Containment Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  PART I: Venus CHAPTER 1: Total Earth Eclipse

  CHAPTER 2: The Pinnacle of Human Achievement

  CHAPTER 3: The History of V1, Part 1: The End of the Space Age

  CHAPTER 4: Earth Elevator

  CHAPTER 5: Reeducation

  CHAPTER 6: The History of V1, Part 2: Earth Crisis

  CHAPTER 7: Water Pressure

  CHAPTER 8: The Emerald Eye of Venus

  CHAPTER 9: The History of V1, Part 3: The Colonization of Space

  CHAPTER 10: Homecoming

  CHAPTER 11: The Biggest Wedding in the Galaxy

  CHAPTER 12: Easter Egg

  CHAPTER 13: Dirt

  CHAPTER 14: Conception

  CHAPTER 15: Outside

  CHAPTER 16: Dead Air

  PART II: Earth CHAPTER 17: The Wall

  CHAPTER 18: A Hole in the Wall

  CHAPTER 19: The Other Side of the Wall

  CHAPTER 20: The Homeless

  CHAPTER 21: Decontamination

  CHAPTER 22: Quarantine

  CHAPTER 23: Genetic Fingerprint

  CHAPTER 24: Time Capsule

  PART III: A New World CHAPTER 25: The Circumference of the Earth

  CHAPTER 26: Redundancy

  CHAPTER 27: Decision Making Processes

  CHAPTER 28: Earth Radio Pod

  CHAPTER 29: Creeping Dose

  CHAPTER 30: Moving Parts

  CHAPTER 31: Red Herring

  CHAPTER 32: Slopes

  CHAPTER 33: The Impossible

  CONTAINMENT

  by Christian Cantrell

  For future generations who must question everything about the worlds they are born into.

  PART I

  Venus

  CHAPTER ONE

  Total Earth Eclipse

  The first thing Arik noticed when he opened his eyes was that he couldn't move his head. He was immobilized from the neck up by a complex and bristling steel vise. Although there was a curtain draped over his forehead, he somehow knew that a portion of his skull had been removed and that his brain was exposed. There wasn't any pain — just tingling. There were questions from someone he couldn't see, and the sounds of tiny electronic motors making thousands of minute adjustments. Then more tingling. Eventually the questions ended and the sensation was gone, and when Arik opened his eyes again, he was looking up at Dr. Nguyen.

  "Blink if you can hear me," the surgeon said. He waited for the series of twitches, then leaned down toward Arik's face and shined a bright white diode into one of his eyes, then the other. "Good. Welcome back. You've been out for 89 days, believe it or not."

  Arik had the sensation of being inside of a heavy inanimate shell rather than his own body. He was entirely paralyzed except for his eyes and the ability to take deliberate, laborious breaths. His head had been recently shaved, and there was a neat hairless incision — precisely cauterized with a laser rather than crudely sutured — above his right ear like an intricate musical note. His immature beard had been allowed to grow in, forming sparse black patches which added an edge to his boyish face.

  "Don't try to move or talk. Just relax. Your father is on his way. He'll explain everything."

  They were in the Doc Pod. The small hospital and adjacent laboratory were officially the Medicine Department, but the younger generation, eager to express their individuality and imprint themselves upon the colony's culture, christened it the "Doc Pod." The name stuck.

  The room was cubic and cramped, as were most rooms in V1 (the official name of the colony was "Ishtar Terra Station One," but it was almost always referred to by its call sign). The walls of the hospital room were thick conductive polymethyl methacrylate, or "polymeth," all of which produced a soft warm light and were electronically fogged for privacy. The wall above Arik's head was a virtual dashboard indicating every detail of his physiology. He couldn't see it directly, but he could see the colors reacting to his heartbeat and breathing reflected in Dr. Nguyen's almond eyes.

  "If we could have gotten you into a hyperbaric chamber, we might have been able to avoid surgery," the doctor told Arik, "but we couldn't get the specifications from Earth to build one, and we didn't feel like we could wait. Every minute of restricted blood flow was increasing the risk of more brain damage."

