The 45th Parallel, page 6
“I think we learn as much as possible from these files before we hunt for people. We might learn something interesting. I can’t see that they will open up their files for two random girls who walk in and say they are from Scotland. Besides, they may not be happy that we have come through their portal. Although no one was there to meet us.”
“True. Cold pea and ham soup or peaches?”
“Ugh. Both,” she admitted. “I lost my dinner traveling through the vortex. I’m hungry.”
Chapter 11
“How do you think this happened? Ending up here, I mean?” Sera yawned as I trawled files. She was trying to rest, her eyes hurting from reading the screen all day. With no power access, she set the power low to conserve the battery.
“I’ve been thinking about that all day. Stewing over Callie’s notes. I mean, I read them enough times before we left. I suspect there are two additional variables. First, the lightning strike. My memory is a little hazy as it happened so fast, but I’m fairly sure it struck precisely as I detonated the charge, which would have enhanced the magnetic pulse exponentially. There is no way we could have predicted that would happen. The second, and the one I am ashamed I didn’t think about before, has to do with the moon phases.”
“What about the moon? We waited until it was shining directly into the tomb. We timed it right when we set off the charge. I was watching.”
“We did. But the moon was full in its cycle. I don’t think it was when they deactivated it before. If the solar cycle impacts the opening of the portals, it makes sense that the moon phases might as well.”
Sera thought about that for a moment. “Isn’t it always full at the equinox and the solstice?”
“No.” I ran the numbers in my head. “I’d say that it occurs about … once every decade.”
“Once in ten years?”
“Sure. The solstice is the point of the year when the Earth’s axis is tilted toward the sun. At the spring equinox, the Earth’s axis is tilted perpendicular to the line between the Sun and Earth.”
“The line?” She looked up from her place on the floor and raised her eyebrows.
Using my hands to illustrate, I explained. “If you were to draw an imaginary line through the Earth, from the North Pole to the South Pole, you’d find the line that represented Earth’s rotational axis. During the moment of equinox, it makes a right angle of ninety degrees. When we lit the charge at the precise moment of equinox, all the sun’s rays falling on Earth are perpendicular to that imaginary line. This means that at the two equinoxes and not on any other day of the year, fifty percent of the sun is visible from the north and south poles. Add that a full moon only occurs once every twenty-eight days, to have both align is quite rare.”
“Hang on. When you were off searching for food, I read something about moon phases.” Sera leaped up and leaned over the laptop. I relinquished control and took her place on the floor.
“Let me find it… Look—here.”
Groaning, I got up again. My stomach hadn’t really recovered from the chunder-inducing journey, and I still felt the waves of nausea wrack my body.
“The portal on Yellowstone used to open for thirty seconds and only on a full moon.”
“What do you mean, they only opened on a full moon? What about the solstice?”
“That’s what it says here.” Sera pointed at the files she was reading from. “Nothing about solstices or equinox.”
“And we chose that particular day to reactivate the portals. Fucking fantastic.”
Sera exhaled. “We did.”
“I didn’t think about it, honestly. I was just trying to replicate the structure that Callie and Tadhg built all those years ago and not wanting to wait another thirteen weeks to the solstice. I can’t believe they left the gear on Lewis.”
“On that note, how did you know where it was?” Sera asked curiously.
I stifled a laugh. “I found it once while looking for parts for an electrical project. Your mum told me, actually. I needed some copper, and she sent me to a small, abandoned farm shed in the middle of nowhere. Of course, I may have poked around a little.”
“Maybe they always intended to reactivate it?” Sera had returned her attention to the laptop, but I knew well enough that she was a queen of multitasking.
“It’s a bit late for that now,” I said grimly. “I think we have activated them all, even though that wasn’t the plan. Were these portals also deactivated? The unhab ones, I mean?”
“I think so. There are trade records, hundreds of them, covering years, but they stopped. So either they stopped using the portal, or it was decommissioned. What about the lightning? I assume that enhanced the charge?”
I nodded. Electrical currents I knew quite a lot about. “Definitely, and I had no way of predicting that. Between the magnetic jolt we administered, plus the lightning strike on the copper pole, and add the possibility of the moon phase playing a part, and I think we have massively overshot the mark.”
“But how did we get from Lewis to America?” Sera asked, looking up at me.
“I have absolutely no idea,” I admitted. “I know there is an antipodal community in Colorado. Both our mums have been there a very long time ago. But I don’t think this is it. It wasn’t over a geothermic vent.”
“Okay, but let’s think this through. If we managed to jolt the entire Nexus back into alignment on the equinox, and it also happened to be a full moon, and these unhab portals were also open, have we managed to link all of them?”
“Fuck, I think we have. It is the only thing that makes sense.” Another wave of nausea wracked me, and this time not entirely because of the journey we had endured.
“Well, the good news is we only need to wait for thirty days, not thirteen weeks,” Sera pointed out.
“Fewer. Between twenty-eight and twenty-nine days between full moons.”
“Even better. How much food did you find?”
“Not enough,” I admitted. “Looks like I am going hunting again.”
