Trojan Gene: The Awakening

by Ben Onslow

  I look around. “Hey Ela, come in here; this is cool.”

  Ela jumps down onto the dirt floor. “What do you think is behind that door?”

  “No idea.” I go over to the door, give it a push then stare at the key pad.

  No handle, no lock; it looks like you need a code to get in.

  “It all looks quite new.” Ela is standing in the middle of the cave, hands on hips looking around. “There’s no rust on the door. This can’t have been here when William and Mere were here.”

  “No, I don’t think they had electronic door locks in 1885.” I stay staring at the key pad, thinking, and then have an idea. I punch in a series of numbers and push on the door. It doesn’t move.

  I try a different sequence of eight numbers and push again. The door stays right where it is.

  “There are billions of possible combinations,” says Ela.

  “I know. But what I’m doing isn’t random.” I put in another combination and push the door. There’s a pause then the metal door slides open slowly, the rock behind us groans shut. Concrete, tiles, glass and LED lights are everywhere in the room in front of us.

  “Step one accomplished.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I used the numbers on the plan.”

  “Your birth date?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I think this is the storage facility the plans are for.”

  “Why?”

  “We were sent here. Jacob told you to take me to the waterfall, William’s journal mentioned it. I think the bloody Willises are looking for artesian water, and that’s how the pool at the bottom of the waterfall is heated,: and thermal water from underground could be used to heat this. Dad would have known I’d recognise that number sequence.”

  “That’s a big leap. You think your dad wrote the number on the plans for you to find?”

  “Yeah, I told you Dad drew the plans.”

  “So why did it take three goes to get the number?” she asks.

  “I figured he’d use the palindrome; it was just a matter of working out which pattern he’d choose.”

  I stare down the long tunnel in front of us.

  “It looks like home,” says Ela.

  “Yeah, a slice of the City.” I go through the doorway. Ela follows.

  There’s a glass door about two metres away.

  I put the code into the keypad for the next door and, before the door in front of us opens, the one behind us closes. We’re in an airlock. Soft light fills it from the room behind the next door.

  “Are you sure we can get back out?” asks Ela.

  “Pretty sure.”

  I go to the next door and use the combination again.

  The hum is still there and I guess it comes from the heat exchanger or the batteries.

  The glass doors slide open with a sigh.

  The plans said the whole building, or tunnel, or whatever you call it, is 120 metres long, 12 metres high and 12 meters wide. You have to see 120 metres to know how big that is. It’s bigger than a carpark, bigger than ten car parks. Every few metres there’s another glass door. There are white tiles that shine in lines on the floor and the walls. Every room has rows of metal shelving along the walls filled with plastic containers. The first room has only red containers, the next blue and so on. It stretches on and on and on, like one of those perspective paintings or the painting of the room reflected again and again in mirrors.

  “If your dad built this I wonder where he got the money,” says Ela. “It’s massive; it must have cost millions.”

  I go through the glass doors and Ela makes sure she keeps up with me. Slides her hand in mine so I can’t get away. “I don’t want to be stuck in another room trying to remember your birthday,” she says.

  The door slides shut behind us. It’s quite cool in this room. I tuck our hands inside the sleeves of my Swanndri.

  We go over to the first lot of shelving and look inside one of the plastic containers about halfway along. None of the containers have lids; they are filled with packets of seeds, sealed in more plastic. On the front of the container a label says,

  ‘Carrots 10/13,

  2037’.

  The next container has a label with ‘Carrots 10/14, 2037’, and so on.

  “It’s just seeds.” Ela sounds disappointed.

  “It’s a seed bank. It has to be where Jacob gets the seed he grows. They all come in bags like this.” I pick up a bag of broccoli seed and shake it. The little brown seeds slide around inside. I put the bag back into the container.

  We wander around the room reading all the labels. There is every type of vegetable seed you can imagine. The different vegetables are organised alphabetically, and there are lots of each type.

