Chapter 32

“From what I hear, the beach on the west side is a popular place for first timers.”

Sam wasn't sure what to make of that. When she pictured beaches, she thought of soft golden sand and cooling off in the water. When she pictured the Antarctic, she thought of ice. Somehow the two just didn't blend in her mind when she tried to force them to. She thought about asking Diana about what Jeff had meant, but she excused herself soon after the others left, saying that it was time to give her rig another check. Sam still had another hour before she was required to.

It was mostly just busy work to her, booting it up and running the start-up sequence to make sure that it was real and that the people of the city didn't have to worry about it suddenly exploding. While she joked about that to herself and other mechanist, she knew that when she was a kid, that was one of her biggest fears about airports; a fear that came about after a media scare campaign caused horror stories about it to circulate through her school. A part of her could still understand it, without her degree she would also be like those people that moved to the other side of the hallway when passing by the hanger that stored her rig. It was almost a kind of insanity to be comfortable working next to a nuclear bomb that was deliberately made to explode if touched the wrong way; a kind of numbness to obvious danger.

As she passed time at the bar, she went over what she had planned for the week. A day after her arrival the trade show would open. Although it was open, most people just set up their stalls in order to free up space in their workshops, the real show wouldn’t begin until the matches started. While any mechanist could understand a part’s performance by reading its patent information, that was far from enough to secure a sale. Most patents for rig parts tended to be inaccurate. Not outright lies, but with performances tested under lab conditions and with cherry-picked data, and measured with deliberately bad equipment to inflate the margin of error. That was why they needed to wait for the games to start for the sales to begin in force. If a sales-rep could point to a screen and say ‘this is how well it does’ then the data would be more likely to be believed.

On Sam’s third day there, the pilots would arrive and the opening ceremony would begin. Unlike the Olympics of old, the Quadrennial Games’ opening ceremony was more downplayed and formal. The games always took place in the same arena, and there were no natives there who wanted to show off their culture. As such there was no competitive drive or cultural significance behind the ceremony, and it was instead treated almost like a business arrangement. The athletes would stand with a representative of their country in rows before a stage and the current head of the Kaya family would formally welcome them to compete. Afterwards, the head Kaya would announce which countries would be granted additional cores over the next four year period, and the number of cores that would be available as prizes. It would normally be a single core, but historically it could be as many as three.

The day after the ceremony, Sam would be working. She and Sachiko would go to the Kaya family workshop in the morning and retrieve their rig, which would be transported there directly from the plane. It was a little irritating that she would have to work with a rig she knew nothing about, but she was also excited to be working with cutting edge technology.

When she went to check on the rig, she noticed that the guards tensed up around her. It was a strange reaction from professionals who would have seen several dozen activation sequences over the previous few days. Their apprehension seemed to grow with each keystroke, and it made her wonder if something had gone wrong with one of the previous rigs. If something had happened, then they had evidently brought it under control before the airport became a crater. When Sam finished her check, they all seemed to breathe more easily. It was apparently the right call to get through it faster to lighten their moods. With the check complete she went back to waiting.

A while past and she eventually boarded her plane and flew further south. The plane’s thick insulation and heating kept it warm, even in the below freezing temperature. From her window she had been able to see the wide, ice-locked country well before they began their landing approach. While decades prior, the landing strip had been a patch of ice coated dirt, it was now a modern airport, complete with a heated umbilical that connected directly from the aircraft to the building. Getting that initial work done had been difficult and expensive, but the global representatives that regularly visited demanded at least that level of opulence.

It was also necessary that the buildings be heated since the weather was unseasonably cold; even at the relatively northern section that they were in, temperatures still didn’t reach above negative six degrees Celsius on the warmest days. Days, of course, being used in its calendar sense, as the land was caught in the middle of its yearly cycle of nights consuming the entirety of each day. With that in mind, the lights the buildings provided were also a welcome feature.

After organising someone to deliver her luggage to the room she was staying in, a small suite attached to her workshop, she loaded the rig and its spare parts onto a heavy truck and delivered it to the Kaya’s. Despite its apparent weight, the actual room in the truck was limited, as most of the design seemed to be bulk against the cold and weight to displace snow. That ensured that while the drive was warm, it was not comfortable. The driver and a security guard took the seats in the cab, which left her with making room in with the parts. After they arrived at a dome shaped building, that, if it had been built normally, would have been ten stories tall. It was located not far from the arena and its village. Alicia Kaya’s secretary had several armed guards take the contents of the truck into the building and got the driver to take Sam to her room. She had expected at least some briefing material or user manual, so getting no hints and being shooed off left her feeling left out and annoyed.

