Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

Milton had blinked several times behind his glasses before pulling them from his eyes. He’d polished the lenses with a microfiber cloth, stared at the floor, and after some moments, laughed softly.

"It looks like I’ll have my work cut out for me while you’re launching your homunculi, my dear," he’d said finally. "This is—well—it’s not a done deal, but the theory’s sound. Our probe would still be crushed as it neared the center of the gravity well, but we’d certainly get more data than we could with existing methods."

"I’ll admit that I don’t get it," Gavin had said. "Why can’t we study the inside of a black hole now?"

"Light can’t escape the gravity well," Hope had said. "So neither can radio, or post cards, or anything else we use to communicate. Quantum entanglement is instantaneous though, so the—"

"Oooooooooh," Gavin had said slowly. "Never mind. I get it. Spooky action at a distance, and across relative planes."

"Yep."

Lori had elbowed Gavin at that point.

"I know it’s easy to get excited," Lori had said, "and I really like the idea of being able to work while in flight versus, say, going into suspended animation or something, but—"

No one had asked, " but, what?"

Lori had a reputation for pragmatism and harsh reality, and Gavin guessed the others were half-scared to hear what she had to say.

"If we’re building our homes while we’re in transit," she’d said, "that means we’re literally on our own on a new world until we start selling services back to corporate or the other colonists or whatever. It’s like a straight-up frontier town, right? Rugged individualism and all that?"

"Well," Hope had said, "I mean in an emergency people are going to help each other. But yes, your log cabin is yours to build. Or plastic Lego-cabin. Whatever. The vent shafts, power connections, all that. You can rent greenhouse space in the mains or build your own."

"Okay," Lori had said. "I’m fine with that. It just seems like Ben and I are the only ones who realize this stuff costs our money and our sweat—that it’s not just cool televised rocket blast-offs on a taxpayer subsidy."

"I do know how it’s supposed to work," Gavin said. "Give me thirty minutes and I’ll be at our build site, okay? We’re ahead of schedule as it is."

"We’re ahead on the habitat , Gavin," she said. "What if we have hang-ups with the greenhouse? I don’t want to rent space to grow food. That wasn’t in our budget."

"Thirty minutes."

"Fine," Lori said. "I’m going to make tea before I start then."

She pushed off from the bulkhead, pulled herself through the hatch, and disappeared into the food prep area.

Gavin replaced the headset, and the dimly-lit ventilation shaft became his world once again.

"—still there?" Hope’s voice came through the speakers. "Gavin, can you hear—"

"Yeah," he said. "Sorry. I had to detach to talk to Lori."

"Oh," Hope said, her voice thick with maternal anxiety. "Okay."

Gavin moved his legs through the plastic bubbles that floated in the box, their limp, unflexed forms offering almost no force feedback. Beneath his feet, bubbles flexed each time the homunculus’s feet touched the floor.

The tiny bot speed-walked through the narrow ventilation shaft until he came to a crossroad. Gavin looked left, then right, but saw nothing.

He thought, for a moment, he heard shuffling, but it could’ve simply been a shift in the air pressure.

Or it could’ve been a child.

Gavin turned left, which he knew would take him toward the long shaft that led to the tidal power station.

"Jonah?"

Nothing.

He heard another shuffle, and this time he was certain that it was the sound of cloth on plastic. He sped up, and the shuffling abruptly stopped.

Gavin rounded the corner, and found himself looking into the wide blue eyes of a young boy. The boy seemed startled for only a moment before his face broke into a broad grin.

"I found you!" Jonah said. "Or you found me. I thought you’d left me alone."

"Hello Jonah," Gavin said. "My name is Gavin. Your mother is—"

"Mama told me not to come down here," Jonah said, "but I knew you lived in the labyrinth. I knew I’d find you if I searched all the tunnels."

"Jonah," Gavin asked, "who do you think I am?"

The boy cocked his head to the side.

"Fair folk never tell their real names," Jonah said. "Names have power—even I know that. I just thought I’d gotten too old to play with you, or—"

" Fair folk ," Gavin said. "You think I’m a fairy?"

"Where are Mr. Pickles and Lady Twilight though? Are they further down?"

The techs on Earth have been entertaining this boy, without realizing the consequences of their departure to research Hub 2.

"Jonah, you mom is really worried about you," Gavin said. "We need to go back the way you came. You’re probably not going to see Mr. Pickles and Lady Twilight for a while because they’re working on a project. And truthfully—because I feel like their make-believe is getting dangerous for you— I’m just a guy in a box with a remote control. I’m not a fairy."

Jonah frowned and sat back.

"This is a trick," he said. "You don’t want me to find your secret underground kingdom. Wait—are you one of the bad fairies?"

"I’m not a—"

"You stay away from me," Jonah said. "I’m not big, but I’m bigger than you. I can smash you if I want to."

It was true, too. Durable as the carbon-fiber was on its aluminum frame, a few kicks would break Gavin’s circuitry, leaving him incapacitated in the tunnel.

"Okay, Jonah," he said. "I won’t try to come near you."

The plastic bubbles pulsed around Gavin, then pulsed again.

What was that? A malfunction in the bubble box?

Jonah’s eyes grew wide again, so Gavin assumed he’d felt something too.

Gavin tapped his fingers together.

"Hope," he said through the radio, "there’s something going on down here. The shaft just shook."

"I felt it too," she said. "Let me look at some things. I’ll call Scott."

Gavin’s homunculus took a step toward Jonah, but the boy scurried farther away.

"You can’t scare me that easily," Jonah said. "If you use earthquake magic, you’ll die too."

"Gavin," Hope said in his ear, "Scott says there’s a small cryovolcano just south of here discharging ice. We might be feeling some of the seismic effects of—"

"How sturdy is this plastic, Hope?" Gavin asked. "If the solids around this thing shift…"

"You’ve got to get Jonah out of there, Gavin," Hope said. "Those shafts definitely aren’t load-bearing. We have safety shut-offs at each end too, so if there’s a breach or a leak, they’ll automatically seal."

"He doesn’t want to come out," Gavin said. "Some of the techs from Earth have been pretending to be fairies from Jonah’s books. He thinks they’re down here somewhere and that I’m a bad fairy who’s trying to keep him out of their kingdom."

"Let me talk to him," Hope said.

Gavin tapped his fingers for voice command.

"Direct audio patch," he said, "Greenhouse 3 to external."

In the shaft, the homunculus’s voice changed from a man’s to a woman’s.

"Jonah," Hope said. "Jonah, sweetie, I need you to come out of the tunnel. I’m in the greenhouse, okay? It’s not safe down there and I need you to come out."

Jonah kicked out at the homunculus with a speed Gavin hadn’t expected. The boy’s foot hurled him into the corner where the shaft turned. Plastic bubbles flexed against Gavin’s chest and back almost simultaneously, and with a force that hurt. He moved to right the tiny avatar, and saw Jonah scrambling away from him in the shaft.