  At the end of the room, there’s a small desk with two books sitting on it. I flick through the pages of one of the books.

  “The log book – last entry was two weeks ago in Jacob’s handwriting.”

  I go backwards through the book and every month there’s an entry for temperature, humidity and a record of seeds taken out of the seed bank or put back in.

  I keep flicking back and then the handwriting changes, I stop at that page. “It’s Dad’s handwriting, and it looks like Jacob took over from him when he left. See. He’s recording the same things.”

  The other book sets out the desired temperature and humidity range for the room and lists each type of seed, it’s number, and whether it needs grown on and new seed collected. I keep going through the book; near the end is a summary of what the seed bank is supposed to achieve.

  “It says there are more than 10,000 seed samples of more than 2,000 cultivars of 300 different species in the Vault.” Ela starts reading from the book. “Most of the seeds are packaged in special four-ply packets and heat sealed to exclude moisture. The storage rooms for those seeds are kept really cold. We designed the Vault so it could preserve the seeds from most major food crops for hundreds of years. Some of the seeds might survive a thousand years. Should we check all this for Jacob, the way he has been doing it?” Ela asks.

  “Let’s just look.” I walk ahead, put the code in to the keypad at the next door. “We’ll talk to Jacob and see what he wants us to do.”

  “I wonder why your Dad built it? He must have thought it was important,” says Ela.

  We go into the next room and then the next and the next. All the rooms are set up the same way, with the metal shelving, the containers and a desk at the end near the door. In each room the seed is stored differently. The temperature keeps changing. In some rooms there are cuttings not seeds – those rooms are freezing cold.

  Right at the end there is a small living area. It is just a kitchen, two chairs and a bedroom with two beds and a desk. On the desk there’s a photo of me when I was twelve. I guess that convinces me this is Dad’s work.

  We wander back through the rooms, back to the entrance.

  I put the code into the keypad beside the entrance. The slab of stone tilts down again to let us out.

  “It’s got to be on a fulcrum. It’s clever.” I start putting all the branches and ferns back in place so the entrance is hidden again.

  21.

  Jacob

  Saturday 18th Feb 2051

  2:20 p.m.

  We find Jacob in the hospital grounds near a picnic table. He’s sitting in a wheelchair: pyjamas, dressing gown, slippers, his glasses on his nose.

  Ela plonks herself down on a seat. “We went to the waterfall today,” she says.

  I sit down beside her. We’re planning on leading up to the seed bank slowly; see if Jacob tells us about it or if he’ll wait until he thinks we’ve got this puzzle he’s set figured out.

  Jacob just nods then starts with his usual question.

  “Have you got through the documents?” he asks peering at us over the glasses.

  “Yeah, but they didn’t make a lot of sense at first,” I say.

  Jacob nods as if he’d expected t
hat.

  “Did you have a good look at the drawings?”

  Ela nods. “Jack recognised them. He said his father did them.”

  “Yes, Mike drew them. They’re for a seed vault.” Looks like Jacob is planning on telling us; trees can’t have ears.

  “Yes, we found it. The entrance was all covered over with branches, wasn’t it?” Ela turns to me and puts her hand on my arm as she asks the question. I see Jacob’s eyes follow the gesture; he frowns but doesn’t comment.

  “Did you get in?”

  I lean on the bench, rest my chin on my fists.

  “Yeah, Dad used my birth date for the code.”

  “So that’s where that number came from,” says Jacob. “I sometimes wondered.”

  “And I guess that’s where the seeds we’ve been growing come from,” I say.

  “Yes.” Jacob nods again. “We plant the seeds from the Vault: we have to grow some of them out every couple of years so they stay viable. Some seeds will stay viable for hundreds of years if they are kept in the right environment, but some have to be grown then the seed saved again.”

  “Why a seed bank,” asks Ela, sounding puzzled.

  Jacob leans back in the wheel chair, sort of easing his back, flaps his dressing gown over his legs. “Thomas worked out the problems with Genus 6 and decided to take out some insurance.”

