I watch the screen. The man seems to sense something, stops and turns. The smaller man keeps going until he hits the end of his leash and jerks back around. I recognize them now. Then two blasts of bright light fill the dark screen, and when they fade, the two men lie in heaps with the red draining out of them. My legs twitch; I want to stand and leave
Dr. Radcliffe taps another key and the horrific scene is replaced by a graph.
“As you can see,” he says, “we’ve had both successes and setbacks over the years.”
With bold red characters, the graph shows the current estimated above ground world populations at 25,754. It graphs the history, too, showing decades as high as 350,000, and others much lower, one as low as 2,900. As we watch, the count drops by three to 25,751.
“These are only estimates, of course,” Dr. Radcliffe says, pointing to the bottom of the graph where the margin of error is displayed. “But we track land covered, drone sightings, kill data. And the algorithms are usually pretty damn close.”
He taps another key, another graph—
This one says at the current pace, total extermination will be achieved in 357 years.
“But don’t be fooled,” he says. “these numbers can change fast. The Americas are largely under control. But other places remain problematic.”
“What places?”
“Well, strange things are happening in China, for example. We lost a drone there, and when we sent another to retrieve its weapons, we lost that one, too. What we need is a new strategy, my boy. We need fresh blood, fresh ideas. We need you.”
“Me? What am I supposed to do?”
He spins the chair so I’m facing him and he reaches down and taps his finger against my breastplate.
“First, when I know you’re really ready, we get you off this terrible clock that’s ticking inside of you.”
“And how do we do that?”
“I’m glad you asked.”
He steps over to a locked refrigerator, punches in another code, and the door pops loose. He opens it and pulls out a clear case of preloaded syringes. Opening the case, he removes a syringe, and holds it up to the LED light. The red fluid inside shimmers with a life of its own.
“This makes you a god, Aubrey,” he says, holding it out to me. “At least as close to one as there ever will be.”
I reach for the syringe, but he pulls it back.
“Not yet, young man.” He says, giving me a subtle head shake and a grin. “Not until I’m convinced that you’re ready.”
“That’s all it takes?” I ask. “One shot?”
“That’s it,” he says, tucking the syringe back in its case and putting the case back in the refrigerator. “Your body does the rest. Everything you need, you already have. This unlocks it.”
He shuts the refrigerator door. The lock clicks closed.
“Once I take that, then what?”
“Then we need to get you and Hannah working on some kids. She’ll be mature in another year or two.”
“You said I’m not ready?”
“I said: I’m not convinced you’re ready.”
“How do I get ready?”
“Now there’s the bright young man I’ve been looking for. I like the way you think, Aubrey. I knew we chose right when we chose you.” He points to the screen. “We need to come up with an actionable plan to get that number to absolute zero.”
“And once it’s at zero, what will you do?” I ask.
“No, you mean what will you do?” he corrects. “I’ll be long gone, unfortunately.”
“Well, what will I do then?”
He slides the chair out, with me in it, lifts me to my feet and lays his arm over my shoulder.
“What I’m about to show you,” he says, “no one else has seen, not even my wife.”
Then he sits down and slides up to the desk. He hits a yellow button on the panel, a hatch pops open revealing a keyhole. He reaches under his shirt collar and slips a chain over his head, a small silver key dangles at its end. He slides the key into the hole and turns it. The lid opens, revealing two red toggles protected with reverse finger guards labeled PHASE 1 and PHASE 2. Next to the toggles a yellow button reads: LIVE FEED. He reaches in and presses the button. The screens all go dark, then three click back on. One screen shows a view of the lake from the house, another screen shows the Foundation cavern. But the third screen looks foreign, until I look closer and recognize the Transfer Station of Holocene II where I boarded the train that set me on this journey. The elevators stand closed, the loaders parked and still, the silent train waiting at its platform. It must be rest hours.
