The End of the Beginning

by Eichholz, Zachary

  “What about adaptation projects?” William asked, finding himself becoming increasingly enthralled the more Roger spoke. William had always been fascinated by geopolitics and world affairs. It was something about the complexity of it all that just appealed to him.

  “Ah, yes,” Roger said, “the other side of the organization.” He gestured to a map on the screen. “Areas around the planet are studied and identified by the IPCC – that’s the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” he interjected, “that are in most need of repair based on their importance to overall planetary systems and human health. Once identified, remediation techniques are evaluated and a plan of action readied. After approval from the Security Council, the project can begin. Twelve such climate change, risk prevention, and geoengineering remediation projects have already been approved and are well into construction, nearly complete, or finished. One could say it’s the terraforming of our own world.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” William interrupted. “Geoengineering. What’s that?”

  Roger tried his best to explain. “Geoengineering is the attempt to slow down global warming and repair environmental damage on both regional and global scales through various engineering schemes. That’s about as much as I know. The men and women behind it can tell you more later once we arrive at the base and you go through basic.”

  “So, we’re going to one of these bases?” William asked.

  “Yes, we are, in Florida. It's just outside the town of Oak Hill, to be exact, just north of the Kennedy Space Center. The base we are going to is a little special for reasons you’ll discover when we get there; that’s why it was built near the Cape.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to the Cape,” William said with the most exuberant tone Roger had heard from him yet…

  That was where we were supposed to have gone when it was all over. When we were all safe. I dreamed of that day that never came to be. Now, I would be there, but alone…

  “Yeah,” Roger said. “It's a great place… Anyway, the organization hasn’t started rescue operations yet. We are still getting some final touches squared away. Opening ceremonies are set to begin in three months in late June.”

  Roger swiped a calendar down from the tablet’s menu.

  “Three months exactly, actually. Three months to have the chance to be the last class of trainees before opening and to get to know the ins and outs of UNIRO. And shave...” he said with a bemused expression.

  “Yeah, I could use a little cleanup,” William chuckled, feeling his scruffy face. “So, this organization seems pretty powerful. When the UN worked with us in Korea, I remember their power to make agreements was only usually non-binding and their reports and actions were more like suggestions than anything else. They had no spine. How did you get around that? Why are countries following all this?”

  “The agreement that formed UNIRO is binding international law,” Roger explained, “What would be the point of doing anything if the organization you made to do something had no teeth? Also, some things were changed around and the organization, once it receives the bought parts and vehicles it needs to function, permanently owns them. The UN has never been able to own anything before until now. This skips over the old method of waiting for supplies to be found and gathered and then mobilized when it's already too late. The organization works, Captain. It’s a fast and efficient system. It’s a wonderful thing, finally.”

  “Yeah. It’s certainly been a busy six years. If you guys have all this fancy tech and money though, why exactly do you need me, sir? I’m sure you have already found the world's best and brightest, some young kids ready to rock the world or something.”

  Roger turned, putting away the glass tablet as he did. He then leaned in and looked at William.

  “We have plenty of kids. What we need is someone to whip them into shape. You were one of the best pararescuers in history. We want you to keep your present rank and lead a team of your own again, search and rescue. You see, UNIRO runs paramilitary style. The organization has ranks and squadrons like the military but the only difference is we are not soldiers, we’re rescuers and we don’t fight with weapons. We fight with construction and preparedness. You would lead one of these squadrons. In fact, you would do operations in this very aircraft. Phoenix 1.”

  “My own team and aircraft? This aircraft?”

  Roger waved his head enthusiastically. “Yeah, this aircraft.”

  William leaned back in his seat, looking overwhelmed. “So all of the Phoenixes are aircraft?” he asked curiously.

  “No,” Roger replied, “most of them are aircraft but many of them are ships and orbiting satellites. They are machines that each serve a specific purpose whether it be cargo transport or asteroid deflection.”

  “Asteroid deflection?” exclaimed William.

  “That one's not finished yet. Still on the boards. We’ll show you all of them once we get to the base. We will be there in about six hours, so get some rest while you can. You’ll be pretty busy.”

  William decided to take Roger up on his advice. He leaned his head against the window and tried to fall asleep. His mind was buzzing from all this new information. This new mystical organization seemed incredible, almost too good to be true. Even still, he thought, they wanted him enough to hunt him down from the backwoods of Alberta. William closed his eyes, contemplating. They wanted him. They needed him, and that made him feel something he had not felt in a long, long time, he thought as he nodded off against the window. Purpose.

  CHAPTER 12: Home

  “Where are we going, Poppy?” I asked.

  “Someplace safe, Will,” he said with forced strength...

  “Captain, wake up, we're almost there,” Roger said, shaking William. “Captain! Wake up.”

  William opened his eyes to a bright blue ocean only a few hundred feet below, moving swiftly by.

  “Are we there?” he groaned, sitting up.

