Having had the wind taken out of his sails, Handro looked back down at Cooper, squinting slightly. “And where is Ann now?”
“She told me so much stuff, she wanted to leave me to learn how to use some of it. Truly, I was getting overwhelmed. I can call her though if you need something.”
“No, no, everything is fine. So, these are actual images of outside?”
“That’s what she says, but now that you’re back we can test it.” Cooper punched the arrow picture on the table that he had called up through the floor and scrolled through the cameras, settling on the one showing the outside of the front door. The sun was nearly up and the terrible storm from the previous day seemed to have ended. “Ok. Stay right here and I will run out there and come back. You should be able to see me. I’ll be right back.”
With that, Cooper went tearing down the hall, excited to finally test it and make sure it wasn’t all some elaborate lie.
As the door snapped open to the outside, both dogs went running out, eager for some fresh air. Cooper had to admit, the cold, fresh air did smell much more alive than the air inside the bunker. He stayed out there and stomped around in the snow for a few minutes until he heard Handro yell something unintelligible.
Cooper came back inside and had an idea. He stared into one of the black boxes and said “Let both of those dogs activate the doors so they can come back inside.” Truly, the redhead had no idea if that would work, but it was worth a shot. He made a mental note to remember they were out there so they didn’t end up stranded if his little experiment failed.
Heading back to Handro, he could see in the other man’s excitement that it must have worked.
“I saw you on the screen! This is amazing! Did she say how it worked?” he asked.
“She started to, but it was pretty complicated. The important thing was that she told me how to use it. This whole bunker was in some sort of stand-by mode and she turned it back on for us. If you want something, look into one of the black boxes and ask,” Cooper replied. “Oh, and you don’t need to yell, I learned that one right away,” he said with a big grin.
Handro thought for a minute and said, “I want a boat that can break up the ice out there and get us home.”
Cooper looked shocked that he hadn’t thought to ask for that as well. The two men stood there for some time, wondering just how much magic this place had in it. Finally Cooper heard a dull gong sound and the same voice that said “welcome” came on and said, “Sorry, there is no boat present with that ability.”
Cooper and Handro were let down, but realized that this thing had to have limits somewhere. “Had to try,” said Handro.
“It was a great idea,” Cooper said, smacking the other man on the shoulders. “Let’s try some of this food.” Cooper asked for two large meals, which slid out on a table from a hole in the wall several minutes later.
+++
The next day, Cooper was talking with Ann again in the library room. He was quickly growing accustomed to these screens, even though they still amazed him. She had taught him a few more things about the bunker they were in, but was now asking her own questions of Cooper.
“I understand your hesitation in telling me about your village, Cooper. There are some things I am interested in that wouldn’t reveal where it is.”
“I will answer everything I can. Both Handro and I are very grateful for the help you’ve given us.”
“Just tell me about your home then. How many people live there? Are there any children?
“A few dozen adults and now nearly twenty children are running around because we saved many from my old city.”
Ann’s eyes grew wide. She started to speak several times but caught herself each time. Finally, she composed herself. “Do you know what happened to all the people, Cooper? Not your village, but what caused the fall of man?”
“I have heard of a few things from the elders in the village, and Aria has told me all about the radiation making it hard to have babies,” Cooper replied.
“Most of what you heard is probably incorrect. Although there is certainly radiation out there in spots, that’s not the main reason for the infertility.” Ann looked down at her hands, and then slowly looked back up into the screen. “It was a virus. A simple virus. The best guess at the time was that it was frozen inside the glaciers. As they melted, it spread all over the planet”.
Cooper nodded his head. He was very interested in this story, but he was unsure why he was hearing it now.
“A very small segment of the population seemed immune to the virus. Less than 1% survived. What the doctors from hundreds of years ago discovered, was that it wasn’t a full immunity. This damn virus was building up in their bodies as they aged and causing damage to the reproductive systems.” Ann had grown unsettled as she told the story.
“So, the virus is still here? Is it inside me?” Cooper asked as he looked down over his own pale body.
“Oh yes, it’s certainly inside you, and everyone else on the planet. People at my facility had been working on a cure for it for hundreds of years. They were using samples of blood from children before the virus grew out of control inside them.”
Cooper was starting to realize where this was going as he gingerly asked, “Why did they stop?”
Ann grew very quiet again, like she was lost in thought about some other thing. “This cure had the potential to give us our planet back. It couldn’t make everyone fertile again, some are merely too old, but most of the people under 40 years of age would, theoretically, be able to have children again without any serious complications.”
“Why did they stop working on the cure?” Cooper asked again, even though now he was fairly certain of the answer.
“Well, we were having fewer and fewer children until one day there were no more. As the virus changes over each generation, it seems to attack earlier and earlier causing a steady decline in our population. We are so close to the cure now. When work stopped, they thought they only needed a dozen more samples to tie the genetic material together.”
