So far, the only good thing about higher gravity is that you can travel downhill quicker; and that means, on the sea of shells, an exhilarating opportunity to slide-surf. Thorpe-Campbell and Sergei reach frightening speeds ahead of me because they’re more daredevil. I touch the crater bottom before them, though, thanks to a Minsk Machine special, a numbnuts nosedive that bowls Thorpe-Campbell over and leaves the two of them body-surfing together with arms and legs flailing.
I only hope someone recorded that on video.
“Okay, so the whole planet knows where we are now.” The O’see cuffs them both upside their helmets. “From here on, no aping about. Stay behind me. Don’t use comms unless absolutely necessary. Jiminy warned us not to provoke them...whatever they are.”
We find the upended rover lying on top of the rubble next to the collapsed chunk of rim rock. It’s battered and filthy, and by rights should be buried under the rubble. Someone or something has lifted it out. Likewise the three bodies arranged neatly on the crater floor, still in their pressure suits. A couple of the helmets are smashed. Limbs are broken. The suits are shredded in places. All the evidence suggests they were killed in the rockslide. But, like the rover, they’ve been fished out.
Lohengrin has the clever idea of righting the rover, to see what kind of shape it’s really in. Though they don’t weight much, they’re some of the toughest vehicles ever designed. If it’s still mobile, it will be an enormous help in this punishing environment. All seven of us heave it onto its side and then shove it upright. It bounces on its over-sized tires and impressive suspension, and doesn’t look too bad except for a coat of black dust and several severe dents in its bodywork.
Thorpe-Campbell tries the fuel cell battery. Nothing. Not even a flicker.
Hendron switches the power routing to the alternate cell, tries that. Nothing. She tries it again. Still nothing.
They’re both about to give up when Lys, shaking her head, squeezes between them and yanks a lever on the dash. The entire panel lights up and the rover thrums to life.
Everyone looks at her.
“Yeah, it was in neutral,” she says, as though she’s been driving all her life. “Hey, don’t blame me!”
Thorpe-Campbell drives it off the rubble and skids a one-eighty on the sea of shells. “Hop on,” he tells us. Catching Hendron’s stern look, he throws her a sheepish salute. “I promise I’ll take it slow. Until things get dicey.”
“You’d better.” She climbs on after us. It’s a tight squeeze, as the rover’s only designed for four people.
He’s true to his word, keeping it under 5mph. As we approach the giant petrified wave, a horrible feeling that it’s been waiting all this time for me, and is about to collapse at any moment, forces my gaze elsewhere. The shadowy area refuses to spill its secrets. Another sensor reading by the O’see reveals “figures, faces in front of the buildings. Some kind of projections? I don’t know. Keep going.”
A few hundred yards from the shadow border, Thorpe-Campbell hits the brakes. He slowly stands up, facing the great black wave. Lys, Lohengrin and the O’see join him. I’m about to ask what’s got them so spooked when, from out the sea of shells ahead, a single tree pops up. Its trunk is thick and wrinkled. Its leaves are auburn. Several more appear around it, painted into existence from the roots up by...an invisible artist.
They sprout up to full height in seconds. It’s mesmerizing and absolutely impossible! But it’s happening all the same. An emerald lawn spills out over the dark shells, surrounding the trees. A pair of wooden benches appears, bearing bronze plaques—faded and discoloured. An elderly woman wearing a peach tracksuit and a sweatband perches on the end of one. She kisses her fingertips, touches them to the bronze plaque. Then she opens a Thermos flask. I don’t how she got here, where she came from, but she looks real enough to me. A little vague, a little fuzzy in the details, but her movements are so lifelike I’m betting this is a simulation of an actual person.
But from where? Who is doing this?
A wind from the shadows swoops into the scene, blowing a mass of dark leaves. Only they aren’t leaves. I can’t tell what they are. They swarm and settle in vast numbers on the ground in front of the lawn. Then, as if by magic, a massive tower block structure builds up from the crater floor, storey by metal storey, window by window, until it reaches the cusp of the petrified wave itself.
