Prologue
“My name is Sethra Slatten. I’m twenty-three now, but when The Attack came I was sixteen. I’m one of the few survivors of that Tuesday’s viral and nuclear holocaust. It swept the globe on June 6th, 2276.
Am I one of the fortunate, to have survived? Usually I feel that I am. But not always, and less and less as more of us die.
I live in subterranean compound A-3. We call it that because ‘A-3’ is painted on every wall and chamber of this godforsaken man-made cave system. We feel certain there must be other compounds, but how many? And where are they located? Nobody knows: at least, nobody here admits such knowledge. I feel certain this dearth of information was intentional, to help protect each cell of survivors from the aliens. The expense and the time it must have taken to prepare this place! These places. These underground redoubts. And to keep the knowledge of them from those whose apparent mission was to cleanse this planet of its infestation of humans.
Perhaps to the aliens The Attack was nothing more significant than a pest control workman going door to door as he sprays an entire apartment building for vermin. Perhaps. One thing is certain: unless the aliens have evolved into pure energy, or they have metabolisms much more resistant to radiation than are ours, they won’t be landing on Earth any decade soon, if they are even still in orbit.
Today is Thursday, June 7, 2283. As I record this, I have lived 260 meters beneath the charbroiled surface of good old planet Earth for 2,558 days, 10 hours, 8 minutes and counting, according to my implant. I know my implanted computer is accurate, because it is self-contained and shielded, and was therefore not connected to the Worldnet in the days leading up to The Attack. So I’ve no concern that it may have been infected.
We estimate that perhaps as much as one-fourth of the world’s population was slain when an alien computer virus struck our global communications net, chewing through peoples’ implant firewalls and antivirus executables like they were some poorly written twenty-first century anti-malware program. How could an electronic virus scramble the minds and slay the bodies of the Connected? Certainly, this is still beyond our own technology. After all, as a race we have only been -- in the most literal sense -- cyborgs for the better part of the past fifty years, though the line between electronic device and human organism becomes further blurred with each passing generation. The aliens were able to leverage this. ‘The only real protection is disconnection.’ Experts have told us that for years. I guess more people should have listened.
The bodies of the Connected lay wherever they happened to have fallen when the virus struck: in bed; slumped at a terminal; on the operating table, split open down the middle; face-down in a bowl of soup; couples grotesquely entwined in their interrupted passion, naked limbs clenched in rigor mortis; people slumped forward on their toilets, sightless eyes forevermore staring at that roll of toilet paper that will never again be needed, as their own crap dries and flakes from their-”
Sethra snorted and rolled his eyes, grinning. “Implant, delete all text following ‘when the virus struck. Period.’” The activated implant program edited the recording, and Sethra took a few moments to collect his thoughts. This was becoming harder to do, the more hair he lost to the Sickness, the more frequently his nose bled. Concentration was increasingly difficult to maintain. “Resume dictation.” He scratched his nose and yawned.
The speaker next to his cot beeped twice. Sethra rolled over onto his right side, facing where his cot abutted a wall, and stared at the speaker embedded there. “Dictation stop. Save and exit.” He pushed the white button next to the speaker. “Sethra Slatten A-3 2445. Go ahead.” A slightly tinny male voice responded, “Is this a ... bad time?” The tone of voice identified the caller to Sethra, and he chuckled at what the slight pause implied. Currently, he had no visitor of the opposite sex in his cubicle. He grinned.
He sat up and swung his legs around, stood up and pulled out the two chairs from his small table. “Nope. I’m giving the lucky ladies some well-deserved rest, Byron. Door, open to admit guest.” The door pneumatically retracted. Byron entered and said, “Door, close behind guest.” He took the proffered chair. He was dressed in coveralls made of red neoprene. Sethra took a carafe from its heating socket and filled two plastic cups with a steaming red liquid that the Compounders called Urea Tea, or sometimes just UT. It was a play on words, as most beverages now were composed of water recycled from the compound’s waste management units. It was flavorful enough, a bit like hot apple cider. Sethra made it a deliberate practice to not think about the beverage’s origins.
Byron took a sip of his drink, then set the cup down gently and studied Sethra. “I have it,” he said.
Sethra felt his heartbeat quicken, but he forced his voice to remain nonchalant. “Do you, now?” He took a long sip of his drink before looking back at his friend. “You’re quite sure? Have you tested it?”
“Not fully, but it’s the genuine article alright.” He hesitated, glanced around the small living space. “You’re certain that your cubicle is secure?”
“Not sure at all, as you well know. But I’ve exercised some precautions, and I’m confident that this is the safest place in the compound for this discussion.”