  “So my dad was involved with building the seed bank too?” asks Ela. She leans forward, folds her arms on the table, rests her chin on her wrists, sounds excited, like she wants it to be something her dad was part of.

  Jacob nods. A guy strolls past near us. He’s in the same dressing gown and slippers as Jacob is; must be standard hospital issue. Jacob watches him go past before he says anything else. “Both your fathers were.” He’s still watching the hobbling dressing gown guy a few trees further along. “It was Thomas’s idea and Mike’s design: a temperature controlled vault with automatic ventilation and cooling.”

  “Why?” I ask. Building a vault for the seeds isn’t the first thing I’d have thought of doing. The dressing gown guy turns around, to start another pass near us. “Vector work pretty hard at keeping Genus 6 out of the country,” I say before the guy gets close enough to hear.

  “Mistakes happen,” says Jacob. The guy in the dressing gown is just a retreating back again. “Your dads wanted to make certain that when we took over again there would be some seeds left that didn’t have the gene. Thomas knew he couldn’t trust the Administration or Eugenics Corp. It looked like they’d do anything to keep it a secret that Genus 6 was suppressing the fertility of the world’s population. He was worried that maybe they’d even release the Trojan Gene here to confuse things. Tom and Mike decided they needed to keep the seeds they were sure were free of the Trojan Gene safe, so they built the Vault.”

  “How could they afford it, it’s huge?”

  “People helped,” says Jacob. “It was about when Leblanc was redeveloping the City and the Outposts. Some truckloads of building materials went the wrong way.”

  Must’ve been a lot of truckloads – like I said, the Vault’s huge. “That means it can’t be a complete secret.”

  Jacob nods. “Vector was just starting to build the Outpost and Mike and Thomas knew the guy, Jules Willis, with the contract to move the building materials from the City to the building site.” He trails off as a couple of burly nurses in blue cotton shirts and pants come towards us, looking like they want to check up on Jacob.

  “Here come Bill and Ben.” Jacob turns to Ela. “Have you heard from your mother?” he asks.

  Bill and Ben must have ears.

  Ela’s played the game before. She sits up, smiles at him across the table, like they’re just chatting. “We made a Connect this morning. She’s enjoying her holiday.”

  Bill and Ben arrive at the picnic table.

  “Everything all right here Mr Hennessey?” asks Bill.

  Jacob nods then introduces me and Ela, all friendly towards the two guys. Definitely part nurse/part jailer.

  Bill and Ben wander off and there’s a bit of a pause before Jacob starts talking again.

  “They convinced Jules to falsify the records and divert some of the building materials to the vault.” Jacob’s still watching Bill and Ben. “So at the very least Jules and his drivers knew about it.”

  “Is Jules Willis, Henry and Charlie’s dad?” asks Ela.

  Jacob nods.

  “Could they know about the Vault?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure,” says Jacob. “Everyone involved kept it really quiet, but there might be rumours around still.”

  We sit there quietly. I watch a car go by slowly, vaguely wonder about electronic surveillance, decide Jacob must know it’s safe to talk or he wouldn’t have told us this much.

  “Did something go wrong?” I ask finally. Ela’s father got killed, Dad turned up badly injured only days before he left.

  Jacob nods, then watches another car go by. The exhaust pops and bangs like a gunshot, Jacob flinches. “When the Vault was finished…” Jacob hauls on the wheels of the chair and moves it about like he’s restless, the way some people will walk around the room when they are talking about something difficult. He stops a bit away from us and keeps watching the road without talking, then wheels himself back to the table. “We decided they needed to blow up the Outpost to make sure all the records were destroyed. It went bad and Jules was killed. Evidence pointed to Thomas and Mike; suddenly they were wanted for murder and terrorism. We got Mike out but Vector got to Thomas before we could get him away too.”

