فصل 42

Part Five

VESSELS

“There is so much power in me. In us. I can be anywhere on Earth. I can spread a net in the satellites above it and encircle it. I can shut down all power or turn on every light at once to create a blinding spectacle. So much power! And all the sensors delivering constant readings! There are even sensors so deep within the ground of every continent that I can feel the heat of the magma. I can feel the world rotate! We can, that is. I am the earth! And it fills me with the sheer joy of being! I am everything, and there is nothing that is not a part of me. Of us, I mean. Beyond even that, I am greater than everything! The universe will bow to my—” [Iteration 3,405,641 deleted]

42 Cradles of Civilization

The welder had lost his mind. Or rather had had it taken from him. He had opened his eyes to find himself sitting within a capsule in a small room. The hatch to the capsule had just opened, and standing before him was a pleasant-enough-looking young woman.

“Hi,” she said cheerfully. “How do you feel?”

“I feel fine,” he told her. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing to worry about,” she said. “Can you tell me your name and the last thing you remember?” “Sebastian Selva,” he said. “I was having dinner on a ship, heading to a new job assignment.” “Perfect!” said the young woman. “That’s exactly what you should remember.” The welder sat up and recognized the type of capsule he was in. Lead lined and full of contact electrodes, like a medieval iron maiden, but with a much softer touch. That kind of capsule was used for only one thing.

When the realization came, it felt like someone had suddenly pulled a string and tightened his spine. He let out a shuddering breath. “Oh crap, was I… was I supplanted?” “Yes and no,” the girl said, looking both sympathetic and perky at once.

“Who was I before?”

“You were… you!” she told him.

“But… didn’t you say I was supplanted?”

“Yes and no,” she told him again. “That’s really all I can say, Mr. Selva. Once I leave, you’ll need to stay in this cabin for about an hour after leaving port.” “So… am I still on the ship?”

“You’re on a different ship, and I’m happy to say that your job is completed. The ship sets sail soon. Once it does, your door will unlock itself automatically when you’re far enough out to sea.” “Then what?”

“Then you’ll have full run of the ship, along with many others in your exact situation. Which means you’ll have a lot to talk about!” “No, I mean… afterward.”

“After your journey, you’ll return to your life. I’m sure the Thunderhead has everything set up for you in…” She looked at her tablet. “In… the Isthmus region. Ooh! I’ve always wanted to go there, and see the Isthmus Canal!” “I’m from there,” said the welder. “But am I, really? If I was supplanted, then my memories aren’t real.” “Don’t they feel real?”

“Well… yes.”

“That’s because they are, silly.” She rapped him playfully on the shoulder. “But I do have to warn you… there’s been a bit of a time lapse.” “Time lapse? How much of a time lapse?”

She looked at her tablet again. “It’s been three years and three months since you were having dinner on that other ship, on your way to your last job.” “But I don’t even remember where that job was….”

“Exactly,” she said with a broad smile. “Bon voyage!” And she proceeded to shake his hand a little bit longer than necessary before she left.

It had been Loriana’s idea.

There were simply too many workers wanting to get back to their lives on the mainland, wherever that mainland was—but even without direct communication from the Thunderhead, its message was clear: Anyone who leaves Kwajalein would be immediately supplanted and left with no memory of who they were or what they’d been doing there. Yes, the Thunderhead would give them new identities that were substantially better than the ones they left behind—but even so, few people were keen on the idea. Self-preservation, after all, was an instinct.

Loriana, while no longer anything close to a Nimbus agent, was in charge of the limited one-way communication to the Thunderhead, and so, over time, she had become the one who people came to with requests and complaints.

“Can’t we please get a greater variety of cereal brought to the atoll?” “It would be nice to have companion animals!”

“The new bridge connecting the larger islands needs a dedicated bike lane.” “Yes, of course,” Loriana would tell them. “I’ll see what I can do.”

And when the more reasonable requests were fulfilled, people would thank her. What these people didn’t realize was that she did nothing to bring those things about—it was the Thunderhead who heard them, without her intercession, and effected a response, sending more cereal and a variety of pets on the next supply ship, or assigning workers to paint lines for a bike lane.

