Reconception: The Fall

by Deborah Greenspan

  “Maybe we should be working on changing animals—you know, adapt them to taking in CO2 instead of oxygen,” Garrett said, sitting down at the desk across from her station.

  “No less complicated than trying to fix the earth or networking brains,” Evie said, slipping the slide out of the microscope and then bending forward to release the tension that always built up in her back when she was concentrating. “You're right though,” she added as she stood up. “We need to take another tack. We can’t do this microbe by microbe. We need a more holistic way of defining the system we’re trying to create and ....”

  Garrett threw a paper clip at the wastebasket and stood up, too edgy to sit. “We’ve already got models like that,” he argued.

  “Yes, but they’re too simplistic.”

  “But that’s exactly what I’m saying. We haven’t the knowledge, skill, or a computer large enough or intelligent enough to do it. It’s too complex.”

  “So what do we do?” she said, looking directly at him.

  She’s done it again, he thought. Picked up my thought and carried it forward. “We change direction,” he said, smiling. “So. Where exactly do you envision us heading?”

  Evie laughed. “Same place we’ve always been going: into the unknown.”

  “I think we need to work on a smaller scale,” he insisted.

  “You mean larger, don’t you?”

  “No, I mean smaller than the whole world.”

  Evie grinned, “And I mean bigger than a microbe.”

  “Well, I’m glad we’re in agreement,” Garrett said, laughing. “How about a plant?”

  “How about an animal?”

  “How about a human?”

  There was a short silence as the implications of this ran through their minds. Evie broke it with a sudden deluge of ideas. “It should be a plant that can survive surface conditions. It should consume CO2 at a rapid rate and excrete large quantities of oxygen. It should not need too much water ....” She stopped to think.

  “It should provide nourishment,” Garret stated.

  “For whom?”

  “Some people think there are still people and animals living up there.”

  “Do you?” Evie asked.

  “We’ve been up there.”

  Thoughtfully, she chewed the tip of her nail and looked at Garret. “That’s true. Some people may have been tough enough to survive, just like the plant life we’ve seen.”

  “And insect life and microbial and fungal life ... ..”

  “I think you’re right; it should provide nourishment. But do we design it to feed microbes and insects, which we know exist, or mammals, which we suspect may be alive?”

  Garret thought for a moment. “Look, up to this very minute, we, and everyone else, have been working on restoring the earth, making it habitable for us to live on again. What we’re talking about now is not reclaiming it but improving it for those who are already living there, for those who’ve already proved their ability to survive.

  We’re assuming that it may be centuries before it will be possible for people like us to survive on the surface, if ever, but that indigenous species can be assisted. What I’m saying is let’s support whatever life there is now. It’s not possible to recreate what was.”

  “Or maybe we should go a step further ....” Evie mused.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure yet; let me think about it. Let’s do something else,” she said suggestively, stepping forward into his arms. Garret breathed her in and pulled her closer, and they stopped working.

  CHAPTER 2

  East USA Habitat: 2128

  John Morgan was not a New Scientist. He was hereditary Chairman of the Board of several major oil companies, pharmaceutical companies and food conglomerates that no longer existed. He was a 45-year-old man of distinction, impeccably groomed and dressed, carefully tanned and manicured. Every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday morning, he played tennis, and every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday morning, he played squash. He took all his vitamins and adhered to a scientifically designed diet that guaranteed him a long and productive life. Fine restaurants and rich foods were a thing of the past anyway.

  In East USA, the underground city where Morgan had been born just nine years before Garret and Evie, 5000 people made their residence. Children were few, and the saying was, "One good apple is worth the whole rotten barrel." Energy and space were limited; therefore, once the original children had grown up, no more could be born. Only when someone died was birth permitted. Morgan had been one of these babies: a treasure, carefully reared, educated, and spoiled.

  His father, who died before Morgan was allowed to be conceived, had been a scientist of modest reputation before the Fall, but he had also been the only son of an industrial giant, which connection was stellar enough to earn him a place in the underground city. By some genetic miscalculation, it was not just his father's scientific capability that came out of the sperm bank, but his great great grandfather's ruthless drive for power as well.

  Morgan had been bred to be an intelligence of the first order, and he was. He was also a megalomaniac—a man whose feelings of guilt (carefully instilled in him by his teachers) were inversely related to his acquisition of power: the more power he attained, the less guilt he felt.

  His mother, Anna Claxton, had never been fooled. She saw if no one else did, the monumental effort it took for Morgan to control himself when he didn't get his way. She admired what she saw as strength of character, not realizing that it was merely Morgan's understanding of his present weakness, not any innate concern for the rights of others keeping him in check.

  Evie and Garret gave Morgan as wide a berth as possible, and had done so since they were four and he was twelve. During a game of hide and seek initiated by Morgan, they discovered just how ruthless he could be.

  “Come on, Morgan,” Evie had teased, holding her long blond braids out from her head. “Play with us!” Garret and Evie had been released from school and were on their way back to their living quarters when they spotted Morgan hanging out in the 1st Quad, doing homework. There were few children in the habitat, and Morgan was considered a contemporary despite the eight years difference in age. “Let’s play a game!”