“I can’t tell you how I dreamed of this,” Dr. Radcliffe says, holding his hands suspended over the toggles and wiggling his fingers like some pianist about to perform. “To be the last man, to draw the last breath, to think the last human thought. What would it be like? Now it’s slipped away. Gone, gone, gone. But you can be the one, Aubrey. You can be the last man.”
“You want to be the last man alive?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “I want to be the last man to die. You see, I used to be afraid of dying, Aubrey. That fear helped motivate my work. It had a place. But I’ve come to see it differently now. The fear of death is the fear of being forgotten. Of being irrelevant. Overlooked. It’s not death that scares men, it’s life going on without them. But to sit right here and welcome the end of all humankind, to have the honor, no, the privilege, of handing the planet back to nature …”
“You look forward to it?”
“It’s a glorious gift, young man. A glorious fine gift. And it’s a gift I’m giving to you.”
“What about Hannah?” I say, not wanting to sit and listen to this madness alone. “Shouldn’t you be telling this to her?”
“Hannah’s my only daughter, I love her. She’s probably smarter than you are. No offense meant, but it’s true. But she also has a soft heart, you see. A nurturing instinct. And when the time comes, you’ll have children, don’t forget. You can’t trust a mother to make a rational choice.”
“But what is this rational choice?”
“To pull these switches.”
“And what do these switches do?”
“When the above ground population reaches absolute zero, and after a grace period to be sure, of course, you’ll come down here and toggle these switches—Phase 1, Phase 2.”
He snaps his fingers, the pop echoing in the closed room.
“And just like that it all ends. One, two, it’s all through. You can watch in the monitors if you’d like. I always thought I’d walk outside and meet it with open arms.”
“Meet what?”
“The wave,” he says, as if I should know.
“What wave?”
He points to the lake view screen.
“You see that monolith of stone there? Just right of the dam, hanging over the lake?”
“Yes, I see it.”
“It might not look like much from here, but that stone is larger than ten thousand of these houses. Look at it compared to the dam. It’s bigger than the dam. This second switch labeled Phase 2 closes the locks, seals the launch tunnels, and floods the Foundation with lake water. Then it detonates small nuclear charges bored deep into that stone, and that stone there slides into the lake.”
“I don’t get it,” I say, shaking my head.
“The wave, boy, the wave. I got the idea from Lituya Bay up in Alaska, mid-twentieth century. One of my fellows was studying it to help map potential asteroid tsunami patterns.”
“Tsunami?”
“An earthquake sent a massive slide into the enclosed bay, and a wave rose seventeen-hundred feet up the other shore, snapping every tree in its path and washing everything back with it, even the topsoil. Don’t you see the beauty of it? This wave won’t be near as high by the time it reaches the house here, not with the size of this lake, but it’ll be a hundred meters for sure. Maybe two. It’ll wipe out the lake house, the bungalow down th
e beach, everything. And when it retreats, it will take every last trace to the bottom of the lake. It even cleans up the mess, you see. It’ll be like we were never even here.”
“Well, what about the people down in Holocene II?”
He waves his hand, as if batting away an invisible fly.
“By the time you hit the second switch, they’ll be flooded.”
“Flooded?” I ask, a sick feeling rising in my gut.
“What do you think the Phase 1 switch does?”
“You mean it drowns them?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Phase 1 opens an ocean gate in the train tubes and floods Holocene II. When it’s time, you can watch it all on the monitors there,” he says, pointing.
“You mean they’re all living down there every day with the threat of being drowned while they sleep? And they don’t even know it? I was living like that?”
He stares up at me, a look of genuine confusion.
“We live every day with the threat of disaster. People used to believe in God’s wrath, not knowing when he would strike us down again. He even flooded the Earth himself once, they say. Don’t believe in God? Asteroids then. Comets. Or how about the nuclear bombs that rained down? We all live at the whimsy of chance. We’re pathetic, powerless little people.”
