DeLonge has inverted the bug once again and brings it down to rest on the wheel, where it lives up to its name by clinging to the surface via six electromagnetic feet.
For safety reasons, the maintenance hatches are not controlled by code but by manually operated dial-keys, carried as standard by limpet-bug inspection and maintenance crews. It’s so that if something goes wrong, a worker isn’t lost for the lack of a security clearance to open the nearest route back to safety.
Nikki can see their target. It is ten or twelve metres away. Landing spots are restricted by out-jutting attachments, such as aerials and dishes, and by banks of solar panels, but she is sure he could have narrowed the gap.
She double, triple, quadruple checks the tether that will be her only means of survival should she get deflected from the surface.
“Can’t you get any closer?” she asks. “I don’t see any obstacles.”
“Can’t land on top of a vent,” DeLonge replies. “If it’s obstructed, it will trigger a report, maybe even an alarm.”
“I don’t see any vent.”
“You have to know what you’re looking for.”
They need to go one at a time, so that neither of them is out there any longer than necessary, waiting for the other to clear the hatch entrance.
“I’ll go first,” Alice volunteers.
That mothering instinct gnaws Nikki again, but not enough to make her argue.
They have a final check of their comms, ensuring their lenses have an open channel to each other. Then Nikki watches Alice crawl down through the limpet-bug’s door, the safety line trailing after her as she grips one of the purpose-designed handholds, curved bumps in the otherwise smooth surface.
“It’s a bit like rock climbing,” DeLonge tells them. “Except it’s the absence of gravity that is the hazard. Instead of falling, the danger is floating off, exacerbated by the fact that the spin of the wheel is always repelling you, with the same force as it is drawing people in on the other side. Progress is by reaching the next handhold and pulling yourself along. Mostly you can reach the next one before you let go of the last, but not always.”
“And what do you do then?” Nikki asks.
Alice illustrates. She seems to instinctively know what she’s doing. She uses the spin to move, gently pushing off the surface a few centimetres and letting the wheel pass beneath her. Using this technique, she makes it to the hatch in a matter of seconds, skipping several handholds. She’s a quick study, that girl. Or maybe she already has this training in some neural database that she’s tapped into automatically.
Nah. Nikki still isn’t sold on Alice’s android hypothesis. It’s maybe down to the fact she doesn’t believe human technology has reached such an apex that it is possible to have created a machine that can be so consistently self-righteous and annoying.
Nikki won’t be trying any of that skipping-holds shit. She’s got the insurance of a line connecting her to the limpet-bug, but that only means her life is entrusted to the integrity of the cable, to the strength of the bolts attaching the anchor, to the metal in the thread around the bolts, to the material of the EVA suit where the tether is clipped on, and so on through a dozen other things that could fail.
She begins to crawl out of the bug, coaching herself as she grabs that first handle. It’s only a few metres, and it’s not a climb. She’s not hauling herself anywhere, fighting against her own weight. She can do this.
She reaches for the next hold and gets her fingers comfortably around it, grateful in this instance for the thinness of the suit. Memories of an indoor climbing wall in Santa Monica come rushing back. Same deal: always look at the rock face, never at anything else. She stretches to grab the next hold, then the next, taking it steady, but then sees that the one after is just too far. Why the blank space? Were they trying to save money on one tiny lump of metal?
There is no alternative: she will have to kick off, push clear and let the wheel pass beneath her as Alice did. She’s going to have to work up to it, though. Find her calm, centre herself, go to a happy place, whatever. Just one more second. Maybe two. Possibly twelve.
Up ahead she sees Alice’s head peek out of the hatch, looking back to check Nikki’s progress.
“Come on. Hurry up.”
“Fuck you.”
Nikki lets go and pushes off with her feet as gently as she can, eyes fixed on the hold she needs to zero. It is gliding smoothly towards her outstretched hand when something slams her from the side, spinning her out and away from the wheel.
