Containment (11 page)

But nobody could agree on exactly what should be done, or even what
could
be done. They felt confident that they could manipulate levels of various hormones associated with sexual desire and attraction, and even stop the special auxiliary olfactory sensor called the vomeronasal organ from regressing at the fetal stage which, in theory, would make Gen V more susceptible than the average human to pheromones. But in truth, funding for human sexual research had been scarce enough over the years that nobody knew for certain what the results of such intervention would be. In the end, they decided that there was nothing evolution favored more than a good hardy immune system which was already standard genetic procedure, so the rest would have to be left to chance.

Would-be parents were allowed to submit gender preferences. Arik had heard several times the story of Kelley personally guaranteeing parents one of their top two gender choices. The story also went that enough couples didn't have a preference that those who did got exactly what they wanted. Gen V was supposedly the most thoroughly researched, best planned, and most widely anticipated generation in the history of the human race.

Arik was sometimes skeptical about elements of Gen V's little creation myth. Although he had no proof, he suspected that certain couples did not want children at all, but assumed the responsibility for the overall good of the gene pool and advancement of the colony. He suspected that some children were conceived more out of duty than love.

Since everyone in Gen V had known each other essentially all their lives, Arik had no memory of meeting Cadie, but he did remember the first time he felt attracted to her. They were drinking hot sweetened soy in the Play Pod where they sometimes spent a couple hours after school while waiting for their parents to pick them up on their way home from their shifts. The top layer of the soy was aerated with nitrous oxide to make the high-protein treat more of a novelty. Several of Arik's friends were experimenting with drinking from the backs of their mugs which left white foamy beards on their chins. Unlike foam mustaches, foam beards were out of range of most of their tongues which pretty much just left their shirt sleeves for getting them off. Nobody wanted to waste precious soy foam, however, so while watching the other kids stretch and strain their tongues, Arik realized a more practical solution was to lick each other's chins. Arik and Cadie teamed up, but Cadie's father happened to walk in at precisely the moment Arik was fulfilling his part of the bargain. Although the two of them were yanked apart amid a flurry of commotion, Arik still managed to get a taste of her salty flesh beneath the sweet foam. He never forgot the sensation.

He proposed to her for the first time the next day. Even at such a young age, they all knew that they would grow up and intermarry, so proposals were frequent among the children. But her only answer was a coy and ambiguous smile which Arik interpreted as the need to impress her and keep her as close to him as he could. He tried his best to get on her team when they played cricket, and to hide with her when they played ghost in the machine. If she had a problem with her workspace, he would solve it before a teacher could intervene. As they got older, they worked on projects together, ate with each other's parents, and participated in the V1 version of dating.

By graduation, everyone in Gen V had been paired up. Although the process was long and certainly not without its share of drama, fears of incompatibility, alternative lifestyles, and accidental death proved unfounded. Most couples had been together since their early teens and had plenty of time to develop strong friendships as well as romantic relationships. As the number of commitments increased, those remaining tended to come together out of necessity. There were certainly fears that 100 healthy young adults confined to such a small area would eventually lead to some level of mingling and indiscretion, but none of the couples believed that it could happen to them.

The Infrastructure Department used any spare time they had over the years to configure 50 additional double occupancy home pods. V1 was not a religious environment, and therefore its citizens were not governed by traditional Puritan morality, but when it came to relationships, there were two rules which were considered gospel: first, you had to be married to move into one of the new home pods; and second, you
always
used birth control.

Arik proposed to Cadie again 13 years after his first proposal, and this time, she accepted. They were in her parents' home pod during a break from their work at the Environment Department. Rings weren't expected on V1, and neither were weddings, necessarily. Kelley had the authority to marry, but Arik didn't have access to him, so he talked to his father about helping him make the arrangements. Apparently, Arik and Cadie weren't the only couple putting in requests for Kelley's time, and it was decided in the interest of efficiency that Kelley would marry multiple couples simultaneously. Once the couples who weren't yet engaged discovered that their friends would soon be moving out of their parents' pods and into pods of their own, they hastily proposed, as well. Kelley then proclaimed that all the marriages would take place at once in what would be, as far as anyone knew, the biggest wedding in the galaxy.

The couples were allowed to move into their new home pods the day before the wedding since saying goodnight to your new spouse after the reception and going home with your parents would be unbearably anticlimactic. All fifty couples were able to move in a single day since moving in V1 basically consisted of carrying a couple of cases on the maglev from one home pod to another. Most of what people owned were clothing, a small amount of equipment, and their data stored in the central solid quantum storage grid. Since the doorways in V1 were too small to cram most pieces of furniture through, all the new home pods came fully furnished.

Arik and Cadie's new pod was almost identical to the pods they grew up in, but it had four rooms rather than three. The largest room combined the kitchen, eating space, and a small sitting area into a single room. There was also a small bedroom, a lab, and a spare room which, for the time being, would probably be used as a second office, but could be converted into a baby's room once the time had come.

Arik and Cam were hoping to get pods in the same section, but they ended up being almost as far apart as they could get. The four-room pods were in Section R, and Cam and Zaire were assigned a smaller pod in Section C since no Wrench Pod employees qualified for home labs. Cadie and Zaire were friends, but Arik knew that Cadie would miss Cam's casual company more than Zaire's. Cadie and Zaire's friendship was based more on the fact that Arik and Cam were best friends than on any type of real connection with each other, or even any common interests. Cadie and Cam didn't share much in common, either, but they had always had an uncommonly open and effortless relationship. Arik knew that Cam was probably Cadie's best friend as well as his.

