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= META 4 CITY =

a DarkSF Novel

by John Argo

Page 23.

Chapter 17

The senior lead in the Bit Cave was Wally, a jovial software engineer whose easy-going smile softened his hard, probing eyes.

Lindy confided to Tedda: "He and I were an item on and off. It's been off for some time now, but we're still friends."

"Has there been anyone else?" Tedda asked casually.

Lindy gave her a strange glance that told her there wouldn't be anyone other than Wally.

In the subsequent days, as Tedda and Lindy walked back and forth from the Bit Cave to the Fortress where they lived, Wally and his staff made them feel at home.

"I see why you like to get away from the Fortress and come here," Tedda said on one of the first nights as they walked back. It was a damp, windy night with twigs and leaves blowing about. The air smelled of wet rubber and stale coal smoke.

"It keeps me from going insane," Lindy admitted. "Locked up forever, with no end in sight, they really keep your mind engaged."

Tedda asked cautiously: "Lindy, do you ever, you know, get to see a man now and then?"

"Oh sure," Lindy said guardedly. "You learn to get yours when you can, when you feel like it, when it's safe."

"How do you know it's safe?"

"Experience," Lindy said with a sidelong glance. "Until you have it, avoid it, for your own good."

Tedda welcomed the pattern that ensued, in which she felt safe, and there was almost a normalcy in the regularity of it. By day, she would sleep into the late morning hours. Lindy was usually up a little earlier, and would come in with two metal cups of coffee to wake her. The cups were plain soldier's tins, brought from a field kitchen run by two huge NCOs with walrus mustaches, knee boots, dirty green trousers, and stained long-john tops. As grungy as the two men looked, their food was always superb. Lindy, who had always already eaten, would bring for Tedda a plain, heavy ceramic plate the color of egg shells, on which sat a nice warm hunk of brownish farm bread. On the bread, a melted pat of sweet butter, and on that one fried egg with the yolk still partially runny and the white edges browned and folded over to fit on the bread. With that came two or three thick slices of crisp bacon, and a few slices of juicy tomato. As Lindy explained, the farm on the northern end of the fortress was self-sufficient and worked by veterans forced from the conflict by wounds. Tedda would eat this wonderful breakfast sitting by a small table in their bedroom, overlooking green trees and the grassy field below. Sometimes, men in long overcoats rode by on horses, with sabers and lances, but slung over their backs also automatic assault rifles. Sometimes the officer on the huge white horse rode with them. The rain would sleet down and the men looked as tolerant and enduring as the horses who trudged in powerful lunges. It was the way the whole fatherland trudged in endless war, like the endless sleet, like the endless bacon that appeared no matter how hard the enemy attacked the city's shields during the night.

During the afternoons, Tedda and Lindy would walk in the fresh air and explore the upper fortress. Tedda gradually learned the lay of it, though it was as complex as the snowflake designs of Vauban. There weren't massed assaults anymore these days, as far as Watka knew when she asked him about it and he spat to his side while pondering an answer. The walls, when she looked down 30 meters to the green forest and swamps below, had lost their naked threat. The even gray stones were now etched with the round sores of lichens, and their crevices thickly padded with moss. Insects luxuriated over the yellows and whites of the lichens. Swarms of insects could be heard droning over the foamy and sewage-tainted moat water amid grotesque water lilies. At one place, a broken cast-iron pipe protruded a forearm's length beyond mid-wall, and a steady gray waterfall splattered down on a mossy parabola further down the wall's slope.

Beyond the swamps and parks lay a distant city skyline. Most of it was successfully shielded by the modern devices invented by those who ate on linen and silver in the university dining halls. A few of the buildings had taken hits. Amid the hundred or more skyscrapers looming amid a humid marine layer of mist and fog, a few looked ragged and blasted along the top, with girders sticking out this way and that way like toothpicks rusting in raw air flow and whitened with bird dung.

On the other side of the fortress, the jewel of the university lay, with its mishmash of neo-Gothic bulwarks and towers amid primly puritanical modern cubes and other sections with splashy, colorful Mediterranean fantasies tending to curves rather than straight lines. Far beyond that, more skyscrapers, more city, more occasional blasted high-rises.

Sometimes the shields guarding the city shimmered in rainbow colors in the distant sky. Eventually, Amy realized that never once had she seen the naked sun itself. Why would that be? Watka explained, spitting to one side, that an ocean lay nearby, and the city was usually engulfed in its marine layer, which formed as moist, warmer sea air blended with the cooler night air from the desert inland, causing condensation. Lindy explained further that as air cools, it can hold less moisture, and so sheds it in the form of precipitation. The city air was almost constantly in the throes of condensation. Like the endless interplay between West Gotha and East Gotha, the air in the city knew neither peace nor rest.

Atop the northern fortress, some eight acres contained not only the military hospital and a huge administrative and digital facility, but sizeable farms, stables, and even an artillery range that blazed away on Saturday mornings.

