Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  “No,” Cadie said. “Not without Arik.”

  “Cadie,” Cam said. He waited for her to turn and look at him, then gestured vaguely toward the laser projector on the ground. From the tone of his voice and from the way he was looking at her, Cadie already knew what he was going to say. Instantly her face contorted.

  “It’s not true,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Cam said. “Arik isn’t coming.”

  “You’re . . .” Cadie shook her head. She started to say something in protest—she wasn’t sure what—but she stopped. Some part of her knew that Cam was right. The ease with which the tears arose told her that she had actually known all along, but the thought of really losing her husband this time had allowed her to lie to herself—to get all the way out here without admitting that Arik was obviously far too sick to ever leave V1. If he had really intended to go with them, he would never have sent them off ahead, never made Cam promise to take care of her; never encoded a message for them in the laser projector. On some level, Cadie knew that when he was saying good-bye to her and the baby back in the dock, he was saying good-bye to them forever.

  She shook her head again. Tears fell from her cheeks, then ran down into her e-suit’s neck ring. “I’m going back,” she said.

  “Cadie,” Cam said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “There is,” Cadie insisted. She took a step back. “At least I can be with him. That’s something.”

  “This is what he wanted,” Cam told her.

  Cadie leaned forward and glared. “Well, it’s not what I want!” she screamed, then turned back toward V1.

  Cadie heard the girl’s voice in her helmet. “Don’t let her get away,” it said, and she knew that the girl was talking to the man with the rifle. “Do it.”

  When Cadie felt her helmet start to vibrate, she stopped. The device the man attached was just far enough away that she was able to bring it into focus, and suddenly there were plastic shavings twirling around a tiny diamond bit. When she turned back around, she could see that both Cam and Zaire were frantically trying to dislodge the devices from their faceplates, and she reached up, as well. The hardened tips of her gloves would not grip the cylinder, and when she heard a hiss, she thought the sound was her atmosphere escaping through the puncture. But then she had another thought of what the noise might be, though it never had the chance to fully form.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CALIBRATION CUBE

  THE ABILITY TO ASSEMBLE JUST about anything imaginable simply by arranging molecules with atomic precision in predefined patterns had a profound impact on the nature of crime. Like most business endeavors, crime was once a problem of logistics: manufacturing and distribution, supply and demand, profit and loss. But eventually, crime became as much a technical problem as anything else: a game of spoofing, cracking, and circumventing DRM.

  Although assembling narcotics was clearly a violation of the bylaws of the San Francisco—a nomadic, floating, hermetically sealed mining platform about the size of four square city blocks—Luka Mance did not consider himself a criminal. Rather, he’d managed to convince himself that any offenses he was committing were the direct results of defects in the system rather than within himself. Additionally, Luka refused to accept the label of “junkie.” He was just a simple assembly technician and part-time forklift operator whose neurotransmitters required a little more pharmacological stimulation than most, and who happened to be in a very good position to make that happen.

  The San Francisco was a Metropolis-class mining and refinery rig—one of several built decades ago, each christened in honor of a different long-forgotten cultural and economic mecca. Luka worked in the Mission Street Foundry: a multitiered metallic microlattice and silica-paned structure between Serramonte Boulevard and Mission Street situated along what was considered to be the starboard perimeter of the vessel. For the last month, he had spent his days working on a project that was a vehicle-cum-tool, the schematics for which were labeled “Roverized Mining Drill (RMD).” It was a squat, unmanned, treaded vehicle, the front of which was a menacing, toothed-and-clawed, cone-shaped drill bit at least as long as the rover itself, and almost twice as heavy.

  This afternoon, Luka was using a clean-room assembler to complete the last of the RMD’s integrated circuitry. But he had made one tiny modification—not to the schematics themselves since the files were protected in such a way that they could not be tampered with (at least not through any procedures he had access to), but to the low-level executable bytecode in the assembler’s memory. Through a binary code injection technique that Luka knew enough to exploit, but not nearly enough to understand or explain, he caused a thin layer of yellow dust to be assembled on top of the rover’s motherboard. Luka called this substance “curious yellow” due to the positively mystified expression he wore for the benefit of anyone who might be watching as he cracked open the receiver, removed the component, and performed an initial visual inspection. Whatever this bizarre and unforeseen contaminate was, his expression broadcasted, it must be carefully preserved for further investigation. He tapped the substance into an envelope, sealed it, slipped it into the front pocket of his microfiber coverall, deposited the clearly defective board into the pneumatic waste chute, and spooled up the assembler to have another go at the problem. When the second job yielded the expected result, Luka shrugged off the initial attempt as one of those unexplainable anomalies that would probably never be entirely eliminated from technology, and that usually went away after rebooting.

