Chapter 31 #2
Our destination reared before us, the massive, shadowy line extending into the sky. The object I’d seen from the coast near New Los Angeles when I’d first stepped into this time. “That’s the space elevator?”
“Yes.”
Our ovoid craft approached the wide, bustling base of the cable.
We slowed. Hundreds of massive ships docked around the hexagonal platform.
It crawled with movement, machinery and cranes and people going back and forth, moving materials from ships to what looked like enormous, vertically oriented cargo containers.
“Is it all raw materials going up?”
“Some are raw. Some have been processed or refined on Earth. The major operations, those most heavily pollutant, are done in space. However, there are still some materials that cannot be manufactured without the aid of gravity, and our larger orbital centripetal factories are still under construction.”
“What about passengers? People, I mean.”
“Most humans choose to take vehicles such as this, or larger-scale versions operating on similar principles.”
“This thing can go into space?”
“Of course. Would you like to see the Orbital Ring?”
I looked up, the sky deep blue and patched with heavy rain clouds. “All right.”
The ovoid’s nose tilted. We accelerated skyward, again moving so quickly I should have been pressed back into my seat by the g-forces, barely able to breathe. But I was fine, completely comfortable, as if sitting still with the view around us a clever projection.
“Fancy,” Lyle said.
We followed the line of the cable through the clouds.
The air thinned, turning lighter blue and then darkening, deepening into black as the horizon fell away.
The great, arcing curve of the Earth. The vague demarcation between tenuous atmosphere and hard vacuum.
Gravity disappeared, and although I was strapped into the seat, my hair bobbed upward, away from my scalp.
Above us was a glittering white line. It arced away to either side, passing the edge of the horizon.
The line grew thicker as we flew higher.
The elevator cable led to it. Gradually, the glittering line resolved itself into an uneven, linked chain of spherical objects.
Space habitats. I had no frame of reference, so I didn’t understand how large they were until we were close enough to see tiny ovoids, like ours, flitting like gnats around them.
Some of the spheres were skeletal, little more than structural supports surrounding what looked like massive, angular spacecraft under construction. Other spheres were enclosed and dotted with ports and extensions. Some had spinning rings around them, creating gravity for the occupants inside.
“How large is this? How many people live up here?”
“This Orbital Ring circumvents the entire Earth, a continuous linked chain of habitable environments.” Raven gestured with one slender hand toward the distant curve of the Earth where the ring narrowed away to a point, like a railroad running to the horizon.
“It is theoretically possible to walk—or float, in many cases—around the entire planet without entering vacuum. Altogether, the Rings are occupied by approximately six hundred and twelve million people. Around two hundred million of those are considered permanent residents. The rest are temporary or seasonal workers, vacationers, visiting businesspeople, and the like.”
A teardrop-shaped craft disappeared into an opening in the side of one of the huge spheres. “Do people commute? Live on Earth, work up here?”
“Some, yes.”
I tried to take it all in. It was overwhelming, unreal.
Not only was I in space, I was witnessing what had to be among the grandest pieces of construction in human history.
To everyone else around me, the people bustling back and forth on this duty or that, it was just another day.
But for me, it was so awe-inspiring it didn’t feel like it was happening.
I felt queasy. My stomach twisted. I gripped the supple armrest. “Can you take me back down, now?”
“Of course.”
Raven showed me more once we were back in Earth’s gravity well.
It took me to an underwater metropolis in the Atlantic, a green-tinged land of glass domes and fish-adapt people who swam around like mermaids.
We cruised by, still in the ovoid, and a woman with gills on her neck and fins for feet swam by, waving to us with webbed fingers.
A mermaid. A cat-man. A space elevator leading to an orbital city. I was in the middle of a James Cameron film.
Raven got me food at a restaurant in a floating city.
It bobbed among air currents above equatorial Africa.
It showed me the palatial tiered gardens in what I still thought of as China.
Vast swaths of flowers and beautifully colored plants of every type, protected under a crystal clear dome and tended daily by millions of humans who did the work because they wanted to, even though avatars like Raven or other autonomous artificial beings could have done the work instead.
