Age of Z: A Tale of Survival

by T. S. Frost

  His eyes narrowed, and he sounded angry at the prospect. “Honestly, you're lucky that... whatever it was, the electricity-generating goop, was still working. Without the life support the emergency systems were providing...” He let it hang, but Alexa swallowed suddenly; she hadn't even considered that possibility.

  The thought that Casey might have died alone and unknown, spending his entire existence from birth to death in an induced sleep, was too horrible to dwell on.

  Casey looked frustrated. “That doesn't answer any questions for me, though,” he said harshly, putting his head in his hands. “Why do I know all these things? Why did they want me to know these things? Why did they stop? Why can't I remember anything else? Why wasn't I activated when Z-day hit? What was the point of my creation at all? Why did they leave me down there to rot?”

  Blake looked sympathetic. “I don't know,” he said softly. “I'm sorry. I wish I could do more, but all I can give is speculations, without more evidence to work off of. If I was there, or had access to one of their computers–”

  “Or one of their flash drives?” Alexa interrupted with a grin. She drew from her pocket the little drive she'd stolen from Gentech's computer bank in Project LS's room, and waved it in front of Blake's nose.

  The teen's eyes lit up with excitement at the sight of the technology. “Or one of those,” he agreed. “Do you know if it's encrypted?”

  “No idea,” Alexa admitted. “I just took it from the computer outside LS's pod. None of the computers were working there, it was all emergency power only. I had to grab something and hope for the best. It's a long shot, but I figure if anybody can get anything out of it, it'd be you.”

  “You've got that right,” Blake said. His eyes were sparkling now at the prospect of a challenge, and he snatched the flash drive from Alexa's hand, jumping to his feet. “C'mon, let's go.”

  “Maybe you should rest for the night and try this in the morning,” Lewis said, through grit teeth.

  “Are you kidding? I do all my best work at night. Always have.” Blake was already bounding for the door in the back of his little cottage, drawing a key from a cord around his neck as he did so. He unlocked the door and held it open for the others, adding with a chuckle, “Welcome to my lair.”

  Alexa grinned as she stepped into the room, with a curious Casey and a muttering Lewis hot on her heels. She'd only been back here once or twice, but it still never ceased to amaze her, and it definitely qualified as a 'lair'.

  It was dark, very dark, with only a single dimly lit shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling for light, it was nearly the size of the little studio-apartment room outside, and every inch of it was packed with flickering screens, blinking lights, cool metal and smooth plastic surfaces, and enough wires slithering between the machines to choke a whale.

  A small corner was devoted to a pile of electronics currently not on or blinking, most of them waiting to be gutted for parts, and the room possessed only a single chair. Alexa always figured it was like some crazy cross between mission control, a computer junkyard, and a gamer nerd's paradise.

  It always astounded her to think that every single machine in here had basically been built from scratch from a variety of abandoned parts. Blake always came across as clever, but it was in this room, his real haven, that his genius truly shown.

  “Watch your step,” Blake said, for Casey's benefit more than anything else, as he slid into the chair confidently. He tapped on the keys to the central machine as they gathered around him, adding, “No promises on what I'll be able to pull up, mind. Gentech was clearly working with high-end technology even by pre-Z-day standards. With this cobbled together system this could get really tricky. Maybe even impossible. But I'll see what I can do.”

  He looked positively excited by the challenge, genuinely happy, and Alexa wasn't exactly sure it she should smile for her friend, or feel sorry for him. Blake got plenty of challenges these days, running one of the only strongholds left in existence, but rarely did he get the intellectual challenges he probably should have had. This was a rare chance to exercise his brain, clearly something he hadn't had in a long, long time.

  “If you can find anything...” Casey murmured softly. “Anything at all. I'll be grateful.”

  “Just don't say you'll owe him, he'll never let you live that down,” Alexa warned her friend teasingly.

  “Hey!” Blake twisted around smacked his friend on the arm playfully, and then went back to work, inserting the flash drive and typing madly. All Alexa could make out were very long and complex lines of numbers and symbols that flashed past so quickly she could barely keep up with them, and Blake's fingers were blurs over the keyboard. Then the machine beeped, and Blake fell still, studying the screen thoughtfully.

  “Well?” Alexa prompted.

  “It's encrypted.”

  “Can you break it?”

  “Of course I can break it,” Blake said, smirking. “These Gentech guys might've figured they were good but they were also lazy, at least as far as their external storage was concerned. Or maybe somebody just didn't cover their tracks properly. I can crack it... but it's gonna take a while. Like, a long while, with this makeshift system. We're talking hours.”

  He cracked his neck and settled deeper into the seat, finishing with, “You guys might as well turn in for the night. You were traveling all day, you must be beat. I'll be through this by tomorrow and we'll have access to any answers that might be on here.”

  “Blake,” Lewis growled in exasperation.

