Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  The floor of the lobby was some kind of sound-rebounding glass tile and the airspace above was full of swirls and loops of dizzying suspended walkways. Luka spent almost his entire life aboard a floating mining rig and never once felt seasick until the first time he walked into City Hall and looked up.

  The space was moderately abustle with those who were gradually divorcing themselves from the physical world—those who somehow earned their keep without producing, building, transporting, or fixing anything. Layers of abstraction were being allowed to accumulate throughout the increasingly complex economy as fewer people called themselves miners, growers, and assemblers and instead carved out niches for themselves as things like advisers, arbitrators, consultants, and representatives. Luka believed he was witnessing the birth of a new class who, in order to sustain themselves, had to spend more time convincing the world that everything would fall apart without them than making sure that it didn’t. In fact, it was precisely their tendency to string together as much of the prevailing but ultimately vacuous jargon as possible—and their unquenchable propensity for lofty but nonsensical pontification—that earned City Hall the nickname of the Tower of Babel, or as Luka preferred to pronounce it, the Tower of Bullshit. Luka had yet to figure out how to fully respect someone who, at the end of the day, had nothing physical or tangible to show for his or her work, though he couldn’t deny that he was still somehow intimidated by them, and was surprised by how nervous he was now that he was about to present before a group of them. He was confused by this new and seemingly paradoxical social hierarchy wherein he believed he contributed more than anyone whose entire careers revolved principally around increasingly convoluted manifestations of futility, yet the mere act of them placing themselves above him still somehow made him feel small.

  In a self-contained environment that ran almost entirely off a single technical infrastructure with concepts such as identity, access, and permissions globally integrated, there was clearly no need for a human receptionist to greet and direct visitors, yet there she sat at the base of the nearest ascension spiral. Her blonde, pixie-cut hair had blue and purple highlights, and her neck was long and slender. Although she was stationed behind a polymeth surface, Luka could see that she was wearing a well-fitted cornflower-blue dress with a slight lustrous sheen.

  The girl greeted Luka with a smile and a cheerful “good morning” as he approached.

  “I’m Luka Mance,” Luka said. He looked up at the walkway above them and pressed his damp palms against the thighs of his slacks. “I have a meeting with the City Council this morning.”

  “Hi, Luka,” the woman said with unexpected familiarity. Luka looked at her again and realized that he knew her. It was more her voice that he recognized than her face. There was some association with Val. Coworkers, he decided. They once worked together at the Gardens. Leah? Lilly?

  “Allison,” the girl finally prompted.

  “I remember,” Luka said. “I just wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

  The girl shrugged her delicate shoulders. “I wanted to try something new,” she said. “Everything’s changing so fast now.”

  Luka nodded and affected what he hoped was a congenial smile. That was exactly why he was here. Change. But not the kind to which Allison referred.

  “I think I’m early,” Luka said. “Is there someplace I can wait?”

  “It’s OK,” the girl assured him. “They’re ready for you now.”

  Luka tried not to reveal his alarm. He was expecting some time to gather his thoughts; to go over his talking points one last time; to sit and breathe. To at least to find a restroom.

  “Where do I go?”

  “You’re going to the top floor, so you’ll need to take the elevator in the back of the lobby. When you step out, just follow the ramp down to the council chamber.”

  “I’m going to the council chamber?”

  “You are indeed,” Allison said. She raised an eyebrow and gave Luka a slightly skewed smile. “Must be an important meeting.”

  “Must be,” Luka said. “Thanks.”

  The electromagnetic guts of the lift were visible through its transparent material, though after ascending beyond the lobby, the car darkened as the shaft transitioned into less elaborate and more opaque materials. The ride was so smooth, and the deceleration so gradual, that the only sense of movement was visual.

  The doors opened and Luka stepped out onto a ramp that he could see spiraled down an entire level to the council chamber below. The floor was a dark iris purple, and in the center was a polymeth ring surrounded by a dozen or so chairs, only one of which was occupied. In the center of the ring was a hollow cylindrical drum—a giant petri dish—which looked to be filled with a black viscous liquid.

  Luka stood at the top of the ramp and looked down over the rail, trying to make sense of the fact that there was only a single councilperson below.

  “Luka,” the woman called up to him. “You’re early. Come on down.”

  As Luka descended, he was momentarily distracted from his consternation by the view through the glass wall. Although it was no more spectacular than the view one could get from any number of locations aboard the San Francisco—including Luka’s own transpartment—it was a new perspective for him, and therefore represented a moment of rare visual novelty.

  The woman was Khang Jung-soon, President of the City Council, and probably the most powerful and influential individual on the entire rig. As far as Luka knew, Khang had served in some official municipal capacity since the traditional nautical chain of command was replaced by democratically elected officials, and was now on her second of an as-of-yet undefined number of terms as president. She was a small woman either in her late fifties or early sixties with hair that presented as short because of the way she gathered it in the back and pinned it into an intricate and compact black nest. The smile with which she greeted Luka was impossibly sweet, and although Luka knew it was simply her own personal form of posturing, contrived or not, she genuinely seemed to radiate warmth.

