by M. R. Forbes
“Tinker likes for me to make an appearance. The people here, they’re used to me coming in, waving, having a quick drink, and then disappearing.” He held out his glass. “To the future.”
Nathan hesitated a moment, and then clinked it with his. “To the future.”
They both downed the cocktail in one large swallow. Nathan’s throat burned, but he held it together.
“Now we can go?” he asked.
“Ebion, stay here and help entertain the guests,” James said. “Colonel Stacker and I have business.”
“Of course, General.”
The robot moved off into the crowd, smiling and greeting the different guests. Nathan noticed none of them were paying much attention to James and him. It was all ridiculous pomp.
“Come on,” James said. “Tinker’s waiting for us.”
Chapter 6
James brought Nathan to the ground floor, and then out into the street.
“Tinker’s not even in the building?” Nathan asked as they crossed a small patch of grass to the street.
“His research facility is a few blocks over,” James replied. “We’ll find him there.”
The traffic in the road was a mixture of horses, cars, and people riding single-wheeled devices with foot pads on the sides. There wasn’t a lot of vehicular traffic, making it easy to cross the intersections on foot and join the heavier pedestrian traffic on the other side.
The residents seemed to slow automatically as James approached, recognizing him in his uniform and clearing the way for him. Nathan noticed the people were doing their best not to stare, keeping their heads down and occasionally flicking their eyes toward the pair to get a quick glimpse.
It made him uncomfortable at first, but as they made their way across Edenrise he began to settle in, his mind turning to the fact that he was outside, in open air, walking in a city on Earth. He looked around, following the tall buildings from the ground up, spotting the drones darting around in the sky and then looking at both the people and the vehicles in the streets again. Some of the residents were dressed in newly woven clothing, others looked like they had only just arrived. They were clean, but their attire was old and worn, faded and full of holes. They had the same expression on their face Nathan pictured he was carrying around. He wondered what it was like for them, to go from the dangers of living outside Edenrise to the safety of living inside.
Not that being inside was completely safe. Nathan also noticed Edenrise’s version of peace officers walking the streets, dressed in green Space Force jumpsuits and carrying rifles and steel batons. He didn’t witness any trouble, but they wouldn’t have been out there if it never happened.
Their journey ended ten minutes later, at the front of a small, squat, unmarked building. It was made of brick, stained and ugly, resting only a couple of blocks from the waterfront, where Nathan could see massive, long piers with ancient ships still tethered to them. The vessels were similar to the Navy ship Hayden had used to escape Manhattan, only larger and older. There were lights visible on them, suggesting they had power, but he doubted they would be going anywhere anytime soon.
“Where are we?” he asked.
The area around them was dark and nearly deserted. He caught a glimpse of something standing in the shadows. It was humanoid shaped and made of metal. Another robot.
“A long time ago, this whole area was one of the United States’ major naval bases. James and Mary Stacker came down here near the end of the war, after the Space Force fell apart. Trife don’t like water, so the environment made it easier to defend. If you head further east, there’s an old wall that protected the first iteration of Edenrise, before Tinker finished the spire and the shield.”
Nathan turned and looked back at the city. It was completely lit up at night, a beacon of hope probably visible for kilometers.
“How come Proxima Command doesn’t know about this place?” he asked. “They must have noticed the lights if nothing else?”
“The shield absorbs most of the light. It isn’t bright enough to register as an anomaly from space, and as far as I know Proxima has never done low altitude flybys of the planet’s surface. Their ignorance of Earth is pretty complete.”
Nathan couldn’t help but notice the disdain in James’ voice when he said it. A lot more people would feel the same way, both here and on Proxima, if they knew the truth of things.
They approached a steel door with a keypad mounted to the wall beside it. James typed in the passcode, and the door clicked and slid open slightly. He pulled it the rest of the way, and motioned Nathan to enter.
The facility was dark, the lighting across the ceiling kept dim. The air was cool and stale, and a musty smell infiltrated every breath. They had entered into a small lobby with a desk in the center. Nobody was sitting behind it. If James hadn’t brought him here, he would have thought the place was deserted.
It made him wonder again if James had told Tinker what they had discussed. Had James put him through another of Tinker’s test? Had he failed? Had James brought him here so they could get rid of him or worse, use him for one of their experiments?
“This way,” James said, leading him to the door behind the desk. It had some other device on the wall, and James put his finger to it. A red light scanned his print and it opened.
“Biometrics are dangerous with replicas around,” Nathan said.
James smiled. “You can probably open every door I can, but I’m not worried about it unless you’ve changed your mind already?”
“No. I haven’t.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want to have to make you disappear down here.” James smiled mischievously before laughing.
Nathan laughed too. He assumed James was joking, but he hadn’t thought his counterpart capable.
The second door led into a longer hallway, lined by white tile and white walls, with more modern white slab doors on both sides.
James directed them down an intersecting corridor on the right to a lift. “We don’t use the upper levels,” he said. “Too risky if there’s ever an emergency.”
They boarded the lift. James pressed his thumb to the control pad to activate it, and the doors closed. Then it started to descend.
