by Jade Kerrion
Water spilled over the planet.
“Oh, my God!” Jem screamed. For a single, terrifying moment, the continents vanished beneath the downpour.
Kir scrambled to catch the cup before it landed on the planet. “Damn it, Kav.”
“Stay back, just stay back!” Jem yanked Kav away from the planet and pushed him out beyond the asteroid belt. “SimOne, damage reports.”
“Significant global systemic damage from the equivalent of forty planetary days and nights of heavy rain. More than ninety-nine percent of terrestrial creatures eliminated.”
“What?” Jem could not breathe through the shocking weight on her chest. “They’re all gone?” She spun on Kav. “You…you did…” She forced the words through a fog of stunned disbelief. “You killed them all. This is all your fault!”
“Jem, it’s all right. We’ll get through this,” Kir promised as he crossed over to his brother and squatted beside him, throwing an arm around the boy’s trembling shoulders. “Relax. You’re frightening him.”
Kir’s air of deliberate calm took the sharp edge off her rage, but there was still a great deal of anger to go around. “Frightening him? He just drowned an entire planet. Get him out of here before he wrecks the universe.”
“Come on, Kav. Let’s go.” Kir led his brother away, never removing his hand from around his brother’s shoulders.
Jem sank to her knees. Her legs refused to hold her up. She dragged her hands through her brown hair. “We have to start over?” Again?
SimOne’s artificial voice was calm. “No. All species survived.”
“What?” Jem raised her head to look up at SimOne. “Nothing went extinct?”
“No.”
“But you just said we lost ninety-nine percent of all terrestrial creatures.”
“That is correct, but enough members of each species survived to ensure continuation of the species.”
Jem shook her head, brows furrowing. “That doesn’t make any sense. How could all that biodiversity survive forty days of rain?”
“Would you like to download the planet’s archives?”
“Yes, send it to me, will you, SimOne? Send it to Davos, too.”
Jem found Kir Davos and his younger brother seated together on the wide expanse of green grass on the upper quadrangle. Kav looked up as she approached and then quickly looked away.
She had not imagined the tears in the brown eyes or the quiver of the child’s lips. Kav reminded her of another child whom she dearly loved and saw too little of.
“Hey,” Kir greeted quietly. His arm slipped around his brother’s shoulders, steadying him.
“I thought you might want another drink since you spilled all of your water,” she said to Kav, holding out the peace offering.
She stumbled over the words, but the boy did not seem to notice. Kav stared wide-eyed at the fruit-blended drink and then looked at Kir.
Kir nodded, and the child reached out with two hands to accept the cup.
“What do you say?” Kir prompted.
“Thank you,” Kav said in a lilting tone before slurping loudly from the straw. His lips curved in a smile of pleasure.
Kir looked down at the top of his brother’s head before turning back to Jem. He raked his fingers through his hair. “How bad is it?” he asked softly. “I heard SimOne say something about ninety-nine percent extinction. I am so sorry, Jem, but we’ll fix this together. I know we can.”
Jem sat across from him and folded her legs beneath her. “More than ninety-nine percent of all terrestrial life forms died, but apparently enough members of each species survived.”
“So what’s the extinction rate?”
“Zero.”
Kir’s eyes narrowed. “Zero? That’s not mathematically possible.”
“I didn’t think so either so I had SimOne send the planet’s archives to us.”
Kir twisted his wrist sharply and activated his personal device, spreading out his astral workstation between them. It was a mess. Files scattered across the surface, long electronic threads trailing out of each, creating active links to other files in storage. Still, Kir seemed to know where to find things. The planet’s archives sat at the top of the largest pile of folders. He touched it to expand its contents and then scanned through the information.
“It says here that life started regenerating around this location. 39°42.113’N 44°17.899’E.” Kir summoned the communication interface on the workstation and pressed a button. “SimOne?”
“Yes, Kir,” the android replied.
Kir had the android on speed dial? Perhaps he was taking the simulation more seriously than she had expected.
“I’m here with Jem,” he said. “Can you display the area around the coordinates?”
“Yes. Stand by.”
The astral workstation shimmered, and light was recast into a live scene of a mountain range.
“It’s not that remarkable,” Kir said. “SimOne, can you scan the area? Let us know if you find anything interesting.”
Even before the last word had left his mouth, the picture zoomed in on the top of one of the mountains. Jem’s eyes narrowed. She leaned forward. “Is that a…boat?”
“A very big one,” Kir confirmed. “What is it doing there? Why are they building a boat at the top of a mountain?”
SimOne’s disembodied voice reported, “Analysis indicates that the wood used to build the boat is not native to the mountain habitat.”
Kir frowned. “It’s miles from the ocean, and at the top of the mountain. How did humans get it up there?”
“They didn’t. The flood did,” Jem murmured incredulously. Had the water really covered the mountaintops? “Would they have had time to build it when the rain started falling?”
