Afon shrugged and smiled in response, We’ll see …
Afon’s eyes, deep blue under perfectly arched eyebrows, were full of calm and carried one singular message. Trust Isi.
Jian was a man of routine and seemed to be oblivious to the past few moments between Afon and Nanook. He headed toward his hospital-like bed in the lab, ready to be fed.
Nanook and Afon followed his lead and, in a few minutes, Dr. Isidora Nizienko had skillfully inserted an intravenous line in all three of the men, starting the flow of blood into their bodies, restoring and strengthening the Immortals for the battle that surely lay ahead.
FOUR
Afon, Nanook, and Jian had spent the past five years in the cavernous basement laboratory below Thule Airbase, so they were all momentarily stunned at the feel of fresh air on their skin, and in their lungs, as they followed Isi and Fyodor through the door to the outside.
Two soldiers of the AmEur Alliance came to attention at the sound of the door to the lab opening. The stockier of the two turned to Isi, his salt-and-pepper hair and his deep southern accent from the former United States, revealed the length of his service to the Alliance.
“Good evening, Dr. Nizienko,” he said. Then, after a brief pause, he acknowledged Fyodor with one word, “Soldier,” and a nod.
The guard wasn’t completely blocking their way, but it was clear that he had no intention of letting the five of them out onto the grounds, without some sort of explanation.
“Good evening, Lieutenant,” Isi said. “Captain Nizienko will be accompanying my patients, and I, on their last nights walk through the grounds. You’re familiar with the routine, right soldier?”
“Yes ma’am, I sure am familiar with you alls routine,” the Lieutenant said. “I’m also familiar with those creatures you call patients, but I don’t see why you folks feel the need to take ‘em out for a walk. Back home, we just slice the pigs neck open, ‘stead of taking it out for tea and a stroll before the slaughter. But you all go on and enjoy now, get their little walk in, and then get rid of the last three of those bloodsuckers, doc. We’ve got enough problems without their kind around.”
Isi was tempted to remind the guard that “back home” didn’t exist anymore. Wherever he was from, was now underwater. Regardless of whether it was one of the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, or even most of Virginia, it made no difference. “Back home” was gone, and if the obtuse guard wanted a chance for the United States to come back to life, he needed to get out of Isi’s way, and let her have one moment alone with the Immortals, away from prying eyes.
“Ha, ha, very true Lieutenant,” Isi said. “Still, traditions are traditions …”
She smiled at him, and then started walking forward, her hand on Afon’s elbow, continuing on to her objective after placating the views of the AmEur Alliance guard. Fyodor followed his sister, and escorted Jian and Nanook through the door, and into the fenced in area surrounding Thule Airbase.
Afon thought that the five of them had been walking through the grounds for about a mile, when Isi pulled him to a stop and waited for Nanook, Jian, and Fyodor to catch up.
“This should be far enough away to put us out of earshot,” Isi said. “Just act like you’re listening to me give the same farewell and thanks speech that I gave to all of the others on their nights of execution – that will explain us all clumping together like this, for a few moments. When I’m done talking, I want you all to split off and walk away from each other forlornly, like you’re taking your last breath of fresh air and your last look at the world.”
Isi studied Afon, his blond hair holding it’s precise short style against the wind that was sweeping across the airbase. His blue eyes met hers and Isi had to look away, before she became as concerned about herself, as he was about her. Her lover couldn’t stand the thought of Isi putting herself in danger, just to save him. No, Afon’s eyes would be no source of courage for her this night.
Isi glanced over at Nanook, his massive frame blocking the sun from her eyes. Nanook would watch the back of whoever was closest to him, he was a natural born hero, but his greatest desire in this life was to, literally, save the world. He had watched his family wash away in the melting of a great ice sheet, and been forced to stand idly by while his newly green homeland had been invaded, and it’s resources pilfered, for the good of a people not his own. He was a man who should be bent on revenge, but was instead focused on making sure that no one else would ever face the losses that he had faced. Nanook would do much good for the human race but, over the next few hours, he could do the most by doing the least. While Isi would easily trust her life in his hands, tonight Nanook’s physical strength was a warning sign that might let their enemies know what they intend.
Finally, her eyes settled on Jian Hu. Staring off into space, looking out at a slowly darkening sky, every movement Jian made was intentional. Each crease on his hospital scrubs accentuated his bony frame, and every hair on his head was in place but, with all of his seeming mastery over his own body, Jian sensed Isi readying herself to speak again and turned toward her, standing at attention as if she were his commanding officer.
Isi smiled, they’re ready.
Isi cleared her throat to make sure that she had the attention of all three Immortals and said, “Gentlemen, please listen carefully. We don’t have much time … and I do not intend to let a single one of you die tonight.”
FIVE
The barren landscape didn’t give Isi and the Immortals much privacy. For miles around Thule Airbase the land stretched out into a cold, grey nothingness, broken occasionally by a poorly lit runway, or a drab concrete building constructed like a bunker. Greenland was now the number one power in the world, but it met its need for electricity and transportation without access to coal, or oil. The Middle East had become a no-mans land, where one hundred and fifty degree Fahrenheit temperatures were prohibitive. No one could survive the heat in order to extract the oil, and most coal producing regions of the world had been rendered similarly inaccessible. Humans had been reduced to hydropower as their main source of energy, and that provided only barely enough juice for the military and government of the AmEur Alliance to function.