In moments, a street. In minutes, an entire city rises.
CHAPTER 24
Ingol
“Is it solid?” Sergei asks a good question but doesn't get an answer.
Hendron finally breaks out of her trance. “Solid, yes...in a way.”
“In what way?”
Nothing.
While we’re all mesmerized, he clambers onto the driver’s seat and slowly reverses the rover back the way we came. The grassland parts from our path just enough to let us through, then reconstitutes behind us, as though we’re drifting through algae on the surface of a pond.
Skyscrapers of all shapes and sizes ring the grassland. They stretch back as far as the eye can see, at least three miles, maybe much farther. For all we know this city has spread over the entire planet!
Sergei reverses the rover along neat asphalt paths, over bridges and around ponds. People jog by. Others walk their dogs. An occasional driver-less car floats by along one of the designated levways—the passengers are either old or handicapped in some way. As we approach the border of this parkland, the number of vehicles increases. I can see multiple lanes and tiers of traffic. The bottommost are maglev and are packed very close together, almost fender to fender. The higher-flying cars and shuttles use thrusters and are widely spaced apart.
As we leave the grassland, details become hazier, blurrier. It’s as if everything is out of focus. Also, there’s no noise in this city. None. That’s maybe the strangest part. It’s many times bigger than any settlement I’ve seen on Mars, and it should be a riot of noise. But the only sounds I can hear are my own breaths.
“Beth! Eight o’clock!” Thorpe-Campbell’s warning makes us all jump. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Good God,” she replies, wiping her visor. “Guys, look over there, directly under the pink moon. Do you recognise it?”
Lohengrin says he doesn’t. Lyssa isn’t sure, but it strikes her as familiar. Rachel links arms with me, her cute face drawn into a frown. Meanwhile, Sergei stops the rover and turns to see if I’m seeing what he’s seeing…
“The Empire State Building,” we both say together.
That means…we’ve just travelled through Central Park? And this is New York City!
But how is any of this possible?
A part of me wants to jump down and explore this amazing metropolis I’ve only ever seen in movies or on the podnet news. But is it safe? Who—or what—is doing this? And why?
Even Charlie Thorpe-Campbell, lifelong daredevil and explorer, doesn’t risk leaving the rover. Instead, he tells Sergei to “stay away from the traffic. Until we know what we’re dealing with, let’s keep to the park.” He gives his daughter’s shoulder a squeeze, then looks across to the O’see. “Beth, tell me you’re recording this.”
“On every wavelength.”
“Are there any—wow, what’s that?” Glancing over his shoulder, he ducks. An entire block of skyscrapers collapses over the levway, about a quarter mile from us. As it falls, the building material dissolves into streams and vortices of the dark leaves we saw at first. Another block falls, then another. Soon, the entire cityscape surrounding the park becomes a dark, swirling cyclone that migrates back toward the petrified wave where it came from.
New York disintegrates at many times the speed it came into being. Buildings and people and vehicles and trees crumble and fly apart like an autumn spell gone horribly wrong. But the city doesn’t vanish altogether. It changes. Green becomes white, grass turns into snow. Central Park morphs into a desolate Arctic landscape.
Wind whips frozen spindrift off the peaks of icy o
utcroppings. A half dozen tents stand off to the eastern edge of the crater. A couple—a human couple, wearing fleece coats—walks alone over the ice. Their gloved hands touch. Then each puts an arm around the other’s waist and they walk on. It starts snowing. The blizzard soon envelopes them.
Before we have chance to catch up, the scene changes again, this time into a rolling red landscape that has to be Mars. But the contours are tiny, as though we're at high altitude. It appears the way you’d see it if you were a passenger in a skycab, looking straight down. Here a microscopic greenhouse, there a tiny oasis dome complete with water recycling plant. The experience of feeling so high, even if it’s just optically, makes my head spin and my shins and toes tingle. It must be what Alice felt like after she took a bite from the Eat Me cake when she first entered Wonderland.
