Aggie remembered an old saying as she jumped. "W-8, 599, wall…" Home is where the heart is. "W-9, 151, wall…" Home was where she was loved. "W-10, 530, wall." Home! "W-11, 113, wall…" Aggie realized she wanted to go back. "W-12, 484, wall…" And she was working to do just that.
Five minutes later.
"Clicking to X-28, and… a door. Ta-da! Want to guess where I am Emily? I'll give you a hint if you want."
Aggie heard her friend laughing. "I'll take a wild guess," giggled Emily, "and say you're at the bottom of the barrel at carriage 673."
"My gosh, that was incredible! That's exactly right!"
Emily was laughing loudly. "I have a confession. We were keeping up with you on the reverse lookups. The only remaining possibility for the last jump size was 179, and your last jump was from base ring position 529, so you had to be at ring position 35 which is physical carriage 673."
"Oh… You know it feels kind of spooky, that I started at carriage 1 and ended at 673. Why was that Mark?"
"A complete fluke," he replied. "Remember you started your journey clicking A-3. Your trip didn't include A-1 and A-2, and regardless, finishing in the last physical zone is a complete fluke. Aggie?"
"Yeah?"
"The jump program will be in your phone in just a few seconds. While we're waiting, I also pulled up the density distribution we talked about. You hit 242 zones once, 132 zones twice, 32 zones three times, twelve zones four times, and four zones five times. And that means there were 251 zones you didn't hit at all. Did you notice that you never returned to zone one?"
"I sure did. A-1 and A-2 are still the only two tumbler codes we have eliminated." Aggie smiled. "But all that's about to change. So what do I jump now?"
"You tell me. Run Leophone program J0."
"Okay!" A few seconds passed by. "Hey, this is easy! I just typed 673 and 1 into the from and to fields, and it's telling me the ring position pair is 35 and 0, that I need a jump size of 638, and to set the tumblers at K-28…. And voila! I'm back at the top of the pyramid! Scratch K-28 from the list! Hey Mark?"
"Yeah Aggie?"
"What's the tumbler code that goes with A-1? A-1 is the minimum jump size, maybe the maximum jump size gets me out."
"Uh, all the rings are equivalent. This is going to be a fluke if it works. Jump A-1 and return on T-16."
Fifteen seconds passed by. "Nuts. Scratch T-16. I'm jumping on A-2 now."
"You'll need a return size of 170. That's E-12."
"…And I'm back at the top. Scratch E-12."
"Uh, Aggie?" asked Mark.
"Yeah?"
"It will be slightly easier to keep track of this if we work the pairs by jump sizes and not by tumbler codes. I've translated a second program for your Leophone. It's called J1 and it gives a table of 336 tumbler pairs. Your phone will get updates in real time as we eliminate the pairs. This way if we're cut off, you can finish the job yourself. You can update the table locally too if you have to. Download complete. Would you run J1 and test it?"
"Okay… Nice colors Mark, this is very helpful. I see you sorted the table by the jump size of the first code of each pair, and that the first row has both A-1 and T-16 colored green."
"Yep. Green means unbroken, yellow is unknown, and red will be used for the broken ring when we find it. Aggie, do you see that M-6 and L-22 are the next row on the list?"
"Uh huh, jump sizes of 2 and 671."
"That's what I'd like to test next. We'll just work our way down the list."
"And the colors will update in real time? Cool. Thanks again. One second, I'm curious… I just went to the bottom of the table, N-8 and B-5 with jump sizes of 336 and 337. And that refers to movement on the base ring."
"Absolutely. And the physical carriage numbers will be… everything. If we jump the complete table, you will have tested every carriage below the top of the pyramid. Aggie, we'll call out the tumbler pairs to you. All you have to do is click and push."
"Click and push, yeah. Let's get started," said Aggie. She glanced at the time on her Leophone. It was 4:31 PM.
"I'll just read you a pair of codes, out and returning. I'll wait for you to say done when you're back at the top of the pyramid. Don't be bashful about asking for repeats of the codes. This is going to be a bit boring."
"You're very sweet. I'm ready Mark."
"M-6, L-22."
More than thirty seconds passed by before Aggie said, "Done."
It was a bit longer than Mark would have hoped for, but he thought perhaps he underestimated the time it would take Aggie to spin the tumblers. "Now do L-22, M-6," he said.
"Huh?" said Aggie. "I just did that."
"Hmm? You jumped the pair twice? That fast?"
