Atlas Alone Read online

  He beams at me and slips his hand around my waist in a way that makes me want to break his neck, but I simply let myself get pulled to his side. “I can tell we’re going to get along just fine!” he says, and Carolina actually looks relieved. “Go get your poor old granddaddy a drink,” he says to her.

  “Less of the old, Pappy,” she says. “You be nice to Deanna, now.”

  His hand squeezes me tighter to him. “Course I will!”

  I feel like a doll that Carolina has delivered to her grandfather to play with. She gives me the briefest smile as she exits, leaving us alone, entirely unconcerned about the way he is holding me. I note the way that the people around us are looking at me with more interest now.

  “So, I hear you’ve started to work for my girl now,” he says, finally letting me go so I can look at him. Or rather, so I can move round for him to look at me better.

  “I have,” I say, keeping my eyes bright, attentive, free of the irritation his roving gaze causes.

  “And that you helped her to win today’s game.”

  “It was a team effort.”

  He chuckles. “Ah, Noropean through and through. Next you’ll be telling me it was more luck than anything else.”

  “Oh no, not that,” I say, putting a glint in my eye. “More my own ruthless drive to win.” I let his chortle pass before adding, “Something tells me that you understand that drive.”

  His smile morphs into a frank nod. “That I do.” He tilts his head as he stares at me, this time into my eyes, as if really trying to see me for the first time, rather than my body. “My Carolina is good at panning for gold.”

  “And are you hoping I’m a new nugget?”

  “Oh, I know you are. I know what you did in that game and I respect that level of commitment.” He leans a little closer. “Only when it serves to help my girl, you understand,” he adds, sotto voce. He leans back. “I watched your interview with great interest.”

  It takes me a moment to figure out which interview he’s talking about. “The one I had in the States?”

  He nods. “It must have been hard, living where you did.”

  “It was,” I say, truthfully, but not for the reason he thinks. “It’s hard to present an image of yourself, day in, day out, that doesn’t match how you feel inside.”

  “It’s an upheaval, coming onto this ship, leaving Earth behind . . . but I’d like it if it could be something else for you. A coming home, as it were.” He offers his leathery hand, which I take, draping my fingers across his palm like the dainty little lady he wants me to be. “I truly believe that God has chosen to pluck you from your old life and bring you to us. There are people here, myself included, who would love to welcome you into his house. Give you sanctuary from the memory of your old life that you suffered with the ignorant.”

  It takes a supreme effort to keep my hand resting in his, to keep the mask of my face looking innocent, slightly needy and shifting now into hesitant gratitude. I’m just playing a role, that’s all. “You are so kind,” I say to him. “All I have ever wanted is a place where I felt safe enough to be who I really am.”

  His fingers close tighter around mine, and then Carolina is there with his drink and the conversation shifts from saving my soul to easier subjects such as data analysis and then a flurry of introductions as those around us clearly decide I’m someone worth meeting, given the attention lavished upon me by one of the founders.

  After almost an hour of small talk, I excuse myself by asking Carolina to remind me where the restrooms are. I go back outside, into the corridor, past the lift and through the other set of doors ahead. I go to the bathroom, just in case Carolina is watching to see if I get lost, noting how spacious the cubicles are. As I wash my hands, I see that by the door there’s an actual full-length mirror, which I use to check my outfit properly.

  As I turn to the side, examining the cut of the dress and trying to decide if I should ask Carolina for the printer pattern, something on the collar catches the light and sparkles. Reaching up, thinking it’s something that might have rubbed off someone else’s dress during the overly tactile introductions, I feel something small, round and hard. A pin!

  Close up to the mirror, I recognize the North American continent logo immediately. Carolina must have left it on by accident. Is this why Ada was confused about my membership status?

  After getting Ada to check that Carolina is still in the party room, I take a left out of the bathroom area instead of a right. The corridor stretches onward in a way that’s familiar to me, only with fewer doors on either side of it, implying larger cabins—or perhaps offices?—within.

  Just as I start to consider turning back, I spot something mounted to the wall next to the last door on the left. It looks like some sort of security pad. As I approach it, a fluttering sensation builds in my stomach. It looks just like the one from that game. A touchscreen with the CSA logo is spinning on it, but this time there’s no string of letters and numbers.

  A notification from my chip pops up. Then a new logo appears in my visual field as the others gray out: the CSA logo, just like it did in the game when Bobby Bear synced my neural chip with the tiepin.

  The screen on the security pad changes and a single line of text appears. “We walk in God’s light.”

  Holy shit. Just like the game. I glance back down the corridor. I’m alone and I can’t see any cams anywhere. Of course, they can be so small they’re hard to spot, but still, I can’t walk away from this. Maybe that game wasn’t just to upset me. Maybe it was to train me . . . Didn’t the beast tell me it would help me with my goals? Fuck.

