Journal of Simon Herbert 2

CHAPTER TWO

The storm sounded like transport ships were landing on the floor above us as we tried to make ourselves at ease in the shielded suite. It has comfortable furniture, an entertainment console, an office area, a stocked kitchen on one end, a full bath, and several separate rooms with bunks. It was actually nicer than many of the apartments I had lived in before. But the noise made it hard for us to relax. Well, except Webby. He had curled up for a nap on the top of a tall cabinet.

I remarked that Webby must have done this before. Marvin said the storms came at least every 25 to 30 days, and he did not think he would ever be able to sleep through one like Webby could. I asked how long they lasted. He said this type of storm will pass by or dissipate within a couple of hours, but the suite was stocked to take us through one of the annual storms that could last for 10 days or longer, and would require the buildings to be swept clean of the dust left behind. Fortunately there are drones that do that after big storms. The weather AI did not think this would be one of those. Marvin had great confidence in the weather AI.

“Harbinger, when will this storm pass?”

The suite, like the rest of the station, had AI interfaces for every system in the building. They all had human names and voices to interact with them, but Marvin didn't like to reference them as if they were human, so he had hacked into the system and given them all new descriptive names. The weather AI was called Wendy, but Marvin changed it to Harbinger. The transport scheduler was called Nazmi. Marvin calls it Scheduler. The report system that he uses to send daily and weekly reports to the company is no longer Enzo, but is Pointless. Before I came along, Marvin did spend all his time here with just Webby for non AI conversation, so he had to amuse himself somehow.

Harbinger replied, “Storm J1003674X643N9857 will leave your location in 0.2 local planetary days, and dissipate by .6 local planetary days. There are no other storms predicted for the next 10 local planetary days.”

I suppose the interface was programmed not to just say “day” or express things in hours because it was made to work on any planet. For the variety of travellers, I guess the developers felt they needed to remind the users that the times were all local and days are not the same length as the ones back home. Days are relative, but atomic seconds are universal. Not all planets use hours and minutes. And the ones that do simply divide the local day into 24 hours, which is seldom the exact amount of time from planet to planet. Marvin's home planet, like mine, used hours. Time terms seem to be constant across both our universes. So we use the term hour between ourselves. Though we still have to adjust to how long an hour is in universal seconds. His planet's hour is longer than this one's, and mine is shorter.

I asked about all the equipment on the upper levels, if they would be damaged by the storm. Marvin assured me the building and the equipment was made to withstand the wind and pressure changes in the storm. He said our relatively fragile humanoid flesh bags however would not handle it as well. The city was made as a strong hold against the storms, but Marvin pointed out that there is no structure beyond the city, and no evidence that there ever was.

“You didn't see anything but dry cracked ground on the way to this city did you?”

Indeed, we did not. And Marvin says the people that once lived all over this planet left a long time ago, right after the storms started growing with intensity. They built the city for a mining company, but it was too costly, took too many resources to make a whole planet as strong as the city. And there was no way to grow food in such a hostile environment. So eventually, after there was nothing left to mine, they abandoned everything.

I start thinking about The Rip. I wonder if it existed before the storm. Wonder if there is a correlation, or even a cause and effect. There are no such storms in my universe. My old universe. Our way station could never survive one. What happened here to create them? Could they cross The Rip? Almost as if he could hear my thoughts, Marvin says he is sure Pretentious will have any info about the storms if I am interested. Pretentious is his name for the Historical AI. After asking it a question once, I understood why Marvin gave it that name. I don't think I have ever felt so talked down to by an AI.

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