Seed

by Michael Edelson

  “Okay,” Alex said. “I get it. But for fuck’s sake, you tried one thing then said, ‘Oh well, that didn’t work, let’s kill everyone instead’?”

  “No, son, of course not. We tried a lot of things. Fonseca tried to engineer a predator species to wipe them out, but there wasn’t time. We tried to develop counter measures, same problem.”

  “The barrier,” Alex said. “You could have created safe zones. Places with supplies, places people could hide until it was over.”

  “We did,” Hughes said. “Your facilities.”

  That stung. A lot more than Alex was prepared to deal with. These people had saved them all at the expense of the rest of humanity, and so he, Alex, and the others, shared in their guilt.

  “No, bigger, with room for more people.”

  “You mean, without killing everyone on the outside,” Hughes said.

  Alex showed his teeth. “Yes. That would have been nice.”

  Hughes nodded. “We thought of that. We did the math. We didn’t have the time to put away enough to save even a tiny fraction of the population. Can you imagine the entire population of Hawaii showing up, naked and starving, outside of your facility?”

  Alex opened his mouth, ready to make an angry retort, but closed it. “No.”

  “We’re not talking about our technology no longer working,” Hughes said. “We’re talking about it disappearing. These people, these seven billion, wouldn’t have so much as a nail or a hammer. No roofs over their heads. Do you understand that? They would be naked, out in the cold or heat, with nothing. Nothing! And if they tried to build anything, it would be destroyed all over again. Because if we didn’t trigger all of those things at once, if we didn’t spread them out to every corner of the world, every nook and cranny, then some wouldn’t trigger. And they would reproduce. Can you imagine what that would be like?”

  Alex held up a hand to silence him as he tried to picture it, to process the possibilities. It was mind boggling.

  “I can’t imagine it,” he said finally. “I don’t want to.”

  Hughes nodded. “Most of those people, seven billion, would die horribly. Starvation, cannibalism, exposure. Our experts told us there was a fifty-fifty chance humanity would not survive the event. At all. Not a single person. Our tools, our greatest strength, would have been taken from us had we not acted. Not temporarily, but forever.”

  “You don’t know that,” Alex said, realizing that he was repeating himself. “You could have given them a chance. Given us…” He stopped. He knew what Hughes would say next.

  “We did, son. We gave you a chance! We built the facilities. We worked around the clock, as quickly as we could. Did as much as we could. Yes, we saved our own asses too! We did that! But we also saved as many regular folks as we could. We saved you! You’re not politicians, you’re not rich, you’re just regular people. The best and the brightest, people of all races, all over the world. Our best hope for the future. What chance would you have had if all those people were still around? They would have stormed your facility and ripped you to pieces! Mobs of millions.”

  Alex took a step back as it all sunk in. “But..spreading them…you don’t get to play God!”

  “Someone had to,” Chambers muttered. “The real one was a no show.”

  “They reproduce, son,” Hughes explained. “As long as a few are left, they’ll make more. Always. I already told you, there was only one way to get rid of them, and that was to make sure they got everywhere. Everywhere. Had to be. Not a single spot left uncovered. And then set them all off at once.”

  Takahashi took a step forward.

  “Yes, we set them off!” Hughes shouted, a little spittle flying from his mouth. “What if we hadn’t? They’d spread on their own, and eventually trigger. Maybe a few days later, maybe a week, maybe even a month, tops. But before then? What? What would China do if the western world disappeared and all that was left behind were a few settlements? What about Syria or Iran? All we did was make sure they went off at the same time, everywhere. All we changed was when, not what! We had to make sure that our plan worked. That the New Tomorrow facilities wouldn’t be attacked! We didn’t kill anyone who wasn’t going to die within a day or a week anyway! And we did them a favor! Can you imagine how they would have died if we hadn’t?”

  Alex looked at Tom though the laptop screen. Could what they were saying actually be true?

  “You killed my daughter!” Takahashi growled. “My little girl.”

