Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  Ayla’s former residence of seventeen years was essentially an archipelago of geodesic domes connected by underground passages. The southernmost pod was designed to be the initial approach as it housed the loading dock as well as the system’s primary decontamination chamber and airlock. Very much in opposition to Omicron’s advice (which fell just short of insistence), Ayla stood fully suited and helmeted at the rail of the forward deck with a centrifugal pistol clipped to her thigh by its acceleration disk. Although Omicron made it clear that he preferred that they both remain below (his biggest fear was thermal-cloaked snipers), he stood beside her—likewise fully suited—holding a remote polymeth panel in both gloved hands, and with his rifle slung over his shoulder.

  The feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality that Ayla expected were conspicuously absent at first, and she realized that it was because she barely recognized her home from the outside. The first and only time she’d ever left Nanortalik was aboard the Hawk, and therefore the southern approach never had an opportunity to imprint itself upon her. Omicron maneuvered the vessel beneath the loading bay, which was a long, fully enclosed stone cove, blasted out and shaped with a hydraulic breaker, then reinforced with buttresses and arches of steel trusses. All the slips were empty and the main cargo bay doors were lowered, leaving only a few meters of empty dock. When Ayla was growing up, unless a ship was either inbound or outbound, the artificial cave was usually sealed and the main loading bay doors raised, creating a single massive open space where winches and cranes constantly loaded and unloaded cargo and freight. The environmental and water circulation systems had kept the area mostly free of contaminants so Nanortalik’s primary airlock—off to the side where the loading bay doors ended—was seldom used. The dock, as Ayla was accustomed to it, had always been indicative of vibrancy and commerce and purpose, but its current state made the entire pod system feel shuttered and abandoned. As deserted as the loading bay was, though, just being inside the dim and damp cavern proved to be catalyst enough, and Ayla began to sense the emotional charge that can only be induced by returning to the one place in the world that one forever thinks of as home.

  In the ensuing barrage of memories, there was no accounting for chronology. Suddenly there was the collective reverberant cacophony of children swinging from the loading bay winches; her mother’s clearly feigned calm when Ayla told her she’d gotten her first period; the smell of the detergent her father used every evening to remove grit and lubricant from his hands and from beneath his fingernails; the texture of the six stitches on the inside of her lip that she couldn’t stop feeling with her tongue after she ran into an air intake duct; the tiny pictures all the kids drew in the corners of their tattered silicon paper notebooks, which they flipped through to create primitive animations; the reaction of her mother and her entire Queen of Spades card group when Ayla and her best friend walked in after lopping each other’s hair off with the curved beaks of tin snips; the nests she used to build at the top of the warehouse shelving where she wrote stories by the faint green light of stolen glow sticks; the salty soy broth her mother brought her when she was in bed for three days with a urinary tract infection; the first time she boarded the magnificent vessel with the mysterious and regal moniker of Accipiter Hawk; and finally, the look on the crew’s faces—and especially the profound regret in Costa’s eyes—when they returned from investigating the unexplained radio silence, and the moment Ayla realized that almost everything she’d ever known was gone forever.

  Omicron was the first on the dock. His rifle was raised and he was trying to detect movement through the walls using the 3D radio reflection scope he’d attached. Ayla followed him down the gangplank, holding in each hand a suitcase-size inductive capacitor. By the time Omicron had traversed the length of the dock, he had a detailed model of the entire space beyond the bay doors. Not only was there no movement, but his acoustic and infrared sensors were coming up empty, as well.

  “I think we’re clear,” he said, though his tone indicated that he wasn’t sure he believed it.

  Ayla stood on the dock in front of the lowered bay doors. “The contact patches are this way,” she said.

  Omicron turned his rifle on Ayla. His finger was safely up along the receiver, above the trigger guard, and she knew that he was simply performing a sanity check. He wanted to make sure that something he knew was there appeared on his scope before he was willing to bet their lives that they were actually alone. After a moment, he seemed satisfied that his instruments were indeed working, and he lowered his weapon.

  Ayla moved the cases around to different locations on the dock. She loosened her grip on the handles and allowed them to magnetically align themselves with the contact patches embedded in the siliconcrete floor, then paused, watching for a reaction from the charging indicators, shaking her head when the displays remained dark. Initially she refused to believe that anyone could have found the stash, and even questioned the viability of her capacitors, but as she began to feel increasingly like a physician desperately looking for a heartbeat in a patient she already knew was dead, her entire perspective shifted. Maybe the equipment to detect such a substantial store of power really wasn’t all that complicated or unusual after all. The architects of Nanortalik, Ayla suddenly realized, probably got the idea for hidden capacitors from other pod systems, which meant there were almost certainly thousands of people who knew right where to look. Perhaps concealed current was among the very first things raiders and scavengers looked for when they came across an abandoned or insufficiently guarded outpost. Maybe the entire trip had been for nothing, Ayla thought, and her judgment had been skewed by an unconscious desire to see her home one last time.