"Yep, fast fingers Aggie, that's me, frontwards and backwards, four jumps total. I start spinning the tumblers as soon as the door starts to open. This is definitely the way to do it because I don't have to change the tumblers before my third jump. I went out on L-22, back on M-6, then out again on M-6 and finally back on L-22. Two more rings eliminated from contention, right?"
"Yep. You are good Aggie. I'll read each pair just once and wait for your word. O-21, J-15."
"…Done."
"D-28, F-17."
"…Done. Hey wait!"
"You're out already?!" Mark exclaimed.
"No, it's not that. Emily?"
"Yo!"
"What will I be able to do with the tumblers after I jump the broken link?"
There was a pregnant pause. "Yeah, that's an interesting question. I'm going to guess the tumblers will remain locked. Be sure to take everything with you as you leave the carriage. I suspect the carriage will close and not let you back in."
"Okay. Please proceed Mark."
"M-3, R-3."
"…Done."
"R-8, D-19."
"…Done."
"F-5, G-21."
Aggie steeled herself to concentrate, focusing her mind on the repetitive task and determined to enter every tumbler code correctly. "Done."
"V-21, E-24."
As she worked, Aggie took a second to flash her eyes at the colored list that was updating on her Leophone. "Done."
"S-4, E-25."
336 pairs! Mark was right. This was going to get a bit boring. "Done."
"J-4, K-25."
Unless she got lucky… "Done."
"R-26, U-12."
…or clever. "Done. Say Mark?"
"Yeah?"
"Why don't you resort the remaining list by the tumbler letter of the first code? It'll save me an extra spin at the start."
"Wow, I should have thought of that. Great idea. One second.. The done pairs will still be on top. You'll see the new list on your J1 table… Hey Aggie, while I'm doing this, jump K-21 and then R-20. We already know K-21 is unbroken."
Right. I remember… Done. R-20 is also unbroken."
"Okay, the list is resorted. I also did a secondary sort on the right tumbler for the first pair. It'll cut down on the distance you have to spin the second dial. Go with A-3, H-23."
"…Done."
"A-13, G-25."
"…Done."
"A-14, S-22."
"Ah, this is easy. I see what you mean. Thanks Mark. …Done."
"A-17, V-19."
"…Done."
"A-18, B-20."
And the methodical work continued.
Chapter 85.
The display on Aggie's Leophone at the end of Chapter 84, showing the top 30 pairs on the jump list. Jump size refers to number of nodes on the base ring. Total length of list is 336 pairs. Mark organized the pairs so that the jump out of the top of the pyramid had a jump size of 1 to 336 on the base ring, and the return jump had the mirror size of 672 to 337.
Chapter 86.
Time: Thursday, May 14, 2019 5:14 PM
Aggie was totally focused, Aggie was on her game, Aggie was in THE ZONE. Ashley was currently working as her teammate and calling out the codes, and Aggie was speed jumping through the ring-pair list. She was averaging under 30 seconds per pair, and there were many pairs that she double jumped in 24 seconds, the theoretical minimum. When the pair of codes shared the same first-tumbler or second-tumbler setting, Aggie could consistently eliminate the pair with minimum time.
"G-6."
0 to 3 seconds: Door opening in zone 1 (the top of the pyramid). Ashley would have already called out the x for the new (x,y) pair of tumbler settings, and usually getting to the new x involved a small increment on the second tumbler. Aggie would set and push the close button before the door fully opened, saying the word "go" as she pushed.
"Go."
3 to 6 seconds: With the door closing and the tumblers locked at x, Ashley would speak the y code of the current (x,y) pair after hearing Aggie say go.
"R-9."
6 to 9 seconds: With the door opening at destination x, Aggie would spin the two freed tumblers to code y and push the close button.
9 to 12 seconds: With the door closing, Aggie would take a breath and rest.
12 to 15 seconds: With the door opening back at zone 1, Aggie would push the close button and jump the y code a second time, saying the word go again.
"Go.'
15 to 18 seconds: With the door closing, Aggie would take another breath as Ashley repeated the x code.
"G-6."
18 to 21 seconds: With the door opening at destination y, Aggie would reset the tumblers to code x and say go as she pushed the close button.
"Go."
21 to 24 seconds: With the door closing, tumblers locked and the carriage about to jump to zone 1, Ashley would speak the x code of the next (x,y) pair.
"G-7."
"…Go."
"S-19."
"…Go."
"G-7."
"…Go."