“So you plan to murder everyone alive.”
“Such ugly words,” he says. “This is the only moral choice, Aubrey. It’s the right thing for this planet and all the peaceful life left on it. We had our chance. We failed.”
He clicks the lid shut, removes the key and hangs it around his neck. Then he rises and pushes the chair in. He walks to the safe room door and slaps a green button with his palm and the door slides open. I stand looking at the blank screens.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s a lot to digest in one meal. That’s why I’m not convinced you’re ready. But when you are ready, you’ll know. You’ll know, and I’ll know. Now come on, let’s go see about some dinner.”
CHAPTER 33
I Love You, Dad
I wake thrashing with my legs tangled in wet sheets.
A dream, a nightmare—what was it?
I kick the covers off, and roll onto my side.
The sun has yet to rise, and the window above my bed glows faint silver in the dawn, casting the room in shadow. The wallpaper picks up the low light and the yellow birds shimmer, as if flapping to free themselves from their paper prison.
My hand reaches up instinctively, grabbing my father’s pipe where it hangs from the bedpost.
Then I remember—
I remember the safe room and Dr. Radcliffe’s crazy video feeds, the train sitting idle on the Transfer Station platform in Holocene II. I remember him telling Mrs. Radcliffe yesterday that the train arrives today. Then I remember Hannah handing me that leaf and saying that it was September already.
My father retires in September.
My father—he’ll be on that train to Eden.
I jump out of bed. Everyone is still sleeping when I creep into the hall, stopping in the kitchen to drink a glass of water and fill my pockets with breakfast bars. Then I step from the house out into the cool, gray morning.
The lake is still as poured lead, and the predawn sky hangs heavy above it. My breath smokes, silver frost covers the grass, crunching beneath my feet as I walk down to the dock.
I twist the boathouse knob. The door opens. The wooden boat floats there waiting, its lacquered steering wheel catching the low light from the high windows. Above the wooden boat, suspended from the ceiling by an electric lift, hangs another boat crafted from carbon fiber, its cockpit enclosed in glass, the Foundation crest on its hull. Must be a backup for bad weather.
The boat rocks slightly when I step into it and sit behind the wheel, the cushioned seat soft, the polished-wood throttle knob cold as steel. I search the gauges in the dim light, but see no instructions and no key. Next to the wheel is a circular pushbutton cut from a deep-red jewel, and I wonder if it isn’t some precious ruby recovered from the ruins they razed to reclaim the park. I press the button—the electric engines whir to life; a small churn of water echoes softly off the stone walls.
I see no way to open the boathouse doors, and I assume they must be automatic.
“Here goes everything,” I mutter to myself as I push the throttle forward, just a little. Nothing. A little more throttle—still nothing. I press the throttle all the way open and the water churns violently behind the boat, but still it doesn’t move. Then I see a drive switch and when I press it, the boat launches forward, rams into the closed boathouse doors and fishtails in the water, fighting to get out. I panic, leaving the throttle wide open. The doors part and the boat blasts through them, scraping against the wood as it shoots out into the glassy lake, the automatic doors drawing themselves closed behind us.
I get a grip on myself, pull the throttle back to midpoint, and steer toward the dam. I look back once more to see the lake house disappearing into the shadows of the bluff.
The boat cuts through the clean water and throws a wake behind it that fans out and rolls away, leaving the water smooth and unmarked, the only evidence of a crossing arriving as small waves on either shore, hopefully long after I’m gone.
The wind is cool on my face. The air smells of wet leaves. It feels nice to be out in the boat, moving across the water. The sun rises from behind the jagged mountains, its golden light forcing the gray down to the surface of the lake. I can see why Dr. Radcliffe prefers this open-air antique to the covered thing he has hanging in the boathouse. I fish a breakfast bar from my pocket and eat it. Mrs. Radcliffe was right. They are stale.
