by Unknown
Another bullet ricocheted off the prone fridge. For some reason that was what made us finally unpetrify. The three of us all jostled for a crouching position behind the fridge. Don shoved the fridge door open for the extra cover it gave.
“Okay, yeah, I think I’ve figured out what’s making it do that,” said the flustered sniper. “Look, I was the one who sent the ladder down. I thought you might have been someone I knew. Then I saw you weren’t, so I just thought I’d watch you for a bit before I introduced myself. Wait, does that still sound a bit threatening? It does, doesn’t it.”
“Dr. Thorn!”
X had suddenly reappeared from wherever she’d been hiding and was standing fearlessly in the open a few yards down the runway from the fridge. Not only was she not afraid, she looked like it was taking all her power to resist jumping up and down for joy.
“Yolanda?” said the sniper as if he’d spotted her at a high-school reunion. “Is that you?”
X waved both her arms in that really enthusiastic crossing-uncrossing way. “It’s me!”
“Hold on. I’ll come down.” Yet another gunshot sounded and a bullet whizzed by some way above us. “OW. Ow. Sorry, put it down too fast.”
X was already running towards the tower. When she was halfway a figure burst out the hatch in the tower’s base and ran to meet her. I could almost see them go into slow motion and hear the music swell. Crucially, the sniper rifle wasn’t in evidence, so we came out from behind the fridge and headed over awkwardly.
By the time we were close enough to converse they were only just breaking off from a hug, holding hands and bobbing up and down like high-school girls catching up after a long summer holiday.
“Oh my god, I thought you were dead!” said X.
“Oh my god, I’m not!” replied the man she had addressed as Dr. Thorn. He was middle aged, with touches of silver hair at his ears. He was wearing a white lab coat over a T-shirt for some Japanese cartoon. “I thought you were dead!”
“Oh my god! I’m not either! How did you survive when the jam came aboard?”
“I hid in the freezer! Hey, does this mean you were the one who took off with the helicopter?”
He didn’t seem too offended, but X hung her head apologetically. “I didn’t . . . I mean, if we’d known you were still alive we would never . . .”
“Oh, forget about it; it’ll all even out in the end. Do you know those guys?”
“Oh yeah, this is Don, Angela, and Travis,” said X, shifting back into her monotone professional voice now that we had reentered her zone of perception. “I’ve been . . . traveling with them. We were trapped in the city for several days. Things have deteriorated somewhat among the locals.” The dismissive way she pronounced locals made Angela bare her teeth.
“Oh, sure, hey guys. Sorry about all this.”
“Is the generator still working, Dr. Thorn?” asked X, anticipating the question Don had already opened his mouth to ask.
“The generator? Oh, sure, I turned it off right after I got out of the freezer. Didn’t want to waste power. You want it on for a bit?”
“My companions would like to make use of the satellite Internet,” said X in a hushed tone.
“I can understand that,” said Thorn. “Do you want to use it too, Yolanda? I’d’ve thought you’d want to check in with HEPL at least.”
X (or Yolanda) covered her eyes with a loud, painful-sounding slap, a gesture that completely sailed over Thorn’s head. I heard a funny noise come from the back of Angela’s throat.
“HEPL?” she asked, after a cough.
“Yes, Human Extinction Protocol Libra,” said Thorn, beaming with the pride of a Boy Scout giving his troop number. “We’re the idiots who caused this whole mess, but I’m sure Yolanda already told you that.”
“Let’s take a look at that generator,” said X, grabbing Thorn very firmly around the arm and propelling him towards the main hatch at the base of the tower so fast that she had slammed the heavy steel door behind them and turned the wheel lock before any of us got there.
Angela, the reactionary, was already sprinting to the door. Without a word she tugged the wheel around as hard as she could, so I ran up and helped. Don held back, never having been one to give in to enthusiasm.
The instant the door was wide enough for her to fit through, Angela slid inside, not waiting for us. I was just in time to see her rattle down a flight of metal steps, and was going to follow her when I felt Don’s hand on my back.
