probably punch her in the face. She couldn't help but smile.
"I hope we're not too tired for tomorrow," Dierk whispered. "It's tough staying up like this. You've got to be rested to crack the barrier, remember. Good night."
"Hah, sure. Good night, Dierk."
She forced herself to push all thought aside, but her dark unfocused suspicions followed her into sleep, coloring her dreams with sibilant whispers - and an inexplicable fear of some vague approaching disaster.
A disappointing instant later, she floated back into semi-consciousness. She let her mind float in the dim outer marches of sleep, listening to her bad dream continue to play out.
It took her some minutes to realize the truth.
She sat up.
The other sleepers were already awake, standing in the aisles and murmuring among themselves. All of them seemed to be looking to Og, who stood by his cot, fighting not to look worried.
She caught his attention. "What's going on?"
"There's been a riot," he answered weakly, as if he couldn't quite believe his own words. "In the southwest, near enough the Fields to cause problems. A few harvester-operators were killed." He licked his dry lips, thinking through the best way to explain it. "The nearest replacements were way up north, so they moved every operator down the line a few machines… but there were still four harvesters out for nearly thirty minutes."
A slow feeling of horror crept through her. Quickly accessing the Peak, she found her fears confirmed: the unexpected problems had dropped the number by nearly a quarter.
"They were fighting over a kid," he continued, raising his hands helplessly. "A thief."
"What do we do?" one of the onlookers asked.
"Let's just go to work as usual," he suggested with a veneer of sincere confidence. "We've still got the Peak to worry about. Keep the people around you calm. Remember, we're not enemies, no matter who may have been involved in that riot or which sides they chose. It'll be fine."
Considering his words, moving along with the crowd on the way to their Morning shift jobs, she almost believed him.
He walked alongside her, dismay clear on his face. "How did this happen? How did this backfire so much?"
She had no answer.
"Let's just hope it doesn't get any worse," he said half-heartedly. He opened his mouth as if to say something hopeful, but then frowned with worry instead. Turning away, he headed for the labs without saying goodbye.
Pressure
She stood near sheer brick and touched cool stone, drawing strength from its constancy. Down the divide between wall and crowd, Rolf and Kitna sat talking. Passing down the row of sitting and leaning layabouts, she approached to a certain distance.
She stood awkwardly until Rolf saw her.
She did her best to feign nonchalance. "Hey, that programming stuff, you can do that from anywhere, right…"
He studied her body language for a moment, and then moved to stand. "Yeah."
"What are you doing?" Kitna interjected.
"I'll meet you at Eve shift."
She stood in anger and grabbed his forearm. "No, seriously, what are you doing?"
He pulled his arm away, offering no explanation.
"Is this about that family-promise with Ragnisson? Because that was with him, not her… and who knows if he really meant it anyway."
That did give him pause, but did not elicit the reaction she wanted. Instead, he only seemed unhappier. "I'll meet you at Eve. Good luck in your games today."
"Fine, do what you want." She sighed in disgust and sat back down, heading off virtually to manage her team.
Elizabeth bit her lip as Rolf came up, and the two of them headed off toward the solar factory. "I didn't mean to cause problems between you and her."
He gave a light snort. "It's always up and down, regardless."
It soon became apparent that Kitna might have meant more by her harsh words than a simple expression of a grudge. The main quadrant seemed darkly different in character. Instead of easily flowing lines, there were many discordant clumps. Small groups stuck together, their faces worried, their conversations low and quiet. Nords walked with Nords, Anglans with Anglans, Oranis with Oranis… they both noticed the undercurrents of fear as they walked. It was not lost on either of them that they had no group in which to find security, and that three might have been better than two.
"Did we do this?" she asked, terrible pressure clenching her heart.
Wary and vigilant, he stuck close. "No."
"But the riot, it was over a thief, just like what we did."
He shook his head. "Similar conditions, similar variables. With a billion people all connected like we are, someone else was bound to have the same idea."