"And stop," said Ashley.
Aggie blinked. "And stop?"
"Well, I guess you can set the tumblers to G-10 if you want, but don't jump. Fatima asked that you take a mini-break after a hundred pairs, and the way she said it, it sounded like an order."
"She said that? I…" Aggie took a deep breath and sighed. "I think that's probably a good idea. My throat's a little dry." Aggie stretched her arms and twisted her hips back and forth before taking a big swallow out of her canteen. Then she looked at the time on her Leophone and amused herself by bringing up the display of the J1 table. "Wow, you're right, a hundred pairs. Look at all the green rows. Progress is being made."
"I'll say. You did the last five pairs in two minutes flat. Aren't your fingers getting tired?"
Aggie took another swallow. "A little stiff maybe. I'll be okay."
"Hungry? Maybe you should eat something."
Aggie thought about the suggestion for a moment and then rejected it. "I didn't have much of a lunch, just a snack bar, but I just don't feel hungry." She turned and stared out the door of the carriage and through the transparent walls at the top of the pyramid. "It just feels like the dead of night. It feels as if I should be asleep."
Ashley countered, "Ten weeks ago all of us were eating our dinners at night."
"Yeah, I know. But I still don't feel hungry now. I think the snow has stopped by the way, it's a little hard to tell. The carriage is lit and it's still dark outside."
"Want to walk around the carriage, stretch your legs?"
Aggie took a third big swallow on her canteen and then returned it to her backpack, doing some deep knee bends for a while but deciding not to leave the carriage. She finally replied to Ashley. "I want to get back to jumping. I have this vague feeling about a closing window of opportunity."
"What do you mean?"
"I can't explain it Ashley. It's just a hunch. I have the ability to get out of here now and the hairs on the back of my neck are up. My window to leave is open now, but what if it closes? Maybe it's just the silence here, I don't know." Aggie took a final stretch, standing on tip-toes and trying to reach as high with her fingertips as she could. Then she waved her arms back and forth several times and asked, "All set to continue?"
"Wow, that was a really short break. Your sure?"
Aggie turned back to face the tumblers and answered by saying, "Pressing G-10."
Time: Thursday May 14, 2019 6 PM
"And stop."
"Huh? Again?"
"You've completed two hundred pairs Aggie." Ashley waited for a response. The line remained silent.
"You can click right tumbler for O-14 if you want." Ashley leaned back in her chair at the Hilton and sighed. Aggie was one determined speed demon with this job. Her last pair had been particularly easy, O-11, O-3, but it almost didn't matter anymore. Aggie was nailing everything and had searched the last hundred pairs in less than forty-two minutes.
There was still no response on the line, and it wasn't like Aggie to pout. "Hey Aggie, you okay?" Still no response. Ashley felt a spasm of worry and she waved her arms to the other people in the room that there might be a problem.
And then a hoarse voice came from the network. "My God, it's dawn now." And then an incredulous whisper, "Where am I?!"
Twenty minutes later…
"Try it again Aggie," Akiko said from her console at the Hilton.
"I'm getting green board for video now!" replied Aggie in an exciting tone of voice and she stared at a diagnostic menu on her Leophone. Connected to her phone was a somewhat bulky video camera with a large telephoto lens. Aggie had originally objected to carrying it, but now she was very glad she was overruled. "Are you receiving me?"
"Yes!" replied Akiko. "The high bandwidth channel is working. Resolution is excellent."
"Marvelous! I'll take a walking tour around the perimeter of the carriage. You'll get a panoramic view." Aggie slowed walked the four-meter lengths of each side of her hexagonal room. The views outside were nothing less than spectacular.
Her great pyramid was situated at the saddle point of a stunning mountain landscape. To the east and west, great snow-covered mountains rose more than three thousand meters above her head. To the north of the eastern range, a great and familiar orange-looking sun was cresting the horizon. And further north as well as south, the ground sloped down and down and down. It seemed to go on forever, and Aggie thought she could see several distinct ecosystems.
It was the northern slope that definitely had the more gentle incline, and Aggie guessed the snow fields ran for five kilometers before changing into high meadows. Much further down the meadows transformed into forest, and Aggie could see sparkling orange sunlight reflecting from the rivers formed by the massive snow fields of the high mountains. The forests extended as far as the eye could see, all the way to the northern horizon.