It is a vent, a blast of escaping gas. She can see it now: one second it’s invisible, the next it’s lines of a grate, an ejecting plume of vapour.
She drifts outwards, the surface of the wheel passing beneath her. The hatch is three times the distance now, four times. Then she feels the jerk as the safety line runs out and the resultant motion tugs her back towards the wheel.
She flails for a handhold, misses in her panicky desperation. She’s hyperventilating, the sound of her own breathing claustrophobically loud inside the suit. She can hear something else too, a wheezing sound, and is terrified that it’s an escape of air, a tear in the material.
She realises it’s DeLonge laughing. This shit must happen all the time.
On the plus side, it appears she’s been flung around to within an arm’s length of another hatch.
“I’m gonna go in this way,” she tells Alice. “We’ll rendezvous on the inside.”
That may prove tricky, but it’s got to be easier than navigating all the way to the hatch Alice went down.
She fishes for the key and tries turning the dial. It doesn’t move, which prompts another moment of panic before she susses that she’s simply not tugging hard enough because she’s terrified she’ll break the goddamn thing. She gives it a solid wrench and within another few seconds she is inside with the hatch closed again behind her.
Nikki enjoys a moment of blessed relief at no longer being directly exposed to space, before having to deal with another kind of blackness. She would confess she had been picturing a well-lit vertical shaft that would take her all the way to topside, like she has seen in the shuttle bays. Should have known it wasn’t going to be so straightforward, or even straight upward. Instead she’s facing a complex journey through interlocking ducts and channels, all of it in the dark. All she’s got is a shitty little light on the suit, and this new lens isn’t tricked out for night vision.
As she worms her way around this 3D maze, she nixes the self-pity by contemplating how some poor bastard had to build everything she is climbing through, before they connected this to the next section and created a new seal. This was somebody’s job every day, only metres from instant death, working in an EVA suit for air and as protection against the cold. And he or she still probably made less for risking everything each day than some pen-pushing corporate suit-full-of-nothing who signed off on the purchasing order for the materials.
Because of constant changes of axis, Nikki has no idea how far she still has to go. Her arms are telling her she has done enough climbing, but there is still no indication whether she is nearing topside. Then she crawls into another channel and feels water running beneath her knees, maybe a centimetre deep. At the next perpendicular junction, she looks up and sees it tumble down the wall of the shaft opposite an integral ladder.
She ascends the ladder and hauls herself into a gently sloping sluice, further along which she can see water and light spilling down through a grate. Nikki crawls beneath it and looks up. She can see foliage. Greenery. Things she generally associates with the tops of buildings, in Seedee’s world of contradictions.
The grate lifts with a gentle push and she tentatively sticks her head up, knowing it could signal the end if she’s spotted. There are shrubs and bushes and ferns all around, grass underfoot. Real grass. She is in a garden: not an agricultural space, a garden.
Looking closer she can see that there is a wall screened off by a row of thickly planted bushes. It is to c
reate the illusion of the garden continuing, or at least of its borders being a dense arbour that might extend beyond the visible.
A pleasure garden at ground level, full gravity. An expanse given over to plant life, ground that might otherwise accommodate several storeys of exploitable space.
What would justify such an extravagance?
The air is suddenly pierced by a high-pitch squeal of laughter. It is both the most natural sound in the world and one that somehow does not belong on Seedee.
Crawling behind a row of ferns and peering cautiously through the branches, Nikki sees the answer.
Children.
WHEN SHE WAS BAD
Alice pulls the second hatch closed behind her, sealing the airlock. She has a detailed recall of how many safety regulations she was in contravention of whilst performing her brief traverse from the limpet-bug to the maintenance channel, and understands with statistical precision how many things could potentially have gone wrong: twenty-seven regarding the safety tether alone. And yet, what she is feeling now that it’s over is not relief but exhilaration. She’s not about to go and reprise the trip, but part of her is disappointed that it is complete.
