CHOSEN: A Paranormal, Sci-Fi, Dystopian Novel

by A. Bernette

  “There are only so many places people can go that aren’t in danger. Besides that, we are talking about relocating nearly half the world’s population in a matter of months or just a couple of years. I don’t even think it is logistically possible. These people won’t want to leave their homes at the threat of a possible earthquake or volcano happening at some unknown time in the future…maybe. You see? What you are saying and suggesting, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” The Stache argued as if everything Zura had said was laughable.

  “That’s enough Mirkal. For now, this remains completely confidential,” Dr. Sporgsman said. “We’ll talk more at the annual debrief next week. We need to talk on our side before anyone does anything,” Dr. Sporgsman warned.

  Zura looked back and forth between Tomas and The Stache. Their only concerns were about what this meant for UniCorps. The evacuation from just the one city in Southern Allegiance cost the government millions. Just one or two more cities that size and the government would be almost broke and UniCorps would have to support it even more, costing their stakeholders and corporations millions that they may never get back.

  “We’ll be waiting for your visit and to hear how we will move forward responsibly with this issue,” Zura said. “If there is anything else I can answer for you, please let me know. Thank you.”

  Zura cut the transmission. She relaxed the pressure her fingernails were placing as they dug into the palms of her hands. She made sure they were gone before turning her attention to Stephen who’d been sitting silently.

  “Did you get all of that, son?” Zura asked him.

  “I sure did. Every word,” Stephen answered with a smirk of a smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Revisiting

  Antarctic Research Center

  Johan tossed tiny rounded paper pellets at the small window in the room where he sat.

  This had been his life’s work. The work that defined all of their lives. The place that was built to help save them, now felt constricting, a prison of its own.

  Johan had always been proud of the work that he and his team of architects, engineers, scientists, and technicians had done. It was a beautiful work of engineered art. Zura made sure it was also comfortable by hiring interior designers to make the space not just functional, but livable. They knew they would be spending a lot of time there over the years.

  The idea for the ARC was begun more than thirty five years before as part of a global initiative to ensure the continuity of the human race. The scientists, technicians, analysts, engineers, and every person who worked on the ARC as regular employees had been carefully hand selected by the leaders of the collaborative that preceded UniCorps.

  Someone else needed to know. The only person he could tell would be there any minute. Johan hoped it wasn’t a mistake sharing this with anyone else not already approved, but keeping it to himself now felt too risky.

  He looked out the oval window at the land that stretched out from the ARC. Though he and Zura owned their little unit, others who’d bought shares of ownership could lease a unit for Antarctic Expedition vacations. Most people never utilized this benefit and on the rare occasion that someone did they were usually placed in the outbuilding units. From the surface they looked like separate units but underneath, every part of the ARC was connected.

  A light knock on the door brought Johan’s attention back to the present.

  “Come in,” Johan said from his position by the window.

  Rupert walked in and took a seat in the empty chair that rested near the out of place birch wood desk.

  “You seem to have a lot on your mind these days, old friend,” Rupert said without waiting.

  “I do. We all do. I need to talk to you Rupert, about the ARC.”

  Johan sat down in the chair opposite Rupert and leaned forward. His graying hair showed his years - the ones he’d used getting to where he was.

  “Things are going to happen quickly I think and I don’t know if you know enough about the ARC, though by now, you should. I’ve been trying to protect you –protect all of you.”

  “What’s going on Johan? Did something happen we don’t know about?” Rupert asked concerned. He rarely saw his friend like this.

  “It’s more about what’s been going on before now that I need you to know about. It might not make a difference right now, but I feel like it may matter, one day.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Let me start with some things you may be familiar. Before becoming UniCorps a group of powerful organizations came together as a collaborative of sorts, to promote some of their joint interests in a more efficient way.

  “That’s well known. No surprise there.”

  “Well, that collaborative convinced the World Consensus to join in the efforts after making a convincing argument about continuity of life and the protection of natural resources, the environment, and the health of citizens.”

  “I read about those programs, even helped implement some of the earlier ones,” Rupert said curiously.

  “Once they got the World Consensus on board, they began finding the people who would lead the work and build the ARC, this place. They found people from all over the world, Rupert, who could and would be able to work together. They chose Zura to lead up the main work. They chose me to assist that work and to lead another project.”

  “Another project? The one you disappear to work on?”

  “Yes, but that’s for later. They gave Zura leeway over choosing other two members of her core team. She lucked up with Mave and Mave helped her get you.”

  Rupert smiled, knowing he had always been a sucker for Mave.

  “They did a good job recruiting. Everyone I work with is highly rated, from top universities or from some of the most powerful private companies, including those under UniCorps. You should be happy that the ARC can attract and keep that kind of talent.”

  “I am, but what I want you to know is why it was all so important. Why they are willing to recruit and pay for the best. You see, UniCorps invested an unnamed amount of their own pooled money as well as an unnamed amount from the World Consensus budget for Security.”

