The irony of it was not lost on Jack, and he knew he would have to come to terms with this information in time. He didn’t ponder this long, however, simply because he also now had a hint of what might have happened in his last year. “So I ended up going to Minnesota to try treatment? Mae must have done a good job convincing me.” Jack couldn’t see himself voluntarily going through experimental treatment, especially if he knew if would just make him sick. Mae was probably the only one he would have listened to, and he hoped he had thanked her for it, especially now that he was here as a result.
“According to your death records, yes, you spent the last few months in the cancer ward, and when the results were not quite what they had hoped for, you checked out and left for home. It was not long after that you, uh, passed.” Teague said it as if he didn’t want to get into the details, but this was exactly the kind of information Jack was after.
“Come on, Teague this is important to me, what else do you know of my last year?”
Teague spread his hands, shrugging. “Not much. Most of the information I had was medical history. You were the first subject at the facility, and apparently they didn’t have a computer for storing the records yet, so they stored your paper file with your body. There might be something more personal left behind, but I never got anything other than the medical records.”
“So what’s the chance I will get to go back there and have a look for myself?” The idea that there might be something left behind that could fill in the blanks sent a small measure of relief through him.
“About one hundred percent, actually.” Jack was caught off guard by the response. He had expected some spiel about the dangers of the wasteland, or maybe that he wasn’t physically prepared yet to venture out. “You are already scheduled to go out with a small crew tomorrow. Uh, if you feel up to it that is.”
“Of course!” He felt like a school kid that was just handed the keys to a new motorcycle and told to have fun. The thought of getting outside to see what had become of the area he once called home was exciting. An alarm went off in his head, though, and he pulled up his guard quickly. In a more cautious voice, he asked, “Why were you planning to send me there? What haven’t you told me?”
They had reached a large door, and Teague pressed a button next to it. There was a faint ding and the doors opened. It was an elevator, a really large one too. As they stepped on, Teague said, “I figured you would want to get out, and we really want to evaluate your ability in the field.” As he pressed a button on his datapad, the doors closed and Teague put on a half-smile. “Did you really think you were going to wander around here all day wearing casual clothes and fornicating with the women?”
Jack spotted the misdirection but decided now was not the time to get into an argument. He smiled and said, “No, of course not, but I figured you would ease me into some responsibilities. It sounds like you already decided I was going to be a soldier for you.” It was not a question and Jack didn’t expect an answer. He didn’t get one.
Changing back to the original subject, Teague said, “So your brain was in decent shape, enough to bring you back anyway, but there was some damage to your memory areas. The older memories tend to be planted deeper in the brain, with the newer memories closer to the surface. The deeper parts of your brain didn’t suffer as much damage as the outsides. Thankfully we only cared about the memories – there were a couple parts of your brain that were in pretty bad shape. The problem we had was that the cancer therapy, combined with the cell damage from freezing, made it difficult to tell exactly when you died, from a standpoint of the memory center of your brain. So we sort of guessed.”
“You guessed?” That surprised Jack, and even made him a bit angry. “What would have happened if you guessed wrong?”
“If we guessed in the wrong direction, you would not have survived the awakening. If we guessed in the other direction, you would simply remember less than you do.” At least he was being honest about it.
“Did I lose anything else? Were there other parts of my memory that were damaged?” He hadn’t thought about this before, but suddenly it was a question that had deep implications.
Teague looked uncomfortable. “Jack I wish I could tell you that everything was fine, but the fact is there was some damage to all parts of your brain. I can’t answer this completely at this point because there is simply no way to know what affect, if any, this had on your memories. It is not a perfect science. Each brain is a little different, and while we can make educated guesses at what part of your life is stored where, the fact is your brain is way more complex than you can imagine. It is possible you are missing vast parts of your memory, and possible that your brain has filled in the holes based on information surrounding it as well as other memories. You might not remember meeting a particular person, but you still know them from other memories and can recall their name. You know you met them because you knew them, so your brain has filled in the missing parts that can be derived from other memories. What affect this has had on your personality is impossible to say. I didn’t know you before, so I can’t tell you how different of a person you are then you were before you died.”
This may not be what Jack wanted to hear, but at least it sounded like Teague was being honest about it and not hiding anything. “So, I might be missing memories but I won’t really know it?”
“Not any more than if you simply forgot something, or are even blocking it to avoid dealing with it. A particular battle in the war you fought in, for example. You might remember fighting in it, but maybe not the details. It doesn’t change who you are by not remembering.”
It made sense, although Jack was far from an expert. He sometimes forgot people’s names, but it never meant that he didn’t know them or couldn’t remember why he knew them. At the same time it made him wonder what he had forgotten, or if it was the reason he felt different than he remembered. “Doc, I have to ask this: I have felt a little… disconnected from my former self. In particular, certain feelings I remember having before I died, I don’t really have any more. It is a bit distressing. Is this a result of the damaged parts?”
