Scale, p.18
Scale, page 18
The crewmembers handed them masks. The team had noticed the injured guard and placed him on a gurney; Jake offered to push it, giving himself a task that would make him look a part of things while separating him from the sentries. As he followed the others down the tunnel, he pondered the merits of coming clean and admitting the way he’d stumbled onto the hijacking. But who would believe him, and how long might he be locked up beside the hijackers while the people here sought – if they sought at all – to verify his story? Spotlight’s take on him would be that he’d tried to join them but they’d turned him down, so they’d probably be just as inclined to treat him as a spy as the hijackers had been.
He just needed to hold out for the separatists to regain control of the submarine, and then make sure he was on board when it returned to the surface. He didn’t know how he was going to face Elaine Beckman, but at least he could tell her precisely where Shane had ended up.
Chapter 28
“We need to share information,” Loretta proposed. “About the power generators, about the lepton-shuffling enzymes, about all of it. The more we let the other scales know, the more we’ll build confidence that everyone can benefit from this. It doesn’t have to be seen as a reason for us to break away from the pack, leaving everyone else in the dust. We can show our neighbors that they have nothing to fear from letting us use this technology, because they’ll be using it too.”
She looked around the room nervously. She didn’t know any of these people, but it was the only meeting of proponents for a “no” vote that she’d heard about since the referendum was announced. The fact that they could all fit in Stephen’s living room was disconcerting, but given that the whole thing had been sprung on the population without warning, she could hardly expect to find a huge, pre-existing network of citizens who had already committed to a position and organized their response.
“All right,” Stephen said. “‘Build trust.’” He wrote the words on the sheet of paper he’d taped to one wall. “Any comments?”
“Why would we want to help the other scales build their own bombs?” Genevieve protested, playing devil’s advocate. “How is that making the world a safer place?”
“They’re sure to get hold of the technology eventually, whatever we do,” Loretta argued. “What’s the alternative? Turning them into our enemies, while delaying the inevitable? That won’t leave us any safer.”
“The alternative is to do everything we can to maintain our advantage. If we’re starting out ahead, and we keep developing new weapons, no one will ever catch up.”
“And what a horrible state that would be,” Loretta countered. “Wasting all our energy desperately thinking up new ways to threaten our neighbors, when we could have spent it finding ways to make them value us all the more.”
“You mean making them jealous?” Genevieve replied.
Loretta said, “I’m not a scientist. I never will be. Am I jealous of people who are? No. Am I happy when they get better at what they do, and I reap the benefits? Absolutely. But if the day came when they declared that they needed to form their own republic and be free of the laws that govern everyone else, that’s the point when I might start to resent them.”
“That’s a terrible analogy,” Genevieve complained. “You might not want to be a scientist, but what if you were told that none of your children could aspire to that? None of your descendants, ever?”
Loretta was confused for a moment; surely it was separatism that threatened the other scales with the prospect of exclusion. But even with the scales remaining intertwined, the success of Scale Seven could seem threatening.
“I take your point,” she said. “We need to make it clear that anyone can learn about these things, and have a chance to push them further.” It might take a Scale One student longer to master the theory behind lepton engineering, not to mention all the new developments that would keep coming at them thick and fast, but they’d still have a lifetime to make use of what they learned. And who knew what further insights might flow from a single, long-term view of ideas that in Scale Seven would be scattered across a dozen generations?
Stephen said, “We don’t want to get too lost in the thickets of second-guessing what the other scales might think. We just need a clear, simple message for the voters, that appeals to what they believe the rest of the country will do under each scenario.”
“The trouble is, the rest of the country has already tried sending in soldiers,” Pablo observed wryly. “After that, I don’t know how we can convince anyone that Wendale would let us keep the generators.”
Loretta said, “You don’t think sharing them is enough?”
“No,” Pablo replied. “Our own side has already kept too many secrets.”
“What’s the solution, then, if it’s not more transparency?” Loretta was growing frustrated. “We open up all our factories to inspection, and they do the same. Once they understand how the generators work, surely they can tell the difference between a valid use of the technology and an attempt to make weapons.”
“Can their inspectors even fit inside our factories?” Pablo joked. “Scale Six inspectors, maybe. But then there’s the question of facilities they don’t even know about, that are too small for them to ever find. Or at the bottom of the river.”