The landscape rolls by under us. I don’t recognise whereabouts on Mars it is, but we do pass over quite a few canyons and through a couple of rain clouds. It’s like the weirdest VRI simulation ever invented, taking place in reality, on a crater floor a million light-years from Mars.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the magic show dissolves back into the sea of shells and the shadow of the petrified wave. The crater appears undisturbed, pristine, as if nothing at all has happened.
Thorpe-Campbell says nothing. He plucks Sergei out of the driver’s seat and takes the rover to the far edge of the crater where we found it, as far from the source of this thing as possible.
“There’s only one thing it can be,” the O’see assures us. “Programmable matter.”
“You mean nanobugs and stuff?” The title of Sergei’s future PhD thesis, right there.
“Kind of. The basic principles behind it are nothing new. Our scientists have actually researched it for the past couple of centuries, and we’ve made some decent breakthroughs, from what I understand. At the simplest level it’s just material that can change its properties on command. There are lots of ways to do it: claytronics, shape-changing molecules, metamaterials. You manipulate material at the atomic or molecular level and program it to do whatever you want, like change shape or alter its magnetic behaviour. The potential has always been there, but we’ve never really got to grips with nanotechnology for large, practical applications. ISPA put a ban on private nanotech research because people were mostly using it for industrial espionage and spying on each other. These days we use it primarily for little things like ID tags and ink password security.”
“But this is way more advanced, right?”
“Correct, Lys. This is light-years beyond anything we’ve imagined. It’s so advanced it would scare the daylights out of the top brass at Alpha. Jiminy appears to be sentient, so there’s probably a sentient intelligence at work here, too. Whatever’s programming all this, it’s wielding the most powerful creative force—and potentially destructive force—ever devised. Think about it. If it can build a city in a few minutes, how many atoms must it have under its control?”
“Um, that was a rhetorical question,” Thorpe-Campbell tells Lohengrin, who’s honest-to-God trying to come up with a number. His darting eyes and muttering lips calculate like crazy.
“So what do we do?” asks Lys.
“For now, nothing,” says Hendron. “We need more intel. Some good, thorough observation time can’t hurt. I’m going to leave a pair of omnicams here to record everything that happens while we’re gone. We’ll be able to watch the whole show from base camp.”
“Shouldn’t we leave someone here, or take turns, observe it in shifts?” Lohengrin’s contribution, typically smart.
“Later,” she replies. “We need to come at this thing fresh. Right now we’re exhausted, and our brains have just been fried. So we need to recharge, nosh up, and figure this thing out objectively. We’ve got the rover. We can come and go as we please.”
“But Jiminy said Mum doesn’t have much time left,” I remind her.
“I know. And we’ll do our best to get to the bottom of this as soon as possible, I promise. One of our cameras will record images across multiple wavelengths, including infrared. If your mum’s alive in there, we might be able to find her that way.”
“Her body heat?”
“Exactly. Any gaps, any lulls in activity and we might be able to see further into the shadow, see what’s behind all this. In any case, we’ll be watching. No matter what happens, we won’t miss a thing.”
Back at base, it’s a bit like old times. Thorpe-Campbell and the O’see stay outside to discuss the problem on their own, leaving the five of us to “recharge” inside the oxygen tent. It feels great to be out of my spacesuit. Rachel leads us in a few warm-down exercises to help ease our stiffness and sore leg muscles. After that we tuck in. The food’s delish, I have to say. It’s all synthetic, health-engineered, but they’ve worked hard to bring out the taste. We all go back for seconds.
Nothing much happens over the live feed from the canyon. A large, bare wall rises up a few times, shielding our view. I’d give anything to know what’s happening behind it. Then another forest of trees grows in seconds. The trees are much bigger this time, and there’s no city around them. Several figures standing on ladders pick fruit from the branches and place them into wicker baskets held in mid-air by hoverbots. It’s a peaceful scene, but it doesn’t tell us much. Humans seem to populate these simulations, but what does it all mean? Where’s the connecting thread?
