Ch 6: Basewater
The Futureness Part Two
I was in the house when the house flooded down in the 100-year storm. Rushing waters took my legs out from under me at the top of the stairs, and I sluiced down the eighteen steps to the den.
“That was fun,” I told my dad.
“This isn’t fun,” my dad said.
The rains came and would not stop. Motorboats cut down our street. I tried to hit them with my pellet gun.
“Those are people,” my dad said.
The water surged over the windowsills and rushed into the house. I screamed when I couldn’t lift my feet from the mud. Quicksand in my bedroom? I was thrilled. Billions of drones by now. But when is now? I hacked the entire facility and anyone within the area who could have seen us ascend. There wasn’t much lightning, just rainwater, just more and more rainwater until it became a thing, like a light left on, solid as a car and as constant as static.
Static. Basewater.
Where was I?
Dreaming again, Francesca said.
I saw black, punctuated by the pinpoints of distant stars.
“Where’s that crystal alien?”
“I’m from Earth, no,” I heard her say, but could not see her. “I’m Theian, but I developed on Earth. I’m not alien. Your automobile’s mind is the most alien thing here with us.”
“Where. Here, where?”
She appeared just as she looked before in my dream, covered in crystals and hovering in front of the blackness of space.
“I don’t know where we are,” she said.
“Well, why not?”
“The Metasoma was different this time, right, unexpected. It took dozens of years longer to get through than it should have. We didn’t know this was there, but we’re here now, hmm.”
You are speaking strangely. Is everything all right?
“I’m exhausted. I’m trying to sound like you, hmm.”
“Neither of us sounds like that.”
“None of us sound like anything. We can’t speak here, only think.”
“I woke up thinking the word basewater. What does it mean?”
“You have to have basewater to make life. Water isn’t enough. When Theia collided with Earth, the basewater moved from Theia to under the Earth’s crust. When some of it started slipping out through thermal vents on the ocean floor, you got your chance. It’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s being mined by everyone.”
It’s a natural resource
“Besides light, there’s no other natural resource that can create life and power a drone like this. The rest of the universe is dead. Nothing untouched by basewater develops.”
How are our basewater levels?
Francesca wavered in the corner of my vision—my banged-up version of my car floating in outer space.
“We weren’t expecting the automobile. That will be interesting in a do or die sense.”
Do not tell me what I am
“You’re my cargo.”
“Are you taking us to an alien zoo?”
“What? No. Further than that. You’ve long since passed the furthest mark one can ever travel. We know, we’ve tried, we’ve watched others try with our drones—long may we go—and no one can travel this distance in a short twelve hundred or so years, is how you say it. They’re not years. There’s not, in the God’s world there’s not what you think of as time, the Metasoma, if you know what I mean.”
No
“No, we don’t.”
“We need to show you to it” the vision said. “We need to show you to the God. And again, we weren’t expecting the automobile.”