by Nick Thacker
“Don’t get excited, Mark,” Austin said. “Dr. Grantham here has served his purpose. I suppose unsuccessfully, as you are currently still carrying on a conversation with me.”
He watched as Austin sidled over to the man—Grantham—and placed a hand on his shoulder. Austin reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device that looked like a cell phone. He placed it next to the doctor’s ear and waved it a few times around his temple.
The scientist reacted immediately, wailing in agony and dropping to the floor. He reached to his head, pushing against his skull, but flailed around on the ground for a full minute.
Finally silent, Austin stepped over him and approached the left side of Mark’s table.
“We’ve placed an electronic device inside each of my scientists’ skulls, both for tracking and monitoring, and as a sort of control mechanism. It’s basically a small vial of chemicals that I discovered reacts strongly to a specific electromagnetic pulse.
“My research back in the states was centered on botany, with a unique focus on naturally occurring chemical compounds found in exotic plant life. Interestingly enough, many of these plants have insanely useful applications to people like me, including the one plaguing our friendly research scientists here at the station.”
Mark tried to put it all together in his mind as Austin continued.
“One protein from here, a few from there, and zap it with an electrical current, and you’ve got a living, breathing machine. Something—someone, excuse me—who can be persuaded to do things that need to be done. Simple tasks, really, but useful nonetheless.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Forcing someone to do something in this way is impossible, but using these particular programs to deny the brain option is not impossible. By temporarily shutting down certain synapses in the human brain, we can remove possible results from the subject’s conscious decision-making process, and thus give the illusion of control. Imagine what this would offer governments, organizations, and even universities. The ability to control subjects; to control the variables enough that your solution is the only one that is enacted. No more arguing, fighting, or insubordination.”
“But this man is dead,” Mark said. “You just killed him.”
“No. On the contrary,” Austin said, “he is now able to truly live. Without the hindrance of humanity’s daily routine, and without the annoyance of personal desire. He will wake up in about an hour and carry on as if nothing happened. But his mind, unfortunately, is what we call wasted. No longer useful to scientific endeavors, he is merely a warm body that will attain his natural instinctual goals—food, shelter, protection of his own, and survival. He is now free.”
Mark decided it was time to act. Austin was lost in his own arrogance, explaining his utopian view of humanity, and drawing ever closer to the table each second.
When Austin was about a foot away, Mark lurched upward, slashing the scalpel toward Austin’s head. Austin’s reaction time was phenomenal, and he ducked out of the way. As the scalpel closed in on his head, it clipped his ear and split an inch-long gash deep into the man’s cheek.
He instinctually reached to his ear to slow the bleeding, but Mark was still moving. He rolled completely over, twisting his left arm, which was still zip-tied to the table, and pulled the table over with him.
He landed on his feet, but kept twisting his wrist around until the zip tie snapped off his wrist.
Austin rose, one hand holding the side of his face, and the other now holding a pistol. He aimed at Mark and fired.
When Mark saw the pistol, he quickly pivoted and slid the table between himself and Austin’s gun, and when the bullet smacked against the table it left a half-inch dent in the underside of the metal. Mark pushed back against the table, knocking into Austin and causing the man to fall backwards.
Mark crawled a few feet, then stood and ran out of the room. He heard Austin curse as the man tried to lift the heavy table, but Mark was already running the opposite direction.
I have to get to Reese. He knew his son was here somewhere—Sylvia had said so.
CHAPTER 40
MARK RAN FOR HIS LIFE; for his son’s life.
After leaving the lab room where he had been held, Mark stumbled down the long hallway as the last of the sedation effects had worn off.
Achieve.
Mark’s training was in full gear now, and he had a new objective. Find Reese.
Reese wasn’t safe anywhere in the station, so there was no point in waiting. They needed to find a way out of this mess, and then get back to Jen and the others.
He rounded a corner, reading the plates on the doors as he passed.
L10.23
L10.24
He must be on Level Ten.
He found a short hallway that appeared to not have any doors. There was no sign above it, and he began to run past as he heard a noise.
Shouting?
He stopped.
Turning, he focused his attention on the short hallway.
Another shout.
“Reese!” he yelled.
He ran down the hallway, trying to find a door; anything.
“Dad!” Had he heard that correctly?
Finally, reaching the end, he saw an unmarked door to what looked like a closet. He examined it, seeing a deadbolt fastened haphazardly on the outside of the door. This had to be it.
He unlocked the deadbolt and tried the handle. Finding it also locked, he kicked on the door violently.
It wouldn’t budge.
He yelled again.
The handle turned, and the door opened from the inside. Blistering white fell out into the hall, immediately lighting the area.
“Reese!” his son stared at him from inside the room, eyes wide and frightened. He stood still for a second, unsure, then ran forward and embraced Mark.
“Reese, are you alright?” Mark asked. While holding his son, Mark took a look around the room for the first time. Stark white walls, white bedsheets on a white-framed bed, and a white chair in the corner. Clearly there weren’t a lot of decorating ideas put into this room.