Cooper’s eyes narrowed slightly as he thought on what she had said. “So, you’re saying that the children in my village might be what you need to finish this cure?”
“We have looked for other camps of people. Many, many times we have gone out looking. We found a few, even got several blood samples a few years ago, but then we stopped finding colonies that were still vibrant. Some places were still alive, but they didn’t have any children. This is the last gasp of humanity, Cooper, the final end of a dominant species.”
Cooper thought back to how the birth rate had dropped in his old city. He wondered if the same thing was happening in the village, but with so few people anyway, it was hard to notice.
“Cooper, what I am saying is that your village has the only known children on the planet. Your village has the last hope for humanity.”
“And all you need is blood? A small sample of blood?”
“That’s right, just a few drops and then our scientists should be able to finish the cure. It’s so close right now we have thought about injecting it and hoping for the best, but it wouldn’t work without the missing pieces.”
Cooper stared up into the screen. Ann looked calm again but her eyes were pleading with him. “I still need to talk to the people at the village.”
“I know,” said Ann with more than a little sadness in her voice.
Cooper could see her typing into her own table at a speed he couldn’t even follow with his eyes. Her fingers danced all over the table without even the slightest pause. He felt silly now, the way he had to use each finger to stab at the letter he wanted the few times he had typed in queries to the computer.
“I have pulled out the weather information for the area of that bunker. It appears that it will get warm enough to break up the ice in less than a week. I will turn the generators on higher under the water to push the water more and clear the ice from your path. Then you can leave safely.”
He watched his
screen flip over from the picture of Ann to a picture showing dots and green slashes and blobs of things moving across an image of the big map showing the rivers all the way down to the gulf. He wasn’t sure what any of that meant; it was almost hypnotizing to watch it over and over again. Still, he nodded in agreement as if he understood what he was looking at.
“When you get back to your village, you won’t need to come back up here to notify me.” She punched in some more things into her keyboard and a small door opened in the wall revealing a shiny black egg.
He picked up the egg and found it was cool metal. It was also heavier than it appeared to be. It had a small depression on the top with a slowly blinking red light.
Ann spoke again while Cooper stared at the odd, black egg. “What you are holding is one of the last emergency beacons that this facility has. Most of them were taken by the original crew as they tried to distance themselves from their sick counterparts. When you get to your village, get us permission and then push the small button on top until the light holds steady on red. Then we will come to you.”
Anne was now talking so fast that Cooper could barely keep up. “How are you going to get to me? Do you have a boat?”
“Yes, we have a boat. Sort of. It’s a different kind of boat. Listen, Cooper, I have to run, I have many things to do now.”
Cooper could hear loud beeping in the background and the lights over Ann dimmed drastically. “Ann, is everything ok?”
“Yes, just be safe on your trip back. Take anything you might need out of the bunker.”
“Wait, I’m not going to talk to you for the next week?” But Ann’s screen went dark. Cooper sat there, staring at the screen, thinking about everything she had just told him.
How did she know what the weather would do? He guessed that since these computers could do everything else, maybe they were actually controlling the weather. A chill ran down his spine and exited his toes as he thought about it.
He needed to talk to Handro and get him up to speed. If the lake was going to thaw, they needed to be ready to go.
As Cooper turned to leave the room, he slid the egg back into his pocket, deciding it best to not mention it to Handro unless he absolutely had to.
24
Cooper found Handro sitting in the bedroom, interacting with the large screen on the wall. When he walked in, Handro turned to look at him as both dogs jumped off the bed to greet him.
“Has your friend in there told you what happened to the people who lived here?” he said, not even trying to hide the distrust he had for Ann.
“You realize if she wanted to, she could have heard you say that?”
“Of course.”
“Ok, well she told me that they all got the virus and died, pretty early on actually.”
“Yeah, did she tell you where they are?”
Cooper remembered her saying that they had taken many of the other eggs when they left. “I guess they left when people started getting sick,” the redhead said with a slight shrug to his shoulders. “That would have been hundreds of years ago, why does it matter now?”
“I pulled up the history of this place. Some people did leave, but most are still here!”
“What? That can’t be right. No one is here.”
“The main facility is behind those locked doors labeled ‘Access’, we’re just in the reserve portion. It says the main part locked down once the sickness hit some critical level, then…” Handro paused and his mouth twisted out the rest of the words, “…then it cleansed the building and sealed off the main portion.” He spat the words out like just saying them created a foul taste in his mouth.
“What do they mean by cleansed? Just cleaned it up after they left?”
“No Cooper, this computer that has been making our meals killed everyone and then burned everything in the main part and sealed it off forever because of possible contagion. It just did it automatically!”
