The Garden

by Craig W. Turner

  “I didn’t have long to find you,” he replied. “They run a pretty tight ship here.”

  “So I see.”

  To their left was one of the crown jewels of SATP, The Copernicus, a 5-star restaurant overlooking the rest of the campus and the western view, frequented mainly by the organization’s leadership. There were a few food offerings in the park, but none matched its level of sophistication and luxury. Robert, of course, was a regular at the restaurant, often hosting dignitaries and heads-of-state as part of their welcome party and tour. Though he never admitted it, he thought their lobster was a little tough.

  “What’s on your mind?” Robert asked.

  “Why are you here?” Landon asked, finally turning to face him. He wasn’t defensive. More frustrated at having drawn the team’s attention in a negative way. “You have more important things to be doing than babysitting me.”

  “Actually, I don’t,” he said, taking a position next to him, leaning on the wall and looking out the adjacent window. He could see the array of neighborhoods below. “Landon, we don’t have a lot of moves here. I’m not happy about what’s happening, either. But if we don’t do something dramatic, tomorrow morning I’m going to prison and you’re headed back to India. SATP is finished.”

  “I thought I was here on my merit,” Landon said. “Not as part of some scheme. I’ve done good work.”

  “Nobody’s denying that.”

  “The Eden paper was a joke. A random essay I wrote to challenge myself because I was bored. I haven’t looked at it since – until General Reilly slid it across the table at me.” He turned back to the view off the building. “To learn that it’s what got me the role in the program is… Well, disheartening, at best.”

  “You’re making inferences,” Robert said. This conversation was going to be a challenge, but he had no choice. Landon’s position paper on Eden was ground-breaking, even if he didn’t feel that way about it. And while Robert, himself, hadn’t put great weight on it during Landon’s interview process, Reilly had been adamant about considering it. Keegan’s obsession with an Eden mission had only fueled the fire, and now Robert found himself a player in the game. “Just because Reilly tossed a paper across the room at you doesn’t mean it’s the be-all, end-all of your value to the program. It’s a piece of the puzzle. The President coming after us – well, that was just bad timing. Your second day here. But we’ve been researching this mission since long before you wrote this paper. Don’t think that this is all about you.”

  “No, of course I don’t think it’s all about me,” he said, still staring out even though the sun was exceptionally bright. Landon stood, reflecting for a long moment before turning back toward Robert. “What are they asking of me?”

  “Landon, your paper is the only research on the topic that’s been done from the perspective of what we, as scientists, can expect if we get there and there really is, truly, a Garden of Eden,” Robert said. There wasn’t time to be cryptic. He had to lay it out for him. “There are some of us on the team, as you might have found out already, that believe one way or another, but yours is the only research that assessed scientifically what it would mean if what’s written in the Bible and in other ancient texts about the origin of man are true.”

  He was shaking his head. “But that’s not true,” he said. “That’s not what my paper said. And how did you get it anyway? It’s not a public document. It was never published.”

  Robert wasn’t about to divulge that. At least not yet. So, he shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you, Landon. All I know is we have it, and it’s the most forward-thinking work on the topic that’s been done to date.” He stopped and looked at the restaurant. “It’s super hot up here, Landon. Can I buy you a drink?” He motioned with his head toward The Copernicus.

  “I had enough last night,” he said. “I’m not a big drinker.”

  “How about something? Iced tea? Water? I can’t handle this heat.”

  Landon looked for a moment as though he would try to use his discomfort as a way out, but eventually nodded and turned toward the restaurant. They walked inside and made their way to the bar, though Robert was forced to stop and glad-hand the maître d’, two of the servers and about a half-dozen diners seated at tables along his route. The word was spreading, and there was no avoiding it now. He knew them all, of course, but his mind was too cluttered to put names to faces at that moment. Each one gave him an encouraging sort of Atta-guy! grin and knowing look.

  After a few moments, they were settled at the bar with drinks in front of them – a glass of a 30-year-old bottle of Bowmore that they kept behind the bar for him, and for Landon, a glass of water with a lemon.

  Once they’d had a moment to sample their drinks, Robert continued the conversation. “What did you mean, that’s not what your paper said?”

  Landon picked up where he’d left off. “You’re telling me that my paper explored what would happen if the Biblical account of the Creation is true, and that’s not accurate. It may be what SATP wants to read into it, but that’s not what I said.”

  “Correct my thinking, then.”

  “First of all,” Landon said, “at the time, time travel wasn’t on my mind, so the connection you’re making is suspect from the start. What I did in my paper was to look at if there was such a thing as intelligent design, then science would be forced to explain its various aspects in a concrete way.”

  “Isn’t that the same-”

  “No,” Landon said, cutting off his question. “It’s not. To date, the scientific debate has been about how to prove Creation to be false. And why wouldn’t it be? The Creationists, from whatever religion they represent, had no way to prove that what they believed was true – that’s the axiom of the various deities that people hold belief in, right? Faith. Faith in a higher power that has some degree of control over what happens to humanity. So, because there was no way to prove that a belief is based on reality, all the Creationists could do was throw their hands up and say that the entire foundation of our existence must be based on faith. And since science could neither prove nor disprove an assertion based on faith, it has spent centuries simply telling the Creationists that what they’re saying is absurd.”

