Noriama: Chapter 12
“The elevator will reach the ground in five minutes,” Kristiana said. It was an unnecessary report, Victoria thought. The four of them were seated in their chairs, staring at their screens. She couldn’t imagine that any one of them wasn’t perfectly aware of exactly how much longer they would have to wait.
“What do you think they called it?” Sughouri asked.
“Called what?” Zuri asked.
“Well, the star is Proxima Centauri. They wouldn’t have stuck with Proxima b, would they? We don’t call Earth ‘Sol Three.’”
“There wasn’t anything in the Compact about naming the planet.” Kristiana said.
“I’ll bet you they did all the same.”
Victoria scratched at her hairline. “Noriama, probably.”
“Hm,” Sughouri clicked her teeth. “Noriama is the colony, not the planet. Noriama colony on planet Noriama? That just sounds silly.”
“The colony is the planet. As far as humanity is concerned, Proxima b is Noriama, and visa versa. I think it’s more likely they’d change the name Noriama.”
“Hm,” Sughouri tapped her fingers on her keyer. “Then what would they change it to?”
The room was silent for a moment.
“Maybe we’ll find out inside.” Zuri leaned forward towards her screen. “Elevator touched down at ten twenty-five, ship time.”
“Okay,” Sughouri reached out her hands to her keyer. “Churji’s relay is active. Connection is live. Preparing connection test.”
Victoria watched as the little video feed shifted back and forth as Sughouri tested the CHR-3’s mobility, flexibility, and reliability so far away from the Croatoan.
Finally, Sughouri shifted in her seat. “Relay test complete. Connection is stable. Relative delay is…hm…one point one three five nanoseconds. Com delay, one point four seven seconds.”
“Something wrong?” Victoria asked.
“Probably nothing,” Kristiana chorded a few commands. “According to the math, we should be only getting a relative delay of one point one one five, not one three five.”
“Nanoseconds?” Zuri glanced at Victoria. “Is that important?”
“In the big scheme of things, no,” Sughouri scratched her chin. “In the bigger scheme of things, it means that the fundamental physics of reality aren’t working properly.”
“Or,” Zuri smirked, “some dust somewhere.”
“I thought there wasn’t any atmosphere?” Victoria asked.
Sughouri laughed. “It’s astronaut lingo. Everything is measured so carefully, if any measurement is off, it must be because of dust. She means reality never conforms exactly to the math. And she’s right,” Sughouri shrugged, “It’s just off a bit more than I expected.”
“Well, nothing we can do about it now,” Kristiana took a deep breath. “Let’s see what Wolf can do.”
Zuri took a breath, and keyed the CHR-3 over to Wolf.
On their screens, the video feed flickered as the CHR-3 turned to the elevator’s control panel. 213,000 kilometers below, the resilient nexus was extending its telescoping neck, the camera and robotic arm stretching forward like a curious dog. Up on the Croatoan, the team watched three thin claws push out from below the camera and release the maintenance catch.
“Why isn’t it releasing the drones yet?” Sughouri asked.
“No need, probably,” Zuri answered. “They all have to get through the airlock, might as well do it piggybacking on the nexus.”
The A thin cylinder, no thicker than a pencil, extended from the top of the screen; the CHR-3’s hard-connection port. With precise care, the Wolf AI maneuvered the port into position, plugging the nexus into the console.
Zuri’s automated voice broke the silence. “Churji is connected to Noriama. Lemon is tapping into the system…No active computer, no access, no power. Nothing.”
Sughouri sighed. “Noriama is closed for business.”
Victoria surprised herself with a sinking feeling in her gut. She knew the colonists were dead; they had to be. Every scan and sensor reading they had taken from orbit told the same story; the colony was un-powered. Power was life in space: without power, there was no water recycling, no atmospheric scrubbing, no food, no heat. If the power was off, then everyone in Noriama was dead.
She hadn’t realized until now that a fool’s hope had still glimmered in her chest. Perhaps they had walled themselves off somewhere deep inside the Colony, and had cut themselves off from the central computer? Perhaps they had created some new kind of power generator, a new computer system, a new way of surviving without the Noriama’s computer? Perhaps they had simply moved closer to the terminator line?