“I—I’m fine. How did you find me?”
“Weren’t you yelling?”
“I was, but that was because I thought I heard a crash or something, through the walls. I thought maybe some people tried to break in to rescue me, but I never thought it would be you! I mean, how did you find this place?”
“Your mother and I were brought here too, to find something. Come on, we don’t have a lot of time.”
Reese was confused, but Mark couldn’t deal with that right now. “Reese, do you know your way around here?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve been locked in this room since they brought me here. I remember… the house… they came in—” he stopped short, tears brimming at the sides of his eyes.
“It’s okay, Reese. We need to find Mom.” He turned away from the room and waited for Reese to follow. “Can you run?”
Reese nodded, and they started jogging down the hall. At the main hallway, Mark turned left and continued reading the numbers on the doors. “Do you know how many people might be here?” he asked.
“No, I’ve only seen the lady and the man.”
Mark knew he was talking about Sylvia and Jeremiah.
They ran more, now in a dimly-lit hallway that was walled with glass, large offices spaced down each side. He targeted the final door, the one facing them at the very end of the hall.
L10.33.
The room wasn’t lit, but from the lights above bouncing through the glass, he could see plants growing inside, almost covering every inch of the front wall. It looked promising. Further, the door was slightly ajar, and Mark slowed to a walk.
“Reese, I need you to wait outside, by the door,” he whispered. “If you hear me yell, or anything unusual, run away. Get to the exit of this level and run up the stairs. Okay?”
Reese nodded again.
Mark approached the door and gently pushed
it open. The office was empty, but the humidity and smell of vegetation forcefully filled his nostrils. He blinked a few times, trying to adjust.
“It’s okay, Reese. You can come in. Don’t touch anything.”
Reese entered, and his eyes lit up as he saw the venus flytrap on the desk. “Cool!” he said, running toward it.
Mark followed his son, dodging leaves and branches, and rounded the desk. He sat down in the leather chair and opened the MacBook Pro on the desk. He stared at the standard password field for a few seconds, then pressed a key combination on the keyboard. Immediately a black screen appeared, followed by a command prompt of operating system jargon. He scanned the lines, then typed another string of characters.
/sbin/mount -uw /
Another few lines of code, and more waiting.
Finally, he sat back in the chair. Reese watched over his shoulder as the computer booted up to the desktop, and Mark started perusing the files. Another screen opened as he clicked into a folder.
“It’s password-protected, and I’m assuming it’s expecting credentials from an admin or higher, but I don’t have time to bypass and hack into it as Austin, so I’m going to try setting back to the default super administrator user.”
He typed some more, opening a terminal shell application, and entered a few strings. A text file popped up onto the screen called init_err.txt, and immediately began to fill with newly-discovered system errors. Mark sat back, looking at the file, then started typing again.
“It’s trying to launch a specific program; one that was in Austin’s encrypted folder.” Finally he pressed a key and waited as lines of code streamed down the small window on the screen. Mark started mumbling to himself out of habit as he followed the code and read along. He frowned and stopped the code as a message appeared in another terminal window.
/etc/init.d/GLIIdatabase_cron_server
The message disappeared, and Mark froze.
“What is it?”
“Once I got in, it opened a file full of errors that said this other file couldn’t be found. I was trying to find it so I could see what it was, but when I did, it launched automatically.”
He logged off the computer and shut the lid.
Mark reached for the top of three matching drawers on the front of the desk, opened it, and pulled out a three-ring binder.
The binder was labeled like the others he and Erik had found on the main level, but Mark quickly realized it had been updated. The first page was missing, judging by the words “Table of Contents—Pg. 2” scrawled across the top in handwritten text. He flipped through to the next section and started reading.
The book wasn’t what the Table of Contents listed at all. Instead, Mark found redacted communication files; letters sent back and forth between “AB”—Agartha Base, he guessed—and another name that had been blacked out.
“What is it, Dad?” Reese asked, coming alongside him at the desk.
“I don’t know yet,” Mark answered, continuing to read. “It looks like this station was built for one purpose, then changed around for another purpose later. Whoever brought you here is in on it, but I don’t know what they’re trying to do.”
He flipped a page and gasped. The page he was reading was not redacted—it had been added recently—and it was a diagram of the research station, viewed from the side. The majority of the diagram was familiar to Mark, including the domed roof, the multiple levels each with a specific function, and the upside-down conical power plant in the center.
But it was the area around the station on the diagram that caught his eye. He read the captions aloud: “‘Crustal formations indicate weakened pressure points…’ ‘load-zone activation points…’ ‘trench convergence—focal point.’”
He scanned the pages following the diagram, confirming his thoughts. “Reese, my company did some work for the people that brought us here. At the time, it was nonsense—computer stuff, programming and developing, that sort of thing. There was a lot of it, but it all seemed unrelated, and they just needed to find a way to get it done right, quickly.
