How to Save the Planet 03

"And if Cybeline connects everything around the frame too tightly, how are we going to get it apart after? We can't leave it for someone to find, so do we need to get a saw, or some sledgehammers, or --"

"We'll be --" I began. Then I stopped. "Actually, that's good thinking."

Kate nodded, jotting a note down on her phone. "And then --"

"Oh my god," Evan said. "Kate, we can't plan for everything."

"But we have to plan for something!" She ran her hands over her face, and I realized there were bags under her eyes. "If we mess this up -- if we don't send out the message right, or if we miss picking it up, or anything, we're not going to get another chance."

I blinked. "We're not?"

She shook her head. "I talked with Cybeline. The monitoring station can tell us a lot, but it's not here as part of Cybeline's mission. Its job is to observe. It'll want to cooperate, or at least we hope it will, but every signal it sends out increases its chance of discovery. There's no way we'll convince it to keep sending messages back and forth, whether it tells us everything we want to know or not. We ask for help, and then we wait."

The front door opened. Lace walked in, composed as always, and stopped when she saw our faces. "Someone die?"

Evan looked up from pouring hot sauce over his food pile. "Kate's just telling us that if this weekend doesn't go perfectly, we're fucked."

Lace kicked off her shoes and tossed a couple notebooks into her bedroom. "Well, we knew that, right? We don't have time to go out to the wilderness every weekend, even if nobody ever noticed us doing it."

"So paranoid," Kate scoffed.

"I'm not sure you're paranoid enough," Lace said. Her expression was serious. "The stuff Cybeline knows, the stuff she can do... its like giving mortars and machine guns to Alexander the Great. Maybe worse. If the American government or any other finds out about her, they'll kill us all to get their hands on her."

"So don't tell anyone." Evan shrugged. "And she's not quite heavy artillery. Taking apart drills and telling us the world's going to end aren't the same as explosive shells."

Kate shook her head. "Lace is right. We've barely seen the start of what Cybeline can do, all on her own. And if she started sharing her scientific knowledge with tech companies, pharmaceutical labs, or weapons manufacturers..."

"Pharmaceuticals?" I raised an eyebrow. "Don't tell me alien drugs would work on people."

"Of course not," Kate said impatiently. "But there's drugs out there that need a dozen different steps to manufacture, and that's with a low yield and a ton of impurities. The shit Cybeline knows about physics and chemistry could cut that down to nothing. Hell, that's exactly the scale her nanotech works at."

"And they could do that stuff outside of a lab," Evan said quietly. "Make chemotherapy drugs inside a tumor. Lodge inside a diabetic's pancreas and make insulin."

I looked at him in surprise.

"The stuff I read at the library," he said with a crooked grin. "Sci-fi shit, you know."

"But possible," Kate said. She looked over at the flower. "Very possible."

"Which," Lace cut in smoothly, "is exactly my point. This is information that will change the world. Anyone with a scrap of ambition and half a brain in their heads who hears about it will want it, because then they get to decide how the world changes."

We sat for a moment and let her words sink in.

"Is there anywhere we can hide this thing?" I asked. "Or... can we get Cybeline to defend herself if someone comes looking?"

"I've been stashing her in my room," Kate said. "Whenever nobody's here, at least. In a box in the back of my closet."

"Let's work on something a little more secure," Lace said. "I'll talk to her, see what she can do."

"Tell me if you need help interpreting," Kate called, as Lace headed to the flower on the coffee table. She was still the best at framing things in a way that Cybeline could understand.

"Should we be worried?" I asked the others under my breath. "I mean, the government's not actually going to come for us, right?"

"They will or they won't," Evan said. He looked totally unconcerned. "I'll see you back at our place, okay? Meeting some people for a group project in a bit."

After he was gone, Kate sighed. "Lace is probably right," she admitted. "We're in serious danger if Cybeline becomes common knowledge. We just have to hope that... none of us let anything slip."

The pause was telling. I knew she had been about to mention Justine, to say that we had to hope she didn't tell anyone. I was grateful she hadn't.

"I hope Lace comes up with something," I said. "Maybe Cybeline can make some kind of taser trap, just in case."

"She could definitely be running some kind of surveillance," Kate mused. "Except she doesn't really know what to look for. And I'm not sure she'd do something like that on her own, anyway. I'm almost suspicious of how passive she is about all of this."

