“Let’s be thinking quickest, too,” Rachel said.
“—likely and quickest option would be to get you to a city like Shanghai, into some luxury hotel complex where my media work can commence—”
“And the money can begin to flow,” Xavier said.
Rachel saw no better option. “Can you get us out of here tonight?”
“By early morning . . .” Chang frowned. “I don’t want to promise what I can’t deliver.”
“Then please arrange for an early-morning departure,” Rachel said, looking toward Pav, then Xavier, then Zeds, and finally Tea and Taj. The humans indicated their acceptance of the plan with nods. Zeds clapped all four hands, which meant the same thing.
Chang cleared his throat. “How many of you will be going?”
Rachel turned to Kaushal. “Sanjay still can’t be moved?”
“Under no circumstances!” the commander said. “Moving him would jeopardize his recovery.”
“In that case,” Rachel said, turning back to Chang, “it’s the five of us.”
“We’re just going to leave him?” That was Yahvi, speaking for the first time. Yahvi had found the weakest spot in Rachel’s argument. She didn’t know whether to hug her daughter for displaying empathy and courage, or tell her to shut up and listen.
“Yes. He’s better off here than on the road—”
Pav weighed in. “And we have to move. It’s clear we are no longer safe here.” He looked at Remilla and Kaushal, as if daring them to argue. They remained silent.
Not Yahvi, however. “What if they come after him again?”
“We can put out a story,” Chang said, “let people think he’s been moved elsewhere.”
“We’re going to have to put out a whole bunch of stories,” Rachel said.
Chang stood up. “Which means I have a lot of work to do.”
Before he could exit, Taj caught him by the arm. “One moment.” He turned to his granddaughter. “Yahvi, I will take personal responsibility for Sanjay’s care—”
“Aren’t you coming with us?” Pav said.
“Yeah, Husband,” Tea said. “What about it?”
Taj looked at his son, then at his wife. “Tea will go with you. She and I will be in constant communication.” He glanced at Chang. “Someone needs to coordinate the travel, and I have the most experience.”
“More than I do,” Chang said, sounding grateful.
“I can help, too,” Pav said. “With Zeds.”
“It would have been nice to be in communication prior to the announcement of your decision,” Tea told Taj, with an edge in her voice that Rachel knew well.
She realized she had to play peacemaker for the various factions. “Tea, I know Taj would have talked this over, but this just came up, right?” Taj nodded.
“It’s settled then,” Rachel said. “We move tomorrow morning.” She pointed to Xavier. “We need to deal with the cargo, too.”
She was glad to have something practical to do, because if she allowed herself to consider the odds against the Adventure crew right now, she would probably curl up in a panicked ball.
Day Three
SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2040
TIME TO FIRST LIGHT:
Minus 7 days
FIRST LIGHT
22 APRIL 2040 0001:00 MDT
TIME TO FIRE LIGHT:
Minus 24 days
FIRE LIGHT
09 MAY 2040 0001:00 MDT
COUNTDOWN CLOCK AT SITE A
CARBON-143
STATUS: Humans assigned to the Project had long reverted to their centuries-old practice of working 6.5 days a week. The formations would have required more—the quotas certainly demanded more—but a decade of observation and interaction had proven that humans working seven days a week not only were not more productive, they actually made more errors.
There were also limits on the resources that could be shipped to Site A and processed for manufacture. So Aggregate Carbon programmed a Saturday workday that ended at 1 P.M.
Absence of humans did not mean that work ceased; far from it. Aggregates usually worked 23.5 out of every 24 hours, with the unused 0.5 hour devoted to system updates and checks or needed rotation of functions.
In addition, every week Aggregates in high-stress activities would have a programmed “refurbishment” session of two hours, in which new downloads from the formation were processed, and possible new aggregations were formed. (Carbon-143 “remembered” that she had been “born” as an aggregate of 11,211 “cells” that had first been aggregated into an intermediate stage of 89 “individuals” before becoming a “unit.”)
DATA: In her five years as a unit, Carbon-143 had grown convinced that Aggregates needed additional “downtime” for maintenance, energy reboost, and additional programming in order to function at optimum efficiency. But she had not shaped this observation into an action statement, much less sent it up the information tree. That, as her human counterpart observed in other circumstances, would have been “pointless to the point of idiocy.”
ACTION: So it was that Carbon-143 was at her assembly station with the other eleven members of her formation on Saturday afternoon when her human counterpart entered the facility.
“You need to check this out,” he was saying to another human: younger, clearly new, and nervous. Both were males—a distinction that did not apply to Aggregates. (Carbon-143 assumed a feminine aspect for linguistic reasons, and because her human counterpart insisted on addressing her in that mode.) But their gender did put the entire formation on alert; they had been programmed to expect a higher probably of mischief from off-duty males than females, especially deep into the leisure hours.
“Won’t we get in trouble?” the younger one said.
“Only if we get caught.”
“But there are Aggregates all over the place!”
“They don’t care, unless we try to break something. It’s fucking THE we have to watch out for.”
“Okay, then, what if they catch us?”
“They won’t,” the human counterpart said, moving behind other members of Carbon-143’s formation and making odd and very likely derogatory hand gestures behind their cranial structures. “They’re too busy singing and praying at this hour.” The human counterpart actually jumped up on the assembly-line structure.
“Aren’t you the least bit curious? Isn’t it worth a bit of risk to see what you’re working on?”
“I’m working on magnetic fields,” the younger one said. “They showed me the generator and I already sketched the power inputs. What else do I need to know?”
“How about what’s going through your big old portal?”
“Don’t call it a portal. I’m not sure—”
The human counterpart jumped down and took the younger man by the shoulder, turning him. “All those machines you saw lined up out there when we rode in?”
“I’m not sure, everything was so far away—”
“Thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands of them. Some of them are trucked in, but the most interesting ones are assembled right here.”
“Fine. Noted. Can we go now?”
“First, meet your team. It’s only common courtesy.”
“Meet an Aggregate?”
“Meet one. My girl here,” the counterpart said. “The one on the end.”
“They all look alike.”
“She’s always the one on the end, aren’t you, baby?”
Carbon-143 was unsure if this direct address required a response. Certainly the cold static of her cross-links with the other eleven members of her formation did not suggest so. But she interrupted her assembly sequence ever so slightly, to allow for a quick nod and turn.
The human counterpart clapped. “Thank you, darling!”
“Randall—”
“Carbon-143, meet Whit Murray.”