We manage to sleep for several hours, using our spacesuits as pillows. Thorpe-Campbell and Hendron, we find out, have taken turns sleeping aboard the pod. In VIP luxury! When Sergei asks why we couldn’t have all done that, the word “buggos” is thrown back at us. Our collective groans and boos bring a wry grin to the O’see’s tired face. Thorpe-Campbell says he’ll gladly give up his pod cot to anyone who beats him in a foot race. More groans. Louder boos.
Sergei whispers to me, “Someone might have to break that fool’s legs.” We bump fists.
Of course, while we’ve been asleep, at least one of them has been monitoring the canyon feed at all times. “It might be nothing, but we’ve both noticed this,” Hendron explains. “During the periods of low activity you get flickers of energy here and there. Most of them are random. But there appears to be one small, constant infrared signature deep inside the shadow. I checked back over the footage at high speed. That one spot never dims, never changes. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s either a power source...or a living creature.” She looks at me. I shiver out of body.
“Jim, it could be her,” says Thorpe-Campbell.
“How can we find out for sure?” challenges Sergei.
“We’re working on that.”
Rachel asks, “Are there any patterns in the activity so far?”
“None that we can see.”
“Or patterns in the inactivity?” adds Lohengrin.
“What do you mean?”
“The gaps in activity, the duration of those gaps. Are they regular intervals? Is it some kind of cycle?”
“I’d say, off the top of my head, each period of activity lasts between one and two hours,” answers the O’see. “As for the gaps, we haven’t really...”
“We’ll have to get back to you on that,” says Thorpe-Campbell, sharing a nod with Hendron. “Interesting ideas, Lohengrin. Anyone else?” When no one speaks up, he goes on, “Okay, this might be a good opportunity to brainstorm. You’re a pod unit now, you’ve worked through some tough problems already—in the canyon, in the Hex. So have a think, talk it over, spark off each other. Make this your team huddle. In the meantime, the O’see and I will have one of our own. Who knows, you lot might be schooling us by the time we’re done.”
“Correction: will be,” taunts Sergei.
“You’re on.” Thorpe-Campbell points a competitive finger at the Minsk Machine.
Sergei sits up, enjoying the exchange. “And if we come up with something, we get the pod cots, you and the O’see have to sleep in here...for a night.”
“Deal. But if we come up
with something and you don’t, the five of you have to endure a singing lesson from the O’see. That’s opera, too.”
“Hey, what’s this endure business,” objects Hendron.
“Suits me,” Rachel says after the rest of us have finished moaning.
Thorpe-Campbell wags his finger. “Ah, I forgot about that. Okay, Foggerty, you get to dance while they sing, in front of the class, for the whole lesson.”
She buries her face in her hands. “In what style?”
“Whatever style you want. Just...don’t let it come to that! We’ve kind of gone off topic here, haven’t we?” He clears his throat. “Okay, get thinking, all of you. This is what we brought you for. Team Trillion—have at it.”
Our two instructors seal themselves inside the airlock section, climb into their spacesuits and then carefully exit the tent.
“We could try communicating with them,” says Rachel. “Like we do with Jiminy. Broadcast some images from an omnipod, something like that. See how curious they are.”
Over to Lys. “Yeah, or we could, like, distract them. Set up a decoy. Find out what makes them curious, like Rachel says, and then tempt them away from the crater.”
“A diversion,” says Rachel.
“That’s the word. Then we sneak in with the rover and rescue her.”
“You’d have to seriously distract them for that to work,” Sergei points out. “The rover does 30 kph tops, and that’s on a flat surface. Over this crap, it’s a twenty minute trip back to base.”
“Then how about a series of diversions,” suggests Lys. “Keep them occupied for as long we need to get away.”
“I like it,” says Lohengrin. “But first we need to know what makes them curious. More important, what do they want with Jim’s mum? Why hold her captive like that?”
Rachel replies, “Maybe they’re keeping her alive. If she was injured in the fall, who knows, in their own way they might be helping her.”
Star Binder Page 30
