It's My Party

"Sure." The others on the bridge could hear a big yawn. "Sorry. I was up working most of last night. I'd like to confirm yesterday's diagnostic that the interface down here has scheduled some sort of system reset. I think I managed to understand the countdown shortly before we left to come here. If I'm reading this correctly, the reset will occur in five days, next Friday, maybe shortly after noon. I want to recheck my analysis, but that's what I think now."

Holly spoke up from the Hilton conference room. "So you think the communications system is going to reset all by itself?"

Lynn answered. "It's hard to know, but if it doesn't, there're a couple things I can do to try to nudge the process. I'm almost certain there is some type of resonance phenomenon linking our two dead Leophones with the library console here. But it's not simply a matter of distance. The first dead Leophone went all the way back to the entrance rooms. The resonance lock did not break. Yet the phone we're using now is only one kilometer away and is unaffected."

"Lynn, this is Mark. Is what you're suggesting to do dangerous?"

"Well, potentially, sure. I'm pushing buttons on a machine I don't understand. But we do that every time we sit down at a console."

"The reason I'm asking is that the spring equinox occurs next Friday, I think a few minutes after noon. I'll check my logs when I get back home."

There was a long pause and then Lynn replied, "Uh Mark, I don't see the connection."

"Yeah, neither do I, and that's what's worrying me. Why schedule a communications reset at the exact moment the sun crosses the equator? Somehow I'm guessing it's not a coincidence."

"Oh. Okay, I see your point." Another yawn. "I'd still like to try to get the interface online. We have a whole bunch of volunteers down here that are eager for janitor training." Everyone knew the point Lynn was making. Would a White Mall janitor have the authority to activate the one-way elevator at the entrance rooms? It was an enticing possibility, and thus far their only hope for leaving Wobanakik.

After a nod from Fatima, Amber spoke next. "As Fatima mentioned, we're seeing a lot of building activity outside of Black Mall's entrance location. They have poles and wire mesh and dozens of roles of aluminum foil. It's pretty obvious they're going to construct some sort of a barrier. If they cover the wire mesh with the foil, we'll lose our periscope into Jacob's."

Aggie answered from the box maze, "Well, if they do that, they'll have to keep their barrier under constant surveillance for it to work. Remember how quickly the servos tore down our barricade? It happened minutes after Segundo died."

"I think we should assume Ricardo knows this," said Amber. "His team down in the mall has had plenty of opportunity to run experiments." She leaned back and thought of the rules they had learned. Supplies intentionally left in the mall would be left alone. But trash, human waste, or anything that impeded the free flow of traffic was removed as soon as the material was unattended. Ricardo would need to schedule continuous monitoring for his barrier for it to work.

The group around Fatima started kicking around ideas of how to respond to the barrier's erection. At first, most people thought they should do nothing, but Amber made a counter argument that that was what Ricardo was almost certainly assuming they would decide, and thus probably not their best move. After that the discussion became more complex, and Fatima dismissed the meeting to let the other teams get on with their work.

Time: Sunday, March 10, 2019 8:40 AM

Mark looked up. In front of him were sixteen meters worth of ladder that he was about to climb with Lucia on his back. Already at the top level were Husna, Aggie, and Whitney. Also still with him were Emily and Heather who were giving Lucia's harness a final safety check before the ascent. Afterwards Emily folded the lightweight wheelchair and secured it to Heather's back. The group also had a nylon rope they could use to haul the chair up, but Heather had no problem carrying it and it was a bit faster to let her port the chair on her back.

"All set?" Mark asked his passenger.

Lucia arms were hugging his collarbone, and a playful voice said near his ear, "Giddy-up!" A second later Mark felt Lucia's heel lightly kick his butt. Mark blinked.

"Yikes! Sorry Mark! I didn't think I had the strength to do that!"

Mark grinned and began climbing. The ladder was an integral part of the building, its rungs flowing directly out of the wall. Hand over hand, one sure step and grip after another, Mark was taking his time. There was absolutely reason to rush. "This is the last ladder before the Waterhole," he said as he approached the halfway mark. "It's easy from here, just a few long corridors and a single flight of stairs heading down. We should be at the Waterhole in twenty minutes."