  He rolled himself down to the end of the bed and raked the bottom of Arik's foot with a thin metal implement. Arik did not react and the doctor frowned.

  "Anyway, one of us was going to make history," Dr. Nguyen continued. He recorded something on a luminous polymeth tablet. "Either you were going to be the first human to die on Venus, or I was going to perform the first successful off-Earth brain surgery." He chuckled at his observation, then composed himself. "Considering we actually had to build several surgical instruments from scratch, and the fact that we were right smack in the middle of a total Earth eclipse which meant I had no medical consultation from the GSA whatsoever, I'd say it went pretty well."

  The term "total Earth eclipse" was used to describe a period of time during which communication between Earth and Venus was impossible. When there was a direct line of sight between the two planets, communication was easy — it was just a matter of picking the right satellites on either end, aligning transmitters and antennas, and timing the broadcasts. But when Venus was on the opposite side of the solar system, obscured by a violent ball of nuclear fusion and plasma 1.3 million times the size of Earth, sending a radio signal from one planet to the other was like lining up an incredibly complex billiards shot on a table billions of square kilometers wide. You could bank the signal off one of the many communications satellites distributed throughout the solar system, or you could try to bounce the high frequency microwaves off of Mercury's iron-rich surface. You could even direct the broadcast through just the right point in the Sun's gravitational well that it bent back around toward the planet behind like a golf ball catching the rim of the cup on its way past. But sometimes everything was just fractions of a degree out of alignment all at the same time, or signals were being scrambled by solar flares, or satellites were busy with higher-priority tasks, and the only thing to do was nothing at all. The only solution was to simply wait for the solar system to realign itself into a simpler and more auspicious configuration.

  Total Earth eclipses tended to put people on edge.

  "Now technically you did suffer some brain damage, but we expect you to recover almost completely — except for some minor memory loss, perhaps." The doctor teased some fibers out from a cotton ball and brushed them across Arik's eyelashes. Arik squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them again, the doctor looked satisfied. "Good. Your reflexes are coming back. The paralysis you're experiencing is only temporary. We just did that to keep you calm when you woke up."

  The fact that Dr. Nguyen was just now getting around to addressing the paralysis was a true testament to his bedside manner. Although Arik had no memory of what happened to him, he assumed whatever it was had caused severe trauma to his spinal cord. Since the moment he realized he couldn't move, he had been trying to imagine a completely immobile and dependent existence — a life expressed entirely through robotic prostheses and computers. The first quadriplegic on Venus. History was always being made here, for better or for worse.

  The door in the wall across from the bed began to glow. All the inside doors in V1 were identical prefabricated units. Because space was limited, swinging doors were shown to be impractical in early designs, and because almost all inner walls were made of transparent conductive polymeth, the pocket sliding door design was also rejected. The proposal the Global Space Agency eventually approved was a louvered concept consisting of six long thin pieces of polymeth standing together vertically. The doors opened almost in
stantaneously by pivoting the slats 90 degrees, then flinging them on tracks to either side — three to the left and three to the right — where they slapped against each other in a crisp and unmistakable announcement of someone's arrival or departure. Not only were the doors very compact, but they were also airtight in order to help balance the distribution of oxygen throughout V1. And since they were conductive, they could perform handy tricks like glowing as someone approached.

  Something changed on the display above the bed, and Arik heard his father's voice. Dr. Nguyen looked up and tapped the wall with one finger. The door snapped open and Arik's father ducked into the room. Arik's young wife entered a moment later, a beat behind, just long enough to let Arik know that she had almost changed her mind.

  Darien was older than one would expect the father of such a young man to be, and having been one of the original settlers on Venus, the years of stress and exhaustion showed. There was little resemblance between Arik and his father; Arik's expression, even when fully relaxed, tended to be naturally intense. Conversely, Darien's expression had the perpetually contented and affable look of a proud grandfather. He put his hands behind his back as he approached the bed as if intentionally resisting the urge to reach out and touch his son.

