She stepped to the side where a silver panel of unmarked dials were situated in a matte black panel. By laying her fingertips on various ones, she was able to will the machine to make a few minor adjustments; another display opened, initially showing them the skyscraper-like hotel they were holed-up in. From here there appeared to be no discernible difference. Nothing had changed.
Jenny returned to her position at the console and began to manipulate the display. Her fingers danced above it and their window onto the world reacted accordingly. At first they were looking up into the sky overhead. Largely clear and blue, they could see glimpses of the outline of the massively expanded forcefield where layers of wispy white cloud bumped up against it inside and out, hundreds of meters above the hotel roof.
Their view changed again; Jenny made ushering wave-like gestures, and now it was as if they were watching pictures from a camera that had been strapped to the front of a jet. The world raced past below them at lightning speed, flying north.
“Head back to where we saw the Japanese boat,” Maddie suggested.
“Already on it.”
They covered hundreds of miles in seconds, then stopped. Way ahead of them, the area of water where the bloody hand of the Bleed had torn apart the Japanese warship was now a sea of undulating, uninterrupted red. The water itself appeared to have congealed. Its surface rippled like the skin of a custard.
But it had stopped advancing.
Between the Bleed and the position from which they were watching, the water was clear. An invisible wall was preventing the bloody waves outside from mixing with the unpolluted seawater within the orb. Deep red lapped against the forcefield but was unable to penetrate.
“I think we did it,” Jenny said. “I don’t know how, but I think we actually did it!”
Between them, Jenny and Maddie had configured the god-tech to put a protective dome around all of Australia and several thousand miles of sea. As planned, the center of the forcefield was their location on the Gold Coast. It described a perfect circle with a diameter of somewhere in the region of three thousand miles.
“I can’t even begin to imagine how much power it takes to generate something like that,” Maddie said. “And the fact we’re able to control it from here…it’s unbelievable.”
“Hope it’ll hold.” Don’t think about it, Jenny warned herself, just use it.
From the various viewpoints the clockwork room presented to them, it was hard to appreciate the scale of what they’d achieved. The sunlight glinted off the forcefield in the sky like a sports car windscreen. “It’s a perfect sphere,” Maddie said. “It’s like we’ve taken a perfectly shaped chunk out of the planet.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“I think so. There are so few people left alive now, relatively speaking, that I figure we’ve probably got enough air and water in here to see us through. What I’m saying is, I think there’s more chance of the Bleed breaking through than us suffocating anytime soon.”
“How long do you think we can sustain this?”
“Honestly, I have no clue. According to all the laws of physics I’m aware of, what we just did is completely impossible. Draw your own conclusions.”
“But you must have some idea?”
“I don’t think the room’s power is limitless. I think what we’ve got it doing now is putting the tech under massive strain and I honestly don’t know how long it’ll last. Looking at the way it reacted when I rescued you compared to the way it’s holding up now, I’m thinking the room’s capabilities change according to its task. I had precision control when I was picking you up. This feels a lot rougher, a lot more brutal.”
“The gods used orbs like this for transport. Reckon we can do the same?”
“Transport to where?”
“Anywhere? The moon? Your moon?”
“Maybe. But it’s one thing moving a couple of people around, we’ve likely got millions of people trapped inside this bubble with us.”
“Sounds huge until you remember we’ve already lost more than seven billion.”
“I hear that. I just don’t know how the machine would cope trying to move that many bodies at the same time. If it could cope, even. I think for one or two people it could, theoretically, go anywhere, but with these kinds of numbers I’m not so sure. And even if we could move them, unless we can find an empty planet that’s capable of sustaining life, what’s the point? Anyway, all that’s for later. We need to deal with the Bleed first.”
“I hadn’t forgotten. How are we looking?”
Maddie checked the display. “Whatever it is we’ve just done, it seems pretty stable. Trouble is, not knowing exactly how this stuff holds together, we’re never going to be sure. The most important thing for now is we’ve bought ourselves some time.”
They were watching from down at sea level now, their position just inside the forcefield, looking out. Now that this part of the world had been isolated from everything else, nature no longer had the same sway as it should have had. Within the orb, the tide and wind had stopped. It reminded Jenny of being trapped in a giant snow-globe.
“It’s trying, but it can’t get through,” she said as she looked through the invisible wall of the orb to the bloodied ocean where the Bleed had run rampant. When it reached the barrier formed by the god-tech and found itself unable to progress, it reacted with violent anger and aggression. Great grabbing hooks and pincers were formed from the bloody depths but were unable to get any purchase on the perfect sphere of energy now surrounding Australia. Soiled waves battered the forcefield, then washed away. Jenny couldn’t stand to look for too long. The polluted liquid was filled with the remnants of everything the Bleed had consumed. A huge upsurge broke against the surface of the orb, and as it drained away, she saw the remains of hands reaching out from the spill, trying to claw