“Computers,” he said, simply, pointing to an open door opposite the main hatch which led through into a small office with a couple of laptops and an old-looking bulky desktop machine.
“So?” I said, mindful of Angela’s fading footsteps.
He tapped his hard-drive necklace. “I’m gonna get set up. Let me know if there’s any problem with the generator.”
“Don’t you want to find out about . . .” I attempted to gesture towards the entire city and the ocean of red horror it was sitting in.
He swatted me away. “Give me the abridged version later. I’d rather just sort out this albatross.”
“I thought it was a hard drive.”
He opted not to respond and set to work cracking open the desktop case, so I hurried after Angela. The carrier’s interior was cramped and metallic enough that I could still hear the echoes of her sneakers being carried throughout the corridors.
I caught up with her, along with X and Dr. Thorn, in what I presumed was the generator room, because it was full of massive pieces of machinery that left me utterly bewildered, with everything connected by pipes that seemed specifically designed to get in everyone’s way. The two Americans were by a control bank at the far end of the room, Thorn lighting the scene with a battery-operated lantern, and after negotiating our way around the labyrinth of pipes Angela leapt into the circle of light like Batman confronting two creeping ne’er-do-wells.
“You caused the jam!” she yelled.
“Yes, I said sorry,” said Thorn openly, as X’s hands snapped back over her eyes. Thorn studied Angela’s gobsmacked expression and added, “Oh, we didn’t mean to. Is that what you were thinking? It was an accident. Ooh, are we on camera?”
“You didn’t mean to?!” Angela’s camcorder hand was shaking, but then she’d probably never been in the running for any major film awards. “You’re called Human Extinction Protocol and you didn’t mean to cause human extinction?”
“Well, the fire department doesn’t go around starting fires,” said Thorn, still smiling but slightly nonplussed. “You don’t call them the Spray Water All Over the Place Department. HEPL was set up to specifically control, analyze, and suppress the usage of any technology that might cause artificial human extinction. Excuse me a moment.” He turned and pulled a large switch on the control bank behind him, and the generators whirred to life, fading in the ceiling lights. He strode cheerfully out into the corridor away from the increasingly loud noise, and the rest of us followed.
“Yes, been a lot more call for this sort of regulation,” he continued, once the hatch had shut and we could hear ourselves think again. “What with all this top-secret nanotech research that’s been going on. You know, gray-goo scenarios and whatever. Are you all right, Yolanda? You’re making some very strange noises.”
X stepped close to him and mumbled directly into his ear, not quiet enough to go unheard. “My feeling was this information exists on an official need-to-know basis.”
“You haven’t told them anything?” He clicked his tongue. “Personally I think I’d have a need to know about things that had destroyed my home and everyone I’ve ever met. I’ve always said you’re a bit too neurotic about this, Yolanda.” He turned to us. “You know, we used to go to this little bar by the river after work, and Yolanda used to insist we pretend to be substitute teachers. Good times. We had fun in this city. Shame about what happened to it.”
X was starting to look like a teenage girl whose embarrassing dad was jovially telling her f
riends all about her culpability in crimes that carried the death sentence. Angela was still staring at Thorn with open-mouthed disbelief.
“You . . . you were here before the jam hit?” I asked.
“Of course. We brought the jam here, on the Obi-Wan,” said Thorn. “It’s been anchored out in the bay for months. We were doing tests on the stuff, trying to create a neutralizing agent.”
Angela adjusted her camera. “So that’s what this was? Some American government test? And Australia was the nice, dispensable country to act as a test ground?”
“Well, yes,” said Thorn, with the obliviousness of a lifetime in the academia bubble. He blinked as he analyzed her accusatory tone. “Oh, well, we didn’t intend it to get released in any populated area, if that’s what worries you. We had a special test zone on a patch of dead ground in the country somewhere. The whole area was cordoned off with plastic barriers going right into the ground. We took every care to stop it getting out.”