Mark could feel Lucia nod against his shoulder blade. She said quietly, "It'll be a strange emotion to see the place again."

At the top of the ladder, they got a cheerful smile from Husna, and then Aggie and Whitney helped Lucia out of her harness and into the wheelchair that Heather brought up. Afterwards Mark glanced at the time and called a three-minute break. The group spent the time stretching and drinking from their water bottles.

Lucia sat sipping a bottle of lemonade that Aggie had handed her, staring out the windows on their new level. It had been a raw, cloudy dawn when Lucia had last seen the outdoors two hours ago on the top floor of the box maze. Now the sky was still very dark, and wind driven sheets of rain and wet snow were slamming against the window by her side. Lucia reached up and traced the window with her fingertips. "I don't know if I'll ever get used to these windows. They're so clear they're invisible, and yet they block all the sound, and the surface feels impossibly warm."

"And these windows are absolutely impossible to break," added Husna. "We tried for weeks. We hit the window at the box maze with absolutely everything we had, with zero results."

Heather nodded. "Jada and I ran some experiments shortly before she went down to Wobanakik. We don't think the window is made of matter, nothing that we would recognize anyway."

Husna looked perplexed. "Huh?"

"The material properties are beyond anything that makes sense. The reason it feels warm is because we can't measure a heat transfer coefficient. Maybe it's exactly zero."

Husna frowned. "It can't be exactly zero. At the atomic level,"

Heather interrupted. "You're making too many assumptions. Don't think of this stuff as matter. Jada jokingly calls it frozen time."

Lucia turned and stared at Heather. "Frozen time? What is that supposed to mean?"

Mark spoke up. "It's a wild conjecture, a crazy model for how the overhead doors in the Mall work. They feel vaguely like thick plastic when they're moving up or down, but once their fully extended, there's a tiny flash of light and the door becomes rigid and impervious. Jada calls it adding a touch of frozen time."

Lucia growled. "Oh, I hate this kind of stuff! You build a model without ever defining what you mean, and then you think you're making progress. I defy you to explain the concept of frozen time. Wouldn't that imply that time itself has a temperature? What is the thought?! What is the concept?!"

Mark grinned. "Welcome to the club. It drives us crazy too. But the reason we picked the phrase frozen time is because of the time delays we've measured for light passing through the windows. Remember the experiments Heather was mentioning? We found it takes about 200 milliseconds for light to pass through the windows of our home complex. We can measure the delay. We also estimate the window is about two millimeters thick. So the velocity of light within the window is about one centimeter per second."

Lucia gave an exasperated gasp and then stared out the window while moving her head back and forth. "That's ridiculous! That would imply an index of refraction of… of thirty billion! But I'm not seeing any bending of the light!"

Mark laughed. "Yep! Excellent point Lucia.. You have to throw all the principles away, Snell's Law, the principle of least action, everything! It's an observable fact that the window slows but does not bend the light."

Husna was staring at the storm and gave a deep sigh. "So I'm watching the storm with a 200 millisecond time delay?"

"Yep."

Husna digested Mark's answer for a moment and finally said, "It's scary. The builders of this place, the technology here, millions, billions of years ahead of us? Do the builders think of us as some sort of…"

"Insect?" offered Lucia.

Husna shuddered. "I remember hearing once that Earth's biosphere developed multi-cellular life about six hundred million years ago. Perhaps the word I wanted was bacteria. Even for an insect… I would hope most people would feel squeamish about torturing an insect. But we have no concern at all for bacteria. Spray the disinfectant on the table and wipe it clean. Does anyone give a passing thought that the bacteria might have found their deaths unpleasant?"

It was a sober reminder of how much they didn't understand. Lucia glanced up and locked eyes with Mark for a brief moment, and then they held hands as she finished the rest of her lemonade. A moment later they began the last leg of their trip to the Waterhole.

Chapter 67.


Overhead view of the crescent maze surrounding the Black Mall diamond complex. Black Mall's home complex is the southernmost hexagon in the array. The diamond does not quite touch the northwest perimeter wall of the Great Hexagon. To the south is the four-kilometer line of buildings Ricardo is trying to reach.