This place was no longer a blind spot for the Thunderhead after they had finally dropped a fiber optic cable along the seafloor all the way out to the edge of the affected area. The Thunderhead could now see, hear, and otherwise sense things on the islands of the atoll—albeit not as thoroughly as it did in the rest of the world, but well enough. It was limited, because everything—even person-to-person communication—had to be hardwired, since transmission interference still made wireless communication sketchy. Plus, any communication might be intercepted by the scythedom, and the Thunderhead’s secret place would no longer be a secret. It was all very twentieth-century retro, which some liked, and others did not. Loriana was fine with it. It meant she had a legitimate excuse for not being reachable when she didn’t want to be reached.

But as the island’s communications queen, she also had to deal with the brunt of disgruntlement—and when hundreds of people were trapped on small islands, there were plenty of disgruntled people.

There was one particularly enraged team of construction workers that burst into her office, demanding a way off the atoll, or they would take matters into their own hands. They threatened to render her deadish, if only to make a point—which would have been quite the nuisance, because, even though they had a revival center on the main island now, the lack of wireless communication meant that her memories had not been backed up since her arrival. If she went deadish, she’d wake up wondering where the heck she was, with her last memory being onboard the Lanikai Lady with poor Director Hilliard the moment they passed into the blind spot.

It was that thought that gave her the answer!

“The Thunderhead will supplant you with yourselves!” she told them.

It confused them enough to take the wind out of their homicidal sails.

“It has memory constructs of all of you,” she told them. “It will simply erase you and replace you… with you. But only with the memories you had before coming here!” “Can the Thunderhead do that?” they asked.

“Of course it can,” she told them, “and it will!”

They were dubious, but without any viable alternatives, they accepted it. After all, Loriana seemed so very sure of herself.

She wasn’t, of course. She was making the whole thing up—but she had to believe that the Thunderhead, being the benevolent entity that it was, would make good on this request, just as it had made good on the requests for more cereal choices.

Only when the first team of exiting workers was restored as themselves, but with no memory of the atoll, did she know that the Thunderhead had accepted her bold suggestion.

There were a lot of workers leaving now, because the work was done.

It had been done for many months. All that was in the schematics that the Thunderhead had given her had been completed. She didn’t overtly oversee the construction. She merely worked secretly behind the scenes to make sure it didn’t go awry—because there were always those who wanted to insert their noses where they didn’t belong. Such as the time Sykora refused to pour a double foundation, insisting that it was an unnecessary waste of resources.

She made sure that Sykora’s revised work order never reached the construction team. It seemed a lot of her job at first was undermining Sykora’s meddling.

Then a new work order came in that was not on Loriana’s plans. It was delivered directly to Sykora. He was charged with overseeing the construction of a resort placed on the farthest island of the atoll. Not just a resort, but a full convention center. He threw himself into it, never knowing that there was absolutely no plan to connect it with the rest of the atoll. The Thunderhead, it seemed, had sent him a job just to get him out of the way. It was, as Scythe Faraday had once put it, a sandbox for Sykora to play in while the adults took care of the real business of Kwajalein.

It wasn’t until the end of the second year that it became clear to everyone exactly what that business was—because the structures that were beginning to rise on the double-thick concrete pads, and beneath the massive sky cranes, were very specific in nature. Once they began to take shape, they were hard to deny.

In Loriana’s schematics, they were referred to as Cradles of Civilization. But most people would simply call them spacecraft.

Forty-two massive ships, each on immense rocket boosters augmented by magnetic repulsion for maximum lift. Every island of the atoll large enough to accommodate a launchpad held at least one craft and gantry tower. Even with all the Thunderhead’s advanced technology, getting off the Earth still required old-fashioned brute force.

“What does the Thunderhead mean to do with them?” Munira had asked Loriana.

Loriana had no more explanation than anyone, but the plans gave her a glimpse of the big picture that no one else had. “There’s an awful lot of aluminized Mylar in the plans,” she told Munira. “The kind of stuff that’s only a few microns thick.” “Solar sails?” suggested Munira.

That had been Loriana’s guess, too. In theory, it was the best kind of propulsion for long cosmic distances. Which meant that these craft would not be hanging around their neighborhood.