“That wasn’t helpful,” Loretta agreed. “But none of this should be insurmountable. You can’t build anything in a vacuum, and supply chains can be audited. So long as we’re still part of Stedland, with all the financial and transport infrastructure subject to one national law, we ... they ... can make it very hard to cheat. And the generators would benefit everyone! It’s crazy to think that the rest of the country would want to forego using them entirely, just because they were invented here.”
Chandra said, “But the generators are frightening to the larger scales, whether or not they can be turned into weapons.”
“Why?” Genevieve asked.
“Why isn’t the world overrun with Scale Seven creatures?” Chandra replied. “They take up the least space, and they breed the fastest. But in numerical terms, they’re the least common.”
Pablo said, “That’s the Treaty of Holroyd for you.”
Chandra shook her head. “Forget about politics, and human land use; I’m talking about all Scale Seven species. This was true long before humans existed. You can see it in the fossil record.”
“We’re limited in the resources we can use,” Stephen suggested. “We can’t just muscle in on the other scales – drink their water, eat their food.”
“Exactly,” Chandra replied. “But the most crucial limiting factor is energy. Scale Seven creatures use energy faster than any comparable organism. That’s what keeps us in check. Give us an almost limitless power source, and that constraint goes away.”
“Doesn’t it lift the constraints on every scale, though?” Loretta argued. “If we can use fusion generators to access more resources, can’t everyone else do the same?”
Chandra said, “They can, but they’ll never get as much benefit as we would. However much power they have at their fingertips, they can’t make their crops and livestock occupy less land. Maybe they can build taller skyscrapers, and use fusion power to light up greenhouses, but it’s all a bit desperate and claustrophobic compared to Scale Seven. To us, the world just looks vast and empty, waiting for us to find a way to make use of all that space. Give us the enzymes to turn anything into Scale Seven, and the power to make it happen, and the planet could support a trillion of us. What kind of nightmare is that, for everyone else?”
Loretta couldn’t argue with any of these biological principles, but it still seemed defeatist to her to take them as the last word. “We’ve had thousands of years in which we’ve accepted limited growth,” she replied. “Sure, there’s some resentment about land allocation, but that doesn’t mean the only choice is between the status quo and a massive population explosion.”
“Of course not,” Chandra agreed. “All I’m saying is that this is what the larger scales might fear. It might or might not be a realistic prospect, for a thousand other reasons, but it’s not physically impossible that this technology would let us increase our numbers by orders of magnitude. So, if we want to enjoy any of the benefits of lepton engineering – without declaring independence – we’re going to need to assuage that fear.”
Everyone fell silent. Loretta gazed at Stephen’s list of campaign slogans, which so far contained exactly one entry: Build trust. She was sure that most people in D7 would be perfectly happy with factory inspections and commodity tracking that made it more difficult for anyone to build a fusion bomb. But if you told them that the great bounty from G8’s discoveries would need to be accompanied by a legislated restriction on Scale Seven family size, they’d riot. Why would anyone vote to remain a part of a country that would only let them use the glorious new technology their own people had invented, if the price was a commitment that their numbers could never grow?
Chapter 29
When Jake pulled off his respirator, taking his cue from the other six people wheeling prisoners down the tunnel, he was afraid someone would start wondering why they didn’t recognize him, and challenge him with another pass phrase. But no one said a word. Apparently the way he’d shown up in the loading bay with the sentries had been enough to cement his status.
The air in the base had an odd musty scent, but as the docking tube came to an end and they turned into a long corridor, the sheer size of the structure dispelled the sense of confinement he had felt in the submarine. There was still an inconceivable mass of liquid bearing down on him, and no route back to the surface that did not rely on other people and their machines, but the relief he felt was like stepping off a boat that some crazed pirate had been intent on using as a battering ram, onto a bleak but inhabited island, whose tribulations the populace had clearly managed to survive for a much longer time than he was likely to be compelled to stay.
“They really thought we were going to hand over a generator?” a woman on Jake’s right exclaimed.
“Not one,” the man beside her replied. “Four.”
“I was wondering why they didn’t just take the one out of the sub.”
