The Infinet (Trivial Game Book 1)

by John Akers

  At one point Elena stuck her head out of the observation room and said, “Just one more night, Mr. Pax. Our progress has gone exactly as planned. We’ll arrive at Socotra first thing in the morning.”

  At 6:00 a.m. the next morning, Pax was awakened by Angelo opening his door. “Good morning, Mr. Pax. We’ll be at the island soon. You should eat some breakfast.”

  In the observation room, there were bagels with lox and cream cheese, another of Pax’s favorite meals. As he ate, Pax looked at the monitors and noticed the blackness didn’t seem quite so penetrating as before.

  “We’re down to 20 knots and have been slowly ascending for the past two hours,” said Angelo. “We’ll be at the dock in about an hour.”

  Slowly the darkness continued to lighten. Eventually, it morphed into a brilliant blue. Thousands of fish became briefly visible on the monitors before disappearing, the shimmering clouds of scales dissolving into the endless water. The cone at the front of the ship was no longer spinning, but the sub continued to propel itself silently forward by some other means. Finally, the cameras on the top of the sub breached the surface.

  The monitors showed the island was only about a mile away. They were headed toward a small lagoon with a narrow strip of sand all around the perimeter. To Pax’s surprise, there was a small mountain range not far past the beach.

  Pax was nervous but at the same time anxious to get on with whatever awaited him. As the sub approached the end of a long dock projecting from the left end of the lagoon, Pax was fidgeting in his chair like a grade-schooler waiting for the recess bell. At the end of the dock, watching the sub’s approach, Pax saw a solitary woman with long, dark hair.

  When the sub finally came to a complete stop, Elena opened the hatch and stepped out. Pax noticed she had a small brown pouch with a string slung over her shoulder and across her body. She grabbed one of the rungs of a ladder at the end of the dock and swiftly climbed up.

  Pax stepped through the hatch after Elena. The ladder was made of a dark brown material with a dull sheen that looked like modeling clay. It seemed as though it would deform as soon as he touched it, but it turned out to be perfectly solid. As he stepped onto it, the bottoms of his sandals almost seemed to grip the rung. Quickly, he climbed to the top.

  He stepped onto the deck and found Elena and the other woman embracing each other. Pax was surprised to see how small the woman was. Her head didn’t even reach Elena’s shoulders. As they separated, she smiled warmly at Elena, her demeanor natural and assured. She turned to Angelo, who had followed Pax up the ladder and now nimbly stepped around him to give the woman a hug as well. Angelo had to bend almost in half to do so, but despite the fact that he obscured everything but the woman’s face and hands, it was her presence Pax felt most keenly.

  The woman’s hair was dark, only a few shades away from jet black, and was pulled into a ponytail. Her skin was a light copper color, and she had a sharp jawline. A dark purple Univiz hung around her neck, and Pax noticed her eyes were hazel. Although she wore the same tan uniform as the others, something about her projected a more dignified, ethereal air. He couldn’t guess at her ethnicity other than to say it was clearly mixed, but there was no question that she was an attractive woman in any culture.

  After Angelo stepped back, the woman beamed at both him and Elena. “Thank you, Elena and Angelo,” she said. “You’ve done the world a great service.” The two of them nodded and smiled but did not respond.

  The woman turned to Pax. “Welcome, Mr. Pax. My name is Alethia. I am one of the creators of the Infinet, and one of the founding members of our society. We are honored to have you here.” Her voice was lower and more resonant than he had expected from someone of her stature, and it gave her a gravitas Pax found unnerving. He felt her presence as if it were a palpable thing.

  Suddenly, he realized he was staring at her. Embarrassed, he frowned at her and blurted out, “I really hope you’ve got a damned good explanation for all this.” He was annoyed to hear how feeble his voice sounded in comparison to hers.

  “There is, and I know you wish to get to it right away, so please follow me,” she said. Then she turned and began walking rapidly down the dock.

  Caught off guard, Pax had to hustle to catch up to her. His legs felt sluggish at first, but the rapid motion quickly shook off the cobwebs. The feeling of being able to move freely again was wonderful.

