Acosta was one of the smaller craters to get a dome, just thirteen kilometers across. The locals call it cozy. Still, its proximity to the Lunar equator makes it a travel destination, if only as a stop-over point for the Trans-Lunar bullet train. People pass through Acosta, not many stay.
Students stay. Acosta Polytechnic has a vibrant liberal arts program, where the children of the rich come from the Earth-Luna system to be away from Earth or the more industrial parts of Luna. It also has a computer engineering program that's respected, if not the revered. Acosta, perched atop the Trans-Lunar bullet train route is also a hub for Trans-Lunar fiber optic networking. LunaCom's headquartered there and draws from Acosta Poly for their workforce.
The student population, networking location, and LunaCom's datacenters make Acosta a center for Quantum Sentience study. Significant parts of The Sentience made a home in the data centers. Acosta is a hive of activity in The Lunar Chorus, it is a hub of thought and research. The low-latency networking Acosta enjoys from its central location on LunaCom's network make Acosta prime real estate for the low latency networking that The Chorus needs to link the minds of the Enhanced Humans and The Quantum Sentience that lives on the Moon. All this affluence made the adoption of a dome almost preordained.
Acosta is a technology college town, not unlike Mariner Park or Palo Alto. The dome maintains an open-air atmosphere, one of thirty-one on Luna. Twenty percent of the available land in Acosta is dedicated to parks, Redwoods and Sequoias grow particularly tall in the low Lunar gravity, giving Acosta a lush greenspace only rivaled by the atrium of Collins Landing, the anchor point for the Lunar space elevator.
This is all to say, Acosta is a bourgeoise paradise. I hated it. I loved it.
"Stephen?" the thought isn't really a word. The Chorus doesn't often deal in words. There's a shape of a thought that is the mental concept of me, of Stephen Francis. It's a pale blue, vaguely sandalwood smelling concept. I suppose I've always been a hippie.
I respond with a questioning thought. The inquiry comes from a teal thought, a rumble of cello, Genevieve.
"We're going to lunch at Alfonso's. We'd like you to join us." Again, it's not words. It's images of Alfonso's, smells of the pasta, the feel of the old, cracked booth seats, a dream of seven of us around a long booth table, laughing, eating, communing.
I'm close to Genevieve, we've studied in the same classes at Acosta Poly, though Genevieve is focused on ethical use of Quantum Sentience while I'm focused on network engineering. Genevieve is headed for a doctorate. I'm headed for a cubical at LunaCom.
"I'll catch up, I'm in the middle of a lab," I share the image of my screen with Genevieve and the tiny part of The Chorus that is beckoning me to lunch.
They feel my anxiety with the problem I'm presented and sent feelings of affirmation and support. I smile, happy to have support. The Quantum Sentience scolds us, amused. I need to work on my lab by myself, I need to learn on my own, form the memory structures on my own rather than relying on the network of other minds from the Chorus. Genevieve and the sliver of Chorus retreat from my mind, laughing at The Quantum Sentience and sending me feelings of encouragement.
I cut myself off from most of The Chorus, just the buzz of processing and inter-brain communications murmur in the back of my mind. I concentrate on the networking scenario presented to me, an outage of a fiber optic re-transmitter.
I felt the explosion more than heard it. It wasn't a physical sensation. The buildings in Acosta are vacuum safe, they're well insulated from sound and the environment. It was a wave of panic and dread that overcame the blocks I had in place, the isolation from The Chorus. I dropped them at the first indication of panic. The Chorus assaulted my brain.
"Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!" repeated over in my mind, but a feeling of terror and the actual words, unusual for The Chorus. The Screaming was intense, as was the pain. It felt like my chest was pinned under a pillar of concrete. I heard someone, physically heard someone, scream from a classroom down the hall. The Chorus was screaming.
The Quantum Sentience quieted the cacophony, filtered the pain and panic and terror we all experienced. I ran down the hall, several of us did, Enhanced Humans, members of the Lunar Chorus.