  Morgan weighed his homework against playing with the little kids. Neither was of much interest. The math was easy, and he was bored. The kids…well, they might offer some diversion. “Like what? Tag? You know I’m too fast for you,” he said.

  “I know!” Garret said, “Let’s play hide and seek. You hide, and me and Evie will find you.”

  Morgan thought about it briefly and shook his head. Hiding in a closet somewhere from a couple little kids didn’t sound like fun. “Nah. You go hide. I’ll find you.”

  When he did find them, instead of letting them know it, he locked the door of the storage space he found them in and went back to the quad to finish his homework. Six hours later, after he’d had dinner and was getting ready for bed, he thought of the consequences he might have to suffer, and decided he’d better release them. Garret leaped at him when he opened the door, punching him with his little four-year-old fists. Morgan held him off until he settled down, his dark wrath incongruous on his baby face. “Come on, you guys,” Morgan said. “Wasn’t that fun?” Evie’s tears and Garret’s anger just made him laugh. In fact, it was the best time he’d had all week.

  When Evie began to blossom in adolescence, Morgan was irresistibly drawn to her, as were most of the men in East USA. But he was twenty-two to her fourteen, and his wife, twenty-five year old Elissa, was a bore. Evie was a challenge that sharpened his wits and tore at his ego. His attempts to seduce her met with consoling smiles, and sometimes gales of laughter. “John!” she’d say, “I’m only fourteen!” or “Stop it, John. You’re married!” But Morgan could see that fourteen was ripe, and his marriage, arranged from birth, meant nothing to him.

  One day, he followed her back to her cubicle and opened the door, which was never locked, t
o find her getting undressed. Her back was toward him and his breath caught as she peeled off the navy jumpsuit, revealing the slender curves of her back and buttocks. As she turned toward the shower—her long, blonde hair swinging—she saw him in the doorway and froze.

  Morgan enjoyed the moment. He admired her breasts and belly, even the look of shock on her face. He stepped forward, crossing the eight feet between them, and reached out. Evie whirled out of reach, slamming the door of the bathroom in his face.

  Angry now, Morgan turned the handle and pushed on the door. He was strong and wiry, and she was just fourteen, so it didn’t take long for him to push it back far enough to get a hand inside. The pain as a pair of scissors went into his hand was unbearable, but he grunted in agony and kept pushing. This wasn’t about sex anymore. Now it was about control. He would have her. She would be his.

  And Morgan’s will might have made it so except that Evie was just as determined that he would not have her, that she would not be his. She pulled the scissors out of his hand and stabbed him again, and this time, Morgan couldn’t do anything but withdraw his arm. Evie slammed the door closed and locked it.

  Swearing, he opened her tiny closet, pulling out a shirt and wrapping his arm and hand. The pain lessened slightly, and blood stopped pouring out. Morgan sat down on the bed to catch his breath.

  “You’d better get out of here,” Evie said from behind the door.

  “You can’t stay in there forever.”

  “Get out of here, John, or I won’t be responsible for what happens to you.”

  Morgan laughed. “What happens to me?”

  There was silence for several minutes. Then there was a knock on the door. Morgan didn’t know what to do. There was blood everywhere. Evie was locked in the bathroom. The knock came again, and then the voice of Jersey Lipton. “Evie! Evie, what the hell is going on in there? There’s talcum powder pouring out of the vents. Is everything all right?”

  Morgan cringed. She’d dumped powder into the air vent and it was flooding the hall! Pulling his dignity like a robe around him, he got up, opened the door and walked out, pushing past Lipton and disappearing around the corner.

  The repercussions had been minor, the worst of it being the jokes about how a man of twenty-two couldn’t take a fourteen-year-old girl. Between the stitches he’d needed in his hand and forearm, and the ridicule, most of East USA thought he’d been punished enough.

  Except for Garret, who caught up with him in the 1st Quad and threatened him in public, saying that if Morgan ever so much as went near Evie without an invitation again, he, Garret, would see to it that the next time Morgan got to his feet, he would be missing a couple of vital parts.

  After that, Morgan stayed away from Evie. Not because he was afraid of Garret, but because of the titters and chuckles at his expense. Someday he’d get even. When the time was right.

  Another thing Morgan kept hidden was his ambition, but after his thirty-fifth birthday when his work on the regeneration of earth's atmosphere had earned him a position of some influence, he opened up and let it show. People started to pay serious attention to him and to his ideas, and he began to crave more of the same. He discovered that people he had formerly taken as intellectual equals could now be manipulated. This aroused in him such contempt that he could scarcely contain it.

  Morgan had it worked out to a formula. Find a man's weakness (basically whatever he believed in). It could be an ideal, his feeling of love for another, his respect for his fellows, his desire to be recognized for his ability, or his fear of looking like a fool. It didn't matter what the weakness was; once it was found, it was a simple matter to use it to control the man. It never occurred to Morgan that what he called a weakness was very often the most decent thing about the individual.