  I send my mind back to that moment in the game. What was the phrase I used? Then it comes to me, clear as day. “Proverbs 18:16: ‘A man’s gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men.’” I say the words and there’s a clunk from the door’s lock. When I realize it’s not going to slide open automatically, I reach toward the handle, wondering what could be inside. Whatever it is, keeping it off-grid is the best way to keep it secret. I press the handle down and push the door open, steeling myself for whatever the most powerful people on this ship want to hide from everybody else.

  19

  I DON’T THINK I have ever been in a place that has been completely off-grid. Not even the Circle’s land was as strictly closed off as we’d always thought; it would be very inconvenient to plan for Rapture if the only way you could access the Internet was to drive to the perimeter, after all.

  Initially I’m thrown by the fact that the lights don’t automatically come on when I go through the door. I stand there in the dark, stupid with confusion for a few moments, before remembering a historical mersive I played years ago set in a house with light switches. I brush my hand to the right of the doorway and the lights come on. I’m also disconcerted by how not only has my connection to Ada been cut off, but my connection to all chip functionality is severed too. I can’t even take simple pictures with my retinal cams, and when I see the space within, I have never wanted to take a picture more.

  The room is dominated by a large central table and, lined up against the far wall, three others, upon which a set of models has been built. The model at the center is, at first glance, that of a town. But as I move closer to it, I realize it’s not just any town; it’s the first phase of the new colony.

  It’s beautifully made, with the hallmarks of handcrafted modeling that I recognize from working with some of the most elitist directors in the mersive industry, who insisted upon using them instead of printed ones. They argued they created a more realistic effect, as the real world didn’t have such perfect edges and uniform color schemes. Here, in this secret room, I suspect the handmade aspect has far more to do with removing the need to upload the designs to the server in order to print them out.

  As first impressions go, it’s fine. I’m no town planner but e
ven I can appreciate that there are open areas that look like they could be used as parkland, wide streets, lots of space for gardens. But do we know we’ll be able to live outside there? It seems . . . fantastical to plan something out that looks like it could be dropped into any place on Earth. There aren’t any trees, I note, but that could be an artistic decision.

  It seems to be designed around a cluster of large central buildings, surrounded by a band of smaller and still presumably civic buildings, with spokes reaching out from those linking to clusters of housing. At a quick glance, it looks like there are far too many civic buildings for the number of people in the colony, but maybe this is only one possible design, and besides, with its modularity, more spokes could easily be added on. Or perhaps they are planning more than one city.

  I move to the far wall, glance over the models on two tables, which showcase two of the big public buildings from the center of the town plan. I was expecting the interiors to be concert halls or something, but they’re laid out like mansions rather than civic buildings. Confused, I move to the third model, which shows a cross section of an apartment block. Then I realize I’ve got the scale of the first model completely wrong. The buildings that I assumed were civic in purpose are actually private dwellings. Ten of them. One for each founder and their family. What I had assumed were houses in outer spokes are actually more like apartments. I suppose there’s an efficiency in that sort of design, though I thought the Americans resorted to apartment blocks only in high-density areas, as they had always enjoyed a massive landmass to spread out on. But if it’s a first-phase plan, they need to get thousands of people homed as quickly as possible, and that makes sense to a certain extent, but . . .

  My eyes flick from the central houses to the outer spokes. From one lifestyle to another. Surely it isn’t as obvious as this looks. Is this the reason why this model is hidden away from the server?

  But then it’s making me angry, just looking at it, and the last thing they want is ten thousand angry people realizing they’re being shipped out like sardines only to end up living like them at the end of the journey. But why? Why design something like this when you’re only sharing the planet with one other colony? Why make a city plan that’s almost a parody of the gap between the haves and have-nots when . . .

  I think about the data I analyzed for Carolina, in particular the bizarrely impoverished mersives recorded by the vast majority of people on the ship. What if they have been trained for the trip in places designed to give them low expectations for what they will have on the planet? Something about all this is making my stomach churn, but it’s still not enough to explain why this room is shut off from the server. I’m missing something here . . .

  I look at the rest of the room. The walls are bare but the floor area seems small given how far apart the doors are spaced in the corridor. Either the neighboring rooms are larger than this one, or there’s more to be found here. The only lighting is positioned directly above the models, so bright that it’s hard to see the walls to the left and right of me properly. When I move closer to one of them, I see there’s a strip running parallel to the floor at about waist height. Hoping for some sort of secret passageway, I press the edge of it where it meets the corner and get the next best thing: a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that slides out a couple of centimeters, ready for me to pull it out with the handle in its side. Its near-frictionless glide reveals deep shelves filled with honest-to-goodness paper files. What the actual fuck?

  I pluck one from its place at random and open it to find profiles of people I assume are passengers. It details skills, medical history, all the things that would normally be kept online. Nothing particularly controversial or inflammatory, nothing that would merit premium space on a ship with one of the most advanced AIs known to humankind. I put it back and start taking random samplings, quickly conclude that these are all passengers and go to the other side of the room in the hope that I’ll find something more interesting. On those shelves are thousands of data drives, protected by shielding, and on the bottom shelf even a set of cores that could be used to reboot the AI. It’s as if they’re preparing for some computer failure or worried about an EMP wiping critical data. But why?