"Help!" still pounded in my mind, but I was able to function. We floated down the stairwell, jumping from landing to landing it large arcing leaps. I felt someone's Ankle twist as they hit a landing wrong. We all grunted in pain in unison. We left the injured behind, we were all converging on the accident, whatever it was, as quickly as we could. The injured would make their way as they were able.
"Stephen!" Genevieve pleaded. Oh no. No. No. No. No. No.
"Later," The Quantum Sentience commanded, my dread and anxiety at my friend's injury tamped down by the artificial intelligence that comprised most of The Chorus. I hated them for that. Hated them for commanding my emotions into subservience. Even the hatred was a distant, conceptual thing. My own desire to panic for my friends and hate The Sentience would have to wait.
We burst out of Liu Hall and looked across the northern campus of Acosta Polly to see smoke rising from Jansen Residence Hall, our home. It was surreal. Smoke moves oddly in Lunar gravity when it is present at all. I'd never seems smoke anywhere but a chemistry fume hood to this point. It billows and flutters more like grey milk in tea than a pollutant in air.
Our hearts stopped for a beat. Two. Three. Someone to my right collapsed to their knees, the pain of the pavement echoing through all of us. I grasped at my chest and willed myself to breathe, for my heart to pump blood.
"Live," The Sentience commanded. One of us had died. A piece of the Chorus ended, gone silent, in terror, their death reverberated through us all. I helped the collapsed person, pulled them to their feet. We started running, as much as one runs in Lunar gravity, large, long, arcing bunny hops, bouncing as quickly as our legs would carry us.
"Stephen," Genevieve's voice, presence, thought was weaker, fading.
"We're coming," I thought. Of course they knew. We all knew we were coming, the mass of The Chorus racing to Jansen Hall, horrified at the smoke, at the darkness those there experienced, the suffocating stillness of the air.
Our hearts stopped again, more painful than the first, we felt several people fall to the ground painfully, twisted ankles and shoulders as they couldn't land properly from the shock of another of us dying.
"Live!" I thought, those around me recovered, slightly, shaky from the experience. We were almost there. Some people were already at the hall, trying to get in, to find people trapped there. There was rubble everywhere. We needed to move it, to clear a way.
"Lift!" Someone ahead thought. I could feel our muscles strain, fractured concrete bite at our palms, feel the rubble move, slightly. "More!" we thought, "We need more!"
It was quiet for a moment. Another. My brain recognized it as a network interruption. Our link to The Chorus had blinked, cutting us all off from one another. As abruptly as it stopped it resumed, as the mesh of Enhanced Human's implants routed around the interruption. The static of pain and terror and panic was overwhelming. I fell to my knees.
"Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!" Screaming, crying, terror flooded in.
"Lift." Someone ahead thought, but it was quiet, distant, weak.
"Run," I thought, we thought, the idea infectious, spreading across those of us who hadn't gotten to Jansen yet. We moved, but not as quickly as we had.
"Stephen."
Genevieve's mind was quiet, subdued, in shock. Their breathing was slow and labored.
"We're almost there," we thought. I helped the others trying to move the rubble. The concrete moved as more hands pulled at it. There was so much though. Moving the first rubble revealed more. It was smaller, we split into groups and attacked it. Our hearts stopped again. Genevieve stopped.
"Live!" someone else thought. We all gasped, cried, screamed in anguish. We pulled at the rubble, moved it in relay as we made our way into the hall, searching for survivors. But we weren't searching for Genevieve anymore. We focused on the living. I hated us for it. I still do.
"The Quantum Sentience cut itself off from Acosta, from us," I say to Ward, my mind back on Carpathian Forty-Three, back in the present. "It couldn't cope with the death, the sensation of their dying minds. It left us on our own to feel those people die as we tried to dig them out of the collapse."
Ward's concern is genuine now. I can see the sympathy on their face, feel their hand grasp my bicep in shared humanity.
"I never want to be a part of a Chorus again. Ever."