He didn’t like hearing that, but really, it made sense to him. With what Ann told him about the virus, there was no getting better. You died if you weren’t immune, but was it only sick people left at that point? They must have been trying to slow the spread. Still, he didn’t like thinking that the bunker was making decisions like that…he just couldn’t get too stressed about something that happened generations ago.
“I have news you will like then!” he said, smiling wide, trying to lighten the situation. “Ann said the weather will be warming up and the river should thaw in a week. She did something to the big rollers out in the water to make them generate more current to sweep the ice downstream. We’re going home soon.”
“How does she know what the weather will do?” Handro seemed to dismiss the question nearly as quickly as it came to him. “Either way, we’ll need to prepare. Oh, and I am not sleeping in here anymore, I don’t trust this place. What if I sneeze and it decides I am sick? ”
Cooper couldn’t tell if his news had brightened his mood or not. He hoped it had. “How is your ankle feeling?” he asked, glancing down at the rigid boot with its metal band.
“It’s feeling much better. I was actually going to tell you that I would be walking out of here in the next few days. I want to get away from this place as soon as possible.”
Cooper looked at him and could tell that the story of what happened in this facility all those years ago had steeled his resolve to not trust others. He had hoped Handro would see the good in this place, but that hope had just drifted down the river. At least with Ann’s news of the virus, they had something to work towards. “New plan. We need to save humanity.”
Handro looked back at him with eyebrows raised as Cooper began describing all that Ann had told him about the virus and the children.
+++
The next several days were mostly preparation. Cooper and Handro had trekked back across the field to survey the damage caused by the storm to their tiny camp. Most of the walls were gone. Only the ones attached to the overturned boat remained in place.
“You sure you want to sleep out here instead of the nice, comfy beds in the bunker?” Cooper said as he looked down at the ruins. “I don’t plan on sleeping out here, and I bet you’ll be hard pressed to get the dogs. They seem addicted to those soft things!”
Handro held his hand out as if to test the air. “It’s not that cold out here, I’ll be just fine. Certainly safer than inside a building that might decide to kill me if I get sick.”
“I don’t know what you’re worried about; you said you never get sick.” Cooper grinned as he said this.
“Yeah, but maybe the computer will think my ankle is some sort of threat and put me out of my misery”
Handro was joking, so Cooper was happy. The possibility of going home in a few short days had put them both into a more jovial state.
“The ice is starting to break up and move down,” Cooper said, glancing out at the floating ice chunks. “It does look like the current here is faster now, too.”
“It is. You can actually go over there and almost feel a churning emanating through the soil. Whatever those things are doing out there, it’s powerful. We’ll need to wait until most of that ice has moved down a good ways. Otherwise we will just catch up to it with the motor.”
Cooper looked back at him. He had assumed they would float back home, at the same speed as the ice flow. “The motor works?”
“I want to try to make it work at least. Actually, next time you are inside that place, look for a book or something on engine repair. Scoob showed me a few things but more info would be good.”
“But, what if the books actually sabotage the engine…since the building wants to kill you.”
Handro laughed at his joke. “I will read any instructions carefully, that’s for sure.”
“Ok, should we re-build our camp for you then?”
“I don’t want to spend much energy on that, it’s only for a few nights. Just help me flip the boat over and I will sleep inside it. I can use the last wall as the roof.”
Later, Cooper went out and gathered a large supply of firewood. Even though Handro could walk better with the boot and his ankle was healing, he didn’t want him to push himself.
As he was walking back across the field, he could still smell the sweet scent of woodsmoke drifting into his nostrils. He was thinking about what he needed to bring back from the bunker to the village. It might be awhile before he got back up here and since they were taking the boat, he could bring a good deal of supplies.
+++
He was walking around in the supply rooms, gathering medicines from the crates when he remembered Handro’s request about information on an engine. Cooper headed over the wall to look into one of the black boxes.
He had grown more comfortable asking things of the computer, but it still felt like he was talking to himself. “Do you have any books on fixing an engine?”
The answer came immediately. “I will need more information. What size engine?”
Cooper wasn’t sure how to describe the engine. It seemed average size to him, but he had only seen the engines that Scoob had fixed in the village. He decided to try to describe the problem. “It’s for a small boat that holds two people, two dogs, and all our gear. It won’t start and we think it’s the cold.”
The computer took a moment before returning with “I have several resources for small engine repair as well as a stock of spare parts.”
Cooper was elated! Now they could almost certainly get the boat working. With control of the boat, he knew it would be a safer trip home.
The computer, however, was not done. “I also have similar sized crafts with functional engines if you would prefer that.”
“What? You actually have boats here? I haven’t seen any boats,” Cooper was shocked. The idea of a new boat was exciting, but he didn’t want to leave one of Tom’s boats stranded here. He had said it was one of his favorites.
Further: Page 16
