Readyworld

fiction by michael werneburg

I didn't respond immediately. I'd come to the point where the walls of the spiral ramp gave way on one side to an open view of the Big Room. The lights were on in the Big Room, so I didn't need my suit's lights anymore. In fact, I needed to dampen the signal coming in on my optic nerves. I made a change on my ocular heads-up display and the blinding light eased.

"None of us has, sweetie," I told her. "I think I'm close to figuring out the Big Room, though! That should be a big piece of the puzzle. It'll definitely mean a bonus this time."

"Great," she said in a supportive but distracted tone. My work paid the bills, but it didn't really tickle my wife's curiosity.

"We'll talk about Dium tonight, my dear," I pronounced.

"Yup," she said with a sigh.

"I love you," I told her, "and I love Sonia!"

"Me, too," she said, sounding a little better. With that, I signed off.

I stepped off of the spiral ramp and onto the webbing that had been strung up underneath the ceiling of the Big Room. Or, more to the point, under the lattice of light emitting constructs that had been hung below the ceiling.

The ceiling itself was the underside of the surface of the rock that made up the hill above. The rock ceiling was roughly 130 centimeters thick, and was reinforced with struts of some alien material at various points. And that material was one of the subjects of my study; I'd already found it to be immensely strong, and had determined its mean chemical makeup.

I'd excitedly passed back my findings of that early analysis to my employers, along with an analysis of possible means of producing the stuff. It turned out that we couldn't fabricate the material in a cost-effective manner, given that there were cheaper substitutes on the market. So no bonus for me on that one. It had happened a dozen times.

I was part of a forum of similarly-employed specialists operating all over humanity's growing sphere. The other members told me that that was a typical outcome: the employers claimed the findings were worthless but the specialists would sooner or later see their discoveries turned into products. If you played the company's game, you got cheated. I'd picked up a few tricks from those forums and was now looking out for number one.

The ceiling was my current subject of study, and my employer was keen to see results.

The upper surface of the rock—that is, the hill-top itself—had been scoured clean by some unknown agent in the distant past, and the combination of altitude, prevailing wind and situation at a rocky finger of land sticking out into the black sea had kept it cleared. I was studying it because the aliens had somehow managed to turn what seemed to be normal sandstone into a solar collector. It didn't seem to be as efficient as the man-made solar arrays billowing out over the sheltered harbor, but the aliens must have figured out how to make it cheaply because much of the surface of the area was made of the stuff. And it was far more durable than humanity's sheets of photo-sensitive Mylar; from some geologic evidence it looked like the alien artificial light-gathering sandstone appeared to be tens of thousands of years old. In any event, it certainly transmitted quite a bit of juice to a huge bank of batteries set into the walls of the Big Room. Those batteries powered the lattice above me.

That lattice behaved like an array of lights. It had been an early discovery by the first human scouting team here on Readyworld. The lights came on at regular intervals of 28 hours 16 minutes and stayed on for hours at a time. Though the total cycle was fixed the duration of actual light. In the four years that humans had been coming, the light shift had extended by almost forty-five minutes. We didn't know why. The planet's daily rotation was around nine hours, like almost all planets everywhere.

I found the harness I'd left hanging from the lattice the day before, and clipped my belt to it. I then willed the motor suspended next to the harness to pull me up, and got to work. I'd left a large array of instruments running during the night, and I was here to ensure that the collection had gone as planned. Hanging from the lattice, I scrolled through the results. No clear patterns had emerged as of yet but it seemed that everything had worked for once. Since coming to Readyworld, we'd all learned to prepare for odd equipment malfunctions. Things rarely broke down physically, but lots of electronic or electronically-controlled things performed poorly or erratically. Computing nodes, automated weather stations, even the central man-made water heater for the human habitations around Site 4 had shown signs of flakiness at one point or another. My personal theory was that whatever was generating the planet's oversized gravity was causing the problems. Readyworld had a diameter of around 5,000 kilometers but a similar gravity field to Earth.