In the evening, Tedda and Lindy would avoid the beauty queens of the dormitory, and take their meal in an inoffensive little coffee shop slash grocery market in a section of the campus with narrow cobblestone streets and many little shops. This was the Old Town, with its tiny leaded windows and stone buildings. Some of the windows were improbably narrow, others decorative with ogive points at the top. Gargoyles spouted rainwater on street corners, and toward evening, iron-banded lanterns cast their orange light beside major doorways.

In the Bit Cave, Wally walked Tedda through their project. Lindy worked primarily on chemistry-related services in the Compounds section in a nearby room. Wally placed Tedda in an empty cubicle whose previous occupant, he told her, had died from complications of a battle wound. Tedda didn't ask further; it was considered impolite.

Wally was a large, overweight man who often strode about holding a bottle of soda in one hand and a candy bar in the other. The inactivity of his job, and its stresses, would probably kill him at an early age. At the moment, he was a vigorous, funny fellow of 30 with a wife and two children in an apartment down in the southern city. He seemed successful, happy, and well-adjusted. He did, also, have that hard look in his gray eyes.

The Bit Cave people worked in their island of cubicles all packed together, oddly, for the huge open expanse of the former hangar. Tedda asked Wally about that during her introductory tour.

He laughed. "Yeah, the answer is simple. See that pillar there, and there, and there? Those are heat radiators. It gets cold in here. The hangar is almost large enough to have its own weather. At one time, part of the roof on that end"(he pointed southward)"collapsed during an aerial attack on the city below, and we had clouds drifting through here. Sometimes it even drizzled on us, making the papers on our desks curl. We all had colds, and mold started growing on the cubicle walls. The fatherland patched the roof and fixed that, but it's still damn drafty at times. The best they could do, under wartime conditions, was scare up these four heat pillars and keep our cubicles tightly bunched."

He led her to a roped off area, beyond which the darkness shimmered with stray lights, and crackled with excess energy discharging into the air. "Did they explain what we are working on?"

"Nobody has explained anything to me at all," Tedda told him.

"Figures. Okay, this is a top secret data warehousing project that has run into some unforeseen problems of the highest order. We'll get to that in time. For now, though, I want you to know that once you step beyond these ropes"(he loosened them, thick red ropes on stainless steel poles, like at the movies)"you are entering a high-energy zone with special hazards." He picked up a half-eaten banana lying on a table, and tossed it through the air. It exploded in smoke and dripping rainbow-light before vanishing an instant later. "It's very important, therefore, to enter the warehousing zone through the portal, which is here. It's also known as a step-down collar."

He led her down the middle of a long pathway about ten feet across, delineated only by long strips of baby-blue masking tape, four inches wide. The masking tape path led from the carpeted area of the cubicles toward where, in a normal high school auditorium, the stage would be—and perhaps was, until this place was preempted for government research. Now there was no stage visible. Nothing was visible at all, just that opaque smoky fog that masked the far wall.

"Before we go in there," Wally said, "just be aware you'll feel a little queasy passing through. That's your molecules compressing as the energy levels at the subatomic level are stepped downward several quanta."

The question she asked rose up like a bubble from some deep murky place in her memory: "So this takes us through a barrier?"

"If you will," Wally said kneading fat brownish fingers together while he gazed thoughtfully at some blackboard in his mind. "On the other hand, it's also a threshold. Okay, let me try and explain from the start before we go any further. This entire project grew out of an academic paper at the university, regarding information storage, and then object storage. That, in turn, grew out of a project looking for ways to compress data, which originally grew out of a very abstract mathematical paper on number theory. I'm skipping a lot of steps here, so I can get to the gist of it. The author of the paper was researching, for the War Department, laboratory experiments that lie between the realms of physics, chemistry, computer science, and so forth. At the end of this trail lay some very esoteric and fundamental studies on moving energy around, so that the natural quantum shells of atoms moved more closely together. This in turn affected the space around the objects, drastically shrinking the distances among molecules. Let me offer a terribly bad analogy. Suppose you could wave a magic wand and decrease the gravitational energies between our sun and the stars by some integer amount. Suppose, for example, the distance between the sun and the Earth shrank from 93 million miles to 9.3 million miles, a tenfold factor. Ignore where the excess centrifugal and centripetal energies go—let's assume they migrate elsewhere in the overall universe this posits. The net result is that everything gets smaller. The elements don't necessarily change. Understand what this means. The 'normal world,' as we tend to call it, is mostly empty space. This empty space is occupied or defined by extremely tiny particles, from protons and electrons and neutrons down to the quark level. More importantly, it is defined by the relatively vast distances among these objects. By analogy to the universe, the distances between the nucleus and the electrons might be light years. The key factor here, the critical element, is what determines the energies that keep these particles in check from slamming into each other and causing annihilation. What we have managed to do is leach energy from the overall system or universe—it's that simple. By taking energy out of the system, we collapse all the quantum levels into smaller values." He added: "If energy spills into this construct, it doesn't necessarily mean the whole thing blows up again—instead, we think it makes more of the smaller stuff, so the world expands. As you pointed out someplace, this could be very dangerous."

