It's My Party

Tom replied in kind, and also affirmed Carla's right to follow her training as she saw fit. So as long as they were co-leaders at the entrance rooms, they would refrain from physically expressing sexual interest in each other.

Suvarna and Tajana had no such perspective. Tom was more than mildly amused in the first days of their arrival when it became obvious that a major reason the two women had volunteered to be at the entrance rooms was to explore developing romantic attachments with him. Tom couldn't exactly fault their logic. Their full Society currently had three guys and thirty-three women. And he had to admit to both himself and Carla that he rather enjoyed being chased by attractive women, and he found both Suvarna and Tajana to be bright, amiable, and very pretty.

Carla wound up shrugging her mental shoulders over the issue and told Tom in a link that he was of course free to follow his own morals, and that she wouldn't judge him and regardless of what he decided, Carla was still interested in pursuing their own relationship when their circumstances were different. She was somewhat surprised and very gratified that Tom finally decided on something very close to her own training, accepting a minor amount of flirting with the two Hindu women but stopping well short of anything Carla would consider inappropriate between a commander and his subordinates.

Carla sighed and reached for another handful of the popcorn. Maybe Maddy was on to something. The popcorn seemed extra tasty and somehow was making Carla feel optimistic. She settled back and watched the pleasant day and waited for the reset to begin.

Chapter 70.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:11 PM

Ricardo's high-power binoculars had revealed two entrance doors on the northern face of the great line of buildings to the south. They certainly weren't very common. The two he could see were spaced two kilometers apart. The architecture brought home the alien nature of the design. What a massive fire-code violation to space exits in a great continuous building two kilometers apart. Of course, perhaps it was a different story on the southern side, but somehow Ricardo doubted it.

Well, regardless, they would reach the nearer door in just a few minutes. Ricardo had had a horrible thought when he first sighted the doors twenty minutes ago. He took a long time surveying the doors as Jenaro was recovering from his trip down the slide and getting dressed. Ricardo's thought was that the entrance doors looked horribly like the doors leading into the southern vertex where Diego was chained. Those doors could only be opened from the inside.

After Jenaro finished dressing, Ricardo called for a ten-minute break to think things over. His team responded well to the down time, taking the opportunity to drink and grab a few bites from their food supply. Ricardo was impressed with how completely he had transformed Jessica. She was very modest in her toileting, walking off a distance and then shielding herself with her parka as she squatted.

When she got back to the group, Ricardo decided it was time to move on to the critical test of the doors. The nearer door was less than a kilometer away. Ricardo glanced at his watch as they resumed their journey. It was five minutes after noontime, and they were hiking up a slight incline through open fields of damp sea-green grass.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:12:03 PM

"One minute to reset," Carla called out. Yesterday she had wondered why Tom had ordered that everyone be inside now, but then he linked with her and shared his memories of some private conversations he had while linking with Lynn. Lynn had been truly nervous about what she was trying to do.

Her impressions of the control systems here at the Great Hexagon were that they were so difficult to understand partially because they were so interconnected. Incredible optimization, she had thought. It reminded her of biological optimization, cardio systems and skeletal systems and immune systems and lymph systems and neural systems all coming together to make one body. True, there were specific organs for specific functions, but there was also fantastic interdependence at the cellular level, integration to a degree that human engineers had never dared approach.

But Lynn thought the builders of their current home had no such inhibitions. Power systems, communications systems, elevator transport systems, environmental systems, servo maintenance systems, security systems, structural systems, Lynn thought all the control systems were as tightly woven together as the threads in her blouse. And here Carla was now at the entrance rooms, waiting for Lynn to cut the cloth. Carla found it difficult to remain calm as the final seconds of the countdown disappeared.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:13:03 PM

"And execute!" Lynn cried out as she typed the final keystroke for system reset. There were a dozen people around her in the library in the northwest segment of their home hexagon on the central island. The roof above them was set at full transparency, and a beautiful sunny day was providing more than ample light for the room. An instant after she typed the keystroke, the monitor in front of Lynn suddenly lost power, presenting her with a dark screen.

