Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn

by Carlos Meneses-Oliveira

  “Why did you murder three Portuguese citizens before kidnaping me?” Lucas asked.

  “We only killed the fighter in order to confirm a crucial enzymatic phenotype in your saliva. Remember? You spit in his face. Crucial. We needed your saliva and we had very little time. No one told you to use a cheap toothpaste that denatured your saliva’s enzyme on your toothbrush. The fighter saw our agent when he went to collect your saliva from his face—and he’s as easy to describe as he is to recognize. The brute tried to attack him and only fled when he saw that our agent was armed. If ten guys had come out of the gym, our laboratory in the positioning cabin could have been captured. An SOS from the Portuguese police to Interpol and the Russians realized who our target was too soon. The Muscovites killed the second one because they got mixed up, convinced that he was the alpha and apparently he resisted. They killed the third so you would run from your house right into their laps when they thought they could get their hands on you alive. If you had not woken up and left the room, their earth-moving team would have eliminated the police, your parents, your little brother, any neighbors who got involved, and have taken you. According to the communications we intercepted, you fled out the illogical side, which surprised the Slavs. With us, it’s different. We only use force when there’s no alternative, a matter of life or death for humanity.”

  “And what matter is that?” Andrew demanded.

  “You already know. It’s your genes.”

  “What’s so special about our genes?” Lucas wanted to know.

  “I’ll explain it to you personally, to each one of you.”

  “And the attack on the collier?”

  “It was the Russian’s earth-moving team. They were annoyed at you, and they don’t worry about collateral damage.”

  “What’s this on our bodies?” Sofia asked, pointing at the myriad of platinum disks covering her skin.

  “A bluff. It’s only on your skin. A justification to have the same weight on Ganymede. Instead of fifty-six kilos, you would have weighed twenty there. We had to have an explanation for why that didn’t happen and to frighten you, to keep you from leaping about. In that case, you’d realize that you were falling faster than other things. Your food, the silverware, tools and even your clothes, everything was inflated with helium micro-bubbles to be less dense and the ship’s atmosphere was enriched with argon to seem denser so things would fall more slowly, making it seem that gravity was lower. It cost an arm and a leg.”

  The ice, thought Lucas, that’s why the ice in the grotto fell that fast—it didn’t have helium bubbles.

  The meeting ended, but they were called one by one for another one with Hendriks. Lucas entered and saw the senator standing up, looking out a window.

  “I’m going to tell you why you were chosen. We’ve been preparing the others for years. We’ve opened door after door for them without them knowing. You, no. You were a last minute discovery. That’s why you’re poor and not studying engineering. You carry several dominant spontaneous mutations. One gives you greater motor speed. We identified a similar mutation in the body of a fighter, a mestizo, we found in Hong Kong, but his was recessive and yours is dominant. It lets you make ballistic movements with terminal correction. We value speed more than strength and, for strength, we have a good German candidate. You see well at night and have a bone calcification that seems independent of weight, which is good in zero gravity. But the key mutation for us is that you adapt well to the cold. Mars will always be cold; it will always be winter. It is farther from the Sun than the Earth and no one can convince me that planetary engineering will change that. Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons that interest us are cold. During the Ice Age, if people had been like you, they wouldn’t have had to find shelter in Southern Europe. This adaptation of yours is interesting not only in tasks in extreme cold, but even in cryopreservation, in the animal models we inject with your gene. Curiously, more imperfect mutations of this type happen in Jews like you. That is a kind of a joke because the Germans in the Thirties and Forties, during the twentieth century, liked adaptability to the cold very much and really disliked Jews. It seems they wanted to settle in Siberia, Greenland, and the Antarctic but we froze them out of that plan,” Hendriks said, laughing slowly and inappropriately in such a way that he choked a little, clearing his throat to free his voice before continuing. “They kept a very active medical unit during the siege of Leningrad to identify who survived better. Many of them were Spanish...”

  “I’m not Jewish,” Lucas interrupted, uncomfortably remembering his infantile clowning around with the butcher of Berlin’s moustache and the Hugo Boss overcoat in the streets of Lisbon.

  “Ah, but, yes, you are,” Hendriks tossed back. “Your adoptive parents are not, but your biological father was.”

  Lucas had strong philosophical and humanistic convictions, but he had never related them to political ideas or historical visions. Now, the fact that they told him he had Jewish ancestry made that moustache with which he had masqueraded about on the night in question, as a young man, provoke guilty embarrassment that evaporated any humorous perception the scene had given him in the past.

  * * *

  They were transferred to Houston where they remained in quarantine, having no contact with people other than those who appeared in biological protection equipment. Their training continued intensively and the platinum mini-disks were removed from their skin.