  Ayla stopped moving the cases and looked up at Omicron.

  “Anything?” he asked. He was on the opposite side of the dock now, but his voice—resonating from the spheroidal polymeth of her helmet—made it sound as though he was standing right beside her.

  “I’m sorry,” Ayla said. “This was a stupid idea.”

  “It wasn’t stupid,” Omicron said. “It was the best shot we had.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was stupid and selfish and naive. What are we going to do now?”

  “Continue on to Svalbard,” Omicron said. “That’s all we can do.”

  “How are we going to get back to the San Francisco?”

  “We’ll worry about that when we have to.”

  Ayla looked down at the two handheld graphene power blocks—dark and cold and empty—then looked back up at Omicron. “Hold on,” she said. “Let’s go inside.”

  “Ayla,” Omicron began. Even from across the dock, she could see both caution and concern in the narrow slits of his eyes. “We already talked about this. You can’t think of this place as your home anymore. There’s nothing left for you in there.”

  “I’m not saying I want to take a tour,” Ayla snapped. She knew she was taking her disappointment and anger at herself out on him, but at that moment, she didn’t care. “Maybe there’s something in there we can salvage. Maybe we can find something worth enough caps to get us back to the San Francisco.”

  “You understand how unlikely that is, don’t you?” Omicron asked her. “If someone was able to find capacitors buried in a meter of siliconcrete, they’d easily find anything else of value. It’s even possible all the cabling has been ripped out of the walls. That might be why nobody’s here.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ayla said. She nodded past Omicron at the airlock behind him. The outer door was circular and set back into the wall next to the loading bay door about half a meter. The curved polymeth panel in front of it was dimmed, but clearly still powered.

  Omicron did not turn to look behind him and Ayla realized that he’d already made the same observation, probably long before she did. And then she realized that he was almost certainly hoping that she wouldn’t notice.

  “Come on,” Ayla said. “What do we have to lose? We’re already here. We might as well take a quick look around. Th
at thing will tell us if anyone’s coming. It’s worth the risk.”

  “The risk is our lives,” Omicron said, “and there’s almost certainly no reward. I’m not sure I agree.”

  Ayla watched the enormous Neo standing between herself and the airlock. She considered issuing him a direct order—even tried it out a couple of times in her head—but ultimately decided she couldn’t sell it. She knew that it was her own safety and wellbeing that Omicron was concerned with rather than his own, just as it had always been since the moment they met in the Maldives and just as she believed it always would be until, for reasons as inevitable as they were unknowable, it was finally time for them to part ways.

  “I’m the reason we came all the way up here,” Ayla finally said, “and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that we leave with something. Anything.” She set the capacitors down on the dock and drew her sidearm from its clasp on her thigh. “I’m going in there,” she told Omicron. “I’m not asking you to agree with me that it’s the smartest decision, and I’m not asking you to like it. But I am asking you to come with me.”

  Ayla hadn’t realized what a defensive posture Omicron had assumed until she noticed him relax. He turned and looked at the airlock behind him, then back at Ayla.

  “I’ll go on one condition,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You let me go first.”

  Ayla watched him for a moment, then smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said.

  The panel in front of the airlock detected their presence and the screen brightened. Omicron touched it and a massive disk-shaped door pivoted outward toward them, spilling a red warning glow from within. Omicron checked the integrity of the twin orange O-ring seals recessed in the edge of the door—seals that Ayla knew would expand into place as they inflated after the door closed—and, apparently satisfied that they hadn’t dry rotted, stepped into the chamber. Ayla followed, and after Omicron touched the panel inside, the door swung closed behind them with a metallic rasp and a final deep, resonant rumble. After a moment of stillness, there was the sound of the seals inflating and air exchanging while Omicron swung the rifle back and forth, trying to detect movement or heat signatures on the other side.

  The decontamination instruments were all housed inside the dull metallic walls, so the only features were ventilation openings and air fins. The red glow overhead transitioned to a rich indigo blue, and then the exchange of air stopped.

  “Still clear,” Omicron said. He crouched and placed the rifle gently on the grate at his feet, then unclipped his helmet and pulled it off. “I suggest we leave our suits here. If something goes wrong, we’re better off taking a few rads on our way out than trying to run in these things.”

  Ayla nodded. She secured her pistol, then reached back behind her neck and lifted her helmet latches, rotated the gasket ring, and lifted the dome up over her head. She set it down at her feet and started unthreading her gloves when she was suddenly aware of Omicron’s stillness.

  “Wait a second,” he said. He looked at Ayla for a moment, then made a sudden movement toward her helmet on the floor. “Don’t breathe!” he yelled.