“How far down does this thing go?” Nathan asked.
“Sixty meters,” James replied. “The USSF built this halfway through the war as a bio-engineering lab. Tinker kept the equipment and added more over the years. Fabrication and replication units mainly. He produces augmentations like mine as well as robots like Ebion and the guard-bot you saw outside. Not to mention the weapons modifications. All of it gets designed here, even when it’s machined in the larger replicator closer to the spire.”
“He does it all himself?”
“Not himself. He has a team of engineers he hand-picked and trained. Those engineers have passed their skills down to their children, and so on. That’s one of the reasons we took women from outside Edenrise. The original families are too valuable.”
Nathan nodded, a little uncomfortable with how normal it was for James to talk about what the Liberators had done. But then, he firmly believed the cause was worth it.
The lift stopped and opened. A guard-bot was standing at the entrance, but it didn’t move when they entered, recognizing both James and Nathan as Stackers. James stopped anyway, picking up a wired device hanging from the wall.
“Sir, we’re here,” he said into it before putting it down.
“An analog telephone,” James explained, noticing Nathan’s curious expression. “Useful for maintaining communications in the event of a power outage. You didn’t see it, but there’s a line that runs from here to Fort McGuire.”
“So you can talk to Tinker?”
“Exactly. He’s on his way.”
“Am I going to see the sphere?”
James nodded. “That’s why we’re here.”
“What is it?”
“It’s better to see it.”
“Where did Tinker get it?”
/> James smiled. “Be patient, Nathan. Tinker will explain everything. Hopefully once you know the whole story, it’ll help galvanize everything we’re doing.” He paused for a moment. “And everything we might have to do.”
Nathan opened his mouth to respond, but nodded instead when he noticed Tinker rolling down the hallway. The old man was wearing a white lab coat and Nathan was surprised to see he was wearing an Oracle over his left eye.
“Ah, there you are. How did you enjoy the party, Nate?” he asked.
“I didn’t, sir,” Nathan replied.
Tinker cackled. “You’re such a Stacker. Who needs careless enjoyment when there’s so much work to be done? James told me you’re on board with our grand design.”
“Yes, sir,” Nathan said. “I’m all in.”
“Excellent. We thought it would be helpful if you had a deeper understanding of our motives, which is why I had James bring you here. Are you ready to see the sphere?”
Chapter 7
“How much do you know about the war, Nate?” Tinker asked.
He was leading them to wherever he kept the sphere, somewhere in the back of the facility. They had passed through the first long corridor, and were halfway down a second. While James had said there were other scientists down here, Nathan hadn’t seen any of them yet. But then, he hadn’t seen anything yet beyond the lift and a few sterile hallways. He didn’t hear anything else, either. The place seemed to be empty except for them.
“Not that much,” Nathan replied. “The first I heard of it was when I met Rhonna.”
“Rhonna?”
“One of the Amtraks, sir,” James said. “She died in Crosston.”
Nathan glanced over. James could have saved her, but had let her die to punish him for disobeying orders. Just because he was helping them, it didn’t mean he had forgotten about that.
“A shame,” Tinker said. “Did you like her?”
“She helped me get settled when I crashed. She saved me from the Stalker. Actually, she kept me from killing the Stalker. But she did try to guide me.”
“The Stalker?”
“Betty,” James said.
“Oh,” Tinker replied, laughing. “One of my earlier experiments. The USSF had two programs running in parallel during the war. Mary Stacker was involved with both of them. One was to create a virus that would wipe out the trife. The other was to create a creature that could stand toe-to-toe with them.”
“You created the Stalker?”
“Yup. Among other things.”
“And you named it Betty?”
“No, Betty was the source subject. We let her go on Manhattan to see how she would do. She wound up staying in the subway, and only coming out when she was hungry. The trife learned to avoid her, because her healing factor made her damn near impossible for them to kill. She would have made a good baseline, but the alterations left her too dumb to control. Why trade one monster for another, right?” He shrugged. “Whatever happened to her, anyway?”
“I killed her,” James said. “She was attacking Nathan, and wouldn’t stand down.”
“Like I said, too dumb to control. Anyway, the war. I think we probably have the best, most honest account of it out of any of the communities around the world because of James Stacker. He kept a personal account, handwritten in a time when everyone was using tablets and watches and phones and early versions of these things.” He tapped on the side of the Oracle. “He was a rarity in that, but he was also smart because of it. You can’t delete a book from a thousand klicks away.”
They neared the end of the corridor. There was another door there, a sliding metal hatch like the others in the area. It stood alone within the long hallway, keeping whatever was beyond it well separated from the rest of the underground compound.
Was the sphere dangerous?
“What we know for sure is that the government tracked a number of asteroids headed toward Earth. Near misses, all of them, probably the remains of an old comet or something, I don’t know. The space agencies kept an eye on them. They figured it was going to make for a pretty light show as some of them skipped off the atmosphere. But then they started changing direction.”
“Changing direction?”
