Outlanders 15 - Doom Dynasty

by James Axler

  Dr. Erica van Sloan was of half Latino and half British extraction. She had inherited her dark hair and eyes from her Brazilian mother, but she possessed her father's tall frame and long, solid legs. God only knew from which side of her family her 200 point IQ derived, but she knew she received her beautiful sing­ing voice from her mother.

  At eighteen years of age, the haughty, beautiful and more than a trifle arrogant Erica earned her Ph.D. in cybernetics and computer science. She wanted to pur­sue a singing career, but within days of her graduation from Cal Tech she went to work for a major Silicon Valley hardware producer as a models and systems analyst.

  Eight months later, she left her six-figure annual salary to accept a position with a government-sponsored ultra-top-secret undertaking known as Overproject Whisper. Only much later did she realize Whisper was a major division of something called the Totality Concept, and she was assigned to one of its subdivisions, Operation Chronos. In the vast instal­lation beneath a mesa in Dulce, New Mexico, she served as the subordinate, lover and occasional victim of a man who made her own officious personality seem mousy and shy by comparison.

  Torrence Silas Burr was brilliant, stylish, waspish and nasty. He excelled at using his enormous intellect and equally enormous ego to fuel his cruel sense of humor. He delighted in belittling and degrading not just her, but other scientists assigned to Overproject Whisper. The one scientist he could not deride was Mohandas Lakesh Singh, the genius responsible for the final technological breakthrough of Project Cer­berus, which permitted Operation Chronos to finally make some headway.

  Although the Totality Concept projects were rarely coordinated, the techs of Operation Chronos used Singh's mat-trans discoveries to spin off their own innovations and achieve their own successes. Opera­tion Chronos dealt in the mechanics of time travel, forcing temporal breaches in an attempt to enter "probability gaps" between one interval of time and another. Inasmuch as Project Cerberus utilized quan­tum events to reduce organic and inorganic material to digital information and transmit it through hyper-dimensional space, Operation Chronos built on that same principle to peep into other timelines and even "trawl" living matter from the past and the future.

  Although more than one hapless human being was snatched from the past and brought forward into the present, there had been only one proved success with a trawling subject, who arrived in the twentieth cen­tury sane in mind and sound of body. After many failures, his subdivision successfully retrieved a living subject from a past timeline, a scientist from the nine-teenth century. However, the subject proved so very troublesome he was finally removed from Dulce.

  Not too long after that, a series of sweeping policy changes came into play, which created something far beyond the scientific ambitions of the Totality Con­cept staff. Other government agencies became in­volved, as well as other countries.

  With the advent of the Cerberus success, the re­doubts were built, linked to each other by gateway units. Though the Continuity of Government facilities and the redoubt scientific enclaves were not part of the same program, there was an almost continuous trade-off of design specifications, technology and per­sonnel. Many of the Totality Concept's subdivisions and spin-off researches were relocated to COG re­doubts. Operation Chronos was moved to Chicago and Project Cerberus was moved to Montana.

  The most ambitious COG facility was code-named the Anthill because of its resemblance in layout to an ant colony. It was a vast complex, with a railway, stores, theaters and even a sports arena. Supplies of foodstuffs, weapons and anything of value were stockpiled.

  Because of its size, the Anthill was built inside Mount Rushmore, using tunneling and digging ma­chines. The entire mountain was honeycombed with interconnected levels, passageways and chambers.

  Erica learned that once construction on the Anthill was completed, the entire Totality Concept program would be moved into it. She could not understand why, and when she spoke to Burr of her confusion, he spoke cryptically of the "Jamais vous principle," referring to a time-perception disorder.

  He spoke darkly of a probability-wave dysfunction that Operation Chronos had triggered when it dis­rupted the chronon structure. He claimed they had inadvertently created an alternate-future scenario for humanity, and it wasn't one he cared to live in.

