It's My Party

Red and Green Malls, Parties #1 and #4, It's My Party and I Can See Clearly Now, were the two interior Parties on the tilted north-south axis. They were 2.06 straight-line kilometers and 6.46 spiral kilometers (the 828 degree mark) from Hex Hall. Party #1 was on the southernmost tip of the local revolution of its spiral, and Party #4 was on the northernmost tip of its spiral.

The Party locations for Black and White Malls were also situated on the northernmost and southernmost arcs of their spirals, but much further out. They were both at the 1248 degree mark of the 1260 degree spirals, 70.1 kilometers out along the 75.1 kilometer spiral and 21.3 kilometers in a straight-line distance from Hex Hall. They were very near the edge of the great complex, only 1.7 kilometers away from the great exterior hexagon walls with their terrifying guardian plants.

The areas around the home complexes of Black and White Malls were unusual in other ways too. The two homes were at the tips of two large diamond-shaped arrays of hexagons, the homes at one tip and the other at the inner barrier of the great perimeter wall. The diamond arrays were composed of forty-nine hexagons each, and were surrounded by more than two kilometers of open fields on three sides and the perimeter wall on the other.

The Party locations for Yellow and Blue Malls were at the maximum east and west directions of the last loops of their spirals, at the 1218 degree mark (59.3 spiral kilometers) and 18.0 straight-line kilometers from Hex Hall.

"This map has such high resolution," concluded Emily, "that we know exactly which store to search for in each spiral. All we have to do is count the distance. You can tell from the exact placements of the six stairwells. Red, Black, and Blue Malls are entered on the inside arc, and the other three Party Malls on the outside arc. The images line up perfectly with the geometry."

"Emily," prodded Hannah, "tell him about the end stores."

"Oh yeah. This is interesting. Assuming all the spirals are identical, the six terminal stores are all outside the complex perimeter walls. The end of the Red Mall corridor is 22.793 kilometers due east of Hex Hall, 276 meters east of the eastern wall of the primary hexagon."

Mark nodded in silence and stared for a long moment at the image. "Hilly forest, can't say I can see anything in particular at the site."

Emily sighed. "Yeah. It is an intriguing possibility, thinking we could tunnel up sixteen meters from one of the terminal stores and leave this place. Somehow though, I think getting through the store ceiling will be very difficult. The building materials here are incredibly tough."

Mark shrugged. "Right now I don't see leaving as a high priority." He sat down and helped with the image processing until the rest of the team returned for dinner.

Time: Friday morning, January 11, 2019

Today was the first day they tried to think of Friday as the first day of the week, and also the day set aside for rest and reflection and prayer. The interface had accepted without complaint Mark's request to skip his lessons on Fridays. And so the whole group had met after their morning showers but before their usual breakfast time, in a meeting Fatima suggested they call The Hour of Common Prayer. Somehow the name seemed to fit, even though people were mostly discussing their hopes and fears rather than formally praying. They all agreed they got a lot out of the meeting and decided to try it again next Friday.

But the urge to explore could not be denied, and after breakfast they quickly got their bikes from Blazo's Art Gallery and then jumped again to the terminal store of White Mall, a huge food store called the Dutch Market which looked as if it held enough fine chocolate to last a thousand years. Ashley who was part Dutch fell in love with the place and offered to make appelflappen for their upcoming celebration of the winter solstice.

But their current mission here had a more serious objective. According to the orbital images, the home Party location of White Mall was just five kilometers away. Madison and Ashley stayed at the Dutch Market to set up a surveillance system while the other six began to bike down the spiral. They had no side cars and were taking the ride slowly, examining the locked stores as they passed. They reached their destination shortly before 9:30 AM. According to their calculations, the store was less than nine kilometers northeast of the southern vertex of the great complex.

"Notice how the door flows and seals itself around the mushroom?" Jada asked as she spun the tumblers on the lock.

Mark nodded. "Yes, some sort of plastic flow, what a technology. How long does it take?"

"It starts about a minute after the mushroom snaps and locks, finishes a few minutes later. Watch this." Jada completed the combination and the door flowed back at once, allowing the mushroom to be extracted easily. She then reached in and pushed the button to open the door.