"All of what?"

She waved a hand vaguely. "Everything. We came up with the idea to call the monitoring station for more information. Lace came up with the idea to hide her somewhere better than the box in my closet. I even had to go hunting for all that information on where she came from and what she actually was supposed to be doing here."

Now Kate was looking into the living room, eyes narrowed slightly. "I wonder if it's a test? If we have to... I dunno, prove that we're worthy of her help? Maybe if we're careless, and somebody else finds out about her and takes her from us, it means that they're smarter or tougher, and deserve her help more."

"Kind of... Darwinian." I thought I saw what she meant. "She's not here for us, she's here to save humans in general. And if someone's smarter than we are and steals her, then they're the right people for her to be with. Their odds of survival are better."

"Yeah," Kate said. "Yeah, I wonder."

We watched from the kitchen as Lace picked the flower up and carried it over to the air duct. She looked over at me and Kate in the kitchen. "Do either of you have a screwdriver?"

I handed her my multitool. I'd actually never owned one before -- I had pocketknives growing up, but my dad was never exactly handy, and not much of a teacher even if he had been. I'd gotten the tool specifically for building the antenna frame.

After Lace got the vent cover off, she slid Cybeline inside. I raised my eyebrows -- not only was the vent a pretty obvious hiding place, I could actually see the lamp reflecting off Cybeline's screen. I was pretty sure the box in Kate's closet was a better hiding place than this.

Just before I could embarrass myself by speaking up, the metal flower twisted. The petals turned, lifted, and then the whole thing sank straight through the metal of the duct and disappeared.

"Hey," Kate said in alarm.

"Don't worry," Lace said. She waved at the TV, where Cybeline's avatar appeared. "Any problems?"

"None," Cybeline said. "I can still connect to this device, and there's plenty of space for me here."

"And you can get back out?"

In answer, the flower rose up through the vent. It was eerie, as if the metal was flowing like water around Cybeline's vessel. Solid objects weren't supposed to pass through each other like that.

"I can," she said unnecessarily.

Lace turned to us.

"Pretty good," I said.

"Better than the box," Kate agreed.

Lace nodded. "I just hope it's good enough."

- - - - -

"Kate," Lace said calmly, "tell me you checked the power requirements."

The shorter girl said nothing. She was red as a tomato.

"Tell me," Lace said, almost as calmly, "that we can run the communicator on the truck battery."

Kate shook her head with a little involuntary squeak.

"Then please," Lace continued, not really sounding very calm at all, "please tell me that Cybeline can be hooked into the driveshaft or something, because Kate, you have been telling me all week long that I didn't need to get a goddamn generator."

Kate's silence spoke volumes.

"Can we pick one up on the way out of town?" I asked.

"Do you know," Lace said, "I actually thought to check that about four days ago. The hardware store in Kearny is happy to rent generators, except they don't keep any in stock so you have to book ahead."

Kate winced.

"We'll buy it," Rosemary said. "It's fine, it doesn't matter."

"Couple hundred dollars more," Lace grumbled.

Rosemary nodded patiently.

"We'll have to get gas too."

"Then we better get going," I said. Lace glared at me. I didn't sound as patient as Rosemary.

But things continued to go wrong. The Kearny hardware store did have generators for sale, but the only ones in stock were either smaller than what Kate said we needed, or so large that we couldn't have fit them in the truck. We considered getting a generator somewhere else, but we'd deliberately chosen our route to be far from any large towns. There was one place on our route with a hardware store, a town called Buffalo, but Evan called and discovered that they didn't carry generators at all.

So Rosemary added a trailer to her list of purchases, and we loaded up a truly impressive generator that filled the thing almost side-to-side. She was starting to look worried as the money added up, and I swear I heard her mutter something about 'Korean parents.' She couldn't have been worried about going broke on generator payments, but might very well reach the kinds of sums that her parents would notice. And if they looked at the card payment and found 'generator, stadium-size' on the statement, they would certainly have some questions.

The trailer was a problem. We were already behind schedule from our shopping trip, but the trailer was going to limit our pace even more. The truck might or might not have been able to get up to speed even with the extra weight, but none of us were interested in bouncing the very expensive generator right off the trailer bed. Rosemary laid it all out for us while we filled the gas cans for the generator, and ended with the important point of it all: we would be arriving well after dark.

