Falling Ark

by Leigh Snelson

  The sight was disturbing, even though this man was trying to kill me. Frank dropped to the floor, clawing at his face and spreading the pink ooze around. As he tried to scrape off the slime, chunks of his flesh came with it and sat in his gloved hands.

  We had some excellent technology in this building but even the best plastic surgeon wouldn’t be able to help. I felt sorry for him, but I was unable to help at this point.

  He was just doing his job. He probably didn’t want to do it, but who knows what leverage Lara had over him, he was just following orders and that had led him here.

  Turning away I knew I would be hearing his screams for the rest of my life. After a few moments he went quiet and passed out from the pain. There was no way I was going to take another look. Carefully I navigated around his limp body and turned down the corridor.

  I found the orb floating in the middle of the elevator car, destruction and carnage all around it.

  When it had lost signal from my phone it was on a collision course with the elevator and it was obvious what had happened. The orb had continued its trajectory, broken through the steel doors with quite a bit of force, bounced around the inside of the elevator car a few times, causing destruction, before coming to rest in the middle.

  This was my only way up to the ground floor. There were stairs on the other side of the basement but that meant going back past the lab where I left Lara. She might be awake now and who knew what she was willing to do to stop me.

  Instead of taking the stairs the solution was floating in front of me. Climbing back onto the ball I removed the ceiling panels from the elevator and exposed the shaft that led up to the ground. I connected my phone to the orb again and with a few settings changed I started to float upwards.

  Within the shaft there were cables dangling, strange pipework and steel girders lined the walls. It was difficult to estimate how far I had travelled upward, there was no way I was going to look down.

  Eventually the walls gave way to two shiny metal doors. Floating the orb next to them I pressed my head against the cold steel and listened.

  It was all quiet. No guards, no alarms, nothing.

  Pulling the doors open was tricky. Sitting on top of a floating beach ball trying not to fall to my death. The doors had no obvious handles and they weren’t really designed to open when there was no car in place. They were stiff but with a lot of grunting and nearly falling a couple of times they eventually opened for me.

  The light from the big glass atrium blinded me for a moment. It was nicely lit, not too bright for this time of night but a harsh contrast to the dark shaft. The facility was made from two main buildings at right angles to each other and this large glass structure linked them.

  It had been installed at the same time they dug down and built the basement. Every day I had worked underneath one of the largest glass structures in the country, but I still didn’t get any natural light in my office.

  Dismounting the orb, I pressed the button on top, turning it off. It clanked onto the floor and the sound echoed around the vast, three storey open space.

  I felt very exposed crossing the empty lobby towards the doors, surrounded by nothing but glass walls and marble floors.

  Looking around to make sure no one heard, I reached down, picked up the orb and wrapped my lab coat around it. If anyone was watching me leave they wouldn’t question why I was holding my coat, however, a metal beach ball floating behind me, people usually noticed stuff like that.

  As the automatic doors opened and the cold night air hit me. It was the end of March and it had been a particularly cold month. The bitterness in the air took my breath away for a moment but I was relieved to feel the fresh, morning breeze in my lungs.

  My eyes scanned the carpark and relaxed when they found my old reliable. It was second hand, over a decade old and things were starting to wear out but it had never once let me down. It had bumps and scrapes over its silver bodywork from years of abuse, but it always started first time.

  Nestling the orb on the passenger seat I roared the engine into life and made my way over to the exit.

  The barrier was down and the little light in the security office was dimmed. I tensed my body again but my concerns were soon put at ease when I noticed the guard sleeping in his chair. I don’t blame him, who in their right mind would still be a work at this late hour!

  Tapping on the window he jumped in alarm. He looked at me, looked at the barrier, pressed a button and then pulled his hat back over his eyes.

  I didn’t know this guard. A place like this had so many staff it was impossible to know everyone, and the night watchmen were not people I regularly met. It also seemed that every night I did work late, there would be a different person on the gate.

  This guy seemed pleasant enough and he gave me a smile. I just hope that he wasn’t going to get into trouble for letting me go that easily.

  A minute later I was driving down the main road out of town and away from the VisionTech facility I had enjoyed working at. Now I needed to get far away from here.

  Chapter 3

  The car took its time warming up. On several occasions I had to stop to clear the windscreen as my warm breath misted up the cold glass. It would just be my luck, survive the night at VisionTech and then get into a car accident and end up freezing to death on the side of the road.

  Instead of focusing on driving like a responsible adult should, I found my mind racing on what had happened tonight. So many questions that I didn’t know how to answer.

  Did Lara just try to kill me, and hire a trained hit man to come after me? I didn’t want to believe it, although the evidence would suggest it was true. My lack of shoes the most obvious loss from the night.

  Lara had been my boss for several years, and I had known her all my life, I had never thought she was capable of this.