Byron nodded. If Sethra was confident, then he was as well. He slid his right hand into the chest pocket of his coveralls, and withdrew a small crystalline rectangle with the approximate dimensions of a matchbox. He lay it gently on the table between them. Sethra instantly recognized the data storage device. He managed to suppress the desire to ask Byron how and where he’d come across it. Byron wouldn’t answer anyway: where Sethra’s specialties were electronics and computer programming, his roboticist friend’s flair was for, how did he put it? ‘Acquisition and reallocation of materials.’
Byron grinned, fingering the data chip. “This is, or was, QuarkCorp’s latest derivative of the line of holographic storage blocks that have been evolving since the days of InPhase in the early twenty-first century.” He gave the small object a twirl. “3.9 million bits per data page, and 2,048 pages in total. Sixteen tracks of overlapping books, each written at a track pitch of 700 microns for reading by a 407 nanometer reading-laser. This little baby is undoubtedly one of the few of its kind left in the world now,” he said, eyes flicking upward, indicating the nuclear wasteland that was now the planet’s surface.
Sethra lifted an eyebrow, impressed. “I thought I was the tech guru around here. Somebody’s been doing some research.”
“Nah,” said Byron. “I just have a good memory. Those specs are the first gleanable bits of data on the chip. I was able to read at least that much, and get the size of the chip’s contents.”
Sethra picked up the data chip and held it up to the light, studying it a few moments, then handed it to Byron. “Never thought I’d see that again.” He took another sip of his steaming red beverage. Powerfully unpleasant memories engulfed him. He puffed out his cheeks for a few seconds, then exhaled and leaned forward intently. “They were pretty harsh when they found that data chip in my possession on the Day of Sequestration,” he ruefully recalled. “‘Not program-approved. Could be infected.’ Did I ever tell you that they gave me three days in Solitary Confinement?” His face reddened at the memory, and he stared at the tabletop for several moments before continuing.
“I figured they’d have destroyed it, or at least erased it and put it to use for some other storage purpose,” he mused, and then was lost in thought for several long seconds. “The hardware we’ve got down here is even better than what I programmed on at MIT, before The Attack.” Suddenly he shot Byron a grin. “I hope they haven’t erased the chip’s data, and replaced it with a big image of them giving me the collective finger...”
Byron snorted reflexively at the mental image this conjured, and Sethra barked laughter giddily. Time was short, and they really couldn’t afford this indulgence, but in contemplating his coming death in recent weeks, Sethra had come to believe that perhaps they couldn’t afford not to enjoy such moments. Gradually, they reined in their mutual mirth, and forced their minds back to the matter at hand. Byron observed Sethra, who sighed and drummed fingers on the table, then pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and continued, “If we could get access to the Core, I’m sure I could squeeze the reader laser’s shutter speed to around 1.05 milliseconds, which would translate to a data transfer rate of roughly 100 to 110 megabytes per second. That’s mega-bytes, not -bits, mind you.”
Byron whistled appreciatively. “It will need to be that fast for what you have in mind. This data module is almost chock-full. That’s about all I could tell with my equipment, without risking damaging its contents. We’re talking almost half an Exabyte of data on this thing!”
“Then they haven’t compromised it!” Sethra said excitedly, rising to his feet. Real hope began to glow in the center of his chest. “The last backup my team and I made took sixteen hours and was around 506 Petabytes in size. Mind you, that was using the entire South Lab’s massively parallel computing matrix. We could barely obtain permission for that much computing time on the matrix, even given the nature of our work. But it’d have taken over a century otherwise, and I don’t like waiting that long for a backup to finish.” He brought cup to lips again, totally deadpan, watching Byron over the rim of the container. But the humor was lost on Byron, whose mind had obviously drifted.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Byron angled his left arm and glanced at his wrist chronometer. Jerking to his feet, he spewed a stream of expletives. Sethra didn’t immediately glean the cause, and looked on in bemusement.
“I gotta go, like, right now, man, or I’m gonna be late for observation detail. Frackin’ crap!” he exclaimed, as if his former crude verbal catharsis had not sufficiently conveyed his dismay. “Thanks for the ‘UT’, buddy.” He set his cup on the table, then slid the data chip across the table. “You keep that damned safe, S-man. We’ll talk later. Door, open for guest to exit.”
Sethra Slatten watched his friend Byron Milner leave. It was several seconds before he had the presence of mind to say, “Door, close and lock.”
***
2283-06-09T09:34-5:00
Meeting Chamber 3, Core Section
Sethra sat in the midst of over seven dozen Blues, so called because of the color of their neoprene coveralls. Blue denoted the science staff in A-3. At the lectern, Jim Mephord droned on about some data they’d received overnight by tight beam from one of the hidden scanner droids near Moonbase #2.
