Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  Nsonowa looked genuinely curious. “What makes you say that?”

  “The fact that it wouldn’t work on us.”

  “What would not work on us?”

  “Controlling us with technology. Enslaving us. Eventually we’d find a way around it, or we’d die trying. There’s a resignation in Theta that I’ve never seen in anyone strong and resourceful enough to survive in a place like this.”

  The man gave her a new kind of smile from his seemingly unending repertoire—the first one that was not all facade or formality or condescension. “I will tell you something, Ayla Novik,” the man said. “I am not a cruel man, just as I can see that you are not a cruel woman. I am not a slave trader, and you are not a slave owner.”

  “That’s a lovely sentiment,” Ayla said. “So then what are the two of us doing here?”

  “You are a frightened girl who must protect herself at any cost. And me—I am a scientist.”

  “So that’s how you justify what you do,” Ayla said. “What kind of scientist do you presume to be?”

  “I am one of only a few paleogeneticists left. In exchange for negotiating on behalf of the Coronians, they permit me to study their genetic miracles.” The man looked down at the table and used his finger to trace what she now knew was just an imitation of actual wood grain. “I am not always proud of what I do, Ayla Novik. But I am proud of what I have learned.”

  “And what is that?”

  There was a thunderous concussion above them as the hammer slung another cartridge into low-earth orbit. The sound wasn’t quite as loud as Ayla would have expected, as close as they were to the source, and she noticed that Nsonowa did not react in the slightest.

  “I once believed that humans were not a robust species—that we were simply lucky to have survived all the ice ages and the droughts and the plagues. There have only been nineteen species of humans in seven million years, and until the divergence of the Coronians, only one species has survived.” He looked from the table back up to Ayla. “But I now know that our near extinction was not because we are a delicate species, Ayla Novik. Indeed, it is quite the opposite. It is because there is only room for one species of human on the planet at a time. The answer to the mystery of why the Neanderthals were not successful, and why we were, is simply that they had the misfortune of coming into contact with us. The advantage we had over the Neanderthals was not strength, or superior intelligence, or more sophisticated social structures. It was not even our technology. Do you know what it was?”

  “What?”

  “It was simply that we were more willing to kill them than they were to kill us.”

  Ayla watched Nsonowa for a moment as she repeated the words in her head. “Is that why you think your Neos are safe?”

  “What I think is that we are more unsafe than they. You see, I have learned many things about Homo neanderthalensis, but in studying them, I have learned even more about us. I believe there is a gene within us that will always find expression across the greater species. It is the gene that whispers to us that, unlike every other species that ever existed, simply surviving is not enough. It is the gene that compelled us to spread to every continent on the planet, even before the technology existed for safe travel—before we even knew what was beyond the horizon; the gene that gave us the passion to first leave our home planet and explore other worlds; the gene that has given us inspiration and curiosity and innovation and all the great works of art.” He paused for a moment, and then his gaze intensified. “But it is also the same gene that has allowed us to slaughter countless other species, and even billions of our own. And it is the same gene that has finally brought us to the point of destroying almost everything we have ever built, and ever cared about, and ever loved. Do you know, Ayla Novik, what that gene is?”

  Ayla watched the man in silence for a moment, then shook her head.

  “The secret to the success of Homo sapiens,” the man told her as a grin spread beneath his wild eyes, “has always been incurable madness.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PARALLELIZATION

  THE ENTIRE THIRD DECK OF the San Francisco was devoted to transportation. Not the transportation of people, but of things. New shipments were lowered through the foundry’s massive freight platforms, then hauled by electric forklift or liftsuit to the foundations of their destinations, where they were lifted back up through the basement level to the surface, maneuvered into place, and finally installed. Conversely, disused goods were lowered to deck three, then hauled to the far northeast corner where they accumulated in a massive chamber directly beneath City Hall. Technically the chamber was a mechanism known as a floodable airlock, but it was usually referred to simply as the rig’s waterlock. When it was at (or frequently, quite a bit beyond) capacity, the deckmaster on duty called up to the bridge and scheduled a dump. Once the San Francisco had slowed to twenty knots or less, the chamber was sealed, flooded, and then its contents violently flushed. After being dispersed by currents, the San Francisco’s scrap, refuse, and waste eventually came to rest upon the place where it would spend the next several centuries decaying back into the elements from which it was originally assembled.

  Deck three was two stories tall and almost a hundred eleven thousand square meters. The lights were bright, and overhead the steel trusses, fire suppression system, and the air ducts were all painted white. The smell was predominantly synthetic rubber and hot electronics from the vehicles that were in almost constant operation throughout the day, but it was also the deck where you started to get just a hint of the acidic tinge of stagnant seawater. Deck three was connected to the deck above it (which was completely dedicated to utility conduits) and the deck below (where mining operations started) by hexagonal, synthetic graphite supports which were close enough together to provide incredible strength and rigidity, yet far enough apart to allow the passage of even the most sprawling pieces of industrial equipment.

