So the three of us set out from the ships airlock, accompanied by three bots guided by George. We weren’t completely stupid, though we were pretty close. While he was guiding the bots, George was also trying to crack into the stations computer through open terminals. As we got to the personnel doors, he finally had some success. “I’ve accessed basic systems,” he said. “But there’s no sign of the station AI. And all records seem to have been wiped.”
“That’s weird,” Sarah said as we gathered around the sealed door.
“That’s nothing,” George said. “The station chronometer is also offline and wiped.” They left the power on but shut down the station rotation and the clocks?
Beyond the docking bay door was the standard maze of corridors, offices, storage rooms, embarkation lobbies, workshops, transport system and whatnot that you find near any docking bay. The transport line with a cargo sled was just a short stumble away — the gravity plating was a bit wobbly. Apart from the wonky gravity, clocks and computers, all systems seemed to be working properly. There were no signs of panic, or struggle, or a rush on evacuation ships. Certainly no signs of disaster; everything was intact, except for occasional bits of random consumer goods. That weirded me out, I can assure you. Same with Sarah. And I’m pretty sure same with Cranston, though he never said a peep. All I got from him was a look of relief when he saw a sign that pointed out we were heading to Cylinder B. I guessed that’s the one that his family lived in.
The cargo sled took a corner and headed towards the cylinder hub, through the massive magnetic bearings. As you go through, the gravity from the deck plating cuts off and you are left in pretty much freefall. The sled wouldn’t cross from the fixed crossbar to what should have been the rotating hub-tunnel, so we pushed off and floated onward. The tunnel was well lit: the far end of it, maybe a hundred meters off, was bright as daylight. We drifted off towards the light.
At the end of the hundred meters worth of tunnel, you’ve passed through the magnetic bearings and are in a hemispherical endcap. There’s another terminal there, where you’re supposed to be able to hop a shuttle that can take you all along the core spine that runs the length of the habitat. There’s also a bunch of windows, a big annular low-gravity viewing area where you can look out over pretty much the whole inner surface of the habitat. Remember, you’re like two and a half kilometers up from the floor, so it’s a hell of a view. All the main internal lighting in this type of O’Neill is on the core spine, shining straight down from above. Usually the habs in each pair are different, with one industry and housing, the other more like farms and forests and nature and stuff, but even so there are some pretty common features such as the quartets of radial support struts connecting the spine to the hull every so many kilometers. All the ones I’ve seen are pretty impressive sights… big cylindrical fields of green or urban areas, rivers, roads, aircraft flying around, people basejumping from the core to land under chutes or fanpacks. But this one… damn.
The cylinder we entered must’ve originally been given over mostly to farming or forests, but something had gone wrong. The lights were still on but the gravity off, and the pressure vessel was still sealed. So it remained a viable place for plant life to survive. And boy did it… the whole cylinder was covered in green fluff. But the fluff, which was trees and weeds and whatnot, was no longer held down by artificial gravity. Trees grew hundreds of meters high. Balls of weeds dozens of meters in diameter floated free, or tethered by long vines. Ivy, or something, seemed to cover all the core spine supporting struts. Vines snaked upwards, reaching towards the lights on the core spine; some grew kilometers long, reaching from the walls to pretty near the core. We couldn’t see that any had grown all the way to the core, but it looked like a few had tried; there were clouds of smoke some ways down the core where weeds had gotten too close to the lights and caught fire.
In every O’Neill this size I’ve ever seen, the far end, twenty or more kilometers away, is a bit hazy. But this one… you couldn’t see a third of the way down the length of it. With no gravity all the water in the lakes and streams and sewers and such was free to float around, and I guess it mostly evaporated into one vast uniform cloud. Plus there were darker clouds here and there… smoke, some of them, maybe, but also probably vast blots of pollen. I could feel my allergies acting up even though my suit was sealed up tight. Bleah.
It was a mess. Of course, there was only one question: how the hell had the plants grown this much in only a week and a half? Well, there was more than one question… another was “is there really enough organic matter on board to feed this much plant growth?” And of course the ever-popular “now what do we do?”
We must’ve floated there for a quarter hour, just looking at the jungle around us. Sarah and I, we had nowhere to go… we sure didn’t have need to go gardening. But Cranston started to panic. Kept going on about his sister and her kids, down there in the weeds somewhere. But nobody answered any communications. George even rang every phone number he could find in the stunted computer records. Nothing. Cranston was able to call up the map of the place on his faceplate; his sister’s apartment complex was down there in the weeds, not far from the base of the endcap. Just two and a half kilometers down, two and a half kilometers forward.
The core shuttle system, looking like any subway that’s ever been built, still seemed functional. Cranston was insistent that we take it to the support strut closest to his sister’s apartment; he went kinda bugnuts when Sarah and I hung back. Sarah was disturbed by the place and didn’t want to go down into that mess. I agreed… I didn’t want her to get into some unnecessary danger. Of course, I didn’t want to get me into any unnecessary danger either, but I think I sound more heroic if I say that my main motivation was to keep her from harm. And let’s face it, we weren’t explorers. We weren’t Space Marines, cops or rescue personnel. Basically, I was just a truck driver.
But ah, hell, it was his sister. Could you really say “no” to a guy in that much distress over his lost sister and her kids? Well… I could, and was about to. But he was smart enough to appeal to Sarah, not to me. She was always more sympathetic than me. Better person, I guess. He talked her into it, and thus I had no choice but to go along. So we and the three bots hopped on the shuttle. The bots managed to get the shuttle working; it drove us the three kilometers or so to the first station, which was a ring around the core connected to the four spokes that radiated out to the hull. An elevator was waiting at the spoke Cranston wanted to ride down. He launched at it, the rest of us just followed.
Let me tell you, elevators in a zero gravity facility need to be designed right. This one wasn’t… no hand-holds, no seats, no straps. Made for a rather undignified ride.
Weird as everything had been, all the mechanisms had worked more or less fine. So it was actually a bit of a relief when the elevator stopped early, a hundred or so meters up… something finally not working entirely right. Of course, this resulted in everyone slamming into the floor and bouncing when we came to a stop. Warning lights blinked and alarms beeped; the panel said that the elevator shaft was blocked below this point. We never did find out what it was blocked with, but Sarah guessed that it might’ve been weeds that had invaded the shaft and had filled it with crap thirty stories high. In any event, that was as far down as it was going to go. The bots pried the door open to find a blank wall. Then they popped open the emergency hatch up above; George let us know that there was a door only a few meters up. So we floated up though into the elevator shaft. With no sense of up or down, I had this moment of panic when I was sure that I was staring down into a poorly lit bottomless pit.