She didn’t let her self believe it. What possible reason could there be to go to such extreme lengths? No, the far more likely explanation was that the colonists had died, and Noriama Colony had died with it.
“Well, we knew it wouldn’t be easy,” Kristiana said.
“Okay then, we do it the hard way.” Sughouri clapped her hands. “Come on, Churji, show them how you open doors, ah?”
Victoria watched as the claw moved across the video feed, and grip the panel’s manual release. Once the claw was firmly secured, it began to pump the handle back and forth.
It was a slow process, but the mobile nexus managed to build up enough charge in the door locks to release the seal and open the airlock separating the elevator from the rest of the Colony. Once Churji was through and the airlock was sealed, it was another agonizing wait while the mobile arm worked back and forth, pumping with its clumsy robotic might to open the next door.
“This is a lot easier than the airlock doors to the station,” Sughouri grinned. “Remind me to let a drone do all the heavy work in the future.” On their screens, the claw reached out and pressed the release switch. The inner airlock door slid open, and Noriama was breached.
The room on the other side of the airlock was moderately sized, a staging area for the colonists to stretch and relax for the moments after disembarking from their two-day journey from space. Or embarking, Victoria reminded herself; this would be where replacement crew to Noriama Station would wait before boarding the elevator, too.
The room was dark, gray, and remarkably clean.
A flashing red alert grabbed Victoria’s attention. Almost without thinking, she chorded a series of commands and pulled up the medical alert.
She swallowed hard as she studied the report. Rapid heart rate and breathing, elevated levels of epinephrine — Victoria had been panicking.
She knew why. It had been a long time since she had been in a dark warehouse deep underground, but even seeing it through Churji’s camera was enough. The detached psychoanalyst side of her mind found it interesting that her body had reacted so strongly, while her conscious mind had remained ignorant.
Victoria closed her eyes and focused on her breathing.
“Now what’s it doing?” Kristiana interrupted. “Why isn’t it scanning the colony yet?”
Victoria opened her eyes to see Churji’s camera feed vibrate as the drone crawled out of the airlock.
“Zuri?” Kristiana asked. “Care to explain? It should be scanning first, shouldn’t it? Is there a bug in the programming?”
Zuri was smiling. “No. Wolf’s just eager.”
“Eager?” Victoria latched onto the available distraction. “What do you mean? I thought you’ve been programming the drone’s AI for three years.”
“Training,” Zuri shook her head. “Not programming. My guess is Wolf figured it needed to get Churji out of the elevator before it could get accurate readings.”
“You guess?” Victoria grimaced. “You mean you don’t know what Churji is going to do next?”
“No more than I know what you’ll do next,” Zuri glanced up. “But I can guess.” She looked back at her screen and pointed. “See? There.”
Sure enough, Victoria’s screen was lighting up with information as probes and sensors extended from the drone to record atmospheric elements, background radiation, seismic readings, and a thousand other variables that could tell the specialists back on Earth long tales about what had happened to Noriama.
“No vibrations,” Kristiana mused as the information rolled in. “No notable radiation, and no discernible magnetic interference of any strength. That means no nearby machines are running, and likely no generators are currently active.”
“Maybe not,” Zuri answered. “The power-station should be three kilometers away from the elevator. That’s a long distance for nothing to go wrong. There could be power, but an electrical fault or corrosion that’s keeping the power from reaching all the way.”
“Unlikely,” Kristiana answered, “or we’d have seen some radiation, even from up here. But I take your point. Let’s see…atmosphere is virtually non-existent, with only traces of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen.”
Victoria was about to ask if there could be a leak in the colony’s walls somewhere, but stopped herself the instant before she said something foolish. There couldn’t have been a leak; the colony was almost entirely underground.
“Where did the atmosphere go?” she asked instead.
On their screens, the dark void in front of the nexus glowed faintly as its two LEDs — one wide-beam on the front of the chassis, a smaller one on its rotating arm — cast their light into the Colony’s waiting room.
“Maybe there was a collapsed section somewhere,” Zuri said at last.
“Surface scans of Proxima didn’t show anything like that,” Kristiana said. “The surface is mostly flat.”