Raven offered to take me to see Bellerophon.
“It is on the Moon.” We were we back in the ovoid again, cruising across the Pacific toward the western coast of North America.
“But we can reach it with enough time for you to see the city and still get you back to Earth before your next jump forward through time. It is an incredible sight to see. Several radiation- and asteroid-hardened domes on the surface, and hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and buildings underground.”
“Thanks, but I’ve seen enough. I’m tired.”
“Of course. The Central Overmind has a room prepared for you to sleep in tonight.”
“Where?”
“The Central Overmind thought you may have had sufficient exposure to the wonders and, to you, strangeness of modern times. Your room is in a hotel designed to provide a roughly twenty-first- to twenty-second-century experience.”
“Retro chic for the time traveler, huh?”
“Yes, if that is acceptable.”
I leaned against the seat. I had a pounding headache again, the pain bouncing back and forth between my temples with each heartbeat. I hadn’t asked Raven for any painkillers, even though it probably had things that would stop the headache cold. The headache, the pain, was real. Familiar.
Understandable.
I let it throb.
“Sure,” I said.
Their records on the twenty-first century had a few gaps, or the design was retro as seen through the filter of a modern lens, the way a 1950s-style hamburger-and-shake diner would have looked when it opened brand new in the twenty-first century.
It had the general appearance of the times being represented but without sacrificing any modern convenience.
A robot ushered us through the rotating front doors.
It looked like the old Honda robots I remembered from news specials when I was young: white, vaguely humanoid body, plastic “face” with large black camera-lens eyes.
Inside the lobby, a statue of a cowboy sat on a chopper.
The cowboy wore a wide-brimmed hat, bandoliers, and machine pistols at each hip.
He sat back on the seat and gripped both handlebars, which were level with his head.
Around the statue, the aesthetic was enhanced—if that was the right word—by dark paneled wood and fake oil lamps.
It was, in short, strange. A blend of time periods. I considered telling Raven all the anachronisms and inaccuracies, but it would take a lot of time for little gain.
“I will show you to your room,” Raven said.
We passed the front desk, behind which stood a smiling animatronic woman dressed like she was going to an eighteenth-century French ball.
We took a rapid elevator to another floor and stepped into a corridor lit by flickering neon signs.
The dirty gray walls were covered with spray-paint graffiti and realistic-looking vomit or urine stains.
“Urban alleyway in the twentieth century?” I asked Raven, who was already gliding ahead, moving around piles of newspapers.
“Yes, that is the intention. Is it a realistic approximation?”
“Realistic enough. I’m not sure what it has to do with a hotel, though.”
“Ah. I suppose it is the aesthetic intent that matters. I understand each floor has its own theme.” The tall avatar stopped before a door. “Here we are.”
The door opened by itself. The decorum of the room was a stark contrast to the intentionally filthy-seeming hallway.
It was all clean, smooth white lines flowing into one another, with pieces of cushioned furniture formed out of the walls and floors.
I glanced back at the hallway. “The rooms aren’t themed? ”
“No. At one point, when the hotel was first constructed, they were. But it turned out guests did not want that much exposure to history after all.”
I snorted.
Raven glanced sideways at me. Then it motioned to a light brown box sitting on one of the tables in the center of the main room. “That would be your new suit. A gift from the Central Overmind. Custom designed for you and your needs.”
“How’s that?” I picked up the box. It was about five inches wide by six inches long, and four inches tall. It was light. I popped the lid open. Inside, nestled in velvet or some other soft fabric, was a silver bracelet.
“As the Traveler, you have specific needs.” There was a change in Raven’s tone. I glanced up. The avatar’s posture had altered, straightened.
“Am I talking to the Overmind again?”
“Yes.”
I looked at the bracelet. “Thank you for making this.”
“It was my pleasure. An interesting exercise in anticipatory design and rapid non-combinatorial nanonic manufacture.”
“How does it work?”