“Yup. Their vectors adjusted in a way that suggested they had propulsion of some kind. That they were more than rocks, and something was steering them. They were numerous enough to cover the entire planet as it turned, bombarding every square kilometer. The asteroids were small though, and they couldn’t survive the atmosphere. They burned up. Or at least, everybody thought they did.
“Next day, the world woke up to these tiny particles floating down from high above, coming to rest on everything like a layer of dust. The scientists knew the dust came from the asteroids, so they took samples and started running tests. You want to guess what they discovered?”
“I have no idea,” Nathan said.
“The dust was alive. Xenotrife embryos, every last fucking one. Trillions and trillions of them. And they were growing.”
“Didn’t we try to destroy them?”
“Oh yeah, of course. They did everything they could. Swept them up and tied them off. Burned them. Razed entire forests and open plains. Sprayed them with weed killer, bug killer, anything they could think of, they tried. Probably killed trillions of the fuckers, but there were always more. The even tried to nuke them, which turned out to be a disaster.”
“The trife feed on radiation.”
“Yup. All it did was speed up their maturation cycle. Picture a world where billions of vicious aliens grow up faster than you can get rid of them. Not only that, but they carried a disease that killed humans. Within six months we were down billions. Within a year, we were fighting for survival. We did everything we could. Every resource around the world was poured into research and development. Bio-engineering. Weapons. Armor. You name it. You know now how well that all went.”
“Until you came along.”
“I continued what Mary started, that’s all. But I also had a small advantage.”
“The sphere?”
“The asteroids didn’t only drop off trife. A few of them were carrying different payloads. Not too many people know about that. The governments kept it secret from all but the highest-ranking members of the military. The reality of the trife was bad enough. A lot of folks, they wanted to believe we just had back luck. That the asteroids were the remains of some planet that got blown up or hit by a black hole or something stupid like that, and the trife were aliens that lived on that planet and got delivered here like some bigtime cosmic accident. Personally, I think that’s worse, but to each their own.”
He laughed again. They were all standing in front of the door, but it didn’t seem as if Tinker was in a hurry to open it.
“Of course, there were the Bible thumpers who said the trife were sent by God to cleanse the world of all the sinners that had turned their backs on Him. That He had opened up the Gates of Hell to give the world to Satan, and only the righteous would be spared in the afterlife.” Tinker spun his chair around to look up at Nathan. “The funny thing is, they were the closest to the truth. James, can you get the door?”
James turned away from the door ahead of them, to the right side of the corridor. He put his human hand near the wall, and a biometric panel lit up. He placed his hand against it, and a hidden doorway turned inward.
“What’s behind the other door?” Nathan asked.
“Death,” Tinker replied with a laugh. He rolled through the formerly hidden doorway.
The lights came on as he entered, revealing a large, organized workshop. It was filled with all kinds of equipment, from microscopes to laser cutters, to machining tools and a centrifuge. A long wide table sat near the center, with all kinds of tools neatly lined up along it, including a rifle that was only half-assembled.
Further back were shelves, each one clearly marked with whatever parts and pieces they contained. On the left wall stood a computer mainframe, alive with dozens of
flashing lights. Beside it was another robot, a boxy thing with multiple arms and treads at its base. It started rolling toward Tinker.
The real treasure was in the back of the room, behind a wall of what looked like thick, hardened glass. Nathan identified the sphere immediately. It wasn’t hard, considering its shape. Round and flat, matte black, with tiny lines etched all over the surface. It was suspended between two beams, floating in the air. There were other items around it, what looked like debris from something, all of it composed of the same matte black material.
“Not now,” Tinker said to the robot, waving it off. It stopped rolling toward him and retreated to its original position.
Nathan followed Tinker and James to the heavy glass door separating the two parts of the room. As before, James put his hand on the glass and it activated a scanner, which then allowed the door to open. A blast of colder air greeted Nathan, washing over him and giving him a deeper chill than he was already feeling.
Tinker rolled in first, stopping his chair next to the sphere. He tapped the side of his chair, and it lifted from the base, raising him to a normal standing height. He reached out and took the sphere in his hand, and then flipped it casually toward Nathan.
Nathan wasn’t expecting Tinker to treat the artifact with so little concern. He stumbled forward, catching the device, desperate to stop it from hitting the ground. The whole scene amused Tinker, drawing out an extended cackle.
“That thing survived the Earth’s thermosphere. It survived crashing into the surface at something-thousand kilometers per second. Believe me, it can take a fall from a hundred fifty centimeters.”
Nathan held the sphere in his hand, looking at it. It was lighter than he had imagined. It barely had any weight at all. But it felt firm and strong, made of something that didn’t exist on Earth.
“The sphere was discovered on a farm in Kentucky,” Tinker said. “I don’t believe it’s the only one that was sent. I think the Others dropped dozens of them, but they either landed in the ocean and sank, were never found, or were located and hidden because of what they represented. The one you’re holding was confiscated by the National Security Administration as soon as they caught wind of it, and the farmer was told if he ever breathed a word about it, he wouldn’t breathe again. The sphere isn’t the key, but it contained the key. The crazy part about that is what you saw in my office was intentionally designed to be compatible with human storage technology. Well, not so crazy once you dig a little deeper.”