“It would only take a tiny breach,” Sughouri shrugged, “but again, there’s a lot of space in the colony for things to have gone wrong in. We could sit here debating it, or we could explore.” She let the question hang in the air.
“It’s not up to us,” Zuri smiled. “Give it a moment.”
A few seconds was all it took. The Wolf AI had analyzed the sensor readings and decided that the environment was well analyzed. The probes pulled back, the camera settled, and Churji began moving again.
“Still not releasing the drones?”
“Why would it? There’s only one hallway to go down.”
Step by step, The team watched the colony unfold on their screens. The hallway out of the waiting room was long and dark. The walls were arched, wide enough for two people and not much more. Here and there were braces, framework that kept the small hallway upright. It took almost five minutes for Churji to finally reach the far end, where a sealed airlock door waited.
Behind this door was the staging room, a place for the colonists to divest themselves of their safety equipment and uniforms before setting out into the colony proper. Lockers lined the walls, and thin benches rimmed the center of the room. The team watched as Churji slowly panned its camera over the entire room.
“I won’t lie,” Sughouri muttered, “I really want to open each and every one of those.”
Through the next door was another hallway, much shorter this time, and at the other end was the last doorway to Noriama Colony proper.
The team watched as Churji opened the airlock door, rolled into the colony, and stopped.
Victoria watched as four sets of heartbeats on her computer screen rose higher and higher.
“What’s it doing?” Sughouri asked.
Zuri shrugged.
“Can I say I am feeling a little concerned about how little you know about your own AIs?”
“They’re not mine. I don’t own how they think.” Zuri pointed at the screen. “There. It’s releasing the swarm.”
On their screens, twelve points of light blinked to life. One at a time, they separated from the nexus, and slowly moved a few feet away. Arranging themselves with millimeter precision, in ten seconds a circle of small drones surrounded Churji, waiting patiently.
On earth, there could have been flying drones. Here, there wasn’t enough atmosphere to create lift.
Victoria watched as Churji reported back to the Croatoan everything it was doing. She recognized some of it. Most of it was beyond her.
Zuri pointed, smiling. In unison, the twelve drones extended small cameras and probes, and began rolling different directions into the colony.
As the team watched, the pings on their screens returned their sensor information as they slowly mapped out the colony’s floor plan.
It would take days before the whole colony was mapped. Maybe even longer, if uneven ground or broken terrain stalled their efforts. Every obstacle would require a pause while the stopped drone studied its obstacle, called out to the Churji nexus, and decided whether to circumvent or avoid the problem. If it was something significant, they might call out to their nearest sibling, possibly two or three, summoning them to its side to help move a large boulder or broken support beam.
Wolf would be working overtime, constantly judging where the most efficient and effective place to guide the modules would be. If three drones were occupied climbing over a pile of garbage, where did the other drones need to be sent? If the obstacle was off the beaten path, would it make more sense to come back later, and keep the drones searching the more central locations? If so, what made a location central? Where were the beaten paths?
Eventually, though the sensors and cameras, Wolf would find something it didn’t recognize. When that happened, it would send the Churji nexus to look, bringing along its far more sensitive cameras, advanced sensors, and processing power.
Then there were the doors. All of them were closed, and Churji would need to manually open each one until they got the power on — assuming they could. Thankfully, Zuri had trained Wolf to be cautious, and no doors would be opened until it was positive every other nook and cranny had been explored.
It would take time.
But they needed an accurate map of the colony before doing anything else. Yes, they had the KAP mission floor-plan, but if the colonists had changed something…
“Why did it pause for so long?” Victoria asked. “Releasing the swarm was the first step in the plan, wasn’t it?”
“Our plan, yes,” Zuri nodded. “Wolf was thinking about what to do. It’s a complicated AI, and it had a lot of options.”
“Did it?” Victoria was still confused. “Releasing the drones from the nexus should have been an easy decision to make. It was a mission critical step.”
Zuri shrugged. “I’ll need to read through its report to know it’s thoughts for sure.” She tapped her fingers together for a moment before admitting; “I expected Wolf to act faster too.”
“You don’t know how Wolf thinks?” Victoria asked.