“That one would be hot, so it would be trickier to work with. I wouldn’t want to walk into the engine room with a screwdriver and try to take it home, myself. They asked for four brand new ones that hadn’t been powered up.”
“To send off to Wendale?” the woman guessed.
“Probably. I don’t think these fools would have had much use for it themselves.”
Jake had questions, but he didn’t risk showing so much as a flicker of interest in the conversation. He followed the group as they turned into another corridor, but stared ahead blankly, as if his mind was elsewhere.
“Did they rough you up much?” the woman asked him. Jake forced himself to take a moment before responding, as if he really hadn’t been listening.
“No, no. They were sweethearts,” he joked.
“You should get checked out,” she suggested.
“This guy had the worst of it,” Jake replied, nodding toward the passenger on the gurney he was pushing. “He went right through the back of their truck.”
The woman laughed, then said, “Wait, whose truck?”
“Our truck,” Jake corrected himself. “But he went through it after they’d stolen it.”
They arrived at some kind of clinic or infirmary, and two doctors checked the unconscious prisoners before asking for help to move them. One of the prisoners was the tall man who’d been so welcoming to Jake, but Thaddeus’s group was still in the submarine.
“You’re new, aren’t you?” the woman asked Jake, as they slid the guard off his gurney onto a hospital bed.
“Yes.”
“Have you got your paperwork from Spotlight?”
Jake hesitated, wondering if he should pat his pockets, but then he opted for, “It’s back ... ” while gesturing vaguely out of the room.
“On the sub, of course,” she completed for him. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll find it eventually. I’m Sandrine, by the way.”
“Gabriel,” Jake replied.
The man Sandrine had been talking with about the generators overheard them. “Have you had gas extraction training yet?”
“No.” If he was new, and it was possible to be hired without it, then he wouldn’t have had time for it, surely?
“Then you’d better not come back to the sub for the next round. Go and help them move things out of module B.”
“All right.”
“If you get lost, follow the blue arrows,” the man added helpfully.
Jake left the clinic and found a series of blue arrows on the wall of the corridor outside. He’d tried to stay oriented as he’d come from the dock, and the arrows appeared to be directing him around the base, rather than deeper inside. He didn’t want to be too far from the submarine when it departed, but carrying out a task he’d actually been assigned might be the least risky way to pass the time.
As he advanced toward his destination, there seemed to be an awful lot of people in the corridors, all pushing things around on trolleys. Jake could understand why nobody would be literally sleeping through an attack on the base, but he wasn’t sure quite what all this motion was in aid of.
The arrows pointed him to a heavy door with a wheeled handle, similar to the one he’d seen on the submarine; as he approached it, the wheel spun and a woman emerged with a trolley stacked with electronic equipment. Behind her was a small compartment with another door like the first.
“Are you going through?” she asked Jake impatiently.
“I’m meant to be helping in module B.”
She gestured to him to enter the compartment, and when he did she slammed the door behind him and turned the wheel. Maintaining separate modules in the base that would not be compromised if one of them failed seemed like a sensible idea, but why exactly were people hurrying to move everything out of this one?
Jake opened the second door and stepped out of the compartment. Did he really want to be here? As he lingered, a siren began to sound; for a moment he thought it was a call to evacuate, but then he realized that it was coming from inside the compartment.
He shut the door behind him and sealed it, silencing the alarm. As he walked down the corridor, there were open doors on either side, but when he peered into the rooms they looked as if they’d already been stripped of most of their contents.
He came to an intersection, and saw a man approaching, wheeling a large wire cage with a floppy-eared, white-furred creature inside it, cowering among some vegetable scraps. As he passed Jake, he gestured back the way he’d come. “There’s still a few more in the animal house. Can you bring them?”
“Sure.”
Jake followed the corridor and found the room. It was almost bare, but there were two large cages with similar animals to the one the man had been transporting, and three smaller cages with what he guessed were young of the same species. Rabbits? The creatures looked like Scale Five to him, and he was pretty sure there were rabbits down to Scale Five. When he hefted one of the cages the weight seemed to confirm his guess. There were no trolleys in the room, so he’d have to carry everything out. He stacked the two large cages on top of each other, then went to lift one of the smaller ones.
It wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t any lighter either: the quarter-sized animal weighed about as much as the others. If they were Scale Five adults, this was not a Scale Five child. It was a Scale Seven adult.
He peered into the small cage. There were pieces of lettuce that he recognized as edible, and the water dish had the unmistakable sheen of his own kind of water. But there was no such thing as a Scale Seven rabbit. Stories flowed back and forth between the scales, with realism in one setting reading like a fairy tale in another, but though he had read children’s stories about rabbits, some of them portraying the animals as pets, no one he knew in D7 had ever had one; it would be too hard to feed, and if you stroked it, you’d risk inflicting burns.
He stepped out into the corridor; there was no one else in sight. Back in the animal house, he took out his camera and photographed all five rabbits. Then he noticed a set of scales in a corner of the room. He carried one of the large rabbits over and placed its cage on the weighing pan; the dial read 2.6 kilograms. He photographed the whole setup, then did the same for one of the quarter-sized specimens, at 2.8 kilos.
He knew that G8 had borrowed its techniques from biology, but the routine processes that every organism used to change the scales of a few specific molecules were nothing compared to this: bringing a species to a scale it had never inhabited before. It had to have happened in the wild, millions of times, over geological time, but he’d never heard of any scientist actually observing it. Let alone inducing it.
Jake stacked all the cages on top of each other and carried them out, making what he hoped the rabbits of both scales would recognize as soothing noises, as if that might compensate for the disruption. At least they weren’t being left to die. But why were people risking their lives for these animals? Why create them in the first place? There were plenty of sources of Scale Seven meat already, and plenty of suitable pets. Was it pure, curiosity-driven research, aimed at understanding how the ancient scale shifts had happened? But if that was the whole reason, why hide them away down here?
He reached the bulkhead and put the cages down to open the door. As he started shifting the rabbits into the compartment, a siren sounded; he groaned at the stupid machine’s impatience, but then he realized that this wasn’t the same tone as he’d heard before, and it was coming from an entirely different place.
He grabbed the last two cages then slammed the door shut. He tried to open the second door, but the wheel wouldn’t budge. He stood in the compartment, wondering what to do, when the first warning siren, the one he’d heard earlier, joined in with the new one. He hadn’t turned the wheel on the first door, so it wasn’t registering as closed. He was about to remedy that when someone grabbed the door, flung it open, and squeezed into the compartment. It was the woman who’d let him through when he first entered; she was clutching a stack of notebooks.
He just needed to hold out for the separatists to regain control of the submarine, and then make sure he was on board when it returned to the surface. He didn’t know how he was going to face Elaine Beckman, but at least he could tell her precisely where Shane had ended up.
Chapter 28
“We need to share information,” Loretta proposed. “About the power generators, about the lepton-shuffling enzymes, about all of it. The more we let the other scales know, the more we’ll build confidence that everyone can benefit from this. It doesn’t have to be seen as a reason for us to break away from the pack, leaving everyone else in the dust. We can show our neighbors that they have nothing to fear from letting us use this technology, because they’ll be using it too.”
She looked around the room nervously. She didn’t know any of these people, but it was the only meeting of proponents for a “no” vote that she’d heard about since the referendum was announced. The fact that they could all fit in Stephen’s living room was disconcerting, but given that the whole thing had been sprung on the population without warning, she could hardly expect to find a huge, pre-existing network of citizens who had already committed to a position and organized their response.
“All right,” Stephen said. “‘Build trust.’” He wrote the words on the sheet of paper he’d taped to one wall. “Any comments?”
“Why would we want to help the other scales build their own bombs?” Genevieve protested, playing devil’s advocate. “How is that making the world a safer place?”
“They’re sure to get hold of the technology eventually, whatever we do,” Loretta argued. “What’s the alternative? Turning them into our enemies, while delaying the inevitable? That won’t leave us any safer.”
“The alternative is to do everything we can to maintain our advantage. If we’re starting out ahead, and we keep developing new weapons, no one will ever catch up.”
“And what a horrible state that would be,” Loretta countered. “Wasting all our energy desperately thinking up new ways to threaten our neighbors, when we could have spent it finding ways to make them value us all the more.”
“You mean making them jealous?” Genevieve replied.
