It's My Party

"Hmmm?"

"No words, just do it. These plants are dangerous. Get off the cobblestones. Now, as quietly as you can."

Mark turned slowly and walked across the stones, walking carefully over the bumpy surfaces. As he got back to the sand, he asked in a quiet voice, "Aggie, what's up?"

"Wicked curved thorns along the vines Mark, like needles."

"Yeah, I saw them. I have good boots on."

"I saw the vines twitch."

"What? You mean from the wind?"

"No. It looked much more organized than that. Several vines twitched, just when I sneezed. It was exactly as if they heard me, moving slightly towards my sound. Then other vines in contact with the first ones reacted to the motion, jerking and wiggling from the disturbance."

Mark turned and stared at the greenery. "You think the ivy can hear us? This is a plant, right?"

Aggie whispered, "Maybe not just a plant. I'm telling you, I saw the vines move and wiggle. My impression was that of lots of green garden snakes with thorns, or cats with retractable claws. They wiggled! The motions had purpose! It was… scary."

Jada stared at the lush foliage. "I could throw my water bottle in, see what happens."

Emily frowned. "I'm strongly inclined not to do anything."

"Me too," added Aggie. She shivered, and it was not from the cold. "Seriously. We do not want to cause a disturbance here."

Meanwhile Jada had turned to her college roommate and locked eyes and thought, "My dear friend, you've learned caution at last!"

Emily mouth formed a thin smile as she thought back, "Some life lessons you just can't ignore." Then she hiccupped and broke the eye contact.

Mark was staring down the length at the long glass wall beyond the plants. He asked quietly, "Hex Hall is directly under this wall, isn't it?"

Emily turned away from Jada and looked at her map sketches and nodded, pointing to her left as she faced the southern wall. She answered quietly, "I think so. That way, about four hundred meters maybe." She pointed across the ivy. "That wall, I'm guessing it's a boundary between the surface areas of Red and Green Mall." She then stared east to the spot above where Hex Hall would be. "I don't see anything special. Do you want to hike down and take a look?"

Mark heard the worry in Emily's voice. She would follow him in obedience if he decided to explore further, but he could clearly hear her desire to go back. He glanced at his phone for the time. "No, I guess not. We should turn around. We'll barely make it back before dark." He locked eyes with their newest member and thought, "Sorry Aggie."

She nodded sadly and gave Mark a brief hug, acknowledging they would not find her lost group today.

The next morning.

Time: Thursday, January 10, 2019 10:30 AM

According to his calculations, sunrise today would occur in five minutes, but you could never tell it from the scene outside the glass walkways. Mark, Emily, Jada, and Aggie were standing at the southern vertex of their home above Red Mall, and the weather outside was frightful. The temperature had actually risen during the night, and the outside sensor Emily had activated was reading a temperature of +0.7C. There was also lots of precipitation, and it was cycling every ten minutes or so between freezing rain and big wet flakes. If they were back in Vermont, the precipitation would have been called a classic New England wintery mix.

"Is it my imagination, or is it colder in here than usual?" asked Jada was she stared into the predawn grayness. The opposite end of the soccer pitch was completely invisible.

Emily issued a voice command for the interface to report the corridor temperature, and then grinned at Jada. "I guess it's your imagination."

"The corridors are always 15C?" asked Aggie.

Emily shook her head. "The corridors are at a minimum of 15C in winter and a maximum of 20C in summer. They'll feel really pleasant in the summer heat."

"Ah, thanks," said Aggie. "Is that true for the buildings too?"

"No. Building temperature depends on whether the interface considers them occupied. Occupied buildings are kept in a range of 18C to 20C, towards the cool end at night. It's the same in the malls. Unoccupied buildings are kept at 10C year round, even in the summertime."

Aggie looked somewhat surprised. "Wow. So when we enter a building, the system will automatically heat it for us?"

"Well, sort of, not exactly. Just entering a building doesn't flag it as occupied. If we stayed for more than an hour though, or started making frequent trips to it, the complex would start to raise its temperature."