  "Can he hear me?" He was looking at Arik, but talking to the doctor.

  "Yes. He's reacting normally to stimuli. He just can't move yet."

  "Thank God you woke up," Darien said. His normal, easy smile had to be forced, and was incongruous with his worried eyes. He looked at the doctor. "How much does he know?"

  "Nothing about the incident."

  Darien watched his son while he selected his next words. When he was ready, he leaned forward. "Arik, you had a very serious accident." He spoke slowly and deliberately, a little too loudly. "Your environment suit failed while you were outside. We got you back in, but not before you developed a very prominent embolism in your brain. You're extremely lucky to be alive."

  "The technology for this kind of surgery didn't even exist here," Dr. Nguyen reminded Arik.

  "But you're going to be fine. Everything went smoothly."

  "Well, mostly," Dr. Nguyen corrected. "We'll know more in a few days."

  Darien looked at the doctor, then back at Arik.

  "Your mother really wanted to be here when you woke up," Darien said, but he didn't finish the sentence. He gave his son another sympathetic smile instead, then quickly turned his attention back to the doctor. "Yun, when are we going to know how much he remembers?"

  "As soon as he can talk. There's no other way to know."

  "When will that will be?"

  "It's impossible to say right now. We're no longer restricting his movements, so he should be fully mobile again in a day or two. The question is how much brain damage he suffered. As you know, we had to remove some lesioned tissue, but the brain is an amazingly resilient and adaptable organ. I don't believe he'll have any permanent disabilities, but it might take some time for him to regain his speech and fine motor skills."

  Darien tightened his lips and nodded at the doctor's explanation. Cadie appeared beside the bed between the two men, and Darien wrapped his arm around her narrow shoulders.

  Cadie was a smallish girl who fit well within the scale of V1. Although her parents were both Japanese, she had curiously prominent Western features: round eyes, full lips, freckles — a little elfish. She was smiling both compassionately and nervously as she looked down at her husband, her straight black hair hanging beside her face, the tops of her ears peeking out.

  "Arik," Darien said, "there's something you need to know."

  Cadie was wearing a dark synthetic long-sleeved dress which, when flattened out, revealed a subtle roundness that was not there the last time Arik saw her. But even to someone who had never seen a pregnant woman before, the shape was unmistakable.

  His wife's transformation suddenly made the passage of time real. Arik felt like he had just been flung into the future — or rather that the future had just abruptly and rudely displaced the present. His eyes were wide as he strained them to see his wife's tiny hands clasped over the gentle rise in her middle. He struggled to comprehend the life growing inside her that he knew would be born into a world of containment, of constant and exact calculation, of oxygen levels that everyone knew could not safely support any increase in population.

  "As you can see," Arik's father said, "we're going to need you back at work as soon as possible."

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Pinnacle of Human Achievement

  The first person to be born in space was a little girl named Zephyr. Her mother became very rich selling a type of gum called "Oh-Chew" which, when mixed with the enzymes in human saliva, supposedly produced fresh clean oxygen (Oh-two). She had three adjacent luxury suites on a commercial orbiter converted into an operating theater with surgical instruments Velcroed to one wall. Zephyr's mother believed that a baby born in zero G would grow up to have a superior intellect — literally, a more well-rounded brain. But the process turned out to be a lot messier than anyone expected, and everyone involved considered the experiment irrefutable proof that gravity was a good thing during the birthing process. Zephyr's mother lost most of her deposit, and 13 years later, Zephyr was arrested for stealing a car.

  The first person to be born on another planet was Arik's best friend, Cam. Three weeks later, Arik became the 29th baby to be born on another planet. After Arik, 71 more babies were born in a two-month period. This off-Earth population explosion came roughly nine months after it was definitively determined that V1 could maintain enough oxygenated air to support exactly 100 additional lives. No more.