Sethra mentally tuned out of the meeting, as he frequently did, and accessed his implant. The vibrations of his subvocalized words were transmitted through the bones of his face, where they were picked up, filtered, and recorded by his implant.
“Personal log, open. Use default 348-bit symmetric key encryption. Open log page last accessed June 7, 2283, and append. Day 2,560 in Compound A-3. Blue team vote to be called...”
The woman sitting next to Sethra glanced at him momentarily before turning her attention back to the Administrator. Subvocalizing was common in meetings such as this. Everyone was implanted, and the polite assumption was that anyone subvocalizing while someone was speaking aloud was making a note related to the speaker’s topic.
Sethra added to his log, “Sitting through another of Mephord’s lame-ass meetings. Covered so far: enzymatically improving our waste conversion infrastructure, and recalibrating our Geiger counters as an ‘accuracy check’. You think, Jim? Something’s sure as hell making everyone sick! Let’s see: nosebleeds, nausea, hair loss, miscarriages, concentration difficulty. What could be causing all those symptoms? Wait for it ... radiation poisoning!”
The speaker clicked a small control, and the holographic projection switched once again. Sethra sat up straighter. “Log program: save and pause.” The projection showed a detailed 3D schematic of the entire compound, and Sethra was again reminded of its staggering size. The Administrator was using a laser pointer to indicate a section of long tunnel, located some two kilometers from their present position, and maybe a couple of dozen meters deeper.
Sethra dismissed the white noise he often used to help him concentrate when subvocalizing, and tuned back into the Administrator in the middle of a sentence: “-need now, is the vote on whether to dig deeper and migrate.” Jim Mephord paused, and surveyed the science staff. He was a heavy man in his late fifties, maybe 170 centimeters tall and massing 114 kilograms. He had bulldog jowls, and a military style flat-top haircut. As usual, he wore the gold-sashed white coveralls reserved only for the Compound Administrator.
“After all,” Mephord continued, “we’ve already recalibrated the Geiger counters twice, as well as added two newly produced detectors into our array, and we continue to consistently show radiation levels well above those that are safe for humans.” Sethra applauded Mephord’s grasp of the obvious. He studied their leader closely. The old man wasn’t looking so hot. Sallow-faced, he appeared to now be noticeably thinner than he had just six months ago.
“We have the equipment and manpower, still, to accomplish another lengthy drilling. Seismology and Deep Drilling’s Dr. Jaimie Ericson, A-3 Designee 0112, has approved her team’s final report on Main Channel Two. We could get another two hundred meters’ depth before ever having to fire up a borer. And it is believed that the original architects began Main Channel Two with the intention of eventually carving a tunnel all the way to the floor of the Atlantic, where they would construct seafloor habitation domes almost three kilometers below the surface.”
Murmuring swept over those gathered, as the Administrator had anticipated, and he waited several long moments, then added “It is the consensus that even if we made it only as far as another five hundred meters below our current depth, we’d drop our radiation exposure to eleven percent of its current value, putting us well back inside the green zone. As discussed previously, we’d use Engineering and Materials personnel to shore up the tunnel as we descended, placing watertight bulkheads with manual overrides every hundred meters. The sickest would be moved first, of course, and-”
“The sickest will be dead before you can even get the boring machines fueled and their teams assembled!” Eddie Hasser said, stridently, standing in the midst of a few fellow Medicals. “I beg pardon, Administrator, for speaking out of turn. Will you briefly yield the floor to me?” Mephord grudgingly did so with a wave of his hand, and Eddie plunged on, “Eddie Hasser, Chief of Medical, Designee A-3 4252. If we had initiated Project Deep Survival three years, or even two years ago, it might have been our best hope against our current predicament. We’d have done well to hedge our bets in that way. But we didn’t. Now, there are far too many of us sick to make such a massive undertaking feasible. Total population is down by eighty-four percent! And Administrator, a goodly fraction of the remaining survivors are either children, or personnel without the requisite skills to help in such a venture. Of those who do have the skills,” he looked around the room at balding men and women in blue coveralls and jumpsuits, “most of those are quite ill and wouldn’t have the stamina for this endeavor!” The doctor’s voice broke with raw emotion.
Hasser glared around at his fellow Medicals in the room, square jaw clenched, sweat beading his forehead even though all environmental controls were functioning optimally.