  “Blake's a little bit busy now, Lewis,” the teen shot back glibly. “No, don't give me that look, this is important and you know it.” He cracked his fingers and set to work typing madly at the keyboard, almost instantly zoning into the work and ignoring the others around him.

  Lewis sighed, but clearly knew better; once Blake was fixated on something it was impossible to stop him until he'd seen himself through to his goal. “You may as well rest,” he told the travelers. “Waiting around won't help any, and it's not all that exciting to watch him type strings of gibberish for hours at a time.”

  He led them back out to the first room. Casey looked reluctant to leave the computer stations, but followed after a moment once he realized that code was apparently one of the languages he wasn't gifted with.

  “There's blankets in that chest over there,” Lewis told them, gesturing to the small box sitting underneath the work table, “if you want to lay any out for the floor, or on the couch. Latrine is out back if you need it. I'm on guard duty tonight, so if you need anything, feel free to ask–as long as it's not more food,” he added, giving Alexa an irritated look.

  Alexa offered him a cheery grin. Lewis shook his head in exasperation, but added more softly, “Rest easy. Things are safe here, and I've got my eyes open, so there's no need to sleep light.”

  Alexa smiled. Lewis said essentially the same thing every time she visited the island. It was the archer's own rough-but-serious way of showing that he cared and understood, despite his bluntness and frequent mistrust; he always encouraged Alexa to relax, and confidently offered protection.

  It felt good, and it felt... safe, to know somebody as competent as Lewis was looking out for her. Even Casey seemed to relax, slowly but visibly, with the promise.

  “Dibs on the couch!” Alexa called loudly. Casey rolled his eyes as Alexa tossed him a few blankets from the chest, but didn't argue, and after a moment started making a rough nest of blankets on the floor in one corner.

  “What,” Alexa asked teasingly, as she tossed a blanket over the couch for herself and kicked off her shoes, “not going to fight me for it?”

  But Casey just shook his head and said dryly, “I've gotten used to sleeping on the ground like normal people,” and curled up on his blanket-nest, head pillowed on his arms.

  Alexa laughed, flopped down on the couch, and stretched out to make herself comfortable. She was asleep before Lewis was out the door to start his patrols, and never heard it close.

/>   Chapter 9

  Alexa was surprised to find herself waking almost two hours past dawn; she must have been exhausted, to sleep in like that. Yawning, she stretched and sat up on the couch, glancing around blearily.

  Casey was already awake, leaning back against the end of the couch near Alexa's head, with his book carefully propped open on his knees. Peeking over the arm rest (and thus Casey's shoulder), she was not surprised to find the pages had become rather worn from handling despite the care Casey took with it.

  “Catching up on your reading, huh?” Alexa asked him.

  Casey was obviously not surprised to hear her awake, but he did glance up and put a finger to his lips, before gesturing towards the cot in the far corner of the room. Alexa could just make out the small lump under the thin blanket, rising and falling gently in sleep, and Blake's dark hair splayed out on the pillow.

  “Oh,” Alexa muttered under her breath, barely audible–but that was one of the perks (and occasional curse) of having Casey as a friend; he'd hear it anyway. “You know if he found anything?”

  “No,” Casey murmured back. “Lewis carried him out of the... lair... some time before dawn, but he was already asleep then. Told me if I woke him up he'd find a way to teach me a lesson.” He snorted softly.

  Alexa was hardly surprised by this, but before she could comment Lewis entered the cottage quietly, closing the door softly so it didn't snap. He nodded to their guests, and deposited a new basket and a thermos on the ground in front of the couch before taking Blake's chair from the night before.

  “Breakfast,” he said softly, without any preamble.

  “You're a life-saver, Lewis,” Alexa said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster while still being quiet. She slipped off the couch to sit on the floor and sort through the basket, while Casey quietly put his book away and came over to join them. “Fresh strawberries, wow... more bread... and eggs?”

  “Just hard-boiled,” Lewis said. “Nothing fancy, but everything's all produced on the island one way or another.” Alexa opened the thermos to find a sweetly fragrant tea.

  “Leave some for Blake,” Lewis warned, as they dug into breakfast, this time with the archer joining them. He popped a strawberry in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully for a moment, before adding more softly, “But Alexa, if you can get him to eat as well as you did last night, I will personally pay in trade for you to get some of the last strawberry harvest in your pack when you leave.”

  Casey frowned, and glanced over at the figure in the bed. “Why? Is he sick or something?”

  “Not exactly,” Lewis said, voice flat, although Alexa could hear trace amounts of concern in it. “He goes through these phases of short-term insomnia, and his appetite usually drops with it when he does. It's stress-related. He puts on a good game face, but it really gets to him, to have to make some of the tougher calls. Not all the decisions we need to make here are... pleasant, exactly.”

  Alexa grimaced. It was unfair to force anyone to make as many life-or-death calls as Blake had to, in order to protect and support a fragile apocalypse-born colony. But he was still the best-qualified candidate for the job, and it wasn't in his nature to back down when people needed help, either, even if it did come with a huge boatload of stress-related problems.

