Evolution's End

by Steven Spellman

  Marcus began to shake his head, but then the light of recognition sparked in his eyes. “That’s right!” he said a little too loudly. “That’s right. It’s been what, thirty years since anyone’s talked about that bomb shelter.”

  “Thirty-two years to be exact …” Professor Edelstein tapped his temple “and you know, exact is the operative word in what we do.”

  Marcus sat silent as he rifled through the possibilities in his mind. He realized that it could work. The bomb shelter had two floors with six large rooms on each floor and two lavatories that could recycle waste into clean drinking water. The rooms weren’t as large as the auditorium where he’d taught in his old building but they weren’t much smaller. The shelters had generous lighting and a reliable power supply; he could teach during the day and conduct his research and experiments during the evening, the same as he’d always done it. It made sense that the underground installation had survived such a powerful explosion; it was a bomb shelter. Buried underground as it was, there would be no way to compromise the building like that ever again. It was perfect.

  Marcus grimaced; as ‘perfect’ as the bunker might seem he wasn’t certain that his students would enjoy being buried underground with no windows to show them the outside world while they listened to lengthy lectures. He didn’t know if he would enjoy it. He decided he’d make it do. He’d have to make it do. That was the only way that anything got done in the world now.

  CHAPTER 5

  Marcus traded the quiet, somber ambience of the quaint restaurant for the bright lights of the bomb shelter and the huge photographs of amputees that that lined its walls. Most of the amputees in the pictures had been fitted with prosthetic Titedelstein implants. The before and after pictures were startling in their contrast. The pictures had been Professor Edelstein’s idea. He believed that the photos would give hope to future Titedelstein candidates. Professor Edelstein lead Marcus on a tour of the facility. That had been his idea as well. His eyes sparkled as he led Marcus down one of the bunker’s massive entrance hallways. Professor Edelstein led Marcus beyond the hallway and past the doorways of the huge, shiny metal rooms that lay beyond. There were operating tables in a few of the rooms. There were shiny metal needles, laser scalpels, retractors, and cranial drills in other rooms. Marcus glanced up at Professor Edelstein and surmised that the professor probably had crews of campus laborers bringing more shiny metal surgical equipment to fill the rooms with.

  Soon, every room would shimmer with ubiquitous metal surfaces. But as the professor led Marcus further into the bunker, Marcus noticed that two of the rooms had been converted into an auditorium. It looked like the perfect place to teach his robotics courses. There weren’t many chairs in the auditorium but Marcus knew that the professor probably had a labor crew working on that as well. Professor Edelstein led Marcus to a caged fixed ladder that led up through a small hatch door in the ceiling. When Marcus climbed the ladder to the bunker’s second floor, he saw that the floor plan was identical.

  The difference was that the rooms on this floor were filled with industrial equipment. The first room where the professor led Marcus was as large as the auditorium. Two large furnaces sat beneath large mechanical ventilation shafts that were on either side of the room. Marcus recognized the furnaces; they were two of the furnaces that the professor used to extract the ore that made Titedelstein possible. The professor and Marcus walked further down the shiny corridor. As Marcus glanced into the rooms, he noticed that their walls weren’t decorated with as many photos of amputees as the rooms on the first floor. There were pictures of Professor Edelstein instead. The professor stared off into the distance with lifted chin and regal pose in most of the photos. The pictures of the professor that hung high upon the walls like prized trophies didn’t surprise Marcus. Professor Edelstein liked to talk about himself. Everyone knew that. Everyone also knew that he liked to look at himself. Marcus turned to look up at the ventilation shafts that extended down from the ceiling above the furnaces. Each vent was as large as a small vehicle

  Marcus couldn’t remember if those had been there before but if they had just been installed it looked like it cost a pretty penny. Other areas of the first floor were outfitted with fixtures and vents and equipment that Marcus didn’t immediately recognize, that were obviously much newer than the building. It didn’t look as if any expense had been spared to outfit this place and Marcus had no doubt that every square inch of the floor space, every piece of equipment and more to come, would be put to use before it was over with.