It was unfortunately a large store, another ACE Hardware running sixty meters in length along the outside arc of the spiral. That meant with two floors they had a full hundred and twenty meters of back wall to search. From her calculations Emily thought the back entrance would be about twenty meters from the wall closest to the Dutch Market and at first they concentrated their search there. But nothing was found on either floor. The team spent the better part of an hour methodically pressing every square centimeter along the back wall.

While the rest of the team was downstairs, Mark quietly walked over the Emily who was sitting on a counter on the second floor thinking things over. "What do you think Emily? Did we pick the wrong store?"

"I don't see how. Three of us independently counted this as the correct location."

Mark nodded. "Maybe the door is locked from the other side. Remember how easy it is to make our own door at the Dress Barn disappear?"

She nodded glumly. "Do you want to give up? We can still try to find the Party location on Yellow Brick, or maybe get back to locking down Black and Blue Malls."

Mark sighed. "I wish we weren't doing that."

Emily sighed back. "I know. This is one issue I agree with Jada… Well, she also has an ambitious schedule for setting up all the surveillance systems. Maybe we could spend some time on that."

"Ah. Jada hasn't filled me in on the details yet."

Emily went on to explain. "We want to install Matrix surveillance systems at all locations we have elevators. At the sky bridges and our Party locations, there'll be six sensors on the door and another six on the door opposite across the corridor."

Mark nodded. "So the system unit can pick up sensors through the closed doors?"

"Evidently. The doors are transparent to visible light. I guess they're transparent to the sensor data frequencies too. We mount the sensors at one, two, and three meters above ground level, along both sides of both doorways. Then the system unit integrates all twelve inputs. I've seen the test. It's not just multiple screens of video. The system unit can integrate the images into very detailed 3-D video. It can even extrapolate shadows and guess the existence of surfaces it can't see."

Emily jumped off the counter and continued. "They're sophisticated systems. You set them to record differentials so an empty corridor doesn't get recorded, but all the interesting images do. What took Jada so long on the first installation was figuring out how to get the counting software to work. The system can be set to record how many people have passed in each direction and when, and store video of the events too. Ask Jada for a demo sometime. It's quite impressive."

Mark nodded and stretched. "Yeah, thanks, I'll do that. Say, wait a minute. Did you say every location we have an elevator?"

"Uh huh."

"But our Party locations, do we really want to place sensors around the doors? If somebody sees them, they'll know"

Emily interrupted. "They'll know nothing. The sensors are identical in appearance to the black sensors that are in the door archways anyway. Jada thinks it's some sort of RF-ID tag reader to record what's leaving the store. We just unplug the RF sensors and snap in the audio-visual upgrades. The sockets even power the sensors. It's a beautiful system. We keep the system unit out of sight near the elevator. You just walk out and check the corridor traffic logs without ever revealing your presence. It's a beautiful, powerful system, and a snap to install."

"So why is it taking Madison and Ashley so long to set up the surveillance system at the Dutch Market?"

Emily laughed. "Oh, I doubt that. They probably had the whole thing up and running in fifteen minutes and have spent the last hour munching chocolate."

Mark grinned back. "Oh my gosh."

"So, are we ready to call it quits here?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Why don't we…" Mark paused for a moment, and then turned slowly to face the back wall of the store. He just had a sudden insight.

The entire back wall of the second floor of the hardware store was covered with tools and supplies hanging off hooks from a pegboard. Like all the stores in the great mall, both floors of the store were 3.9 meters in height. To reach the upper half of the displays, this store like many others had two small sliding staircases locked into below-floor-level tracks. Mark slid one of the staircases to the position twenty meters from the appropriate side wall and climbed to the top of the small platform. He began to push against different areas of the pegboard.

There was a faint click as he pushed under a row of chalking guns and the wall in front of him began to slide away. He heard Emily gasp behind him and he turned to her and their eyes locked.

Mark thought. "How could I have been so dumb?"

Emily's eyes were alive with laughter and she thought back, "Not just you, my love. We're all bozos on this bus." And then she hiccupped and the eye contact broke. Emily turned and ran to call the others from downstairs.