“Slip the bracelet on your wrist. Either wrist will do. The bracelet is a combination nano-forge and hyperspatial computational device. It will extrude an extremely strong and highly protective layer of chained graphene nanotubes that will surround your skin. It will also generate multiple layers of adaptive force fields. Together the graphene and force fields will provide significant protection from energy or physical attack, as well as enhance your own physical capabilities. To control the protective system, I have taken the liberty of providing a new computational matrix for the pseudo-SI you carry with you in your earpiece.”
I glanced up as Lyle made a little “hmm” sound in my ear. “New computational matrix? What does that mean?”
“The bracelet, and the suit it will extrude, will accept and enhance the processing ability of your pseudo-SI, which I deduce is a mimetic quantum-state amalgam of your son, Lyle Treder.”
“Will he still be … him?”
There may have been a flicker of hesitation.
“Yes. I have not included any alterations to the consciousness emulation your son designed within the comparatively limited quantum-fold array embedded in your earpiece. However, if you are not comfortable with this transition, you may retain the earpiece instead. If that is the case, the bracelet has redundant, non-sentient capabilities that will still serve you well.”
I held Raven’s expressionless, mirror-black eyes for a long moment, and looked down at the bracelet. “Hm.”
“The transition to the suit from the fold array in your earpiece can be done quite safely. And the consciousness will still be able to communicate with you. I must mention that I considered offering to enhance you physically, providing you with direct interface neural electronics, reinforcing your bones with alloys, enhancing your metabolism, et cetera. These enhancements would have allowed you to communicate with the bracelet sentience through thought alone. However, I felt it was not worth the risk. It is conceivable the entity responsible for your transit through time would construe this as an inappropriate alteration of your physical being.”
“Wait.”
“Yes?”
“You mean it might stop? If you changed me enough, did that stuff to me, this entity, whatever, might stop making me move forward through time?”
“It is a small possibility.”
“How small?”
“It is impossible to say. But there is an equal likelihood that rather than no longer traveling forward, you would be annihilated upon your next transit if the entity determined you were no longer sufficiently ‘you.’ Of course, given the technological sophistication of this unknown entity, it is far more likely any alterations I made would either be ignored or removed, instantaneously. Because of these considerations, and because items physically close to you—like the survival suit you wear now—have been included in the transits forward thus far, I judged this was the solution most likely to succeed in protecting you.”
I stared hard at Raven, trying to see something. Anything. It would have made a hell of a poker player. “All right. Lyle?”
“I think it’s worth moving to the bracelet. If it makes me better able to guide and protect you, it’s worth the risk that something might go wrong.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” I closed the lid and set the box back down.
I wanted Raven and the Overmind to go. The day had been too much.
Just like the days preceding it. “I think I’ll put it on tomorrow before the next jump.
If that’s all right.” I knew I shouldn’t wait.
It would be better to test the bracelet out, iron out any bugs.
But I wanted to be alone with Lyle. I needed to rest.
“As you wish,” Raven said.
“Will you, or Raven, come back an hour and a half or so before the next jump happens?”
“Yes. I will instruct the hotel to have food ready for you at that time.”
“Thank you.”
We stood there for a moment. It felt awkward, or would have, if the other being in the room with me had been human. Raven’s head inclined. “Raven will now return. Good night, Scott Treder.”
“Good night.”
Raven’s eyes shut. When they opened, the avatar was itself again, its posture changing. It regarded me. “Is there anything else you require?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“If you need anything during the night, you may speak to the room and the local pseudo-AI will be able to provide you with whatever you may require.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“I will return in the morning.”
“Okay.”
It stared at me for a heartbeat, then left the room. I went to the broad windows. The sun was setting, visible between the elaborate crystalline spires surrounding the hotel. Ovoid aircars moved back and forth, glinting in the red-and-orange light.
“They can’t stop it, either.”
“No,” Lyle said, his voice gentle in my ear. “I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t think this is something that can be stopped.”
“Yeah.”
It was a long time before I went to sleep.