  Hughes looked at him and his gaze almost dropped, but he held it. He spoke softly. “And if we hadn’t? What would have happened to her? She felt no pain, son. Nothing more than a headache, and maybe not even that. She just went to sleep. And then, she was in heaven. And I’m sorry, so sorry, that we had to make that decision. But would you have wanted us to make a different one?”

  Takahashi’s body trembled, but he said nothing. Alex knew what he was thinking. What if they hadn’t killed her? And in that moment, he couldn’t deny the reality. If she survived the building collapse, her death would have been brutal and agonizing. These people, they had spared her that fate. And they had spared Takahashi from having to imagine his little girl calling out for her chichi as she suffered and died.

  Hughes kept talking. “We had to move fast, to build the Seed colonies. Once we accepted that we couldn’t stop these things, we had to ensure the survival of our species. Of humanity. This was the only thing we could do, and nothing, nothing in the history of human civilization, has ever been more important. Do you understand that? We had to save the human race.”

  Alex nodded.

  “We barely managed to do it in time. Even as we rushed to populate the colonies, we started to get headaches, and not all of us made it.” He shuddered, looking away. “They were inside our heads, eating our brains. The things we made to save us!”

  “Headaches…” Alex said, remembering.

  “We both had them,” Campbell said. “That night in the hospital.”

  “Are there any left?” Alex asked. “Are they all gone?”

  Hughes slumped and the fight went out of him. “There shouldn’t be. What we did…spread them, fire them all off…that should have taken care of them. We are constantly broadcasting the activation signal, even now. But we can’t be sure. We can never be sure. As long as you maintain the barriers, they shouldn’t pose a threat. It takes them a long time to build to sufficient quantities to kill a human being, even the ones we bred. But you have to stay in the colonies, indefinitely, or at least until we know they are all gone. You can venture out for days, maybe weeks, but you have to return, always. And if the fusion generators fail and we can’t fix them…”

  “Indefinitely?” Alex asked. “As in forever?”

  “Not forever. But for now. For a long time. Until we’re sure. This must never happen again.” He paused, looked at Alex, then at Takahashi, and finally at Tom on the little laptop screen. “We did what we could. Believe me, if we could have done more, we would have. We knew some peoples’ body chemistry was resistant, and we tried to replicate it, thinking we could spread it all over like a vaccine, but all our attempts failed. It wouldn’t have been enough anyway, not nearly.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “I did read that in your files, though at the time I thought you were trying to overcome the resistance. In retrospect, I can see where I read into your data.”

  “So all of this,” Alex said, turning to Tom. “The whole world, all of human civilization, gone, destroyed, because some fucking biotech company played around with nanotechnology?” It was unbelievable. The worst disaster in human history—no, in the history of world, akin to the Permian extinction—decided in a board room by old rich bastards looking to make a fast buck.

  Chambers, who had stopped sobbing, nodded. “Terrifying.”

  “Terrifying doesn’t even begin to cover it, lady,” Tom said. “That little invention killed seven billion people.”

  “What about the rest of the world?” Alex demande
d. “Other countries? Did you tell them?”

  Hughes nodded. “We told our allies. We told the Russians. A few others.”

  “A few?”

  “We couldn’t take the chance,” Hughes said. “We told whoever we could trust to cooperate with our plans. We acted on our own in some countries, to save as many as we could. Do you understand that? We did what we could!”

  “I understand,” Alex admitted. It was a difficult admission, but it was true.

  “Hold on,” Campbell said. “Are you guys buying this? ”

  “I don’t know,” Alex admitted. “But even if I do, that doesn’t change the fact that these people spread the transports to places where there weren’t any.”

  “No, they were everywhere, just not in sufficient—”

  “I know,” Alex said. “I heard you the first time. I understand what you did. And we’re going to verify it, but for now let’s say I believe you. You did what was necessary. I get that. But you still killed billions of people, and you can’t just walk away from that.”