  “Yeah, almost. We’re approaching the coast of Florida. We’ve arranged to do a flyby of the base so you can see it properly.”

  A large piercing white ship with what looked like a kite attached at its bow came into view below. William could see it had the UNIRO seal on its hull.

  “One of yours,” said William to Roger, pointing below.

  Roger looked and said, “Yeah, that’s Phoenix 25.”

  The pilots told everyone to prepare to descend. Then they engaged in the usual pilot babble.

  “This is Phoenix 1-2 calling Tranquility Tower.”

  “Tranquility Tower, Phoenix 1-2. We have you on radar. Descend to 400 feet and continue on your present course. Once flyby is completed, use landing pad zero-four.”

  “Understood, Tranquility. We are passing outer beacon buoy now, seven miles out. We’ll be over the seawall in three minutes. Base computer is synchronizing. Bring us on home.”

  William heard all this and looked back to Roger and said, “Tranquility. What is that?”

  “Tranquility is the name of the base,” Roger replied, moving with Andrew over to where William was sitting, each taking their own row and window seat.

  “You're on the side you’ll want to be on,” said Andrew from behind Roger, who was behind William. “Any second now.”

  William turned so that his entire body was facing the window. He anxiously awaited the site of the base; his nose pressed against the glass. A few small ice crystals were on the other side of the window. As William watched them, they began to melt with the warming air. Air streamed past the airframe across the engines and the stationary disk above. William looked down at the ocean as his ears popped. It was clean and had only a light chop across its surface. A bright sun was to their south, high in the Florida sky. The last time he could remember seeing the ocean, he had just landed in San Diego from Hawaii after the war.

  William felt like a child. Having been closed off in a shell of solitude for years, he had forgotten the world and its many simple gifts. Things seemed brighter and warmer and it wasn’t just
the clear day. William was about to undertake an adventure much like that of colonizers of old, not to discover a new land but a new life. The sails had been set and his course laid out in front of him. All he had to do was find the wind.

  A dolphin jumped from the waters below, a few more of the pod followed in its wake. From the air, the playful group looked like an aerial battle. Their wakes looked like contrails and their splashes like explosions, intertwining in a display of aquatic precision. Roger suddenly pointed.

  “There it is, look. Home.”

  William looked to the west and then saw it.

  CHAPTER 13: A Base for Change

  As they gradually turned north, the full scope of the base became apparent. Roger hadn’t been exaggerating - it was a city. Blue and white structures abounded. A massive semi-circle shaped seawall jutted out from the shore. It had a sort of earthen levee shape to it. At its keystone was an opening for shipping traffic. A seagate, Roger called it. There were two more seagate openings on the north and south ends of the semicircle but they were closed at the moment. On top of the wall, wind turbines spun majestically, spread out every few thousand feet or so, their tower bases sloping down the side of the wall into the sea. Solar panels lined the wall’s sides and its flat top had an access road. At the bottom of the wall on the ocean facing side, jagged star-like concrete structures protruded up from the water.

  “What are those things pointing out of the water?” asked William.

  Andrew answered, “Those are concrete accropodes, habitats for marine wildlife. The concrete pods have holes in them, which provide places for fish to colonize and sea plants to grow. Hundreds of thousands of them line the outside of the seawall. We get a lot of hurricanes here; they also act to dissipate wave energy on the wall. Our wall is designed to handle a category five hurricane and a fifty foot high tsunami.”

  Inside the seawall was a harbor filled with ships of all sizes and designs. Row upon row of shipping containers stacked four and five units high stretched inland over hundreds of acres, perpendicular to the shore. Straddle carriers, automated stacking cranes, and trucks scuttled around and atop the containers, moving them back and forth between the harbors docks and the huge yard. Some containers were being moved into large solar panel covered warehouses near the docks. The docks were spread out over what had to be at least ten miles from north to south. Each of them was large enough to fit at least three post-panamax ships.

  “Those giant blue and white striped container handling cranes down there perched over the docking areas,” Roger pointed, “are some of the largest in the world, and are controlled with a single joystick. Amazing.”

  The seawall continued inland shortly, then turned inward towards the base parallel to the shore. After a few hundred feet, it resumed inland, still covered in wind turbines, splitting into two walls that formed a huge perimeter around the circular base. Surrounding the perimeter walls were large stretches of bright green grass and shaded walkways; in between them, a canal. A system of wide roads and maglev train lines followed the inner perimeter wall, eventually converging at the center of the circular base in three spokes. The three converging spokes, which Andrew called transportation spokes, separated the base into three distinct watermelon slice-looking sections: one up against the ocean taking up the eastern side of the base, the other facing south and west, and the last one west and north.

  “It kinda looks like a peace sign,” William commented. “Was that done on purpose?”

  “Yeah,” Roger laughed, “but it also serves a function. The roads and gradual hills they’re on split the base into three distinct sections.”