We were all quiet while we finished up. Finally, it was Lace who asked, resigned, if any of us had tents.

Rosemary, unsurprisingly, and Evan, quite surprisingly, said they did. Evan's tent was news to me, despite sharing an apartment, but we all agreed to split up, grab supplies, and head out as soon as we could.

Maybe we could have gone the next day, leaving earlier without classes to interfere. But we were all worried about giving ourselves as much time as possible in case the observer didn't respond right away. We couldn't leave up the antenna, but we also couldn't take it down until the reply came. We wanted to get it up soon.

As it turned out, I didn't know about Evan's tent because it wasn't, in fact, his tent. It actually belonged to our other roommate, Dave, but he was happy to honor his promise to let Evan borrow it 'whenever, man.' I was pretty sure he'd never so much as opened it, so I doubted it was much of a sacrifice.

"Hey," Evan said as we drove. "What do you think is next? After... all this?"

I shrugged. "I dunno, man. I don't even know what this thing is gonna tell us."

"I'm pretty sure it's climate change," Kate said from the backseat. She and Rosemary hadn't made a big deal out of riding separately, but there'd been a certain tension around it all. "No simple fix for that, which tracks with what Cybeline was saying about her mission."

"I dunno," I said, frowning. "It's happening so slow, would it really be as big a threat as she says?"

"Sure," Kate said. "I mean, it's gonna make every other tension in the world worse, water more scarce, farmland unusable... weather's gonna get more intense, coastal areas will flood, and people are going to start fighting over the resources that aren't affected. And it's all happening quicker than we think."

We all rode in silence for a while.

"Why would she even come here, just to tell us that?" I asked. "I mean, the whole world goes extinct, civilization collapses, and we, what? Use her nanobots to dig out a vault to hide in?"

"No thanks," Evan said, making a face. "I've lived with Alex for more than a year now. If I have to hide in a bunker with him for the rest of my life, I'll just walk into the ocean."

"Same here," I retorted. "If I have to deal with your piles of dirty laundry --"

"-- your terrible cooking --"

"-- hours in the bathroom --"

"Oh my god," Kate said, holding her head, "shut up already."

I grinned. "I'm coming around to Evan on this one," I said. "You can't take the end of the world too seriously. It just encourages it."

"Thank you," he said, accepting the praise with a dignified nod.

Kate rolled her eyes. "Whatever you say. But... Cybeline could still be wrong. I mean, some of the things she might be able to teach us... we could do a lot to slow down global warming. Climate scientists still think it's fixable now, even without a little alien helping hand. She might help us crack fusion power, and nanotech is a great path towards cheaper biofuels."

"I'll take your word for it," Evan said.

"But that's, like, half the problem," Kate said. "Just those two things, and we're almost out of it."

"If we get the rest of the world on board," I noted.

She sighed. "Yeah. That's an issue."

We drove and I thought. I couldn't decide if it was worth hoping for a magic bullet or not. Even if Cybeline said it was all climate change, wasn't that enough? What could we do, go to some massive tech company and sell them a patent for a fusion reactor? Bring some billionaire into the circle, tell him about nanobots and let him have at it?

Somehow, I was pretty sure that either of those answers would end with us edged out of the process and Cybeline taken away -- by whatever means were needed. It was too much power. Too much knowledge. And I couldn't think of anyone I would trust to be totally selfless with it. Including myself.

"Hey," I began. I didn't know how I would bring up those concerns. How do you say, 'guys, what if having access to incredible power just turns me into an asshole' without sounding like you've started measuring the rugs for your Bond-villain lair? Or even worse, seeming like you're a melodramatic up-your-own-ass dipshit?

Thankfully, I was saved from my own angst.

"Is that the turn?" Evan asked. I closed my own mouth and looked.

"Yeah," Kate said. "Off behind that ridgeline there. Lace says there's a hollow that can't be seen from the road."

"Okay," Evan said, "but this car's not going up and over. Is there a way around?"

I looked at my phone, wondering if I should call Lace and ask. Unfortunately, I had no bars.

"-- to the right?" Kate was asking.

"Lotta rocks," Evan said. "Wasn't this supposed to be flat? I guess I could get out and see..."