“But it did get out,” I said.
“I know! Don’t even know how. One day the testing went on, same as always, we put the jam back in its containment unit, put it away with all the rest of the equipment, and set off back to the city. When we unpacked everything on the Obi-Wan the containment unit was missing. And the next day, the jam hit the city. That’s as far as I know.”
“Could you have left some of it behind?” asked Angela.
“No, it doesn’t work like that. There’s only one swarm, it can’t separate into smaller ones, and we take every precaution on site. It was probably just stolen by terrorists. That’s what normally happens.”
“What about X—I mean, what about Yolanda?” I said.
“What about her?”
“She said she was responsible for the jam.”
“No way! She said that?” He reacted with excited glee as if I’d said she’d found a new boyfriend. “You didn’t actually say that, did you, Yolanda?”
Our foursome in the cramped corridor had, at some point in the conversation, been downgraded to a threesome. From somewhere not far away I heard an interior door slam.
“Where’s she going?” said Thorn.
“God damn it!” cried Angela, immediately sprinting after the newly identified Yolanda.
Thorn and I watched them go. When their footsteps had faded away, I became suddenly, depressingy aware that I was now alone with the bizarre scientist. He rolled his eyes at me and smirked like we were watching our nine-year-olds kick each other’s teeth in on the football pitch.
“Did you really create the jam?” I asked.
“No no no, not at all,” he displayed his hands openly. “They just gave it to us to study and wouldn’t tell us where it came from. Need-to-know basis. Apparently it wiped out an underground research facility in New Mexico, but I don’t know if it was created there or if they were just studying it as well. Did she really say she was responsible for this?”
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my neck uncomfortably. “I don’t think she was lying. There wasn’t much of a reason to lie at the time.”
“Hm,” said Thorn, scratching his head. “No, I think you must be mistaken. I know Yolanda quite well. I don’t see any reason why she’d admit to doing something like that. I wouldn’t discount her doing it, you understand—christ knows she’s wound tight—but I definitely don’t believe she’d admit it.”
“I’d better . . . check on my friends,” I said, attempting to drift away.
“Oh, sure, I’ll come with you,” said Thorn eagerly, drifting right along with me. “Of course, if she is a terrorist, that puts a bit of a dampener on the jam neutralization project. Shame. We were so close.”
I’d been attempting to block him out but his words burrowed right into my head like an agitated mole. I stopped and spun on my heel. “Did you say you can neutralize the jam?”
He grinned impishly. “Certainly can. Isn’t even that hard. Obviously it works on a molecular level, since it can convert matter into other matter, so we formulated a compound that effectively turns its molecular disassemblers on themselves. Turns the whole swarm into water. Theoretically.”
“Where is the compound?” I barked, before he could digress too far.
“Ah. Well, I say theoretically because we never actually made any of it. We were going to call it ‘Peanut Butter.’ ”
My built-up hopes promptly dashed me down. “Oh.”
“I should be able to make some with the Obi-Wan’s facilities, though. I’d just need the test data.”
I very cautiously let my hopes start building up again. “Where’s the test data?”
“I gave it to Yolanda just before the outbreak, on a USB stick.” He stroked his chin again. “Hm. That might have been a bad decision, mightn’t it.” I was halfway through deflating again when he suddenly added, “Oh wait. I remember now. She gave it to her bodyguard for safekeeping. I forget his name.”
“Y,” I breathed.
“I dunno. I guess because he wasn’t very memorable?”
My hopes had been inflating and deflating like an accordion throughout the conversation but they’d ended on a slight net gain. Y had been claimed by the jam, but we knew where it had happened, and a USB stick was inorganic. The most the jam could do was give it a polish. There might have been a few waves since then that would have pushed it away, but it was still a hope of some kind.
