, over and over again. He had to make himself presentable for death, after all.
***
As the colonists began their plan to rescue themselves, they realized that every single step was going to be impossible. There was first the question of how they were going to haul the battery up to the surface. While the battery was narrow enough to fit through the access shaft up to the granary, it weighed over five hundred pounds, too much for any colonist to lift. And Khunrath was afraid to take apart the battery, for fear of breaking it or not remembering how to put it back together. They had to figure out the problem and fast – they had just a few days at the most before their planet was caught up in the black hole’s gravity. After a couple hours, it was Chroma who found a solution. This may have been because he saw how the others were fascinated over Khunrath, and he felt a bit of jealous desperation to prove his genius.
After speaking with the waterworks department, Chroma was able to get them to infuse one of the canals with the same magnetized water they used for guarding the entrances against hydrogen leaks. At first, the waterworks specialists were reluctant, saying that the neodymium could contaminate the drinking water. But when Chroma assured them that the filters could screen out the contaminant, and Latch ordered them to obey due to the state of emergency, waterworks had to comply.
Soon, Canal Christina was a magnetic river. As the water poured into the Dives, the massive well at the heart of the colony, Chroma was ready. The drainage pipes normally routed the well water back up to the surface, but Chroma had the waterworks people put an override in place. Instead of being sent back up, the water was led by the hand through the system of pipes, down further to the storeroom. As the millions of drops of water slipped through the mesh floor tiles, they found their paths of least resistance to the access shaft, as the stone floor beneath the tiles sloped gently towards that point.
Before the water had even been diverted, a few of the colonists had retrieved one of the MRI machines from the clinic. They positioned the machine at just the lip of the shaft, prepared to turn it on at the word. They also had tied a rope to the battery at the base of the access shaft, with a handful of people holding on to the other end of the rope at the top. They watched in silence as the pour of magnetic water flooded the storeroom, snaking its way beneath the floor tiles towards the shaft.
“Pick up,” Chroma ordered, and he and the other colonists heaved up the heavy battery on their shoulders. Chroma gasped under the weight of the battery, the first exercise he had in years. Knowing that his arms were going to give at any second, Chroma screamed, “Turn it on!”
“It’s on!” A voice from high above called down. At the same second, the water that was around them was beginning to rise up like magic.
“Go, go!” Chroma urged the colonists around him. With one, mighty heave, they launched the battery up the shaft as the people at the top pulled hard on the rope. Like an artillery round, the battery shot up the shaft, gliding up that barrel of rising water. It not only worked, but it worked better than expected. From almost sixty feet down, Chroma could hear the surprised cries of the people at the top as the battery launched out of the shaft and nearly landed on top of them.
Chroma scrambled up the steps to the storeroom. When he reached the storeroom, he saw the crowd of colonists, gathered around the battery. Chroma was relieved that the device looked as if it survived the rise. If anything, the floor had absorbed the fall, the mesh tiles twisted around the battery like a cocoon.
