12: Chloe – Unique Architecture

Reece returned from his enquiries to find me rearranging my bandages, ruminating on everything we’d been through. Almost all of it was beyond control. Of what little remained that was, he was easiest to deal with.

“Guards confirmed it.” He said as he got back. “Helicopter hanger really is twenty floors below ground.”

I didn’t look up.

“Reece, we need to talk.” I said.

“Shoot.”

“I don’t blame you for being a jackass to Holden. He’s a jackass himself, but I’m not some prize you win for coming out on top.”

“Oh? So what is?”

“There isn’t one. Flashing your badge and calling security? That was a dick move.”

“Hey, it was your not-boyfriend being an asshole. I didn’t mean anything by it. I just don’t like smarmy guys who think they can swarm in and sweep every girl in the room off their feet.”

“I can handle guys like that myself.”

“Whatever. I just thought I was being chivalrous.”

“You thought you were being a hero. But undermining me just to swoop in and save the day makes you as bad as he is, and I shouldn’t have to explain that to a grown up man.”

“So that’s a no to hanging out?”

“It really should be.” I said, and stood to face him. “But you piqued my interest. Show me a hanger twenty floors underground.”

I’d given Reece my warning, hopefully enough to keep him on his toes for a while. He kept quiet while we waited for the elevator. A maintenance technician apologized for the delay while he updated the floor directory. We were no longer on floor eighty.

Compartment 20 – Storage

The new scale revealed the already tall, seven hundred meter building stretched a further four kilometres underground. A good chunk of the bottom was inaccessible and had a different label from other floors.

Danger. Tether: No Access

“I really need to figure this place out.” I said.

The ride was smooth and ear-popping fast, and when the doors slid open, we found ourselves staring out at what could only be called a cavern. It was huge, a single room, three of the building’s already tall storeys high and as stretched the entirety of the exterior. Its smooth ceiling and walls formed a dome that curved down in the middle around the elevator shaft to form a giant, central support. Crew members stood in pizza slice shaped stages around the raised platform we stood on, efficient and organized.

On the raised stages were helicopters in various stages of disassembly, their separate components locked into floor cages around the main bodies, secured by sturdy clasps and bolts in underfloor compartments. It seemed less a hanger than a militarized chop shop.

“Reece Alexander?” a voice called from above.

A man in an orange vest leant over the edge of a gantry.

“That’s me.” Reece said. “You Mr. Yao?”

“David.” he said and waved us up. “We’re being informal here.”

A ladder led up to his platform. Rows of desks, half manned by a skeleton crew, none of whom seemed old enough to hold a pilot’s license, lined an outer gantry around the rest of the chamber.

“Welcome to the shitshow.” David said. He tossed Reece a tablet without looking up, then admonished a kid who’d lost his password.

Aerial shots and probe footage peppered the screens. The kids at the desks were strapped to their chairs, which along with their desks were rigged to the floor. They were piloting drones, eyes under immersion goggles. Footage transmitted from across the globe revealed several monuments or landmarks showcasing their location. I recognized several skyscrapers in Shipyard City alone. Bullet shaped eyesores, cutting edge in terms of technology and architecture, all owned by the Kinsley Foundation. They were being monitored by this handful of undergraduates. On other screens, flybys of the Sydney Opera House, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and Easter Island Heads flashed in quick succession.

One pilot signalled David to his rig. He clipped his tablet to the boy’s chair and showed us what the kid was seeing.

“Red means you’re low on power. Dock the mother. Get her green. You gotta refuel, just like driving a cab.”

“What’s with the drones?” I asked.

“Surveillance.” He said without looking up. “Keep an eye on anything that’ll get in the building’s way.”

“What, like terrorists?”

“No. Like birds.”

This subterranean hanger was raising more questions than it gave answers.

“Oh, of course. Obviously. So do the drones have to dock here to recharge?”

David shook his head. “We make ’em face the wind, use their rotors as wind turbines.”

He plucked the tablet from the chair and flicked off multiple files at techs waiting around him. A file opened on Reece’s screen. It was a checklist.

“Look, I need to concentrate now.” David said. “Interview when I’m done. After tomorrow I promise I will never even think of going up in a building again.”

He strapped a visor to his face and took control of another kid’s rig. A passing drone captured his flight as an arm extended from it to grab a fire escape on another building. It leaned backwards to funnel wind through its turbines, and a battery readout grew at a steady one percent every two seconds. This tech was decades ahead of its time.

