Containment (16 page)

"The handle on the shovel telescopes if you get tired of bending down."

Arik nodded in his helmet. Cam could hear him breathing hard.

"Don't worry. You're going to love it out there. This equipment is completely foolproof. Just remember: two rights, and the Public Pod will be on your left. When you're ready, come back the way you came. The entire perimeter is lined with white strobes, so as long as you stay where you can see them, you're fine. And there's a red strobe over the airlock so you can't miss it. Copy?"

"Copy."

"Stay out there as long as you want. I'm going to be in here rebuilding Clara's suspension, so I'm in no hurry. I'll be able to hear everything you say, and I'll keep an eye on your suit's status, so don't worry about your HUD. Now go have fun playing in the dirt."

Cam gave Arik an encouraging cuff on the side of the helmet. Arik nodded and turned toward the airlock. The suit didn't feel as heavy or as bulky as it looked, but it would take some getting used to — especially the helmet. Arik had never experienced such constrained vision before, and there was something disconcerting about listening to himself breathe. Being aware of every breath he took seemed to suggest that he had to consciously remember to take the next one. The feeling would pass, he told himself. He moved the bucket to his other hand and touched the pressure panel beside the inner airlock doors.

The huge slabs of steel slid apart noiselessly. There were no warning lights or alarms or automated instructions, presumably because nothing could go wrong. According to Cam, the system was foolproof. The inner and outer doors were physically linked, and the outer doors wouldn't open if the suit wasn't properly pressurized. The helmets were unbreakable, and the suits were a ballistic composite fiber material that couldn't be compromised by anything Arik would encounter out there. Cam wouldn't let him do this if it wasn't perfectly safe.

Cam's voice was in his ear. "Touch the panel on the inside of the inner door. When the panel next to the outer door turns green, you're good to go."

"Copy that."

Arik turned and touched the panel, and the inner doors closed. It was completely still in the airlock while the computer scanned and evaluated. Arik imagined what was happening all around him in the portion of the spectrum beyond human detection. The suit was communicating with the airlock, indicating its presence and reporting its status, but the airlock was necessarily skeptical. Since a suit could malfunction, the airlock had to run its own set of tests to determine the number of people inside it, probably using lasers that Arik wasn't able to see, or possibly radar. It used complex algorithms to determine that there was only one person standing there, to conclude that it was a bucket that Arik was holding rather than another human standing close by. The algorithms had to be smart enough to differentiate between a human and a rover, and to account for an infinite number of configurations of equipment, tools, and materials that might also be present. Once the airlock was confident in its evaluation, it would compare its number to the number of suits reporting in, and if and only if those two numbers were precisely equal would the panel beside the outer door turn green.

The airlock was not only relying on its own evaluation to be correct, but it was also relying on the software that Arik's environment suit used to evaluate itself. And both the airlock and the e-suit relied on the cartridge to accurately measure and report its status. And, of course, all of these systems relied on robust and functional hardware. It didn't matter how reliable your software was if the O-ring that maintained the seal between your cartridge and your suit had been allowed to deteriorate to the point where microscopic cracks formed that would expand under pressure and eventually cause the ring to rupture. Or if a helmet was inadvertently exposed to a chemical compound that weakened its molecular bonds over time just enough to allow them to break in a circumstance just beyond the limits of the helmet's own diagnostic tests.

Arik understood that even the digital world was fundamentally analog. Even in the seemingly unambiguous case of true versus false, there were billions of complex physical processes involved in determining that a one was actually a one and a zero was actually a zero. He knew that the word "foolproof" actually meant "good enough" and that once all the measurements were taken and all the variables defined and all the expressions evaluated — and once the physical world with its entropic underpinnings had its say — you could only hope that when it really counted, the results would fall mostly in your favor.

The panel turned green by the outer airlock door, and Arik reached down and touched it. The doors parted and the airlock was pierced by an expanding plane of hazy tangerine light. The brightness flooded Arik's helmet, and burned away the sterile white glow of the diode tubes overhead. Arik stared out into the dense haze in front of him, then took his first steps out into a world that he knew was fundamentally beyond anyone's control.

D
arien's workspace hadn't been active for the last 42 minutes and 22 seconds, and there was no status message. It was unusual for him not to be available during lunch. He usually brought his boxed meal into his office and ate in front of his workspace, reviewing water sample results, checking pressure readings, and going through the queue of messages that had invariably accumulated since closing his workspace last. Since the accident, he sometimes even took a moment to check up on Arik and see how he was feeling.

But Darien was offline today. Arik sent out a ping and waited for a response. Somewhere in V1, a notification was being rendered on the closest piece of conductive polymeth to his father's last known location, and Darien's personal tone was being emitted from the surface of the plastic to help him locate it.

Arik didn't ping people very often. He preferred asynchronous communication. For issues that weren't urgent, it made much more sense to leave a message that could be responded to whenever it was convenient, and when the recipient had the time to devote to a thorough and appropriate response. Arik, along with most of Gen V, considered pings to be borderline rude, though there were plenty of people in V1 who felt differently. Certain people (namely those who didn't have jobs that required them to focus for long periods of time, and were therefore unfamiliar with the concept and merits of prolonged concentration) thought nothing of not only sending out dozens of pings a day, but even sending multiple pings to the same person. These were the user accounts which, sooner or later, found their way on to almost everyone's ping blacklist.

