It's My Party

Charles gave her a friendly nod. "Anything exciting happening on the surface?" They had of course all attended the 8 PM meeting of the Society, but the conference call had been very short. Afterwards Jada and the two Abenaki women stuck around to chat while the others drifted off.

Jada nodded. "Madison made a suggestion to her brother about his expedition to the pink tower yesterday. If we really wanted a sample of the foam, Maddy suggested Mark take an empty bottle and just screw the lid on while the jar was submerged."

Charles paused for a moment. "Yeah, that might work. Is Mark going to try it?"

"Actually the foam is so bizarre he'd rather just leave it alone. But it seems clear the rest of the Black Mall team must have walked the path through the foam. There's no place else in the fields to hide." Jada sighed. "And the Black Mall people never came back. I'm surprised they abandoned the home complex."

Charles frowned. "That bothers me a lot. Ricardo… He wouldn't have done it, not willingly anyway."

"You think he was overthrown?"

A shrug of the shoulders. "Possible I guess, but I don't think that's it. More people would be dead. I think something happened we don't understand."

"Ah… Yeah that's my gut feeling too." Jada took a second to stretch out and take another sip of her milk. "On a lighter note, Abit and Oona where having a name discussion with Madison. The three of them would like to name this island Manhattan."

Charles sputtered. "This little rock?!"

"Well, relative to the size of Wobanakik…"

Charles reconsidered. "That's true. You know, I kind of like it. I always did want to try living in Manhattan, for a while at least."

Jada grinned. "Well, here's your chance. I'm going to put it up to a vote tomorrow. I'm pretty sure everybody is going to agree." She stared at her friend for a moment. "Charles, it's nice to see you smile again."

Charles blinked and stared at her for a moment, and then closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. "I know I've been out-of-it this last week. Brandi… She was my friend and girlfriend and sister all rolled into one."

Jada put her drink down and silently got up and walked behind Charles' chair. Her hand gently stroked his head.

He sighed at the caress, recognizing it as pure friendship. "I keep kicking myself for not raising an objection."

"Absolutely nobody is blaming you."

"That's true. I'm blaming me, and I feel like a nobody."

"Hey…"

"I know. I'm getting over it. The guilt is disappearing. But the sadness…"

Jada kissed the top of his head and went back to her chair, commenting as she did, "Your laughter today, it was very nice to hear."

Charles smiled at the memory, his eyes still closed. "Abit and Oona, they are such bundles of energy. I still haven't figured out exactly what they were proposing."

"Oh haven't you?" Jada smiled too. Earlier this afternoon, the seven of them had been playing a pickup game of football outside in the park. Jada and Lynn as goalie had been on Charles' team, playing against Abit, Oona and Mandy as goalie. Thara was acting as the sole referee.

Jada had pulled Lynn out of position and then kicked a perfect pass to Charles. Abit and Oona were near him but were out of position to do anything legal that would stop Charles from scoring a goal. So they tackled him, and then did something so blatantly unsportsmanlike (as well as unladylike), that Thara blushed and turned the other way and pretended she didn't see anything.

And now Charles was sitting in his chair, thinking of Jada's last question and reminiscing about being ambushed by two very attractive and athletic women. "Yeah," he admitted, "I guess maybe I have. It feels like such an honor Jada. This is so completely different than the shit we were running at Black Mall. I look back and it seems inconceivable I was raping Mandy." He paused and whispered, "How could I do such a thing?"

Jada sighed. "I see you with Mandy now. She's not holding any grudges." Jada added a playful smile. "Just the opposite in fact."

"I know. We've done a lot of talking. And I know Mandy been doing a lot of talking with Oona and Abit. Probably the four of us should get together and talk about where all this is heading."

A moment of silence followed. Jada took the time to finish her milk and then she changed topics. "Akiko called me earlier today."

"Hmm?"

"Akiko wanted my opinion on something she wants to propose. She thought of this weeks ago, but she didn't want to say anything before Suvarna had a crack at getting us out of here."

"Akiko wants to try something dangerous?"

"Not exactly. Akiko is a truly humble person, in the good sense of the word. She didn't want to volunteer to be a hero before there was a real need for it."