Chapter 68.

Five days later.

Time: April 1, 2019 5 AM

Jada was at the core hexagon lying on her bed and gazing at the morning through a large bank of windows. She and Madison were now sharing the northern of the two bedrooms that faced due east, and while Madison was still sound asleep, the dawn had awoken Jada five minutes ago. A pretty morning, she thought. The overhead dome was filled with fluffy white clouds, a pure cornflower blue sky, and the bright butter-yellow light of the strange linear sun.

Madison had made a measurement a few days ago and confirmed an early suspicion. The linear sun was not uniformly bright along its length. It was brighter near the north and south poles of the cylindrical sky. It had an intensity profile that provided equal sunlight along the entire length of Wobanakik.

Their society had made a lot progress in the last several days, both at Wobanakik and on the surface. This past Monday Fatima remembered a sporting goods store along Yellow Brick Road that had never been checked out, about three kilometers up-spiral from the segment's home complex. Her memory was accurate, and at the 56.3 kilometer mark, the society discovered another six of the Little Auk kayaks. Over the next few days, Jada's group of seventeen people went from being five kayaks short to having a spare. And believing in safety in numbers, Yesterday Suvarna and Tajana had remained with Tom and Carla at the entrance rooms when the new kayaks were transferred to the central island.

Today was the day Lynn would try to push the interface system out of its resonance lock with the Leophones. It was a very brief window of opportunity, opening just before 12:13 PM today and closing a few seconds later. It was critical that the opportunity not be missed. Yesterday Lynn had found their next chance would not occur until another 504 days, another two Wobanakik years.

Jada had scheduled an easy morning for everyone, even cancelling Mandy's morning kayaking lessons so that some unexpected issue wouldn't run into the scheduled noontime reset. So the group had a mini-party yesterday evening. Madison made a ton of popcorn and they all watched a movie in the lounge. Mandy dressed in her pajamas had unashamedly curled up by Charles' side. And now everyone would have nice easy morning. Most people had said they would just sleep in and have a late breakfast together at 9 AM. But Jada was fully awake. She got up, put on a bath robe and headed off for a shower.

She gulped a moment later when she walked into the bath area. Charles was there and he had evidently just taken off his robe and about to step into the shower. He quickly turned his head the other way, pretending Jada hadn't entered the room. He hung his robe on a hook and walked a bit stiffly into the shower area.

Jada felt a pang of nervousness and also a slight pang of guilt. According to their new social custom, the correct response for both of them was to ignore each other's presence while in the bathroom. If Charles had truly not noticed her, Jada would probably have turned around and come back twenty minutes later. But she was sure Charles had seen her, and in her bathrobe too. It seemed to Jada that to turn back now would be a mild insult to Charles. She would be making a statement she didn't want to rely on Charles to be polite and follow the new rules.

And how would this look to the other women? Jada had told them of the new social custom established on the surface. Would she be a hypocrite if she turned away now? Jada admitted to herself that the answer to that question was a simple yes. So she disrobed and was soon washing herself on the opposite side of the shower room.

Charles was polite throughout the bathing. Over the soft hiss of the high pressure sprays, Jada thought she heard him sigh several times, but he was true to the social standard and did not steal glances at her. And as the end of Jada's shower neared, she heard Charles turn off his faucet. He calmly walked across her field of vision as he left, and Jada's peripheral vision caught a quick glimpse of a semi-erect penis before she thought to turn her head away.

Her mind drifted to the image as she finished bathing. It had never occurred to Jada that the common bathing areas might be more difficult for men than for women. But as she headed for her towel and robe, she had to admit it was much easier for a woman to hide sexual interest. Charles had tried his best to live up to the new moral codes. Jada sighed and made a mental note to give him a friendly smile later when she got the chance.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 6 AM

Fatima stretched at the break of the new day. The day's new light was just touching the top of the hexagonal perimeter outside her bedroom window. She left her Red Mall bedroom and went down the circular staircase to the first floor, and then marched briskly through the silent rooms to the library.