In a few minutes all six of them were exploring the White Mall copy of their home. The general layout was identical, but there were a few differences. This home complex was attached to the west southwestern vertex of the local hexagon, not the southern vertex. And the place looked pristine, as if it had never been occupied. It was also a chilly uniform +10C in all the rooms.

Their first objective was to check out the first floor library and elevator. They all felt a rush of victory as they saw an access code being brightly displayed above the interior keyboard. They recorded the code, triple checked it and then left the elevator and called Madison and Ashley as the door closed. A moment later the last two members of the team joined them. There were grinning faces all around.

"So this is Party #2?" asked Hannah as they explored the spotless upstairs kitchen and lounge.

"Party #2 or #6 we think, yeah," replied Aggie. "Maybe a slight chance of one of the others."

"Did they ever even make it here? The place looks untouched."

Aggie remembered the lessons from her janitor training. "Six days after being vacant, auto maintenance flagged the structure as unoccupied. All traces of the Party have been removed." She took a deep breath in the chilly air. "You can tell from the temperature too." She looked out the window and saw the first orange rays of the rising sun touching the great open fields. It was 10:45 AM. Today there would be two and a half hours of daylight.

"Temperature?" Suddenly Mark bucked as if he had been struck by lightning. He looked around rapidly and noticed two team members were not in sight. He said hoarsely, "Where's Maddy and Ashley?"

Fatima looked up from examining a kitchen cabinet. "Downstairs installing a Matrix system in ACE hardware. Mark, you okay?"

Mark nodded quickly. "I've got to get back home. The orbital satellite, the spectrum analyzers, I can set them for infrared."

Fatima's mouth formed a silent oh.

Nine hours later.

"Oh hell, Mark. If you disagree with us that much, why don't you just overrule us? Every one of us agrees you have the right to do so."

Mark stared back at Ashley, and then looked at all the other women gathered around the conference table. "I've never done that, and I really don't want to start now." He paused and added wistfully, "We really need to find some time to work on our government."

"We're giving you most of what you've asked for," Jada said defensively. She gestured to a large display they had nearby of an infrared view of the great complex. There were many surface locations showing heated buildings, including two in their own area above Red Mall.

Jada turned and pointed to a spot about twenty kilometers away, near the southeast vertex. It had to be the rest of Party #1. But everyone except Mark thought the group should try to make contact with Black Mall first. The home complex of Black Mall was the most northern of the six Party locations. It was at the southernmost tip of a diamond-shaped hexagonal array of buildings, and it was brightly shining in infrared, with the entire surface area belonging to Black Mall dark by comparison. The conclusion seemed obvious. The people of Black Mall were still living at their home location.

Mark had been debating with his group for the last half hour. Everyone was agreed they would bike towards the end of Black Mall tomorrow morning, past the 50.1 kilometer mark which was their previous furthest penetration. The only point of contention was the women's desire to keep locking down the mall, an act Mark thought was insanely hostile.

"Look at it this way Mark," said Jada. "I think most of us agree with you that Party #5 will probably be filled with reasonable people. We will then apologize and give them the combination for Black Mall. But if they're hostile, having the Mall locked down could be a tremendous benefit for us. It'll throttle their ability to disturb our use of the other spirals."

Fatima chimed in. "You don't know what it was like Mark, having the Beta Sigma Rho brothers intimidating everybody else in the line. They were boorishly rude and very aggressive. I think otherwise I'd agree with you. Perhaps morally we should give them the benefit of the doubt. But…"

Mark interrupted. "We'll only get one chance to make a friendly first impression."

Fatima shook her head. "We'll only get one chance to continue the Black Mall lockdown. Once our presence is known to them, it would indeed be overly hostile. But for now, we can hide behind our supposed ignorance." She frowned. "I'm not particularly proud of acting like this, but bottom line, it's just not worth the risk to do otherwise."

Mark was shaking his head. "I still feel we're about to provoke an incident. People, this is how wars start."

The debate lasted another few minutes, and then Mark capitulated. An hour later, he and Jada were hanging out in his bedroom. Jada was in her pajamas and quietly reading the surveillance user manual from Matrix Security while Mark was going through some exercises before bed. He worked out more vigorously than he had planned and decided to take a shower before bed. After sharing a friendly kiss with Jada, he took off, expecting her to be gone by the time he returned.