  “Sometimes you just have to let him work himself into a stupor,” Lewis finished with a quiet sigh of exasperation. “It's the only way he gets any rest otherwise, we don't even have the medication to spare as a sleeping aid. Eating, though, that's trickier.”

  “I'll do what I can,” Alexa offered. She'd have done it even without the bribe.

  They made small talk for a few hours as quietly as they could, while letting Blake sleep undisturbed in the corner. Lewis updated Alexa on the changes at New Avalon since she'd been there last, six months ago, and explained the island's features and facilities in more detail to a curious Casey.

  Alexa, in turn, gave Lewis updates on the lay of the land in the surrounding area, and notified him about a few supply caches they'd found while traveling, too big and too much for single travelers to do anything with but potential targets for a foraging party.

  It passed the time, and by the time Blake stirred on the bed and groaned as he slowly began to slip back into wakefulness, it was nearing noon. Casey looked antsy and was clearly impatient to get his answers, but Lewis gave him a look that said I really will find a way to kill you, and Casey refrained from pouncing before the young leader was even fully conscious.

  They gave Blake some time to wake up and eat (true to her word, Alexa managed to cheerfully coax her friend into having a decent meal) and by noon he was as energetic as ever.

  “I broke through last night,” he told them excitedly. “Downloaded all of the information to my own systems to be safe, too. You won't believe some of the stuff that was on that thing.” He gestured for them to accompany him into his makeshift lair again and toggled on a number of screens, each displaying various photographs and veritable walls of text.

  “Hey,” Alexa said, pointing at one of the photos–it was the same long-limbed thing that she'd found when she'd first wandered down into Gentech. “I recognize that thing. It was one of the monsters.”

  Blake gestured to the screens and other photos. “Yup. All of these are. According to the files, they're called 'GALFs'.” Alexa blinked; that sounded familiar. Hadn't Casey rambled something about GALFs, back when she'd first pulled the clone out of his pod?

  “They're genetically altered life forms,” Blake added. “Among other things, Gentech was apparently playing God. All the different types are designed for a different purpose. Just look at some of these things.” He clicked rapidly between individual creature data. “Enhanced strength, razor sharp claws...”

  “Weapons,” Lewis summarized flatly. “An army of living weapons.”

  Casey's hands clenched tightly, so hard Alexa could hear his knuckles crack. “I'm also a GALF,” he growled slowly, low in his throat. “Does that also make me a weapon?”

  Alexa winced. She'd long ago guessed that this was Casey's intended function, but she's never really wanted to bring her speculations to light... and she felt even worse now, knowing she was right.

  Lewis was either unimpressed by or uncaring of the warning tone in Casey's voice, and his answer was blunt.

  “We know you aren't,” he said, “but it's not unreasonable to assume that if these people were willing to grow you secretly in a tube twenty-five stories below ground, they also believed they could control you enough to use you as a weapon. Somebody screwed up enough in the head could easily imagine putting those abilities of yours to a dangerous purpose... like in military operations.”

  Casey's eyes narrowed for a moment, but then his face fell as he repeated the purpose scripted into his head. “Created to serve and protect...” he murmured softly, staring at nothing. He looked almost ill.

  “It doesn't matter anyway,” Blake interrupted, before things could get worse. “The projects obviously failed, and you're not being controlled by Gentech at all anymore, Casey. You're free to live your own life. That includes living it as a person, not a weapon.”

  “My choice,” Casey repeated, echoing Alexa's old promises when she'd first found the clone. He sounded determined as he added, “Not as a... a tool.”

  “That's right,” Alexa encouraged, hoping to keep her friend from getting too down. “And those Gentech guys will just have to deal with it, if we ever run across them again. Nobody's controlling or using you on our watch.”

  The others nodded in agreement, and with the way Blake's eyes narrowed, she had a feeling the he'd be doing more thorough research later, to see if he could dig up a few names. They probably wouldn't be welcome in New Avalon if they ever showed up. Alexa tried hard not to let herself feel too much vindictive satisfaction at that.

  “So that explains the basics for why Casey was created to begin with,” Blake continued, drawing up more screens, “But the real juicy info was locked in this Pro
ject LS file. It took me forever to break into this thing, it was triple encrypted, even on the drive, but it's not hard to see why.”

  The screen changed to a photo of Casey, quietly asleep in a much less dirty pod, and a strange apparatus over his head that Alexa hadn't noticed when she'd found the room. It was obviously taken years ago, but Casey didn't look like he'd aged a day. Casey shifted uncomfortably next to her, apparently not liking the reminder of how he'd been locked up for so long.

  Blake tapped out something on the keys, and a bubble of text appeared next to the photo. “They seemed to have a decent handle on cloning tech,” he began. “They force-grew you in just a couple of months–the records say the project began in early January. They would have finished the physical developments barely a month before Z-day hit. But here's the real kicker: your DNA isn't one hundred percent human anymore.”