Containment (28 page)

Arik recognized the broadcast as a table of radiation exposure levels and symptoms. He had been preparing to broadcast a hail in response when he realized from the rhythm of the voice that it was a recording.

"—latency period followed by bleeding of the gums and nose, hair loss, fatigue, nausea, and the breakdown of intestinal tissue. Untreated, death is imminent. Most levels of chronic and acute radiation sickness
can be treated
, and many genetic mutations can be reversed. We have an on-board hospital, food, clean water, and a nineteen percent oxygen atmosphere. We can provide safe and free passage to Sakha, South Station Nord, New Elizabeth, and the Hammerfest pod systems. If you register one thousand REMs or less,
please
hail us immediately on the following frequency: two-five-nine-point-seven megahertz. If you can hear this broadcast, we can reach you. This message will repeat."

There was a long pause, but Arik didn't wait. The scanner had been working in the background, searching for other frequencies with unencrypted chatter, but it had already finished cycling and there were no other hits. Arik changed the tuner's frequency by hand and transmitted a hail.

A
rik sealed all of his clothing and equipment inside red hazardous waste pouches and dropped them down the dock's disposal chute. He performed a field decontamination on himself as thoroughly as he could, and put on the change of clothes that he'd left for himself in the dock. Malyshka was back in line with her two sister rovers, but her work lights were still on and she was still alert. Arik wasn't done with her yet.

Malyshka hadn't been idle while Arik was in the ERP. Assuming her instructions were correct, after operating the emergency ingress lever exactly fifty times, Malyshka should have turned around and very slowly approached the outer wall of the Public Pod. The electromagnetic field would have prevented Arik from manually guiding her, and her cameras would have been useless, but acting completely autonomously, she should have been able to measure atmospheric conditions at frequent intervals right up to within a few meters of the window shields. If any of Arik's experiments had been successful — if anything at all had sprouted — there was a small possibility that the rover might be able to detect it.

Arik transferred the data from Malyshka to his workspace, then shut her down and clipped her back in to charge. He closed his workspace, picked up the carton of powder and the plastic brush from the decontamination kit, and left the dock. This late at night, the maglev only operated on request, and since nobody else needed it, it was waiting for Arik outside the Wrench Pod where he had left it.

As soon as Arik reached his home pod, he swallowed two pain pills. He had felt ok in the dock, but now the pounding in his head was becoming much less bearable. This wasn't one of his usual headaches which tended to concentrate itself around the site of his incision; this time, the pain filled his entire skull, radiating in short sharp bursts up from the base of his neck all the way through the frontal lobes of his brain. Arik believed he was suffering from what was casually referred to around V1 — and especially the Juice Pod — as a "creeping dose." The more scientific name for it was
acute radiation poisoning
.

This wasn't a complete surprise, and not as serious as it sounded. Arik knew that he was exposing himself to radiation which is why he had taken the precaution of a field decontamination. He knew that even a minor and ultimately harmless dose could cause symptoms, especially when coupled with severe dehydration. What Arik didn't know was how much radiation he'd actually been exposed to.

He would have liked to have worn one of the yellow hexagonal radiation badges that everyone in the Juice Pod kept pinned to their shirts. In the event of an accident, radiation badges can report exactly how many REMs an individual was exposed to, and over what period of time. But the badges were kept in a sealed storage locker which Arik didn't have access to, and he couldn't think of a good way of casually asking for one that wouldn't have raised too many questions. He considered building his own, but he didn't have a good way of testing it, and Arik firmly believed that the only thing worse than no data at all was data you couldn't trust.

It was a calculated risk. He knew he was taking a chance, and now all he could do was wait. Arik finished his bottle of water, then took the carton of powder and the plastic brush into the shower.

As he stood under the driers, he began to experience almost debilitating fatigue. The pain medication was starting to neutralize his headache, but he'd been awake for almost twenty-four hours, and had endured tremendous physical stress. Arik partially dressed himself and went into his office. It was obvious that he wasn't going to be able to get up for work, so he added a text message to Cadie's queue asking her to let Subha know that he wouldn't be in until after lunch. Cadie would be awake in about two hours, and Arik knew that the first thing she would do is open her workspace — probably even before she got out of bed.

There was one more thing Arik wanted to do before he slept. He felt like he needed to review the environmental and atmospheric measurements that Malyshka had collected. He could save a detailed analysis for after he'd gotten some rest, but he wanted to see if his eyes could detect anything prominent in the data — any sort of anomaly salient enough to grab his attention at first glance.

But before Arik could bring up the data, something made him pause. He was conscious of his heart beating in a way that he'd never experienced before, escalating into a violent pounding that he could hear as well as feel, and although the medication had dulled the pain in his head, he was aware of an unsettling accumulation of pressure inside his skull. His breathing grew shallow and rapid. He began to sweat from every pore in his body, and when he looked down, he could see that beads of perspiration had already formed on his chest and arms. His throat opened involuntarily, and his stomach convulsed.

Arik instinctively ran to the bathroom and vomited for the first time in his life.

A
rik didn't go into work at all the next day. Or the day after that. But by the third day, he had almost completely recovered.

Cadie begged Arik to see Dr. Nguyen, but Arik convinced her that the best thing for a viral infection in a closed environment like V1 was rest, fluids, and above all else, quarantine so as not to infect anyone else. He assured her that his body would take care of itself, and by the time Cadie checked on him on the morning of the third day, it apparently had.

But Arik knew that he hadn't actually recovered. He had become what those in the nuclear field refer to as a "walking ghost." He had entered the deceptive and almost cruel latency period of radiation sickness — the incandescent honeymoon, as it was sometimes called. He knew that he would get sick again, but what he didn't know was when or how bad the symptoms would get this time which meant that he needed to use his reprieve as effectively as possible.