Mark walked into the bathroom quietly and was startled to see Ashley fully disrobed and about to step into the shower. Their eyes locked before either could say anything.

"I'm so sorry," thought Mark. "I should have made some noise coming in."

"You live here too. You don't have to do that. Besides, I don't mind…"

Mark's eyes were locked on Ashley's, but his peripheral vision was drinking in the sight of her body. She was standing before him in full frontal nudity and making no attempt to cover herself. Mark had nothing but admiration for her, sexual and otherwise. She had lost about two kilos of fat since they came here, and had gained about a kilo of muscle from all the exercise. She looked great, a bit of an hourglass figure, full hips, trim waist, a wonderful set of tits, pushing a C-cup Mark thought, and he couldn't help but notice her nipples were hard points jutting out from her taut breasts. He wondered if it were from the coolness of the room or because she was displaying her body for him.

"It's not because I'm cold," Ashley thought with a smile. "Do you usually think of breasts as tits?"

He thought back, "Oh, sorry again. I can't believe I'm being this crude." But he couldn't stop himself. His eyes were enthralled with the triangle of fur below her navel, a thick bush only slightly darker than her naturally reddish hair.

"Seriously Mark, I don't mind. In fact, I think it's cute how you're trying and failing not to stare at… well, at me in my birthday suit. You really think I'm gorgeous, huh?" Ashley raised her arms and locked her hands behind her head, smiling at Mark as she displayed her body. "My last boyfriend was always telling me to lose a few pounds."

"Yeah, I remember. Eric. He was such an idiot," Mark thought back.

"No argument there. So, you want to shower together?"

"Uh…" Mark blushed in his thoughts. "Of course yes, but I might get…"

"Erect? Mark, we might marry someday, and even if we don't call it marriage, we might still have children together. I'll be disappointed if you don't get erect. Come on!"

"Ashley, you're so beautiful."

"Ha! Come on! And don't be bashful about your body. But we won't do anything. I promise."

They both ended the thought conversation with fierce hiccups. Ashley blushed but remained standing and displaying herself to Mark, very happy that he was finding her attractive. "Wow," she said, "I didn't think I had the guts to… well, to speak that directly." She took a few steps forward until she was right before him and offered Mark her hand. "But I'm glad I did, and I'm very glad you accepted! Come on!"

The shower was one of the most remarkable experiences of Mark's life. There was no physical contact except for holding hands as they walked to the shower and a few kisses afterwards as they said goodnight to each other. They both knew it was too soon for overt sexuality. But they shared lots of grinning smiles as they washed, happy to be with each other and happy to be laying the foundation for later physical intimacy.

Mark walked back into his bedroom in a deeply peaceful state of mind, almost unaware of the erection that was still between his legs. He was mildly surprised to see Jada still sitting on his bed. She looked up from her book with wide eyes and exclaimed, "I've just found something fabulous!"

Chapter 22.

Three and half days later.

Time: Tuesday, January 15, 2019 8:29 AM

Mark glanced at the time in a passing clock store just as he heard the sound of their last bags of locks hit the ground about forty meters behind him. He gave a small sigh as he considered that he had less than a kilometer left to go. It was three hours before sunrise and they were right on time. They had all taken an elevator to Blazo's Art Gallery from their home lounge well before 6 AM, and Mark had commented to Jada that if they met no one, they'd probably reach their target destination well before 9 AM, the 62.6 kilometer mark of Black Mall.

They were finally getting back to their mission of Black Mall lockdown after a three-day delay. Late Friday night, Jada had discovered that the sensors of the Matrix Security systems could be linked together in a long chain if they were in visual sight of each other. The outside arc of the Mall spirals provided the perfect setup to test the capability.

All the store entrances in the Malls were a uniform four-meter by four-meter square, with slots for the sensors on both sides of the doorway at heights of one, two, and three meters. The sensor slots were about 1 cm from the outside face of the corridor, and were protected by the transparent door which when closed would lie flush with the wall.