  “But if we hadn’t then all of us would be—”

  “Enough,” Alex said, cutting him off. “You’ve said your piece, now shut the hell up.”

  Hughes turned away, his eyes dancing faster than ever. Beads of sweat rolled down his forehead, which had turned bright red.

  “So what do we do with them?” Campbell asked.

  “Kill them,” Takahashi said. “I don’t give a damn if they made these things or not. They killed my little girl!”

  “No!” Chambers said. “We—”

  Takahashi stepped forward and punched her in the face before Alex could stop him. Red mist exploded from her nose as she collapsed, screaming, clutching her face with both hands as thick blood oozed from between her fingers.

  “Don’t you speak to me, murdering bitch!” Takahashi roared as he raised his weapon. Alex put his hand on the muzzle and forced it down.

  “There’s been enough killing,” he said.

  “I agree,” Campbell said. “But we can’t just let them get away with it. What do we do with them?”

  “Alex,” Takahashi said. “We have to kill them.”

  “We should,” Alex said, and Chambers whimpered. He looked down at her, sitting on her knees, holding her shattered nose, and felt a nausea almost as bad as that of the barrier. So much death.

  “But I can’t do it,” he said. “There are so few of us left. We have to verify their story, make sure it’s true.”

  “And then?” Campbell asked.

  “Spread them out through the colonies,” Alex said. “No more than one family per Seed. Make them work, like the rest of us.” He turned to Takahashi. “That’s not justice, I know. But it’s all I can do. Bill, you’re the colonel, if you want to do something else…”

  “No, I’m with you on this. There’s been enough killing.”

  “Good, let’s get it done.”

  Takahashi hesitated, as though he would start shooting anyway, but Alex knew that he wouldn’t. In the end, Takahashi was a soldier, and soldiers followed orders.

  Campbell gave instructions to some of his men, who began escorting the former leaders of the world to their holding cells while he and Alex went to look for Terkeurst.

  “If they, um,” Campbell said. “If they’re still out there, what can we do? Those generators won’t last forever.”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said. “But what can we do about it? Besides just go on with our lives?”

  Campbell nodded, and said nothing. His eyes were moist.

  They found Major Terkeurst sitting against the wall, sobbing. He looked up at Alex.

  “I brought you here as an executioner,” he said. “But you were my conscience. I almost lost it in there. I almost killed children.”

  “All things considered,” Alex said. “I can’t blame you too much. And wait until you hear the load they just dropped on us. This is your op, so you— ”

  “No,” he said. “I’m done. I don’t want to be in command anymore, I just want to go back to 043-A and never see this place again. Captain Meyer, I’m leaving you in charge. Of this facility, of everything.”

  “No way,” Alex said quickly. “I’m going home. There’s a girl there waiting for me, and I mean to make it back to her.”

  “Who then?” the major asked. “There is a government to run here, Meyer. There are factories that need overseeing, hundreds of colonies that need support, someone has to do it.”

  Alex turned to Campbell. “How about you, Bill?”

  Campbell was taken aback. “Me?”

  “Can you trust him?” Terkeurst asked.

  “He’s a good man,” Alex said. “I can’t think of anyone I would trust more.”

  “I’m honored,” Campbell said. “I don’t know if I’m up to it, but I’ll do the best I can. If there’s anything you need, either of you, you just let me know.”

  “I just want to go home,” Alex said. “To 103-B.” He turned to Terkeurst. “Major, if I may take my leave.”

  Terkeurst nodded without looking at him, once again lost in his own world. Alex didn’t think he had survived the operation. He wasn’t sure if he himself had either.

  “Come with me,” Campbell said, and Alex followed him down the corridor, trying to make sense of things as he walked. In a way, he had gotten what he needed, but it wasn’t enough, and he needed to crawl into his hole and lick his wounds. As Alex had hoped, it turned out that he had done the right thing. The enemy, once they were given all of the information, had become allies. But there were doubts. The people they had just interrogated, if they had told the truth, then they had done what they thought was the right thing also. It was incomprehensible, evil, terrifying, yes. But wouldn’t Alex have done more or less the same thing in their place? And didn’t that mean that all the people they had killed in this facility were in fact innocents? Innocents butchered to sort out a misunderstanding?