A review of the sensor logs confirmed what her eyes were telling her about the outdoors. The temperature was at a minimum, -2C now and that was also the overnight low. Spring was in the air! Equinox day! There were twelve full hours of daylight now, and incredibly in only another six weeks they would see the sun at midnight. So fast! Fatima suspected it would take many, many seasons before the novelty of the 168-day year wore off.

She took a quick look at the census counter by the elevator, still 009:077. The number had remained constant since Husna's and Lucia's rescue. At the other mall locations, Green and Blue and Yellow, the situations of their Parties were still such a mystery, but at least they had evidently found enough stability to survive. Fatima offered a prayer of thanks for that.

It was such a joy to have her friend and confidant Husna again! She and Lucia had arrived at the home complex on Sunday about five hours after leaving the box maze. Initially Husna and Lucia were both somewhat reluctant to let the strange and fearsome looking autodoc treated their wasted bodies, but several of the women from Black Mall gave rave reviews on how the autodocs had cured them of the abuses of their enslavement. Lucia volunteered to give it a try.

It was a very interesting process to watch. The system spent a full five minutes probing her and running diagnostics, and then laid out a treatment schedule of six one-hour periods, two per day, and when Lucia nodded and Emily typed in her acceptance, the treatment began. Lucia's body was covered neck to feet in sensors, and a moment later she said in a worried voice that she could feel and move almost nothing. She was breathing normally and could talk and open and close her eyes, but for everything else below the neck, it felt as if her body were almost turned off.

What followed were quivers over her entire body. At the end of the hour, the probes and sensors released her, and Lucia sat up. She said it felt as if her entire body was being lightly poked with pins and needles, and then she gazed at her arm. It was still thin, but the views of the bones were gone. Instead the arm showed clear evidence of new muscle and even a hint of body fat.

In three short days, Lucia and Husna were returned to full vitality. They now appeared as wiry adults, still a bit on the thin side but with healthy layers of sleek muscles which they were still learning how to use. The autodocs had transformed their wasted frames into athletic bodies. Power, speed, and endurance were all there. Over the last several days, their new job was learning how to use it, practicing in the gym and adding grace and coordination to their restored abilities.

Fatima next checked in with the monitoring team at the Hilton. There had been no change during the night. For three full days now, their monitoring abilities had ended at the barrier Ricardo's team had constructed. From the sensor side, it appeared as a blank six-meter by four-meter wall of aluminum foil.

It only took a few hours to build. The four men under Ricardo started early Monday morning, creating a sturdy aluminum grid of folding and extension ladders lashed together with steel wire. They build the framework a few meters up-spiral from the entrance to Jacob's and then covered its outward face with chicken wire. The final step was a double layer of aluminum foil folded and tied into the wire, first a horizontal layer and then a vertical. Afterwards Diego swung a small chicken-wire door closed and the barrier was complete. It was simple but effective and completely blocked their ability to scan beyond it.

Fatima's strong opinion was to let the issue rest, and she was amazed that Amber was slowly winning converts to her idea that the Society should probe the barrier. At last night's meeting, Mark was her latest convert. Risking a confrontation with a violent, depraved, and armed group still made no sense to Fatima. With four of the five Society's pistols down in Wobanakik, any gun battle at Jacob's would be their one gun against Ricardo's five. The Society would be up against four 38-calibre pistols and an oversized 45-calibre pistol that used to belong to Uno. Fatima considered it almost insane to risk such a confrontation.

But Amber was persistent. Ricardo must know he was trapped in a box. His only way out would be to explore the surface. He would need to leave at least two people behind, one down in the Mall to prevent the servos from tearing the barrier down, and one person topside to let the returning exploration party back in home complex. That meant Ricardo could take at most three people with him. There was much discussion at the meeting over how Ricardo might divide his group.

The debate to challenge the barrier revolved around a core question: Did the Society want to rescue the person or people left guarding the barrier? After long discussion, there was a general consensus that the Society would be interested in rehabilitating Jessica and Diego if they got the chance, and marginally Alfonso as well. Ricardo, Jenaro, and Hernando were considered too hard-core and dangerous to deal with.