Loretta said, “I’m not a scientist. I never will be. Am I jealous of people who are? No. Am I happy when they get better at what they do, and I reap the benefits? Absolutely. But if the day came when they declared that they needed to form their own republic and be free of the laws that govern everyone else, that’s the point when I might start to resent them.”
“That’s a terrible analogy,” Genevieve complained. “You might not want to be a scientist, but what if you were told that none of your children could aspire to that? None of your descendants, ever?”
Loretta was confused for a moment; surely it was separatism that threatened the other scales with the prospect of exclusion. But even with the scales remaining intertwined, the success of Scale Seven could seem threatening.
“I take your point,” she said. “We need to make it clear that anyone can learn about these things, and have a chance to push them further.” It might take a Scale One student longer to master the theory behind lepton engineering, not to mention all the new developments that would keep coming at them thick and fast, but they’d still have a lifetime to make use of what they learned. And who knew what further insights might flow from a single, long-term view of ideas that in Scale Seven would be scattered across a dozen generations?
Stephen said, “We don’t want to get too lost in the thickets of second-guessing what the other scales might think. We just need a clear, simple message for the voters, that appeals to what they believe the rest of the country will do under each scenario.”
“The trouble is, the rest of the country has already tried sending in soldiers,” Pablo observed wryly. “After that, I don’t know how we can convince anyone that Wendale would let us keep the generators.”
Loretta said, “You don’t think sharing them is enough?”
“No,” Pablo replied. “Our own side has already kept too many secrets.”
“What’s the solution, then, if it’s not more transparency?” Loretta was growing frustrated. “We open up all our factories to inspection, and they do the same. Once they understand how the generators work, surely they can tell the difference between a valid use of the technology and an attempt to make weapons.”
“Can their inspectors even fit inside our factories?” Pablo joked. “Scale Six inspectors, maybe. But then there’s the question of facilities they don’t even know about, that are too small for them to ever find. Or at the bottom of the river.”
“That wasn’t helpful,” Loretta agreed. “But none of this should be insurmountable. You can’t build anything in a vacuum, and supply chains can be audited. So long as we’re still part of Stedland, with all the financial and transport infrastructure subject to one national law, we ... they ... can make it very hard to cheat. And the generators would benefit everyone! It’s crazy to think that the rest of the country would want to forego using them entirely, just because they were invented here.”
Chandra said, “But the generators are frightening to the larger scales, whether or not they can be turned into weapons.”
“Why?” Genevieve asked.
“Why isn’t the world overrun with Scale Seven creatures?” Chandra replied. “They take up the least space, and they breed the fastest. But in numerical terms, they’re the least common.”
Pablo said, “That’s the Treaty of Holroyd for you.”
Chandra shook her head. “Forget about politics, and human land use; I’m talking about all Scale Seven species. This was true long before humans existed. You can see it in the fossil record.”
“We’re limited in the resources we can use,” Stephen suggested. “We can’t just muscle in on the other scales – drink their water, eat their food.”
“Exactly,” Chandra replied. “But the most crucial limiting factor is energy. Scale Seven creatures use energy faster than any comparable organism. That’s what keeps us in check. Give us an almost limitless power source, and that constraint goes away.”
“Doesn’t it lift the constraints on every scale, though?” Loretta argued. “If we can use fusion generators to access more resources, can’t everyone else do the same?”
Chandra said, “They can, but they’ll never get as much benefit as we would. However much power they have at their fingertips, they can’t make their crops and livestock occupy less land. Maybe they can build taller skyscrapers, and use fusion power to light up greenhouses, but it’s all a bit desperate and claustrophobic compared to Scale Seven. To us, the world just looks vast and empty, waiting for us to find a way to make use of all that space. Give us the enzymes to turn anything into Scale Seven, and the power to make it happen, and the planet could support a trillion of us. What kind of nightmare is that, for everyone else?”
Loretta couldn’t argue with any of these biological principles, but it still seemed defeatist to her to take them as the last word. “We’ve had thousands of years in which we’ve accepted limited growth,” she replied. “Sure, there’s some resentment about land allocation, but that doesn’t mean the only choice is between the status quo and a massive population explosion.”