  In truth, the yellow substance was a synthetic opioid that was best introduced into the bloodstream through the capillaries in the nasal passage. Once it crossed the blood-brain barrier, it induced a period of euphoria lasting anywhere from four to six hours, and frequently resulted in extraordinarily vivid yet somehow still restful dreams. Although one might find oneself to be a tad bit constipated the next morning (and one’s urine to be a shocking intensity of neon yellow, which Luka felt also justified the substance’s name), the hangover was minimal. With enough water and synthetic caffeine, and maybe a few laps through the swimming tubes in the Noe Valley Rec Center, Luka found he could keep putting the days behind him and continue to function more or less normally.

  If he were ever to get caught assembling illicit substances, Luka figured he could always play the orphan card. Since he no longer had parents—and in fact usually claimed to not even remember ever having parents in order to avoid any discussion of them whatsoever—it was a semilegitimate defense, though clearly a disingenuous one since it had been a very long time since Luka thought of himself as parentless. Orphanhood was a temporary state, he believed. You got to be an orphan for a limited period of time—a decade, tops—but you didn’t get to be one forever. Just like adults whose elderly parents passed away sounded like insufferable twats when they declared themselves orphans, so too did adults who grew up without any parents at all. Luka’s personal universal prescription for good mental health was simple: just get over it.

  According to the San Francisco’s census records, Luka was twenty-nine years old. He was lithe and compact with Egyptian-blue eyes that were just light enough for the maze of circuitry and antennas embedded inside his inductive contact lenses to be faintly visible. His self-cropped hair was perpetually unstyled and started the day out blond, but was usually a dark bronze by the time he shed his anti-electrostatic microfiber coverall, hood, and mask in the evenings. His features were sharp—his nose a tad hawkish—and he sometimes shaved once a week on his day off, if he found himself in the mood.

  Luka packed the motherboard in a silica gel–lined carton and set it aside. Contrary to what most people believed, machines like the RMD were seldom assembled all at once; rather, it was far more common to assemble each individual component, then ship the collection off to customers, who inspected, calibrated, unit tested, and ultimately put the pieces together themselves. Although there was no technical reason why most machines couldn’t be
assembled in final form, building them modularly was far faster since the job could be parallelized—spread out across multiple assemblers, each one tuned for specific types of medium and output. Additionally, componentization simplified transportation, and ensured that parts could be easily replaced or upgraded. This particular job took the idea of modularity to an extreme as the purchase order mandated that the RMD was to be delivered in seventy-nine individual crates of roughly equal size and weight when—in Luka’s well-informed though seldom-sought opinion—it could have easily been done in forty, maybe forty-five. But Luka got paid the same whether he filled one standard carbon fiber shipping crate or one thousand, so he’d long since given up trying to save his customers time or money.

  The one universal exception to the economics and convenience of modularity was machines that were far too intricate and complex to exist as discrete components—most notably, the assemblers themselves. All but the first generation were assembled molecule by molecule by their predecessors in some new manifestation of synthetic, self-referential evolution that was somehow every bit as inevitable as it was spooky. But this particular form of mechanical procreation was not within everyone’s reach. There were various layers of authentication, activation, protection, validation, and verification that determined exactly who could assemble precisely what—the lowest-level and most robust of which prevented assemblers from assembling new assemblers without the godlike cryptographic consent of the creators themselves.

  The operative word in the term “molecular assembler” was “molecular.” They were not atomic assemblers—at least not yet. They did not work on the scale of protons and neutrons and electrons. They had no dominion over the realm of subatomic particles, and instead lived in blissful ignorance of the mysteries of the quantum universe. There was almost nothing a molecular assembler could not assemble, but it first had to be fed every element that the finished product would ever contain. Alloys and compounds and composites were perfectly within a molecular assembler’s power; the wizardry of alchemy was not.

  The polymethyl methacrylate (aka “polymeth”) panel mounted overhead at a forty-five-degree angle indicated that Luka’s assembler was due for calibration—not a surprise since that was the reason he’d chosen this particular station. Assembler stations that needed to be calibrated were like empty coffee urns in the kitchen: everyone pretended not to notice them so that they would end up someone else’s problem. But Luka actually looked for the blinking calibration icon as he reserved his assemblers for the day, and as a result, seldom had any issues with availability.

  To those not wearing inductive contact lenses, the assembler’s polymeth control panel would appear entirely blank. ICLs—colloquially referred to as “icicles”—contained optical decryption technology, which allowed one to see one’s own workspace (when it was called up) and whatever else one had sufficient permissions to access. They also contained decryption keys that were transmitted through the body’s bioelectromagnetic field and into any capacitive surface one attempted to interact with. Early versions of icicles were powered by transparent solar cells, but their capacitors proved too limited to hold much of a charge, so the newest generation was powered by omnipresent ambient radio waves broadcast throughout the rig. In addition to decrypting displays projected from polymeth surfaces, icicles could also produce their own limited interfaces sufficient for things like notifications or the current time. Layered arrays of photolithographic microlenses made words and simple images appear to float in space about half a meter away.