  Burr hinted that the frenzied construction of the redoubts was due to his report of the dysfunction, and if the Totality Concept researches had been left to molder in old military intelligence files at the end of World War n, the alternate-future scenario would never have come into existence. There was no stop­ping it, there was only surviving it and he wasn't very sanguine about humanity's chances.

  He declared vehemently he had no intention of vol­untarily imprisoning himself in the Anthill. He would make his own plans, utilizing the Jamais vous prin­ciple he had created. Erica only saw him once more after that, secretly removing files and computer disk­ettes from his office. It was Christmas Eve, 2000. She could have wished him the season's greetings or she could have logged in the security violation and had him executed, but by then she was too emotionally wrung out to do either.

  She did not miss Burr once she arrived in the Ant­hill to begin her new duties. There were far more immediate concerns to attend to than the fate of her former boss and lover, whom she despised anyway.

  When the world blew out on noon of January 20, 2001, she ceased to think about him at all. Like every­one else in the installation, she prayed the safety mea­sures would kick in as they were designed to. But despite all of their precautions, radiation still trickled in. Bomb-triggered earthquakes caused extensive damage.

  Since the military and government personnel in charge had no choice but to remain in the facility, it took them awhile to realize they were just as much victims of the nukecaust as those whom they referred to as the "useless eaters" of the world. Erica van Sloan could not help but laugh to herself over the grim irony. She remembered how a fringe movement called survivalism had gained popularity, primarily among ex-military and rural people with various po­litical axes to grind.

  They trained and indoctrinated themselves so thor­oughly to survive Armageddon, some of them actu­ally began to look forward to it. They deluded them­selves into believing a postholocaust world would be better than the one they lived in. They aspired to have a world where the romance of the frontier spirit would be revived, free of government regulations, laws and moral obligations, where a human being's worth would be measured only in how willing he or she was to kill a child for a crumb of food.

  Most of the government people in the Anthill viewed survivalists as brain-damaged paranoids. But as the second anniversary of the nukecaust passed, it became patently obvious the men who knew in ad­vance about the atomic megacull were just as stupen­dously ill-informed as the survivalists at whom they had once sneered.

  Like their less educated counterparts, they had no real grasp of the scope of the global devastation. None of their painstaking calculations regarding acceptable losses, destruction ratios and the length of the nuclear winter bore any resemblance to the terrifying reality.

  When this select few, this powerful elite, finally did come to terms with reality, it was too late to do much about it. They had assumed that after five years or less of waiting inside the Anthill, a new world order would be in place. Now the schedule appeared to be closer to twenty. Erica recalled how General Ket-tridge would rant about how "they" had lied to them, about how "they" had deceived them. But Kettridge tended to rant and rave at the slightest pretext any­way, so she suppressed her curiosity about the iden­tities of "they."

  The prolonged nuclear winter changed ideas about a new world order. Even if the personnel managed to outlast the big freeze, the skydark, they would still sicken and die, either from radiation sickness or sim­ply old age.

  So they embarked on a radical and daring plan. Cybernetic technology had made great leaps in the latter part of the twentieth century, and Erica herself had made some small contribut
ions to those advances. General Kettridge ordered operations to be performed on everyone living in the Anthill, making use of the new techniques in organ transplants and medical tech­nology, as well as in cybernetics.

  Over a period of years, everyone living inside Mount Rushmore was turned into cyborgs, hybridi­zations of human and machine. Radiation-burned flesh was replaced by synthetic skin, limbs with can­cerous marrows were changed out for ones made of plastic, Dacron and Teflon. With less energy to ex­pend on maintaining the body, the cyborganized sub­jects ate less and therefore extended the stockpile of foodstuffs by several years.

  Since the main difficulty in constructing interfaces between mechanical-electric and organic systems was the wiring, Erica oversaw the implantation of super­conducting quantum interface devices or SQUIDs, di­rectly into the brain. One-hundredth of a micron across, SQUIDs facilitated the subject's control over the new prostheses.

