The Darwin Elevator

by Jason M. Hough

Page 28

 

  “Going down with the ship, Mr. Platz?” a woman asked, walking with a group toward the nearby junction hall. They all smiled at the joke.

  “Oh, was there an alarm? I didn’t hear it,” he said. They laughed and he offered a sly grin as he waved them off. “Carry on. This is serious business. ”

  Before long he had the office to himself. The crew would be in the topside climber bay now, reviewing the process for activating the lifeboats and attaching them to the Elevator cord. Neil figured he had two hours of blissful quiet. More than enough time for what he intended to do.

  Inside his office, he closed and locked the door. He went to his safe and used a combination of thumbprint and numeric code to unlock it. When the heavy steel door swung open, Neil knelt down in front of a second safe, tucked inside. An antique, purely mechanical, as small as a shoe box. No complicated electronics to fail, no need for some computer expert to have maintenance access.

  He spun the dial from one side to the other, inputting the series of numbers. The combination hadn’t been used in more than twelve years, yet it came easily to him.

  A click as the lock disengaged. Neil closed his eyes and drew a lungful of air, then slowly released it. Indecision crept into his thoughts the instant he wrapped his fingers around the handle. After all, the contents had been secure all this time. No one but Neil knew the secret contained inside. Surely he could keep it, if only to honor the memory. Perhaps to study it, maybe even let the scientists have a look—

  No. He hardened his resolve. It must be destroyed, and today. He should just take the entire safe and push it out an airlock. Let the truth drift for eternity in the vast, freezing void for a million years.

  And yet his hand tilted, pulling the handle on the safe’s door. It opened.

  With a sigh, Neil reached inside and removed the only item within. A data cube, unmarked. Nothing outwardly special about it. He closed his fingers around the cool ceramic object.

  One last look, he thought. Then it’s the heart of the sun for you.

  He held the cube in both hands as he walked to the sensory theater. It felt like a dream, he thought, to walk through the empty station. The place felt cold—creepy, even—without its inhabitants bustling about. He half-expected to see a schoolboy ride by on a tricycle. Or twin girls in matching blue dresses, hands entwined around the hilt of a bloody knife.

  He chuckled. The laugh echoed in the empty hall and carried with it an immediate sense of guilt. The business at hand was nothing to joke about.

  Neil put his focus back on the cube. If there were any ghosts in this place, he held them in his hands.

  He stepped into the sensory theater and flipped the systems on. A semicircular red couch graced the center of the round room, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling screens, each capable of more resolution than the human eye could discern.

  The crew treasured this room, and the vast library of entertainments stored on the station’s array. New and old, from fully interactive sensory experiences in which the viewer could participate to the simple, passive, popcorn fare of centuries ago.

  Neil perched himself on the edge of the cushioned red seat and placed the data cube into a port atop a sleek black pedestal.

  The cube held only three recordings. Before Neil could entertain any more self-doubt, the system accessed the file and began automatic playback.

  Dread and wonder began to build in him. He kept one hand on the cube, ready to rip it from the machine, and watched the events unfold for the last time.

  An odd thing to see the world through a dead man’s eyes.

  The footage, from the tiny camera mounted on Sandeep Sharma’s helmet, presented the scene from his perspective. It infuriated Neil, watching, that he could see everything except the man’s face. No way to read the emotions there. No way to truly say goodbye, to say sorry. To see that hint of Tania in her father’s eyes.

  “If only you’d trusted me,” Neil whispered.

  The image showed the interior of a shuttle cockpit, crowded with gauges and colorful terminal screens. Sandeep sat at the controls, only his arms and the tops of his knees visible in the frame. He looked to his right, at a young Neil Platz in the navigator’s seat, suited up in similar astronaut gear.

  How I’ve aged, Neil thought. Forty-four years since that damned mission, and he felt every day of it. The weight of the world has all but killed me.

  A bob of the camera as Sandeep nodded. The younger Neil flashed an eager grin and a thumbs-up.

