Chapter One
Dr. Tamsin Rivers stands in the abyss.
The absence of light and sound has a weight all its own, separate from the gravity that, along with the sound of her blood and breath, are the only reminders that she has a body. She is standing on a catwalk, suspended in the center of a geodesic dome far below the city of San Siroco. Its walls are several body lengths thick, and the sensors it houses are silent, giving off no telltale hum of electricity. Even the air is tasteless, scentless. She keeps one hand always on the guideline, the only way back to the door she entered through.
This space is a cathedral of the mind. A monument to science. Her flawed human body vibrates with the deprivation of its senses, unable to perceive the immensity around her, and after twenty minutes, a red light beside the single door will switch on, to remind her to turn back. Without the light, some people never come out. Left to their own devices, it’s entirely possible that they’d sit here until they starved.
Tamsin has never felt at risk of losing herself. Her thoughts remain coherent. The panic never comes for her, nor the dissolution; only a quiet, invigorating hum. Here, away from emails and funding requests and board meetings, in the heart of her research, she knows exactly who she is.
There’s data flowing through the chamber, invisible and constant. Test messages sent across the city, traveling along a network of chambers just like this one. Cut out all the noise, and the message comes through, fast and crisp and clear. Stronger than any cell signal, faster than any satellite, bouncing between technological mirrors that can only exist here, in the deep quiet. If it works, she’s going to revolutionize the world. She’s going to be lauded as the fucking genius that she is.
And it does work.
Just a little longer to prove out all the particulars. A few more months, maybe a year or two, and her name will enter history. Dr. Tamsin Rivers, bringer of a new age.
The air shifts, wobbling in her ears, her lungs. The change startles her. She turns and sees a sliver of light grow and expand. Not the call-back light, but the glow of the entryway silhouetting a figure.
The dome swallows all sound, even her footsteps as she retreats back toward the rest of the lab. Yvette Olsen, one of her researchers, isn’t looking at her, her attention fixed on the tablet she’s holding. Her expression is grim.
The door to the chamber shuts behind them.
“Well?” Tamsin asks, eyes adjusting once more to the light.
“There’s been an incident, at the boundary,” Yvette says. “We officially have a problem.”
A few more months, maybe a year or two, and her name will enter history.
Unless everything falls apart first.
* * *
“The city is sinking.”
Tamsin’s voice rolls out across the conference room. She is pristine, her scarlet curls perfectly defined and gleaming down her back, her dress precisely tailored, her makeup impeccable. Her audience, made up of most of Myrica Dynamic’s C-suite executives and many of the other R&D section heads, watches her carefully, rigid in their seats. Murmurs ripple through the room, but they’re soft. Respectful and cautious.
She taps the clicker in her hand. Behind her, the dark screen comes to life, showing a wire-frame model of the city. It stretches well aboveground in the downtown core and plunges below the surface in a warren-path of subway tunnels.
Another tap. The map lights up at three different points along the tunnels. “The first reports came from three different engineering teams monitoring the subway expansion project. Survey equipment at each site began showing a regular, consistent decrease in altitude. After ruling out sampling errors, mechanical defects, and algorithmic GPS drift, we went hunting.”
The altitude drops are minor, and there have been no fissures in the earth, no delays to the construction work underway. But while the subway project isn’t officially hers, her research is the reason Myrica Dynamics bought and privatized the crumbling network of infrastructure below the city. It’s her the engineers come to, because anything that impacts the subways impacts her. It’s a lot easier to build unsanctioned labs that far down with a plausible reason to have teams working on subterranean maintenance and the desperate thankfulness of the city’s government helping them not look too closely.
So if there’s going to be a problem, she needs to be seen dealing with it. She has to lead the charge. It’s the only way she can ensure her research continues in the meantime.
On the screen, the unremarkable green lines sketching out the city turn to orange in a jagged ring, tracing the rough outline of the consolidated metropolitan area. The image shifts down, but at this scale, it’s not so much visible as subconsciously unsettling.
“By taking measurements at sites across the city, we have been able to determine that the subsidence is happening in nearly every neighborhood of San Siroco.” Not the suburbs, though. On a whim, they’d checked population-density maps, and that had almost fit the pattern. But after months of looking, they’ve found no direct mathematical correlation with the boundary, nor any other explanation for the sudden stop.
It’s almost as if the subsidence simply ends beyond what Tamsin thinks of as San Siroco proper, ignoring every objectively measurable variable.
Confirmation bias, she’s sure.
“The geological traits the sites have in common are superficial at best, with nothing directly putting them at risk of subsidence. Only a handful are connected to the subway system. And over the last two months of observation, all have subsided at a rate of twenty-seven millimeters per month. Consistently.”
That gets a reaction.
Several different low conversations spring up across the darkened room. At the far end of the conference table, Mx. Woodfield, dressed in her usual sharp black suit, watches Tamsin. Not the screen behind her, not the burgeoning tumult around them both. The muscles between Tamsin’s shoulders tighten; there’s going to be an unavoidable discussion after this, about her withholding of this information. For all the freedom she’s been granted working for Myrica, there are limits.
She’s crossed one.
Tamsin does not wait out the chatter; if she tried, she might be standing there for hours. Instead, she lifts one pale hand, advances the presentation once more. She makes herself relax and ignore Woodfield.
The wire-frame begins to sink again, this time noticeably.
Copyright © 2023 by Caitlin Starling.
