Chapter 16: Forty-Two Minutes

I need to say something about the tubes before I describe what happened next, because I know that for you, my dear readers, there is nothing remarkable about them. The tubes are to you what the internet was to people in my time after thirty years of having it, invisible infrastructure, as boring as plumbing, something you'd never think to mention any more than I would have thought to explain email. You fall through the Earth and arrive on the other side in forty-two minutes and that's just how getting around works.

But I need you to understand that for me, out of all the impossible things I had learned about since waking up, the info, the AI selves, the equal credits, the absence of money and advertising and hierarchy, the tubes were the most impossible. Everything else was a social arrangement, a political choice, a philosophical shift. The tubes were a hole through the planet. The tubes were humanity saying: we're going to dig through the core of the Earth and fall to the other side, and we're going to do it before lunch. Nothing I had encountered in 2100 made me feel the sheer scale of what had changed more than the moment Edward first explained them to me, sitting in Helen's garden the week before the trip.

"You fall through the Earth," I'd said.

"You fall through the Earth," he'd confirmed. "It's a gravity train. You drop into a frictionless vacuum tunnel and gravity accelerates you toward the center. Then you decelerate as you climb back up on the other side. No engine. Gravity does all the work. Forty-two minutes, anywhere to anywhere."

"Forty-two?" I said. "Like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?"

"Who? What?"

"Never mind."

"Wait," I'd said. "Forty-two minutes whether you're going to the other side of the world or just to the next continent?"

"Always forty-two minutes. It's a property of the physics. A shorter tunnel has a shallower angle, so gravity pulls you less aggressively, but the distance is also shorter, so it takes the same time. A longer tunnel plunges deeper, so gravity pulls harder, but the distance is greater. It all cancels out. Forty-two minutes. Always. It's one of those things that seems like it can't be true until you see the math."

"What about short distances? San Francisco to Los Angeles?"

"You wouldn't use a tube for that. It would be like driving your car to the mailbox. For anything under a few thousand kilometers, there are hyperloops, vacuum tunnels on or just below the surface. Very fast, a few hours at most with stops. The tubes are for crossing the planet."

"I saw this in a movie," I said. "Total Recall. The remake, with Colin Farrell, not the Schwarzenegger one. They had this thing called the Fall — a gravity elevator through the Earth's core."

"That film is something of a cult classic, actually," Edward's info said. "It was rediscovered when the tubes started going in. People couldn't believe someone had imagined it. The original story was by Philip K. Dick — 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,' published in 1966. The Farrell film added the gravity tunnel, which wasn't in Dick's story or the earlier adaptation. But the basic concept was remarkably close to what was eventually built."

"Philip K. Dick predicted a lot of things," I said.

"He did," Edward's info agreed.

"When were they built?"

"The first ones went in during the 2070s and 80s. The technology came together gradually: the vacuum systems, the boring machines, and above all, new materials. That was the real breakthrough. The info designed materials that could withstand the heat and pressure near the Earth's molten core, that could insulate against temperatures that would vaporize any substance my era knew, and that could flex with the enormous tectonic forces of the Earth's crust — the shifting, grinding, pulling apart of continental plates. There's no track, actually. The capsule floats inside the tunnel on a magnetic field. No contact with the walls at all. The tunnel itself is the marvel. It holds its shape through the mantle, through the regions where the rock is liquid, through the fault lines where the crust is tearing itself apart. It took about a decade to build the first network connecting the major cities. They've been expanding ever since. My grandmother remembers her first ride. She says it felt like the world shrank overnight."

It was during that same week that Edward told me about the invitations.

"We should talk about the trip," he said one evening. We were sitting on the garden terrace after dinner, the city lights blooming below us. "People have been reaching out."

"What do you mean?"

"Juliana, you're — you know you're famous, right? Everyone on Earth knows who you are. The woman from 2027. People have been asking to meet you since the day you woke up."

I knew the story of my revival was widely known. People mentioned it, the info had covered it. But I'd been so absorbed in learning about this world that I hadn't considered that this world might be equally fascinated by me.

"We've received hundreds of invitations," Edward said. "From everywhere. Communities, research groups, cultural organizations, schools. People want to hear about your time. They want to know what it was like."

"Hundreds?"

"More, actually. The info has been filtering them. But there are a few I thought you'd really like." He was smiling in a way that told me he'd been looking forward to this. "There's a group of university students in China who've been studying your era — the politics, the economics, the culture wars. They've been following your story since you woke up. They want to meet you."

"Wow," I said. "Really?"

"And in São Paulo, there's a comedy talk show — it's one of the most popular shows in the world, actually. The host has been doing bits about your reactions to things ever since you woke up. Apparently the absurdities of 2027 are the funniest material anyone's seen in years. Traffic jams. Health insurance. Airline food."

I started laughing. He wasn't wrong. From this side, the daily indignities of my old life probably were hilarious.

"They want me on the show?"

"They've been asking since your second week here."

"And Lagos," Edward said, and his voice warmed. "My grandfather has old friends there. Helen's mother, too — she grew up partly in Lagos. They've all invited us. Dinner and a party."