I notice the stone monolith hanging from the mountain, perched above the lake—a granite slab so immense it wouldn’t fit in Level 3 of Holocene II. I try to guess where the nuclear charges are hidden, how it might shear off. Would the wave come right away? I feel the threat of that enormous stone, and my stomach twists up with anxiety. I toss the breakfast bar into the water, drop the throttle, and speed toward the damn.
I don’t see the mitre gates open, and it dawns on me that I have no idea how to work the locks. I pull the throttle back, the boat sinks into the water, and I cruise slowly toward the gates, hoping that they’re automatic also. They are. As I approach, the gates grind open and I steer the boat in, ease the throttle back, and coast the last few meters. Then the automatic doors shut behind me and darkness swallows the boat.
I sit in absolute black, the boat rocking on its own ebbing wake. Smells of wet concrete, gear grease. The lonely drip of water. Just when I think the locks might not be automatic after all, that I might be trapped here in the dark, the LED lights snap on, and the water begins to drain away, lowering the boat.
It takes a long time to drop, longer than I remember. Without Hannah by my side, and without Dr. Radcliffe at the wheel, I feel anxious being three hundred meters down in a concrete chamber, the weight of an entire lake pressing above my head. I bring my hand to my chest, grip my father’s pipe there, and remember why I’m here.
The archway appears, the water level equalizes, and the gates open, the LED lights reflecting off the wet concrete walls. I engage the drive switch, nudge the throttle forward, and idle into the underground channel.
When I cruise from the channel into the red glow of the cavern bay, the Foundation docks are deserted, the submarine gone. It’s quiet. The only sound is a soft tumble of water draining away somewhere on the far side of the cavern.
I guide the boat to the same dock Dr. Radcliffe brought us to and look for a tie off, but before I can find one, the step plate folds out automatically and clamps itself onto the dock.
I press the ruby button and kill the engines.
Onshore, I walk past the galvanized door of the sintering plant and skirt the edges of the living quarters, grateful for the scaffolding that blocks the windows. I make my way to the pathway bridge that overlooks the sunken train channel.
I see right away that I was rig
ht …
The tunnel gates stand open, the train hovers motionless at the loading platform, the cargo cars loaded with supplies from Holocene II. The passenger car is corralled into the receiving dock of Eden, steep walls on either side blocking any exit, the train car open onto a narrow platform leading up to the door and the LCD sign that reads: WELCOME TO EDEN.
There’s no sign of life anywhere.
I hop over the bridge rail and drop down onto the roof of the train, working my way up to the passenger car docked at Eden. I creep to the front of the car, and edge toward the side. The roof slopes away and there’s nothing to hold onto, so I drop onto my butt, slide off the roof, kick free of the car, and land on the platform.
Well, that was simpler than I thought. I have absolutely no idea how I’ll get back up, but getting down sure was easy.
The LCD sign blinks, and the door slides open.
The platform must be pressure sensitive.
I walk to the open door and peek in on a yellow hallway. I’m nervous. Remembering my father’s words, I breathe good energy in, and breathe bad energy out. Then I step over the threshold and into the hall. The door slides shut behind me.
The hall leads to a large circular room. Across the room, another steel door, a blank LCD display and a speaker mounted above it. Other than one ordinary door marked BATHROOM, the walls are entirely covered with digital screens showing video loops of nature scenes—waterfalls, beaches, the forest.
On the largest screen, an animated woman smiles while she talks about Eden: “Soon, your every dream will come true. Just think—anything you want will be yours. You can visit the Sahara, dive with sharks, even walk on the moon. And the best part is you can do it with everyone you love, every day.”
Several rows of padded seats face the screen, and a woman sits in the front watching, her posture rigid, her hands folded in her lap. She wears the familiar gray jumpsuit of Holocene II.
“Hello,” my voice echoes off the walls. “I’m Aubrey.”
She turns to look at me, then looks back at the screen.
“Are you up from Holocene II?”
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