“But I recognize some of this now. At the time, it was all hidden in computer programs, split up enough that it was impossible to see what the big picture was. But here it is; all of it. The pieces, I mean.
“This—” he pointed out to Reese the large conical power plant, “was part of what my team was working on. It was all theoretical, though, at the time, and it was all numbers. We had no idea it was an actual analytical prototype for something of this scale.”
“What was it?” Reese asked.
“The project? It was a probabilistic model to determine the efficacy of centrifugal movement on a pressurized plane.”
He paused, then looked at Reese. “Sorry. It was a computer program that was supposed to determine whether or not this place would hold up after being pressurized under five miles of ocean while rotating.”
“Rotating? Like spinning?”
“Right. Rotating, like a drill.”
CHAPTER 41
HOW COULD IT BE REAL?
Mark remembered the prototype well. It was a computer model that depicted the exact variables he saw rendered in the diagrams. His team—himself and three others—had developed the computer program, performed the tests, and delivered the results. It had been innocent theoretical engineering on a hypothetical set of data.
There was no talk of deep-sea drilling, plate tectonics, or underwater research stations.
How could we have been so blind?
These questions nagged at him as he and Reese hustled down the hallways of Level Ten. He counted up as the office and room numbers slid past, until finally he passed the room he’d been kept in.
L10.03.
Right near the exit. The room was just as he remembered it—white, empty, and devoid of life. A glass wall and nearly invisible door separated the room from the hallway they stood in.
They didn’t wait around to explore more. Mark knew Austin had probably made his way back to his office to check into the closed-circuit camera system, and Sylvia was also somewhere in the vicinity. And who knew how many other “scientists” Austin had wandering around down here.
He thought back to the map up on Level Four. Level Eleven was labeled Geothermal: Power and Energy, and he knew Jen was originally wanting to explore there. He had no better ideas, so that was it.
“Let’s go downstairs, Reese.” He walked toward the exit, Reese following close behind.
He stepped to the large metal doors and shoved. They wouldn’t budge.
Reese stepped toward it and reached out with his hand. He placed his small palm open on the crack of the doors, and Mark heard something click inside the mechanism.
“I saw the lady do it when she took me here. I don’t think it’s locked. You just have to know where the handle is.”
Mark was impressed, and he pushed again. This time, the great metal doors swung open, revealing the corrugated metal staircase to the levels above and below them.
And a flash of movement caught Mark’s eye.
“Did you see that?” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper.
“No. What?”
“Come on, slowly. Try not to make any noise.”
He walked to the ledge and started down the stairs. He had seen something move below them, but it was too small and quick for Mark to be able to discern what it was.
He descended the staircase, carefully stepping with his toes first. They stopped in front of the open doors to the level below, labeled Level Eleven: Rue Marron.
“Reese, wait here. I’m going to see who’s down here. Be ready to run if I yell, okay?” He didn’t wait for a response.
Mark stepped onto the ground of Level Eleven, looking each direction. A huge conical machine hung from above his head, splitting the ground in front of him and descending into the lower levels. He could feel the hum of the huge machine gently shaking around him.
He didn’t dare call out, but he walked a few more steps towar
d an outlying building. Smoke rose from a broken window, and spent magazine rounds littered the ground around him.
Something happened here, he knew immediately. Recently.
He could taste the burnt magnesium on his tongue.
He struggled to stay quiet, wanting to yell Jen’s name. He had to know if she was still okay.
Moving toward the center of the level, he looked back. Reese was waiting by the main entrance to the level, gazing back at him. He’d noticed the burning smell as well.
Motioning to for him follow, Mark continued to examine the level’s buildings and grounds. He followed a line of small buildings, heading toward a smaller one near the central machine.
We need to get out of sight, he thought.
The building was situated as the last in a line of small maintenance sheds, next to a tall structure that had a sign on the side of it.
Maintenance Elevator: To Level Four.
He walked through the unlocked door of the first building next to the elevator. The place was absolutely destroyed, with papers and notebooks sprawled about and bullet holes riddling the walls. Reese entered and stood close by Mark’s side.
“Move to that window and look toward the center of the level. There’s the big machine that I told you about upstairs, but I want you to keep your eyes open for movement, okay?”
“Okay.”
Mark walked back to the door and peered around the corner. I know I saw something.
Something moved in the corner of his eye, and Mark reacted instinctively. He moved his forearm up toward the movement, protecting his face, as a massive force bowled over him.
Falling to the side, he looked back to Reese and yelled just as he hit the ground. “Run! Get to that elevator!”
He felt the wind leave his body as the creature crushed him. His eyes had closed in reaction to the unknown force, but he still used his other senses to analyze what it was that had attacked him.
The thing rolled off him—it was shaped like a human, he realized—and lunged again. Mark rolled to a sitting position just in time, and the person landed hard on the ground. Reese was now running out the sole door of the building, right next to Mark and the attacker.