2112 was not the time of great scientific miracles, foretold in popular culture at the beginning of the millennium; 2112 was not the era where cars could fly like planes, it was a time when people were again reading by candlelight.
What a waste, Afon thought. He took a last look over his shoulder at the once majestic Earth, and then walked through the door and back into the laboratory.
Isi led their procession through the building, with Fyodor taking up the rear. Afon, Nanook, and Jian all wore the carefully composed, but simultaneously terrified, look of men on their way to meet their prearranged deaths. One foot in front of the other, they made their way to the center of the building, and came to an elevator. Isi punched in her access code, and then nervously fondled her clipped on identification card and tapped her foot, willing the door to open.
A moment of brief panic ensued, but the door slid to admit them, and Isi turned to nod at the three Immortals. One-by-one they entered the elevator, and seconds later the doors opened on a scene none of them were prepared for.
The Recycler was there, as expected, looming over them. Built ten feet high of polished steel, the whirring sound that emanated from the monstrosity let Afon, Nanook, and Jian know that it was ready to take them to their deaths. But they had all known that the Recycler would be there, just as they had known that the Infinmachine would be there, purring away in high gear on the other side of the auditorium from where they had entered. Unexpectedly though, the two machines looked exactly alike, with the exception of the Infinmachine’s psychedelic paint job, reminiscent of the 1960’s in the former United States. Some of the engineers had even begun jokingly referring to the Infinmachine as the Magical Mystery Tour Bus.
None of the three remaining Immortals had been in this room before, but it was not the impressive array of techn
ology that caught their eyes, and sent a chill through them all.
The President of the AmEur Alliance, Ignis Mortterra, was standing at a podium in the center of the auditorium.
Isi gasped and pulled Afon, Nanook, and Jian to her side, while the anthem of the AmEur Alliance began to play, announcing their arrival.
“He changes nothing,” Isi whispered. Catching each of the Immortals eyes, she continued, “Nothing! The plan remains the same. Understood?”
The three Immortals nodded, Fyodor smiled in acknowledgement, and they all turned to follow the Alliance soldier ahead of them who guided the group down a center aisle in the auditorium to their seats … directly in front of President Mortterra’s podium.
The President of the AmEur Alliance stood with the regal bearing of the former United States Army General that he was, and waited for the small audience in the auditorium to take their seats.
This was not a normal gathering of witnesses for the execution of a criminal. The team of scientists from the Immortality Project were there, clearly torn at the idea of soon seeing their work of the past five years incinerated. The engineers who had labored on the Infinmachine were there, excited to watch the first public demonstration of their time machine. The ten members of the AmEur Alliance Council were there, lending a faux veneer of democracy to the impending execution, much as they made the military dictatorship of the AmEur Alliance appear democratic by the mere fact that they were elected, despite the fact that President Mortterra never had been.
General Ignis Mortterra had appointed himself President in 2101, after the global warming peak of 2100 had forced the exodus of the surviving former citizens of the United States and Europe. Mortterra had organized both the evacuation of the U.S. and, in alliance with the European Union, the invasion of Greenland. His was a one-man rule, unchallenged and unquestioned. Most of the audience in the auditorium would be dead were it not for his leadership, and Mortterra had played on the fear of his citizens in order to maintain his powerful position, for the past eleven years.
Standing in front of this small crowd, his graying brown hair cut short like a soldier, he had never felt more like a god. In minutes, he would show the audience that he held the power to both give life, and to take it away.
Drawing a deep breath, he said, “Good evening, my fellow citizens. I come before you tonight full of grief for the three men who will lay down their lives, in sacrifice to the survival of the great AmEur Alliance. I am here full of pride in our scientists, who have persevered in trying to keep our citizens alive, and who have also been striving to invent some way to stop the extinction of the entire human race, in this harsh new climate that our Earth has been experiencing.
“The burden on all of us is unimaginably heavy, the fate of the whole world is in our hands but, tonight, I come to speak to you as a man at peace. I am at peace, because tonight marks not only an end to the lives of three brave men, but also a beginning. Tonight, we will show, here in this hall, that we have found an answer. Tonight, we will begin to save the world.”
The auditorium erupted into a sustained cheer while Isi’s mind raced. Did George have time to switch the paint jobs on the two machines? Fuck, where is he … I hope they didn’t catch him.
She scanned the audience for her laboratory assistant, George Murphy, and finally saw just the top of his head as the crowd in the room began to retake their seats. Isi stayed standing just long enough to make eye contact with him and, though she could tell he was trembling from the shaking of the red curls that he let grow too long over his forehead, she could see through his thick glasses the look of a fellow rebel, barely able to contain his excitement. The plan is a go. Isi smiled at George before she retook her seat, and waited for President Mortterra to continue.
