Teague nodded, “Yeah, about that many. Like I said earlier, our success rate is now about half, but that includes all the ones we have to weed out due to condition and reason for death. If they died from massive head trauma, the chance of cloning is lower, and if they had a brain disease like Alzheimer’s, we have to take a shot in the dark on where to cut off their memories, or we end up with complications. We had one unfortunate case...” He stopped, obviously not wanting to talk about failures. “Anyway, the facility was built to hold three thousand, and was about eighty percent occupied at the start of the war. We estimate that we can save perhaps twelve hundred more, give or take.”
That many? “How many people can this facility handle?” This place was large but that’s a lot of people to feed, clothe, and take care of, not to mention how quickly that many people could make babies. Given that men will spread the gene pool around and be encouraged to have more than two or three kids each, within twenty years the population could easily hit six or seven thousand, and then the next generation will be having babies.
“About two hundred families of five. If we are successful in this, we will outgrow this facility within the next four or five years.”
“So what are you planning on doing then? Are you going to move everyone above ground? Try to make a go on the surface?”
“We aren’t sure, but a lot of it depends on you.”
“Me!?” Jack exclaimed. “What do I have to do with this?”
“We were hoping that you could build us a new home, actually.”
Chapter 17
Wendy was working on the cooling system for the armament level, but her mind was not on her work, and it was going slow. It was unlike her to not be able to focus like this, but she knew the reason why. She was almost in a manic state now, compared to the depression she had felt pretty much since she woke up four months ago and found out she had died. If her family or friends had ever had to describe her normal emotional state in as few words as possible, it would probably have been ‘mellow’. That wasn’t to say that she didn’t have the typical mood swings that any woman is prone to having, but extreme highs and extreme lows were not a normal part of her life.
When she woke up four months ago, and the situation was explained to her, she sank into a deep depression. She was good at covering up her feelings, something that made life in the military much easier. It was okay for a man to get drunk and whine to his buddies when he got dumped by a girlfriend or missed a promotion, but one Goddamn tear from a female soldier and it was all about how women are too emotional to be in the Army.
Outwardly, she hid her depression by appearing introverted and shy, which also served to keep the men at bay, at least most of them. The men here were typically not at all inconsiderate about the situation. In fact it was quite the opposite. The woman was expected to approach the man whose seed she was interested in, and if anything, the other women were the ones pressuring her to get pregnant. Aside from the women in the community, Teague was the only one who had even brought it up. He reminded her on multiple occasions that the reason they went through the trouble of bringing her back was to expand their population, and she understood that. She just wasn’t okay with the idea of sleeping around trying to get knocked up. He had talked to her about other methods of getting pregnant like insemination, but the thought of them squirting sperm into her with a syringe was almost as bad as having sex with the men in the first place. The best option so far was IVF, where they harvest her egg, fertilize it in the lab, and then plant it in her womb. Anything that avoided having sex with someone she didn’t know was a good option. Her history of sexual encounters had left her somewhat jaded about sex in general, and not very trusting of either men or women.
Wendy knew she was attractive, and she learned early in life that while she could use that as a tool to get what she wanted, it was a double edged sword. Her first boyfriend in high school had been very persistent about getting into her pants one night, and although he had come to his senses before it turned into rape, she came to the realization that she needed to be able to defend herself. She enrolled in a kick boxing class, but it was geared more toward getting in shape than self-defense. Luckily, one of the students knew of a small school where they taught Jujitsu, and for the next four years before joining the Army, she spent four nights a week learning the martial art, and two nights a week practicing kick boxing. The combination kept her in perfect physical condition, and gave her the confidence to be around men without fear.
During basic training in the Army, her beauty was a huge liability. One moonless evening while returning to her barracks from dinner, a man jumped out from some shadows and struck her in the head. She was dazed long enough for him to get her on the ground and get her pants unbuckled, but she recovered and put a knee in his groin, punched him in the nose, and nearly broke one of his fingers getting out of his grasp. In the scuffle she caught an elbow just below her right eye, and by morning it had turned into a nasty looking black eye. That pissed her off almost as much as the man’s intentions had. She went to report it, but her superiors made it clear that if she chose to file a report and try to pursue finding the man, they would make life very difficult for her. Most of the men in the Army were against women in the common ranks, and as far as they were concerned, rape was just one of the many problems associated with mixing a lot of sex starved men with a few women. They figured it was what the women deserved for wanting to join a ‘men’s club’.