The day Arik started feeling better, Cam and Zaire received a short and cryptic text message: "Work late tonight. Leave at exactly 2100. Take the maglev home."

The maglev cut a circular path through V1 with the Life Pod and Dome at the center, and most of the other pods positioned at intervals along the outside of the track. The train consisted of sections which were magnetically levitated 15 millimeters off a single wide rail in the center. The magnetic cushion almost entirely eliminated friction and allowed the train to be conveyed completely silently in either direction simply by applying electromagnetic currents. Aside from the emergency calipers, there wasn't a single moving part anywhere in the train or the rail system which meant that it was extremely reliable and almost entirely maintenance-free.

Eliminating moving parts from machinery was the best way to improve reliability. Since the subatomic laws of the universe dictate that it's physically impossible for any moving part to move in precisely the same way every single time it moves, each and every moving part in a system represents some measure of unpredictability and unaccounted-for variability. A vulnerability, you might even say. What if one critical part didn't move quite enough? What if it moved too much, or too quickly, or with slightly more or less velocity than the last time it moved? What if it didn't move at all? How many times can it move before it wears out? How will friction change the way it moves over time? How long will it take to break down the lubricant designed to reduce that friction? How does temperature affect the properties of that lubricant? And if (or when) one moving part fails, how will it affect all the other moving parts downstream of it? The amount of unpredictability in any given moving part wasn't usually the problem; it was when all the tiny swirls combined into one massive vortex — when they accumulated and compounded and cascaded into a chain reaction that was far too complicated to be fully understood even after the fact, much less beforehand when there was still time to prevent it.

Another advantage of the maglev's incredibly simple design was that there was no theoretical limit to the number of sections that could be linked together. Unlike a locomotive or a pulley system, each maglev section was individually propelled which meant that to add sections, you only needed to add power. As V1 grew, its transportation infrastructure could easily be expanded to keep up with demand.

But Arik had never seen the maglev more than four sections long. V1 experienced a light rush hour in the morning and another one in the evening between 1800 and 2000 hours as shifts changed, but even at its busiest, having to wait for the maglev to come back around again was very rare. It also helped that those with particularly sedentary responsibilities often chose to walk to and from their shifts along the paths on either side of the rail, applying their daily commutes to their weekly exercise quotas. Whether walking or riding, by 2100, almost everyone in V1 had found where they wanted or needed to be for the next eight to twelve hours which made the maglev an ideal place to have a private conversation. Not only was it a good place to be alone, but the maglev sections had no roof and only very low walls which meant that it generated a fair amount of wind noise while piercing the tunnels between pods, and there were no conductive polymeth surfaces to covertly gather sound waves.

When the maglev stopped in front of the Wrench Pod, Cam and Zaire were standing on the platform. Arik knew that things would be awkward between he and Cam, but as he watched them step into the last section and seat themselves opposite himself and Cadie, it occurred to him that things could also be very awkward between Cadie and Zaire. He wondered how much Zaire knew about the baby. Had she encouraged Cam to do what he did, or was it possible that she didn't even know that the baby had once been her husband's? How would her feelings toward Cadie affect her feelings toward Arik, and how would all their emotions influence their ability to listen objectively to what Arik had to tell them?

Arik realized that the moving parts that drove human emotion and interaction were far more intricate and delicate and explosive than anything found inside manmade machinery. He knew that in order to change all of their lives, he needed to tear down everything that had been built up between them, compact it all down into a clean and solid foundation on top of which he could start building something completely new, something with no moving parts, something so towering and imposing that none of them could dismiss it.

"The first thing I want to say is that all of us need to put everything that's happened between us aside. Everything. Anger, guilt, hard feelings — whatever. Agreed?"

Nobody spoke, but Arik could sense a nonverbal agreement among them. He could see from their expressions that he had everyone's full attention — that curiosity had, at least temporarily, given him an opening.

"There are things about this place that all of you need to know, but that I can't tell you." Arik looked at each of them in turn, let his words take effect. "You're going to need to see them for yourselves which is why I'm going to ask you do something that none of you are going to want to do, but that I promise you will be the most important thing you've ever done in your entire lives. You're all going to have to trust me unconditionally."

Cadie's curiosity had turned to concern. Her hands were folded over the bump under her dress. "Arik, what are you talking about?"

"In ten days, I want all three of you to leave V1."

"
What
?" Cadie blurted out. Zaire didn't react, but Cam was slowly shaking his head.

"Just listen to me," Arik said. "Two hundred meters out from the airlock, there's wall, and in that wall is a metal door. Cam, you know what I'm talking about. All I'm asking you to do is in ten days from now, suit up and take a rover out to that door. Everything you need to know will be waiting for you there."

"Arik, I'm sorry," Cam said, "but I can't be a part of this. I should have never let you go outside. I don't know what happened to you out there, and I don't know what's happening to you now, but I can't be a part of this anymore. This has to stop."

"Then
I'll
do it," Zaire said. Everyone looked at her. She tried to conceal her discomfort and apprehension behind her resolve.

"No you won't," Cam told her. "I won't let you get involved in this. None of us are doing this, not unless we know
exactly
what we're getting into."

"I don't need to know," Zaire said. "All I need to know is that Arik is asking us to trust him, and I do. I think we owe him that much. You don't have to do this if you don't want to, but I'm going."

"No," Arik said to the group, "all of you have to go. It's absolutely imperative that all three of you go out there. I can't stress that enough. It has to be all of you, and it has to be at exactly the right time."