Jack thought about that for a second. “That would mean that you have all the memories from all the copies of yourself since...”
“Yes,” Teague said, “according to my memories, I have been alive for one hundred and eighty years. I am the third clone of my original.” Teague got up and excused himself to use the restroom, and to let Jack think for a few minutes.
* * *
Jack was deep in thought when Teague returned. In a very short time a huge amount of information had been delivered, but it was still just information, it didn’t feel like a history, and certainly not a history of the world Jack had lived in. Many events in his life had changed his perspective of people, his country, and the world in general, but nothing like this. Billions of people dead from unnatural causes. The near extinction of humanity and the destruction of most life on earth. These were not things that were easy to accept. He needed a break, time to come to terms with it, but there were still questions that needed answers before he could take a break.
Teague refilled their water glasses and took a seat across from Jack. He didn’t speak for several minutes, perhaps waiting for a cue from Jack, or maybe because he was collecting his thoughts. Jack finally ended the silence, picking up as if they hadn’t paused the conversation. “Well, that explains how you know so much of the history. But that still doesn’t explain how I got to be here. How did you clone me without a fresh body?” That term still bothered Jack, but he just wasn’t ready to process it yet.
Teague nodded and said, “Let me go back to some history from your time.” Teague settled in the chair across from Jack again, and began. “Sometimes, the creativity of a story teller can spur a scientific discovery. Someone comes up with an idea that is out of this world, and years later someone else decides that it isn’t too far-fetched, and figures out how to do it. You got to see a lot of the race to get into space between the Russians and the Americans. You missed the moon landing by only a couple years.”
Jack smiled at this. “We made it huh? And we beat the Russians?”
“Yes. You did. My point is, there were stories for decades about traveling to the moon. Eventually, it happened. Another popular science fiction story line was where someone is frozen, maybe in an avalanche, and is discovered and brought back to life in the future. In 1967, a company in the United States opened its doors based on this premise. They were selling immortality. They figured that in the future there would be a way to cure all illnesses, and if perfectly preserved, a person could be brought back to life when the cure for whatever killed them was discovered. It was quite popular among the wealthy, and the company thrived.
“Unfortunately for them, the facility was destroyed in the war. Furthermore, nobody had ever figured out how to revive someone who had been dead for more than a few minutes.” Teague looked at Jack and said, “Jack, do you recall that last project you were working on, not too far from the city of Great Falls, Montana?”
A tingle went up Jack’s spine. He knew that had something to do with him being here. “Yeah, is that what that place was? They froze people?”
“The facility you were building before your last memory was completed in February 1967. It was designed to house a cryogenic storage unit for experimentation. The military was freezing soldiers who died in battle and some who died of incurable diseases like cancer, in order to try reviving them when medical technology improved. The cryogenic capsules required very little power, and originally a small hydroelectric power plant was built a few miles away to power it. In 2010 the facility was made to be self-sufficient and a small, automated nuclear power source was placed in the lower levels with enough fuel to last hundreds of years, as long as nothing went wrong. They sealed up the complex with the plan to go back in a few generations when medical science progressed further.”
* * *
Jack didn’t know what to say. It all made sense now. Somehow Phil had gotten him in as a candidate, and here he was three hundred plus years later, exactly as planned. But the revelation didn’t quench his curiosity, at least not quite yet. “So you found me and cloned me, and with a frozen brain you were able to recreate my memories?”
“Yes, it was a stroke of luck, or fate, or whatever you want to call it. We were all that was left of humanity, basically waiting until enough accidents happened where there were not enough of us left to keep cloning or when the equipment we use to clone ourselves irreparably breaks down. I told you I have been around for a long time, and for many decades we have built machines to scour the earth looking for other survivors. It is a bleak task that yielded very low results, and in the past two decades we have not found a single undocumented survivor.”
“If people were unable to bear children, how are there any survivors at all?”
“Women are carriers of the virus but are never infected, they don’t have the gene that the virus attacks. Only the men born of these women are infected and end up infertile. If a man was immune to the disease, he could father children, but since all women are carriers, every baby is a carrier as well. This leads to an exponential infertility rate across the generations.”
“Exponential?”
“Yes, the chance of a male child never exposed to the virus to be immune to it is about one in six thousand. The chance of that man to father an immune child is about one in twenty. Before this virus, it was estimated that nearly six million people existed on this continent. With the ascendancy of the EoS, birth rates were up and for each person alive, at least one new child was born before that person died. After the virus infected the entire population, around 10,000 men of the next generation were fertile. Between the wars going on and the still relatively high rate of infection, fewer than a thousand fertile men were estimated to exist after the cities began to fall.
“Hundreds of communities across the continent, mostly small in population, were formed by survivors. By the time we had the technology in place to start looking for survivors, the total number of fertile men were estimated to number in the hundreds if not less.”