  He pointed at a structure in the distance. “On the east-facing side, we have the Port Section. It, of course, handles all incoming and outgoing traffic and ships rescue equipment in large-scale operations. There is the port command center over there and the mini-sub hangar over there. Oh, and those two glass buildings at either end are refugee terminals for incoming survivors. We can bring thousands into the base via our Phoenix rescue ships. Each base has a fleet of 125 ships. On the southwest side is the Airport Section. It’s got a state of the art terminal and a hydrogen production facility that meets the fuel needs of eighty five percent of all our transportation assets.”

  “I don’t remember hydrogen being so widely used as a fuel source. Technology has progressed that much? How?” asked William.

  “Big money, big breakthroughs,” said Andrew, raising his eyebrows.

  Roger pointed to a distant, fenced in area containing hundreds of white balloons that resembled the bells of jellyfish. “Those balloons are producing hydrogen through ponds of genetically engineered algae.”

  “That’s a lot of hydrogen,” William muttered.

  “Yep,” Roger nodded. “For our fleet, we need it.”

  William could see the familiar C-17 Globemasters and V-22 Ospreys parked across the airport apron, painted in white and brandishing the blue and white UNIRO logo. Beyond them were rows of helicopters and other aircraft he had never seen before. Hangars with grass roofs and solar panels made the airport look more like a grassy field with puddles of shining water than a working facility.

  These aircraft and hangars lay next to the airport section’s two extremely long runways that went from west to east with an enormous terminal to the north of the runways near the convergence of the three roads at the center of the base. The terminal was a trefoil plan with three symmetrical wings with rounded edges and walls.

  “Each runway is 12,000 feet long, perfectly capable of handling any aircraft in the world,” boasted Roger.

  Wheel-less trucks with shipping containers glided across the surface of the tarmac, levitating a few inches above the ground as they did. William blinked twice after seeing this.

  “Are those trucks even touching the ground?!”

  “No, they are not,” Roger explained. “Superconductive magnets embedded in the roads levitate the trucks for frictionless, efficient cargo transport. It’s a pilot program for one of our company partners and so far, it's working fine. The airport is the only section that has those beauties. They are taking equipment brought over from the BLOC Section.” He pointed to an area on the northwest side of the facility.

  “BLOC stands for Base Logistics and Operations Center,” he continued. “The BLOC Section has five warehouses, the largest in the world, where all of our supplies are stored in a climate controlled and computer-handled environment. You see, the base is controlled by a supercomputer. Once a call for action has come in, the base’s computer makes the necessary supply and equipment list. Using this data, warehouse computers, through a system of conveyer belts and tracking cranes, search for the desired items using RFID tags. Autonomous electric trucks, which are loaded at the warehouses, then take the supplies through special access roads to unloading areas in either the port or airport sections. Then the trucks go back to the warehouse either to gather more supplies or to recharge.”

  William shifted his eyes from the airport to the BLOC Section. Of all the sections, it was the most beautiful, having pieces of preserved lands filled with original areas of marshes and wetlands. Abounding with open green areas, small lakes, and newly planted trees, it looked like an oasis. In so many ways, it reminded William of Incheon, before the war – a futuristic city with nothing but ambition and innovation. William braced himself against the window as the plane began to circle back towards the southeast.

  “This is the section where you will be living, Captain, down in the officer's quarters,” Roger said. “They’re really nice. Made from recycled shipping containers - brilliant building technique. The containers are stacked three to four stories tall to make entire buildings literally overnight. Each one has a prefabricated interior that only needs to be plugged into the worksite once it arrives. You’ll never have to leave the base - everything is provided. We have a supermarket, three personnel dining halls, sporting facilities if you like to play sports, entertainment. Everything! Plus, I got you an ocea
n view for your room... well... kind of,” he said, looking a little sheepish as he trailed off. “Warehouse 5 kinda gets in the way... And the terminal… Anyways, when you’re not on missions you’ll be working in that tower. It’s called Umoja Tower. It’s where all the base’s administrative stuff is done. The base’s main command center is under that tower, two stories below ground. That’s where I will be working once I’m transferred here from New York,” he added.

  William gazed at the tower. Located at the northwest end of the base, next to the main entrance of the compound, it looked to made up of mostly glass and concrete, with vines and shrubs draped over its gleaming white façade. It had an industrial look to it, with a truss extending up the south side of the building. Running up the length of the truss was a collection of satellite dishes and antennas. A helicopter pad on its roof made the structure look as though it was wearing a giant metal hat. At the bottom of the tower, below the main façade, was a grand plaza with a reflecting pool in the shape of an elongated pentagon. Three flagpoles protruded from the center of the pool, flying the flags of the UN, USA, and UNIRO.

  A number of buildings were spread out across the section, poking through the manmade canopy of trees. The warehouses Roger had been talking about, came into view through a canopy along the sections southeast side following the inner roads to the point of their convergence. They were the largest buildings William had ever seen. All white, numbered from one to five, and covered in solar panels, they looked like massive guardians of the base, overlooking their land.