It was a buzz. An adrenalin rush. Does she even have adrenalin? Or is it a synthesised adrenalin response? She doesn’t care. What matters is that she is feeling it.
She remembers so many times being told not to do dangerous things, the stifling tyranny of the risk-benefit equation, her mother quoting the statistics to put her off the college trends for base jumping and wingsuit dives. A rain-lashed weekend alone in a dorm looms large in her memory, poring over books while all her room-mates went on a trip to Colorado.
She even remembers being warned against attempting flying dismounts off the swing-set like she saw other kids executing with vocal alacrity.
It is possible none of these things truly happened, but it doesn’t matter. The memories feel real, and they had their effect. Implanted or not, they conditioned her to avoid risk and to obey the rules. All the rules. Maybe that’s adding to how exciting this feels. But maybe it constitutes an abuse, an implanted brake against exercising her desires, her curiosity.
Her free will.
She would never have imagined it, but she has become jealous of Nikki Freeman and the hedonistic abandon with which she conducts herself. Alice wouldn’t want to swap her life for Nikki’s, but she could certainly use a pinch more of her attitude, so as not to feel so constantly constricted by rules, regulations, recommended intake, safe levels, approved procedures, authorised access. Even being inside this access shaft feels exciting. It’s a secret space, a forbidden world: one of those places that would normally remain hidden to her, behind the doors that say Authorised Personnel Only, Strictly No Admittance.
It is dark, claustrophobic and thoroughly dangerous. Through her night-vision she can see hazards everywhere: ways to get trapped, burnt, frozen, electrocuted, crushed, asphyxiated and even drowned. There are very good reasons that the untrained and thus unauthorised shouldn’t be here. And that is why she is kind of getting off on it.
She isn’t merely accessing an unauthorised area, however: she is breaking into the highest-clearance facility on CdC. And this comes on top of stealing a space vehicle, after effectively jailbreaking the city’s most notorious ever criminal fugitive, an act which required the assault and false imprisonment of two ultra-high-ranking security personnel.
In practice the law is a little fuzzier up here than you maybe wrote about in some Ivy League college paper, Nikki said back at Klaws.
Before Alice left for Seedee, her colleagues joked about her becoming the new sheriff in town. Instead it has taken only a matter of days to make her an outlaw.
She is still tortured by the possibility that she may be an android, but even if that turns out to be so, these last few hours are the most human she has ever felt.
Alice emerges cautiously from the darkness of the access channel into the darkness of a closet that serves as an anteroom and storage space for the maintenance hatch. She steps daintily between shelves of equipment as she strips off the EVA suit and stashes it out of sight, then takes a few seconds to check her inventory. She makes sure that everything survived the journey intact, and in particular that the broken-down parts are the parts broken down by her for storage. Then finally she pats down her clothes after their confinement beneath the suit, before donning the single extra item that she predicts will transform her in the eyes of her enemies.
She emerges into a brightly lit corridor, lined with marketing posters for Neurosophy’s various mesh systems down the years, and framed images from surgical procedures. The graphic nature of the latter indicates that this area is accessible by clinical personnel only, and she soon encounters three women walking towards her, one in a lab coat and two in theatre scrubs.
Alice tenses with the rigidity of someone whose entire existence has been defined by the imagined consequences of being caught breaking the rules. This is the first moment that her clever plan could fall apart.
The women walk past. Even though she is identifying as Wendy Goodfellow, a vital-systems scientist at a firm on Wheel One, nobody challenges her, nobody looks at her twice. She remembers that the lack of crime on CdC, in conjunction with its advanced access technology, has a security downside in that nobody is suspicious. Everyone assumes that if you are inside someplace, then you are supposed to be there.
This may not be the case further in, however, when she closes in on the things Neurosophy doesn’t want even its own workers to see.
Up ahead is an open door marked Mesh Lab 3, from which Alice overhears conversation as she approaches.