  Landon took a drink from his glass of water, giving Robert the opportunity to jump in. “But science believes it has disproven Creationism.”

  “Then why does more than three-quarters of the planet still subscribe to it?” He waited for an answer, but Robert said nothing. He wasn’t sure what the best response would be, given the circumstances, so he just took a sip of his own drink. Landon continued, “What I did – what I tried to do – was turn the conversation upside-down: what if the Creation stories were true? How would science explain all of the phenomena that mankind has written about and believed for millennia? When you look at it from that perspective, it changes the debate substantially.”

  “I suppose it does,” Robert said as another SATP bureaucrat passed them and stuck out his hand for him to shake while nodding solemnly. He clutched the man’s hand and forced a smile, then turned back to Landon and sighed. “So, we misinterpreted your intentions with the paper. Where does that leave us?”

  Now, Landon laughed. “I don’t know that I can, in good conscience, recommend a mission to the Garden of Eden.”

  Robert held out his hands. “Do you have any reasoning behind that? Are you afraid of what we’ll find?”

  Landon was nodding. “Yes, I am.”

  “I have to tell you, Landon,” he said, “I was raised Catholic, and while I may not be in mass every week like I should, I still consider myself a card-carrying believer. But now faced with the situation, I’m having some difficulty believing that at the other end of this mission will be a paradise created by God’s own hands. Even if-” Landon tried to say something, but he held up his hand to finish. “Even if the Creation stories have some truth to them, it’s a stretch that we’re going to be able to witness any of it.”

  “And why’s that?”
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  “I don’t know, Landon,” he said, exasperated for not having the words to meet the urgency of the situation. “Because it defies probability.”

  “You don’t sound like a card-carrying believer to me,” Landon said. It stung a little – something he hadn’t anticipated.

  “Wow,” he said, taking a drink to give himself a moment. “That’s something. I guess you’re either a believer or not, right?

  “And are you?”

  He was here to coax Landon back downstairs, not endure an exercise in soul-searching. But Landon’s question was the perfect one for him to be asking himself.

  Before he could spend more time on it, though, Landon picked up his glass of water and with his finger started pushing around the ring of condensation that had gathered on the bar. Without looking up, he said, “I’ll go back down there with you. But I’m going to ask questions. I don’t care that I’m the new guy. I was charged by my country to approach this program responsibly, and I believe that my predecessor would be of the same mind.”

  “No problem with that here,” Robert said, letting out a slight breath of relief, though he couldn’t tell if it was due to Landon’s acquiescence, or that he was out of the hot seat. “I’d feel better about all of this myself if someone was asking questions.”

  “Good,” Landon said. “And I want everyone on the team to read my paper before you leave.”

  “We can ask,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of time.” He paused as he stood. “You said you wrote it as a joke – because you were bored. Why is it so important that we read it?”

  Landon finally looked up at him. “So you can be as terrified of this mission as I am.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “There’s too much to do,” Amy said, once again trying to keep pace with Keegan’s enormous strides. “There’s no way we’ll get done in time.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” was all he said, focused on minimizing the time they spent roaming the halls of SATP, for the very same reasons Amy was enunciating.

  “Well, at the least, we can’t have Robert up on the roof trying to negotiate the new guy into participating. That should be the least of our worries. He’s got a role here, too.”

  “Robert and Landon will be fine,” he said. “Reilly wants him involved.” Some SATP workers continued to mill around as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Though with the story currently hitting people’s feeds, it would only be moments before news of the catastrophe was spreading like wildfire throughout the complex. Their central team could not let it distract them, though.

  If anyone asked him, Keegan would readily admit that he was using the momentum of the growing uncertainty over their futures to his advantage. He knew that at least half of the team was not necessarily on-board with the idea of undertaking the Eden mission, and certainly not on such short notice. But he knew he had the support of the most important and influential members of the team, and could use everyone else’s own personal emotional states to force the issue. Claire was probably the foremost opponent – at least before they’d seen Landon’s reaction – and even she seemed to be playing ball for now. Amy, trying desperately to keep up with him en route to the time portal, had been wishy-washy on the concept for a long time, when it was just an idea, but in crunch time was showing herself to be a reliable teammate.

  Landon’s reaction was not unexpected, but it also was not well-timed. As the team leader, the need for Robert’s involvement in the preparations could not be understated. Keegan had almost intervened when Robert offered to go after him, but he knew that the right person had volunteered. If this had all happened two months later, after Landon had spent some time with the members of the team and built relationships, it might’ve gone differently. But on his second day with SATP, when he probably hadn’t even had the chance to unpack yet, star power was needed. Quietly, he wished Dipin was still around, as his would’ve been the most effective voice for Landon.

  Though, given what Davies had confessed to them about Dipin, perhaps not.