Charles smiled. "Yeah, that sounds like Akiko all right, a very gentle soul. So what does she want to do?"

"Two years from now, Wobanakik years I mean, Akiko wants to volunteer to do the system reset. All of us here now could be at the entrance rooms and leave."

There was a long pause. "Wow," Charles whispered. "I guess that… what a sacrifice. Has she mentioned this to anybody else?"

Jada nodded. "To Ann. If it's successful, Ann will join Akiko for company. The two women will stay here for two years and then expect to be relieved by two new volunteers."

Charles sat for a while considering the gift. "Jada, we have got to find a better way out of here."

"Yep! That was my reaction too. Our vacation time is over! We need to be exploring and probing the perimeter, and not just the highlands, the deep forest too. I didn't want to run the risk before Suvarna had a chance to try activating the entrance elevator, but that's not an issue now."

Jada was pleased and not too surprised to see Charles looking positively happy. "You're exactly right Jada. And besides, we'd go crazy sitting around watching movies for the next two years!"

"Agreed. And we might get some extra help for our search. My husband offered to try to find weather balloons for us. He also has an idea of how to get helium from that engineering building in the Blue Mall area."

"Wow! You want us to become balloonists?!"

Jada laughed. "That would be something! But I was just thinking about sending some high-resolution cameras aloft, especially in the winter when the trees drop their leaves. If there's another building or structure down here, I want to find it."

Charles nodded. "It'll be nice to have a mission again."

"Yes. I hate being idle too. We'll kick around some ideas at the morning meeting." Jada got up and after a friendly knuckle-bump with Charles, she headed off to bed.

Chapter 79.

Ten days later.

Time: Thursday, May 14, 2019 2:03 AM

Aggie's eyes blinked open and her mind started to race. Today was the day! She looked at the clock and sighed. It was so early. Last night she was hoping to get a bit more sleep. But her bedroom now was at Blue Mall and it faced the northeast. Already the hint of a pink sunrise was on the horizon. Dawn was only a half hour away.

But there was still plenty of time for more sleep. She wasn't scheduled to have breakfast with Cassidy for another five hours. And their trip through the Green Mall trapdoor was even later in the morning. They were scheduled to depart at 10 AM.

All the different time periods, and everything was moving so fast. It was fun! Aggie thought the novelty might never wear off. On the surface they were at the end of week four in a six-week spring, at the Bee Park it was the end of week one of a three-week spring, and down at Wobanakik, Jada and her team were at the end of week four of a nine-week summer. The diversity was intriguing.

"Where was I one year ago in Bee Park time?" Aggie thought idly. "That would have been… December? Is that right? Yeah, I guess it is. No wait. January had thirty one days in it. Wow, what an incredibly huge number of days for a month to have." Aggie frowned slightly as she redid the calculation in her head. "Eighty-four days ago would have been January 3rd. What was I doing then? Biking with Maddy's Marauders I guess, that's what, locking down the spirals. Those were good times…"

She sighed. "No it wasn't. We were still grieving then over the loss of the Earth. But at least back then, we were still innocent. We didn't know yet that humanity's brutality had followed us to this planet."

Aggie turned and stretched out, giving herself one last opportunity to get back to sleep. May had been a productive month. Aggie had returned from the Bee Park six days ago after a successful boost, and the plants there now were growing and flowering at incredible rates. At this rate, there would soon be food and honey for more candidates, perhaps even before Team-5 finished their boost in another six days.

Aggie thought that was very desirable. The mental abilities were so vast it frightened her a bit. She now had the power to trap an unboosted mind into any dream she desired. Aggie didn't want to have that kind of power over her friends. It was uncomfortable to think of their society divided into haves and have-nots. And Aggie had noticed subtle changes in how the remaining people were with her, hints of shyness and a reluctance to link. Aggie didn't like it.

The only solution was for everybody to boost. If only there was some way to cover the Wobanakik folks too. Should the surface people try to transport the honey and veggies down to them? But what was the risk of boosting outside the Bee Park?