I tailed Reece on assignment. He was a different man on the job, businesslike and duty oriented, double checking everything. It seemed professionalism was the watchword of the Foundation. I followed him out to the balcony, the same three-sixty degree surrounding maintenance platform we had on floor eighty. His schematic showed every floor had one, a two meter wide, perfectly circular balcony with automatically lowering sunscreens. Sunscreens twenty levels below ground. And what lay beyond them took my breath away.

Our skyscraper stood in a vast vertical shaft, twice as wide as the building itself, with supports loaded with cables and pipes feeding us who knew what. Locking mechanisms held the building in place every ten floors, keeping us upright. Between them were rails. I recognized Maglev technology when I saw it. The heat beyond the sunscreen was intense, rippling the air.

I’d seen a similar setup before, back when SmartBuilds had been my baby. An amateur architect had bought an old bunker, built a farmhouse at the surface and a private mansion below, each level further underground. This was not the foundations of a skyscraper.

“This is a missile silo.” I said, and suddenly the bullet shaped structures of Kinsley’s buildings made a mad sort of sense. I said it out loud to test its absurdity. “We’re not in a skyscraper. We’re in a rocket.”

Reece checked off his inspection. “That’s right. This baby’s heading up where the shit down here can’t hurt us and you get to chronicle everything.”

“Reece, what is all this?.”

“I’m not sure I’m the man to explain it.”

“Then who is?”

A shadow fell across the chamber. “If you wanna find out, come with me.”

I spun to find David resting on the door. He nodded at Reece. “Third Event’s about to start. Everything check out here, newbie?”

“Yes, sir, Mr Yao. David.” Reece said.

David checked off his docket and left without another word.

“So you gonna follow him?” Reece said.

“Yeah,” I said, and hurried out. “Yeah, I’m coming.”

David didn’t stop or acknowledge me. He checked on two more technicians and gave everyone a warning on the PA.

“All of you,” he said into his tablet. His voice echoed from above. “Get to your designated seats. The Third Event starts in five minutes. You know what to do.”

“I don’t.” I said.

“You keep up.”

I followed him to the elevators again and he hit level one-fifty.

“Your last name’s Yao?” I said. “I think I met your little girl. Sweet kid.”

“She talk your ear off? Sorry ‘bout that. She thinks big words make her sound clever.”

I shrugged. “Nah, I’m used to it. Had a boyfriend like that.”

“You got a screen?” David said, holding up his tablet. I fished mine out from its pocket. David flicked what was on his screen at mine. “Let the man know all the balconies have been sealed.”

He gestured out the doors as the elevator opened. A chamber as large as the hanger waited beyond, not as high, but empty save for two armchairs and a coffee table. David said nothing as the doors closed between us and I was left alone.

A large floor to ceiling window surrounded the entirety of the room. I was in the lobby! I ran to the exit and pushed, but the doors had been welded shut. Another sunscreen sealed the vestibule. Beyond that, outside, the ground had been collapsed, leaving a gap between us and the rest of the world. The silo shaft stood open, a dry moat six hundred floors deep.

“Ah, you came.” A new voice said.

I spun round and found a familiar face. I’d never met him in person, but everyone knew his name.

“Wow.” I said. “If it isn’t James Kinsley himself.”

Kinsley smiled behind his iconic half moon spectacles and took a seat at one of the armchairs. I sat down opposite and handed him the tablet.

“What were you told to tell me, Miss Heralds?” he said.

“All your balconies have been sealed.”

“Ah, excellent news! Then all that’s left is to answer your questions. If you’ll indulge an old man, I’d like to narrate it as the story unfolds.”

“Please do.”

“Right then, are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.”

He swept a dramatic arm across the view of the street outside.

“Once upon a time, a team of wise men saw their world was heading for a final disaster. Requiring resources to survive it, they bargained and lied to the leaders of the world, the rich and the powerful, promising safe passage through the turbulence in exchange for funding and the necessary permissions to create what they needed. You are in one such ark now, Miss Heralds, and we’ll be escaping in just a few hours.”

“Escaping what? You already stopped the end of the world. The nukes were pacified as soon as they blew.”

“We didn’t stop them from exploding. We were the ones who exploded them. The Events around us are beyond our control. It was these phenomena that subdued the explosions. Oh, don’t worry. We were quite sure you’d survive.”

