The Sixth Extinction

by Bob Blink

  "Tempting," he replied with the obligatory come back. "Unfortunately, work calls. I have an important get together with Joe and a few others right after breakfast."

  "Too bad," she smiled, not at all perturbed. "I'll just have to settle for a couple of muscular beach boys."

  Glenn held the door to the dining hall for her as they entered, and made their way toward the food line that was only several people deep at this late hour. The walls of the cafeteria were adorned with huge display panels that periodically changed showing pictures of some of the world's more spectacular locations. The intent was to be uplifting and to bring a bit of familiarity and beauty into the somewhat drab environment of the underground facility, but most found the scenes a painful reminder of the outside.

  Filling his plate with the artificial eggs and a slab of soy-ham, Glenn waited for Jessica to select her own items, wondering how Joe would react to her joining them for breakfast. Joe was a bit of a dour type, and when there was business at hand, didn't like outsiders mixing in. The issue solved itself when Jessica begged off, indicating Betty, her immediate substitute sitting off to one side.

  "I want to talk with her," Jessica indicated. "I have a few last minutes issues she should look into while I'm gone. How about we catch up when I get back?"

  "It's a date," Glenn agreed, both relieved and disappointed at the same time.

  As Jessica moved off, Glenn scanned the rows of tables, spotting Joe close to where they usually sat, and moved in that direction.

  "You and her getting back together?" Joe asked, more from idle curiosity than any real interest. Joe's consort, Liz, was a woman who, if anything, was more sour than himself. They had been together for more than fifteen years, some kind of record for this place.

  "Everything ready?" Glenn asked as he scooped some of the manufactured protein into his mouth.

  "I called Jake just before coming here," Joe replied. "The clone is prepped and ready for the transfer. He says she's ready to proceed as soon as we arrive."

  Glenn nodded. He hadn't expected anything different. He'd have been contacted if there were a problem, but he liked being reassured.

  Even though no one was sitting anywhere nearby, they avoided discussing the matter further until they had finished and stepped outside and into the small two-man electric vehicle that they would use to travel to the Command Area. Most of those in the Facility would walk, it was only a quarter mile, but as the manager, Glenn had certain privileges, one of them being the electric car. Powered by a special power cell, it could run a year or more before needing replacement given the small demands Glenn placed on the vehicle. The soft tires made of some super resilient polymer material ran smoothly and silently over the narrow roads that covered the underground compound.

  By design, Glenn's apartment was located on the south edge of the residential area, putting him close to the Central Command area and the two mile ring that made up the all important "Nodes" that ultimately were the reason they were all here. Along the eastern wall and set off somewhat from the "Ring" were the system labs, the cloning facilities, and closest to the living area, the square, three-story structure known fondly as the Resort. Glenn was glad to see that Jessica wasn't making her way along the route they were following, knowing she would wonder why he hadn't offered her a ride since he had planned on going that way.

  Glenn scanned their surroundings silently as Joe drove, taking them past the large hexagonal structures of the third and forth nodes. Simple, unadorned tan structures, somehow showing their government origins, they didn't look to be as important as they truly were. On either side of each building were the dedicated redundant fusion reactors that supplied power to their respective nodes. Power from the main facility reactors could also be routed to any node in an emergency, something that hadn't ever been necessary. The geothermal power link had failed a long time ago, and it hadn't been repaired, so for the remainder of the mission they would be dependent on the fusion reactors. Out of either side of the polygonal structures the ten-foot diameter conduit stretched away into the distance toward the other matching structures that completed the ring.

  Joe parked the vehicle in the manager's slot when they arrived at their destination, and the two men headed into the building. Inside they were greeted by Jake Reid, one of a couple senior technicians of the Cloning Lab. Big boned, with light brown hair, he was an energetic thirty-five year-old, and one of the Cloning Clinic's most trusted employees by the Clinic's boss, Susan Ho, who was the reason they were here.

  "Let's hope this works," Jake said. He had previously expressed concerns with the planned attempt to use an aged clone. That hadn't been done before. Usually the individual's memories were inserted into a young body, but this time they planned to try to place them into a clone aged to nearly fifty-four years, to exactly duplicate the body of the Director who had died unexpectedly of heart failure five weeks earlier. She was a key element in Glenn's small secret organization and there were a number of very important reasons to keep her death and resurrection a secret.

  Cloning techniques were nothing new, the first efforts dating back to the late twentieth century. As technology advanced, so had the ability to produce clones, both human and animal. For the most part the techniques remained a scientific curiosity. A clone wasn't really the same as the original. Genetically, yes, which in rare cases was the ultimate motivation, such as a special racehorse which was wanted for stud, but which had died prematurely. But for most situations that wasn't why a clone was sought. A cloned pet didn't measure up. The new animal lacked the memories that had created the close bond, and the replacement simply wasn't the same as the original. Even so, cloning techniques had been pursued, and the ability to create accelerated growth replacements was one of the more recent developments. An adult human could be grown from the basic DNA in just shy of a month.