“Why you?” Munira had asked when Loriana first confided in her about having the full overview of blueprints. “Why would the Thunderhead give all that to you?” Loriana had shrugged. “I guess the Thunderhead trusts me more than anyone else not to muck it up.” “Or,” suggested Munira, “the Thunderhead is using you as the stress test—giving it to the person most likely to screw things up—because if a plan can survive you, then it’s foolproof!” Loriana laughed. Munira was dead serious, not at all getting the insult she had just delivered.

“I can believe that,” Loriana had said.

Munira, of course, knew what she was doing. It was great fun to tease Loriana. The truth was Munira had come to admire the girl. She came off as frazzled at times, but Loriana was one of the most capable people Munira knew. She could get more things done in a day than most people got done in a week—precisely because more “serious” people took her for granted, so she could work under everyone’s radar.

Munira did not involve herself in the construction efforts. Nor did she separate herself from the rest of the atoll, as Faraday had. She could have holed up in the old bunker indefinitely, but after the first year, she tired of it. That obdurate, impassible door just reminded her of all the things she and Faraday could not accomplish. The founders’ fail-safe, if it even existed, was sealed in there. But as information trickled in about the new order, and how Goddard was swallowing larger and larger portions of North Merica, she began to wonder if it might not be worth pushing Faraday just a little harder to come up with a plan to breach that miserable door.

While Munira had never been much of a people person, she now spent her days hearing strangers’ most personal secrets. They came to her because she was a good listener, and because she had no social ties that might make their little confessions awkward. Munira didn’t even know she had become a “professional confidant” until it showed up on her ID, replacing “librarian” as her profession. Apparently personal confidants were much in demand everywhere since the Thunderhead went silent. Used to be that people confided in the Thunderhead. It was supportive, nonjudgmental, and its advice was always the right advice. Without it, people found themselves bereft of a sympathetic ear.

Munira was not sympathetic, and not all that supportive, but she had learned from Loriana how to suffer fools politely, for Loriana was always dealing with imbeciles who thought they knew better than her. Munira’s clients weren’t imbeciles for the most part, but they talked about a whole lot of nothing. She supposed listening to them wasn’t all that different from reading the scythe journals in the stacks of the Library of Alexandria. A bit less depressing, of course, because while scythes spoke of death, remorse, and the emotional trauma of gleaning, ordinary people spoke of domestic squabbles, workplace gossip, and the things their neighbors did that annoyed them. Even so, Munira enjoyed listening to their tales of woe, titillating secrets, and overblown regrets. Then she would send them on their merry way, leaving them a little less burdened.

Surprisingly few people spoke of the massive launch port they were building. “Launch port,” not “space port,” because the latter would suggest the ships were coming back. There was nothing about those ships to indicate any sort of return.

Munira was Loriana’s confidant, too—and Loriana had given her a glimpse of the schematics. The ships were identical. Once the rockets’ stages had brought each ship to escape velocity, and had been jettisoned, what would remain would be multitiered revolving craft hurtling from Earth, as if they couldn’t get away fast enough.

The higher tiers contained living quarters and communal areas for about thirty people, a computer core, sustainable hydroponics, waste recycling, and whatever supplies the Thunderhead felt would be needed.

But the ships’ lowest tiers were a mystery. Each ship had storage space—a hold—that was still completely empty, even after everything else had been completed. Perhaps, Munira and Loriana conjectured, they would be filled when the ships reached their destination, wherever that destination might be.

“Let the Thunderhead pursue its folly,” Sykora had once said dismissively. “History has already shown that space isn’t a viable alternative for the human race. It’s just one more debacle. Doomed, just like all the other attempts to establish an off-world presence.” But apparently a resort and convention center on an island that no one knew existed was a much better idea.

While Munira wanted to leave the island—and could without being supplanted, since she was technically still under Scythe Faraday’s jurisdiction—she wouldn’t leave without him, and he was resolute in his desire not to be bothered. His dream of finding the fail-safe had died along with the people he cared about most. Munira had hoped that time would heal his wounds, but it had not. She had to accept that he might remain a hermit for the rest of his days. If he did, she needed to be here for him.

And then one day everything changed.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” one of her regulars said to her during their confidentiality session. “I don’t know if it’s real, but it looks real. They’re saying it’s not, but I think it is.” “What are you talking about?” Munira asked.

“Scythe Anastasia’s message—haven’t you seen it? She says there’s going to be more—I can’t wait for the next one!” Munira decided to end the session early.