  “Help yourself to something to drink,” she told him. She gestured toward the cart tucked beneath the ramp Luka had just finished descending. It held a coffee urn, stacks of disposable cups, and several sealed bulbs of water.

  Luka reached for a water and wondered whether it was cold because it was just put out, or if there was a refrigeration mechanism built into the cart somewhere. He thanked Khang and tried to hide his apprehension with a quick, thin smile.

  “Sit wherever you like,” the councilwoman said.

  Luka chose a position he judged was an appropriate distance, sat, and pulled himself in close to the table. He discovered that, rather than castors, the chair’s legs terminated in small metal disks that glided easily on the stiff weave of the carpet below. He looked around at the empty chairs around them.

  “I’m sorry the rest of the council couldn’t be here,” Khang said after an accurate read of his body language. “They had an urgent matter to attend to.”

  “More urgent than this?” Luka asked. He tried not to sound offended or accusatory, but he was pretty sure he came across as both.

  “I think it remains to be seen exactly what this is,” Khang replied, and Luka watched the meaning of her smile begin to transform. He guessed that it was likely not pure warmth that got the councilwoman to where she was. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

  “Right,” Luka said. He flipped the lever on the water bulb to unseal it and took a cautious sip. “You already know about the drill, right? The RMD?”

  “I do,” Khang said.

  “Do you know that we have orders for at least four other pieces of mining equipment to be packaged and delivered in almost the exact the same way?”

  “Yes,” Khang said. “We’ve already looked into that.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And what did you find out?”

  “We found out that there’s nothing to find out.”

&nbs
p; “Are they going to the Coronians?”

  Khang watched Luka for a moment, as though trying to decide whether she wanted to continue betting or fold. “No, they aren’t,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we’ve been assured.”

  “Assured by who?”

  “By people we trust.”

  “Then where’s all this stuff going if it’s not going into orbit?” Luka asked. “I’ve been doing this a long time and there’s definitely something unusual about these shipments.”

  “That’s not information I’m at liberty to reveal.”

  “Is that because it’s information you don’t actually have?”

  Khang’s expression reset itself. The smile was gone, and Luka now saw what it was intended to conceal. Khang may have been a compact woman, but she had a considerable determination and presence about her that bordered on unsettling.

  “Because,” Khang said, “it is of no concern to an assembly technician.”

  Luka accepted the condescension with a smile. “Then let me ask you something else,” he said. The nervousness was gone now, he realized, and replaced with a much more familiar sense of reckless provocation. “Do you know what our position is right now?”

  “I will not be interrogated by you, Luka,” Khang countered. Her tone was a tad softer—perhaps even a touch amused or detached—but Luka could tell it was also a tone with which meetings could easily be ended.

  “Fine,” Luka said. “Then I’ll just tell you. As of yesterday, we were right inside the Antarctic Circle. The reason we’re right inside the Antarctic Circle is because that’s where the Coronians want us. And the reason they want us here is because they have high-definition gravity, laser spectrographic, and radar maps all telling them where we’re most likely to find the kinds of resources they need, and if we’re all the way down here, what they need probably isn’t available anywhere else on the planet.”

  Khang squinted at Luka and let her head tilt back a degree. “I’m afraid I’m not quite following.”

  “Here’s what I think is happening,” Luka said. “The Coronians know that we’re about to run out of certain critical resources, so they’re getting ready to start doing their own mining.”

  Khang produced a patronizing smile. “That’s absurd,” she said. “The Coronians can’t survive Earth’s gravity. There’s no way they could do their own mining.”

  “Not on Earth,” Luka said. “They’re going to mine in space. And once they get good at it, they’re not going to need us anymore.”

  “Luka—”

  “And once the Coronians don’t need us anymore, that means no more power, no new assemblers, and no more trading. We’ll be completely on our own, which you know as well as I means we’re all as good as dead.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being just a tad dramatic?”

  “How?”

  “Because you’re talking about depleting an entire planet of resources. That’s just not realistic.”

  “Are you suggesting that the planet has infinite resources?”

  “Of course not, but—”

  “Then do you accept that one day, we will run out?”

  “one day, yes.”

  “When?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “If nobody knows, then why not now? Or more likely, in about ten years—which is how long we think it will take for the Coronians to completely replace all the medium they get from Earth with medium from asteroids.”

  As Khang regarded Luka, it occurred to him that he might have gone too far. He took another sip of water to counter his dry mouth and tried to hide the fact that he regretted not at least trying to employ a little more diplomacy. The whole thing was going pretty much exactly as Charlie predicted. But it was too late to turn back now, so Luka decided he might as well hold course and see where it eventually led.