May had been a quiet month, a time of renewal and advancement. The census counter had remaining at 007:076 since the deaths of Brandi and Alfonso, stable as a bus, and Lucia, Tajana, and Paige had successfully completed their medical technician training a few days before becoming Team-5 at the Bee Park. Perhaps May would be their first month without a loss of human life. And everyone had his or her own Leophone now. They were even starting to build an inventory of spares. And Mark had a very ambitious project going for how to use the extra phones.

Almost everybody was involved, and they were using technology from many sources. The idea started in early May when Mark and Toshi were visiting the Hot Toys and Hobby Shop at the 25.1 kilometer mark of Black Mall. In the aviation section, they found some extremely lightweight model airplanes powered by the magical batteries.

Mark was looking for something that would fly a package consisting of a Leophone coupled to a high resolution video camera. Unfortunately the planes he found generated a lot of thrust but could not provide enough lift to carry the package. In a stroke of insight, Toshi commented that the airplanes were the functional opposite of the giant balloons in the nearby Weather Shoppe. The balloons could provide lift but no horizontal thrust. Why not try to combine the two technologies?

Toshi's simple idea was the birth of a new project. In the following week, almost everyone became involved in the design and construction of their first airborne probe. A needed breakthrough came when Whitney acting on a hunch asked Mark to return with her to the strange hemispherical engineering building in the Blue Mall area. Whitney remembered a storage room there filled with what looked like five-liter plastic jugs with some very fancy looking nozzles.

Their trip confirmed Whitney's memory had been correct, and they also found that cylindrical jugs would snap and lock into another nozzle extruding from the wall. By depressing the nozzle level they could increase the weight of the jug greatly, from 300 to 800 grams. Further testing revealed the jug had been filled with a half kilo of helium.

And not just ordinary helium. Experiments back home showed the meter-radius weather balloons had over four kilograms of net lift when filled with the strange gas, provided the gas from the jug was allowed to warm up. It was coming out of the nozzle super cold, even though the jug was neutral to the touch in terms of temperature.

Mark guessed the gas must be the light isotope helium-3 to create so much lift, and Suvarna from the Bee Park made the startling guess that the jug held not pressurized helium but liquid helium. Squeezing the valve lever opened a tiny pathway for heat to reach the liquid which would vaporize the He3 instantly. Careful observation confirmed that micro crystals of frozen air could be seen coming out of the nozzle with the gas.

The design of the probe had become quite complicated. At the core of controlling the probe was a Leophone used both for operational control and to transmit video back home. The weather balloon was on top of course, mounted to a carriage that held the jug of helium and a tiny but powerful spark heater that would let a controller add hot helium to the balloon. There was also a control to bleed helium out of the balloon when it was time to descend.

Underneath the helium jug and also attached to the carriage was the model airplane, and then finally at the bottom was a video camera that could be swiveled to point in any direction horizontal or lower. Total weight of the entire assembly (not including the weight of the balloon) was just under three kilograms.

Would it all work? The construction team was very optimistic and hoped to have a test flight before the summer solstice. The probes would be a huge benefit. It would allow them to explore faster and more safely and more completely. Through the Leophone, they could even have a two-way conversation with anyone they found.

Aggie sighed. Almost all the stars had disappeared from the eastern sky. But it was too early to get up. It would be disrespectful to Cassidy to be sleepy when they traveled through the trap door… Aggie's mind returned to their penny experiments over the last few days. A penny placed in the elevator would disappear, and then the trap door would not transport for one minute. The behavior was consistent with automated servos cleaning the carriage on the other end. Aggie and Cassidy had tried writing notes and asking the people on the other side to block their elevator door for a few minutes, but the delay always remained a stable one minute on their end.

And they had even sent a Leophone, one of the new ones that could handle the feed from a video camera. The video signal died immediately when the trapdoor closed. The audio line remained open but nothing could be heard. The conclusion seemed inescapable. There were no people immediately present at the other end.

Whitney made a dark correction, that there were no COOPERATIVE people present at the other end. But it still made sense to go. The evidence was clear. Seventeen women had passed through here, and they were all still alive. The Society needed to trust and assume they wanted to be found. So Aggie would follow with another open Leophone, and then Cassidy as soon as Aggie reported in.