Kir shook his head. “With primitive tools and questionable techniques? Hell, no. A project this large would have taken them years, not days. They built it in advance.”
“But what would anyone do with a boat this large?” Jem asked.
“Nothing I can think of. Though…” Kir said slowly, “…one could imagine that it was built specifically to survive the flood.”
Jem shook her head. “But you said they probably built it in advance. How could they have known?”
Kir raised his gaze to her. His eyes were wide, confusion flickering in their brown depths. He inhaled and released his breath slowly. “That is a really good question…”
5
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech…Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
– Genesis 11:1-4
* * *
Jem looked up as Kir slumped down in the cafeteria seat across from her. He looked as exhausted as she felt. “SimOne says the central command system didn’t do it,” Kir said, dragging his hand over his eyes before taking a sip from the flask he carried.
“I know. I checked too.” Jem blinked hard, gazing at him through the haze of her astral workstation. Her eyes still stung from the effort of going through all the reports SimOne had sent to her. “There’s no way anyone could have known in advance that Kav would spill water on the planet. It was an accident.”
“He’s really sorry, by the way.”
“I know. I’m sorry I yelled at him. I just flipped out.”
“I did too when I saw all that water sloshing down.” Kir chuckled. “He’s heard swearing before, so it’s not as if you’re responsible for expanding his vocabulary.”
Jem smiled wanly. The guilt still tickled in the pit of her stomach. It was easier to change the topic. “So, if it’s not the central command system, and not SimOne, and not either of us, then who the hell told the humans to build a boat? A network virus? A hacker?”
“Who knows? We don’t have the academic or professional background to figure it out.”
“SimOne could,” Jem said.
“Do you think she could do that on top of everything else she’s doing to monitor the planet?”
Kir nodded. “She might have to use a fraction of her computing power, as opposed to virtually none of it, but yeah, she could probably manage.”
Jem slid her astral workstation back into her personal device. “It’s going to drive me crazy until we pin it down. Someone or something out there is gaming the system.”
“We were lucky it did, or we would have had one very dead, wet planet.”
“No food, no drinks around the planet ever again,” Jem said.
“Right. Never again. We can drink to that.”
She glared at him as Kir tipped his flask to her.
Kir chuckled. “Off to class?”
“Yeah, let’s go.”
In companionable silence, they made the long trek from Levering Hall, across the lower quadrangle, the upper quadrangle, and then up the hill to the Simulation Center. “It’s a nice day,” Jem remarked, breaking the silence as she raised her face to the soft breeze. “Pity we’re spending so much time indoors.”
“We could always work out here. SimOne can send us the reports we need to make decisions. It’s not as if we’re doing anything physical to the planet, other than spill water over it.”
She shot him a slanted glare. “Those water jokes are getting less funny each time.”
“Okay, all right. Sorry.” Kir grinned, apparently not offended. He shrugged his backpack off his shoulders and put his flask away before walking into the classroom. Students were gathered around a screen in front of the class. “What’s that?” he asked.
“Probably interim results for the semester,” Jem murmured. She pressed a fist against the sinking feeling in her stomach.
Kir cast her a quick sideways glance. “Want me to check it?”
She swallowed hard. “Yes, please.”
It was cowardly, she knew, but after the near disasters of the past few weeks, she was not ready to face up to their scores. She could hear envious murmurs, soft laughs, and knowing chuckles, and wondered which team was at the top, and which one at the bottom. Her team would not be the former. She could only hope and pray they were not the latter.
Kir came back quickly. He seemed calm and relaxed, as always. She might have smacked him just for that, but the tense knots in her shoulders did not allow for that much freedom of movement. “We’re okay,” he said.
“Define okay.”
“We’re sixteenth.”
“Aren’t there only twenty teams?”
“Nineteen, now. One fell apart last week.”
“That’s not okay.”
“Jem, we’re only a few weeks in.”
“We’re midway through the semester and a quarter of the way through the entire course.” Jem shook her head and turned away from him. Damn it. They had to catch up, somehow. The only problem was that she did not know how.
Kir shrugged. “Look, we’re the only undergraduate team. We’re not scraping bottom. That’s saying something, and we’ve got time to get better.”
“We’re younger than everyone else, so we’ve got a reason to suck?” She spun around to glare at him. “With that kind of attitude, it’s a wonder you’ve even gotten this far in life.”
“You can be competitive without being obsessive. I’m competitive. You’re obsessive. Big difference.”
She turned her back on him and walked into the simulation laboratory. The chill hit her harder that day than it usually did. “Status report, SimOne.”
“Status is normal.”
It was a nice change. Jem closed in on the planet and walked slowly around it for her customary visual inspection. She jerked to a stop and stared at the area around which life had sprouted after Kav had spilt the water. “What is that?”
“What is what?” Kir asked as he walked up to join them. He peered closer. “It looks like a building of some sort. SimOne, we need a detailed visual of the area.”
SimOne complied, projecting the image on an astral screen above the planet.