  “Bill?” Alex said. “Do you think that…I mean…could we have worked this out without attacking? Could we have gotten you the data somehow? Reasoned with your leaders?”

  Campbell shook his head. “I know where you’re going with this, Alex. Don’t. Just don’t. Sure, if you knew everything you know now, you could have done things differently. But that’s not how the world works, and you know it, so cut that shit out. You did the best with what you had, the only thing you could do. The same thing I would have done.”

  Alex looked down at the ground. “Yeah I guess.” He wasn’t convinced.

  Campbell put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t, Alex. These people that were just groveling before you, spilling their guts, acting all humble…they only did that because you were holding guns to their heads. Do you think for one second they would have stepped down off of their pedestals to speak to you as one human being to another under any other circumstance?”

  Alex thought about it. “No, I guess not.”

  Campbell nodded. “You people killed some of my friends, Alex. Some of my brothers.”

  Alex’s eyes widened. “Bill, I’m sorry…I…”

  “Do you remember how we used to say that we were the bad guys? How we were fighting for oil and invading sovereign countries for bullshit reasons, killing their people, and, you know…all that other shit?”

  “Yeah, and you used to tell me to suck it up because we were soldiers and soldiers follow orders, that it wasn’t for us to figure out why.”

  “That’s right,” Campbell said. “We were on opposite sides of this. Not because we wanted to be, but because that’s where our orders put us. This time, you were the good guys, and we were the bad guys. And once I realized that, once you helped me see that, we were able to make it right. People died. People I loved. People I may one day come to hate you for killing.” He saw the look in Alex’s face and put up a hand. “But I’m going to tell you right now, and you better fucking listen and you’d better fucking remember. You did the right thing. And you can take that to the grave. If twent
y years from now, I’m a fat old drunk who says different, I give you permission to punch me in the face. Okay?”

  Alex nodded. “Thank you Bill.”

  “Now how can I help you get home?”

  “I need to get to my boat, it’s not that far from here. Can you get somebody to give me a lift?”

  “I have a better idea,” Campbell said, suddenly smiling. “You’re airborne qualified, aren’t you?”

  Chapter 37

  The C-5 Galaxy transport plane came in low over the ocean, startling the colonists of NTF103-B. They scrambled outside, looking up into the sky in amazement. It was a gargantuan aircraft, with a wingspan of two hundred and twenty two feet and a cargo capacity of nearly five hundred thousand pounds.

  As it passed over the colony it banked and began to turn, its massive cargo doors opening slowly. On its second pass, it dropped twelve large containers that landed on or near the beach, their descent slowed by oversized parachutes.

  The colonists milled about in confusion, looking up and pointing. The plane came around yet again, this time higher.

  Alex looked over his shoulder and shouted, “You guys better not break that thing!”

  “We won’t sir,” the airman replied with a casual smile. “We’re good at this.”

  He nodded, satisfied, then ran down the cargo ramp and out the back of the airplane. He’d never done a jump where he had to deploy his own chute, but there was a first time for everything.

  His mortal fear of heights made it all the more exciting as he stepped past the edge of the ramp and the wind grabbed him and tossed him into the plane’s exhaust stream where he tumbled about like a handkerchief thrown from a speeding car. As soon as he was free of the aircraft’s wake and falling steadily, he pulled the cord.

  The parachute unfolded and yanked him violently as it grabbed the air and slowed his descent. From this high up the beach looked impossibly small, a tiny strip of beige between a blanket of green and the vast stretch of dark blue ocean, coming up fast. He managed to guide the parachute over the sand where a small crowd had formed, barely saving himself from the embarrassment of an ocean dunking. As he touched down, he saw Tom and Barbara, and behind them Patrick, Ryan and Sandi. They were staring at him, eyes alight with wonder.