Aggie turned away from the window and concentrated on slow deep breathing and pushing all analytic thoughts from her mind. She thought of her latest date with Mark. For a man multiply married, the guy could be so shy when it came to kissing goodnight! But would he still be Mark if he weren't so bashful around girls? Aggie smiled at the gentle memory and a short while later drifted into a light sleep.

Time: Thursday May 14, 2019 2:36 AM

The bright orange sunlight hit Douglas Meyers full in the face and he woke up refreshed and relaxed from his ten-hour sleep. The rest period was typical for him now. The nightmares of the previous weeks had at last been subdued.

Douglas stood up and stretched and then went to relieve himself in the grass adjacent to his overhang shelter. It was a strange grass. It turned a very pale green when he pissed on it, almost an off white, but he knew from experience it would recover in a few hours. Douglas had even thought about trying to eat it, his first day after leaving the home complex above Jacob's. But he broke a few blades and then sniffed the oily extract oozing from the breaks. His mind screamed poison at the pungent odor, and in the weeks following he never second-guessed his decision to take the grass permanently off the menu.

Ah, those first days. He had not even returned to calling himself Douglas then. He remembered crossing through the strange elevated maze with two backpacks which were then so full of food, and he remembered sensing the hidden drop under the foam with a walking stick. It wasn't too much of a bother. The pathway had a clear width of two and half meters. Walking its centerline was not a problem, and after a number of kilometers of winding paths he came to the opposite tower. The slide at the end was a challenge, but Diego like Chico was on the varsity wrestling team and in very good shape. He survived the slide with nothing worse than a stiff shoulder.

Diego spent the next several hours inspecting a great line of buildings from the outside. There were few doors, especially on the eastern side of the great southern line. He tried the doors as he passed. The doors on the eastern side would not open, while the doors on the western side would. But Diego remembered his experience with the old home complex. The perimeter doors would open from the inside only. Would the doors here open only from the outside? As one person, there was no way to test.

Diego had no desire to be trapped in a building. If he were going to die, it would be under the sun or stars. So he stayed out of the buildings, even though a biting-cold northern wind made the idea of entry enticing.

Late in the afternoon, about an hour before sunset and much to his astonishment, Diego saw a man waving frantically to him from the second floor of a building near the western end of the line. It was Jenaro, and he was obviously trapped. Jenaro alone? What had happened to Jessica, Hernando and Ricardo? Jenaro pantomimed his answers. Hernando was dead, murdered by Ricardo, and as far as Jenaro knew, Jessica was still with Ricardo. But Jenaro had managed to separate himself from them? Diego sensed that Jenaro was telling the truth. He was so eager to be rescued, he wasn't stopping to think up a lie.

And then Jenaro asked in sign language how Diego had freed himself from the dead-man switch. Diego shrugged and signaled it would be too difficult to explain without words, and he asked with his hands how he could get to Jenaro's position. Jenaro nodded happily and the two men spent the next ten minutes exchanging hand and arm signals as Jenaro went through the motions of what Diego would have to do to reach him. Go through the entrance door about three hundred meters to the east, then circle to the stairway, travel the second-floor corridor three hundred meters back to the west, and open the door that was trapping Jenaro. Jenaro was pleading for him to do it. As an incentive, Jenaro opened the backpacks he had with him and showed Diego they were full of food. Jenaro had almost all the food of Ricardo's team, and he motioned with his arms that he and Diego could share it.

Diego nodded and walked back east to the entrance door. He had already probed it, and the door slid open again without a problem as Diego pushed the command bar. But he still paused before going through. Did he really want Jenaro's company? The man was a hardcase and would be furious if Diego tried to hide his possession of Neto's gun. And knowing Jenaro, the man would insist on packing it, at least part of the time. Did Diego want that?

No! And the sharing of food was not an issue. Jenaro might have slightly more food than Diego, but he was a much bigger eater. If Jenaro were truly trapped, and Diego had no reason to doubt it, chances were Jenaro would be digging into Diego's supplies rather than vice versa. And finally…