“Of course not,” Chandra agreed. “All I’m saying is that this is what the larger scales might fear. It might or might not be a realistic prospect, for a thousand other reasons, but it’s not physically impossible that this technology would let us increase our numbers by orders of magnitude. So, if we want to enjoy any of the benefits of lepton engineering – without declaring independence – we’re going to need to assuage that fear.”
Everyone fell silent. Loretta gazed at Stephen’s list of campaign slogans, which so far contained exactly one entry: Build trust. She was sure that most people in D7 would be perfectly happy with factory inspections and commodity tracking that made it more difficult for anyone to build a fusion bomb. But if you told them that the great bounty from G8’s discoveries would need to be accompanied by a legislated restriction on Scale Seven family size, they’d riot. Why would anyone vote to remain a part of a country that would only let them use the glorious new technology their own people had invented, if the price was a commitment that their numbers could never grow?
Chapter 29
When Jake pulled off his respirator, taking his cue from the other six people wheeling prisoners down the tunnel, he was afraid someone would start wondering why they didn’t recognize him, and challenge him with another pass phrase. But no one said a word. Apparently the way he’d shown up in the loading bay with the sentries had been enough to cement his status.
The air in the base had an odd musty scent, but as the docking tube came to an end and they turned into a long corridor, the sheer size of the structure dispelled the sense of confinement he had felt in the submarine. There was still an inconceivable mass of liquid bearing down on him, and no route back to the surface that did not rely on other people and their machines, but the relief he felt was like stepping off a boat that some crazed pirate had been intent on using as a battering ram, onto a bleak but inhabited island, whose tribulations the populace had clearly managed to survive for a much longer time than he was likely to be compelled to stay.
“They really thought we were going to hand over a generator?” a woman on Jake’s right exclaimed.
“Not one,” the man beside her replied. “Four.”
“I was wondering why they didn’t just take the one out of the sub.”
“That one would be hot, so it would be trickier to work with. I wouldn’t want to walk into the engine room with a screwdriver and try to take it home, myself. They asked for four brand new ones that hadn’t been powered up.”
“To send off to Wendale?” the woman guessed.
“Probably. I don’t think these fools would have had much use for it themselves.”
Jake had questions, but he didn’t risk showing so much as a flicker of interest in the conversation. He followed the group as they turned into another corridor, but stared ahead blankly, as if his mind was elsewhere.
“Did they rough you up much?” the woman asked him. Jake forced himself to take a moment before responding, as if he really hadn’t been listening.
“No, no. They were sweethearts,” he joked.
“You should get checked out,” she suggested.
“This guy had the worst of it,” Jake replied, nodding toward the passenger on the gurney he was pushing. “He went right through the back of their truck.”
The woman laughed, then said, “Wait, whose truck?”
“Our truck,” Jake corrected himself. “But he went through it after they’d stolen it.”
They arrived at some kind of clinic or infirmary, and two doctors checked the unconscious prisoners before asking for help to move them. One of the prisoners was the tall man who’d been so welcoming to Jake, but Thaddeus’s group was still in the submarine.
“You’re new, aren’t you?” the woman asked Jake, as they slid the guard off his gurney onto a hospital bed.
“Yes.”
“Have you got your paperwork from Spotlight?”
Jake hesitated, wondering if he should pat his pockets, but then he opted for, “It’s back ... ” while gesturing vaguely out of the room.
“On the sub, of course,” she completed for him. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll find it eventually. I’m Sandrine, by the way.”
“Gabriel,” Jake replied.
The man Sandrine had been talking with about the generators overheard them. “Have you had gas extraction training yet?”
“No.” If he was new, and it was possible to be hired without it, then he wouldn’t have had time for it, surely?
“Then you’d better not come back to the sub for the next round. Go and help them move things out of module B.”
“All right.”
“If you get lost, follow the blue arrows,” the man added helpfully.
Jake left the clinic and found a series of blue arrows on the wall of the corridor outside. He’d tried to stay oriented as he’d come from the dock, and the arrows appeared to be directing him around the base, rather than deeper inside. He didn’t want to be too far from the submarine when it departed, but carrying out a task he’d actually been assigned might be the least risky way to pass the time.
As he advanced toward his destination, there seemed to be an awful lot of people in the corridors, all pushing things around on trolleys. Jake could understand why nobody would be literally sleeping through an attack on the base, but he wasn’t sure quite what all this motion was in aid of.