  “A crew will be here tomorrow to finish delivering the equipment.” Professor Edelstein said as he led Marcus past one of the rooms that was nearly empty. “From now on the work that we do here will be safeguarded. It will be kept top secret. The crew responsible for the equipment is made up of four men that I personally selected from a pool of almost four thousand …” Professor smiled at his own prowess, and Marcus had no doubt that there had indeed been four thousand people to show up for the job. In Science City, a man or woman would do almost anything to get put to work in the campuses. The dream of having room to breathe, of not dying in the streets like an animal if you got sick or injured, of escaping the hell that was life on the outskirts, had drawn those four thousand and probably more. So many people, cramming so closely together, living in such hot misery; it was disheartening for Marcus to imagine four thousand people grappling for a job that might literally save their lives and everyone being turned away except for four people. Professor Edelstein, on the other hand, was more concerned with the four obviously, because he had picked them.

  “And this time, our budget will be even larger.” Marcus turned to look into Professor Edelstein’s eyes. The budget for the Willoughby building was almost the largest in Science City. Everyone knew that. Where could more money possibly come from to make the budget larger when extreme poverty was the theme of the city to begin with? The harsh truth was that it didn’t matter where the money came from, as long as it came. Everyone knew that as well. Professor Edelstein returned Marcus’ gaze. He placed a bony hand gently on Marcus’ shoulder. “What happened to get us here was terrible, but we’re here now, Professor Willoughby.” He said softly as if he were trying to soothe a colicky child. He gestured towards the huge rooms, “This is progress. If we’re successful here, we could save mankind. Isn’t that worth a few lives?” Professor Edelstein didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he turned and led Marcus further down the hall to see the laboratory and the remaining rooms. Marcus walked behind him silently while the professor bragged about how the rooms they would use for research were nearly twice as large as the research rooms had been in the old Willoughby Building. He sounded as if that too had been a product of his own ingenuity.

  Marcus remained silent for the rest of the tour. After the attack, this underground bomb shelter was indeed the best place to continue to learn to trade frail, ravished human flesh for Titedelstein but why must the cost always be so excessive. It was all he could think about and he knew that Professor Edelstein wouldn’t have understood, not after hearing him just sweep away the lives that had been lost in the explosion like that. Many of the victims had been friends and colleagues of Professor Edelstein just as they had been to Marcus but Professor Edelstein sounded as if their deaths were just the necessary down payment for progress. If human life were so expendable, then why were they trying to save mankind in the first place? But these were questions for the common man. Professors in the campuses couldn’t afford to falter when things got hard.

  Once Professor Edelstein had shown Marcus the entire facility he led him back to the vault door that led to the tunnel that led out of the bunker. He walked through, but Marcus did not follow behind. Professor Edelstein walked twenty feet before he realized that he was walking alone. He turned around and found Marcus looking crestfallen from the opened vault door. “The hardest part is always just before the breakthrough.” Professor Edelstein said.

  Marcus grunted. “Sure. Look, I’m g
oing to stick around for a while. I might as well get used to my new building, right? Especially since I’m probably going to be spending the better part of everyday here for the rest of my life.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Professor Edelstein answered, and turned and walked away down the well-lit tunnel. Marcus remained in the opened doorway until Professor Edelstein turned a corner and vanished from view. He heaved his weight against the huge vault door until it was shut and then returned to the lowest level of the bunker where he sat in a chair in the room that would be his new classroom. He gazed at the place where a large window would’ve been had this been his old building until it started to make him feel sullen and then he turned to the raised wooden stage where he would teach his lessons. That made him feel a little better. As far as he was concerned, knowledge belonged to the people and he felt privileged to be able to share a small portion of it. He chuckled at the reality that Professor Edelstein thought the privilege was with the students for being able to learn from him. He chuckled again at his colleague and felt a little better still.