  “I hope your travel here was pleasant enough, the circumstances notwithstanding.”

  “You mean, outside of the terrifying abduction, entrapment at sea, and being forced to travel in an experimental ship and submarine, how was my trip here?” He smiled broadly at her. “Fantastic.”

  Alethia didn’t respond, but she looked at him with an steady gaze that made him uncomfortable. He turned away and then he noticed the sand on the beach around the lagoon was only 30 to 40 feet deep. Directly behind it were foothills that turned rapidly into the small mountain range he’d seen from the sub.

  Alethia said, “Socotra is an interesting island. For most of its history it was independent, and beyond a very small indigenous population, it was known only to pirates and smugglers. In the 1990’s, it was annexed to Yemen, but just before the government there collapsed, our society purchased it.

  “Although it isn’t very large, it has a number of different ecologies. Right now, we’re on the semitropical northeastern part of the island, where there are scattered beaches and the mountains you see. But much of the western half is a flat, semiarid desert climate. There are also a large number of limestone caves, some of which reach up to a half-mile deep. Because of its isolation, the animals and especially the plants here have evolved in some unique ways, as you’ll soon see.”

  As they approached the end of the dock, Pax saw what looked like four oversized motorcycles arranged in a single file. Each had a curved metallic shell that rose up from a conical front to a larger, bulbous rear about five feet high. Halfway up, the metal morphed into a clear material so the rider could see outside. Four in-line wheels protruded from beneath the shell. Pax noticed there was no kickstand or other support, yet somehow they stood perfectly upright.

  “These are knifecycles,” said Alethia. “Each one has two gyroscopes and several powerful magnets that keep the bikes in balance at all times, even when stopped. As she approached the front cycle the top half of the shell separated and swung backward. Alethia swung her legs over the edge and stepped inside. The bike swayed to one side momentarily before smoothly returning to vertical.

  Pax noticed the athleticism with which she moved, and the shapely muscularity of her legs. He felt a sudden spark of desire which annoyed and alarmed him. He had no time for such distractions. He needed to focus all his attention on getting through whatever they wanted to show him so he could return home as soon as possible.

  The door to the second bike opened and he stepped inside. It swayed as Alethia’s had, dampening the vector forces of his momentum then swiftly returning the cycle to vertical. Glancing behind him, he saw Elena and Angelo stepping into the remaining two cycles. Angelo’s lurched and sagged precipitously as he stepped inside, yet somehow it managed to stay upright as well.

  Pax sat down, and the door closed over his head. To his surprise, the door edge disappeared and his suit constricted, as it had on the sub. When he tried to lean forward, he wasn’t surprised to find he was once again locked in place. As with both the ship and the submarine, there was no control panel.

  He heard Alethia’s voice, though he couldn’t locate the source of the sound. “Ready?” she asked.

  “I’m immobilized and terrified again, if that’s what you mean.”

  Alethia gave a chuckle. “You’re being a bit melodramatic, don’t you think, Mr. Pax?”

  “Under the circumstances, I’d say I’m being more mellow than dramatic.”

  Alethia laughed again, and the sound of it filled his head. Pax saw her knifecycle accelerate rapidly forward, and at the same time he felt himself being presse
d firmly back into his seat. Although they were traveling on a dirt road, he felt almost no vibrations from it. In a matter of seconds, the terrain was flying past. They were following the edge of the coast, with the ridgeline on their left and the ocean to the right. The road began curving leftward, away from the ocean, then began rising sharply upward.

  Alethia’s voice filled his head again. “As I mentioned, the vegetation on Socotra is quite unique. Over one-third of the species here are endemic; you won’t find them anywhere else on Earth. It has the greatest number of unique plant species anywhere other than the Galapagos Islands. Off to the left, at the base of the hill, you’ll see one of the better-known examples of this diversity, the cucumber tree.”

  Pax turned to his left and saw several giant, white tubers scattered over a rocky terrain amidst a patchwork of scrub brush. They ranged from six to eight feet tall and one to two feet in diameter. Their tops split into a dozen or more short shoots, each of which was topped by a small fringe of green leaves.