  Returning to the other side of the room, I pull out the bookcase on the far side of where I started. The files look different. These are reports filled with all sorts of jargon I don’t understand. Why print all this shit out? No one does this anymore, let alone to be stored on a ship where every square centimeter of space is precious and every single gram has to be justified. It’s a chemical analysis of some kind, I conclude, flipping ahead to a page containing a picture that looks like it’s been taken by something in orbit above a planet. I look down at the bottom right corner of the page, to the tiny white text detailing the time, date and source of the cam.

  I read it again. Then a third time. It says it was taken by camera 45 on the Atlas array, over twenty years ago. Then it hits me. I’m looking at an aerial shot of the Pathfinder’s colony. And it looks nothing like the one modeled on the table next to me. But how did they get hold of this? The distances involved are immense! I flip through the rest of the file, concluding that this is data from the planet we’re heading to. One factoid leaps out at me: there is an estimated seventy million square kilometers of habitable landmass waiting for us. What it doesn’t mention is whether that includes the colony already established. Aside from my not being able to understand how this data ended up here, at least there is some vague reassurance that the colony designers know what kind of environment we’re heading toward. But why put all this data here? Why put it in a place where no one can make use of it? Surely the Circle would go crazy over this stuff! Do they have the data and I just haven’t heard about it, thanks to my liminal status?

  Or does this room exist to keep it from them? None of the members of the Circle are in the CSA, after all. It still seems insane.

  I push the shelf back in and with a jolt remember that I’m supposed to be at that bloody party. Shit. I take one last look at the central model, certain there’s something I’m missing in all this, then head to the doorway, remembering to switch off the light as I leave. There’s no one in the corridor and I run back to the double doors, peep through, see the area by the elevator is empty too and slow my pace as I approach the doors back to the party. It’s only when I see that dancing has started, with Carolina and her grandfather right at the center of it, that I relax enough to see that Ada is back online and recording again. My heart is hammering so hard it feels like I’m playing something leet server–worthy, but for real.

 

  The dialog box floats over the punch bowl. I stare at it, realizing the beast is desperate to know and that, finally, I have some leverage over him. I type back like a flirting teenager who doesn’t know better.

 

  “It’s a punch bowl,” a man says with all the charm of a cheap mersive NPC. “That’s a drink inside it. It’s nice.”

  Shit, he thinks I’m staring at it because I don’t know what it is. I put on my most plummy English accent. “Oh, I know, I was just wondering where the cups are. They usually hang off the edge.”

  “Oh, the cups are over there. Hanging off the edge? Is that a Noropean thing?”

  “Probably. Oh, it looks like Carolina wants me to dance.”

  “Need a partner?”

  I glance at him then, seeing a man with far too much hope in his eyes. “I think Pappy is hoping it will be him,” I say, pretending to wave at them past his shoulder. Carolina actually spots it and beckons me over, making me regret my tactic. “Excuse me. The birthday boy needs to have a fuss made of him.”

  “Maybe later?” he calls to my back, but I pretend not to hear him. I silently command Ada to make sure my profile is still set to private and to not accept a contact request
from him. I go over, make a halfhearted attempt at making an excuse to leave and somehow get tempted into dancing. Without my old boss there, lurking nearby like a vulture, I even quite enjoy it.

  It takes me an hour and a half to extricate myself from the party politely. My feet are throbbing and the first thing I do when I get back to my cabin is take the shoes off with a happy groan. Then I peel off the dress, damp from my exertions, and unhook my bra. This groan of relief is even louder. I never thought I’d ever be happy to get back into that boring T-shirt–and–jog pants combo, but right now, it’s bliss to chuck them on and lie on the bed after a quick shower.

  As I always do after an intensely social event, I pick it apart. Carolina was so welcoming, so keen to bring me into the fold. Why? Was it just because I was willing to fuck someone over to let her win? Or was it because her grandfather told her I was a closet Christian and needed saving?

  Either way, I can see a path unfolding ahead of me. I know how to play men like Theodore. The key is making him feel needed and respected, but not by being too vulnerable. He has to respect someone enough to want to help them, but only on the understanding that he is fundamentally superior and that his desire to help comes from generosity, rather than sewing some poor bugger into a net of obligations that he can cash in later.

  If I throw my lot in with them, I have the feeling my life could get much more comfortable and that I would be a lot less likely to end up in one of those tiny apartments when we get to the end of this trip. But I’d have to pretend to be religious; I’d have to play a role indefinitely, just to survive.

  But then, isn’t that what I’ve always done?

  I need to talk to the beast, but I don’t go straight to my office. Instead, I get Ada to pull all the data I used to write the report for Carolina, and the report itself, and have it projected on the ceiling for me to examine.