  The breakthrough that had changed everything had been due to the work of a genius named Susan Ho. Korean, and one of the most accredited researchers in the field, she had applied developments in scanning and capturing human memories to the problem of inserting existing personalities into the minds of newly created clones. After a number of initial failures, she had perfected the technique of transferring the mapped mental "kernels" into a new body. The result was a person who was the genetic and mental equivalent of the original individual.

  Of course the religious community had condemned the process, and within a short time the cloning of humans had been made illegal in the United States and most of the rest of the world. Elsewhere in the world those with the financial ability and a good reason found themselves young again. More than a decade passed after the discovery before the need to overturn the restriction materialized. Now the process was standardized, although no one had been rejuvenated into an old body before. Dr. Susan Ho was breaking new ground once again.

  Only a select handful of people knew of the heart attack that had prematurely taken the scientist. All of those were members of Glenn's select group. Secretly, they had rushed the ailing Susan to the special room that Glenn had discovered during his previous cloning cycle where three of the special Memory Mapping devices were located, creating a current kernel of the scientist's memory. They were able to complete the scan before her body failed.

  The problem they had then faced was keeping her kernel viable. The kernel would begin to degrade almost immediately if not properly "stored". Degradation was an exponential thing, starting slow but accelerating at an increasing rate. A month was impossibly long to keep the newly copied memory kernel uncorrupted, and they'd had no available clone to place it into. It had been Joe who had suggested using one of the Cyborgs. There were exactly three hundred of the biomechanical devices carefully preserved in the storage room in the third level basement of the Cloning Clinic. These were emergency "bodies" that could be accessed in the event of an event that required additional, expendable manpower. They hadn't been required at any time in the Facility's history, but they were always ready for immediate
use. One had been pressed into service, and for the five weeks required to prepare the replacement body, Dr. Ho lived in the mechanical body.

  Lacking anyone they could trust to edit out the last few hours of the attack itself, or the month inside the strange environment, the regenerated Susan would have to live with those unusual memories. While the clone body had been secretly grown and aged from the DNA samples on file for the doctor, the story circulated within the community was that she was on vacation. None had reason to question the story, and if they had, Carol, who oversaw the Resort was one of the core group.

  Now they were here to see how things worked out. Cloning wasn't a guaranteed process, and the mental transfers had been known to fail. Because of the added complication with the aged body, they had actually created three clone bodies. Two were aged, and with luck and the skill of Jake Reid, one of the two would yield a replacement scientist, identical to the deceased but without the damaged heart. If both failed, they would transfer her memory kernel into a young version of herself, and deal with the issues that resulted from that transfer later.

  The body inside the heavily instrumented chamber looked frail. Happily it was clothed, thanks to Jake's efforts. Most often the clone was nude, which might have made this more awkward than necessary. The transfer would be handled entirely by Mary and Jake, their most capable technician. No one else in the facility was aware that a transfer was even planned. A helmet with multiple probes was already attached to the clone's head, and the special rigid gloves with the multiple fingertip attachments were waiting for Jake to finish fitting.

  "Almost ready," Jake informed them as they watched. "The control unit is already configured with her kernel."

  Finishing his preparations, Jake stood back and carefully closed the transparent lid of the chamber. It latched automatically, and the hiss of the special anesthetizing gas could be heard filling the chamber. Checking the readings, Jake looked toward Glenn for permission to proceed, who nodded slowly.

  The process itself was almost dull. A few lights changed color to indicate several stages in the process, but if you didn't know where to look you would miss even that. The chamber appeared static, and the body inside didn't even twitch. Five minutes later, the transfer was finished.

  "How long before she is awake?" Glenn asked.

  "Ten minutes," Jake replied. "Then we'll get the first indication whether our efforts were successful. It'll be a full day before we can be certain all is well, but what we discover when she awakens is usually a good indication of how it went.

  Fifteen minutes later they were speaking with a somewhat groggy and confused patient, but Jake gave them the thumbs up, indicating they had probably succeeded completely a viable transfer on the first try. If something went wrong, they would try again in the morning with the second clone, and if that also went bad, they'd go with the undesirable backup.

  "I'll be back later today," Glenn indicated. "I'll want to speak with her when she is fully coherent."

  Chapter 3

  Sequoia Facility

  "They killed him!" Dale Nesbitt hissed in a lowered voice, glancing sideways at Subha Rao as he spoke.

  The two men were relative newcomers to the facility, and were suddenly more uncertain about their future than ever. The dark eyes of Subha Rao were grave, reflecting his uncertainty about the unexpected turn of events. Last night they had tapped into the system remotely, in a way that Director Walker never imagined possible. They discovered what the "mission" had been and what they had unsuspectingly enabled the previous afternoon before going off duty.

