The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1)

by David Kersten

  The diary had helped her come to terms with her own situation. She didn’t like it, hated it in fact, but the bottom line was that she was given a second chance at life that most people would never get. Not only that, she was brought into a situation that, no matter how grim it was, she had a chance to be a part of saving humanity. There were literally only dozens of humans left on earth who could give birth to a new generation, and she was one of them. She was a daughter of Eve herself here, and would be the mother of a good percentage of human kind, if it could make it past the wars and the fighting. Reading Jack’s story gave her the insight and the strength to look at things in a different light. She had decided that she would make the most of it, give it a shot, get pregnant and have a child and do her best to help restart the human race.

  That’s when things got really complicated. Teague had agreed with her that this could be the best find yet at the facility, and perhaps the solution to the second biggest problem they faced. They took the utmost care bringing him in, and were meticulous in mapping his memories. From what Wendy knew of the process, it was incredibly unlikely that they could bring this man into their world. It would take a miracle. It was a harsh world, and miracles were not in abundance these days.

  It turned out that the some combination of the experimental Cancer treatments he had undergone actually aided in the freezing process, and they had their miracle. When Teague announced they had successfully started the first stage and he was already growing, she was beside herself. The feelings she developed when reading the diary were for someone that would never exist, so it was safe to fantasize about him being alive and falling in love with her. Now, however, it was going to be a reality. She didn’t know if she was more frightened that he would turn out to be someone entirely different than she had imagined, or that he would end up being exactly the man she longed for.

  Wendy did not have much respect for the women here, primarily because she felt that they didn’t have enough respect for their womanhood. She tried not to judge them, knowing full well that they had been raised in an incredibly different and difficult environment, but she felt a person cannot unlearn a set of morals and values.

  It had been discovered fairly early on that the freshly reborn men were like seventeen year olds that had been locked in the closet with a porn magazine and a flashlight. Wendy wasn’t sure who had figured it out, but it had become something of a ritual to try to get the men alone on the first morning after regaining the ability to move. Even if the love she felt for this man was based on nothing more than whimsical fantasy, she didn’t want Jack to fall victim to one of those women. She rationalized her hanging out as close to the medical ward as she could by telling herself she was just trying to protect him from something that would likely embarrass him. From what she read, she saw Jack as a fairly old fashioned guy with a strong sense of duty and incredible loyalty to those he loved.

  When he first gained consciousness, she didn’t wander more than a hundred feet from his room, and when he woke that night, she told herself that she was watching over him to make sure none of the predatory women tried to take him in the night. Before five sentences were out of his mouth, however, she had turned into the exact sort of predator she was supposedly protecting him from.

  She was incredibly embarrassed by her own actions that first night, and laying here under the HVAC unit daydreaming about it, she colored a deep red at the memory of how she had seduced him like that. Regardless of her brazen actions, she was, in a word, happy. Last night had been positively wonderful, as had this morning.

  So far he was turning out to be everything she had hoped. He seemed to enjoy the hours they spent talking, and he latched on to every word she said as if it were the most important thing he had ever heard. When she smiled at him he would pause as if his train of thought had been interrupted.

  Despite the emotional high and the signs he was interested, deep down she knew that the chances of him having similar feelings for her were very slim. He was still driven more by his raging hormones than by any coherent thinking, and she had been for him what every man would desire. Soon he will meet many more women all just as attractive as she is who are willing to jump his bones at the first opportunity, and the special intimacy that they had shared will probably be viewed by him as the result of just another woman looking to get pregnant. From what she had read in the diary, his wife’s memory had stopped him from not just looking for companionship from another woman in those last few years of his life, but kept him from even seeking a single night’s reprieve from loneliness. She had feared that the first night they met he would decline her advances just based on that alone. Now she feared that her boldness would drive him away when he learned that every woman here would be doing what they could to get intimate with him.

  On top of all this, as if that weren’t enough, if – no, when – she gave him the diary, he would probably see her not only as a slut, but as a slut that used his personal information to help seduce him. The thought of losing him like that made her bowels feel loose, and she threw the wrench down in frustration and fear.

  Chapter 18

  In the past couple days, Jack had envisioned various motives for being brought back to life. None of them included building a massive underground city. He was a glorified contractor; his best asset on a project was his ability to see where there were potential problems and fix them. Not just with machinery, engineering, or structure, but also with people, material logistics, and political conflict. He was a wizard when cutting through a bureaucracy, but that was in a different world, with different people, different politics, different machinery, and different conditions. “Teague, I don’t know what kind of help I could possibly be. I’m no engineer. So much has changed. I…”

  Teague held up a hand, “Nobody is expecting you to design anything. We have a few people who are pretty smart, and some of the technology we have enhances that greatly. The problem we have is not whether we can conceive a project of this magnitude, it’s finding someone to go out and do it. There isn’t a man alive that has dug a hole bigger than a grave, let alone excavated enough earth to house a park like this,” he gestured to the courtyard all around them, “eighty feet underground. We need someone who can lead men, not into battle, but in a project of awesome proportion.”