  The view returned to the cockpit and the forward-looking window. Still too far from the object for the camera to discern it, but Neil knew it was there. The idea of sitting through the event again, of watching Sandeep and his younger self see the object for the first time, the unchecked excitement in their faces and voices, disturbed him. He fast-forwarded the footage until they were right on top of the damned thing.

  Foreshadow, they would dub it later, when they understood its significance. A ridiculous name, and yet so perfectly apt. It was the first of the Builder’s ships, parked in orbit almost twenty-eight years before the Darwin Elevator arrived. Undetected by a population turned inward, a population apathetic to the overdue promises of science and bogged down by resurgent religions.

  The rest of the planet thought the Darwin Elevator to be a surprise arrival, the “first-contact” event for the history books. Some noted the absurd luck of the Platz family, owners of the land in Nightcliff and so many industries that would be key to the exploitation of the Elevator. Consumed with awe of the alien device, the populace largely ignored such questions, and in time those voices retreated to the lunatic fringe.

  Neil knew the truth. Sandeep did, too, until his demise. The only other person Neil ever told was his own father, the true business tycoon. The old man convinced the two young astronauts to keep the discovery secret, and together they began to shift Platz Enterprises toward taking full advantage of the finding.

  All because of that bloody room, Neil thought.

  He fast-forwarded again. Through the portion of the recording where Sandeep flew them past Foreshadow Station for the first time. A smooth black sphere tucked at the end of a mottled conical hull. Exotic materials, never understood. Neil sped through the hours of footage as they circled the object, until he reached the portion where their robotic probe touched the device. An accident, Sandeep’s excitement pushing the small vehicle too fast. And yet it started it all.

  Neil slowed the footage to normal speed. He heard his own excited voice as the door opened. Sandeep urged caution, but young Neil demanded they push forward.

  The probe drifted inside. Neil fast-forwarded again, to the part where he and Sandeep entered the station themselves, in space suits, to see it with their own eyes.

  Foreshadow. The cursed room at the heart of it.

  Six-sided, each “wall” nearly fifteen meters tall. Four were blank, then. Two had strange murals, vividly displayed as if painted with light, but not like a terminal screen. These had a physical nature to them. Neil felt he could reach right in and feel the things shown there.

  The first mural they recognized immediately. It depicted the station itself. Foreshadow.

  The next mural depicted something astonishing. Neil paused the video to study it again, for the last time.

  A simple image. Alien in style, yet unmistakable. Earth, at the bottom—a portion of it, at least: Northern Australia. Darwin.

  And jutting from that spit of land was a simple line, stretching all the way to the top of the mural, ending in a black oval.

  He listened with mild amusement as his younger self and Tania’s father debated what it meant. They would think, for the next twenty-seven years, that the message was for them to build the device. That the mural was some kind of blueprint. A space elevator, long the dream of space enthusiasts and science fiction writers, long the butt of jokes by engineers and physicists.


  They realized even then that such technology would take many, many decades to develop and deploy, and yet they would pursue the goal, the resources of Platz Industries at their disposal. The mural told them it could be done, and that was motivation enough.

  They were still frustratingly far from even starting construction when the alien Elevator arrived. Only then did they realize what the mural meant: a foreshadowing. A message to whoever discovered the six-sided chamber, announcing what was to come.

  Knowledge of the future, a bloody powerful thing to have. Enough to drive men insane.

  Neil and his father had sought to guard the knowledge with extreme prejudice. Sandeep would be pulled along with the plan, but never fully on board. He harbored the desire to tell the world. A desire that festered until it became something twisted.

  Stupid, stupid …

  Fast-forward. The exploration of the station sped by, until the recording ended.

  Another followed, taken thirty years later. Their return, a tough mission to arrange. It had been Sandeep’s idea. There were six panels, he’d pointed out, and only two with images. Perhaps with the Elevator’s arrival …

  He was right. Neil skimmed the footage until the part where he and Sandeep entered the mural chamber again.

  The third panel was lit. Neil still remembered the rush of excitement that coursed through his entire body upon seeing it. They held in their hands perhaps the most powerful thing any human ever had: foresight.