For several seconds nobody said anything. There was a lot of linking as random pairs of women asking each other their opinion of what was going on. It was Mandy who first noticed the other change in the room. She was linked to Charles at the time when the realization hit her. She abruptly broke her link and called out to everybody, "My God! The room! The courtyard! Look at the shadows!"

It had been twenty seconds since system reset, and in that time the linear sun had drifted to its 4 PM position. Afternoon shadows were rapidly sweeping the library floor and the courtyard at the core of the hexagon. As everyone stared in amazement, the sun continued its rapid descent. Madison tried to time it but when she looked at her digital watch, all she saw was a dead display. So she looked up and tried to make a rough estimate by counting seconds in her mind.

"One sweet potato, two sweet potato, three sweet potato, …" She clicked off the seconds in her mind as she watched the visible drift of the sun. "Maybe an hour every five seconds," she concluded after she watched the sun drift from 5 PM to 6 PM, "a day every two minutes. Imagine that!" Sunset occurred about ten seconds after Madison stopped counting, and after a couple of seconds of twilight, the room was plunged into darkness.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:13:43 PM

Tom, Carla, Suvarna, and Tajana had their noses pushed up against the bedroom window. They were all staring at the sky in amazement. About one second before sunset, an image of a crescent moon appeared in the sky directly overhead and then shot like a bullet north along the long axis of the sky.

Desperate to make some sanity of the scene before them, Tajana tried to estimate the moon's apparent speed, and came up with a velocity of perhaps one kilometer per second. For a moment she had a truly horrible thought that time itself might have speeded up in Wobanakik, but as she watched the sway of the branches in some trees a short distance below, she thought the motion looked normal.

Meanwhile Suvarna called out in the darkness, "I think room air conditioning is out. I can't feel any flow by the vents."

"How about the door?" Tom called back. It was now twenty-five seconds past sunset, and the moon looked as if it were already past the central island, far too distant to provide much light at all at their location. Their eyes had not yet completely adjusted to the darkness, and Tom heard Tajana feeling her way to the door.

"The door's open. Want me to check the door to the outside?"

"Hold up Tajana. Let's all go together." Tom tried to get a light both from the flashlight he was carrying and from the Leophone he had traded with Madison. They were both dead. He really hated being cut off in the dark like this, but before he could voice his frustrations, a rapid increase of red light appeared along the eastern edge of the sky, followed by the bursting light of linear sunrise. The length of Wobanakik was again bathed in sunshine, but the sun line was maintaining the same breakneck pace as before. Tom asked everybody to accompany him to the main entrance door while they could still see.

Time: April 1, 2019 12:15:03 PM

Two minutes after system reset, Mark discovered that his Leophone could provide a bit of light if he popped it out of its power cradle. Over the last minute, Fatima had restored a semblance of order to their meeting room, and people were just beginning to realize how cut off they were here at the terminal Hilton at Green Mall. If the power stayed out, could they possibly find their way to the Barnes & Nobel that was Green Mall's exit to the surface? The damn bookstore was almost seventy spiral kilometers away and they'd be groping their way in pitch blackness. And even assuming the doors and the mushroom locks still worked after the power outage, how could they spin the right combination on the lock if they couldn't see what they were doing?

"Yo Ashley!" Mark called out.

"Yo Mark!" she replied from across the room. "Is that you with the light?"

"Yep. Try your Leophone."

"I already have. It's dead."

"Try popping it out of the power cradle."

"Okay… Yes! Thanks Mark."

The two phones provided only a tiny amount of light for the conference room, but after two minutes of utter darkness, it was enough for people to make out the shapes of their companions. Fatima called out, "Mark, how come your two Leophones are working but the rest are not?" As of this morning, their society had fifteen of the phones, including the working and non-working ones down at Wobanakik, and there were a total of eleven in the conference room.