  This did relax Jack a little. He still didn’t think Teague had any idea of what he was really asking though. “An operation like you are describing requires a lot of specialized machinery, a lot of skilled operators, and the resources Teague…” He let that hang while his mind processed the amount of steel and concrete alone it would take to build something just the size of this structure, let alone something larger.

  “We understand it will be a monumental task, but there are two factors that we believe make all the difference here.”

  “Yeah, what are those?”

  “First, we have done it before. The EoS built more than you can imagine, and they started with nothing. We might not have those resources at hand, but we have, for all intents and purposes, a detailed history on how those people were able to build magnificent cities from nothing but wasteland.

  “Second, we have a need, and the fate of humanity may very well ride on it. We simply can’t fail here or in another hundred years, humans might just be a part of the Earth’s history, not a part of its future.”

  They sat in silence as the weight of that statement settled in. Jack finally spoke, “I don’t know what to say. I need to learn a lot more about what we have to work with before I can wrap my mind around the idea of leading a project of this magnitude.”

  “If it helps, this is not the most immediate issue, so you will most likely have months to prepare. As long as this can be ready in five years –”

  “Five years?!” He shook his head, “No no no, you don’t know what you are asking here.” Jack scoffed, “Impossible! Maybe twenty years with the right crew, but five? I truly hope you have a plan B because what you are saying simply can’t be done.” />
  Teague’s confidence appeared to waver slightly, but he smiled anyway. “I know it sounds impossible, but in my life I have seen the impossible achieved countless times, and I have faith in you.”

  “Why? You barely know me, how could you possibly think that I am going to be able to pull off a miracle?”

  “Because you are all we have, Jack, and it will have to be enough. Shall we finish the tour?”

  * * *

  The tour continued but Jack was struggling to pay attention. He needed time to process again, to accept what they were asking of him, just as he had needed time to accept how he had come to be here. They spent some time touring the single and family apartments, and by the time they were finished he had pushed his thoughts aside so he could concentrate on the situation at hand. He would worry about things later. As they took the elevator to the top level, he asked about the families. “So do you just put the women and kids in the family apartments?”

  In his usual fashion, Teague seemed to see right through the question, “What you are really asking is do the men and women practice your idea of relationships, am I right?” Jack had to give the man credit, he was really good at reading between the lines. That made him both a great asset as well as a dangerous man. He hoped he never had to play politics against him. Teague went on without waiting for an answer, “The men and women from the past dozen or so generations have lived under the pressure of rebuilding humanity. Relationships are not the same now as in your time, any more than they were the same from your time to say, Wendy’s time.” If there was supposed to be some kind of subtle message in that statement, Jack pretended he hadn’t picked up on it. Even in the last decade of his life, he had seen the changes in the social structure, particularly toward sex and morality. He was well aware of the challenges that lay ahead if he tried to make a relationship with Wendy, or any of the women here for that matter. “Since the fall of the EoS, monogamy has taken on a different meaning than it had in your time. For the most part, people of today’s world see sex as a function that is required to survive. It is not tied to emotion or intimacy for them, so sex is not exclusive to a relationship and copulation outside the relationship is not a threat. Also, there are no moral or religious ties to sex. It is not like the parents teach the kids that sex is something they should be ashamed of or kept hidden, so it is a natural part of everyone’s life. The fact that it is enjoyable practically makes it a good form of entertainment. Oddly enough, one of the reborn put it into words that I particularly like. He said, ‘The women here don’t get out much, and it’s not like they can watch TV or go shopping. They need something to do to relieve the monotony.’”

  Jack chuckled. It all made perfect sense. However, he was raised to believe that being faithful to your partner meant not having a sexual relationship with anyone else. Just thinking about adultery was a sin in some people’s eyes. This concept of sex not being tied to emotion or morality was foreign. “How do the reborn handle this?”

  “The men typically don’t have a problem with this at first, as you can imagine. However, once they start having feelings toward a particular woman, things can get difficult. For the women, it’s far worse. Overall, it is not the ideal situation for us, but we have established some ways around it. If a man and woman want to be exclusive, we allow it as long as they agree on two things. The first is that he either procreates with other women or at the least, donates sperm to continue diversifying the gene pool. The second is that the woman agrees to have children sired by other men, as long as it is necessary.”

  Jack was not sure he would be comfortable with his spouse having other men’s babies. “Necessary? How often is it necessary?”