  Luka initiated the calibration routine, which consisted of assembling a solid block precisely one meter by one meter out of random amounts of hundreds of different materials fused together in a way that only a molecular assembler could. The block would be measured in all three dimensions, micron by micron, and every layer of medium would be independently spectroscopically verified. Should anything fall outside the assembler’s minuscule tolerances, the proper procedure was for the technician to run diagnostics and see if the machine could recalibrate itself. If so, the calibration verification routine was spooled up again and the process repeated until the test block was exactly what the computer was expecting. If the machine could not repair itself—or explain to Luka exactly how he should go about attempting the repair manually—it took itself off-line and a repair ticket was automatically generated, which meant that it had then become someone else’s problem. Luka once made the mistake of wondering how the calibration computer was itself calibrated, and subsequently asked just enough questions of the on-duty foreman to realize it was probably best to avoid such recursive quagmires lest they systematically unravel one’s confidence in every single piece of technology that kept every single person aboard the rig alive.

  By the time Luka returned from cataloging the motherboard, adding it to the manifest, and preparing the entire shipment to go out early the next morning, the calibration process was complete. The result was an extremely interesting and unique piece of material that could never have possibly existed before in this exact atomic configuration, and no matter how many billions of years the universe continued expanding or contracting or whatever it did or might decide to do next, would almost certainly never exist again.

  Assemblers were not in the business of disassembly, so calibration cubes were supposed to be tipped into waste chutes where they would eventually find their way down into the waters of whatever ocean they happened to be currently mining, but instead Luka used a pair of pneumatic pinchers and a portable lever to transfer his from the receiver to a two-wheeled, computerized, self-balancing hand truck he custom-assembled years ago specifically for this purpose. The first few times he left the foundry with a calibration cube in tow, he managed to turn every head between his assembly station and his flat at the opposite end of the rig. In fact, several coworkers scoured foundry regulations, certain Luka was guilty of some infraction or other. However, since calibration cubes were technically classified as manufacturing by-products, Luka’s boss determined that taking one home—while undeniably peculiar—could not be considered theft.

  Since Luka lived alone, his pet calibration cubes rapidly became known as “companion cubes” among his colleagues. But when everyone learned what he did with the material once he got it home, they no longer editorialized or leered. They did not even bother to make eye contact after he had passed by, and then shake their heads or roll their eyes. The idea of an artist—someone who used his own two hands in an attempt to express an abstract and subtle and penetrating idea—was so foreign to them that even ridicule did not sufficiently insulate them from this anomaly that somehow emerged among them. It was far easier and safer for everyone to simply pretend that he did not exist at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE HISTORY OF THE CORONIANS

  PART ONE: THE SUN

  BEFORE THE END OF THE Solar Age, it could fairly be said that the entire sum of human knowledge was accessible in one form or another throughout a decentralized global system of interconnected networks. As soon as data centers started going off-line, there were thousands of individual efforts—both private and state-sponsored—to capture, record, and store as much information as possible using eclectic collections of compression algorithms and highly durable physical media. Such compendiums were generically referred to simply as “archives,” and one or more copies usually found their way onto most local networks such as that which connected hundreds of thousands of nodes throughout Metropolis-class, deep-sea mining rigs like the San Francisco. For those destined for such vocations as assembly technician or water rat (deep-sea miner), regular desultory consumption of indiscriminate but loosely related material (aka “browsing”) constituted the majority of the education they received outside of their specific trades. It was also how Luka was able to piece together an approximation of the history of the Coronians: the first new species of human to emerge in over a hundred thousand years.

  The idea of evolutionary divergence applying to humans was not initially an
easy concept for Luka to grasp. Very few people even thought of themselves as animals, much less as a specific species of animal. At the time the Coronians were establishing themselves, it was no longer even commonly known that over the course of seven million years, at least nineteen species of human had probably existed—many of them occurring simultaneously—and that all but Homo sapiens eventually became extinct. Or that, at one time, there were fewer than ten thousand individual humans of reproductive age left on the entire planet, a fact that served as sobering evidence that evolution very nearly selected against precisely those characteristics held most dear—intelligence, ingenuity, forethought, and compassion—in favor of plain and simple physical robustness and ruthless individualism.

  The Coronians originally considered themselves a subspecies of modern humans and adopted the classification Homo sapiens solisus. However, the genus Homo was eventually called into question due to its literal meaning of “earthly being.” Since no true Coronian had ever been born on Earth—and in fact, almost certainly could not survive the crushing exertion of Earth’s gravity for more than just a few seconds—Coronian geneticists eventually reasoned that their existence merited an entirely new genus. The accepted taxonomic classification of all modern Coronians, therefore, became Caelestia sapiens—or, as the Coronians themselves translated it, “wise beings of the heavens.”

  To understand the emergence of an entirely new species of human, it helped to first understand two related factors. The first was the extent to which life on Earth had always been a competition for the energy from the sun; and the second was how nature almost always rewarded those who were able to find, fill, and hold specific and unique evolutionary niches.