“Quite sure? Thanks a bunch.”

“You’re welcome! Now as you can see, the balconies surrounding each floor have been sealed shut from both inside and out, and are now about to be used for their intended purpose.”

He showed me a camera view on the tablet.

“The outer two meters of every surface of this building are hermetically isolated and awaiting inundation.” He said. “As of this moment, the building is completely sealed off.”

“Inundation? Like flooding?” So you’re going to fill the building with water?”

“Just the outer two meters and various support systems. And it isn’t water.”

“That would trap us two meters beneath the surface in every direction.”

An alert blared out above us. Nina’s voice boomed. “Ladies and gentlemen, the time is now nine thirty-six on July twenty-ninth. The third Event will start in one minute.”

“It would be difficult to create the shelter we need to survive the final Event if not for using this one as a resource,” Kinsley said. “Just like we charged the building’s batteries and primed the subterranean explosives with the last one.”

“Explosives?”

“All in due course, my dear. You’ll find out during the next Event. First we observe this one.”

We waited out the last minute, watching the timer on the tablet count down. At ten seconds, Kinsley placed it on the table and pointed outside. A klaxon wailed and again I sat, a mere observer of the change on the world.

A ripple spread across the city, a shimmer scaring the last of the gulls into the air. It took me a second to understand what I was seeing. The surface of every edifice burst. The glass of every building’s windows, every car’s, every discarded bottle, dropped off the sides of the buildings. I expected the panes to shatter when they hit earth, but instead, they splashed. They’d melted in an instant. This was no gradual process, no seering heat before the fire. The glass, already as transparent as water, simply became it. The shower flooded the streets, raining like, well, rain, and pooled into cracks and ditches.

“We spent fifty years and fifty billion making sure this next part would work.” Kinsley said. “All the glass in the world has just liquidated itself, and all of it in this city is now flowing into our pumps.”

The liquidized glass flooded the streets, draining into storm drains and the moat around the tower. Soon after, masonry followed its example, slower and less liquid, more gunge or slime. It was the devastation of a volcanic eruption, sans the erupting volcano. And as far as I could tell the melting stone wasn’t hot. The world was melting regardless of temperature.

“What about people outside?” I said.

Kinsley shook his head. “The building is now sealed. It would take a specialized drill to puncture that shell. And that’s before this happens.”

A deep grating filled the room followed by the glug of liquid. Water sprayed into the space between the sealed entrances and exterior Plexiglas. It flooded quickly, filling before us like the world’s largest fish tank. The water was dirty but still transparent.

“And that’s not water?” I said, turning to see the outer shell of the lobby filling up around us.

“It’s glass,” Kinsley said. “Along with other ceramics, tiles, the odd bit of authentic pottery. All liquidized, pumped it into these moulds, and with a few chemicals and compounds in the delivery process, it’ll be as hard as we need when it sets again.”

“And we’ll be sealed in completely.”

“Precisely. Utterly airtight, save for the airlocks, of course.”

Airlocks. So there were ways out.

Kinsley continued. “Once this Event is over, the glass will solidify again. It’ll form a shell around the building from roof to the lowest sub-basement and increase our weight tenfold. That’s the key to our escape, by the way, which will be in less than three hours.”

David sent a report through the tablet. The glass was getting less pure. Other ceramics and stone had melted at the same rate, but with the exterior of the building full, it was diverted to structural bladders.

“Structural bladder?”

Kinsley pulled up a schematic of the building.

“The longer the event goes on, the more types of matter it affects. Ceramics melt. Crystals become rubbery. That includes metals, and since they won’t be as supportive as they normally are, we filled the structure of our building with concrete to keep it upright. I’m sure you’ve noticed our unique architecture. Think of it as an inflatable tower, only instead of air, we used liquid stone.”

“And so justifies the blobitecture. And what about when the event is over?”

“It solidifies again and our building will be more solid than ever.”

“That’s insane. What’s keeping us from melting?”

“Polymers remain unaffected, so don’t worry about your body oozing away. Of course, you would, eventually, if the Event lasted longer.”

“And the people outside?”

Kinsley watched the melting cladding. A wall across the street collapsed, crumbling into chunks of soft clay, each piece uncongealing as they rolled onto the warping road. He took his glasses off.

“Anyone indoors or on the streets,” he said sadly. “Will likely soon be dead.”