  But there was no time now to dwell on any of that. As soon as Robert left, Reilly had kicked into action, assigning each of them the first stages of their responsibilities that would lead to a 6 a.m. commencement of the mission. It was an unbelievable amount of work that needed to be done in just under 13 hours but, unfortunately, they did not know when the Attorney General would be showing up in the morning. They needed to be on their way and back before it happened.

  Each team member had a current objective with a deadline of an hour-and-a-half:

  Davies – Pack as much information on the Eden mission as he could onto a memory stick that would be used for upload and pre-mission briefing

  Claire – Prepare the team’s items needed for the excursion, including clothing, equipment and health supplies. To Claire’s credit, when Reilly instructed her, a devout atheist, to gather the team’s clothing, she replied, “You’re familiar with the story of the Garden of Eden, right?” Which gave everyone a small chuckle amid what was otherwise a very tense discourse.

  Caitlyn – Have her team draft SATP statements for both the best and worst-case scenarios.

  Barney – Lean on high-level contacts in the U.S. government to track the Attorney General’s movements and plans, to better anticipate his timing and tactics, and review Caitlyn’s messaging.

  Keegan and Amy were headed to the time lab to begin to ready the time portal for the mission. Normally, this process would take place several days in advance, as the coordinates were checked, double-checked, triple-checked and quadruple-checked by alternating teams of SATP engineers. Satellites had to be confirmed and positioned, the time displacement pods had to be cleansed, the return cloaks had to be programmed… Far too many items on the to-do list to spend time thinking about right then. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

  Their first task would be programming the time portal and positioning the appropriate satellites. There were generally enough SATP satellites in the sky that they had multiple options for wherever they wanted to physically travel on the planet, but for the type of precision that the program used, they needed to be aligned and calibrated. This process generally took 5-6 hours, which is why it had to be their first agenda item. At the same time, what they were doing was going to have a limited reach as far as who knew about it, so Keegan and Amy would be doing the bulk of the work, as opposed to the normal process, which involved between 60 and 70 SATP engineers and programmers.

  “It’s times like this that make me wonder why Reilly put his office so far from the time lab,” Amy said as they turned another corner. “Doesn’t make much sense.”

  “No,” Keegan said, noticing the elevator in front of them closing. He yelled to a woman inside to hold it for them, which she did. They got in, thanked her, and the box plummeted downward.

  “Is it true?” the woman asked after a moment.

  Keegan looked down at her – she was short, slightly taller than Amy. The two of them together enunciated his height even more than normal. “Yes,” he said. “It’s going to be okay, though.”

  She laughed. “Doesn’t seem like it.”

  The elevator stopped, and they quickly headed out. They raced down a long corridor to a set of high-security doors, where both Keegan and Amy submitted retinal and fingerprint scans and were granted entry. One of SATP’s most effective security measures was that the time lab and the control room had separate access points. That way, only an elaborate, coordinated scheme could possibly allow someone to commandeer the technology, necessitating two separate, highly visible trips to the two critical areas.

  Despite the roundabout avenues to get to each, however, the predominant feature when entering the control room was the expansive concave window showing the time portal on the other side. It was a breathtaking sight every time Keegan walked into the room – surpassed only by standing on the other side of the glass directly in front of the machine.

  With no immediate scheduled mission
underway, the control room was minimally staffed – just three engineers. As they entered, Keegan noticed that the chief engineer, Dr. Haru Fujioka, was in the windowed room to the side on a teleconference. He could see Reilly’s face on the screen beyond her, presumably instructing her to allow Keegan to do anything he needed to do. Fujioka, Japan’s representative on SATP, was a fiercely independent leader in the organization who had clawed her way to the top of the program over dozens of international candidates several years before, so Keegan couldn’t predict what her reaction would be. Reilly was the boss, though, and she’d have to succumb to his instructions.

  Still, it wasn’t like some newbie was coming into the control room and pushing buttons. Keegan had cut his teeth in the program long ago working in this very room, and had only left when given the opportunity to join the core team. In fact, when the chief position had opened prior to Fujioka’s coming on board, SATP leadership had considered Keegan, but received pushback from the partner nations for the possibility of too many U.S. reps in leadership positions. Accepting Keegan’s value to the program, however, the Board did position him as team lead on research missions, which was a significant honor for him, as not only did it put him at the center of the action, but also lined him up as Robert’s ultimate replacement. Someday. But Fujioka knew that Keegan’s area of expertise was in her department, which likely wouldn’t help with the politics of the situation.

  Trying to avoid the perception of being disrespectful, however, Keegan and Amy waited by the main door until, after a few moments, Reilly’s image flickered off the screen and Fujioka emerged from the conference room. Keegan noticed the other two engineers, both young men that he hadn’t had the opportunity to meet, look up from their screens to see what was happening. But Fujioka walked past them the full length of the room and up to Keegan and Amy.

  “I don’t know what you’re up to,” she said with contempt, “but I’m supposed to let you go ahead and do what you need to do.”