  “Security? Is that why Mylar is so involved?”

  “Yes. Exactly, though it’s hard to see the connection.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Rupert agreed.

  “They are able to argue that Security includes the security of our environment – how safe it is so that life can go on. The push for the ARC came in earnest after reports on the changing climate, the water crisis, and concerns over the emissions and pollutants that had never been fully resolved. I’m sure you remember the initial solution for the emissions issue was pushed through by an overeager lobbying group. They did not want to disrupt production and sold the prior individual nations on creation of jobs. If I remember correctly, you yourself wrote a report on what we learned from that experience as part of your graduate school program.”

  “I did. Almost everyone had to address it in some way.”

  “So you know that the first solution lasted nearly one hundred years before people began realizing the problem and calling for an end to it. Unfortunately, by that time, it had already impacted the water and started poisoning people with lead. Nations built miles and miles of pipe that pushed emissions several feet under ground and then into cleaning factories that were designed to clean the air,” Johan continued.

  Rupert nodded his head. He knew the story. “Yes, the pollution above ground had been relatively well contained in the nearly airtight buildings, by using the deatomization process to break down the poisons. No one wanted to pay for the around the clock monitoring required or deal with the risk associated with deatomization. It made the air too unstable. After a couple small explosions, they started shutting them down.”

  “Exactly. They never tried to determine how to improve them. Even with the small explosions, the risks, we had the data that the benefits were outweighing the costs. No one ever got to the see that data,”
Johan said, feeling upset about the failure.

  “We wound up with two issues. There was the instability of the deatomization process and then the poisoning of the water supply. That wasn’t even something they’d thought about and didn’t worry about much. They figured someone else would eventually come up with a better solution, before the pipes corroded. When they’d been put in originally, the pipes had an estimated life of about 100 years. So by the time the life of those pipes had worn out, the people who’d worked on them or been around when the pipes went in were also gone,” Johan said as he thought about the lack of foresight that was being repeated.

  “That’s when people started noticing the water tasted funny and sometimes came out of the taps a strange color. We lost a lot of people in Southern Allegiance because of that,” Rupert said, shaking his head and thinking of his grandmother’s stories.

  “Even the ones who’d maintained the pipes had been pushing for someone to fix the real issue decades before it ever broke down, but it wasn’t broken then, so there was no outcry to fix it,” Johan said as he considered the reports he’d read during his studies.

  “Yeah, and no politician wanted to be the one to cause panic or a budget shortfall over something that might not even really be a problem. My grandmother was a local representative in her area and couldn’t get anyone to listen at the time,” Rupert said, shaking his head.

  “Well, when the pipes began failing and contaminating the water supply it happened on a global scale. The solution of the pipes had been global and so was the problem. The world needed a way to manage and control it all and to work together for what was a global water crisis that soon became a global food crisis.” Johan said standing up and looking out of the window at the clear water.

  Johan and Rupert both considered what they’d learned about and read about as children growing up and as scientists. The era of the storms spanned nearly ten years with weather conditions so turbulent and unpredictable that people would be caught in tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, and snow storms with barely enough notice to leave before it hit.

  The casualties in those years had been astronomical, especially for the time. There were only twelve billion people living and nearly a billion had been killed in the era of the storm. By the end of the water crisis, another billion had died. Rupert shook his head as he listened. Some of this was new to him as it hadn’t been reported the way Johan told it in any of his years of school or as a professional scientist.

  “It was the weather crisis that gave birth to the idea initially for the World Consensus. The water crisis became the policy window for the idea to catch on and go through. Those leaders, with the support of those who would become UniCorps, were finally able to act on the ideas and quickly proposed the solution of pumping the emissions miles down into the earth, below the water supply using a safe non-corrosive material. Rupert, I can tell you I have my own opinion about those crises, but let’s just say that it seems very convenient.”

  “But out of that came a solution. Finally. It wasn’t meant to be a permanent one and everyone agreed on that much, at the time. Now if we could just convince them or remind them that it was a temporary solution and we are now working on borrowed time because we still have to deal with the emissions problem and the current system can’t handle it,” Rupert said not convinced of where Johan was going with the conversation.

  “The other solution isn’t ready. It was the second part of deatomizing the particles that became a problem with the poisons being pushed so far down. Unlike the cleaning factories, there would be no way to access them directly or control how they spread.”

  “And this is where we are today. I know they argued it was better financially to start a new process rather than to replace the existing pipes with the new non-corrosive materials. I remember how vague everyone was around a long-term plan and long-term solution, but because people wanted the quickest and cheapest solution they agreed to it all. It wasn’t long after that they asked if I wanted to be a part of the solution,” Rupert smiled as he remembered how he’d come into this life.