  These 100 babies became known as Generation V, or just Gen V. Several of the original Founders of the V1 Colony (anyone not born on Venus was considered a Founder) claimed credit for the clever moniker; the "V" obviously stood for Venus, but Gen V also happened to represent the fifth wave of humans on the planet, the previous four having arrived via rockets and large capsules known as "seed pods."

  The first person to be born on another planet also turned out to be the tallest. By the most accurate instruments available on V1, it was determined that Cam was exactly two meters tall (which meant he was not a big fan of the compact prefabricated doors). The theory was that since Venus was only 81.5% as massive as Earth, the weaker gravity allowed Cam to grow taller than the average human. The fact that none of the other 99 children ended up significantly surpassing the average human height on Earth was not enough to disprove the hypothesis in most people's minds. For all intents and purposes, it was fact.

  The first 100 babies to be born on another planet made history again by becoming the first class to graduate on another planet. School in the V1 colony was much less structured than the Earth equivalent. Parents were responsible for the basics: reading, writing, math up through calculus, a little history, and introductory biology, chemistry, and physics. Since everyone in V1 was smart enough to make themselves useful on another planet, home schooling, with the help of curricular software, seemed to make the most sense up through at least a high school education.

  But eventually the kids needed more time than their working parents could afford, and the benefit of disciplines outside their parents' fields of expertise, so they were split up into ten groups of ten and distributed throughout the colony for an hour or two at a time. Topics of study were narrowed down to various forms of biochemistry, physics, engineering, and, of course, computer programming, which was as essential to every branch of science as learning to use a knife was to cooking. In reality, the computer programming classes were more for the benefit of the teachers and other visiting adults since many of the students — and in particular, Arik — were far more competent computer scientists than most of the Founders. Gen V had, after all, been both educated and entertained by computers quite literally from the very moment they were born.

  There was an Education Department, but it didn't take up any physical space. The "Brain Pod" was wherever t
he small administrative staff happened to squat since anyone's virtual workspace could be called up onto any interactive polymeth surface in V1, allowing for a great deal of flexibility and adaptability. All the Brain Pod really did was shuffle classes around, create schedules, and assign teachers. Eventually, after taking a vote, they determined that the students were ready to graduate, but in order to provide a little closure, they decided that each student should submit a final project. The most impressive, as determined by a specially appointed committee, would be presented during the commencement ceremony in the Public Pod in front of the entire V1 colony (and anyone on Earth who cared to tune in). In order to reduce the number of projects that needed to be judged, the Brain Pod encouraged students to work in groups.

  It was no surprise to anyone that Arik and Cadie's project won. They tested their equipment up on the stage of the Venera Auditorium the morning of the graduation ceremony and rehearsed several times. The logistics of demoing what basically amounted to a computer program executing on a piece of custom hardware were not complicated, but Cadie and Arik had never presented anything before (when you grow up on Venus, there isn't a lot of time for things like Christmas pageants and talent shows). Looking out at all the seats from the perspective of the stage made them feel anxious and important, and brought out the obsessiveness in both their personalities. When it was time to take their seats, rather than sitting with the rest of their class, Arik and Cadie sat in the front row in order to give them easy access to the stage. While they waited for the lights to dim, they nervously turned to wave to friends and to search for their parents and favorite teachers among the crowd.

  The Venera Auditorium (Public Pod) was one of the first structures built on Venus. At one time, it housed all the colonists (there were only 20 back then) and every piece of their equipment. As the colony expanded, it was to become a warehouse, however it was successfully argued that, for the sake of morale, the colonists would need someplace where they could all occasionally gather for events like this. A new, much larger warehouse was constructed almost next door as part of the Infrastructure Department, and the Public Pod was officially established. The crumpled and corroded remains of the Venera 14 probe launched by the Russians in 1981 and later recovered during the early days of Venusian exploration were on display in the back corner beside an interactive piece of polymeth tirelessly preaching its significance.