“Doc, I am no mathematician but you make it sound like humanity doesn’t have a chance, even with those few hundred fertile men.”
“In a way you are exactly right. But that doesn’t mean humanity hasn’t tried to find a way.” Teague said this with a hint of a smile.
“What exactly does that mean?” He suspected he knew, but wanted to be sure before he gave his initial suspicion any merit.
“Basically, it means that once they knew that most babies born would be infertile, they started having a LOT more babies. In the communities we found, it wasn’t unusual for fertile men to father dozens of children, sometimes hundreds, and from dozens of different women. The culture changed very dramatically mostly because of the instinctive need to preserve the species. People could no longer afford to hold any taboo or conservatism toward sex, and monogamy was out the window as well. The only insurance of continuation of the species was to copulate far more frequently and to spread the virile seeds as far and wide as possible. Most communities didn’t have the knowledge or equipment to check for fertility, so as soon as a boy reached an age where he was fertile, he was expected to attempt to get as many women as possible pregnant. In many cases this started as young as eleven years old, and until it was determined that they were infertile, they were encouraged to continue trying at least until about twenty years old. Because of the immediate necessity to keep the population alive, recordkeeping was seldom accurate as females were often encouraged to have sex with many different males during each of their cycles. So, successful fertilization was not always a sign of a man’s fertility. Sex became a regular part of life in a way no other human culture has ever seen.”
“Do you find this as disturbing as I do? Holy shit, Doc, you are telling me that for the last hundred and fifty years humanity has whiled away its days in one big orgy?” On the surface, it sounded like a dream for any man, but his conservative Catholic background still made it seem incredibly immoral, unclean, and unsavory.<
br />
“That would be a crude way to put it, but yes, sexual relations became as common as a handshake. And I can understand why this is disturbing to you. However, I grew up in a completely different time than you, where certain things were necessary for the survival of our species. I was never exposed directly to this sort of culture, I was born infertile so there has never been any pressure on me to impregnate women, at least not to the degree that many of the communities since the fall of the EoS have had to endure.”
“So how many of these communities are still out there?”
“Well, despite the low rate of potency in the population, the efforts of the community to keep the fertility rate up led to sizeable populations, at least compared to what would have been if they had stuck to a monogamous culture. But even so, each generation held fewer and fewer fertile men. Plus, the lack of control over this cultural change led to some pretty major issues. Inbreeding and disease were two of the larger issues. After a couple generations, it was extremely likely that the man who is getting her pregnant is a half-brother or cousin.”
“That is just wrong Teague, any way you explain it.”
“I agree, and from my viewpoint, one of science, it disturbs me to think that this sort of activity, while having the right intentions, was executed so poorly. Some decent records would have gone a long way toward keeping inbreeding to a minimum. Many of these communities have failed over the years as a direct result.”
Obviously Teague’s sense of morality was far different from Jack’s. This was neither the time nor place to point that out, however, this line of conversation was both interesting and disturbing and it was time to get back on track. “So you have made an effort to find these communities and rescue them?”
“Yes, with a little success. Over the years we managed to find about a hundred survivors and bring fifteen of them in. Not everyone was interested in living with us or the other communities like ours. We represent, to some, the EoS, or at least the remnants of it. Our groups are mostly made up of cloned infertiles. Like I said, in the past two decades we have failed to locate any more undocumented survivors. We try to get along with the other communities, but each group is very protective, and for good reason. We don’t know exactly how many fertile men each community has. We have done our best to keep inbreeding to a minimum, and part of this effort involves arranging virile men to impregnate women from other groups, in exchange for the same from them. Even so, of the breeding population here, most are related at least as second or third cousins. After over a hundred years, we have expanded our group to about fifty people; about eleven of them are virile men, able to father children. Despite careful selection of mate combinations, there just wasn’t enough diversity in the gene pool, and things have slowed down.”
“Wait, if you knew that only one in twenty children born were going to be virile, why don’t you have hundreds of people in your group?” Jack felt like he didn’t really want the answer to this, but he had to ask.
“Good question, Jack, I have to say I am amazed by your ability to pick up on the details.” Jack didn’t even blink; he didn’t want this conversation derailed until he had the details he needed to process it all. Teague continued, “First off, when those of us who founded this community escaped the cities during the wars, we didn’t leave empty handed. We brought along some tech, and between us we had some decent medical expertise. We had several women but only one fertile man, and it didn’t take long before he had fathered several children, none of which were fertile themselves. Our resources were very limited at first, and we just couldn’t support too many children. So we worked on the problem in the way we knew how. We attacked it from two angles: first was finding more fertile men, and second was ensuring that the children they had were all fertile. The first required us building machines to search for signs of human life, the second involved developing a method to detect infertile children before the pregnancy was too far along, and terminate any that weren’t going to give us the results we needed.”