Chapter 12
“Can you find me something with a power cable?” Sera asked as I stretched.
“Good morning to you too,” I groaned, rolling over in the cramped space on the concrete floor. Not that I knew it was morning. With no natural light, we did not know what time it was. We had just slid the table as far as we could toward the wall, tried to make space, and slept, using our clothes as a pillow. Like Mum, I wasn’t a morning person. I couldn’t fathom how Dad could be so chirpy in the morning.
“How long have you been awake?” I grumbled.
“Couldn’t sleep. A few hours, I guess.”
“Power cable for what?” Sera’s original question registered.
“My battery is nearly flat, and my plug differs from what they use here.” She showed me the socket in the wall, almost on the filthy floor. Two vertical prongs, not the three angled ones we were used to. “I have gained access to the main file share and accessed some fascinating stuff. But I am down to 8 percent battery. Could you find something? Perhaps a broom and some cleaning cloths while you are at it?”
Groaning, I dragged myself upright, realizing that Sera would stress as the battery level depleted. Fine. We could eat later. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.
Hunting through the accessible rooms, I picked up random items that could be useful: bits of wire, an abandoned pair of pliers, an old fuse. No food. Much of this level hadn’t been used in a long time, years by the look of it. At the back of a cupboard, I located a small fan with a power cable. Picking it up, I coughed from the dust and turned it over, looking at it. I could repurpose that. The plug for Sera, but even the fan blades might be useful for something…
Sera watched nervously as I pulled my pocketknife out of my pack and spliced her old charging cable with the new one, allowing both plugs to operate. Dad had given us these knives on our seventeenth birthday, just before we went to Newgrange. Dad was never without his, often using it for cutting string to stake plants or undertake other random tasks. It reminded me of him whenever I used it, and a pang of guilt struck me now as I used it to slice off the plastic coating.
“It’s fine,” I hissed, feeling her hovering over my left shoulder. “I know how to do this. This is a piece of cake. We reactivated antipodal points to travel across the earth. I think I can change a plug.”
“Yes, but we planned to end up on an island off the coast of New Zealand,” she sniped back. “Not North America. Forgive me if I am a little nervous.”
For more than ten days we stayed in our tiny office, straying only to find food and water and use the filthy, abandoned bathroom we had located near the machinery room. We assumed the water was clean, but it didn’t really matter. We knew we were immune. The bathroom reeked from years of disuse, and we held our noses whenever we used it. No matter how long we ran the water, it only ran cold, so we limited ourselves to the briefest of daily showers, freezing as we toweled ourselves dry. Thank goodness we had packed changes of clothing and towels, expecting to be on August for at least a few days before we could travel to Australia. We washed our clothes and using the cord from the fan, we hung them behind one of the heat pumps where they hopefully wouldn’t be seen.
Sera and I used the time productively, learning as much as possible about the community. Sera had hacked their servers by the second day, laughing at their weak security systems.
“You realize there is no one left to hack their systems, so they probably don’t even bother setting up high-tech security?” I teased.
“Possibly,” she admitted. “But this is a tightly controlled settlement, worryingly so, so I thought their security would be more robust. I can’t imagine a society that refers to people using codes, two letters and three numbers, will welcome us. All hours are accounted for. Look here…” She pointed at the screen. “Every person here is required to report in thirty-minute intervals. They allocate food, water, and oxygen resources to each number—person, I should say. Everything is carefully allotted and accounted for. There is a distinct hierarchy, but everyone gets the same basic food allocation.”
“Well, isn’t that democratic? Not the no-name part, but the allocation part.”
“Not really. I suspect this is socialism.”
I squinted, trying to recall the day in class we had learned about political systems with Xanthe. Or was it with Bridget? I relented. “Socialism. Remind me?”
“In a socialist system, all property, equipment, and resources are owned by the government or the collective. Everyone relies on the government for everything: food, water, healthcare, and education. From what I can see in these files, everything is strictly controlled but equally distributed.”
“Okay, so that is good, right?” I tried to cover my discomfort at the word “collective.” They would have found the rig we set up at the stones at Callanish by the next day and learned what we had done. I prayed Mum wasn’t too angry. I was surprised I couldn’t hear Illy and Mum’s fury from here. It was Dad’s face, sad and disappointed, that I kept seeing flash before my eyes at night. Dad had been through so much. Losing his parents, then my Mum, then his second wife before finding Mum again. I couldn’t imagine his trauma at losing Sera and me. I was a shitty, shitty daughter.
“Yes, and no. Perhaps it is the best choice in a confined community like this one. They can’t expand, and people can’t build private wealth as it would cause resentment. They need to work together to grow food and survive. Maybe it isn’t a bad governance model under the circumstances. But this one appears to be based on military principles. See here. They have powerful defense and offense systems. They are warlike in their decision-making and refuse to negotiate. From what I have read in the archived files, they used to travel to other underwater communities. They operated with the policy to contact, attack, exploit, and pursue resources before the portals were deactivated. But some of the other communities retaliated, and hard from what I can tell, so Yellowstone locked down early. They restricted movement, controlled their population, and restricted birth rates.”
