.The Fleas

Three days after the laser show, the switching crew showed up in the morning rather than the afternoon.  They fired a rocket and drew me to a new panel.  Figures got me to throw a few switches and then, new experience, push a button.

A screen lit up and I found myself facing a room full of people standing in a conference room.

They wore clothes of a style I considered 'retro.'  Stuff from the 2050's.  There was no table, but ranks of chairs and huge windows.  Outside, the view was of a lake. I thought it was the one beside the city right in front of the control room.

Their features were varied, lots of different races expressed in lots of different combinations.  People, in other words.

"English?" I asked.

A young woman in the middle, wearing a latex version of a Northolian swimsuit, started to speak.

"Wilgiest cumliones," she said.  I think.  She haltingly spoke for a bit. It sounded familiar.  Very familiar.  Suddenly I remembered a professor reading Beowulf to us in Olde English.

"I don't speak that dialect," I said.  "I think you're using Old or Middle English?  I speak-"

"Oh, thank God!" she said.  "I speak Unification much better!"

"Unification?"

"That's what we call what you're...  what we're speaking," she explained.

"Okay, cool," I said.  "Um...if it's unifying, why doesn't everyone speak it?"

"Because the Unification failed," she said very naturally.

"Oh."  Well, that made sense.  I guess.

"My name is Entorra," she went on.  The camera zoomed in on her.  She looked to be in her twenties or so.  Long brunette hair, slightly dusky skin.  Features hard to nail down to any ethnicity. 

"Pleased to meet you, Entorra," I said.  "I'm Trevor.  Where are you?"

"Well, depending on how you mean it, we're on the Ark, and -"

"El Arca!  Okay.  Like Noah's ark!"

"Exactly," she said.  "All of us are on the Ark.  We're in the biggest city of the Ark, Constance.  This room is in Council Hall."

"And are you humans?"

"Of course!" she snapped.  Someone behind her muttered and she looked abashed.  "We're not toys, if that's what you're thinking."

"And you're... tiny?" I asked.  It seemed unlikely, given my knowledge of physics, that people could be so small and not be either hypercompressed matter or severely simplistic constructs.

I had half envisioned a virtual reality in the dome, with the actual people living in suspended animation below the landscape.

"Yes, Trevor," she said with a smile. "Everyone's...tiny... Except you."

"Oh!  There's, a, there's a dead body!  Someone in the South-"

"The South Concourse, yes," she said calmly.  "We know.  We have cameras-"

"Everywhere, I saw.  But I thought they were dead."  She looked puzzled.  "They had no lights, they looked inoperational."

"Oh.  No, they're always working, just not always directly monitored."

"Okay," I said.  "But the dead guy...?"

She turned to speak rapidly with the people around her.  They looked angry, embarrassed and guilty, and spoke shortly with her.

"There's nothing we can really do about it, Trevor.  It's okay.  The section is isolated and there's no reason for anyone...  For you to go through there."

"Okay," I said.  "So...  what have I been doing on these switch panels?" I asked.  The man standing behind Entorra made a gesture, a cutting one, and whispered at her.

"Is there a problem positioning the switches?" Entorra asked.

"I just wondered what I was doing?"

"You're tending.  Like any Tender," she said.

"Uh...  Okay.  What's a Tender?" 

"The humans that operate the macroscale interfaces," she said, sounding like she was repeating something memorized in school.  "They are called the Tenders as they Tend the Ark.  We that live within the Center are Keepers.  We Keep the human race alive with the maximum genetic diversity and stability."  She blinked, then smiled more naturally.

"And there are no more Tenders?" I asked.

"Just you," she smiled.

"Okay, okay," I said.  So all the living spaces around me were supposed to be full of the maintenance staff.  The people that fed the fish and threw the switches.  Something had killed them off, most of them slowly.

"And how many Keepers are there?"

"About six hundred billion at last census," she said with a smile.

"Billion?" I asked.  But that made sense.  It made a lot of sense.  The population estimate had been for people of human size. 

At the size they were, the space in the Center could have held...  Up to one and a half quadrillion people.  Plus or minus a zoo.

"I, uh...  I have a lot of questions," I said.  "How long have I been gone?  What do you know of the Proxima mission?  What are the switches I've been working on?  Are you all-"

"Can you come in here?" Entorra interrupted me.  I had a brief image of walking onto a 1/600^th scale city and kneeling down to talk to a spot.

"Have, uh, did history preserve the Godzilla movies?" I asked.  She looked confused.  As I said Godzilla, though, one of the guys behind her got a big smile. 

He tapped Entorra's shoulder and spoke rapidly.  Her eyes went wide, then she started to laugh.

"Oh, no, no!  Not you!  You can...  You can run a remote!"

"A remote?"

"There's a room off of the control room you're in," she said.  The screen split and a map of the level I was on appeared.

"You step on the pad and select this sequence."  There were some squiggles that appeared.  I took a scanner from my pack and took a picture.  Just when Yeoman Crazypants would have been useful, he was nowhere to be found.

"What happens then?" I asked.

"Then you're in the city.  That sequence makes sure you show up in this building!"  She smiled cheerfully and pointed up at the ceiling.

"Okay," I said.  Anything once, twice if it doesn't kill me, you know.  I found the room, more of a closet. There was a framework that supported the body, with a keyboard.  I set the scanner display next to it and carefully selected the symbols.

When I hit what I assume to be ENTER, I was in another world.

I stood on the roof of a building, under a clear blue sky that stretched wide, wide, wider than anything I've seen other than the unending abyss of space.

"Coool," I whispered.  Looking down, the horizon included a lake and mountains.  I turned, watching a cityscape pass by, then saw the wall of the dome.  The edge of the Ark.  And the window.  The control room I'd just stepped through was unimaginably far, unimaginably huge. 

It was like looking up from Earth to see a ship's bridge in orbit.  One that could use the Moon as a doorstop...