"I suppose." She thought back on the millions of funky dance videos she'd seen mere hours after the original, wondering if her split-second decision to defend Alexander had been a similar seed for more unrest to follow.
"Plus it's the pressure," he added, as if he was trying to justify dismissing some other unspoken concern. "People are naturally looking for any outlet."
Watching his forced neutral expression, she wondered at her observed strange hints of something darker going on with him…
As they stood at the wide entrance, the factory floor yawned open like a massive Monotheist cathedral - very crowded, but paradoxically very quiet.
They passed groups intently huddled over their work, clustered Scientists exchanging grim and tense sentences.
She saw Jason across the floor, looking back at her. He coughed and turned back to his group.
"Hi Elizabeth, hi Rolf," Dierk greeted them, hunched over his prototype. He seemed oblivious to the change in the world's atmosphere. "Solve the efficiency barrier yet?"
She smiled weakly. "Yes."
"Really?"
"No."
He let his head droop slightly. "Oh, okay."
Grimacing at her failed attempt at humoring him, she looked back at the giant readout high on the front wall. The number lay significantly lower than the day before.
Instead of accessing more detailed analyses where all the increasing and decreasing statistics were drawn together, she preferred to watch the actual number. She counted to ten in her head.
Ten seconds for the Peak to drop one second… three days was really thirty days.
One month, and the food supply would reach insufficiency… she could only imagine the violence that would follow the shortage.
That seemed an incredibly tight deadline, and the pressure around her heart seemed to tighten further. The strained atmosphere all around suddenly made horrible sense.
She made her way to her prior spot against the back wall. Rolf sat next to her, absently engaged in his project. Whatever support she might have expected from that quarter, it seemed he had something more pressing on his mind.
Clenching one fist, she fought against the painful tightening in her chest, resisting a slew of worries and fears that hovered at the edge of her awareness.
Taking deep breaths, she called up that image she'd caught through the East Residency window. Distant rain clouds shimmered with the reflected light of the Unsetting Sun, creating more-or-less static rainbows she could see any time she wanted. The Rain Belt seemed so distant, so calm, and so monolithic… free, safe…
She stared at the ground, jumping her vision to different live streams outside until she found somebody who was looking at the Rain Belt in real time.
She jumped to recorded streams from the same area, looking for someone who had glanced at the Rain Belt from the same angle at a different point in the day.
There it was… the same shimmering plays of light… the same rainbows…
She glanced at Rolf, but he still seemed more absent than usual.
Seized with a half-formed revelation, she got up and hurried across the floor.
"Dierk…"
"Have you got it?" he asked.
She laughed with overpowering relief. "I - I don't know. But the, u
m… the lower wavelengths, the light you're trying to redirect repeatedly across the film…" She indicated his prototype.
"We can't place components of that size with enough accuracy yet," he replied.
She rubbed her hands, trying to put into words what she was thinking without letting the vague idea slip away. "But we don't have to. It's… context. Outside the design!"
"What is it?"
"The Sun doesn't move," she said with force, the idea becoming stronger and clearer in her mind. "We don't have to make a proper design. It just has to work!"
He gazed down at his exactingly drawn designs. "Randomization."
"Yes! The components don't need to be placed accurately - we can randomize them, throw out the ones that don't work at all - but the ones that do…!"
Dierk finished her thought. "Whatever angle they do work from, that will determine where the cell is placed… because the Sun doesn't move."
"Exactly."
He tilted his head. "See, I knew you'd crack it."
"But have we?" she worried aloud. "This is a brute-force method, not something we can model virtually. We won't even really understand what's going on at a quantum level - some of the cells will just plain work, and we won't really be able to say why."
"We should make prototypes."
She glanced at the slowly decreasing number high on the front wall, weighing time costs - and the likelihood that others would listen to a blonde and a Subian with an inelegant solution, especially given the social stresses going on. "Let's go. We have to start right now."
"Where are we going?"
"Factory Six. We need to create a large number of cells, and we don't have the tools for that here."
"Can we do it alone?"
"Maybe." She looked across the floor, sighting