The next effective day she noticed a few of the other mechanist nearby were gathering together and decided to check out what they were up to. She soon found out that Jeff had been serious about the beach being popular and they were all getting ready to take a trip to the nearby west shore. With nothing else to do, since she had originally planned on spending the day looking at the apparently non-existent rig documents, she decided on tagging along with them.

The beach they headed to was famous, like Jeff said, and as such was prepared to accommodate those who came unprepared. That meant Sam had no problem renting the equipment she needed. The dark black and grey rocks that made up the beach’s surface were brightly lit by a set of portable stadium lights that were steaming as snow hit the heat of their intense light and whose yellow paint seemed like it would be visible even with just star light to go off of.

The suit she borrowed was made from a thick synthetic material that was apparently developed by the Kaya family company prior to their development of formless particles. The material had the property of generating heat in only one side of it to more efficiently use the energy added, making it well suited for cold water diving equipment. An energy field would have done the job better, but recreational divers preferred it for the experience of actually swimming and scientists preferred it for a lower impact on the environment they were studying.

As a part of her studies, Sam and the other mechanist had received qualifications with diving equipment, as there was a niche competition style that involved underwater combat, but she had never used it after passing the subject. It took her a while, but she eventually sealed herself into the foamy suit, strapped the heavy tanks and batteries to herself, and made her way across the lumpy stones. There were many people that were quicker than herself, and they had gone head; their shoulder-lights occasionally splitting out from the black coloured ocean like they were signalling for a hero.

When Sam entered for herself, she was awestruck by what she saw. She had expected to see a wondrous natural environment, with animals adapted to nature performing a show merely through existence. That was not what she found. It was instead a neutrally buoyant disk of metal nearly a hundred meters across. It was divided into three sections, copper for the outer third, silver for the middle and gold for the inner. As she got closer she could see that it was covered in etchings; people’s names. While she recognised none in the copper and silver, there were a few in the gold that she did. Dead pilots and mechanists; it was a memorial wall. When she later asked one of the older mechanists about it, the colours represented the highest division they reached when they died, copper for school and silver for junior. It also seemed that it wasn’t so much a secret spot, as much as a spot that didn’t get spoken of. There was nothing to stop them from talking about it, but doing so would seem crass.

When she was ready, Sam started to swim back to shore. There was something comforting about the disk; that no matter what happened someone would engrave her name there one day as a tribute. It also gave a new meaning to the platinum disk in the International Body for Rig Science’s main office. She had heard that it was engraved with the name of everyone that became world champion and their mechanist. As she was about to breach the surface, she noticed something moving in the corner of her eye. When she turned to look for it, she couldn’t find anything, but it had looked to her like a slick of oil that swam through the water. By the time she was back on land, she had dismissed it as a fast moving fish or swarm of plankton or the likes.

A few hours later, she made her way to the trade show. The bustle of people filled the hall as voices bounced from the roof to the floor and blended in a cacophony. There were three groups of people there, each looking distinct from each-other in wild disparity. The first group were the mechanists, whom made up the largest portion. As an occupation that involved long hours and not a lot of sunlight, there was a kind of near uniformity in the unhealthy looks of their skins. That was just about the only uniformity, as age, race and gender didn’t seem to reveal any other pattern.

The next group were the sales teams and parts reps standing behind stalls and dressed like professionals, with powerful looking suits and hairstyles that anyone could guess were trending, they were next in terms of population. While Sam had experienced the kinds of sales reps that were active in her city, the kind that either knew their parts or were attractive, it was clear from their words and looks that a company wouldn’t have sent them there if they were lacking in either. There were some exceptions to that; Jeff apparently being one of them. He was surprisingly busy, with a small group of people examining his data and asking questions at any given moment. His table seemed to be managed by just Diana and him, and they didn’t look like they could spare even a moment of time.

The third group were apparently media representatives. Unlike the other group, they could mostly be spotted by the looks of boredom. While there was the occasional reporter who specialised in reporting technology, most of them just shot a five minute segment they could loop then just waited around for something to happen or for celebrity spotting, not that any would have shown up to a day one trade show. Sam did notice that there was a tech reporter eyeing up Jeff like a predator, apparently waiting for any break in the crowd to rush in and ask for an interview. As she continued to look around, she decided to leave a note for Jeff on the table as she walked past.

“Thanks for the telling me about the beach and look out for that reporter gunning for you”