The arrows pointed him to a heavy door with a wheeled handle, similar to the one he’d seen on the submarine; as he approached it, the wheel spun and a woman emerged with a trolley stacked with electronic equipment. Behind her was a small compartment with another door like the first.
“Are you going through?” she asked Jake impatiently.
“I’m meant to be helping in module B.”
She gestured to him to enter the compartment, and when he did she slammed the door behind him and turned the wheel. Maintaining separate modules in the base that would not be compromised if one of them failed seemed like a sensible idea, but why exactly were people hurrying to move everything out of this one?
Jake opened the second door and stepped out of the compartment. Did he really want to be here? As he lingered, a siren began to sound; for a moment he thought it was a call to evacuate, but then he realized that it was coming from inside the compartment.
He shut the door behind him and sealed it, silencing the alarm. As he walked down the corridor, there were open doors on either side, but when he peered into the rooms they looked as if they’d already been stripped of most of their contents.
He came to an intersection, and saw a man approaching, wheeling a large wire cage with a floppy-eared, white-furred creature inside it, cowering among some vegetable scraps. As he passed Jake, he gestured back the way he’d come. “There’s still a few more in the animal house. Can you bring them?”
“Sure.”
Jake followed the corridor and found the room. It was almost bare, but there were two large cages with similar animals to the one the man had been transporting, and three smaller cages with what he guessed were young of the same species. Rabbits? The creatures looked like Scale Five to him, and he was pretty sure there were rabbits down to Scale Five. When he hefted one of the cages the weight seemed to confirm his guess. There were no trolleys in the room, so he’d have to carry everything out. He stacked the two large cages on top of each other, then went to lift one of the smaller ones.
It wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t any lighter either: the quarter-sized animal weighed about as much as the others. If they were Scale Five adults, this was not a Scale Five child. It was a Scale Seven adult.
He peered into the small cage. There were pieces of lettuce that he recognized as edible, and the water dish had the unmistakable sheen of his own kind of water. But there was no such thing as a Scale Seven rabbit. Stories flowed back and forth between the scales, with realism in one setting reading like a fairy tale in another, but though he had read children’s stories about rabbits, some of them portraying the animals as pets, no one he knew in D7 had ever had one; it would be too hard to feed, and if you stroked it, you’d risk inflicting burns.
He stepped out into the corridor; there was no one else in sight. Back in the animal house, he took out his camera and photographed all five rabbits. Then he noticed a set of scales in a corner of the room. He carried one of the large rabbits over and placed its cage on the weighing pan; the dial read 2.6 kilograms. He photographed the whole setup, then did the same for one of the quarter-sized specimens, at 2.8 kilos.
He knew that G8 had borrowed its techniques from biology, but the routine processes that every organism used to change the scales of a few specific molecules were nothing compared to this: bringing a species to a scale it had never inhabited before. It had to have happened in the wild, millions of times, over geological time, but he’d never heard of any scientist actually observing it. Let alone inducing it.
Jake stacked all the cages on top of each other and carried them out, making what he hoped the rabbits of both scales would recognize as soothing noises, as if that might compensate for the disruption. At least they weren’t being left to die. But why were people risking their lives for these animals? Why create them in the first place? There were plenty of sources of Scale Seven meat already, and plenty of suitable pets. Was it pure, curiosity-driven research, aimed at understanding how the ancient scale shifts had happened? But if that was the whole reason, why hide them away down here?
He reached the bulkhead and put the cages down to open the door. As he started shifting the rabbits into the compartment, a siren sounded; he groaned at the stupid machine’s impatience, but then he realized that this wasn’t the same tone as he’d heard before, and it was coming from an entirely different place.
He grabbed the last two cages then slammed the door shut. He tried to open the second door, but the wheel wouldn’t budge. He stood in the compartment, wondering what to do, when the first warning siren, the one he’d heard earlier, joined in with the new one. He hadn’t turned the wheel on the first door, so it wasn’t registering as closed. He was about to remedy that when someone grabbed the door, flung it open, and squeezed into the compartment. It was the woman who’d let him through when he first entered; she was clutching a stack of notebooks.