  I remember when she first started working at VisionTech straight after finishing university. We started at a similar time although she had now risen through the ranks of the company with prominence.

  It was her ability to motivate people, to get the best out of her team that was her standout feature, or so the quote on the company website stated.

  The replicator, that giant machine that could turn raw materials into robots, circuit boards and strange biological creatures was her crowning achievement. The ability to produce anything you wanted by re-arranging the atoms was alchemy at its finest. One minute the machine would be producing intercontinental missiles, the next vaccines for babies.

  For two months she had her team working night and day to complete its construction, although half the team quit before it was finished.

  There were stories of Lara locking people in the labs until they solved issues that were holding up the project. She even phoned up a tour operator and cancelled one guys holiday. Nobody was allowed time off while the project was incomplete.

  She liked to push her staff hard. If the deadline was a month away, she would demand it completed by the end of the week.

  This ruthless efficiency gave her a huge portfolio of completed projects very early in her career and her appointment to CEO came as no surprise. The role was pretty much her birth right, however, people were surprised at the speed at which she achieved it.

  Her parents were two of the original five founders of the company, along with my own father. Their initial goal was to help humanity by developing cutting edge technology that could be given away to those who needed it.

  It was a lofty goal and in the early days they kept strictly to their mission statement. They also attracted some of the best minds to work for them. People who also wanted to use their talents to improve the world rather than exploit it for profit.

  The main, pioneering invention was within the field of robotics. I still remember the day my dad came home with the earliest prototype of a box with artificial intelligence.

  It was small, no bigger than a shoe box, with a set of holes down one side that you could plug wires into.

&n
bsp; “Check this out.” My dad said as he dropped the box on the kitchen table. Then he went into the lounge and took a speaker off the wall. Annoying my mum who was listening to the radio at the time.

  “Check what out?” I asked, following him around the house, trying to figure out what he was doing.

  “I am going to stick this speaker into the machine and it is going to learn how to use it.” My dad explained.

  “You mean it can speak?” I asked.

  “Hopefully. I also expect it to use the speaker as a microphone, listening to the vibrations so it can hear us too.” He continued, sticking the bare wires from the speaker into the waiting holes.

  “Wow! That’s cool.” I remarked.

  “Wow! That’s cool.” The speaker replied instantly, copying my voice.

  “It can copy me?” I asked.

  “It can copy me?” Came the echo.

  “In theory it can do anything.” My dad explained.

  “In theory it can do anything.” The speaker said, switching to using my dad’s voice.

  “That’s going to get annoying.” I pointed out.

  “That’s going to get annoying.”

  “You have to teach it.” My dad explained.

  “You have to teach it.”

  “Hmmm,” I said out loud, thinking about how to deal with the little box that was starting to annoy me.

  “Hmmm,”

  I nodded to my dad. I had an idea.

  “One.” I started.

  “One.”

  “Two.” I continued.

  “Two.”

  “Three.”

  “Three.”

  “Four.”

  “Four.”

  “One plus two is three.”

  “One plus two is three.”

  “Two plus two is four.”

  “Two plus two is four.”

  “One plus one is three.”

  “One plus one is three.”

  Then I yanked the speaker cable out of the device before slowly putting it back in. I hoped the box would understand it made an error and I was punishing it.

  “One plus one is two.”

  “One plus one is two.”

  “One plus two is four.”

  “One plus two is THREE.”

  The machine had learnt.

  A pleasing smile grew on my dad’s face as he reached behind the box and turned it off.

  “You have to teach it like a baby? That’s going to take forever!” I moaned.

  “When I get back to work tomorrow this machine will sync up with all the other machines in the lab and share what it has learnt. Once one box has learnt something it can share it with every other box.” My dad explained.

  “Okay, that’s cool!” I commented.

  I spend the rest of the night trying to convince my Dad to let me take it to school the next day, but he never let me.

  Over time these boxes were sold to all kinds of different companies who created a range of plug-in equipment knowing that the boxes would figure out how to use it as intended, or better in some cases, as they learnt out new ways to interface with the tools.

  These days you could see these robots on construction sites, factories hospitals, everywhere, doing a range of jobs that they had taught themselves. Most commonly they were equipped with tank tracks and an arm fitted with sensors. They had docking bays where they would go to recharge and swap out equipment and they had grown to be self-sufficient.

  You would see a truck appear on a building site. Unload a box of robots and the next day a building would appear. The robots would work together to figure out the most efficient building process, where all the parts were and read the blueprints of the design. Usually you could find academics watching and learning from them. Several scientists had even written papers about the new methods that the robots had discovered.

  It was these robots that made VisionTech a household name.

  As I drove through the town the rain started. Carefully I avoided splashing a man on the side of the road who was stood next to a large puddle and then I saw the billboard that I passed every day.