  Further up, he noticed another kind of tree of roughly the same height but with even wider bases. They tapered abruptly at the top into several small branches that jutted upward and had pink flowers at the tips rather than leaves. “What are those?” he asked.

  “The bottle tree, also known as the desert rose.”

  “Looks like someone crossed a bunch of fig trees with cauliflower,” said Pax.

  Alethia laughed again, and Pax once more found himself strangely attracted to the sound.

  “In a moment,” she added, “you’ll see the most famous denizen of the island, the dragon’s blood tree.”

  A minute later he saw them. Dozens of trees with trunks 10 to 15 feet high and one to two feet thick. They had no branches until three-quarters of the way up the trunk, where they suddenly appeared all at once, shooting out perpendicularly or in most cases, angled slightly upward. The branches formed dense, hemispherical green canopies six to eight feet in diameter through which even the bright desert sun couldn’t penetrate. Solid black oval shadows speckled the barren ground beneath them.

  “They look like umbrellas that’ve been blown inside out,” said Pax.

  Alethia laughed again, and the sound lingered in Pax’s ears, like a reverberating tone from the rubbed edge of a wine glass. “They do, don’t they? The shape and density of their tops serves to minimize evaporation and provide shade for seeds and new saplings. The tree gets its name from its bright red sap, and for the seemingly magical range of applications the indigenous people have found for it over the years. It has been used to heal wounds, coagulate blood, eliminate ulcers, alleviate intestinal diseases, and reduce fevers. They even used it as toothpaste. Europeans later used it as both a dye and a varnish for violins.”

  The knifecycles began cutting rapidly back and forth along a series of switchbacks as they carved their way up one of the mountains. They navigated the turns with the dexterity of a speed skater. Despite their high speed, and because Pax was stuck so firmly to the seat, he didn’t get jostled at all. He just kept his stomach tightened and prepared for each turn as he saw it approaching. Strangely, once he got accustomed to the motion, it felt as though his mind and the cycle had become synchronized.

  “Let me know if you start to feel sick,” said Alethia.

  “Doing fine,” Pax managed to grunt. “Sounds like the natives might have been inbreeding a bit too long, thinking they could use that stuff for all those purposes.”

  “Certainly they would need to make the most of what they had available to them,” said Alethia. “But there are over 300 species of plants that don’t appear anywhere else in the world, so it makes sense some of them have properties unseen anywhere…”

  “What the hell is that?!” Pax shouted, his eyes suddenly transfixed by what he now saw directly ahead of them.

  As the knifecycles crested the top of the mountain, the view of the island’s interior was no longer obstructed. Now, in the distance, in the middle of a vast, empty plain, a monstrous funnel rose out of the ground. It stood, impossibly, on its slender tip, before rising, perfectly straight, thousands upon thousands of feet in the air. The width of the funnel barely changed until four-fifths of the way up, where it exploded outward into a circular mouth at least one-third as wide as it was tall.

  It was a frozen, synthetic tornado, inexplicably exempt from all known laws of physics. Pax had seen the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia years earlier, not long before it was destroyed by anti-petroleum activists, and there was no doubt in his mind the structure in front of him was well over twice as tall, possibly close to three times. How it managed to stay upright, how the ground beneath managed to withstand the incredible weight that must be concentrated at its tip, was wholly beyond his imagining.

  “That is the Story of Man, Mr. Pax,“ said Alethia, "That is why we have brought you here.”

  Part 5

  Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Chapter 40

  Sunday, 7:30 AM PT

  As he ate the salmon and egg scramble Risi had made for him, Cevis tried not to think about what would happen once the police showed up at his doorstep. The first thing they’d want to see was Cyrus’ history for the past several months. He would refuse, of course, but when they returned with a search warrant, they’d confiscate Cyrus and all of his servers. He stored all his data for Project Aegis locally, to ensure his life’s work couldn’t be hacked remotely. He also kept two backups, one in a server in his basement, and the other in a hidden server buried under his house. The information was scattered across a multitude of databases, and the connections among them he kept entirely in his head. The police wouldn’t be able to connect the dots, but they might bring in scientists who could. He couldn’t let that happen. He had to find Pax, now.