"Lagos," I repeated. I'd never been to Africa. I'd barely been outside the United States.

"Lagos throws good parties," Edward said.

I sat in Helen's garden in the evening light and tried to absorb it. Students in China were studying my life. A comedy show in Brazil wanted to hear about health insurance deductibles. People in Lagos were planning a dinner for me because I was connected to Edward, who was connected to Helen, who was connected to them through the web of relationships that held this world together. The whole world wanted to meet the woman from 2027, and the woman from 2027 was sitting in a garden in San Francisco, still trying to figure out how the composting system worked.

"So how does it work?" I asked. "Do we need tickets? A travel pass?"

"The invitations are the pass," Edward said. "When people invite you, the resources are allocated. You're not a tourist buying a seat. You're a guest being welcomed. The communities that invited you are expecting you, preparing for you."

"That's — I don't even know what to say."

"Say yes."

"Yes. Obviously yes."

I'd spent the rest of that week in a state of anticipatory disbelief. I walked through the neighborhood doing my morning work, pulling weeds and spreading compost, and the whole time I was thinking: underneath me, right now, there are tunnels through the Earth, and next week I am going to fall through one.

The day came. Edward woke me early, which was unnecessary because I hadn't really slept. I'd been lying in the dark since four in the morning, buzzing with the particular anticipation of someone who is about to do something she is absolutely sure is impossible.

"Ready?" he said, from the doorway.

"I've been ready since you told me."

We ate a quick breakfast. Helen and James were up to see us off, and Helen pressed a small bag of food into my hands with the maternal authority of a woman who did not trust the rest of the world to feed me properly. James hugged Edward and then, to my surprise, hugged me. It was the first time he'd done that. It felt like a benediction.

We walked down the hill in the early light, through the garden paths, past the terraces where people were already doing their morning work, down toward the tower neighborhoods and, beyond them, to a part of the city I hadn't been to before. The towers here were different, taller and more industrial-looking, and Edward led me to a building that was set into the hillside, its entrance a wide, gentle ramp descending into the earth.

"This is the station," he said.

"It looks like a subway entrance."

"It's a little more than that."

We descended. The ramp curved downward in a long spiral, the walls smooth and lit with the same warm ambient glow I'd seen everywhere in 2100. Other people were walking down with us, some alone, some in pairs and groups, carrying bags and instruments and containers of food, with the relaxed energy of people heading somewhere they'd been many times before. Nobody was rushing. Nobody was checking a departure board or cursing about delays. They were just walking into the Earth.

The station at the bottom was enormous. I don't know what I'd expected — a subway platform, maybe, something on the scale of the BART stations I'd known. This was a giant underground airport terminal. Not like an airport terminal. It was one. A vast cavern of pale stone that stretched in every direction, with corridors branching off toward dozens of destinations, departure areas as big as anything I'd seen at SFO or JFK. Thousands of people moved through it with the easy flow of a crowd that does this every day. Because of course they did. There were no planes, no highways, no cars for long distances. This was how everyone traveled. The tubes were the only intercontinental transportation that existed, and this single underground hub handled the traffic of the entire Bay Area — every person who needed to cross the planet passed through here or one of the handful of other stations like it.

I stopped walking and stared. Edward waited.

"How many people come through here?" I asked.

"This station handles maybe two hundred thousand departures on a busy day," Edward said. "About the same in arrivals."

The number was big but abstract. I needed a comparison.

"Edward, can you ask your info something for me? How many people flew from San Francisco to West Africa in a typical day in 2027?"

He tilted his head for a moment. "About eighty to a hundred passengers daily. One regional jet, with connections. Not every day of the week."

I stared at him. That sounded right — actually, it sounded generous. That was the entire flow of people between the Bay Area and a continent of over a billion people. One small plane.

"Each corridor leads to a different set of tubes," Edward said, following my gaze down the branching hallways. "The tubes split into different routes deeper underground, like a rail network. Capsules depart every few minutes. A thousand or more passengers per capsule."

I thought about that. Departures every few minutes, a thousand people each, running all day. That was more people traveling between San Francisco and Lagos in a single hour than had traveled that route in an entire year in my time. And Lagos was one destination out of dozens.

"It's a train station," I said.

"That's exactly what it is."

"No — I mean, it finally makes sense. It's not an airport. Airports were bottlenecks. One runway, one plane at a time, two hours of security and waiting for every forty-five minutes in the air. This is a train station. A dozen tracks to one destination, a train every few minutes, you walk in and get on."

"And no fuel," Edward said. "No emissions. No noise. Just gravity."

"That's why nobody's rushing," I said. "That's why there are no lines. There's always another one coming."

"You can't really miss your train," Edward said. "There isn't a train to miss. There's just a continuous flow."

"This way," Edward said, and we joined a stream of people heading toward a corridor marked with characters I couldn't read and, below them, in English: LAGOS.

We stepped into a fast elevator that dropped us even further into the earth. My stomach lifted the way it does on a tall building's express elevator, and then we leveled out and the doors opened onto the platform.