  Ayla froze while Omicron got her helmet over her head again and rocked it into position. She was aware of him rotating the gasket ring, and she remembered him turning her roughly, then slapping the latches down. Whether or not he ever got as far as activating the helmet’s purge, Ayla never knew.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  SUPERUSER

  LUKA FREQUENTLY STARTED HIS workday from home. He liked having an entire wall of polymeth across which to spread his workspace while planning out his shift, and so long as he remembered not to accept any incoming two-way video requests, he liked that he could do it all in nothing but his underwear. There were certainly plenty of pixels available at the foundry, but there was also too much competition for large, uninterrupted swaths of display real estate in quiet, secluded corners. And this morning—as evidenced by the hacked and modified cupcake decorator on the kitchen counter, along with the yellow-tinged glass tube and eviscerated envelope—Luka was in neither the mood, nor the condition, for distractions.

  In his hand was a cup of sweetened and caffeinated soy porridge, prepared just thin enough that he could drink it without needing a spoon. It was his second cup, and though he was feeling jittery, the effects of the synthetically crystallized stimulant were not translating into anything like alertness or vigor. On mornings like these, Luka found he sometimes had to resort to the drastic measure of exercise in order to perk himself up enough to get through the day. A few invigorating laps through the swimming tubes at the Noe Valley Rec Center almost always made him feel somewhat less somber and lethargic, but if he was going to have time, he would need to have several tasks spooled up well in advance. After confirming that there were no urgent communications awaiting him, he brought up his own personal mash-up of the foundry’s general order queue and the assembly exchange board.

  There were any number of workspace shells available to San Francisco citizens, and new ones—generally forks or derivatives—being made available all the time. The rig’s information and computing architecture was entirely service-oriented, which meant that any piece of code, as long as it contained implementations of the right protocols, could interact with anything for which it could construct well-formed requests and, of course, provide valid credentials. How the input to those services was gathered, and how the resulting output was subsequently presented, was entirely up to the workspace program, and of no concern whatsoever to the underlying infrastructure.

  The workspace Luka used most often was an early version of something called DesignSpace. It was less of an operating system and more of a creative authoring environment, but rather than panels of drawing tools and editing options, the interface primarily supported the visual design of workflows across thousands of discoverable services, data providers, and remote sensors. Of course DesignSpace could execute the precompiled bundles of bytecode usually referred to as applications, but it was more common for its users to piece together their own interfaces and data visualizations, or to import and modify someone else’s.

  DesignSpace is what powered the sound track to Luka’s morning. Several months ago, he’d spent a moderately intoxicated evening connecting an archive crawling service to a service capable of audio recognition and analysis that he’d trained to identify downbeat ambient electronica (original compositions only—none of that algorithmically generated crap). A third service analyzed the waveforms, and still another harmonically overlapped the tracks, seamlessly stitching them together into an infinite stream. Whenever Luka’s “Fusion” workflow was running, all of his notifications were fed into yet another service that buffered them until they could be worked into the soundscape in a way that was just prominent enough to get his attention, but still subtle enough not to take him out of his zone.

  There were those who found DesignSpace daunting to use, and Luka had to admit that if he’d been presented with it as an adult rather than from the time he began his technician training shortly after arriving on the San Francisco, he might have given up on it, as well. Like the majority of those on the rig, he would have likely opted for a workspace predicated more on constraints than on flexibility, intent, and creative expression. Existing within such traditional operating environments was comforting to most people, allowing them to feel productive almost immediately, however whenever Luka was in them, he couldn’t help feeling like it was the computer using him rather than the other way around.

  In exchange for increased complexity, Luka and his peers had the ability to optimize workflows as they became more familiar with particular tasks; to connect workflows in novel and creative ways; to experiment and iterate; and to customize their experiences so that they personally resonated as opposed to being designed for users of the lowest common denominator. By no means was Luka a computer scientist—and in fact, he had very little interest in the mysterious binary universe th
at lay beyond the analog-digital barrier—but by virtue of having been encouraged to explore the versatility of technology at an early age rather than be hindered by its limitations, he was undeniably part of an elite but expanding demographic that was frequently referred to aboard the rig as the nontechnical superuser.

  Almost all of the visuals shared across the San Francisco’s computing infrastructure were multidimensional vectors (.mdv files), which meant they were comprised of equations and mathematical instructions that could be interpreted and rendered at any size, scale, rotation, and resolution. They could also contain an unlimited number of references to other .mdv files, which meant that they were essentially infinitely and seamlessly zoomable. It was theoretically possible, therefore, for Luka to bring up a schematic of something as large as the San Francisco itself, and not just zoom in on its individual structures, and then on the individual mechanisms housed within those structures, and then on the individual components housed within those mechanisms, but indeed continue gesturing and zooming either until his arms got tired, or he got lost in the relatively vast expanses of space between atoms. He supposed it was even possible to go subatomic, all the way down the current limits of humanity’s understanding of the quantum-scale universe, where he would probably eventually find the broken asset icons that indicated data was either missing or malformed.