That was not acceptable to her, so rather than go through official channels, she decided to take the matter into her own hands. It had not been hard to find the man, after all she had injured his finger and bruised up his nose pretty good. She waited until the sergeant was getting his platoon ready for PT, then confronted him in front of everyone. She didn’t say much, just walked up to him, looked at everyone around him and said, “The next guy that thinks he can try to fuck me without my permission is going to end up like this piece of shit.” She paused a second to make sure everyone’s attention was on the private in front of her, then took him totally off guard with a shot straight into his nose, this time breaking it. He had tried to fight back, but he didn’t stand a chance. Normally something like that would have landed her in jail, and possibly discharged from the military. In this case, however, the sergeant figured out right away that one of his men had tried to force himself on a female soldier, and if he put her in jail, he would have to put the man in jail too which would not look good for either himself or the Army. So he had let her finish, sent the man to the infirmary, and filed the whole thing as a training accident. Nothing ever came of the incident, and nobody ever tried to force himself on her again.
That’s not to say that they still didn’t try to get in her pants, they just tried to use their charms to do so. She had dated a little, but on the few occasions that she went to bed with them, not only was she disappointed in their performance, but inevitably they would brag about it, and sooner or later it always got back to her.
It wasn’t just the men either. Not at all surprising, some of the women in the military liked women more than men, and seldom were they shy about it. They usually tried to start a relationship after she had dumped the latest asshole, but in the end they were after the same thing. It had been tempting, occasionally, and although she wished she could forget about it, she had found herself in bed with a fellow female enlisted after a late night drinking binge. Not to say that it wasn’t sort of fun, but the woman just didn’t have what it took to satisfy her, and in retrospect she wished she had not even opened that door at all. Just like with the men, it got around pretty quickly and she had to deal with those types of women even more often, not to mention the men who heard the rumors automatically assumed that she ‘swung both ways’ and hence would be willing to get into a threesome.
It didn’t take long for her to come to the conclusion it was unlikely she would find someone in the military she could fall in love with. Wendy wanted what most young women wanted, a r
eal relationship with a man that truly cared about her. One afternoon, while test flying an apache, the pilot started telling her about this program he had joined where they would freeze his body and try to revive him in the future when they could fix anything wrong with him. It had sounded romantic, being brought back in the future to start over, so she made some inquiries and discovered they were always looking for volunteers, but didn’t make it public knowledge. She had just broken up with yet another man and was so frustrated in trying to find a decent relationship, she signed her death away. Then, while visiting her grandparents on a weekend leave, she had met Gene.
She was hardly a religious woman, having been the by-product of ‘free love’. Her grandparents had lived in a commune in California, and her mother was born there. By sixteen her mother was pregnant, due to her loose morals and even looser knees. Wendy had loved her mother (still did), but they never got along too well, and the only father figure she ever had was the ‘man of the month’ her mother brought home. She got to spend the summers with her grandparents though, and over the years they slipped further away from their hippie heritage and closer to God and religion. Wendy respected this and when she visited the last few years, she even went to church with them.
She met him at a church function, and he was about as far from the typical military type as she could ever expect to meet. They dated a few times during her leave, and the most he had ever tried to do was kiss her. She had returned to base the next week, and for the next two months, they corresponded through phone and email. He visited her once, despite being three hundred miles away, and still he had not expected her to have sex with him. She asked about it, fearing that maybe he was gay and she was misreading the situation, and he simply told her that when the time was right it would happen.
The night before her accident, she had talked to him on the phone. The following weekend kicked off a one week leave, and they had booked a room at a romantic resort in Colorado. She had every intention of taking the relationship to the next level, and hoped that things went even further than that. Then she had to go and die. When she woke up to learn that not only was there very few men left in the world, but they were going to be expected to impregnate a number of women, her hopes and dreams of finding the perfect man and having a monogamous relationship with him were about as dead as she had been for the last three centuries.
The thought of her grandparents and mother living to see her die combined with missing out on what she was certain would be the one true love in her life had really weighed heavily on her heart. Adding the idea of willfully having sex with exactly the type of men she avoided her entire life had put her into a depressive state that she could not escape.
There wasn’t much sympathy to be found here either. Most of the women were from this era, not hers, and they took for granted that they would have sex with any man that was convenient, in effort to expand their family. There were eight other Reborn women who did not see things the same way as the natives, but neither did they see things the way Wendy did. Usually when someone volunteers to have their dead body experimented on after they die, it’s because they don’t have anyone in their life that would care what happened to them after death. Wendy had a family, a man she thought she was in love with, and a life in the military that she enjoyed. Teague could sympathize, but that sympathy always carried the caveat that despite her dislike at the situation, she still needed to have a baby. Try as hard as she could, she simply couldn’t shake the depression.
Then a couple months after her rebirth, she flew with a recovery team to the cryogenics facility, and while she had waited for them to get what they came for, she started exploring the facility. Way in the back she came across Jack’s cryo-tube. The tube itself was unique. It was similar to the other old tubes, but it had more gadgets connected to it. Also, there was a lockbox attached to the end of the tube. None of the other tubes she had seen had a lockbox like this, and it had piqued her curiosity. She got some tools from her pack and managed to pick the lock on the box. It had been vacuum sealed, and in it were several well preserved documents and a diary with a worn black leather cover. She had looked around to make sure nobody had seen her, then stuffed the diary and papers in her pack.
