Authors: Christian Cantrell
When Arik opened his eyes again, the pain had subsided, but he was suddenly horrified by the realization that he'd fallen asleep. His oxygen and power indicators had gone from green to yellow, and his lower body was numb from lack of circulation. When he tried to move, the soreness in his leg muscles recalled the tight balls of pain from the cramps as they threatened to seize up again.
He tried to rub his legs, but the environment suit limited his reach. He finally succeeded in walking his glove down his leg and over his hamstring, but as he squeezed, the suit reacted to the pressure and pushed back. Arik laid back down, and drew his legs up toward his chest, flexing and relaxing his muscles as much as he could to get the blood flowing again.
While he waited for his body to re-oxygenate, he analyzed his situation. Most events which people referred to as tragedies happened suddenly and spectacularly: earthquakes shaking entire cities to the ground, space crafts breaking up in the heat of reentry, nuclear reactors melting down during routine tests. These were the things we worried about, guarded against, spent countless hours training for. But Arik was realizing now that disaster could be dissembled into small unidentifiable components and smuggled past even our best defenses. It could be allowed to gradually accumulate right in front of us without tripping an alarm or registering on a sensor. Misfortune knew how to use our egos and our pride against us to lure us into vulnerable and defenseless positions. The more obstacles you placed in death's path, the more it was compelled to slip in through the cracks.
Arik hoisted himself to his feet in a single fluid motion. His legs wanted to buckle beneath him, but he was prepared, and he pushed hard against the ground and forced them to support his weight. Gravity helped pull the blood back down into his muscles, and with the restoration of feeling came fresh pain and tingling with the intensity of a high-voltage electric current. But his legs were regaining strength. He was on his feet, and he knew he could walk. He just needed to make it to the rover. Even if he was unable to pilot it home, he could probably use the radio to contact someone in the Wrench Pod.
Arik slowly turned and tried to detect the faint light from the strobes in order to get his bearings. He rubbed at the rough coating of crystals on his visor, but they had only hardened and fused further in the heat. Since he couldn't see any lights, he knew he must be close to the rover. He could see the pressure washer on the ground with the nozzle and the compressor spread far apart. He remembered that he had just moved the compressor from his left hand to his right when we went down which meant that if he stood with the compressor on his right side, he should be aligned with his original path.
By the time Arik had been walking long enough that he knew he should have reached the rover, he had already made a decision. He knew that this would be the moment when panic would set in and intensify to the point where he might not be able to think logically, so he wanted to be prepared to act without having to think at all.
Arik knew that if he had been wrong about the hand in which he was holding the compressor, he would have been walking in the opposite direction of the rover, and back toward the Public Pod which he would have already reached. That left three possibilities. The most likely was that he had simply walked right past the rover and hadn't been able to see it which meant he was continuing on toward the red strobe of the airlock. It was also possible that the pressure washer hadn't landed predictably, and that he was walking at an approximate right angle to his intended path. 90 degrees in one direction would take him back to V1, roughly somewhere between the Wrench Pod and the Public Pod which would enable him to easily follow the wall back to the airlock. 90 degrees in the other direction, however, was the worst case scenario. There was a chance that Arik was walking directly away from V1, out into the barren Venusian desert where nobody would even think to look for him until long after it was too late.
But even the worst case scenario was manageable. If Arik turned around in time, he would be ok. If he was able to determine that he was walking in the wrong direction soon enough, he could turn back 180 degrees and correct his mistake. Given enough time, and assuming he could keep himself from panicking, he had a good chance of making it back no matter which direction he was walking in. The problem was that he had no idea what "enough time" meant. Although he was keeping a steady pace, he was extremely weak, and he was going through his remaining air and power alarmingly fast. Arik had never thought to ask Cam what would happen if he ran out of power while he still had air remaining. It was possible that the suit would depressurize, though it was also possible that it simply wouldn't be able to adjust to changes in pressure which meant that he might be able to survive long enough to get inside. But the cartridge's battery life and remaining air pressure were roughly equal, so it really didn't matter if he could survive without power or not. There was nothing ambiguous about running out of air.
The answer to the question of when to turn around was obvious: once he had walked as far or slightly farther than the farthest landmark could possibly have been from the point where he fell, he needed to turn back. But the challenge was in accurately estimating his position. Arik's head was pounding from dehydration; although he was exerting a great deal of effort, he no longer had enough moisture left in his body to perspire, and the heat was effecting his ability to reason. He believed he had walked far enough that he should have reached the airlock, but there was no way to be sure. His oxygen was down to 18% which meant he was probably getting very close to the point of no return, if he hadn't crossed it already. Very soon, it wouldn't matter whether he turned back or kept going. The outcome would be the same.
Arik was beginning to wonder if it might in some way be more dignified to just sit down and accept his situation. He envisioned himself using the remainder of his time to scratch out a final message in the Venusian terrain. He was trying to figure out if he would be able to fall into a deep enough sleep to avoid the unbearable panic and pain of suffocation when he noticed that he was walking directly next to a wall. He felt an intense wave of relief surge through him while simultaneously feeling ridiculous for almost resigning. He envisioned Cam finding his body with a terse apology to Cadie carved in the dirt only a few meters from the airlock. He imagined his friends and family trying to instill some sort of dignity into his mysterious and senseless death.
