This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Backwaters of Beauty, my in progress novel. In this section I give you a glimpse inside the "Ancient City" and the "mining" operations around which the live of The Towns largely revolve. After Susan’s briefing, Josh and I grabbed our gear and jumped on the automated monorail that would take us deep into The City. The monorail had been built buy The Ancients, but The Towns’ engineers had gotten parts of it back up and running generations before, when miners had begun penetrating so far into The City that carrying wealth out, even by electric cart, was becoming too laborious and time consuming. Over the previous year or so, though, miners had begun to move into sections that were beyond the functioning rail lines. The engineers had started on extending the reach of the monorail, but at that point in time, even after our thirty-five minute high-speed train ride, Josh and I would be left with about an hour walk to our section. That was OK with us, though. Or at least it was that day; we needed the time to sort thru our feelings and prop up our nerves before having to face our once well-mapped, now crumbling section.
Finally, though, we arrived our destination—a section that neither of us had thought we’d ever enter again, except perhaps to visit some of our auditor and mover friends, or, if our curiosity got the best of us, to see what exactly they had uncovered since our part of the job had ended. There were no workers there that day, though, friends or otherwise; the section was eerily empty and exuded the kind of loneliness it surely had thru the many years it had stood abandoned between The City’s demise and our arrival. This feeling of loneliness was being augmented for us by the fact that the section we were walking into was not quite the one we had left, a fact driven home as soon as we headed up the ramp that had been built into our original sewer entrance.
It was still morning when we got into the section and the muted sun was drifting down thru the dome’s panels, in a way that made everything seem as if it existed in a slightly smoky fog (the section’s lighting system was only partially functioning). Thru this light, though, the pale green given off by the force fields was visible in just about every direction we looked. Many of these fields were massive too, emanating from the curve of the dome itself in numerous cases with widths that measured hundreds of feet. Others, however, were little more than slivers, strangely projected from angles and in places that showed they were malfunctioning badly. These were the ones that worried us most; the large fields could be easily avoided, these mutated little beasts, however, in certain types of light and when approached from certain angles, could be very hard to see until it was often too late.
“This is unbelievable,” said Josh, sounding understandably awestruck, as the green light from the newly dropped forces fields near the entrance was bouncing off his face and encasing his long black braided hair and black clad shoulders in a kind of ominous halo.
“Beyond unbelievable,” I retorted, looking over my partner, who, as a first officer should be at such a time, was standing at his crew leader’s side. “I’ve been a miner since I was seventeen and I’ve never seen anything like this, anything even close to this.”
Slowly we made our way into the street that ran past the entrance. At this point we pulled our paint guns out of our holsters. Long before our time miners had figured out that the solar absorption paint that was to be found in such abundance in The City had a use besides collecting the sun’s energy: it hung up in force-fields much longer before burning away than any other substance that had been tried, which made it highly useful for detecting and then mapping these fields.
“How many backup paint canisters did you bring?” I asked Josh, as we continued slowly moving into the section.
“The standard number for a reconnaissance mission—three.”
“I have five I told him,” as I reached around and popped the snap on my black backpack. “Grab one of mine,” I then said. “Best to divide our resources up evenly.”
“Right,” agreed Josh. “I should have come better prepared.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “There’s no way you could have guessed that this was coming. I just threw in a couple extra canisters because I had some room in left in my pack. We’d need hundreds of canisters at least to do this job right, anyway.”
Josh pulled out the canister and then I unsnapped his backpack. He then handed the canister to me and I slid it into his pack.
“OK,” I then said, “here’s the plan. We’re going to split up and circumnavigate the section from opposite directions. There’s no point in trying to do any real mapping on a job this big when there’s just two of us, so use your paint sparingly—just do quick markings of new hazardous fragments, understood?”
“Understood.”
“All we can hope to accomplish today is to get some sort of handle on exactly how bad things are, so take your time and be careful.”
“Right.”
“We’ll meet on the other side of the section, near that large white living unit.”
“That one near that huge series of fields you and Tony O’Neill mapped?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Who knows if those fields are still there, though, or what they look like now if they are. If you get into the area first and that meeting point looks too hazardous pick a safe place near there and I’ll find you. I’ll do the same if I beat you there.”
“Right.”
“Good luck. I’ll see you in about six hours.”
“Right, six hours. Good luck to you too, Skip.”
Within about ten minutes after Josh and I split up I found myself slowly moving along the main street running thru the northeast part of the section. I was moving very deliberately, mainly out of safety concerns, but also because I was so overwhelmed by what I was seeing that I felt I had to go slow just to take it all in. All around me the section was bathed in pale green and the slight buzz of the well-functioning fields mixing with the louder, more intermittent buzzing of those that weren’t quite working as designed was filling my ears constantly. I had never before seen this many fields, especially this many large fields, operating at the same time—and I had to admit that there was a kind of beauty to be found in the display; even with the malfunctions, there was a symmetry to the flow of all that power, all that deadly power, that rivaled the artistry of a perfectly formed wave or a field of swaying poppies. I wasn’t caught up in these kinds of feelings for very long, though, as I suddenly noticed in front of me, maybe seven or eight paces away, a slight flicker of a green field directly in my path.
“Fool!” I said out loud to myself, angry that my daydreaming had allowed me to get so close to malfunctioning field before seeing it. “That’s the kind of field that got Flores and you let it come up on you like you were a rookie, Skip!”
I raised my paint gun and gave a quick blast in the general area of the green tinge.