Jem’s eyes narrowed. “It is a building…a ridiculously large tower. What would anyone need with a building that large?”
Kir chuckled. “Remember the boat? I think our humans just do everything large. I blame it on delusions of grandeur.”
“How many people would it take to build something like this?” Jem asked.
“Without modern technology? Insane numbers of people,” Kir confirmed. “SimOne, can you give us a map of the planet and overlay it with population density?”
The image of the tower vanished as a map of the world unfurled across the astral screen. There was a cluster of black around the coordinates of the tower. The rest of the map was conspicuously and disturbingly empty.
“I don’t believe it. Every human being on the damn planet is right down there.” Kir sighed. “They’re lucky the ground’s not sinking beneath all that weight. Freaking cowards. There’s a big world out there. Go explore it.”
Jem snorted. “I know what you’re going to say next. Risk diversification.”
“We need to. You could wipe out the entire human population of the planet by accidentally sneezing on that spot. Not a good idea.”
Jem agreed. “Fine. Scatter them.”
“Right.” Kir paused, staring at Jem. “Uh, how?”
She arched an eyebrow. “Ask them nicely?”
“Funny.” Kir took a deliberate step back and stared down at the planet and at the monstrosity of a building that rose above it. “If the building gets any bigger, it may even affect the axial tilt of the planet. SimOne, who’s driving the project?”
“There are many leaders on the project.”
“How are they coordinating with each other?”
There was a pause. Startled, Jem glanced at the android. SimOne always had answers for everything. Finally, SimOne said softly, a puzzled lilt in her soft voice. “They talk to each other.”
Kir swallowed a snort of laughter. “No, what I meant was—”
“What were you expecting, Kir?” Jem interjected. “Hand signals? Smoke signals? Messenger pigeons? Or electronic mail, perhaps?”
He laughed aloud. “All right, but I think we’ve just stumbled on a way to scatter them.”
“Which is?” Jem asked.
“What happens if someone doesn’t understand what you’re saying?”
“You fire them.”
Kir rolled his eyes at her. “No, seriously. We scramble their language. If they can’t communicate, they can’t build. If they can’t build, they may move away from each other.”
Jem considered it briefly and then shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”
“All right.” Kir inhaled deeply. “We’ll need to do this carefully. SimOne, propose a restructuring of the population along familial lines. However, I want you to ensure there’s enough diversity in each new cluster to avoid inbreeding issues.”
“Developing restructuring proposal…Proposal complete.”
Jem and Kir studied the information that flowed across the astral screen. Jem could not make any sense of it, but Kir nodded several times as he scanned down the document. “That works, SimOne. Execute.”
“Executing.”
“You made it seem easy,” Jem said.
“It’s just like restructuring…reorganizing a business. There are logical structures—departments, functions, corporate centers, stuff like that. The trick is knowing where to draw the lines and how to tie them all together. Once you figure that out, the rest is easy. It’s not quite like rocket science, or designing a human being from scratch.”
“It’s working,” Jem said. Together, they watched the cluster of black disperse. Like a river overflowing its banks, the trickle swelled into a flood, spread
ing across the surface of the planet along seemingly preset lines. “Like ants at a picnic.”
Kir nodded. “They’re following the water. They’re mapping the path of major rivers and their smaller tributaries. They don’t have the technology to move away from large water sources just yet.”
“One day they will.”
“Yes, one day,” Kir agreed. “Meanwhile, crisis averted.”
“We need at least one a day.”
“Got to stay in practice. Keeps us feeling useful,” Kir said. “Oh, SimOne, we wanted to ask you about the big boat that the humans built yesterday. Someone must have told them to build it. We need you to figure out who.”
“The central command system has no record of any such order,” SimOne said.
“Precisely. Something or someone is circumventing the central command system.”
“It is impossible to circumvent the central command system,” the android said.
“Suspend disbelief for a second, SimOne—”
“It is impossible to suspend what one does not have, and your second is over.”
Kir chuckled. “Just imagine with me, what if something did circumvent the central command system? What would it mean for the simulation?”
“If the rules of the universe are circumvented, there will be total chaos.”
Kir nodded. “Precisely. That’s why we need to track it down.”
“Professor Ptera must be informed,” SimOne said.
“At this point, we have nothing more than a hunch that something’s not quite right. Until you find evidence that leads somewhere, there’s nothing to tell him,” Kir said. “Can you do it, SimOne?”
“I can do anything.”
Jem chuckled softly. “She said that with far more certainty than I’ve ever been able to muster in any situation.”
Kir laughed. “All right, SimOne. Go find this anomaly in the universe.”
The anomaly in the universe was the last thing on Jem’s mind as she raced into the simulation laboratory two days later. She ducked under the rings of the second gas giant, maneuvered her way through the asteroid belt, and skidded to a stop in time to avoid a collision with the red planet. Damn it. She knew better. They could not risk any physical accidents around the planets.