Zuri winced before signing her response: “There’s no way to know how AIs think, because we, as a species, still can’t define exactly what thought is. AI training isn’t the same as programming. I didn’t write a single line of conditional code to create Wolf. I provided reward/punishment parameters and environmental sandboxes to encourage certain kinds of responses to specific stimuli.”
“So it really is like training animals, then?”
“Not at all. AIs are not alive.”
“Aren’t they?” Kristiana leaned forward. “From what I’ve seen, the discussion is still very active, about whether AIs can be considered life-forms or not. The arguments on both sides are —”
Zuri raised her hand, cutting off Kristiana’s developing diatribe before signing her response: “They are all wrong. AI’s are not alive.”
“Not in the organic sense, no,” Kristiana admitted. “But they grow, they adapt, they respond to the environment —”
Zuri waved her hands again. “So do stones. Stalactites grow from sedimentary deposits, they respond to erosion, stones are not alive.”
“Complex responses,” Kristiana corrected herself. “Reactions that can affect the environment in turn. AI’s have a more detailed stimulus-response mechanism than anything we’d call ‘un-alive.’”
Zuri frowned as she placed her fingers alongside her mouth. Victoria recognized the posture; Zuri was thinking hard about her response. She sympathized — in the few instances when people had asked her to explain details of her work, the act of translating her expertise into layman’s terms had been a real struggle.
“AIs don’t have bodies,” Zuri began at last. “Because of that, they don’t have basic needs or instincts that cater to them. If I asked you to add a bunch of numbers together, would you do it?”
“If you were my boss, or had some social hold over me, sure.”
Zuri slapped her forehead. “Okay, that’s a whole other barrel you’ve opened. Let’s just say that yes, you would. How long will you work?”
“Until I’m done.” Victoria said, before thinking more carefully. “Or until something more important came up.”
“Which could be a lot of things,” Zuri nodded. “Kristiana wants you to add different numbers. Sughouri gets sick. You get hungry. Tired. Living things have multiple needs that stem from multiple sources. Fuel and energy for the body, safety through social cohesion, propagation of the species, and those interfere with any task you are given. AIs don’t have those.”
“But if an AI is running off a battery,” Kristiana stepped in, “can’t it ‘get hungry’ when it runs low on energy?”
“Only if we tell it to get hungry. All those basic instincts need to be programmed in. We can easily train an AI to recognize a deep hole, but the AI won’t care unless we’ve also trained it to think holes are to be avoided, because it has no builtin instinct for self preservation.”
“Okay,” Victoria furrowed her brow, “but cellular life needed to have instincts ‘programmed’ too, in a way. Natural selection got rid of the life-forms that didn’t have those instincts. Once those instincts are programmed in, doesn’t that make AIs more ‘alive?’”
Zuri winced. “I’m not keen on the idea of life being a spectrum, but you’re right about bespoke AIs. We can give them parameters, connect them to concrete sensors and hardware, and create incredibly advanced tools, but that doens’t make them alive, anymore than a simple spring or lever.” Zuri glanced back at her screen. “Trained AIs aren’t programmed in the same way. They’re…” she winced again. “Grown.”
Kristiana did not take the rhetorical win. “Grown how?”
Zuri rolled her eyes, blowing out through her mouth.
“We’ve got the time,” Kristiana smiled.
Zuri smiled back and shook her head. “We really don’t. Here’s the important bit: Training an animal means guiding an organism towards desired behaviors by manipulating needs. Carrot and stick sort of thing. With AIs, there is only one primal need; to do what is ‘right’ and don’t do what is ‘wrong.’ They’ll never be hungry, they’ll only ever be ‘punished’ for being ‘hungry.’”
“Okay, so how does that connect with not being able to train them like animals? Even if there’s a difference between hunger and programmed-hunger, doesn’t it come to the same thing?”
“Animals live in the world, while AIs don’t.” Zuri held up her free hand as her other hand continued to key her conversation. “You see this. I see this. If a dog were here, they would see it, and probably smell it. You know what it is, because you have had decades of seeing hands and having hands. AIs exist in a different frame of reference. We can connect an AI to sensors, databanks, streams of information, but we can’t know exactly what an AI is seeing. If I teach an AI that this is my hand, we have no way of knowing if it’s registering my heat signature, pulse-rate, visual markers, or my own body position. So we try to give it as complex a picture of what a ‘hand’ is as we can, but even with a thousand different kinds of ‘hand’ in its memory, an AI still might mis-identify a hand if it sees one that’s plastic or not connected to an arm.”