Almost immediately I saw the white-silver solar paint hit the field with a sizzle and then just hang there, getting bounced around by the green, while making the field much more visible. I then paint blasted the ground around the field (the solar paint would only hold up in the field itself for a few minutes), before carefully stepping around the newly marked hazard and continuing down the street. A hundred or so feet later, though, I noticed another similar field fragment blocking my path, which I also marked with paint. But after that things looked clear: all the fields for the next several blocks appeared to be massive ones that were blocking off everything to the north of the street.
The pattern didn’t surprise me: it made perfect sense as a line of defense, in the way it neatly cordoned off such a big chunk of the section. What was confusing was why there had been no indication of this pattern when we’d first mapped the section; there was not a single field operating in this area at that point, not even any fragments. Suddenly it was like a whole region of The City’s defenses had regained full power after having none before. The was unheard of, and therefore more than a bit spooky.
Several blocks later the street I was on curved fairly sharply to the left. As soon as I made the turn I saw the wall of force fields at my right continued as far as the eye could see. I was expecting that, but it was still jolting to gaze upon such a sinister site. After I walked maybe another hundred yards, though, I noticed a break in this long green wall that looked big enough for a person to walk thru. Slowly and cautiously I made my way across the street to check it out more closely.
As I approached this break in the fields, I saw that it was slightly bigger than I’d before thought, seven or eight feet wide at least. Once I’d passed thru this opening, I gave the ground around it a thorough dousing with my paint gun, just to make the portal very visible for future use. I then started making my way up the street on which I found myself.
We miners had figured out that when force fields begin dropping after people enter a section it’s usually because they are designed to protect something very specific, most often a computer interface or another piece of equipment generally related to The City’s basic functioning or its defenses. But these were usually relatively small areas with correspondingly sized force fields. What could this massive deployment be protecting? I asked myself. No useful answer came to me, though.
Looking around I saw buildings that were obviously either living units or distribution centers. This, in conjunction with its sheer size and the fact that its dome was completely intact (which helped greatly to preserve its contents), is what made this section such a great find for The Towns—it was well-stocked with things such as clothes, basic hardware, appliances, and no doubt tons of vacuum packed and frozen foods that every home in The Towns could use on a daily basis. These types of buildings, though, weren’t the kind of installations that would warrant such protection, especially not the endless sheets of green that had come down in this case. This northern part of the section was large, though, so perhaps there was something important here that my crew had failed to notice. There was nothing for me to do but start searching and see if I could find something that would explain the strange and deadly goings on in what until these fields started falling had been the greatest section find of my long career.
Four hours later I was dirty, tired, and frustrated. I had traipsed down street after street and searched a dozen buildings without finding anything even slightly out of the ordinary. I took a seat on a shiny alloy bench out in front of a distribution stall, which contained huge reams of all types of cloth, took off my pack, pulled out my canteen, and then took a huge swig. “What is it that’s so special about this section?” I said, asking out loud the question I’d already posed to myself internally dozens of times. Maybe this is just an insanely large malfunction, my mind answered back, as I screwed the cap back onto my canteen and then slipped it back into my pack. I’d been mulling over this proposition for a couple of hours, but I still didn’t buy it, partially because such a huge number of errant fields had never before been reported, and more importantly because my gut was telling me that what was happening in this section had to be more than just a computer error. I decided that sitting there wasn’t going to help me solve the mystery and stood up to continue my search.
As I made it to my feet, though, I noticed that something didn’t seem quite right; I couldn’t remember ever before seeing the block that was stretching out in front of me to the north. For several seconds I just stood there confused and feeling a little blank. Then it hit me: I was no longer in our section. Quickly I reached around behind me to the outer pouch of my pack and pulled out the map I had made during our initial explorations and confirmed that I was fifty yards or so past what before had been our section’s boundary. I had been so locked into my search for small things like computer interfaces that I’d missed the fact that the permanent field that marked off this section of the dome was no longer there.
Upon realizing this, I just stood there staring north for probably a full minute, in complete state of shock, while I tried to wrap my mind around what this might mean. While the smaller domes were generally sections unto themselves, larger domes such as the one I was in then tended to be divided up by what we had come to call structural fields, or more often white fields or walls, because of the color they gave off when hit by light, especially that of the sun coming thru the domes. These were semi-opaque projections that formed a tight seal from the dome to the ground. Unlike the force fields they did not destroy, or harm in any way, that which came in contact with them, but simply prevented anything from passing thru. Also unlike the green fields, the white ones didn’t appear to be triggered by anything, but were always there as permanent boundaries. No one knew quite what their purpose was. (Despite our name for them, they didn’t seem to actual serve any kind of true structural role, in regards to keeping the domes aloft anyway.) One theory was that they were there as a kind of firewall that helped to quarantine one part of The City from another in a case of an emergency. Another idea was that large domes covered parts of The City that served different purposes and therefore needed different environmental conditions. Both explanations made sense to me, and I could see no reason as to why they both could not be right (or both wrong). However, one thing we all had been sure of up to that point was that white fields did not move and most definitely did not disappear as this one had done.
Because the vanishing of this structural field was completely unprecedented, I assumed that there had been a catastrophic failure in the systems unlike any we had ever witnessed before. I was also pretty sure that the loss of this white field was what had triggered the emergence of the force fields that were supposed to have blocked off this section—they were its backup system. This fact made me very suspicious of what this section might contain. It didn’t make sense, I thought, to throw down something as brutal and dangerous as those massive green fields just because a firewall or section divider had failed. I mean, why hadn’t The Ancients simply devise a back up white wall for such an emergency? My guess was that the green force fields were incorporated into the system because there was something in this section that warranted such protection—and I realized that it had become my job to find out what that something was.