  Although Erica herself had designed the implants and oversaw the early operations, she certainly did not care for the process being performed on her. She knew that SQUIDs could be used to electronically control their subjects, and she wasn't fond of being turned into a biomechanical drone. However, she was even less fond of the alternative—euthanasia.

  Of course, the transformations did not solve all of the Anthill's survival issues. Compensation for the natural aging process of organs and tissues had to be taken into account. The Anthill personnel needed a supply of fresh organs, preferably those of young peo­ple, but obviously the supply was severely limited. So General Kettridge, now calling himself the Com­mander in Chief, came up with a solution—cryogen­ics, or a variation thereof.

  Kettridge was inspired by the method of keeping organic materials fresh by pumping a hermetically sealed vault full of dry nitrogen gas and lowering the temperature to below freezing. He ordered the internal temperatures inside the installation to be lowered just enough to preserve the tissues but not low enough to damage the organs.

  Other scientific disciplines were blended. The in­terior of the entire facility was permeated with low-level electrostatic fields of the land hospitals experi­mented with to maintain the sterility of operating rooms. The form of cryogenesis employed at the in­stallation was not the standard freezing process rely­ing on immersing a subject in liquid nitrogen and the removal of blood and organs.

  Rather, it utilized a technology that employed a sta­sis screen tied in with the electrostatic sterilizing fields, which for all intents and purposes turned the Anthill complex into an encapsulated deep-storage vault. This process created a form of active suspended animation, almost as if the personnel were enclosed by an impenetrable bubble of space and time, slowing to a crawl all metabolic processes. The people achieved a form of immortality, but one completely dependent on technology.

  Erica never wondered aloud where the stasis tech­nology came from, but she assumed it derived from the mysterious "they" whom Kettridge accused of betrayal.

  However, even those measures were temporary. Er­ica volunteered to enter a stasis canister for a period of time, to be resurrected at some future date when the sun shone again and the world was secure.

  When Erica awakened, more than a century had passed. During her long slumber, the Anthill instal­lation suffered near catastrophic damage. General Kettridge was killed and a number of stasis units mal­functioned, including her canister.

  Due to that malfunction, her SQUIDs device had inflicted neurological damage on her body, and she was resurrected as a cripple. Worse than finding out her long, shapely legs were little more than withered sticks was learning the plans made for her while she slept.

  Erica was briefed on the Program of Unification and the baronial oligarchy, and the true identities of Kettridge's "they" were finally revealed. Or at least, they were given a name—Archons. She was told that to be of optimal use to the Archon Directorate and their hybrid plenipotentiaries, the barons, she needed to be as fit as it was possible for a human in her physical condition and chronological age. Moreover, Erica was informed she was only one of several pre-holocaust humans, known as "freezies" in current vernacular, resurrected to serve the baronies and she should consider herself fortunate to be among their number.

  In other words, she was not to grieve, mourn, weep or otherwise feel sorry for herself. She was to con­centrate only on what her technological skills could contribute to the furtherance of the Program of Uni­fication. Otherwise, she would be put out of her mis­ery.

  Erica was not assigned to any particular ville for any length of time. She was given quarters in Front Royal, and from there she traveled from barony to barony, setting up their computer systems, training personnel in their operation and in troubleshooting procedures. The systems, although in absolutely pris­tine order, were not state-of-the art, certainly not by the standards of the first year of the twenty-first cen­tury.

  None of the mainframes employed the biochip de­velopments that would have been commonplace if the nukecaust had been averted. Most of the software, hardware and support systems were fairly basic, as well. Erica could not help but suspect that the truly advanced predark tech was being deliberately sup­pressed. She could only assume it was done out of fear of the new postnuke society becoming just as dependent on technology as the old one.

  Whatever the real reason, she learned quickly not to question. Over the years of Erica's long life, due to the creativity and skills of her intellect, she had undergone many organ transplants so as to extend her value to the united baronies. Despite the pain and suf­fering that had accompanied each successive opera­tion, Erica never regained the use of her legs, and the neurological degeneration grew so acute she became a complete cripple.