“But isn’t that the same with children?” Victoria offered. “They’ll call any four-legged animal a cat before they learn there are dogs and cows.”
“Yes,” Zuri nodded, “but we don’t want broad AIs that mimic human thought. We want mechanical precision and accuracy. We don’t want AI to have personality, we want it to have laws. Living animals are complex organic systems that have already evolved complicated patterns of behavior to survive in established ecosystems. AIs are complex electronic systems that are trained into complicated predictable behaviors to perform tasks in distinct environments.”
Sughouri snickered. “Sounds like you’re a lion-tamer who tries to create clocks out of primordial soup.”
Zuri raised her hands, and then paused. “I suppose that’s not a terrible analogy,” she said with a grimace.
They were all anxious.
It was that low grade anxiety that came from uncertainty, from a plan that needed to change without warning. Their pulses were only slightly elevated, their breathing all regular, but deep. No one was panicking, but neither was anyone relaxed.
It was a problem for Victoria as medical officer. None of their stats were anywhere near the red zones, but just because there was no immediate danger didn’t mean there wasn’t any danger at all. If they stayed this anxious for too long…
Victoria watched the tiny modules on her screen as they ran down the hallways of Noriama. It was daunting, how much colony there was to explore. Noriama had been designed to support over two-hundred people at the outset, with an eye towards rapid population growth. Hallways were long and capable of expansion. Decentralized rooms gathered in unified clusters were linked with mathematically regular hallways to keep distances as short as possible.
There were no main thoroughfares. This surprised Victoria, who was used to the broad main streets of the neo-cities of Argentina. Two or three long wide roads that could hold thousands of people, shops, restaurants, and meeting places. All business happened on Main Street. Groceries blended into cafes and parks and open-air shops. It encouraged civic-mindedness, because you could never avoid your fellow citizens.
Noriama, on the other hand, was a homogeneous net of hallways, all alike. No one passage was wider or more important than another. Victoria was certain there was a reason for it — no decision had been made about Noriama without a very good reason — but she hadn’t found one in her briefing materials.
There were only a few exceptions. The power station was a fusion reactor designed to power the entire colony. They were as far apart as reasonably possible, with every meter being another percentage chance of survival if anything went wrong. Another exception was the Security Lockdown Station. Again, distance was protection.
Victoria’s hands rubbed each other as she watched, waiting for the modules to register some anomaly, some unexpected phenomenon. A deviation from the floorplan, a piece of garbage or detritus, anything that might provide some clue as to what had happened to the colonists.
Her heart leapt as one of the modules flashed red. An alert flickered on her screen.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Something unexpected,” Sughouri explained. “Don’t get too excited, we’re going to see a lot of those. It could just be a strange shadow that tripped a drone alert. Wolf’s already sending Churji to scope it out.”
On their screens, Churji’s camera wobbled gently as the drone made its way towards the anxious node, sitting at the intersection to section D. Victoria stared, anxious to see every inch of Noriama that Churji passed.
There wasn’t much to see. The drone was only five minutes away, and what they saw there was far more disconcerting than anything they had seen on the way.
Sure enough, when Churji reached the alerted module, the camera didn’t see a thing.
“Nothing odd about that,” Zuri shrugged. “If a camera catches the light in a strange way, or even flecks of dust stirred up by its passing, that could be enough to trip its alarm. This will happen a lot.”
Her words proved prophetic. After a few hours, Victoria wondered if the modules found everything unusual. Walls, doors, painted stripes, indentations in the smooth metal floor…It was all mundane.
The team was shocked, therefore, when Churji reached the drone that had thrown an alert at the junction leading into Section D.
Sughouri jerked in her chair. “What the hell?” On Victoria’s screen, four sets of pulses began to race.
Churji was staring at a blank wall.
“Kristiana, tell me I’m wrong,” Sughouri said as she pinched her nose.