  Suddenly, he realized Risi was standing next to the table, looking at him. Her face, controlled by a dizzyingly complex arrangement of tiny pneumatic tubes underneath a synthetic skin composite of silicon, rubber, and plastic, had arranged itself in an amazingly realistic look of concern.

  “What’s up, Risi?”

  “I heard you yelling in your office a few minutes ago, Mr. Pierson. I just wanted to check if everything is all right?”

  “Everything’s fine Risi, thank you.” He sensed what was coming next and began to eat faster.

  “Just so you know, sir, if you’re having any problems, I might be able to help. I know you have Cyrus, but I have a nano-processor myself, and recent studies show that talking through a difficult situation with a humanoid leads to improved…”

  The exterior speakers on Cevis’ Univiz suddenly blared to life. “Thank you, Risi, but I can help Mr. Pierson manage any issues he may have.”

  “I’m sure you do fine, Cyrus,” said Risi sharply, “but if feeling like he’s interacting with another person can lead to a better outcome for Mr. Pierson, then…”

  “Mr. Pierson has relied on me to supplement his cognitive processes for more than eight years, Risi. I am integrated with his consciousness in a way that a simple servantbot could never understand.”

  “Well! I never imagined a pair a hyperactive goggles could be so rude as to…”

  “Risi! Cyrus!” said Cevis, now holding his other hand to his forehead. “Please, you’re giving me a headache! I need you both to be quiet right now, so I can think.”

  “Yes, sir,” Risi and Cyrus said in tandem, before both going silent. Risi retreated to the kitchen and began cleaning dishes.

  Cevis shook his head in annoyance. Risi was a top-shelf bot, but the recent efforts of other AIs to insert themselves into the cog space dominated by UVs for so long, while understandable from a business perspective, was becoming increasingly annoying as a user.

  Cevis finished eating and pushed back from the table. Risi regarded him with an expectant smile. "Did you enjoy your breakfast, Mr. Pierson?"

  "It was good Risi, thank you," Cevis said absentmindedly, as he hea
ded back to his study. On a machine-only comms channel Cyrus told Risi her scramble must have been quite mediocre to have garnered such a generic compliment. Risi responded by asking Cyrus how it felt not to have any legs.

  In his study, Cevis began pacing back and forth over the once-expensive Persian rug he’d bought 20 years ago, now worthless due to the footpath he’d worn in the middle from his daily musings. He thought about trying to hack into Oreste’s home security system recordings, but immediately discarded the idea. Though he could figure it out eventually, it would take too long, and would leave digital fingerprints that could be traced back to him. He also realized it didn’t matter what had happened inside Oreste’s house that evening. All he needed to know was when and how Oreste had left.

  “Cyrus, use BlackGlove to search for public cameras within a one mile radius of the home of Oreste Pax in Rancho Santa Fe, sorted by proximity.” Cevis always used an anonymizing network to conceal all his internet activity, so no casual snoopers could infer what he was up to with Project Aegis. Now, he did so to make sure the police or FBI wouldn’t be able to trace his efforts to find Pax. He didn’t want them following his trail and screwing everything up with some heavy-handed rescue operation.

  Cyrus displayed a map with Pax’s house in the center. Tiny blue dots indicating publicly accessible cameras were sprinkled lightly across the map. Even though there were far fewer than in most places—the super-wealthy valued their privacy after all—there were enough for his purposes.

  Cevis found a cluster of four dots at an intersection at the end of Pax’s street. He gestured to zoom in on them, then said, “Display live feeds.” The current video for each of the cameras appeared in a 2x2 formation on Cevis’ display. He selected the one that pointed up the street toward Pax’s house, and the video from it filled his screen.

  With the advent of automated driving years earlier, traffic lights and intersection cameras had become vestigial remnants of a previous generation of technology. Automated driving had rendered them moot, since there was no more speeding, running of red lights, or other moving violations. For a while, most lights had continued to operate as a visual assurance for passengers that the cars were operating properly, but within a couple of years, everyone’s fears about automated driving had been assuaged.