  “As far as I am concerned, it is vital, but in the past few years there has been some debate as to how to approach gene pool diversification. Frankly, my area of expertise is not in genealogy, so I am not really qualified to quantify how necessary it is. We have only run into a few situations, and in those situations it was the men who were not completely comfortable with our form of monogamy, so we have let the women decide, and it has become an almost primal instinct to diversify our families.”

  He hadn’t really answered the question, but it seemed like a sensitive subject, so he just nodded, “Fair enough. I suppose it’s comforting to know that you aren’t going to force me to have sex with other women.”

  Teague laughed. “You realize you are probably the first man in two hundred years to say that.” Jack grinned and nodded, conceding that most guys’ fantasy was to have dozens of women willing to have sex with absolutely no strings attached.

  The elevator had opened and Teague said, “So let me show you some of the defensive designs on this level.”

  * * *

  After the tour they got lunch. Then Teague excused himself, citing some duties to attend to at the medical lab. He asked if Jack wanted to join him.

  “If it’s all the same to you I would rather wander around a bit. I still have more questions, and if I am going to be busy tomorrow I would like to get them answered sometime today. Right now I just want to collect my thoughts.”

  Teague approved and told him to either come find him later or page him with the datapad. Jack looked at his datapad again, marveling at the technology. Imagine the Army having communication like this... the effectiveness of such a force would be astounding. That is of course, as long as the enemy didn’t have the same or better communications. The thought actually sent a chill up his spine.

  He found the elevator again, and went back to the third floor, figuring out how to use his datapad to get the elevator to work. There were buttons of course, but he figured it was important to learn to use the technology. The fourth floor icon on the datapad was washed out in red, and when he pushed it, nothing happened. Whoever was in charge didn’t want him on that level by himself, obviously. When the doors opened, he started walking through the halls, trying to get a feel for the layout. When he passed the same intersection of three hallways for the fourth time, he began to wonder if he was lost, or if it just all looked the same.

  The fifth time he got to that intersection, he noticed a mark on the wall that had definitely been there before. I’m walking in circles, he thought to himself. He knew he could just press the button to call Teague, but he was a little embarrassed and the doctor was probably busy. Instead, he started knocking on doors. He hit almost twenty doors before one opened. Jack was somewhat taken aback when a little girl with long curly blond hair and rosy cheeks answered the door. Before he could think of something to say, she said, “Hello, my name is Jessica, what’s yours?”

  Jack found his voice and said, “Hi, Jessica, I’m Jack. I seem to be lost, is your mother here so I can get some directions?” He figured if her dad lived with her, he probably wasn’t home, being as it was the middle of the day.

  “Why don’t you just use your pad?” Her innocent question didn’t keep Jack from flushing in embarrassment. His ineptitude with the datapad was probably incomprehensible to someone who had been around one all their life.

  “Well,” Jack said, “I can’t figure out how to use it.” The little girl thought he was being funny and giggled.

  Probably thinking it was some kind of game, the little girl stood up straight and put a look on her face that was remarkably reminiscent of a school teacher. “Would you like me to show you how to use your pad, Jack?” He reluctantly nodded, figuring it might be enlightening.

  She reached up and took it from him, stepped out in the hall, and sat down cross-legged. When Jack didn’t sit down right away, she said, “Come on Jack, you can’t learn anything from way up there!” He quickly sat down, feeling like he had just been scolded by his grade school teacher. “Okay, this is the stylus” she said as she pulled a pen like object from the bottom corner of the pad. Teague had been holding one of those whenever he was working on the datapad, but Jack didn’t know he even had one. “You can use your finger most of the time, but the stylus is more ack-arit.” She stumbled on the wo
rd, obviously not knowing its real meaning, but he knew she was saying ‘accurate.’ “Tap here to get the main menu. From here you can do things like call your mom or your friends. If you press here you get video, if you don’t it’s just sound.”

  Jack was impressed, not just with the pad, but with this child. “You seem to know a lot about these. Does everyone have one?”

  She shook her head. “Only the adults, but we get to use them when we go to school.” She went on with her lesson. “You can also bring up a map of the city, or even of the outside, in case you ever find yourself out there. Of course you would be in bad trouble if you went outside, and the Mutes or Calis would probably steal you away, so you will never need to use the outside map.” She showed him how to bring up and read the maps. The map of outside showed terrain, radioactive zones, and could even show old roads that probably no longer exist, but might come in handy if he ever needed to travel by ground transportation. Jack was particularly intrigued about the mention of dangers outside the complex, and he made a mental note to ask about it. He recalled how Chuck had just come back from an evening patrol. It would be good to know what he was patrolling and why.

  “Here you can control the temperture of the ‘partment, lights, and even see what you have in the fridge. There is video so you can spy on the kids in other rooms too! Once I got mom’s pad and spied on my brothers and sisters for the whole day!” Jack was reminded again that these people grew up with this technology and it was an integral part of their life, even if he barely understood any of it.