“Good Lord, is there no end to the immorality?” Jack felt ill again, a feeling he was growing used to during this conversation.
“Jack, you have to understand that the survival of humanity was at stake here, this was not a decision we took lightly.”
“Doc, you don’t have to defend your actions with me.”
“I know, Jack, I know.” Jack could see the pain on his face so he let it go. “Anyway, even after we found a few fertile men in the survivors, it was rare to have a birth around here. We could have had more, but it would have resulted in inbreeding, so the population only grew with the discovery of more fertile men. We have had a few successful births through the exchange program, but overall things were not developing as fast as we would have liked. At the rate we were going, there was little hope of humanity surviving in the long run.
“We estimate that there are about forty eight hundred people that we know of out there, less than five percent of the males are virile. There are more on other continents, but our best guess puts the world population of humanity below ten thousand people.”
This was staggering. Jack had traveled a good portion of the world in his life and had a very good idea for how big this planet was. To spread ten thousand people out over that kind if expanse was almost certainly going to lead to extinction, even if they could reproduce, which they pretty much couldn’t, at least not at a rate that was ever going to support any real growth of population.
“Doc, this is a grim story and I would love to learn more about it later. For now, I would like to know how this leads back to me.”
Teague had stood up to refill his glass and offered to refill Jack’s. After this conversation Jack was ready to try one of those beers but it was still too early. “Four years ago the nuclear reactor in that facility started to malfunction. The electromagnetic noise from the faulty generator was detected by one of our probes while searching for signs of life. We sent a party to the area formerly known as Montana to find out if it was another group of survivors, and instead we found that facility. Only about half the bodies are in good enough shape to clone. Mostly the early ones are in bad shape because the chemicals used to prevent cell damage when they froze the bodies, was insufficient. The last body was added in 2010 when they closed the facility, and that was the first one we were able to bring back. We have since recovered about fifty more people, mostly men, but some women too. You are the oldest successful recovery to date. We now have over thirty children in our population, and over seventy percent of the men are virile.” With that, Teague sat back and fell silent, waiting for Jack to absorb it all.
* * *
It was beyond overwhelming. He felt exhausted even though he had just been sitting here the whole time listening and thinking. He knew it would take time for him to really absorb it all and be able to think things through. He excused himself to use the restroom. His mind was too occupied to pay attention to the amazing technology in the bathroom.
Foremost in his mind was that he had been given another chance at life. In the short time since waking up he hadn’t once thought of this situation as bad for him, after all if he weren’t here he would be dead. But what did that really mean?
What happened when he died? Did he go to heaven? Did heaven exist? The thing is, he didn’t know because he is not really the Jack Taggart that died in 1967 from cancer. If he died again without losing his brain, there is a chance that they will bring him back again. But it won’t be him, it will be a copy of him that thinks it’s him. If there is a heaven, I will still get a chance to meet Peter at the gates of heaven, he thought.
Next he thought about the reason he was here. Hell, I am one of the last men on earth capable of fathering a child. At first that made him grin. Then a cold realization hit him. Is this why Wendy came to his room last night? That would be a huge disappointment, despite the briefness of the encounter, he felt a chemistry with her he hadn’t felt since he met Jenny. As he got back to the kitchen, he was brimming with qu
estions.
“So when you talked about the cultural changes in the communities after the virus, how does that affect this community? Do the virile men spend their time having sex with the women?”
Teague looked like he had expected the question. “It is true that there are some expectations here, and I can assure you that the culture will require some getting used to, but we will get into those details later. Frankly I am surprised with you Jack, most of the men we have brought back were extremely happy about this part, but you have shown reservation from the first time I mentioned it. Your generation is obviously far different from the others.” This was no surprise to Jack, he saw where things were headed long before he even learned about the cancer. “I suspect you are looking for a second answer as well, perhaps regarding last evening?” Jack didn’t need to answer, it was probably written all over his face. “I can’t tell you Wendy’s motive, but what she did is not only acceptable to us, but encouraged. I can tell you that she was under a lot of pressure to get pregnant, and until you have impregnated more women, she will have a unique child that can spread the gene pool. In our community that will elevate her standing as well as help the community greatly. In many ways it is perhaps the most key aspect of our society right now. As I said, it’s all about the survival of humanity..”
“You sound pretty sure that our… tryst will lead to a child being born. Isn’t there a high probability that even if she gets pregnant from me that you will abort her… our baby?” There was a dangerous tone to his voice. Regardless of the situation, Jack would risk anything and everything to prevent anyone here from harming a child of his, born or not.
The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) Page 10