  He stood from his chair, walked up on the stage, and surveyed his domain. Soon it would be filled with clamoring students all anxious to learn or either bored to tears, but nothing inbetween. Marcus paced the stage. He was ready to get back to work, but there was something else there too now. Work had been synonymous with life for Marcus for nearly as long as he could remember. His students were the children he’d never had and work was the home life that didn’t exist for him when he’d left The Willoughby Building every night. There were times when it wasn’t ideal, but it was enough. Or at least, it had always been enough. Now, suddenly, Marcus felt like something was missing. The world was still plummeting into hell in a gasoline soaked handbasket and his first priority was to help build robotic bodies that could withstand the flames, but maybe it didn’t have to be so arduously difficult every step of the way. And it was difficult, now that Marcus gave it some thought. He enjoyed his students. He drew strength from the fact that his endless evenings of research and development were tedious and draining, but they were vitally important. He’d chosen to sacrifice his life in the hope of a better future but by definition sacrifice was hard and painful and the weight of it across his shoulders never seemed so heavy and piercing as it did in this moment.

  He remembered his meal with Denna. That had been nice. Very nice. He still had no idea why such a beautiful young woman would want to spend even a moment of time with an old man like him, but maybe—just maybe—she’d like to have breakfast the next morning with him. Whatever miracle that had brought her to his door might still be there tomorrow. It was a long shot, but then what other kind of shots were there? Standing upon the stage alone, Marcus nodded his head once, quickly. He decided that yes, he would ask her to have breakfast with him the next morning. It would have to be an exceptionally early breakfast since he would no doubt have his hand’s full with his new building from this moment on, but it just might work. Even if she said no, he wouldn’t regret asking.

  Marcus stepped down off the wooden stage and began arranging the few chairs in the room as they had been in his old auditorium. He glanced toward the windowless wall a few more times until it sunk in that there would be no view of anything besides blank metal to be had here, and finished arranging chairs. Besides, there was new scenery in his head. If you could call exceptional curves clad in black and lined with blue frills, scenery.

  CHAPTER 6

  Marcus wore his best suit. He had even tried to iron it but he wasn’t used to being up so early in the morning and he hadn’t had to attempt to iron a piece of clothing in years; the button down shirt and the slacks both had burn marks that Marcus hoped were not as noticeable to Denna as they had been to him. He concentrated on walking in regal, measured steps instead of the long, hurried strides that normally took him wherever he had to go. The air was as hot and dry as it always was, no less than a hundred degrees for certain, and Marcus wasn’t interested in having iron burn marks and sweat stains marring his neatly pressed suit. Every few steps he reminded himself to slow his stride and calm his breathing. When he stood at Denna’s door he intended to present an image of an intelligent, upstanding professor that knew his place in the world and had something to offer an extremely attractive young woman, not the beaten man that had almost been scared to leave his own home from the day before.

  Denna lived in a large administrative building that had been converted into apartments. Or rather, that’s where Marcus hoped that she lived. Professor Edelstein had told him where her husband had lived before he’d died and Marcus could only hope that the old professor had gotten it right and that she still lived there. There were no guarantees. It wasn’t common for people to move around within the campuses—if by some miracle an outskirter made it into the campuses they didn’t leave unless they were dragged out by the scruff of their neck—but it did happen. If it had happened with Denna then Marcus would just have to hope he saw her in passing soon before another younger, more handsome, more virile man stole away her heart. He certainly couldn’t go around asking people if they knew her and could they tell him where she lived. That would be a far cry from the regal image he was desperate to present.

  When he arrived at the converted apartment building he saw that it looked exactly as it had once been, a huge glass office building. The building was three stories tall and looked as if it had once housed around 60 to 70 office spaces. It now housed around half that number in apartments. The apartments were comparably small by campus standards but to an outskirter they might’ve looked like mansions, with one very important exception. The particular converted apartment building where Denna lived might’ve been the hottest apartment building in the entire city. The building was much longer than it was tall and the long glass façade faced the position of the sun when it was at its harshest of the day. The brutally direct sunlight, amplified through the thick glass panes like a massive sheet of magnifying glass, on top of triple degree temperatures, made worse by an outdated air conditioning units meant that the inside of the building could get as hot as fifteen degrees hotter than the outside when the units weren’t working.