"I did?" Tedda could see the picture he painted, though she had no idea why. Forget the sun and planets analogy about the atom. Picture the nucleus as a fruit basket, and the apples inside being the protons, and the oranges in the basket as the neutrons. Orbiting the basket at vast distances are tiny bananas, or electrons. There are as many apples as electrons. There may be one or more oranges in the basket, which determines the isotope value. The whole thing is an atom, and zillions of atoms form a substance. Maybe the substance is a bar of gold, chemical symbol Au. So Wally was saying that they'd found a way to decrease the energy levels that kept the bananas so far apart from the fruit basket, meaning that the bananas became much closer to the fruit basket, which meant that if this happened in all of the atoms, then the gold bar would shrink to a tiny fraction of its size. If you knew how to control this process, you could determine the size of the final gold bar. It might start out as a foot long bar of gold, and wind up as something so small you couldn't see it anymore, but still contain the same number of atoms. Maybe you could store a thousand gold bars in a volume equivalent to that of a candy bar.

"How do you deal with issues like mass?" Tedda asked.

Wally's face changed as he engaged his mental gears with hers. "That's the next thing. You know about dark matter? Visible matter constitutes less than half of the universe. The ocean bottom of the universe, so to speak, is dark matter." He took a small pointer the size of a pen from his shirt pocket, and aimed a fine red laser beam at an area on the outer transition shield. Immediately, a holographic mesh of virtual controls became visible—a huge and complex interface delineated in fine, glowing amber lines, black work surfaces, and glowing icons: white text, blue notes and underlines, green geometric shapes, red warnings. "Watch this," Wally said. Moving the pointer about, he caused a display to open.

Tedda watched large black dots the size of dinner plates bouncing around against a grayish-white background. "What are they?"

"They are monopole sub quarks, discovered recently."

"Those look like hockey pucks."

"We call them monopole Go-dots, like the black stones in the Japanese game of Go. They do sort of look like black felt dots, don't they? Those are actual images taken through a piggybacked stepdown particle maser looking through a graviton haze in a laboratory near here."

"And what do these monopoles do?"

"Well, we don't know much about them yet, but they exist and they form another layer of reality in the sub-lepton range, which we call Bottom, but that's just a misnomer in itself. There appears to be no smallest particle. There are just layers below layers, each with their own self-contained sets of rules. At one time, people thought atoms were the indivisible. Then a layer of subatomic chemistry opened up, and people thought the lowest you could go were protons, electrons, and neutrons. Soon after that, a whole zoo of particles was discovered by smashing larger particles. Muons, leptons, pions, even tachyons—still part of the so-called material world. Then a new bounding box of self-contained relationships opened up, the six flavors of quarks, and people thought they were done. Well, just as there is no end of the universe where you fall off, anymore than there is no end of the world where ships fall into the sky, so there is no smallest and no largest. We think that the infinite universe is a limitless foam with embedded events that typically spread energy in all directions, pushing particles, whose unity constitutes what our five senses perceive as matter. Not long ago, someone"(he paused, eyeing her with a barely perceivable tightening of the irises)"discovered a way to represent yet another layer. We haven't gotten far enough to give it a name, so we call it Bottom, as in ocean bottom—down in the infinite cold and darkness of a deep sea. That's the metaphor. At this point, all we know is that it is composed of at least two things that we won't even call particles. They seem to have their own sorts of interactions, so effectively it's a two-dimensional plane that seems to be scalable according to the amount of energy—that's the dynamic down there, as we refer to 'energy' in the visible range. In other words, it's so weird that it makes quarks look as normal as the common gumdrop. The two monopoles we know are Black and Gray, and we think there might be a White and a Yellow (actually just shades of gray), and mind you those are metaphors from our own visible energy spectrum." Wally paused and wiped his sweaty brow with a heavy wrist. "I don't know much more about the theory—the fatherland has top people working night and day at this university on the problem, because we know East Gotha has the same information and is exploiting it to destroy us."

"We just need to get there first," Tedda echoed some faintly remembered campaign slogan from her childhood, when schools were let out, and kids marched in uniform down long gray streets. She blinked, shook her head, wiped her eyes, at a vague but persistent memory of stirring martial snare drums rattling so that her heart felt inspired, and rows of children marching under falling confetti while holding long banners over their knees praising the Billo Maximus and denouncing the running dogs and stinking Limburgers of East Gotha. She could hear a man making speeches, and his voice powerfully echoing amid the stone canyons of some city, and confetti falling in chill wind amid the smells of sausage cooking and beer foaming from kegs.

"You okay?" Wally asked worriedly.

"Yes," she said. "Every once in a while an undergone zips through my brain, causing this blippitousness."

He grinned. "Nice sense of humor. We'll be happy to have you working with us."

"Doing what?"

"Thinking," he said; "emanating. Whatever it is that you do best, the fatherland has decided you will be of great help here."

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