Readyworld

fiction by michael werneburg

The instability of our electronics worried Administration due to overhead and the suggestion that the aliens were quite significantly more advanced than we were. And it worried the military because it suggested we were vulnerable. But it kind of worked out for Lena and me. After Yotoyo's Sphere had nixed families with permanent infants, we'd had little choice but the frontier. My skills were in demand here due to the nature of the place but even Lena could find a place here doing some of the things that automated systems were no longer trusted to do, on Readyworld. I was happy that she found a certain bizarre satisfaction in doing odd jobs like the cooking and laundry that no one on Earth had done for two hundred years. Mostly, she tended to Sonia and let me bring home the cash.

Today's data was nothing special so I contacted the main database engine back on the Inas Dorge and had it start the breakdown and analysis of the data I was sending up. The military had insisted that all data storage and manipulation be done off-world. Due, they said, to the inherent instability of systems down here. I suspected it was really to monitor the data. The Inas Dorge was their ship.

It was while I was lowering myself on the harness that I noticed something odd on the floor of the Big Room. It looked wet! Well, damp anyway.

The Big Room had initially been a candidate for a large encampment by humans. It had been perfectly comfortable in temperature, was well lit by 'day' (even if those days were rather long), it was spacious, and it was sheltered from the elements. But the idea had been abandoned for a number of reasons. Thanks to all of the immensely strong and imperviously hard and unfamiliar materials that had been used in the creation of the space, it would have been difficult to get service elevators down here. Being at the far end of the site from all of the interesting buildings of the alien "downtown" as well as being distant from the strange equipment that tended to the fields beyond, this room was out of the way for most of the other researchers. And it had had no connection with the water or sewage systems of the alien site. So, if we were to build our own water treatment facilities, why do so out here in the back end of the site?

For the floor to be wet was something, anyway. I wondered if some new aspect of the site were about to reveal itself to me? I un-clipped my harness, and made my way back across the webbing to the spiral ramp. When I got to the ramp I hopped over the railing and had another look. In addition to the moisture, I could swear there were cracks down there!

I reached into my back-pack and retrieved my field sensor unit. It was my property, an obscenely expensive investment by my standards but my ticket to ensuring that I retained intellectual property for my findings. I hadn't signed in yet this morning and looking at that weirdly wet & cracked surface I made a decision. I marked the day as a vacation day. Now I was an off-duty private citizen.

I began to descend the spiral ramp, cycling between gloom and brilliant. I found my pace increasing with every turn of the ramp. This could be big; this could mean cash in hand! I was fairly running when I got to the bottom but stopped short when I saw the floor. What had once been a hard, dry, smooth, and flawless surface was now both wet and crazed with cracks.

Staying on the ramp lest I step on something important, I lowered my field sensor and let it hover over the ground. It sent me data that played across my OHUD in an easy tumble of familiar figures. The sensor confirmed what me eyes had been telling me; the liquid on the surface was water. It was standing in small pools on a surface that was otherwise damp everywhere like it had rained overnight. For the first time, the sensor was now able to profile the makeup of the floor—whatever magic had previously prevented humans from scanning it was now gone. I watched the field sensor compare its findings against known materials. Its database included everything that we'd found here on Readyworld and virtually all the materials from humanity's vast pool of research. But:

Frowning—until I remembered the worry lines—I went through its analysis in some depth. Density was now slightly down and porosity was up. Aha, had the water had seeped up rather than falling from above.

I decided that the floor was still strong enough to support me. There was no detectable bottom to the material in any case and it was still solid and at least several meter deep. I stepped out and found it sturdy. Falling to one knee, I peered into a crack. It seemed to go only a hand's breadth into the ground, and was easily illuminated by the strong lighting above. There was maybe a centimeter of water at the bottom of the crack. I ran a finger along the inside of the crack, and my finger came away wet and slightly colored by...

By what, mud? This wasn't rock I was standing on, it was an artificial material.

Then I noticed something. The surface of the floor was slightly translucent. I could see down into a little way; maybe ten centimeters. And there was something down there, a darker shape about the size of my own head. I moved my head from side to side to make sure I wasn't seeing some optical effect like a shadow. No, there was a shape down there, all right. I rose to a crouch and sidled over a meter or two until I found another of the curious shadows.

Now this was news! My heart began to beat a bit faster. I told the field sensor to start a wide-spectrum probe of the ground in a grid pattern. I watched it advance-pause-advance for a moment, then I pulled off my back-pack and rummaged through my gear. I pulled a sealed vial out of box and a slender piece of flat steel. I used the steel widget to scrape off some of the residue I'd found, and dumped the widget into the vial. Then I re-sealed the vial and put everything, including the sensor, back into my backpack. My hands were trembling. This was it, this was the big score. As I shouldered the backpack, I heard a noise and glanced out over the big floor.

Out there, maybe two hundred meters away, was something squat and low, sidling obliquely toward me. It was translucent almost to the point of invisibility, and... No. Stop it!