Mark called back. "The same reason Ashley and I need power cradles to keep our phones charged. We have two of the original Leophones. I think Jada has the third, Maddy's old phone. Don't you see? Our old phones have Earth batteries."

"Ah, right," replied Fatima. She paused for a second. "You couldn't call Maddy's phone, could you?"

"No. The walkie-talkie ability is very short range. I could probably call Ashley's phone, but I don't want to drain our batteries."

"Right. Mark, Ashley, please shut off your phones now. We won't require light to discuss what to do next." A few seconds later in absolute blackness, Fatima asked for opinions for how to proceed.

Time: April 1, 2019 12:15:35 PM, reset plus 00:02:32

After two minutes of whimpering in the darkness, Alfonso finally realized the chains around his ankles were no longer locked. With trembling hands, he felt the cuffs open when he poked them.

This morning had been the day of his abandonment, and he was so depressed he had been considering suicide, and then the lights went out. As he had been for many nights in a row now, Alfonso was chained and lying on a mattress directly under the overhead door at the mall entrance to Jacob's Bar and Grill. He was lying on his back with his feet pointed in the direction of the barrier his former compadres had constructed. His left foot was attached to a chain running across the mall corridor and secured inside a store on the opposite side of the spiral. His right foot was similarly secured to a grill in the kitchen area inside Jacob's, near the walk-in freezer and the exit to the surface.

Alfonso had been instructed to defend the barrier with his life, and he thought he had no other option. The chains were carefully set so that the door would sever one of his legs if lowered. And Alfonso had no illusions about receiving mercy from his enemies, not after what he and his girlfriend Jessica had done with their former slaves.

The previous mornings were bad enough, waking up exhausted and stiff from being forced to lie on his back for eight hours. But over the past hour Alfonso had had several muscles spasms in his back, and the pain was so bad he almost put his pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger. And it wasn't just the pain. Alfonso figured he had nothing to live for, and to kill himself and then let the servos tear down the barrier would be the one statement of defiance he could make against that monster Ricardo.

The scene played over and over again in his mind, Jessica being double raped before his eyes. Alfonso couldn't even call out to her that he was sorry. Ricardo had shoved a rag down his throat. It was soaked with some kind of awful fluid and it had blistered the back of his throat and vocal cords, a case of instant super laryngitis. And then those bastard compadres held him while the other bastard Diego kicked him in the groin. As he vomited, Alfonso silently swore he would never forget. And he had a special place in hell reserved for Ricardo for stealing his girlfriend.

The barrier in the corridor next to him was rigged with vials of the acid liquid, ready to explode at eye level if the barrier were breached. It was a trap similar to what Alfonso had helped set up when Ricardo was trying to bait their enemy to enter through the elevators. Both the lounge and the library had been booby trapped with homemade explosives and acid baths, from simple materials Ricardo had procured from pharmacy and hardware stores. But nothing had come of it. Their enemy had never tested their defenses.

And now his chains were off! The strange cuffs had a fiercely strong magnetic type of lock, but suddenly when the lights went out, the cuffs surprisingly lost power too. Alfonso was giddy with delight, and he took his loaded gun and in the pitch blackness started to crawl along the mall corridor away from the awful barrier. For the first time in days, his heart was filled with hope, and it was the hope of vengeance. Alfonso's enemy was now everybody in the world except Jessica. Nothing was certain. He might fail. But if he did, he was determined to go down with his gun firing.

Time: April 1, 2019 12:16:00 PM, reset plus 00:02:57

Ricardo was the first to reach the door in the great façade of the building, and he inwardly breathed a huge sigh of relief. The sliding transparent door was partially open, and with only a moderate amount of effort he pushed it completely aside. He and his two subordinates paused for just a second at the portal and then entered.

