Continuum

I reclined my seat and complied. I was just exhausted. How comforted I was that she was there with me. If the Continuum was gone, so be it. Mary and I would resurrect it or build a new one. Our world depended on it.

I woke suddenly to a bumpy road. A guard was cheerfully waving us through a gate into a giant landfill. Our low slung vehicle was having difficulty negotiating the rutty road, but presently we were around the back of the place, and facing a long building which hugged the hill behind it. A man came over and waved to someone inside. A garage door opened for us, and we drove in. I thought we would be getting out, but Mary turned into the left wall and it opened for us into a tunnel! We drove smoothly on in the large, almost airy passage. It looked well used. Probably had been, by all those earth moving machines.

After a couple of miles of mild but steady descent, we were at another wall. Then the end of the tunnel, obviously. Mary spoke something out loud. Nothing happened. She got out of the car, and so did I. I found my legs worked after all. We walked to the wall and stopped. Mary touched it, and waited. Slowly, a large section moved aside. It was black within. We got into our car and she drove into the darkness.

Our lights did not seem to touch anything, but soon there was another wall facing us. It was the first floor of a large building. Between our car lights and the distant lights of the tunnel, I could sense that we were in a large open space, and that he giant building rose into the upper distance, out of sight of the feeble lights.

"Where is the power switch, Mary?"

She looked very worried. Had Lerno gotten to this place as well?

"Lets find a door, Stevo. You look that way. I'll go this way. Yell if you find one."

I began to trot along the wall of the building, wishing I had a light. I slowed down and began feeling my way, hoping the door was well recessed. Would it be locked? I heard Mary say something far away. I couldn't make out what she said, but I began running that direction back into the lights of the car, and on past it, along the wall of the building. My feet sounded hollow on the metal floor of the room we were in. Up ahead was a light coming from a doorway. Mary had found our entrance.

Inside the door was a small closet, with no other signs of a passageway. I squeezed in next to her, and looked at the blank metal panel on the wall. Mary continued to look worried. Presently, she asked me to put my hand just so, on the panel. She did the same, placing her hand about a foot to the left of mine.

Suddenly, I heard machinery going. A low hum filled the small space we were in. Behind us, I could sense a lot of light coming through the door. We both stepped into daylight through the door of the tiny closet we were in.

I blinked in the overhead light. It did not seem to come from a single source, nor could I see the roof overhead. I knew that there must be one, for we were well underground. I looked at the building we had been in. No doors, no windows. It might as well have been a big empty box.

"What is this place, Mary?" I was looking down a street at perfectly spaced and perfectly formed metal buildings. None of them possessed windows. It was errie to see, because of the Otherness. No human architect had fashioned nor dreamt the fantastic design of this city!

"This building is mostly empty space, but it is filled with our communications equipment. The top of this building contains antennas that almost reach the surface. Our electromagnetic frequency comes from here and is transparent through surface soil. All of the buildings you see here are serving some singular function for us. Most of them are just data storage containers."

"Mary! Shut it down! Lerno had gotten our frequency from my implants in his lab!"

She made no move to do so. She simply said that there would be no transmissions from this place until there was no more danger of discovery. I wasn't sure what she meant by that. I was still trying to figure out how we managed to turn on the city lights.

"How did we turn it all on?"

"It takes two of us to do this. That is insurance against one renegade taking the place over."

"That means my implants still are intact?"

"Yes, Stevo. They continue to work very well. I really doubt that Lerno discovered much about your Nanobots. They are on the molecular level, you know. They are very easy to hide within your body's cells, so they cannot be detected by most any means. Lerno might have suspected your implants, and he could detect their radio emissions, but he would never find them, even with vivisection."

Again, I shuddered! Not a pleasant thought at all! We walked to the car to shut off its lights.

"Where do you stay, Mary?"

She looked surprised at this. "Nowhere, Stevo. I require neither rest nor sustenance."

"You mean there are no dwellings here? That is amazing. Why else would you have a city, if there was no place to stay?"

"None is required. This city is one giant machine, capable of manufacturing touring bodies, or computer equipment, or anything else we might possibly require. Even this conveyance we used came from a factory building here a few years ago. My own touring body was built here, but it had been stored not far from the Citadel for a number of months, should the need arise to ever have to use it."