With the room quiet again, Mortterra picked up his speech where he had left off. “We will save the world, but we will always remember, with grateful hearts, the sacrifices that have been made to get us where we are today. It was only twelve years ago that the human race almost became extinct. When the warming of the Earth reached it’s highest point in the year 2100, humanity stared death in the face. Hundreds of millions of people lost their lives through drought, while hundreds of millions of others perished when the oceans took their homes. We were facing an enemy bigger than all of us, a world on the brink of destruction, but with our faith, we persevered.
“The country I grew up in, the great United States of America, is now half under water, and the rest of the land has turned to desert. But what is taken is always returned to those with eyes to see, and America looked to the north and saw that the same heat that destroyed us, had also melted the icecap over Greenland, showing us the way to our new home, a home that gave us a chance to figure out a way to win an unwinnable war.
“We knew that we would not be able to survive, just by staying here. We knew that our numbers were so small, and the damage to the planet so great, that while we, as individuals, might live a few more decades, the human race itself would become extinct on our watch. We had a choice, like any animal struggling for survival, we could fight, or we could flee … but there was no longer anywhere for us to run to, and so we chose to stay, to stay and to fight.
“We chose to fight. In the year 2107, only six years after the founding of the AmEur Alliance, our scientists began the Immortality Project clinical trial. We were able to develop nanobots that, once injected in the bloodstream, rush to the site of any injury and almost instantaneously repair it. Our scientists discovered a way for us to live forever, but we discovered that God, not man, should wield such a power; we discovered that such a miracle could come with a price that is far too high to pay.
“We are all familiar with the unfortunate side effects caused in their human hosts by the nanobots. Like any machine, these givers of eternal life need fuel to run on and, sadly, their fuel is what we need to live … our blood.”
The crowd in the auditorium erupted into a chorus of boos and hisses. From the back of the room, a deep voice screamed, “Kill the bloodsuckers now!”
Without any conscious decision by the Immortals, the canine teeth of Afon, Nanook, and Jian, all clicked and extended out into fangs automatically. As uncontrollable as Goosebumps, the Immortals don’t choose when their teeth extend, but this was really bad timing. The sound of their canines releasing like switchblades clearly reached the ears of President Mortterra, who smiled benevolently down at them.
Ignoring the heckler, and the Immortals, he resumed, “We would do well to remember, that only a few of the one hundred men who received the injections of the nanobots turned to murder to satisfy their new need for blood fuel. A few participants in the Immortality Project resorted to killing, that is true, but the vast majority of our test subjects stayed what they always were … self-sacrificing patriots … and we owe these men, these volunteers, a debt of gratitude.
“While we bid farewell to Afon, Nanook, and Jian tonight, we know in our hearts that these men pointed all of us toward the truth: human beings were never meant to be immortal. The Earth moves through natural cycles of warming and natural ice ages, changing the landscape of the world, and culling the weaker members of each species. Our planet has always done this – will always do this – and we must learn to adapt, and to live with the changes. We must light a candle, and stop cursing the darkness.
“Some of us will stay here to light that candle, and build a new society in this new world we are facing. I envy those of you who will stay here, with your loved ones. I envy you, for I will be leaving this country that I have worked so hard to build, over these past eleven years. But, as you all know, I once had another country, the great United States of America, and if there is a chance to save her, I must take it.”
A questioning and uncertain murmur made its way through the audience.
“I have the historic honor of announcing tonight that there is such a chance to undo all that has been damaged. When the side effects of the Immortality Project became clear, your go
vernment, under my direction, began research into the possibility of time travel.”
Parts of the audience gasped and began whispering to each other, but Isi, Fyodor, and the Immortals had known this was coming. The idea of Mortterra executing three men, and then taking off into the past to save only his own ass, was what had pushed Isi into her rebellion … that, and her love for Afon. Mortterra was a good enough politician that Isi assumed he had a better story prepared for public consumption, than the one she had heard from him in private.
After the Infinmachine had been sent on a few trial runs with humans, and he was assured of its safety, President Mortterra had met with Dr. Isidora Nizienko and asked her to accompany him back in time, to the year 2000, so that they could sell the nanobot technology that Isi had pioneered. Mortterra had tried to convince Isi that they could warn scientists in the year 2000 about the apocalypse that the human race would be facing in one hundred years, but Isi knew enough about global warming to know that that would not be nearly enough time to save the planet. It would, however, be exactly enough time to ensure that President Mortterra and Isi would live out their natural life spans as two of the wealthiest people on the planet.
Isi had pretended agreement with Mortterra just to give her a chance to get to this night, just to give her a chance to save Afon, and maybe even a chance to stop the human race from ushering in its own destruction.
Isi forced herself to look up at President Mortterra and not show her distaste for him. She smiled and nodded in seeming agreement and encouragement, as Mortterra began to speak again.
“And so, tonight, after I oversee the extermination of these Immortals who were never meant to be, I will resign as your President, and put on my marching boots once more. The Infinmachine will take me, and a small number of others, into the past … a past where we will try to stop the terrible events of the year 2100 from ever occurring. Tonight I will go back in time to save our Earth’s future.”
Immortal Earth (Vampires For Earth Book 1) Page 2