It appeared to be some sort of lobby, a large open area with the floor the color and smoothness of marble and the walls of burnished metal decorated with geometrical designs. It was really quite intricate, designs within designs, with perhaps a hexagonal motif interacting with complex non-repeating patterns. Overhead the ceiling was a pure opal color that they had seen before in the mall and at their home complex, but here the opal was very dull and not emitting any light. In fact, the only light for the lobby appeared to be from the large windows that ran the length of the room on the northern side. Jenaro looked as if he wanted to speak, and Ricardo told both Jenaro and Jessica to speak freely if they had something to say. Jessica nodded and went to a nearby wall to check something that was bothering her.

Jenaro waved his arm in a sweeping gesture. "First time I've ever seen a room seem this dead. I mean since we left Earth."

Jessica nodded from a few meters away. "And the air temperature. This doesn't make sense."

Ricardo looked at her. "What do you mean?"

Jessica had her hand over a grate. "The air vents here, there's no breeze, none at all. Jenaro's right. The room seems dead. But it's warm in here. But how could it be if the door was open to the outside air? Don't you feel the draft now? The room is starting to cool. But why isn't the room already cool?"

Ricardo nodded and replied, "Excellent point," and he saw Jessica smile happily at the praise. Ricardo walked over to what looked like a security station, and sure enough there was a keyboard and monitor there, but the screen was blank and typing on the keyboard produced no response. Well, that wasn't too different from the two dead elevators in Black Mall. Ricardo wasn't too concerned. Meanwhile Jenaro opened an interior door and revealed a long and very dark corridor, lit only by the light from the lobby.

Ricardo sighed. The corridor appeared to be the only interior path to take from the lobby, and he was in no mood to head outside yet. "Time to break out the flashlights," he announced. It was to his utter dismay a few moments later that they discovered all their flashlights were dead. What the hell was going on? Ricardo had personally inspected several of them earlier this morning. The flashlights had been working fine. He frowned and took a long moment to think.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:17:00 PM, reset plus 00:03:57

Diego was napping in his prison area at the southern vertex. The warm sunlight coming in through the windows had made him very drowsy. He had spent most of the morning watching Ricardo's expedition hike to the pink tower and then wander back and forth across the gentle moguls on top of the wall. So many times! It was a great puzzle to Diego why they needed to go back and forth so often. The pale green hills looked so gentle. Why not just hike across them?

It was a strange wall that led up to the rolling hills. Its color was sea-green, almost an exact match to the color of the grasslands, and Diego marveled how the wall didn't even seem to exist unless he focused on the lighter shade of small hills on top and then worked his eyes down. Was the color an attempt to conceal the wall? There was so much about the builders of this place that was a complete mystery to him. What were their intentions?

After much pondering Diego had closed his eyes to rest them from the hours of staring through the binoculars, and over the last half hour he had fallen into an uneasy sleep. There had been several faint clicks a few minutes ago as the couplings in his wrist and ankle cuffs lost their grip. But in his dreamy torpor Diego did not notice. The flat surfaces of his locks remained in contact with each other, ready to re-engage if their unbreakable pseudo-magnetism returned.

Time: Friday, April 1, 2019 12:18:08 PM, reset plus 00:05:05

"Notice something interesting?" Jada called out in the dark night. She was standing about ten meters east of the eastern face of their home hexagon at Wobanakik, and about half of the island's population was out with her. The other half were still with Lynn by the dead console in the library. Jada and her crowd had just witnessed the third pass of the fake moon passing directly over them as it made its ballistic journey from the southern to northern ends of Wobanakik.

"I sure do," said Sandra. "Every since we got here, the phases of the moon have been random, one night to the next. The three phases we've seen now, they look just right for the changes you would see in a normal lunar cycle."

Sachi laughed. "You call this normal?!"

Sandra grinned. "You know what I mean. What do you think Jada? Do you want to wait here for another cycle?" As she spoke, the moon completed its journey to the north pole of the world, and almost simultaneously the eastern side of the sky glowed a bright red just before the linear sun began another breakneck race across the dome of the sky.

Jada blinked for a moment, trying to adjust her eyes to the return of daylight. "I can't think of what else to do. If anybody has a more productive idea, let me know." No one said anything, and they spent the next half minute silently watching the sun crawl to its high noon position with visible speed.