The capsule was enormous. It sat in the tunnel pointed downward at an angle that made my stomach clench, its nose aimed into the Earth like a missile. It was sleek and white and far bigger than any vehicle I had ever seen, three times the size of the largest jumbo jets of my era, and it stretched so far down into the tunnel that I couldn't see the end of it. A dozen or so sections, each one wide and spacious, with broad doors that people streamed through in a steady flow. This wasn't some boutique experience for a handful of travelers. This was mass transit on the scale I'd grasped upstairs in the station, made tangible — a thousand people in a single capsule, and another one loading right behind us. I'd understood the numbers when Edward explained them, but watching hundreds of people board with the casual ease of commuters, I felt what the numbers meant.

We boarded. Inside, the angle of descent was invisible. The floors, the seats, everything was oriented so that it felt perfectly level, though I knew from the outside that we were pointed into the ground. Edward explained that the route to Lagos wasn't a straight line through the center — it arced slightly, curving around the core, and that arc was what kept a gentle force pressing me into my seat. "If the tunnel went perfectly straight, you'd feel weightless for most of the trip," he said. "Some of the shorter routes do go nearly straight, and people float for a few minutes in the middle. Some people love it. Some people get motion-sick." He grinned. "The Lagos route has just enough curve that you stay in your seat. The sections tilt in tiny increments to compensate for the changing angle, so the force always presses you gently down. You never feel sideways pull, never feel the curve. Just a comfortable weight holding you in place, like sitting in a deep armchair." The interior of our section was open and airy, with seats that curved in clusters of four and six, some facing each other, some facing the walls. The seats conformed to my body the way the bed in my room did, cradling me as the angle shifted beneath us in ways I couldn't perceive. There were maybe sixty people in our section, and the atmosphere was relaxed, sociable: a woman was reading, a group of friends were sharing food from a container, a man was talking quietly to his info, two teenagers were laughing about something. Nobody seemed to find it remarkable that they were about to fall through the center of the Earth.

We found seats together. Edward was beside me, close enough that our arms touched.

"You'll feel the drop," he said. "Just for a moment, at the beginning. Like the first second of a roller coaster. Then it smooths out and you won't feel anything at all."

"How fast will we be going?"

"At the midpoint? About twenty-five thousand kilometers per hour."

"Twenty-five thousand."

"You won't feel it. There's no reference point, no windows. You're in a vacuum in a frictionless tube. From the inside, it feels like sitting still."

A voice that I recognized as the info, neutral and calm, said something I didn't catch, and then we began to move. Or rather, to fall. I felt it — a lightness in my stomach, the unmistakable sensation of dropping, my body trying to lift out of itself. But the seat held me. It pressed around me in some subtle way, dampening the weightlessness, converting free fall into something that felt more like sinking into a very deep couch. After a few seconds even that faded into stillness. Absolute silence. If Edward hadn't told me we were falling, I would have believed we were sitting in a room underground, waiting.

"We're falling," Edward said.

"I felt it for a second. Now I feel nothing."

"Right now we're accelerating through the upper crust. In about ten minutes we'll pass through the mantle. At the midpoint, about twenty minutes in, we'll be near the core and going faster than anything you've ever experienced. Then we start climbing."

"Near the core."

"Not through it. The tunnels arc around the core. But close."

I sat in perfect stillness and thought about the fact that I was hurtling through the body of the Earth at a speed that would have been incomprehensible to every human who had ever lived before the 2070s, and I felt nothing. No vibration. No sound. No sense of motion at all. Just silence and the warmth of Edward's arm against mine and the woman across from us turning a page of whatever she was reading.

"What are you thinking?" Edward asked.

"I'm thinking that my last year at Stanford, when Edward — my Edward — was finishing his master's, we lived near Palo Alto and I commuted up to the Lumen office in San Francisco. Forty-five minutes to drive thirty miles on a good day. And now I'm traveling through the center of the Earth to Lagos in the same amount of time."

Edward smiled. "Forty-five minutes for thirty miles."

"On a good day. On a bad day it was an hour and a half."

I felt something shift, a faint sense of rising, so subtle I might have imagined it. "Are we climbing?"

"We're climbing. Past the midpoint. We'll be in Lagos in about twenty minutes."

I leaned back in the seat that held me like a hand, and I closed my eyes, and I let the fact of what was happening wash over me. I was inside the Earth. I was traveling to Nigeria. It would take less time than my old commute from Palo Alto. And when I arrived, I would step out into a city I had never seen, on a continent I had never visited, and I would be there before lunchtime, and this was just a Tuesday for the people sitting around me.

The woman across from us finished her reading and looked up and caught my eye. She must have seen something in my face, because she smiled.

"First time?" she asked.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You look the way my grandmother looked on her first ride. Like someone who just found out the world is a different shape than she thought."

The capsule slowed. I couldn't feel it slow, exactly, but something changed in the quality of the stillness, and then there was a gentle deceleration, a sense of leveling out, and a voice said something in a language I didn't recognize and then in English: "Lagos."

"Forty-two minutes," Edward said, and smiled.

The doors opened, and the air changed.