The wedding was the next evening, and the Venera Auditorium was completely full. The wall lights were down, and the polymeth above the stage showed a panoramic view of a white birch forest with luminous green leaves in columns of sunshine. Music wasn't a big priority in V1, so someone made a simple and obvious choice which even Arik recognized as a movement from Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

The brides wore simple white synthetic dresses and carried long tulsi fern stems. They were escorted one at a time down the aisle and up to the stage by their fathers who kissed their cheeks, then took their reserved seats next to their wives in the front of the auditorium. The grooms were already standing in a line on stage, jostling each other, leaning forward to see friends further down the line. They wore dark outfits with collars, and held their hands clasped behind their backs in order to keep them out of their pockets.

When the last father exited the stage and all the brides and grooms stood facing each other in parallel lines, the music faded and Kelley stepped out onto the stage. He stood at the leftmost end of the group facing the audience, and delivered an uncharacteristically short speech. He couldn't believe that just six months ago, he stood up there and watched Gen V graduate, wishing them well in their new careers. In another six months, he was sure they would all be back here again while these talented young men and women presented their findings on accelerated stemstock growth, more efficient forms of nuclear fusion, and, of course, artificial photosynthesis. But today he was there to wish them well in an endeavor equally important to their work: marriage.

The ceremony was short and secular. Kelley described marriage as a practical contract, a partnership in which both parties were equal beneficiaries, a collaboration resulting in achievements which could not have been otherwise possible. Marriage was not the combination of two entities into one; it was instead the creation of a third entity whose sole purpose was to sooth and inspire the two individuals.

The brides and grooms recited vows together. They promised to support each other in all their endeavors, to promote all aspects each other's development, and to never yield to selfishness. Kelley then pronounced them legally married, and the two lines came together amid a roar of applause.

The wall lights changed and the ceremony led immediately into the reception. Boxed meals were carried in along with V1's modest but effective supply of alcohol. The stage was used for dancing and part of the center section of seats was removed and replaced with several small tables. The focus of the gathering was initially on congratulating and celebrating the young couples, but the event soon became a much-needed break from the general stresses of the V1 routine. The party spread throughout the auditorium, then out the door in the back. As the night progressed, the aisles became lined with forgotten punch cups and plates, and someone even left a tall half-full mug balanced on the remains of the Venera probe in the back corner. Patches of seats were gradually filled by the usual V1 cliques who were too tired or intoxicated to stand, and a few people had even shuffled their way to the center of a row of seats and fallen asleep. When everyone's cup was topped off with the last of the evening's punch, Kelley climbed up on stage.

"Everyone, can I have your attention one more time this evening?" He paused to give the room time to get settled. His eyes were heavy and tired, and he blinked as he tried to focus on the room in front of him. "First of all, I've been asked to convey to the brides and grooms the best wishes of everyone on Earth, and in particular, the GSA. I believe the exact message they sent was 'Congratulations on setting a new galactic record, and please remember to take precautions.'"

There was still enough life left in the party to raise a good laugh. Someone shouted "hear! hear!" and everyone with a cup drank.

"But I'd also like to raise a special toast to two people who mean a lot to me. Arik and Cadie, where are you? There they are. Get up here, you two."

Arik and Cadie were sitting off to the side with Cam and Zaire and two other couples. They were pushed to their feet and sent off toward the stage.

"These two kids have been together nearly their entire lives," Kelley said. "They played together as children, grew up together, and as they got older, they worked together to accomplish things that nobody even dreamed were possible." He waited for them to finish crossing the stage, then put an arm around each of them. Arik could see Kelley's cup in the corner of his vision, and he could smell Kelley's breath mixed with his cologne. "You two are the pride of V1, did you know that? You're a symbol of all that's right with humanity."

Kelley stepped back and brought the couple together in front of him. He raised his cup and everyone left in the room drank to the pride of V1, their symbols of the future, a perfect and indivisible union.

A
rik came home after physical therapy rather than going in to work. He was only going into the Life Pod a few days a week now, partially because of headaches, partially because of Cadie. When they were both at work at the same time, they kept the polymeth wall between their offices opaque, and they made it a point to check to see if the other one was in the dome before going in themselves. If Arik was there during lunch, he usually brought Cadie a boxed meal, but after she thanked him, he carried his own back to his office and ate alone.

Arik swallowed two pain pills, then dimmed the wall lights in his home office to ease the stress on his eyes. He brought his workspace up on the wall and immediately noticed the string of characters in the lower right-hand corner of the polymeth:

His initial thought was that nothing was going to boot because of an unrecoverable error in the shell program, but when his workspace appeared just as he'd left it the night before, he assumed Fai's team was just doing some debugging on the live system. V1CC (the V1 Computing Cloud) was usually capable of debugging itself either proactively by using idle CPU cycles to look for potential errors in byte code, or in real-time by verifying processor instructions as they were being executed. But sometimes humans were just smart enough to introduce bugs that even computers couldn't catch which meant they had be tracked down manually.

Most software engineers resented having to manually debug code. It was considered a waste of their time, a task which was beneath senior engineers and architects which meant that it was usually delegated to those with less seniority. But Arik actually enjoyed debugging. He found the process stimulating, even rewarding. Most errors were predictable and relatively easy to fix, but occasionally an anomaly was so complex and subtle and elegant that tracking it down and holding it all in your head at once actually pushed you to the edges of your comprehension. Sometimes fully and completely grasping both a problem and its solution simultaneously felt like stopping time.

To Arik, these moments were euphoric.