  The cost of every one of those years of agony showed in her face, and so she always tried to avert her eyes from a reflective surface, even the highly polished tabletop. Erica had never grown accustomed to the craggy, seamed face staring back at her from mirrors or even windows. Her hair, though still as black as the night, was so thin and straggly she usu­ally wore it pulled back in a tight knot at the nape of her wattled neck.

  She wore a nondescript gray coverall, which was baggy on her small and scrawny frame. Only her jet-black eyes seemed to show any life, blazing in her deeply lined face, glinting with impatience.

  Erica was anxious for the session to begin. Since cybernetic principles were applied to management and organizational theory, she always had much to offer in the way of streamlining ville government. Just as everything that occurred in the universe'could be reduced to cause-and-effect chains, the chains them­selves could be used to build organizational models.

  Now, months after the disaster at the Dulce site, a new model urgently needed to be constructed, and so Erica sat in the council chamber and waited for the barons to arrive. They needed her input, not simply so they could determine a course of action, but also to stay alive. She was less a moderator of the meeting than a mother figure.

  Erica repressed a bleak smile and wondered what she should tell them.

  Chapter 17

  The baronial council was in full session, with all eight surviving barons in attendance. They filed into the room, moving with a bizarrely beautiful, danceresque grace.

  All of them were dressed identically in the cere­monial garb of the baronial oligarchy—flowing, bell-sleeved robes of gold brocade and tall, conical, crested headpieces, ringed by nine rows of tiny pearls.

  No one, not even the humans who had advised them for years like Erica van Sloan, knew from whence the tradition of ceremonial attire sprang. She always presumed the design had something to do with Archon culture, whatever that might be. Baron Thu-lia's adviser, a man named Bakshmi, had told her in an unguarded moment that there was a marked sim­ilarity between the barons' garb and that of Tibetan high lamas. If indeed the entities called Archons had influenced humanity since the dawn of time, then it stood to reason they had interacted with Tibetans.

  Not only was the barons' mode of dress identical,
but they were also so similar in appearance they might have been born from the same mother and fa­ther. In many ways, they had been.

  Their builds were small, slender and gracile. All of their faces had sharp planes, with finely complexioned skin stretched tight over prominent shelves of cheek-hones. The craniums were very high and smooth, the ears small and set low on the head. Their back­slanting eyes were large, shadowed by sweeping, su-praorbital ridges. Only hair, eye color and slight dif­ferences in height differentiated them.

  Baron Beausoleil was the only female of the oli­garchy, but she, too, had the same wispy hair the tex­ture of duck down, although hers was dark with red­dish highlights.

  All in all, they were a beautiful people, almost too perfect to be real. But their eyes glittered under the muted lights with wariness or suspicion, or a combi­nation of both. Baron Sharpe's eyes, the clear blue color of mountain meltwater, held another spark, a glint that in a human being might have been inter­preted as a sign of dementia.

  Even their expressions were markedly similar—a vast pride, a diffident superiority, authority and even ruthlessness. They were the barons, and as such, they were the avatars of the new humans who would in­herit the Earth.

  Before they seated themselves at the table, they faced one another and moved with a swaying motion, like reeds before a breeze. The movements were very precise, very ritualistic, and Erica knew it was a form of a ceremonial greeting. It seemed a behavior instinc-tive rather than learned, perhaps encoded in their hy­bridized genes.

  After they had taken their chairs, Erica spoke first in a hoarse, dry croak not much above a whisper. Her most recent vocal cord transplants had worn out a decade ago. ' "This, my lord barons, is a historic first."

  Cobalt's eyes flashed a quick acknowledgment of her opening statement. The big irises were a beautiful yellowish-brown in color, only a few shades darker than his complexion. "We are here to make sure it is not a historic last, Adviser Sloan." His voice was musical, like a melody played on a flute.