  Although Luka was trained as an assembler, he was also certified on every class forklift and liftsuit on the rig, which meant—just to get away from the endless sterile rows of workstations where he spent most of his days—he frequently made his own deliveries. He had no interest in things like new boardroom furniture ordered by City Hall, or crates packed full of vapid and ephemeral novelties on their way to Union Square Mall, so those types of deliveries he left to the dispatchers. But an upgraded electrostatic scrubber for the Presidio, on the other hand, or a new low-impact hydromill for the rec center, or maybe even a replacement thirty-ton anchor winch was a different story. And absolutely anything that might bring him into contact with Charlie—perhaps the only friend Luka had left on the San Francisco, and hence, in his entire world—he was always quick to assign to himself.

  Although most shipments were lowered from the foundry to deck three only to resurface a block or so away, some shipments continued to descend. All of the San Francisco’s deep-sea mining operations were launched from tubes and lock-out trunks below deck four. There was even a pressurized moon pool—an airtight chamber with an opening in the hull where water was kept at floor level by constant atmospheric pressure—through which equipment could be lowered and raised. Luka had never worked at those depths before, but thanks to Charlie, he had a pretty good idea of what went on down there. There was an entire fleet of remotely operated and semiautonomous submersibles capable of extensive underwater excavation; dozens of miners in industrial, power-assisted atmospheric diving suits equipped with rebreathers, and with enough structural integrity to be perfectly at home at the bottom of the Mariana Trench; several hyperbaric chambers where water rats were constantly cycling through their saturation rotations; and an old marine research habitat known as Aquarius lashed to the hull, waiting to be sold, traded, scrapped, or eventually converted into some kind of submersible mining habitat. He knew that there were networks of hydraulic pumps that collect material from the polymetallic nodules usually found around both active and extinct hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, and filtering
chambers that separated valuable minerals from the silt known as tailings, which was pumped back down to the ocean floor, far enough away not to be sucked back up again. And Luka knew that once the ore had been sufficiently isolated, it was carried topside to the Market Street Refinery via transparent pneumatic conduits that ran through the centers of several of the graphite hexagonal supports around which he and the other dispatchers currently maneuvered their mighty machines.

  He parked beside the freight platform, dismounted, and approached the row of mechanical liftsuits. Mechs were preferable to forklifts as one descended farther into the bowels of the San Francisco and passages became increasingly narrow. Although operators usually couldn’t carry nearly as much—and therefore frequently had to make multiple trips—the suits were far more nimble and maneuverable. And, of course, far more fun.

  The first mechs on the San Francisco were clawed quadrupeds that were as comfortable moving sideways as they were back and forth, and therefore established the tradition of being named after various extinct species of crabs. Once the issues with weight distribution were solved with a new generation of gyroscopic sensors, all the quadrupeds were retired and replaced with more compact bipeds. While the current versions looked nothing like crustaceans, the naming convention remained.

  From smallest to largest, they were known as fiddlers, blues, and kings. Fiddlers were little more than powered exoskeletons that provided prehensile appendages designed to interlock with the standard carbon fiber crates most commonly used for the transportation of goods both on the San Francisco, and in most broker posts. In addition to claws designed for grasping rails, fiddlers could also accommodate lightweight interchangeable tools such as plasma torches, variable torque saws, and small pneumatic hammer drills.

  The most commonly employed mechs were the blues—so named because their surfaces were electrochemically blued like that of an old revolver, but with yellow-and-black-striped hazard accents. Blues provided about twenty-five times the lifting capability of a fiddler and accepted most of the same attachments in addition to a line of heavier tools like jackhammers, worm-drive diamond saws, and chain-driven trenchers.

  Kings were seldom used anymore since their size obviated most of the advantages of using a mech over a forklift (and forklifts were both far easier to operate and more forgiving of pilot error). They could lift fifty times that of a blue—some claimed up to a hundred, if you knew what you were doing—and were much more like full vehicles than suits. Pilots ascended to raised cockpits via three generously spaced rungs, and were subsequently entirely enclosed by titanium alloy and silica cages.

  Luka kicked the charging coupler out of the first blue in the line, swung up into the cockpit, and connected the harness across his chest. He picked up each of the mech’s feet in turn, took a few experimental steps forward, then performed several exploratory stretches and maneuvers designed to imprint this particular machine’s idiosyncrasies upon his muscles and brain. Although assemblers ensured that each component of a system was molecularly identical, Luka believed that there had probably never been a machine built that did not eventually develop its own distinct personality; quirks and charms that accumulated through the complex interplay of both use and disuse; a soul progressively imparted by everyone who ever operated it. Those who thought of machines as nothing but cold dead steel simply never learned how to imbue them with life; never felt the enthusiasm with which that force was accepted and absorbed and applied; never experienced the transcendence from simple tool to complex and integrated prosthetic.

  The claws of Luka’s blue mated with the rails of the first stack of crates and lifted them as easily as if they were all packed full of perfect vacuums. Luka stepped back and to his right until he was centered on the freight platform, then used the polymeth pad beneath his left thumb to instruct the lift to descend. There was the rotation of amber warning lights and the brief bray of the lift’s klaxon, and then the floor began to descend.