  “You and the rest of us got pulled into this mess Rupert. It was a problem scientists had been trying to solve for as long as it had been a problem. The ARC was supposed to be a part of that solution and we haven’t solved a damn thing yet Rupert.”

  “Seems like there is a lot of talking about what needs fixing, but there’s not a lot happening to fix it,” Rupert said crossing his arms and leaning back.

  “We have some ideas. In fact, what we have is better than just ideas on how to fix it long-term, but no one is listening. Rupert, I’ve started working on ways to improve the deatomization process. It’s been a lot of years since then and the science has advanced so tell me why no one wants to look at it again.”

  “And if that technology to do it was created here, it belongs to them, doesn’t it?” Rupert asked as more of a statement than question. He sat back, understanding Johan’s dilemma.

  “There is a solution. I know it, but it may not happen in either of our lifetimes. It’s that tidbit of information that is only given on a need to know basis, and very few people know.” Johan was now speaking in a low voice.

  “Things like that take a lot of time to get right and it’s not something that can be done and not be right. We can’t take that risk and wind up in the same position twenty years from now.”

  “Of course not. With the right support, it could be done in a few years, but me, working alone in secret, it could take twenty more years Rupert. That’s not fair to any of us.”

  “It will take resources committed to the research and to the maintenance of the infrastructure. No one wants to stop or slow production to make it happen. It’ll never get through any vote to do that, but if the resources were in place, do you really believe it could be a matter of a few years before we started seeing success.?” Rupert asked Johan curiously.

  “Yes. I do. We need a place to test and god knows we need more dedicated brains. I’m frustrated Rupert. I feel like a pawn in their game and it’s not something I ever wanted to be. I only wanted to fulfill my duty, and help save us.”

  “I understand Johan. I don’t believe it’s over. There is still time for you to do that, but you can’t bear it alone. You shouldn’t have to. No one person got us into this mess and no one person is going to get us out.”

  Over the years, Johan had led discussions with UniCorps and the World Consensus about revisiting the inactive cleaning factories. He’d proposed that the cost of producing the noncorrosive tubes had gone down enough that it should be reconsidered as an option. He’d even offered to help lead the project of retrofitting the old pipes. He’d raised the offer again last year during their annual meeting and again he was shut down.

  The reasons were always obscure and arguments poorly formed, ranging from long-term plans that would pursue alternative solutions to there not being enough research on the new materials to overall costs and anything else they could think of. It was clear they had no interest in the one possible solution that anyone had offered that had a chance of working. He understood why, as he was caught in the middle, having the answer while being a party to the problem.

  “I just wanted you to know what was bothering me Rupert and where I am right now. Frustrated and I want to see something happen. I put too much of my life into this for it to all be in vain.”

  “Johan, we’ve all sacrificed for this. None of us want it to be in vain. If we want something to happen though, the demand for it can’t come from here on the ARC. It has to come from out there, the citizens. They have to want it,” Rupert said with a sigh.

  “They’d have to know that they should want it first,” Johan said as his eyes wandered to the small window.

  “Johan, there is no choice but for them to know. Is there something else Johan? I’ve known you a long time and when you asked to talk to me, you seemed to have more to say. What you told me, most of it I knew already. So I’m wondering what it is you decided
to hold back now.

  Rupert was right. There was more. He looked into his best friend’s face and smiled. “It’s not important right now.”

  “Alright, if you say so,” Rupert paused to give Johan a chance to say whatever was really on his mind. After a few moments of awkward silence Rupert nodded, “Well, you know your wife is on us constantly to get all this prep work done before we leave so I’m going to get back to it. If you want to talk again, Johan, you know how to find me.”

  “Thanks Rupert. I’ll be back down there soon.”

  Rupert stood up slowly from his chair and limped ever so slightly to the door. He cast a questioning look back and then left the room.

  Johan turned back to the report he was supposed to read, but now he was distracted. That wasn’t how his conversation with Rupert was supposed to go. He couldn’t put Rupert in the middle of something like what he carried on his shoulders.

  Rupert hadn’t asked for it and had already given more than he ever needed to. He’d barely told him more than what they’d all studied in school with the exception of the possibility surrounding a possible solution to the emission issue, which was important and Rupert did need to know in case anything happened to Johan.

  He stood up, arms crossed, and looked out his window again shaking his head. It couldn’t all be in vain. Years before, he’d trained and studied to become both a master engineer and scientist. He’d done his internships with the International Space and Time Exploration Program, (I STEP) and was familiar with the interest in and exploration of space and time. It was a topic that always held his fascination and intellectual curiosity.

  Johan could still easily recall the excitement he had more than twenty years ago when he’d been chosen to lead the ARC design. He’d come up with the honeycomb styled chambers with central grounds for community interaction, dining, and more. Family units were integrated into the design allowing some semblance of normalcy in the event the ARC was needed to do what it was designed to be able to do.