Mark was paying scant attention to this conversation. His mind was elsewhere, weighing the risks the group was taking yesterday and today, risks with the underground Mall, not the surface excursions. Today they would be spending a couple of hours checking out some nearby buildings that appeared to be warehouses. That seemed fairly low risk as long as they didn't get careless with their observations. Mark was more concerned with how aggressive the rest of the group seemed to be in locking down the malls below.

Two nights ago on Tuesday evening, the entire group had lobbied for a major excursion into White Mall, a combination exploration and lockdown maneuver identical to the procedure that had locked Green Mall. Mark finally capitulated on the issue when he realized that he was the only member of the group that saw this as a high risk activity

After the surface expedition returned about 1:30 PM yesterday, Mark and Aggie stayed at home while the other six team members explored the remaining length of White Mall without incident. It was now totally locked down with its terminal food store and elevator safely added to their inventory.

And today they had the same plans for Yellow Mall, or as Madison was fond of calling it, "Yellow Brick Road". The basis for their aggressiveness was the assumption that Yellow and White Malls belonged to Party #6 and #2 or Party #2 and #6, and thus belonged to women groups and were low risk to explore. Mark still felt queasy about making this assumption, but the time to press the issue was Tuesday evening, and he had let the matter pass. The question Mark was struggling with now was, what next?

Jada gave Mark a playful nudge. "What do you think? Time to get going?"

Mark returned her smile. "Probably as bright as it's going to get. Let's move out."

Ten hours later…

With Mark's assistance, Aggie had prepared a fine ethnic banquet for the team returning from Yellow Mall, delicious arpagyongy kremleves (cream of pearl barley soup), cucumber salad, sweet rolls, beef stroganoff, and amas retes (apple strudel) for dessert.

Mark allowed himself a small grin afterwards as they were sitting down for their nightly conference meeting. Perhaps the only thing wrong with the dinner was it seemed difficult to worry about anything now. Thoughts of a good night sleep seemed very enticing, especially if Jada would stop by for some affectionate cuddling time. Mark looked at her and smiled dreamily.

Jada squinted her eyebrows. "And what are you grinning at?"

Mark shrugged. "Oh, just enjoying life, I guess. Fabulous dinner Aggie."

Aggie cracked a bright smile at the compliment. "You did half the work. Ever think of going professional with your cooking skills Mark?"

Fatima called the meeting to order before Mark could reply. Mark and Jada gave a brief description of the progress of their noontime surface expedition from Red Mall. They had explored three hexagonal buildings less than a kilometer away. The nearest one was a cavernous indoor gym, with basketball and volleyball courts surrounded by a 400-meter indoor oval track running alongside the inside hexagonal perimeter. The other two buildings were warehouses, one filled with vast storage rooms of metal ingots, and another with an incredible collection of all types of hardwood stock. They also mapped what appeared to be another hexagonal fruit orchard four hexagons from their home. The trees seemed very unusual. They were all convinced they were not a species native to Earth.

Madison gave a brief summary of locking down Yellow Mall. Her team had found the spiral deserted and their work was without incident. They now had two surface complexes, four terminal food stores and elevators, and all six central sky bridges under their control. Four of the six spirals were completely locked down, as were the inner spiral halves of Blue Mall and Black Mall.

Mark went next and gave an update on his studies. "Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, I think I'm very close to getting managing control of the orbital telescope."

Ashley nodded. "Does that mean you'll be a Section Zero employee?"

"Well, not exactly. The interface and I, we have sort of a don't ask, don't tell policy going. If I ask it if I am a director, I think it would have to say no. But if I don't ask, it'll let me use the telescope as part of my training."

"But won't it get suspicious if you point it down to the planet?"

"Oh, there are no secrets. It knows my desires. I think it's trying to help me as much as it can, given the strange rules it's following. That's my guess anyway. It won't talk about what constraints it's working under."

The group moved on to the main topic for discussion, what would be the next work activity? Jada immediately pushed for a continuation of Mall lockdown and completion of the Blue and Black spirals. The other women quickly gave their approval. Mark found himself again being the only one objecting and found himself confronting Jada on the issue.

"Why are we taking this risk?"