  They had access to television, but not to the Internet. In the news, the political campaign was in high gear. US investment in the space industry and the like was close to twenty percent of the internal product; in Europe it was eight percent; in China, it was known to be at thirty-two percent, and in Russia it reached forty-five. No one believed the reasons pointed out for the space race. They were exceedingly artificial. Strategic grain and oil reserves were being used without being completely replaced, leading to falling prices for food and fuel. Maintenance of the infrastructure had almost been suspended and American troops overseas were returning home. Six hundred US military bases had been closed and radicals tried to occupy the vacuum. All of the commentators and editors had just one question: Why? Pressure passed the point of being bearable. The information had been disseminated too broadly to be contained.

  Trinity called a second meeting of the leadership in Seattle. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost analyzed the situation in detail. Their invention of a planetary threat was getting more and more dangerous. The first phase of massive investment in space had taken place through intervention by governments and large economic groups—the States because they believed the interplanetary threat and the private sector because they had entered into a growth spiral catalyzed by those who knew the truth and by those who had access to the government and believed the bluff was real.

  Unfortunately, there was a mistake by the team led by their agent at NASA, Anthony Crane. The trilateral had launched orbital balloons and created virtual mirrors that worked like computer viruses and altered data from the world’s large telescopes, making them see a threat that did not exist. The men working for the overly-independent Crane had decided, without anyone’s authorization, to transform the computer robot controlling the installed mirrors, be they in the sky or on the Internet, into a chameleon to give them greater invisibility. When Crane proudly arrived with his new model for invisible computer engineering, as he called it, the NSA had installed many more computer mirrors everywhere and the conjunction of the old mirrors with the new software resulted in an unforeseen inflation of the virtual threat. Prior to that, Crane had pushed a mutant destined to go to Mars into the arms of his best friends’ family and placed those friends’ daughter in the group of people who would actually go to the red planet. In the information and aerospace community that did not belong to Trinity, this created the idea that the threat was very grave: Crane was even trying to save his best friends’ only daughter.

  They then had to tell President Cardoso in secret that Mars, too, was going get zapped and th
at the only solution was now Ganymede so he would approve the massive investment in rockets to transport people from Jupiter to Venus in the future and abandon the illusion they could put half a million people on Mars, especially if chosen at random. They would need the rockets later to precondition Mars, but things got more complicated every time the story changed.

  The Son—who represented the aerospace group, among others—insisted that the Holy Ghost had jumped the gun by launching the mirrors because the last word was technical and that he would give it. The Holy Ghost did not forget that the Son had introduced unexpected computer improvements at the last minute, without telling those in charge, and it was they who were in charge. That which is excellent is the enemy of that which is merely good. The Secret Services were so furious that they did not eliminate Crane only due to the Father’s special request. They distanced themselves from him, but it was too late.

  They were now entering into their plan’s vertiginous acceleration phase which would occur if the “threat” was made public. Unfortunately, the new model for Crane’s simulation, instead of putting the probability of Earth’s destruction at fifteen percent, had given a probability of seventy-something percent. Worse, the new model did not allow for the alternative of simulating Theia’s hitting Saturn since their trajectories were too distant. Thus, they could only use Jupiter. The new system could be invisible in terms of computer science, but it was less flexible and removed their control over time. They had to wait for Jupiter.

  After losing Cardoso, the new President Magnuson had called early elections, something never seen in the United States, and Trinity had not had time to promote their own candidate for the presidency. Magnuson proved to be less easily influenced than anticipated. They even tossed about the possibility of aborting the entire process, but they could not sustain the risk. If the phantom planet suddenly disappeared from telescopes, without an explanation, all countries would join forces to discover how it was possible to fool so many scientists and they would discover the deception. No one wanted to have the FBI after them--it was better not to awaken a sleeping dog. They would all be arrested and some would run the risk of receiving the death penalty.

  This thing had gotten too big. Making the “threat” public would multiply investments by a factor of two or three and the profit of those making a living off the phantom threat by a factor of ten. On the other hand, there would be not one hundred but ten thousand new independent initiatives launched to follow the black simulation. There was no guarantee that NSA and their allies within NASA could place computerized mirrors in all the new observatories that would spy on the sky or at least be able to sabotage them. They could launch more orbital balloons to fool the medium-sized telescopes, but there wasn’t enough smoke to cover the myriad small ones that would be in different locations, if not mobile. They would need more—and more sophisticated—computerized intervention from the NSA. Happily, the celestial body was so black that some not being able to see it wouldn’t be surprising.

  They had to wait until the specter reached Jupiter. Then it would be easy to mimic its hitting the giant gas ball and, immediately, turn off the computerized intervention and annihilate the orbiting mirrored spheres.

  They were going into the bluff’s so-called hard phase.

  * * *

  At an international forum sponsored by the new American president, with support of the UN Security Council, the governments of the great developed countries and those of Russia and China had announced to the world they had proof that Theia, an enormous black cosmic object, was on a collision course with the earth’s orbit and that nations with technology in that area were preparing a response to impede the disaster. The States did not commit themselves to concrete probabilities of collision. The nations not involved, namely many small European and Asian countries, and Brazil and India, were outraged because they had not been alerted, now that they had no time to prepare missions.