And to the south, the direction the storm had blown in from last night, the view was profoundly distinct. It was a land of shadows, shielded from the northern sun by the great mountains. The southern slopes were steeper yet the snowfields were far more extensive. Even the vegetation of the great southern forests looked different, more purplish perhaps, though it was difficult to be sure. The northern forests were approaching their summer and bursting with colors and blue flowing rivers. By comparison, the southern forests seemed to be bedding down for a short winter's sleep.
"It's Africa, isn't it?" whispered Aggie as she walked. She was referring to the largest continent on their planet, a great equatorial continent that completely circumnavigated the globe. "I'm either here for real or this is one hell of a simulation!"
"It's hard to imagine a simulation with this kind of detail," commented Lynn from Manhattan. Akiko was duplicating the video feed on her library console.
"It's not a simulation," Mark commented from the Red Mall library. "I've just found the hexagon in the satellite image database."
"So fast?" asked Fatima from the Hilton. "You just started a few minutes ago."
"I knew exactly where look. Aggie, as close as I can measure and that's within a few meters, the top of your pyramid lies directly on this planet's equator. You're also exactly 180-degrees opposite longitude from Hex Hall."
Aggie started to laugh nervously. "I knew it!" She forced herself to calm down. "How high am I?"
"One second and I'll let you know," Mark replied. "I can pick that up in the radar files… Okay, here we are. The base of your pyramid is very close to 5000 meters exactly, so add about another four meters times thirty-six for where you are now."
"Wow," whispered Aggie. "Is it breathable outside?"
"Oh yeah. It would be a bit of a shock if you're not used to it though. Sea level pressure here is almost exactly Earth's value, and the air here is slightly richer in oxygen, a few tenths of a percent…" Mark typed rapidly for a moment. "The two peaks to your east and west are both above 8,000 meters. That would be a severe environment for breathing. Believe it or not Aggie, your pyramid is one of the lowest spots on the equator. It's rare for the ridgeline to dip down that low."
"Mark," interjected Fatima, "I thought you searched this planet for large buildings."
"I did! And I failed to find this. What can I say? I coded my search parameters to look for images with long linear walls. This pyramid, it looks like a big pile of kid building blocks on the imagery. There are no straight lines longer than four meters. The way I wrote my code, it didn't recognize what I was looking at."
Fatima sighed. "This is huge. We thought the world would come later. We thought we had years to stay within our walls before venturing forth. But with a jump-site to another continent… And perhaps jump-sites to the other continents as well…"
"I wouldn't be surprised," Emily replied slowly. "Mark, I'll work with you later. We'll develop more sophisticated algorithms. Back in Vermont, I just finished a course called Discrete Visual Analysis. We spent most of the semester on image processing and recognition."
"Aggie, stop," Alison called out. "Back up a bit. There! Zoom in. What is that?" She was referring to something several kilometers away on the southern slope.
"It looks like a hexagonal building," commented Heather. Suddenly recognition hit her. "It's a ski lodge! My God, look at the slopes! They look natural, and some of them would be for expert skiers only, but do you see how many paths circle around and lead to the building."
"Oh, I don't know," said Heather. "I've skied a lot, but that central path, it would be like skiing down an elevator shaft!" She paused and then added, "But for an Olympic athlete, yeah maybe, just maybe humanly possible. I'd never have the guts though."
"I wouldn't mind trying the northern slopes six months from now," commented Aggie. "Kilometers of long bunny slopes, just my speed." She started to laugh. "And no chair lifts! No rope tows! What do you want to bet that building is a jump transfer station?! Mark! Could this entire pyramid be one gigantic ski lodge?"
He was silent for a moment and then commented. "I see several more small buildings, and not just down slope. To the east and west, small buildings at 500-meter elevation intervals, up to 7000 meters. That I think would be dangerously thin air."
Aggie spoke up. "But my ears didn't pop when I got here. Why?"
Mark countered with his own question. "Do they pop when you jump from the ground floor to the top?"
"No. Should they?"
"Well, an instantaneous change in pressure of a 140 meters, yeah, I would think you'd feel something. My guess is each floor is individually pressurized, and since your ears didn't pop when you got there…"
Aggie's eyes blinked open. "I'm as sea-level pressure now?"
"Yeah, I would guess. Be careful about how you leave the building. I would think there'd have to be some sort of airlock."
Another voice came over the bridge. "Aggie, this is Carla over in White Mall."
"Hi Carla."
"Hi Aggie. Tom and Suvarna and I were just sitting down to dinner. We were listening to you testing the jump pairs with Ashley."
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