"There's Lace," I pointed. She was standing up along the ridgeline, waving. It was further off than it looked, there against the open Wyoming sky. Little bushes and tufts of grass had shoved up through the ground below it, where water might collect in a rainstorm, but the ridge itself was a long line of bare red rock, a heavy shelf that had slipped sideways under some old continental shift. It jutted up at us edge-on, and in the dimming light it looked like an enormous trapdoor being pushed up from beneath the skin of the earth.

I was glad we weren't going to try the antenna until tomorrow. I wasn't sure how it was going to go, and I'd rather have full daylight for it.

"Okay..." Evan said slowly. He eased the car off the shoulder and onto the hard dirt beyond. "It looks pretty good this way."

There was a bump as the car rolled over a rock. Or maybe a bush.

"Almost clear," he said nervously. The car creaked and shifted as it rocked over an uneven patch.

Evan put it in park.

"Pretty close to the road," I noted.

Evan looked at me. "You want to try?"

I shrugged. "Let's go see what it looks like out there."

Evan, somehow, had taken exactly the worst route over the most broken ground towards the stony ridge ahead. I pointed this out, with complete and unfailing politeness, and he suggested that I take my advice and shove it somewhere anatomically improbable.

"Guys," Kate said, "would someone just get the car headed over towards Lace so we can all go to sleep sometime tonight."

Evan tossed me the keys. "If you dent this thing..."

"...you'll never be able to tell," I said. "You know, under all the rust."

We piled back in. "There's like one spot of rust," he complained. "Nobody else even notices."

"Yes they do," said Kate.

We drove. It was slow going, but mostly flat. I was sure we would end up in a hidden ravine, and I was pretty sure Evan's shocks were about to shake themselves straight out of the car, but by the time it was too dark to go on I was into the shadow of the ridge. I almost stopped in the open, but in the edges of the headlights I spotted a flat space behind a boulder that would hide the car as neatly as you could hope.

"Better parking than we've got on campus," I said, killing the engine.

"That's not saying a lot." Evan was eyeing the looming rock formation. "Nothing's going to fall off that and total my car, is it?"

I shrugged.

"Probably not," Kate said. "Come on, help me with the food."

It was a surprisingly long walk from where we left Evan's car to the other side of the ridge. There was a notch with a path a little ways away, so we didn't have to circle the entire thing, but it wasn't just a line of rocks. This formation had some depth to it, and the other side had the kind of isolated feeling that's hard to find in many parts of the United States. The stars were coming out, and the milky way was a slash of distant white flame from one horizon to the other. The moon was low and waning, and as the last of the sunset bled away, the brighter stars seemed to grow to replace those other lights, shining out like beacons through the flatness of the night.

Evan lit the flashlight on his phone.

"Watch it," I complained, blinking away blinded tears.

"Point that away," Kate said, pushing his hand down.

"I can't see," Evan complained, but he lowered his arm. The path ahead of us was still lit up, and my night vision was entirely ruined, but at least the flashlight was out of my eyes.

"I was looking at the stars," I said.

"You're gonna trip over a rock if you keep it up." Evan kicked one out of the way, as a demonstration. "How could either of you see where you were going?"

"We were looking," Kate said. "Try it sometime."

"Look," Evan pointed. "There's a hole right there, in the middle of the path. There's no way you would have seen it --"

"Just leave it alone, guys." They were giving me a headache. "Look, someone's got a fire going."

"Someone?" Kate scoffed. "It's Lace and Rosemary ahead of us, and Rosemary couldn't start a fire if she had a box of matches in a paper factory. I think we can take a wild guess."

Evan grumbled something under his breath. I thought it sounded like 'sour grapes.'

"What's for dinner?" I asked, trying to keep their squabble from flaring up again. They normally got along just fine. I could only assume our day of disappointments was getting to them both.

"Just hot dogs," Kate said. "Chips and some pasta salad on the side. I've never tried cooking anything complicated on an open fire."

My stomach rumbled. "Bring stuff for s'mores after?"

She grinned, shadows dancing over her face in the light of Evan's phone. "Like there was any chance I wouldn't."

- - - - -

Dinner wasn't exactly fine dining, but it was still a welcome change from what we usually ate. None of us were standout cooks, and the dining center had gotten tedious about a week into my freshman year. The hot dogs were juicy, and the wood smoke made them taste much better than they should have. We ate quietly, relaxing after a long day. Evan and Kate were especially quiet, possibly embarrassed about their little squabble on the way in.