We approached an open doorway leading into what looked like a small cafeteria, and both stopped short as Tim suddenly appeared at the entrance to the extremely well-polished kitchen, a certain wildness in his eyes. I made the introductions, and Tim gave Dr. Thorn only a momentary glance as if I’d merely pointed out my new set of self-assembly bookshelves. “Travis, come look at this,” he said, before racing back into the kitchen without even waiting to see if I was coming.
I stepped through and found him in a storage room, making the kind of hand gesture usually accompanied by the exclamation ta-da. I looked around, but it was a perfectly ordinary pantry with militaristically clean floors and large catering-sized cans of food on every shelf. Then I started. There were large catering-sized cans of food on every shelf.
“Food?” was all I could say.
“Canned, jam-safe food,” said Tim like a proud parent. “Enough to keep an entire settlement going for a very long time.”
“Oh, sure, take whatever you need,” said Dr. Thorn, just behind me.
“But how’re we going to get it all back to Hibatsu?” I said. “We lost the Everlong.”
He gave me a look that made me wonder if I’d turned over two pages at once. “The Hibatsu building’s going to tear itself apart. What we have here is a ready-made settlement in itself. Food, water, power, and transport. It’s absolutely perfect.”
“I guess,” I said, scratching my head. “But how’re we going to get everyone from Hibatsu to here?”
“Do I get a say in this?” said Thorn, to fill the unpleasant silence.
Tim wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I don’t think the Hibatsu settlement needs to know about this.” I heard myself make a sound like an upset puppy and he continued. “Travis, this is what we’ve wanted right from the start. A settlement of our own. Look, we already know we can’t have too many people on the ship at the same time. That’s why the jam killed the whole crew the first time, right? We have to keep our numbers small.”
“But we can take it out to sea,” I said breathlessly, thinking on the fly. “Past the jam. Then bring them all on in small boats. You said yourself the building’s about to tear itself apart; we can’t just leave Deirdre to that!” I checked myself. “And everyone else!”
“And what makes you think the jam hasn’t spread all the way around the world? And would that be so bad? We could become adventurers traveling the jam seas on our own aircraft carrier. It’ll be awesome.”
“It’s possible,” said Thorn, tapping his chin with a strange regular rhythm like a slow metronome. “We never tested it on seawater. I suppose there might be en
ough life forms to sustain its growth.”
Tim looked Dr. Thorn up and down again. “Who did you say this was?”
“He’s a friend of X’s and he knows more about the jam than anyone else,” I said. “That was the other thing I needed to tell you. He might be able to destroy the jam.”
“He . . . what?”
“We need to get his test data back from where Y died but when he gets that we can turn all the jam into water.”
“Actually, we could turn it into whatever liquid you want, hypothetically,” piped up Thorn. “Water, vodka, milk, whatever you’re into. I was thinking it might be best to turn it into regular, non-maneating jam at first so everyone can be let down gently.”
Tim didn’t reply straightaway. He walked slowly out into the cafeteria, barely acknowledging our presence as we moved out of the way of the pantry door, and seemed to be heading for the exit when he tottered drunkenly and turned to us again. “You realize that’ll flood the city?”
“I like that better than what we’ve got now, Tim,” I said, slightly loudly. “We’ve got a dam for floods. We don’t have a dam for jam.”
“Yes, yes, I get that.” He resumed drifting to the door. “I’ll see you up top later.”
“I am really not making a good impression on all these new visitors,” sighed Thorn, hands on hips. “Are there any more?”
“Don,” I said. “Don was just . . . I need to find out if the . . .”
I left the sentence where it was and ran from the room. The power was on now, I realized, and we could already have access to the outside world. After several minutes of wrong turns I eventually reached the computer room at the base of the control tower. Dr. Thorn didn’t seem to be following me anymore, which I noticed with mixed feelings.
“Don, I—WAAGH,” I exclaimed, jumping back from the doorway.
He looked up slowly. “What’s wrong with you?”
The ceiling lights were off, but the computers were on, and the blue-green light of the monitors deepened every crag and shadow on Don’s perpetually angry features. For a moment I’d thought the room was haunted by the ghost of my old head teacher.