Kristiana’s tone was dour. “No.”
Victoria stared at the KAP floorplan for Noriama. As far as the exploratory modules were concerned, Noriama had been built to perfect specifications. Their map had been millimeter accurate until now.
According to the map, Churji should have been sitting at a crossroad. Instead, it was a T-junction. The wall they were looking at should not have existed.
“Damn.” Sughouri muttered. “This is a whole new shit-show, now.”
“Maybe not,” Victoria hedged. “The colony was designed to be modular, right? They may have just decided to move things around.”
“There’s no ‘just’ about it,” Kristiana said. “Noriama was supposed to be built according to the mission plan. Building a wall here was in direct opposition to the KAP.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Zuri bit her lip. “The colonists are building Noriama, they reach this junction, and just stop?”
“Look at the wall,” Kristiana said. “This isn’t a temporary mock-up; its as solid as the others. They didn’t just stop, they finished. For some reason the colonists decided to never dig further. At least, not for a very long time.”
Sughouri tapped her screen. “It’s a practical problem for us, too. We can’t rely on our own maps anymore. Zuri, can we take control of Churji? The swarm is pretty spread out, and I want to see how many surprise walls there are around here.”
Zuri gave a quick nod. “Let me turn Wolf off so it doesn’t learn anything accidentally. There. I’m connecting you to Churji.”
“Okay,” Sughouri licked her lips. “Let’s see how badly they messed up the feng shui.”
The team watched in silence as Churji rolled down the hallways, following the walls as they turned.
“Damn,” Sughouri muttered. There was another wall where there shouldn’t have been one.
Then a third, and a fourth.
After the fifth, Sughouri released her keyer and pressed her hand to her mouth. “I’m looking at this map, and I’m looking at these walls…Am I missing something, or is there no passage to Section D?”
Kristiana rubbed her temples. “As far as the map is concerned, there is no Section D.”
“Okay, I don’t buy that,” Sughouri muttered. “These sections were decentrilized. Each of them, A through J, had its own hydroponics and residential block, and the colony was balanced carefully enough to rely on all ten. Did they just decide to go without food? Leave twenty colonists homeless?”
“Water.” Zuri’s response crawled across Victoria’s screen. “We’re near the terminator, between the baked sun-facing side and the frozen dark-side of Proxima. This location was chosen precisely because water was possible at this longitude. Maybe as they were digging, they discovered a deposit, and redesigned the colony’s floorplan to avoid it.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Kristiana answered. “Or if they didn’t find water, it could be some other geological phenomenon. Gas pockets, or maybe radioactive ore.”
“Can you tell if that’s the case?” Zuri asked. “Does Churji have that kind of sensor?”
“No,” Sughouri said. “Well, it does, but not a very strong one. Not enough to penetrate beyond a few meters. The colonists could have detected something much further away and decided to stop here.”
Victoria stared at the map, her pulse-rate rising again. “What about the Security Lockdown Station,” she pointed at her screen. “It’s a vital colony system, and it’s supposed to be in Section D. If they didn’t build Section D, where is the SLS?”
It wasn’t an idle question. The Security Lockdown was the place that — in accordance with the KAP mission plan — in the event of an emergency, the entire colony could escape to. It had its own small power generator, extensive dried food storage, even a small space set aside for farming, in case they were trapped for years. It wasn’t a sure bet, but it was hope for survival in case of a catastrophe.
The Croatoan’s mission plan had been explicit. If the colonists were still alive, they were in the SLS. It was the only place they could be, if the rest of the colony was dead.
“If anything,” Kristiana answered at last, “it means they likely did build Section D, just somewhere else.”
“We can’t know where,” Zuri said. “We’ve been going off the KAP’s map, and we now know it’s inaccurate. The SLS might be on the other side of the colony, or they might have never built one. As of this moment, we’re flying blind.”
“There was never any mention of this,” Sughouri muttered. “In our briefing, remember? All preliminary communications between Noriama and Earth were normal. There was never any mention of deviating from the construction plans.” She paused. “They were hiding this from us.”
“Let’s not speculate about their motives yet, either,” Victoria spoke quickly. “If our current map is no good, can we use the swarm to generate a better one?”