  It was an advert from VisionTech promoting their new anti-aging cream. It claimed to make you look younger every day but if you looked closer the little disclaimer stated that only fifty-three percent of people on the trial agreed.

  I had been annoyed by the advert before, claiming it to be misleading but when I approached Lara about it she didn’t care. If it was within legal guidelines, then she wouldn’t care, as long as it boosted sales.

  Then I accused her of losing focus of the company’s ethos, that this was not how the company should be run and the founders would be horrified if they found out how she was running the company. Then I stormed out and didn’t speak to her for a few months.

  None of the original five founders were alive today. Two had sold their shares before I was born. They were happy with how the company was being operated at the time and they retired early. I can’t blame them. They lived long lives and spent most of it with their families and friends.

  Both of Lara’s parents were founders and this was how she acquired her shares. She was the largest shareholder within the company.

  Adopted at an early age by her fathers. They were the firstly openly gay couple regarded as powerful business leaders, something that was unheard of at the time. I remember being very small when then first announced that they were adopting Lara. There was so much controversy surrounding them, but I was too young to know why.

  Six years ago this summer since their plane went down in the Alps. Their bodies were never found but after a month of searching Lara called a halt to the rescue party.

  It was disgusting the way newspapers reported the story. They didn’t focus on the fantastic medical or robotic advancements that Lara’s parents made, or how much of their fortune they gave away to good causes every year, instead they still echoed the same story about two men raising a young girl.

  I didn’t care, I still held them as visionaries.

  In many ways it was a shame that they never saw Lara rise to the top of their company, perhaps they could have guided her, and she wouldn’t have turned the company into the profit machine it now was.

  Perhaps my parents knew what Lara would become, that was why they rarely allowed me to spend time with her.

  Growing up we occasionally holidayed together, usually when our dads needed to go on a business trip. But my mum would always ensure there were other people around, so I wasn’t stuck with Lara the entire time.

  Lara was also sent to the posh private girls’ school and I went to the local high school. My parents always said it would make me more “down to Earth”. It is only now, through hindsight and experience that I see why they didn’t want me to be influenced by her.

  My father was the final founding member, and he worked there until he died. A fluke accident in the very building I now worked in, just after the basement had been dug out.

  I had just returned from a university lecture on astrophysics. I was only in my first year and they weren’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.

  Sitting in my room, like any normal day, just working out some problems for my relativity class when my phone rang. II will never forget the phone call. My mum had chartered a private jet and flew me across the country.

  Even now, after working for a decade in my dad’s lab I still don’t know the details of that day. I think I prefer it that way, the past is usually better left alone.

  I took some months off from my studies to help my mum around the house. She took it harder than everyone, naturally. She kept insisting she was still in contact with him, she would see him everywhere we went.

  Once we were out shopping. I was looking for a new suit as I was attending an interview for a summer internship. We had enjoyed the morning looking around the stores, drinking coffee and even popped into a small museum but in the afternoon my mum went missing and I found her by the railway tracks, staring into the distance
. She told me that she had just had a conversation with my dad and that he said I shouldn’t go for the interview.

  Over the next few days my mum was insistent that I shouldn’t go and on the morning of the interview I found her in the bathroom coughing blood.

  That was the day we discovered her cancer. It was everywhere, in her lungs, stomach and brain. The doctors explained that she must have been exposed to extreme amounts of radiation at some point and when they learnt who my dad was they connected the dots. Perhaps one of the devices he was working on had been radioactive and it had reacted with my mum.

  “Your wrong, my dad would never put anyone at risk, he was smarter than that.” I argued, but it was in vein. No-one would listen and there was no point anyway, what had happened couldn’t be reversed.

  It took only two months for the cancer to overcome my mum, but I was very grateful that I didn’t attend the interview. Instead of spending my Summer working on some pointless science project my mum regaled me with stories of her and my dad, firstly at home, then from her bed, then from the hospital.

  It was exactly six months between my dad’s funeral and my mums, and it was the hardest six months of my life.

  A few years later, on my twenty fifth birthday my father’s shares were passed to me and as bestowed in my dad’s will, I sold them and donated the money to various charities.

  This was always the plan. As a teenager I wasn’t fond about the idea of giving away my inheritance but as I aged, I realised that the point of the company was to help others. Besides that, VisionTech paid me handsomely at that point anyway.

  The harsh beams of the streetlights reflected off the wet surface and snapped me back into reality.

  Driving on autopilot meant I was naturally heading back to my own apartment in a little suburb just outside town. This was a mistake I quickly realised. Lara knows where I live, it’s the first place she would go.

  Pulling into a nearby side street and turning off the engine I looked nervously into the rear-view mirror expecting to see headlights following me.

  Nothing, phew.

  My phone lit up on the seat next to me so I grabbed it, ignored the email notification for two pizzas at my favourite pizza place and started to scroll down the list of contacts, wondering if there was anyone I could turn to for help.