“So did we,” I admitted. “Well, the lockdown part. Not the controlled population part.”
“Yes, but we didn’t stockpile weapons and build weapons systems capable of taking out an entire city.”
“They didn’t protect their antipodal point, did they?”
“Agreed. But if it has been deactivated for fifteen years, perhaps you don’t bother. But that begs the question, is it antipodal? And if so, where is the partner community?”
“Indian Ocean?” I guessed, trying to remember the world maps we had been forced to study at school.
“The antipodal point would be in the Indian Ocean. The nearest landmass is a long way off, and on Kerguelen Island, and as we know from your parents’ travel, there is already a domed community. My mum has been there several times, yours too. It makes no sense that there is an unhab one there too. In fact, from what I can tell, all the unhab communities are in the northern hemisphere. I can’t find anything detailed about the communities on other unhabs, the political systems and such. They don’t seem to have any records about the aboveground societies, you know, those in the Collective. All the files I can access are about this community, and overwhelmingly, everything here is tightly controlled. Resources, the people. Everything.”
“What do you mean by tightly controlled?” I didn’t like the tone of Sera’s voice. “What happened if you didn’t agree with this type of rule?”
“Terminated is the expression used in the personnel files. But I think we can safely assume that means…”
“They killed anyone who opposed them? Their own people too?”
“Correct. Several hundred records were terminated within a few months, nearly twenty years ago. Only the occasional one after that. That was what made me look at them more closely. At first, I thought there had been a pandemic, or perhaps the virus had made its way into the community here. But when I started digging, it looked like that was the point where they felt threatened by the expansionist overtures of other communities, so they changed their societal principles to be based on equality, utilitarianism, and strategic defense. By the time travel ceased fifteen years ago, they were already isolationist and had no trade with anyone else.”
“And they killed off people who objected?” I felt sick. Illy would never kill off anyone who disagreed with her. She would talk at them until they complied, but no one was ever threatened physically.
“I can’t be sure, but it looks that way. The word ‘terminated’ makes it reasonably clear they didn’t just relocate anyone who objected. They didn’t tolerate dissent. Something I read proved they tightly control partnerships and the raising of children. Thank goodness I found a set of policies and protocols, all in English. Each couple is permitted only to have one child, and then the woman is sterilized.”
“Bloody hell! Why not the man? Mum always said a vasectomy was easier. A quick snip, and that was it.” Hearing her voice resonate through my head, my stomach reacted to the memory by sinking further. Poor Mum. She and Dad would be beside themselves at losing Sera and me.
“Yes, but sterilizing women is the ultimate form of control. You can guarantee no more children if you remove the womb from use.”
“Wow. That is pretty harsh. Surely that isn’t true.”
“That isn’t even remotely close to the worst policy I have read. How do you feel about killing children if they are disabled or maimed in some way? Even older ones who suffer an accident like losing a finger. Honestly, I think we are best to wait it out and go back through the portal. From everything I have read, I can guarantee this is not the type of place to take kindly to strangers walking in and wandering around.”
“Agreed. Well, we might need to space the meals out a bit. The stash I found is finished, and I don’t fancy traveling farther afield now that I know that.”
“Have you seen anything in your explorations that makes you think this isn’t true?” Sera asked, watching me intently. She barely left the office except to use the bathroom.
“Sadly, no. It all makes sense. Everything here is painted gray. I found the maintenance shaft and climbed the ladder to the pod level a few times, mainly in the dark. I’ve only seen people from a distance, but they all wear a uniform, have short hair, and look identical. As in, I can’t even tell men from women. Everything is orderly, like a warehouse.”
“Where did you find the food, then?”
“In an unused storeroom, in a cupboard. Someone’s personal stash, clearly, but it is really old.”
“What do we have left?”
“Canned surprise. Fifteen cans with no labels. It could be soup or tuna. Who knows?”
“Fifteen cans?”
“Yup. How many days?”
Sera gazed at her screen. “The best I can tell, we have been here seventeen days. So eleven to go.”
“Damn.”
“A can to share per day?”
“I can make that work.”
Chapter 13
More time passed in that lightless, soulless room. Bored with reading over Sera’s shoulder and copying files she found helpful, I went roaming, looking for something useful. There was no food to be found anywhere. On one loop around the floor, checking all the unlocked doors, I located a stack of dusty old manuals and carried them back to the office. Barricading us in again, I picked one up and sat down to read. My eyes were drooping. With no natural light, I was yawning madly. Flicking ahead, it was a service manual for a water pump, and I was reading out of desperation for something to do. It was rudimentary in some ways but had some interesting elements, including detailed instructions on how to hook them up to the geothermic regulation units. There were several elements I had never seen in action. As the dull rumble of machinery outside registered, I decided. Kinesthetic learning was my thing; I may as well learn all I could while we were stuck here. I wouldn’t pull one apart and potentially draw attention to us, but if I could see one in operation, I could form a picture in my mind…