Jada countered. "What do you mean? It's a greater risk to leave the Malls with open access."

"But these are not our spirals."

"Haven't we already decided that point when we talked about White and Yellow Malls?"

Mark took a deep breath. "Well, okay, but you know what I mean. Black or Blue Mall is probably the spiral belonging to the twenty fraternity brothers. I don't want do anything provocative, especially for our first contact with them."

The debate went back and forth for a half hour. Mark was so unhappy about the idea that Jada thought he would simply overrule them by decree and simply say no, but Mark was extremely reluctant to go down that path. As 9 PM neared, he and the rest of the team finally reached a compromise. Since there was too little light to do surface exploration now, Mark would go back to a 9 AM to 5 PM training schedule. And very early tomorrow morning, all eight of them would attempt to lock down a third of the remaining open space of Black Mall.

They would leave the Black Mall sky bridge stores with twenty-five sacks of locks in two side cars and bike outbound on the spiral to the 50.1 kilometer mark, dropping two sacks every kilometer and closing the doors behind them. If they found the Mall vacant, Mark and Emily would then bike back to the sky bridge with the two side cars while the other six team members leap-frogged the locking work as they returned. If all went according to plan, Mark would be home in time for his 9 AM lesson.

Chapter 21.


View of the Great Hexagon, 26 km on each side, showing locations of the six home-complex locations (Black Mall most northern, White Mall most southern, Yellow Mall to the far east, Blue Mall to the far west).


Plot of Red-Mall spiral showing location of Red-Mall home complex near the hub.

The next morning.

Time: Thursday, January 10, 2019 11:00 AM

Mark finally looked up from his terminal as his two-hour lesson ended. He shivered and then smiled at Emily who was standing beside him with a hand on his shoulder. "Wow," he whispered.

"Yeah…"

Mark frowned as he realized what time it was. "I'm surprised the group isn't back yet." He picked up his phone and was relieved when Jada answered. Mark asked her where she was.

"Ah, sorry. I guess we should have called in. We're about three hundred meters from the Black Mall sky bridge. Do you remember the store here called Matrix Security?"

"The one with the diving eagle as a logo? Yeah, vaguely. Why? Did you find something interesting?"

"I'll say. Wireless surveillance systems, thirty system units and a huge number of audio-visual sensors, maybe hundreds for each system unit. I've got some really interesting ideas on how we might use this."

"Sounds good. Are you about finished?"

"Uh, we're cleaning out the stock now, storing everything on the second floor of the deli next to the sky bridge. We should be finished in another ten minutes or so."

"Great. Jada, I have operational control of the orbiting telescope. Emily and I getting some fantastic shots of the southern hemisphere on the other side of the planet now. The images are incredible."

"My gosh. Bravo Mark!"

"And it gets even better. The telescope is in orbit 500 kilometers above the surface, has an orbital period of 95 minutes. In 56 minutes, it'll be almost directly overhead, just a few degrees to our south. The clouds have broken up, the sun is shining. We couldn't ask for a better setup, ultra-high resolution images of everything within fifty kilometers of here." Mark could hear several of the other team members whoop for joy as they heard him speak. Jada promised to hurry and then she closed the connection.

The group spent the next hour gasping and admiring the beauty of the planet, switching between real-time observations and the vast memory stores of the orbital platform. Their impression was of a lush world both similar and profoundly different than Earth. The data were showing them a world with a radius 1% less than Earth's and considerably more water. There was no frozen icecap at either pole, and the ocean coverage was 76% of the planet, compared to 71% for Earth.

Over 96% of the land area of the world was concentrated in eight isolated continents, three in the northern hemisphere, four in the south, and the largest continent, one incredible continent with the land mass slightly over thirty million square kilometers. It was a uniform 700 to 800 kilometers wide and completely circumnavigated the globe at the equator, dividing the world's two great oceans into separate bodies of water. One hundred percent of the world's equator was over land, high above sea level along the spine of a great equatorial mountain range. The mountains were often above 8000 meters, never quite as high as Mt. Everest on Earth but rivaling its height for tens of thousands of kilometers. The group decided to name the continent Africa.