Teague thought it over before answering, “It is difficult to say. I have gone through the process and have never felt the kind of disconnection with my former self that you are talking about, but then I have never been in the same situation you have been in. The people you remember are long past gone, so knowing they have been dead for centuries could create a disconnect from them. On top of this, you lost roughly a year of your life, and just as it is possible to remember something differently than it really happened, your brain could have edited those memories in that last year of your life. You don’t have the new memories to back up the changes though, so it could cause some of the disconnection you are talking about as well. It could also be that you are missing some key memories that gave you the feelings you remember, but now that you don’t have them you don’t feel the same way. On top of all of this, feelings, emotions, and love are not things that are only fueled by memories, there are pathways and receptors that are created during the hormonal and chemical reactions when we interact with other people, and those don’t get recreated when we inject the memories. I wish I had a more definitive answer for you, but there are so many variables at play. I just don’t know.”
Jack shrugged. It was food for thought but there was nothing to be done about it now. He figured there was nothing more to learn from Teague about his past, but there was still one thing that had been bothering him, and now seemed as good of a time as any to bring it up. “How do you know what year I was born?”
Teague looked at him in confusion. “Well, from your medical records I suppose.”
Jack shook his head, “No, I don’t think that is it. See, when I joined the military, I had a new I.D. forged. To get this, I paid a guy I worked with who was dating a girl who worked for the county, and she filed a revised birth certificate for me that showed I was eighteen years old instead of sixteen, then I used that to g
et a new driver’s license and with that I was able to join the military. Ever since then, legally I was two years older.”
Jack was watching closely as he revealed this information, but Teague was either really good at hiding things or he simply didn’t know what Jack was referring to. “Jack, I don’t follow.”
“The birth date you gave me when I woke up was my real birth date, not the one that would have been in my medical or military history.”
The two men stared at each other, each looking for an answer to a different question. “I will pull the images later and compare it to our records. I am sure that whatever the medical records showed, that is what we entered. Perhaps you revealed your true age to the doctors during an exam. Or maybe this is an example of the damaged memories we were talking about.”
Jack nodded slowly. “Maybe.” But he wasn’t buying it. Teague didn’t look like he knew anything about it, so he let it drop for now. Plenty of time to get back around to it.
The elevator doors opened back up, and a small child ran past followed a moment later by a middle aged woman. “Welcome to the family level.”
* * *
Jack was disappointed, they had skipped to level three and he had hoped to check out level four, the armament level. Looking at the next question on the list he said, “So if most of the world is a wasteland filled with radiation, how do we get to Montana? That’s a long way to walk, and I imagine the roads are in pretty rough shape by now.”
Teague stepped off the elevator and Jack followed. The hallways on this level were wide with higher ceilings, and, similar to the cloning room, the light was brighter and much more natural. Unlike the cloning room, the walls were painted in warm tones, not sterile white. Up ahead looked to be a courtyard of some kind, and they were headed that way. As they walked, Teague said, “The world up above us is not like you are used to, of that you can be assured. But it isn’t quite the wasteland you might be thinking. We are in a desert of course, so it’s pretty barren immediately outside the bunker, but there are all sorts of climates out there, just as there were before. Much of the radioactive areas have settled out, and there is very little of the radiation and other contamination in the air, as there once was. Perhaps twenty percent of the land is inhabitable, but the problem isn’t finding safe land, its finding safe land that isn’t broken up by radioactive zones. Sometimes the ‘safe zones’ are as narrow as fifty feet. Navigating from place to place is difficult, and downright dangerous without the right equipment.”
They approached the courtyard and Jack was impressed. They were at the lower of two living levels, and the courtyard extended up three levels. It was about a square acre, and the ceiling was as bright as a noonday sun. As they came out of the hall into the courtyard, the ‘sun’ washed over Jack’s face. He felt his spirits rise instantly. Most of the courtyard was covered in green grass, and air was incredibly fresh here, a big change from the air a couple levels down. “This is amazing! To have an open area of this size...” Jack had been impressed with the size of the cloning room, but he was in awe when he saw the courtyard. Seeing more than one level from a “cross section” like this allowed him to get an idea of how they had constructed the bunker. In his day, they dug a big hole, built a strong building, and buried it. If structures built in the decades after his death were all like this one, he questioned again what value he could have in a world like this. So much had changed.
There was a bench next to a walkway and they wandered over to it and sat down, enjoying the warmth of the fake sunlight. “So there aren’t many large radiation free zones? I mean, with enough room for farms and cities and such?” He was interested in what resources humanity had left to work with.
“Actually, there are hundreds of areas, maybe thousands, where people could start a good sized community, set up some decent sized farms, and live in relative comfort. Some of those areas are more than a thousand square miles, and could probably support a hundred thousand people. The problem is, they are not interconnected. You can fly small amounts of people or equipment in, but anything bigger than a bus you would have to build there. It is not impossible, just impractical. Think of Hawaii. Plenty of land to live on, but imagine if you couldn’t get a boat there. You could fly a plane over for anything you absolutely needed, but if you wanted housing or transportation, you would have to make it with the resources available.