  Neil found he couldn’t pause the video here. He couldn’t stare at that cursed image any longer than necessary.

  Such a simple pictograph. So obvious now what it meant, so damned confusing back then. Neil sighed. If only they’d figured it out. So many lives could have been saved. Not all, no, but many. Millions.

  But they didn’t understand. The third mural, almost identical to the second, showed Earth at the bottom. Darwin, and the Elevator, but with a critical difference.

  A vague, ghostly column stretched the length of the cord. Iconic depictions of strange buildings crowded the ground within the column. Disks were spaced evenly along the cord itself, all the way to the top. All within the column.

  Nothing existed outside that ethereal shape. Only blackness.

  They’d thought it to be another guidance. Build a grand city around the Elevator. Build space stations. The rest of the planet didn’t matter now, so it had been left out of the picture.

  The version of Neil in this video, now past sixty, quipped how they were well along this path. Darwin had blossomed since the Elevator arrived, and it showed no signs of slowing. Platz Industries had already begun construction of a number of space stations, just like the mural showed.

  They would understand, shortly after SUBS began to sweep the planet. When they realized Darwin was safe, in an eight-kilometer circle that stretched to the top of the Elevator. A cylinder, with blackness outside. So goddamn obvious, after the fact.

  The mural had been a warning. Contain yourselves here, puny humans. A purge cometh.

  A tear rolled down Neil’s cheek and he wiped it away with an angry swipe. The end of the footage loomed like a sentencing. He knew he should stop there. Why suffer such torture again? Nothing good had ever come of it.

  One last look. So I never forget.

  The third video segment began, twelve years after the last. Just weeks after the SUBS outbreak. The footage began like the others, except this time the passenger seat was empty. Sandeep had taken the shuttle, alone. The beginning of his swan song.

  “Billions are dead because of your greed,” he’d raged earlier that day, over the radio. Neil, safe in Darwin, had listened in silence. “And still you want to go on! To keep the future for yourself! Can’t you see it is a curse? I will not go along, not anymore. The world, whatever’s left of it, will know the truth. Tania will know the truth!”

  Neil wondered, for the thousandth time, if he should have gone along on the mission. Maybe if he’d been there with him, in person, he could have talked sense into the man. But he’d asked Sandeep to make the trip to Foreshadow alone that time. There was too much chaos on the ground, too much to do.

  Faced with Sandeep’s threats, Neil did the only thing he could think to do. He’d sent the remote commands needed to shut down the tiny outpost station. The air processors stopped. The data feeds to ground died. Soon Sandeep would, too. Neil could claim a malfunction and that would be that.

  The footage rolled on, like a bullet train heading toward a ravine. Neil couldn’t bring himself to fast-forward now. He sank deep into the couch and watched.

  Sandeep took the only action he could: He went to the shuttle and powered it up. It would buy him air, and thus time. He sat there for a while before launching. He could have made a desperate run for the Elevator, to dock with one of the stations there.

  Alas, no. Sandeep had only one thing on his mind, and it wasn’t survival. Reason had long left him. He took the shuttle straight to Foreshadow, suited up, and began construction of his bomb.

  A simple device. Crude, yet ultimately effective. Compressed fuel canisters, a clever detonator made from parts yanked out of the shuttle’s cockpit. For the next hour Sandeep went back and forth, from the shuttle to the mural chamber, bringing the components and connecting them.

  And with maddening, deliberate care, he kept his gaze away from the fourth mural. Above all else, he didn’t want Neil to know what image displayed there.

  Neil had watched this part of the video a dozen times, frame by frame, trying to catch a glimpse. But only a tiny portion ever came into view, enough to know the fourth panel had indeed lit up, but nothing more.

  Finally ready, Sandeep rested. He sat for a while and stared at his makeshift explosive. Then, at the end, he removed a grease pen from his utility pack and wrote a note on the side of one fuel canister. He drew out the block letters with calm deliberation and then stared at it, making sure the video caught his words.

  I DO THIS TO END YOUR MADNESS, NOT MINE

  YOU HAVE THE BLOOD OF THE EARTH ON YOUR HANDS