“Standard cranial insertion,” says a woman’s voice. “Should take about two hours as it’s the Gen-4 mesh. Averages half the time I used to need for the Gen-3. But the subject is signed up for the full suite of initial uploads, so that part’s going to take me the rest of the day.”
When she draws near enough she can see two people in scrubs, one man and one woman, making preparations for surgery. Her lens identifies them as Dr. Florian Ringwald and Dr. Lisa Kaiser. Alice stops on the spot, listening to their conversation while the corridor is clear and nobody can see her eavesdropping.
“Least you have some surgery to make it interesting,” Ringwald replies. “I got a whole day of nothing but uploads. Six patients. Two for languages, three for technical data and one for map layout. Just wish they didn’t have to come in for this. Maybe you could propose that the next-gen mesh should let us do remote uploads.”
“And what, put us out of a job?” Kaiser scoffs. “Besides, nobody’s going to sign up for a mesh that allows that. I sure wouldn’t.”
They don’t know. They’ve been implanting the Gen-4 for over a year and they don’t know.
“No, I’ve heard the big development on the Gen-5 will be to do with the watermark effect,” Kaiser goes on. “The new mesh will be able to suppress some of the contradictory signals and impulses that cause the memory to be identified as non-native. Supposedly subjects will be able to turn this off if they want to experience a more emotional and authentic interaction with the implanted information.”
“But if a subject is consciously turning off the watermarking, that’s effectively a watermarking in itself, isn’t it?”
“You get the full benefit of the imported experience but you still know it’s not your memory. Sounds like a win-win to me.”
It sounds like a massive lose-lose to Alice. She is certain the Gen-5 will secretly allow watermarking to be remotely deactivated, just like the Gen-4 secretly allows itself to be remotely accessed. Thus non-native memories could be installed without the safeguards that normally make an individual aware of it. Conceivably, native memories could also be remotely deleted, allowing Neurosophy the power to edit and censor the memories of anyone with the Gen-5 mesh. In a few years, they would have complete control over the memories and therefore the world view, the perspective—the very personalities—of everyone on CdC.
Then they just have to wait for the technology to be finally approved and rolled out down below. It’s certainly no wonder they’re killing anyone who might have found out about this.
Alice has to find a way of making it public.
She hurries away from the Mesh Lab and turns a corner, where she comes face to face with someone who is looking at her twice: staring right at her, in fact.
It is the man from Central Plaza, the one who shot her. She only glimpsed him for a moment and from a distance, but as soon as she sees him she is sure. He is dressed identically to the two guards she shot: charcoal fatigues. He has the same athletic build, and his identity reads blank: clearance-protected.
His voice is quiet but forceful, a tone of controlled aggression that is unused to refusal.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
THE GIFTED ONES
They are mere toddlers, four of them. Nikki would put them at around two, maybe three, chasing each other aimlessly but joyfully around a square of lawn. There are two adult supervisors, a man and a woman, vigilantly ready to intervene but otherwise keeping their distance. When the woman turns, Nikki sees that she is cradling an infant in her arms.
This is a bigger secret than mind-control devices or Project Sentinel. Someone is raising children on CdC, which is as unethical as it is illegal to the extent that women are forced to abort pregnancies or fly back to Earth to give birth.
These are not mere visitors. This garden proves that. Someone wants young bones to develop properly, under standard gravity while playing outdoors and enjoying nature; or as close to nature and outdoors as you’re going to get here.
Nikki hasn’t seen children in the flesh in fifteen years. The sight of them is almost paralysing. She wants to get closer, wants to reach out and hold them but she has to stay hidden.
Her eyes mist, a rush of feelings and memories coming back, lying dormant but so close to the surface. The sluice-gates open on a flood of hurt she tried to escape, but there is not only pain: there are good things too. Things she once had but lost. Things she could not stand the loss of. Things that made her who she used to be.
Places in the Darkness Page 35
