Death's Twilight
Page 35
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Antarctica December 8, 2308
Sunlight reflected off of the corrugated iron roofs of Casey Station. This time of the year, the sun never set, and it was one long day until March, when the days would get progressively shorter until there was sunset, and it would be night till midway through September. Penguins congregated on ice floes that moved slowly in the Antarctic waters. A few birds flew overhead, searching for fish to make their meal.
Casey Station, from the outside, looked abandoned. The doors had been frozen shut months ago, and the snow blown by the high speed Antarctic winds had drifted halfway up the doors. The two-story building, nicknamed "The Red Shed" housed hundreds of computers that were used to capture data relating to climate shift, ocean water levels, and zoological inventories of fish, animal, and plant life on the forbidding island. Personnel tunnels connected the three main buildings, and smaller pathways led from doorways to clusters of personnel huts.
One hundred and twenty-five meters from The Red Shed was the power plant used to power the buildings of Casey Station. Originally a coal and oil burning station, it had been since converted to a solar driven station, with banks of batteries that stored immense amounts of energy for the long winter night. Cameras mounted to the outside of the plant monitored movement as it came close to Casey Station, and acted as an early warning system for larger predators like bears and wolves.
The last building was a corrugated half-dome with huge barn doors. This building, nearly one hundred meters across, housed the vehicles used to travel around, and off, the Station. A flat packed path led to the Wilkins Ice Runway, nearly sixty-five kilometers away. While the planes, including an Airbus A319 could be stored nearer to the runway, there was nowhere between here and there that provided the natural geographic shelter that Vincennes Bay did. Assorted vehicles, including tracked people movers and snowmobiles stood idle in the heated dome. Barrels of fuel and oils lined the outer walls, and crates of medical supplies and food were stacked in groups beneath the sheltering wings of the twin A319's.
On the top floor of The Red Shed was a room with a black door with no window. A sign warned all that the room was for Restricted Access Only. Fingerprint and retinal scanners were positioned to the right of the door, allowing access to those who needed it. Above the doorway, a red plastic sign engraved with white letters read: Integrated Registration Information System. All of the computers at Casey Station fed their collected data into this room to be analyzed and recorded. New species of oceanic life had been revealed to the world once collected and recorded by Red Shed computers.
Though this was the busiest time of the year for Casey Station, there was not a person in sight. One hundred and ten years ago, personnel were redirected to appropriate Zones based on their degree of expertise and level of education. Periodic post-Great Fire trips to Casey Station upgraded the computer in the room with the black door as necessary to handle security, power plant production and energy storage, along with its usual cataloging, recording and analysis duties. The last manned trip to Casey Station was in 2286, when the computer was modified yet again to handle all census, migration and internet data. What had once started as a collection device had been modified to be the largest single storage facility in the world, cataloguing data of every kind imaginable.
Servers and hard drives stretched floor to ceiling on three of the room's four walls. Ethernet and power wires snaked through metal racking connecting the components to each other and to the energy required to perform their task. Lights on servers blinked amber and green as the multitude of data was processed and filed for later recall. The whir of cooling fans, both on the machines themselves and in the roof was ever-present, keeping the room at Casey Station a chilly three degrees Celsius.
A large bank of screens, fifteen by fifteen, showed changing images from cameras around the world. Traffic images from busy city streets flicked into still shots of underwater ocean life. Other screens showed motion captured images from ABM's, while still other screens displayed ever changing shots of flight routes, secure transportation depots, and government building access points. Before each change, a small green checkmark appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, indicating the image had been catalogued.
Two of the over two hundred screens held images that changed between two images only. One screen revealed a black state-issued hover parked beside a fading farmhouse. This image was alternated with an interior shot of the same hover. The cover of an album depicting four men walking across a roadway could be seen on the hover's dash. The other displayed the interior of a hover, where a woman dressed in a black dress navigated the twists and turns of the urban roadways she travelled. Its alternating image was a map showing the GPS location of her vehicle. Both screens had a flashing red "X" in the corner.