The other seven continents were oriented in an unusually uniform east-west orientation, with shapes that varied from oval to cigar. The continent they were on was vast, the size of Russia on Earth and the largest continent in the northern hemisphere. They eagerly counted down the last minutes before they would get a detailed orbital view of their home.

"The global dominance of east-west orientation," Jada commented. "This is so different than Earth! What could make the tectonic forces align like this?"

Aggie shook her head in wonder. "To answer that would be a lifetime of study. Do you notice there are no deserts in Africa? The mountains must be drawing great quantities of moist air from both oceans. Look at all the rivers! The place must be a paradise!"

Ashley added as an afterthought. "Don't forget there was a nasty snake in paradise."

And then their home complex was displayed before them, the great labyrinth completely revealed by the low noontime sun. All speech stopped as they tried to absorb the implications of what they were seeing.

"Was all that recorded Mark?" Emily whispered at last.

"Oh yeah, wouldn't miss it," he mumbled back. Mark had also written some software to search for hexagons with a central circular stairwell connected by a linear building to a hexagonal vertex, and the code had overlaid six spots on the map before them with blinking red icons. "My gosh, no wonder we never found the other party locations. We've been looking in the wrong places!"

Five hours later.

Time: Thursday, January 10, 2019 5:03 PM

Mark wandered into the multimedia room after finishing his day's lesson with the interface. He saw Emily, Fatima, and Hannah working quietly with one of the best satellite images of their home complex projected on the huge TV screen. Emily was working on a new laptop she picked up at the Mall a week ago. She looked up and smiled as he walked over. "How was the rest of your class?"

"Oh, just fine. The orbital platform has very broad spectrum capabilities. I was learning how to use the spectrum analyzer. Solar UV is a small fraction of what it was on Earth. Sun screen lotion might be a thing of the past."

Emily smiled. "That's good. I never liked the stuff anyway."

Hannah looked at Mark curiously. "But we got what we want. Why are you still going through the motions of studying astronomy?"

Mark grinned. "Yeah, I know. It's a little difficult to explain. Somehow I'd be embarrassed if I were too flagrant about my ulterior motives. I know this sounds weird, but I think the interface trusts me, and I don't want to betray it. And besides, astronomy is fun! I'm enjoying my lessons immensely." Mark looked around the room. "Are the other folks upstairs?"

Emily shook her head. "I don't think so. They're setting up two surveillance systems at the sky bridges of Black and Blue Malls. Mark, take a look at this." She zoomed in on the TV display until a great hexagonal maze filled the screen. She began to summarize her analysis of their great enclosure.

"The sides of the hexagon are twenty-six kilometers each, a total of over 878 square kilometers of enclosed space. See the green along all the external edging, and again with the six interior partitions? I'm guessing they represent long stretches of the thorn plant, isolating the Parties from reaching each other on the surface. The Malls are our only way to make contact with each other."

Mark sighed. "So this really is a prison?"

"You think so?" ask Fatima. "My impression was one of giving the different Party groups some breathing time to get their bearings before they would have to interact with the other teams. I think having multiple teams like this increases the chances of our species survival immensely." She paused for a moment and then added, "Mark, how difficult would it be to make a hot air balloon and travel above the walls?"

Hannah turned and looked at Fatima. "We have lots of brisk winds here. Getting out might be easy within a year, but how would we get back? We'd be on our own, on a continent of an unknown planet with no idea of what the dangers were."

Fatima nodded. "I know. We're all urban dwellers. Defending ourselves against a wilderness, building our own shelters, growing our own food, none of us have the skill sets."

Emily brought the conversation back to the results of her work, typing in a command to highlight the six Party locations. Together the six points formed the shape of a great lopsided cross. There were four Parties connected by a line tilted eighteen degrees to the left of vertical on the top. The line also intersected the underground Hex Hall in the exact center of the great complex. Two more Parties were to the far east and west, on an orthogonal line that also intersected Hex Hall. Emily had been partially correct in her guess that there would be a super symmetry in the placement of the Parties, but it was not the symmetry she had been expecting.