  “I’d like to show you something, Luka,” Khang finally said. “But before I do, I need to know that you will keep it to yourself.”

  Luka was about to raise his water again, but stopped. There was a moment of hesitation before he agreed.

  “That means you tell absolutely no one,” Khang stipulated. “Not even your friend, Charlene.”

  For a moment, Luka wondered if the councilwoman was trying to intimidate him by proving how much she knew about his personal life, but then decided that his relationship with Charlie was common enough knowledge that even if she was, she was doing a pretty poor job of it. And he was far too curious at this point about what she had to show him to risk saying something that might jeopardize her confidence.

  “You have my word,” Luka assured her.

  “Good,” Khang said. She gestured with her head at the circular vat of black liquid inside the polymeth ring. “Do you know what that is?”

  “I’ve been wondering that since I got here.”

  “It’s ferrofluid. Dispersed nanoscale magnetic particles. Basically magnetic liquid inside of a discrete electromagnetic field generator. We use it to model construction projects.”

  Luka remembered hearing about ferromagnetic technologies, but he had never seen them. They were designed as alternatives to polyvid systems—opposing volumetric plates between which three-dimensional holographic images could be rendered. There was something about the physicality of technologies like ferrofluid that—even though they were more limited than holography in terms of expression—made them preferable in certain contexts. Instantaneously manipulating tangible matter also felt borderline magical to Luka—somehow even more miraculous than the far more advanced molecular assemblers he’d become largely desensitized to over the years.

  Khang activated the polymeth surface in front of her and began navigating. Luka watched carefully as the liquid began to vibrate—to seemingly quiver with electromagnetic anticipation. There were a few moments of what appeared to be measurement calibration as perfectly symmetrical stalagmites rose from the black surface, then receded into absolute placidity. Another moment of humming, and then the surface erupted. Luka was so startled that he jerked back and blinked, and by the time he refocused, he was looking at what appeared to be a perfect model of every above-deck structure on the San Francisco.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Khang said.

  Luka realized that what he wanted to say was far too blue-collar for present company, so he very consciously checked himself. “Very,” is all he managed.

  “Given how you spend your free time, I thought you might appreciate this.” There was another look from the councilwoman intended to either impress or intimidate him with what she knew. “What you’re looking at is, of course, the San Francisco as it exists today. Minus the dome, of course.”

  “And minus the other two thirds that are below deck.”

  Khang conceded with a quick and dismissive smile, then touched the polymeth surface again. Luka was ready, but this time the transformation was gradual. As additional fluid was added, the globe enclosing the Yerba Buena Gardens in the center morphed into a massive segmented tower—four towers, actually, overlapping to form a single, clover-like quatrefoil. It was by far the tallest structure in the city and it was clear to Luka just from the scale that the dome would probably have to be raised. The metamorphosis was so conspicuous that Luka almost missed the transformation of Paramount Tower. It had melted away into a flat and nondescript block—more of a tenement than a tower.

  “And this,” Khang said, “is the next phase.”

  There was no stopping it this time. “Holy shit,” Luka declared.

  “Eloquently put.”

  “What the hell are we supposed to eat without any agriculture?”

  “Good observation,” Khang said. “We are currently working out a deal with the Coronians that will enable us to take delivery of the first generation of atomic assemblers. Do you know what that means?”

  “What kind of a deal?”

  “That isn’t important. What’s important is that we will finally be able to turn
just about any kind of medium into any form of matter, including matter that is safe to consume. Do you have any idea what kind of an impact that will have on our lives? How much that will change our standard of living?”

  The model was gradually rotating, though Luka couldn’t tell if it was turning, or whether the entire model was transforming at a high enough frame rate that it just looked like it was turning. Either way, the new building in the center gave the distinct impression of being the axis around which everything else on the rig rotated.

  “What’s that new building?”

  “The Infinity,” Khang said. “The first mixed-use space on the San Francisco. Luxury flats and retail together in a single structure.”

  “Luxury,” Luka said. “As in big?”

  “Up to twenty times the size of a standard transpartment.”

  “And what happened to Paramount there?”

  “In order to balance out the weight of the new building, Paramount Tower will unfortunately need to be razed and rebuilt at approximately a third of its mass.”

  “Right,” Luka said. He nodded deliberately while he watched the model spin. “I wonder who gets to live where.”

  Khang gave Luka curious look. “People can live wherever they can afford, of course,” she said. “You know we have a free-market economy here. That certainly won’t change.”

  “A free-market economy where the people who make the rules also determine everyone’s compensation,” Luka amended, “including their own. It looks to me like you’re proposing a very tidy three-class system here: the poor live in Paramount, the middle class get Millennium, and the emerging elite get to live in luxury in The Infinity. And my guess is that the more important you are, the higher up your flat.”