They brought back two more heads to try to clone that day. She found it a little morbid that they only took the heads, but that was all that was needed and there was not a huge amount of room on the transports. She never looked for her tube, and had no interest in seeing her three hundred year old frozen headless corpse.
Back at her apartment, she took out the diary and documents. She didn’t know what had prompted her to take them in the first place, and once she had them in front of her, she felt a little guilty about it. At the same time, however, she had felt a tingle of excitement at the prospect of reading something that was not intended for her eyes. Being depressed all the time had really been a burden, and this sudden change in the normal day to day boredom had already lifted her spirits a little, and it even got her mind off of having a baby.
All the medical records for the inhabitants of the cryogenics facility had been stored on the central computer, and when the place was first discovered, it hadn’t taken long for their advanced computers to hack the ancient systems and get all the information translated into a format they could use. The leaders of the community reviewed the information in the files and selected the candidates based not only on being male, but also on their job before dying, their psychological reports, and their medical history. Wendy had been selected because she was a mechanic and an amateur pilot, or at least that was what they had told her. They needed someone to fix their aircraft and even to fly them, and aside from some massive body trauma, she was in great shape. The man whose body was in that tube was different. He predated the computer system, and had never been added to the database. The documents Wendy had found were all the information on this guy that existed.
Most of the documents were medical reports detailing his illness, the treatments, and the time line. Cancer. Man what a crappy way to go, she had thought. Much better to go down in flames. Of course she had no idea what it was like to go down in flames, or to crash at all, as she had no memory of it.
There was a personal letter in the documents, and Wendy had felt like a voyeur reading it. It was from a woman named Mabel, addressed to this man as if she was sure he would be revived one day and would want to read it. It talked about how they had spent some time together the last year and she was very happy that he had reconnected with her, then wished him a long and fruitful life. Was this his girlfriend? Wendy was intrigued, and next she had taken out the diary.
The first entry was dated September 1, 1966. The penmanship was obviously that of a man’s, and the content was not very eloquent.
Today I got the results from Dr. Bill Callun. There is no question that it is cancer. I don’t know how to feel about it yet, but there is little doubt that I won’t live through it. Mae suggested I write in this diary, as a way to come to terms with my feelings. I feel a little silly doing it, but the truth is, I have never been so mixed up inside. If it doesn’t help, I can always stop. She is a very convincing woman. She convinced me to fight this cancer. I suspect I will be leaning on her for support in the coming months.
So far, the only thing I have found comfort in is the hope that when this is over, I might get to see my wife and daughter again. With death now a certainty, I don’t think it is worth spending what time I have left trying to find a woman, just so I can break her heart. I got my chance at love already, and despite the fact that she was taken away from me, I feel like I was blessed.
So Mae must be a relative or old friend, and his wife and daughter must have died. How awful, she had thought as she read it. She had put down the diary, intending to savor it for a while, like a good book from an author who only writes a new one every few years. She then looked more thoroughly through the rest of the documents. When she came across his military history, and the notes on what he had done, partic
ularly involving the very facility that was his final resting place, Wendy knew that this had to be brought to Teague’s attention. Despite trying to appear withdrawn to the rest of the community, she was well aware of the challenges they faced. If he could be brought back, he could help to solve a lot of problems.
Before taking the documents to Teague, however, she hid the diary and the letter in her dresser. They weren’t going to need it, and chances were, as old as the body was, it would be far too freezer burnt to have any chance at cloning.
* * *
The wrench slipped off the nut and she banged her knuckle hard enough to make it bleed. “Dammit!” she exclaimed and grabbed a rag to wipe the blood away. She needed to concentrate on the job at hand, but she was like a schoolgirl anxious to meet her new boyfriend under the bleachers to make out. Thinking about the diary sobered her up a little. She knew she had to come clean about it sooner or later, or the guilt would tear her apart. What she needed was a way to bring it up and explain why she had read the diary, without making her seem like some kind of stalking freak. It really didn’t look good on the surface, and even when she rationalized it in her own head it looked pretty bad.
She had read a little bit more of the diary each day, learning more about Jack, his illness, his dead family, his mother-in-law who was damned near a saint to him, and even about how he found out the facility he was building was the ultimate irony in his life – a place to be stored until someone could come along and fix the cancer and bring him back to life. The more she read, the more she wished she could meet this man in person, give him a hug, and maybe even ask him to marry her. At first the writing was pretty basic and to the point, but as he got closer to the inevitable death that would mark the end of his diary, he opened up and it was as if he was writing poetry. Even though he was dead, he had filled the void in Wendy, and it had given her a reason to continue on.
The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) Page 15