“After the big war, almost all the ‘safe zones’ were populated with the survivors. Some of those areas included entire cities from before the war, and a handful had it pretty good, particularly in the grain belt area where farms were plentiful and cities could generate electricity. Regardless of the resources available to them, none of the communities ever got much larger than a few thousand people. Life was hard everywhere, and even where they had it good, things broke down fairly quickly. The problem was they were isolated, cut off from the rest of the world, and with no government to enforce the laws, natural selection took over. The strong ruled and the weak were oppressed.”
“You said they were inhabited. What happened?” Jack wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Disease, famine, inbreeding, conflict… you name it. The ones that survived without some natural or man-made disaster killing them off ended up trading or working with the EoS when they rose to power. There were resources in some of these safe zones, and it was easier to trade a little technology for them than it was to take it by force. The EoS wasn’t interested in ruling anyone but themselves, but when the fighting broke out, no place on earth was safe. Traders inadvertently brought man-made plagues to these places and now they are, with a few small exceptions, all wiped out. If we had more people and more resources, we could give those areas a try again but it will take many more decades before we are ready for that.” He looked like he wanted to say more but he left it at that.
“So with so much land broken up, finding paths through from one safe zone to another is tricky, and of course sometimes downright impossible. Since the air is pretty well cleansed of radioactive particles, air travel is pretty safe. During the height of the EoS, flying machines were commonplace, and luckily we got away with a few.” Jack made a mental note to ask about space flight and if it ever played a role in the EoS. But right now he was more interested in the flying machines they had available here.
“How many is a few?” You can’t lead men without knowing your exact strength, so it was almost pure instinct to ask that question.
“We have two heavy freight haulers, four medium transports, Two four man flyers, and a half dozen two man flyers. There is also a very large hauler stored on the surface a few miles from here, but it requires a runway to take off and land. We keep it maintained but it almost never sees use because it is difficult to find a place to land, and we have not had need of that kind of capacity. We were recently blessed with an aircraft mechanic though, and soon she will be up to speed and will be able to maintain the larger craft. She is already proficient with the small craft, and I understand she has become quite the pilot as well.” He was talking about Wendy of course.
Jack wondered if air was the only means of transportation. “Do you have any ground based vehicles?”
“We have a couple transports, and a dozen smaller vehicles made for two or four people. They do okay out there, but some of the terrain is challenging, and while their theoretical range is almost unlimited with the power source they have, realistically they are only good for about two hundred miles.”
Jack was satisfied, so he looked over his list of questions. He was able to cross off the ones about where they were and how big the place was they were in, those were all but answered already. He spotted one question and chuckled. “What exactly is the food? And where does it come from?”
Teague smiled and said, “Do you really want to know?” Jack nodded although Teague’s smile made him feel a little uncomfortable. “Okay, but don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. Level six is the utility level, everything happens there. Power is generated, air is filtered
and exchanged with outside air, water is brought in from some rain catchments up on the surface, and the water we use is recycled. This includes water recovered from the air with condensers, from the human waste, and gray water from the showers and cleaning machines. We retain almost one hundred percent of the water in this facility and we get the rest of what we need from catchment. The rain water is not radioactive but it is dirty from all the debris still in the atmosphere from the nukes. Water is filtered, then purified and stored. Everything else that is waste goes into some large vats, where some very handy bacteria go to work on it. They eat anything you give them except the lining in the vats, and they excrete some very nutritious stuff.” Jack had gone a little green at the thought, but Teague wasn’t finished yet. “The excreted goop rises to the top and is scraped off and some of it is made into the sawdust like stuff in the food. It is processed and cooked to kill off any biologicals, so it is totally safe. It is basically like a super multi-vitamin, containing just about everything a human needs to survive, with the exception of protein. The rest of the goop is fed to another organism, this one is more like a worm. It feeds on the goop and grows rapidly, and then splits, like a bacteria would, and continues on as long as there is nutrition to eat. The worms are processed into a protein paste, and a powder is made from that. When mixed with water, it’s something of a gelatin. The machines mix that with some artificial flavors and the sawdust-like nutrients, and it comes out of the dispensers in the mess halls or in the kitchens of the apartments.” Jack felt positively ill now, and Teague just grinned and said, “I warned you.”
“So basically bacterial poop and worms. I ate some crazy stuff in Korea and Japan, from fried bugs to dog stew, and most of it tasted worse than the food here, so I guess it isn’t all that bad. Far better than C-Rations too.” Trying to take his mind off the food, he looked at his list once more. Cross that one off and never bring it up again, he thought. He didn’t see any more questions he wanted to ask right at the moment, but then he remembered the question that came up when he was talking to Tiny. “By the way, Doc, how many frozen bodies are at the site in Montana? You have revived about fifty, right?”
The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) Page 14