“A crude one,” Kristiana nodded, “though we wouldn’t have anything behind the doors. Best option would be getting Noriama’s internal map. Zuri? Is that possible?”
Zuri looked up. “From the computer? If they didn’t wipe the database there’s probably a map. If not, we could use the colony’s internal sensors to create at least an outline; get a good idea of what rooms are where based on the atmospheric and seismic sensors placed throughout the colony.”
“Okay then,” Kristiana took a deep breath. “For now, we let the drones keep mapping out what they can. Once they’re finished, then we can work out what to do and where to go next. Who knows, they might find our missing section.”
“Or we might find even more things are missing,” Sughouri smirked.
After three days, the floor map was more or less complete. The modules had already rolled their way back to the elevator, and slipped into their storage compartments by the time the team had started to discuss their next moves.
“We’re still missing section D,” Kristiana said, highlighting the offending portion of the map with a squeeze of her hand. “Along with the power-station, Security, and anything behind doors.”
“Could we get Churji to open them?” Victoria asked.
“Most of them,” Sughouri explained, “but there are a few that need the generator. They’re blast doors, designed to shut and remain shut if the power ever fails. We won’t be able to open them until we get the main power back on.”
“If we turn the power on,” Kristiana said. “Remember, our mission is to figure out what happened here. We might not need the power to do that.”
“There are doors we can’t open,” Sughouri laughed in astonishment. “How can we ever be certain about what happened if we don’t open them?”
“The colony couldn’t survive without Section D,” Kristiana explained. “They wouldn’t have enough food or atmosphere. It’s pretty clear that they ran out of life-support and died.”
“Or,” Victoria said, “they built it somewhere else, behind a door. Let’s not jump to assumptions just yet. What about the power-station? Could Churji open that door?”
“Probably,” Zuri nodded. “From the cognition report, Wolf sees the power-station as a possible danger, so it decided not to try and open it until we actively tell it to go through. Same deal with the mining section.”
“That’s a whole can of worms,” Sughouri sighed. “We’re going to need to search the whole mine, aren’t we, before we leave? That’s going to take months. Years, maybe.”
“We’ll see,” Kristiana said. “We might get enough answers without committing to a full-scale spelunking operation.”
“Okay,” Victoria folded her arms. “So where do we go first, then?”
“The mission plan is explicit,” Kristiana answered. “We go pick up the black box.”
“Okay, or,” Sughouri raised a finger, “we turn on the main-power. If the power’s on, we can access the computer and get Noriama’s logs, open doors remotely, things like that. It’ll make it a lot easier for Churji to sniff around.”
“It could, but what’s the worst case scenario?” Kristiana said. “If something goes wrong at the power station and it explodes, we have a whole different set of problems. If we get the black box first, we can secure it in the elevator and then no matter what happens, we’ve at least got something.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Sughouri shrugged. “Okay, I can live with that.”
Victoria stared at the digital map of Noriama’s floor-plan. “If they built everything to specifications, central control should be on the far end of the colony, to the east. Churji should be able to take the hallway straight ahead to Corridor F, and follow that.”
“If they built to specifications.” Kristiana grimaced. “That would be a simple explanation of how the colony failed, if they changed the plan around.”
“The KAP wasn’t perfect,” Victoria said. “There wasn’t only one right way of doing things. They could have moved things around and done just fine.”
“We’ll agree to disagree, then. Go ahead and tell Wolf to fetch the black box. Carefully; we don’t know how stable these floors are.”
Victoria looked at the screen again. The walls were pale white. They looked a little like plaster, and a little like cloth, with strange folds and dark veins crossing back and forth. The floor, on the other hand, was simple slate gray. “It’s metal, isn’t it?” Victoria asked. “I’d have thought it would be very stable.”
“All metals erode or oxidize in some manner. At least, all metals useful for building. The plan was for simple metal paneling to be used until enough water and atmosphere was established. Then they’d replace the floor with concrete and recycle the metal.”
“Well, it still looks like metal to me,” Sughouri said. “I guess they didn’t get that far in the plan. So, assuming Churji doesn’t fall through a hole in the floor, onward to Noriama’s computer center we go!”