  Whenever Luka got this far down, he was always struck by how much of the San Francisco was unseen and unknown by so many of those who called her home—by the incremental devolution from a nanotechnological existence back to the age of mining and manufacturing. Although the entire rig was once a dark and gritty industrial city, deck one had become a gleaming metropolis beneath a perpetually bright white sky. Even utility deck two—with its neat lengths of bound optical fiber, warm bunches of power lines humming and buzzing through their thick gray insulation, postal tube exchange, sanitized aluminum airflow ducts, and methodical lengths of PVC—was clean and well organized with climate control, plenty of light, and comfortable access. But the farther down you went, the closer you got to the true heart of the city where there were hard hats, and cogs that glistened with lubricant, and tremendously powerful moving parts entirely indifferent to human limbs. Everything down here eventually corroded, no matter how resistant it was said to be, and by the time resources and priority trickled this far below sea level, there was never enough of anything.

  From deck four down, the lighting was generally poor, and the floors were metal grate panels that rang when struck with boot heels. Below the panels were series of grooves and channels that directed seawater to low spots where drains carried it down through the dark to giant black and bellowing bilge pumps whose float switches brought them roaring to life several times a day. After two Metropolis-class rigs sunk when flammable liquid somehow made its way down to the lowest point of the vessel where its fumes were ignited by a single stray spark from an electric pump, all submersible equipment was updated with brushless motors.

  The sight of Charlie standing beside the lift shaft struck Luka as immediately incongruous. Her hard hat was under her arm and her bleached-blonde hair was just long enough to point in every possible direction. She was tall and not particularly petite—a less secure girl might consider herself slightly overweight at Charlie’s size—but in perfect shapely proportion, which was evident even through her heavy one-piece engineering suit. Luka couldn’t remember her natural hair color, but her eyebrows were dark and her green eyes each carried a faint amber nebula beneath the floating circuitry of her contacts. When she looked up and saw Luka descending, she gave him her little-girl smile: perfectly pink gums, small white teeth, head slightly tilted, and bunched-up eyes. It was a look that induced in Luka an endorphin rush that he was every bit as addicted to as curious yellow.

  Charlie’s real name was Charlene. Charlene Abigail Talleyrand. Her parents—with whom she still shared a transpartment—not-so-subtly guided her toward a career as a school teacher at Mission Dolores, which is probably exactly how she ended up as a water rat named Charlie. Charlie’s adopted sister, Valencia—the one who was supposed to be a doctor running the entire Pacific Medical Center by the time she was twenty-five—became a grower at the Yerba Buena Gardens instead. For a short time, she was also Luka’s wife.

  Charlie radiated in a way that Luka knew almost everyone found infectious. Down here, she was an improbably perfect white bloom among ruins, and it certainly did not go unnoticed. one of the engine rooms was also on deck four and the engineers who ran it rarely missed an opportunity to accost Charlie whenever she was seen to be loitering. When the middle-aged man with the paunch and the goatee followed Charlie’s gaze up and saw Luka inside the metallic carapace of the blue, his expression changed from convivial to subtly menacing. It reverted as his eyes returned to Charlie, after which he abruptly excused himself with an inaudible parting utterance.

  As the lift halted, Charlie made a face at the giant stack of crates locked inside the blue’s claws.

  “What in the world did you bring me?” she asked Luka with a combination of curiosity and doubt.

  Luka put the liftsuit into powered standby and released his harness. “It’s your brand-new roverized mining drill,” he said as he swung down out of the cockpit. “Custom assembled by yours truly.”

  The landing was empty now except for them, so they came together in an easy and fami
liar embrace, Charlie’s hard hat pressed against the small of Luka’s back. Luka was only slightly taller than Charlie, and when they separated, Charlie took the opportunity to inspect Luka’s eyes.

  “You look tired,” she told him. “Have you been getting enough sleep?”

  Luka shrugged. “Enough.”

  “From the looks of it, barely,” Charlie said. “And something tells me you’ve been assembling more than just mining equipment.”

  “I didn’t come down here for a lecture,” Luka said. He gave her a thin smile, but his tone clearly signaled caution. “Where do you want these? Let’s get this done so we can get some lunch. I’m starving.”

  Charlie looked back at the stack of crates. “What did you say it was?”

  “An RMD. I have two and a half pallets upstairs. You guys seriously need to learn how to consolidate.”

  “An RMD? Are you sure we ordered it?”

  “Who else would order a drill?”

  “Did you check the manifest?”

  “No,” Luka said, “but there’s usually not much mining going on topside, is there?”

  “No,” Charlie admitted, “but there’s usually not much terrestrial mining going on down here. What would we do with a roverized anything? Is it even submersible?”

  “I don’t think so,” Luka said. “I guess I hadn’t thought of that. Can you check and see if you guys ordered it?”

  Charlie touched the polymeth terminal beside the lift and began navigating.

  “Look,” she said. She touched the corner of the surface to make it visible to Luka, as well. “This is everything we have on order. Two new ADSes, some diamond bits, polymer depth charges, pumps, filters, tanks. All the usual stuff. No RMD.”

  “Then who the hell ordered it?”

  “Don’t know,” Charlie said. “Why don’t you check your manifest like you probably should’ve done in the first place?”