  This morning after an early breakfast, they were walking to the Command Center where they were assigned, a hike of some two miles from their modest one-man apartments located almost as far from the important facility as was possible. When Dale stepped out of the apartment building every morning he was greeted by the huge expanse of open fields where farmers toiled growing a variety of high energy food items. With over sixteen square miles of highly enriched farmland, they could easily support the five thousand permanent residents of the Facility. More than eighty years before the Facility was activated, it had been estimated that an acre would support one person for a full year. Technological advances had cut the amount of land required nearly in half. Given the land available, they had enough for everyone, as well as being able to support a reasonable herd of selected meat animals.

  They weren't part of the original staff at the Facility and, as a result, had very little status, getting the least desirable location, in apartments that clearly had seen little use before their arrival. They were not assigned even one of the bicycles to ride to their work assignment. But the open air and thinly populated path this time of morning gave them confidence they could talk freely between themselves. That had not been the case back at the apartment, or the dining hall, and both had held their thoughts and reactions to the unexpected events of the afternoon before.

  "I saw it, the same as you," Rao replied, his head nodding quickly up and down as if to emphasize his agreement. "I think I am wondering what happened to the engineer named Charlie Crane, who we have been told by several people here we have replaced. More than once I have been asked where he went. He was too young for normal retirement, and now I wonder if we should be worried what might be happening to us. We have given these people the power to completely wipe us from existence."

  The two engineers had not known one another prior to waking up in the facility just over three months ago. They were told they had a special, confidential assignment that the Managing Director had selected them for, and were set to work in a secluded work area pursuing the matter. Both being outsiders, and working side by side day after day, they had formed a strong bond. As part of the selection process during the manning of this place, everyone else currently living here had been exposed to the facility, and had a chance to see what living here would be like when they were called to duty. Some had even participated in the construction of the Facility. For Dale and Rao, it had been a shock to wake up in this completely unfamiliar place. Rao's last memories had him working in Silicon Valley after completing his doctoral thesis at Cal Berkeley. Dale had been an engineering professor at a college in Pennsylvania. It had been only two weeks ago that they had achieved the goal they had been assigned, and the action yesterday had been the first use of their success.

  "This is a government funded project," Dale reminded Rao unnecessarily. "What could be the motivation for killing a United States Senator?"

  Dale was physically twenty-two years of age, with thick light brown hair and intelligent, gray eyes. He was average height, just over five foot, eleven inches. Twenty-two was the standard age of recent clones, and so both he and Rao were of the same physical age. He felt distinctly odd in the youthful body. The last thing he recalled before waking in the cloning lab that he had never seen before, was going into the scanning center in Denver. In his mind, he was fortyish, and after three months his established habits had him developing the growing gut that he'd been saddled with most of his adult life.

  "I am agreeing with you," Rao said in his somewhat mangled English, all the while nodding his head as he usually did when excited. "There is something odd about all of this, but Mr. Walker is the Director here. What he is doing must be authorized by someone."

  Rao was Indian, born in the southern part of that country. Thin, wiry, with light tan skin and very dark hair that he'd grown long since cloning, along with the thin wispy beard he was used to, he was far more comfortable in his twenty-two year old body than Dale. He'd been twenty-eight when scanned, and was working on a special assignment for the company that had hired him and which was working on getting him his green card so he could remain in the United States and bring Mina from India to join him. Unfortunately, many of his memories hadn't been resurrected with him, and they would have been extremely useful, as he had discovered after digging into the system documentation here that he had been working on this very project during its development, although remo
tely. He had found his nearly unintelligible scrawl on a number of documents that must have been transferred from San Jose, and from what he could tell he'd held a fairly high position on the project. He'd also learned enough to realize that Glenn Walker apparently hadn't known that when he'd selected him to pursue the special modifications to which they'd been assigned. At least he hadn't sought the memories that had been extracted and stored somewhere controlled that would have made the task infinitely easier. Fortunately, Rao had been able to follow the trail he had traveled before, small clues in the notes here and there, and now knew far more about the system than even Dale suspected.

  "Then why have we been kept apart and told not to discuss what we have been doing?" Dale asked pointedly.

  "Director Walker must have his reasons," Rao replied, but inside his gut told him that yesterday's action was just the beginning of what was coming. The modification that Rao and Dale had managed to implement in "The Ring" had opened a pathway that would allow other incursions on the lives of people in the cities. The Director had some special agenda, otherwise why would he have been so intent on discovering the impacts of what had taken place yesterday. Rao was also very uncomfortable with the three men that had accompanied the Director. They looked fierce and cold, and he didn't believe they would hesitate to do to him what he'd witnessed them doing in Washington. The fact that everything that happened had been carefully orchestrated to take place out of sight of others within the Facility told him all he needed to know. Unfortunately, they had few friends here, and since Mr. Walker was the highest-ranking official in the place, nowhere to turn seeking advice or help.

  "I am believing we need to know more about the situation here," Rao said. "We must be very careful in the meanwhile and not let it be known what we have been learning. We also need more friends. We are too isolated and expendable. Can you ask Mattie about this? Would she talk to others if you reveal what we have learned? That would be bad!"