  The predicted vertiginous acceleration in the production of goods and services took place. The world went into a true war economy. Every developed country experienced double digit growth while unemployment disappeared. The space industry was growing everywhere. Countries with a technological base allied themselves with Europe and the United States in a joint effort, signing an Entente. Later, due to the pressure of public opinion, the Entente, Russia and China created a trilateral to increase the terrestrial orbital projects.

  The possibility of placing a very high number of people in orbital stations to repopulate the earth was real, if the threat were confirmed. There would be at least two hundred thousand people in orbit.

  Biotechnology was another area showing explosive growth. The need to adapt microorganisms and other beings to diverse environments led interest in extremophile genetics to double. Seeds were produced and stored to help reconstitute a post-apocalyptic civilization with a modified climate. One of the areas finally freed from all restrictions was genetic and embryo animal experimentation.

  “There are no vegetable planets; the planet itself is an animal,” insisted Hendriks buried under a sea of microphones and television cameras.

  Eggs weren’t enough. They needed reserves of in vitro embryos of innumerous species of mammals and he took on the mission of collecting those embryos so there would be a future. It was still important to quickly obtain modified animals, even hybrids between animals and plants. All YouTube and Vimeo videos were showing Hendriks’ green bat.

  Whether it was the need for future implantation of mammal embryos in pluripotential uteruses or the notion that the crisis was discouraging pregnancy, it led to the implementation of embryonic transplant programs between species and to the development of animals that, after immunological and angiogenic conditioning, would accept xenopregnancy—the embryo of one species growing in the uterus of another.

  In Hendriks’ lair, between genetics and the scalpel, not only did fusion animals reappear, for which he had been the object of disciplinary proceedings in the past, a Pandora’s box of all damned beings was opened, with no vestiges of leashes or muzzles.

  Suspended animation also benefitted from considerable investments. Not only did good luck come from Mars, a lot of money was made available hand over fist. The Entente created an international agency, the Biogenic Agency for Reconstruction of the Biosphere, to coordinate this effort.

  Hendriks, the collector, was preparing a Noah’s Ark with animals that had never seen the light of day and no one suspected that the hand constructing the Ark was the same one that had ordered the coming of the Great Flood.

  With the support of Congress and the Supreme Court, Magnuson, who had risen to the Presidency of the US, called early and exceptional elections to reinforce his legitimacy, and Senator Tyrell Hendriks wound up chosen as the team’s number two, a candidate for the vice presidency after scandals drove off Magnuson’s first two choices. Victory of the Magnuson-Hendriks duo was tangential since the president had been accused of collaborating with Cardoso to hide the coming disaster, and there were rumours about Hendriks health.

  The Entente accepted the vice president’s name to lead the Biogenic Agency.

  Tyrell Hendriks removed suspended animation from the agency and integrated it into an autonomous group collaborating with the Pentagon that was dedicated to the long term preservation of conscience. It would have two divisions, the old one dedicated to transferring the human mind to a solid, computerized support and a new one for the conservation of native support, with or without preserving the afferent limb, the euphemism used for keeping either the brain or the entire body frozen in a state of suspended animation. The Pentagon, however, removed the division for transferring the mind to solid support from the collaborating group, integrating it into its artificial intelligence division. Hendriks was infuriated with the military but Magnuson yanked the rug out from under him, saying that the troops also needed toys to entertain themselves. The vice president detested sprockets, robots, and artificial intelligence programs. If they needed to
improve intelligence, why not human intelligence?

  Later, he got over it. His collaborators convinced him that a transfer of the mind to solid support was a dead end file, a cemetery of data. If they wanted to make it functional, they’d need biological support and that’s where Hendriks came in again. What they recommended against was antagonizing Magnuson. He forgot his rage and took up his old enthusiasm once more in great style. The politician’s enthusiasm was hard to understand for some. Why is it that the gentleman, who had a seventy-three percent chance of dying, kept interminable pressure on the development of technologies that would bear fruit too late?

  “If we’ve lost everything, we’re lost; if there is some chance that we won’t all die, I have orders from the President to guarantee that we use that window of opportunity to save ourselves in one way or the other,” responded the Vice President Tyrell Hendriks. “And any step we can take now will be one step we will have already advanced in the future.”

  * * *

  The eight mutants had changed from kidnap victims to volunteers, not because they were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, but because their ties to the world were such that their fate was more useful if they went than if they stayed. They knew three spacecraft would leave from Houston to join a military vessel with eight young Marine officers, one of whom was a general and another was a precocious major, as well as an engineering vessel, that had already been on Mars for some time. Initially, Steven had tried to escape in order to visit his youngest sister, Alicia Boyd, who was sick. In order to not destabilize the polar team, as they were called, he had been separated and assigned to the second engineering ship. Before leaving, they learned that the polar group would include two NASA pilots, Commander Peter Bryant, from Texas, and copilot Diane Nishimura, a Brazilian sansei. Neither was a mutant.