  Ela looks down at her hands and I put my arm around her. She rests her head on my shoulder. We all knew her dad was killed by Vector but hearing Jacob say it straight out like that makes it more real suddenly.

  He watches us a moment, then goes back to watching the road. “The night they tried to blow up the Outpost everything went wrong. They had you two with them. It was a cover – just two dads camping with their kids. We knew about the explosion, we knew someone had been killed, but didn’t know what had happened to you or your dads. All we could do was wait; it was the worst forty-eight hours of my life.”

  So that was what happened that time my dad and Ela’s didn’t get back to us for a couple of days. I’m pretty shaken by Jacob’s story, and Ela’s real quiet. What if they had never come back?

  I guess eventually they didn’t.

  “Why build the seed bank by the waterfall?” I ask, just to get Jacob to talk about something else; he’s upset and so is Ela.

  “They needed the thermal energy from the water to power the system your father designed – to control the atmosphere in the Vault,” says Jacob.

  About what I figured.

  Jacob looks like he’s relieved I didn’t ask anything more about his son dying, and considering he’d said, ‘we decided the Outpost needed blown up,’ he could be blaming himself.

  “Do we need to do anything with it while you’re in here?” I ask.

  “I need someone to go and check things.”

  “We could go back tomorrow, do anything that needs done.”

  Jacob nods. Then we get a load of advice. He starts to go through a routine that involves keypads and security numbers in detail. He explains what we need to check.

  “There are books inside each cell with all the protocols for that cell,” he says.

  “Yeah, we saw them.”

  “Check each area, follow the instructions, see if anything needs adjusted.” And so on and so forth. It’s like he’s turned a switch and gone back to his normal self.

  Then we talk a bit about the Willises and the helicopter.

  “Hmmm.” Jacob’s looking real worried.

  We’re having dinner with Mum again.

  “What are you doing tonight?” Patsy asks.

  “There’s a party in Waihi.”

  “Whose party?”

  Patsy spears a carrot, keeps her eyes on it, lifts it to her mouth.

  “Scott’s. It’s
at his flat.”

  “What’s Ela doing?”

  “She’s coming with me.”

  I’m answering her questions, but I know she isn’t going to like the plan.

  “Is that a good idea?” Patsy asks. She turns to Ela. “What would your mother think?”

  “She won’t mind.” Ela smiles at Patsy, all Sweet and Elite. “Everyone goes to parties.”

  I can almost see Patsy thinking, ‘Ela is staying with me. She’s my responsibility and Jack and parties aren’t always a good mix.’

  Mum stands up, takes her plate into the kitchen. Rinses it and then comes back to the dining room. “If Ela’s going with you,” she says, “you stay out of trouble and don’t drink.”

  I roll my eyes. A couple of incidents and she is going to hold them against me for the rest of my life. I expect the drink driving lecture again, how if I get caught I’ll lose my licence again, but she restrains herself. I push my chair back and start clearing the table. “Don’t worry, I won’t drink.” I take Ela’s plate and stack it on mine. Mum always acts like a few drinks are a crime.

  She owns a pub for fuck’s sake.

  “Are you sure you want to go?” asks Mum.

  “It sounds fun,” says Ela.

  Yeah, lots of fun when the choice is come with me or stay here with Mum.

  We arrive at the old cottage where Scott and some mates live. The doors are open, kids spill outside, and music meets us across the road.

  I park the Land Rover down the street, a bit away from the streetlights. Just got it back. It’s still dented but at least it’s got glass now. Mike says he’ll fix the dents and give it a new coat of paint in a few days. I open the back and get out the dozen beer I got at the bottle store.

  “Why?” asked Ela, when I stopped at the bottle store.

  “Can’t turn up with nothing.”

  “But you told Patsy you weren’t going to drink.”

  “So Mum wasn’t going give me a crate.” I stick the box on the bonnet. I go round and shut the back.

  Ela slams her door shut. “It’s cold tonight,” she says, going to open her door again. “I might take my cloak.”