  When he realized that the project in which they were all involved would never end, at least not during his lifetime, he began to have serious doubts about its merit. His life would be unending work deep within the bowels of East USA, with little opportunity to exercise what he had come to believe was his true gift—his ability to manipulate and control the lives of others. He was bored with the Habitat. He was sick of the sameness. He wanted a change.

  At first it was just a niggling little thought that kept going round and round his mind. What would happen if the earth restoration project were abandoned? What would happen if there were no restoration project? Then he began to imagine scenarios that put an end to it, realizing that the only way this could happen was to put an end to the earth.

  The thought tantalized him; it drew him like a magnet draws steel. Could he do it, he wondered? Could he carry it off? Could he convince others to work with him, or in some other way coerce them? In no time at all, the thought became a challenge he could not deny. He would do it. He would put paid to the whole venture and start a new era in human history.

  The first question was: what could he do to finish off the earth once and for all? It was his wife, Elissa, who answered that one. Elissa, Morgan had long ago decided, was some kind of throwback. She had had an education of superior dimensions even by Underground standards. She was the daughter of a corporate king, and all the little fool wanted was to have a baby.

  One "evening," he let her ramble on and on about her need before interjecting, "You know there's no way you can have a baby until someone dies, and then you have to wait for your turn. There are four women ahead of you."

  "Of course I know that. It'll be ten years before my turn or more, and even then, it won't be our baby—not really. I want us to have a baby the old fashioned way, our baby, not the baby of some dead man. Oh, I know the law, but why can't we change the law, or figure some way around it? Don't we have any power or influence?"

  Chuckling, Morgan replied, reaching for the cup on the coffee table, "You sound like a spoiled little debutante, not a scientist with a total education."

  "I know. I know. It's just that I want it so desperately. I can't stop what I feel. I just wish there was some way...."

  He pretended to think for a moment before answering, "Maybe there is ... you know, if there was just some extra space, if we all didn't feel so closed in, if we'd only work a little harder on making our own situation more bearable, instead of forever trying to make reparations for what our ancestors did. We didn't do it. Why do we have to suffer?"

  "I agree with you 100%!" his wife cried. "If only we could expand our horizons a little, build more cities, travel a little. We've become so insular. It's just all wrong. My natural instincts are being smothered. I want a baby!"

  "The only way to change the direction of our R and D would be to end the earth project."

  "Oh, no one would do that," she said, stretching out on the couch. "Not unless someone made them give it up. It's practically a religion to some of these people you know."

  "I know. I know." Morgan grimaced in distaste. "You'd think people of their supposed intelligence and education would be above all that, wouldn't you?"

  "The only thing that could stop the earth project would be a disaster of such dimensions that it became hopeless to persevere. You know, like a nuclear accident ... "

  "But we have no nuclear weapons...."

  Elissa looked at him darkly. "Morgan, I'm surprised at you! Think of the millions of tons of waste! But, this is a foolish conversation. That’s not the answer to us getting a baby."

  Morgan liked the idea. Although all nuclear power plants (no more than sophisticated, expensive and dangerous devices used to boil water) had been shut down in 2018, the problem of what to do with the billions of gallons of deadly nuclear waste remaining, had never really been solved.

  Each of hundreds of commercial breeder reactors in the U.S. had, for over 50 years, produced tons of cesium-137, strontium-90, and other radioactive materials requiring hundreds of years of isolation from the environment. Additionally, between four and five hundred pounds of plutonium was produced in each reactor each year.

  Since even the tiniest dose of plutonium i
s lethal to all life for 500,000 years, it had to be kept isolated from the environment for virtually all time. This was, of course, an impossible task, and just as there had been power plant accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Guadalupe, and transport accidents such as Albuquerque (which rendered the entire city uninhabitable for the next 500 years when cesium-137 was leaked from a truck) a catastrophic nuclear event was only a matter of time. Fortunately, the clock stopped when the power plants were shut down.

  In Morgan's time, barely a hundred million hardy souls, genetically predisposed to live under the most harrowing conditions, still survived on the surface despite cancer, mutations, brain dysfunctions and more. But the worst was yet to come.

  The chromosome damage and sweeping death of every form of life caused by a nuclear accident of such magnitude as that imagined by Morgan would finish the planet off. Plants would die or mutate into poisons that could not be ingested. Reproduction would stop as plants and animals became sterile. Even when no damage was evident, the plant carrying the most minute bit of plutonium would destroy any herbivore that ate it and any carnivore that ate the herbivore, and so on and so on ad infinitum. Death would not be quick or easy for these unfortunates but slow, painful, and very ugly.

  To Morgan, this was of little consequence. What kind of lives did these remaining inhabitants of earth have anyway? His useless wife had given him the answer. He knew what he would do. Now all he needed to know was how, where and when.

  CHAPTER 3

  East USA Habitat: 2128

  Industrialism was founded on the premise that it was perfectly rational to profit at the cost of common property; and self-interest, for most people, represented the highest level of rational thinking. To consider that it might be reasonable to take only what one needed and no more was considered either ridiculously idealistic or dangerously communistic. The results of industrialization were finally an indictment of the capitalist system that spawned it. It was on this sorry foundation that the world rested and finally died.