  And unfortunately, the air conditioning units were often down for repairs. It was a common problem in a city as perpetually hot as Science City and the tenants of the building were glad that their units were ever repaired at all. Besides that, the sunlight was painfully blinding to anyone inside an apartment that wasn’t fortunate enough to have shades or curtains to block out the white hot brilliance. Most of the apartment faces did have blinds of some sort in their windows but that only made the reflection worse for onlookers outside of the building when the sun was at its zenith. It was like looking into a mirror that was facing the noonday sun; your retinas could still be soldered into their sockets if you didn’t look away quickly enough.

  And Marcus did look away quickly, when he glanced up at the building just as the rising sun was blasting a bright spark off it right in his direction. Reflex had him shielding his eyes in a literal second but he could still see the sun’s brilliant halo behind his squinted eyelids for five long seconds afterwards. When he could open his eyes and see something besides ubiquitous white he kept them carefully leveled on the building’s front door. It too was mostly glass but the sun wasn’t blasting directly into it at the moment and so it was bearable to look at. He made a beeline for it. When he reached the door he snatched it open and stepped in and immediately felt the sharp rise in temperature. He stepped out of heat into a stronger wave of heat and as it wafted over him he felt as if his body were suddenly exploding with sweat. He glanced down at his shirt. The armpits were already soaked through unfortunately but it hadn’t spread to the rest of the shirt yet. He could feel that it would soon.

  He pulled at his shirt to try to work some air inbetween it and his sweating torso but it didn’t help. Even if he had had an industrial sized fan to put down his shirt there was still only scorching hot air for it to blow. Meanwhile, he glan
ced to either side of him. There were long brightly lit hallways stretching out into the distance on both his left and right side and a shorter, less harshly lit one directly in front. Apartment doors lined every hallway. It was only as Marcus looked over the numbers that he realized that Professor Edelstein hadn’t given him an apartment address, only a building address. Suddenly it seemed as if there as many apartment doors as there were buildings in the entire world and any one of them could belong to Denna. He might not even be on the right floor or near the right hallway. Even if he were on the right floor and on the right hallway, with Denna’s front door six feet away, there was no way for him to know it.

  He turned to his right and began walking down the hallway. The morning sun outside was rising quickly and Marcus was sure that he could feel every ray through his clothes like laser beams burning into his flesh. He looked down at his shirt and saw the small wet patches on the front that meant soon, perhaps within moments, his shirt would indeed be completely soaked through. There was nothing he could possibly do about it. Even if he ran home right now as full speed his shirt would look like a used chamois before he reached his front door. He continued walking on past door after door. He could’ve already passed Denna’s door, probably already had, but he was not about to knock on any one of them and find out. What would he say when a stranger came to answer the door at such an early hour? He didn’t even know Denna’s last name. He continued walking slowly down the hall with the sun’s rays beating down upon him. He hoped that some ingenious idea would come to him but he decided that if it didn’t before he reached the end of the hallway he would just leave and forget this whole foolhardy plan.

  He passed door after door until he began to feel lightheaded. The heat was too much. He was sure that if he looked at the arm or leg that was facing the glass façade he would find skin that was blistered and cracked irreparably; It certainly hurt like that was the case. Then one of the doors he’d just passed opened. A woman came out who looked as if she had lived a truly difficult life. Her skin was unnervingly dry and sallow like no lotion or proper diet would ever remedy. Marcus didn’t think that the woman was beyond forty years old but her face and hands were as wrinkled as a centenarian’s. Marcus watched as the she walked with a slight limp in her right leg towards the building’s entrance. Even though she walked with a limp she moved like a woman with a purpose and no doubt that purpose was to get out of the hallway and to work, doing something that was probably dangerous and excessively labor intensive. She might’ve even worked on the rover recovery team.