But there weren't any strobes. Arik was hoping to see the red strobe of the airlock, but there were no lights or beacons of any kind around him at all. The entire perimeter of V1 was lined with flashing diodes, and even through his encrusted visor, he should have easily been able to see them from this close. He stepped up to the wall and put his hand on the surface. Rather than the inert metal alloy shell of V1, the structure in front of him was concrete. He followed it for a few meters, looking for something familiar, but its face didn't change and no strobes came into view. He took a few steps back and tried to judge its height, but the top was lost in the haze. Arik felt a small piece of basalt under one boot, and although he was hesitant to expend the energy, he picked it up and lobbed it as high as he could toward the structure. A moment later, it hit the ground in front of him.
Arik was startled by his air indicator going from yellow to a flashing red as it dropped below 10%. Whatever he had found, it wasn't V1, and he knew he wasn't anywhere near the airlock or anything else he could identify. His best guess was that he had been walking in the opposite direction of V1, and had hit a wall that somehow defined its boundary. He'd never heard of wall enclosing V1, and he couldn't imagine what it was designed to keep out, but right now, that wasn't important. If the wall was indeed the perimeter of V1, walking in a line perfectly perpendicular to any point along it should take him back to V1.
Arik began walking with the wall at his back. Whatever happened, he would walk as far as he could and not deviate from his path.
A
rik brought up the most detailed schematic of V1 that he could find. The view defaulted to his current location (his home lab), but he re-centered the 3D image on the dome — the very center of V1 — and began zooming out. He expected to be able to retreat infinitely, but the perspective froze precisely at the moment when all of V1 filled the frame. He tried to pan, but the model wouldn't move in any direction. He zoomed in on the main airlock, and found he was able to pan at that level, but once again the image froze at exactly 200 meters from the outer airlock doors — right around where Arik believed he had encountered the wall.
The schematic was a vector-based three-dimensional representation which meant that it was essentially a collection of mathematical formulas describing V1 in great detail. Vector-based schematics allowed the viewer to inspect the model from any altitude and from any angle; the computer simply needed to use the vector's equations to recalculate and render the requested perspective which it could do, for all intents and purposes, instantaneously. Even the most complex vector-based graphics with the most detailed textures requiring millions of calculations per microsecond were trivial for modern computers to render. The only limitations were the amount of data represented in the vector's formulas, and any arbitrary constraints intentionally injected into the model itself.
Decompiling the schematic and looking for the block of instructions that prevented it from being viewed past a certain set of coordinates would not have been practical. Schematics were far too complicated to be authored by hand which meant that the tools used to compose them generated equations which were designed to be evaluated by computers rather than read by human beings. But the vector viewer — the program that interpreted and rendered vector-based models — was much simpler. While removing the limitations from the model itself would have been prohibitively complex, removing the code from the viewer that observed and enforced those limitations was much more feasible.
Just as Arik brought up the source code for the vector viewer, he got a video connection request from Cam. He had hoped to know more about the wall before they spoke, and for a moment, he considered ignoring the request. But Cam would know that Arik's workspace was active, and Arik knew that he owed Cam an explanation. He took a moment to prepare himself, then accepted the connection.
"Howdy."
"What the bloody hell happened out there?"
"I screwed up."
"That's a bit of an understatement. What did you do to your helmet? I had to use hydrochloric vapor to get it clean."
"It was the crystalline catalyst. It reacted with the heat and fused to the visor. I couldn't see well enough to get the rover inside."
"Arik, you probably couldn't see well enough to get the rover inside because you were half dead. Did you know your cartridge got scrapped because they thought it was defective? It registered as completely empty. Nobody has ever seen that before. They figured it had to be broken because nobody thought anyone could survive on so little air."
"Did I break any Wrench Pod records?"
"This isn't a joke. Do you have any idea how close you came to not coming back? You were literally no more than a breath or two away."
"Believe me, I know."
"And do you know what would've happened if you'd run out of power?"
"I was wondering about that."
"The suit holds a residual charge for about five minutes, then after that, all your equipment, with you inside it, would've been crushed down to about the size of your helmet in less than a second."
"Fortunately I would have probably already suffocated."
"Trust me, the implosion would have been much more merciful."
"I'll keep that in mind for next time."
"There isn't going to
be
a next time. You know that, right? You know you can't go back out there."
"Can we talk about this in person?"
"It's ok, I'm alone." Cam moved to the side so Arik could see the room behind him. "There's an all-hands drill going on right now."
"That's not what I mean. There's something else I need to talk to you about."
"Something more important than you almost killing yourself?"
"I found something out there."
Cam squinted at Arik in the polymeth. "What do you mean?"
"I'll explain when you get here."
Cam's eyes flicked up to the top right of his workspace as he checked the time. Arik could see he was contemplating his schedule. "Where are you?"
"At home."
"Are you sure you weren't hallucinating? Seriously. I'm not saying you didn't see anything, but it wouldn't be the first time someone thought they saw something out there that didn't exist. Especially with as little oxygen as you were probably getting."
"I should have proof by the time you get here."
Arik could see that Cam's vexation was starting to yield to curiosity. "I'll be on the next maglev. This better be good."
The video stream closed. Arik opened his vector authoring tool and created the simplest model possible — a single micropixel point — then added zoom and pan constraints to it. He ran the vector model viewer inside of another program that showed him in real time the lines of codes that were being executed, then loaded his test model. He zoomed out until the model froze, then switched to his code editor.
The vector viewer wasn't as easy to modify as Arik had hoped. He was expecting to simply remove a few statements that checked to see if any zoom or pan constraints were specified in the model, but the logic turned out to be inherent in the camera control algorithms themselves. Fortunately they were well isolated and easy enough to reverse engineer that Arik had revised versions working against his test model by the time Cam arrived. He opened the front door from his workspace, and a moment later, Cam was standing behind him.