“We’ve already lost three personnel this morning. From 811 to 808,” he snapped his fingers loudly, “just like that. And we’ll lose that number or more again before sleep-cycle. I’m telling you, your plan is too little and much too late. It’d take months to accomplish it, and in six months from today, we’ll have less than four hundred surviving adults to run our existing infrastructure. If those surviving four hundred don’t include the best of our medical staff, then I’d give us no more than nine months from today before we’re dead in the water!” Hasser’s voice was trembling. “I relinquish the floor.” He sat, defeat writ large in his body language.
Sethra silently applauded Dr. Eddie Hasser’s honest and, to his mind, much more accurate assessment of the situation. He saved the man’s brief speech in a subdirectory labeled ‘Hasser’.
Administrator Mephord was trying to regain lost morale, to judge by the measured platitudes with which he was now peppering his speech. He understood the good doctor’s concerns, oh yes indeed! And Designee 4252 had very eloquently expressed the fears and frustrations of every surviving member of A-3, undoubtedly. But it was at just such moments as these, when the goal seemed impossible, that humanity had always triumphed, drawing upon a deeply hidden well of inner strength...
Sethra tuned out once more, and subvocalized, “Resume dictation. Meeting summary: Dr. Hasser has his head on straight, and the Administrator has his head up his ass.” Sethra grinned and glanced around the circular, twenty meter diameter chamber, trying to gauge the emotional temperature of the group as a whole. Lots of crossed arms. Even more glazed expressions, though that could be the Sickness, of course.
“Like the Reds and Greens, the Blues will, as a group, accede to Mephord’s suggested course of action,” he subvocalized. “I’d call the vote at about eighty percent Mephord, twenty Hasser.” He sighed and let his gaze take in the chamber’s industrial-grade plastcrete walls and flooring, and the diamond-fiber steel trusses supporting the ceiling. The oversized data flat screen monitors were mounted high up, one in each quadrant along the curving wall. They displayed diagrams of the whole compound: camera views of designated locations at five-second intervals, environmental readouts, the status of the main fusion reactor, recent deaths. He focused on the display of recent deaths. What he saw there jerked him upright, and he fled the meeting. He could feel Administrator Jim Mephord’s eyes on his back as he exited.
***
Veronee Houston stood on an alumino-ceramal catwalk high above the large sewage treatment pools. More precisely, she perched precariously on its waist high guardrail, contemplating plummeting headfirst into the pool of chemicals and waste materials twenty meters directly below her. The tank was twenty meters in circumference, but less than two meters deep. She didn’t expect to resurface after such a dive.
Her wrist chronometer vibrated, alerting her to an incoming communication request. She refused to acknowledge the hail, but a voice issued from her wrist chronometer’s speaker anyway. It was difficult but possible to make it out over the background noise of all the machinery in the vast sublevel chamber. “I swear if you jump, I’ll show the video to the entire compound, so help me God,” came Sethra’s voice. Veronee sobbed, and her face crumpled into a complex expression of humor, irony, and sorrow. Her head sagged forward, chin on breast. Tears coursed down her ebony cheeks, and her left hand tightened on the stanchion with which she maintained her delicate balance. “Dammit, Sethra! What the hell are you remote-monitoring in here for?”
“Ease down off that railing and I’ll answer that question,” urged Sethra, voice tense. “Or, if you insist on jumping, not only will I follow through on my threat to share the video, but I’ll personally kick your ass after Medical gets done saving it.” Sethra’s voice broke just discernibly on the last three words. The slender, athletic black woman laugh-cried and returned, carefully, to the catwalk. Her tiny intracranial speaker beeped, and she heard Sethra’s voice more privately. “No more talk on wristband.” Veronee nodded, switched to implant, and made sure to use the special encryption key that Sethra favored. Sethra spoke over their implants’ connection, “I’m sorry, Ver...” Veronee heard the grief in his voice. She was beginning to worry for him when he continued, “...so damned sorry. He was my son, too. It was the radiation. Nobody’s been able to carry to term in the past few months. It’s not your fault.”
Veronee leaned heavily against the stanchion, fighting dizziness, “He was my one bright spot in all of this! The one thing that kept me emotionally above water during the bouts of sickness. We’d just reached five months, Sethra! His heartbeat was fine!” she cried. “All his other vitals were within tolerances just last week!”
Half a minute ticked by and neither of them spoke, perhaps both too overwhelmed. “I’m grieving too, Ver. And we’re both gonna hurt, and hopefully go on hurting for a long time. Veronee, we need you too much for you to go swimming around in sewage. Meet me and Byron in Rec-Area #2 in fifteen minutes, okay? Promise me.” She leaned on the rail, drained both emotionally and physically. Then, weakly: “I promise, baby.”
***