One of the original programmers of the ping system thought it would be a good idea to return the 3D spatial coordinates of where a ping notification was rendered. It was probably done for debugging purposes, and thought benign enough that it wasn't worth removing. Since ping notifications were rendered as close to an individual's last known location as possible (which was updated every 10 milliseconds or so), someone eventually discovered that they could combine a ping's 3D coordinates with a set of schematics to figure out exactly where anyone was in V1 at any particular moment just by sending them a ping. And since almost all the inner walls in V1 were conductive polymeth, there was no place — literally
no place
— that a ping couldn't find you. Initially, the technique was too complicated for most people to figure out, but it was only a matter of time before the entire process was scripted and shared, and could be exploited by anyone, regardless of technical aptitude. After months of receiving daily complaints, the Technology Department finally took the time to remove the single line of offending code, thereby restoring a reasonable sense of privacy to V1.

Darien was an important enough man that he generally kept himself accessible, and even more so since Arik's accident. Even if his workspace wasn't open, he was almost always somewhere in the Water Treatment Department which meant he was easily reached. And his and L'Ree's relationship wasn't such that Arik had to worry about his ping interrupting them in the midst of a midday tryst. But there was one activity in which Darien regularly partook that he would not allow to be interrupted. When Darien was playing cricket, nothing short of a catastrophic structural breach or flash oxygen fire could get him to lay down his bat.

Arik took the maglev to the Play Pod. The gym was usually moderately busy in the middle of the day as residents worked toward their weekly exercise quotas. Everyone in V1 was required to get a minimum of 100 minutes of exercise per week (not to exceed 420 minutes due to oxygen conservation ordinances), and since there was a limit on the rate at which oxygen could be consumed over a given period of time, you couldn't get away with cramming all your exercise in at the end of the week. Of course, nobody actually enforced exercise quotas, so only those who were incapable of disregarding the rules were actually bound by them. Most people in V1 simply had their favorite activities — cricket, martial arts, walking rather than taking the maglev — and it was pretty much left at that.

The Play Pod was divided into three main sections: the gym in the front, the pitches in the back, and the dojo off to the right. The gym contained several configurations of hydromills for low impact cardiovascular training, two convertible resistance strength machines, and a low climbing belt which was seldom functional. There were polymeth slabs within reach of all exercise stations, usually dripping with water droplets from nearby hydromills.

The dojo was a separate room off to the right which ran the entire length of the Play Pod. The floor consisted of well over a dozen nylon and foam tatami mats, intricately arranged according to tradition so as not to visit misfortune upon V1 by the corners of too many mats intersecting at a single point. The dojo was used for yoga, tai chi, jujitsu, and, when Arik was a child, for various lessons and games which required an open space and a soft floor.

The four enclosed pitches were in the back: two on each side with an open carbon rubber tiled area between. The walls dividing the front and back pitches could be removed to form two areas large enough for a full match of reduced cricket (five or six players per team). On the few occasions when enough players could be assembled for a game of standard cricket, two innings were played simultaneously in the adjacent pitches with the padded area between staked out by observers on picnic blankets or in plastic folding chairs.

Arik could see his father with Priyanka and Zorion in the front left pitch. He nodded to the occupants of the hydromills on his way back, and stood on the mats between the pitches, watching through the polymeth barrier. Darien was batting. He was standing in front of the spring mounted fiberglass wicket, eyeing Priyanka warily. Priyanka was considered the best bowler in V1, but Darien was a very competent batsman. In actual matches, they were considered to be ultimate rivals, but while practicing, they each focused on honing specific skills. Priyanka began his bowling action, and Arik saw that he was practicing his spin. The ball hit the mat and leapt away from Darien who stepped toward it and popped it off toward the back wall. The ball was soft and designed to absorb the majority of the shock in order to limit its travel in confined spaces. Zorion caught it off the back wall and made a dramatic motion before tossing it gently back to Priyanka. Darien was adjusting his stance and Priyanka was just beginning another action when the walls of the pitch brightened with an intense red glow.

Activities in the pitches were limited to sessions which were defined by the amount of oxygen consumed during play. It would take 15 minutes for the red to fade at which point they could begin another session. The three men relaxed and moved toward the door.

Darien emerged first, but stopped when he saw his son waiting for him.

"Is everything ok?"

Arik nodded. "I just need to talk to you when you have a minute."

"Sure."

"Hello, Arik," Priyanka said. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine. Hi, Zorion."

"Afternoon, Arik," Zorion said with the exaggerated civility that playing cricket often evoked.

"I need to get back," Priyanka said. "As always, it was a pleasure."

"Same time next week?"

"To be sure."

Priyanka and Zorion left together through the gym. Darien started back through the door of the pitch.

"Give me a minute to gather my stuff."

Arik followed his father inside. You could stay inside a pitch between sessions as long as you weren't playing. If you began consuming oxygen faster than what was considered the standard rate, the walls would turn a deeper red rather than fading. If you persisted, an oxygen alarm would sound which even the most devout cricketers couldn't possibly play through.

"I don't have very much time," Arik said. "I have to get back soon. Can we talk in here?"

"Of course," Darien said. His soft eyes could look every bit as concerned as kind. "What's going on?"

Arik touched the wall and the door of the pitch snapped shut. Everything emanated crimson as the red wall lights glowed. "Cadie and I had a long talk last night. She told me about the baby. And about her conversation with Priyanka."

"Good," Darien said. He picked up his bat and pitched himself against it. Arik thought he seemed surprisingly casual about the conversation they were about to have — even prepared. "I wanted it to come from her. I hope you don't feel like you've been mislead. I think everyone's been as open and upfront as they felt they could."

"Even about the baby?"

Darien lowered his eyebrows. "What do you mean?"

Arik leaned down and picked up the ball. "If the point of the baby was to replace me, why did Priyanka bring Cadie a DNA sample while I was still alive?"

"Arik," Darien said, "I don't know how much Cadie told you about your condition, but nobody expected you to recover. Priyanka was just acting on information from Dr. Nguyen."

"But Dr. Nguyen certainly knows that you can get a perfectly viable DNA sample from a cadaver. Or that DNA samples are easily preserved."