Succinct (Extinct Book 5)

by Ike Hamill

  “You’re right. All in favor of abandoning this Outpost and moving into the unknown?” Dianne asked.

  Tim put up his hand and smiled when Gloria put up hers. He was shocked to see Warren and Cirie both put up their hands. That put the vote at five to four. Tim was shocked at the support, but he was still two votes short of the two-thirds majority that he would need to carry the measure.

  “Okay,” Dianne said, nodding. “The motion is rejected. I’ll remind everyone that our current policy limits exposure to the jungle to be no more than four hours, and we require check out and check in with the current watch.” She punctuated the reminder with a look at Tim. Everyone seemed to know about his excursions.

  Tim tilted his head back and tried to tune out the rest of the meeting. They talked about their experiments and readings. The information they collected and collated was all probably very important, but it was also tremendously boring.

  “Someone has been spying on me,” Tim said.

  Gloria only smiled back at him.

  They were walking down the road to the Croc and Shop. Penny walked between them, keeping pace exactly with them.

  “Was it you? Have you been telling people about my little trips into the jungle?”

  She laughed. “Everyone knows about your trips,” she said.

  “But how?”

  “Your partner in crime has been informing on you,” Gloria said. When he looked over, he saw that she gestured toward the dog.

  “What?”

  “Those burs that she gets stuck in the long fur on her chest,” Gloria said. “There are three botanists here. You didn’t think that one of them was going to catalogue the seeds that she has tangled up in her fur?”

  Tim tilted his head back and sighed. “I should have known.”

  “Yes. You should have.”

  Penny was always getting stuff tangled up in her hair. Even walking down the middle of the road, there were enough clumps of weeds and grass in the cracks of the pavement that he would have to brush her out when they got home.

  “I’m spending my time trying to understand that jungle. I don’t understand why that would make anyone upset,” Tim said.

  “We came up with rules. They shouldn’t apply to you?”

  “No,” Tim said, shaking his head. “No, they shouldn’t.”

  The two of them started across the old parking lot. It was in worse shape than the road. Chunks of asphalt had been lifted by a hard frost from a seriously cold winter a few years back. As soon as the soil underneath was exposed, plants had burst forth, erupting through the parking lot in mounds and jagged lines. Only the cement sidewalk around the Croc and Shop was still intact. Penny jogged ahead and sat down near the door. She knew that she wasn’t allowed inside.

  “No rules for Tim,” Gloria said.

  “Ninety percent of those rules are for reproduction, right? We want to maintain as much of our genetic diversity as possible. I’ve got some bad news for you—I’m not a part of that equation.”

  Gloria barked out a laugh.

  “I gave my samples to be stored up in the freezer. If anyone wants to use them in the future, I have already given my permission. But as far as I can tell, anyone trying to have kids seems to be doing it the old fashioned way. I’m not going to be a father any time soon.”

  “That doesn’t mean you won’t be called on to raise a kid,” Gloria said.

  “Yes, in fact that’s precisely what that means. I’m not having any of my own, and we’re not letting young people anywhere near the Outpost. So, in fact, I will never be called upon to raise a kid. Therefore, the rules about safety should not apply.”

  Tim opened the door and held it open for Gloria.

  She flashed a smile at him as she passed. He knew what she was going to say.

  “You’re indulging in the bounty of the community. That makes you subject to the community rules.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t been tempted to leave,” Tim said. He followed her inside. The lights came on as the sensor picked up their movement. Gloria paused at the rack of sunglasses. Tim headed for the back wall. It was lined with glass refrigerator doors.

  “So you’re going to strike out on your own.”

  “No,” Tim said. “I did that once, remember? It was precisely the same sentiment. I left the community because I didn’t feel like I would fit in. Guess what—the community followed me to the end of the known world. It followed me and enveloped me once again. This time, I’m going to work to make this community into the place that I want to live instead of letting everyone chase me away again.”

  “I don’t remember anyone chasing you away before.”

  Tim bent over and squinted at a hand-lettered label. “Some of this beer is about to expire. You want it?”

  “Who made it?”

  “Doesn’t say. It comes from Warren, Vermont.”

  “Talk about the end of the known world,” Gloria said. “Grab it for me and I’ll take it back to the house. Someone will drink it.”

  Tim pulled the bottles and shut the door. From the next cooler, he pulled a clear bottle with purple liquid in it. He met Gloria back at the counter. She was unloading nut cookies from her backpack and putting them in the display case.

  “It’s not that they chased me away,” Tim said. “I’m not saying that anyone chased me away. But when everyone else was settling down, I wanted to live on the margins. I thought that I was setting up this place as a sanctuary for anyone else who might feel like me.”

  “And the rules caught up with you.”

  “Yeah. So, like I said, I was thinking about leaving. I can survive on my own, even out there in the jungle. I’m convinced of it. But I think it might be important to stay here and make this place what I originally thought it would be.”

  “Most of the people here didn’t come because they wanted to be apart from the group. They came because their skills make them an asset in the study of the land outside the bubble.”

  “I realize that,” Tim said. “I think that my intentions can coexist with theirs. And I’m not planning on stopping my support of them. I just want to also support my other approach.”

  Gloria shrugged. “What you’re saying sounds perfectly reasonable.”

  “In other words,” Tim said, “they will never go for it.”

  Gloria gave him a sad smile as she nodded.

  Chapter 5: Brad

  Brad woke up in the dark. For a moment, he was convinced that he was still at Mike and Sariah’s house. The thin blanket reminded him where he was. Brad was alone, in the apartment above a rural post office in Maine. The building housed an endpoint of their communication network. The tower on top of the building had a lot of power, reaching well out into the ocean, but the link was slow. Brad had come to upgrade the equipment. His effort had run out of steam and he had decided to stay the night.

  Getting up and shuffling across the cold floor, he regretted his decision.

  The area still felt dangerous, even all these decades after the floods had scoured away everything north of Portland.

  It didn’t help that the moon was full and he had a clear view of the big red spot.

  Brad stared through the window, putting a hand against the wall to steady himself. Over a hill, the moonlight was reflecting off the ocean. It was hard to believe that it was the same body of water that sat a few blocks from his house down in Connecticut. Up here, the water looked dark and deep, like it was hiding something. When he went out fishing, he never strayed north of Cape Cod. Floating near that invisible boundary felt like he was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down into a bottomless abyss.

  It was completely irrational. He understood that. Brad tended to trust his instincts—even the irrational ones. He was starting to believe that they didn’t simply come from his accumulated experiences. They came from somewhere deeper.

  Expeditions had ventured up into Maine and out into the ocean as far as Nova Scotia. They had reported nothing except for nature rec
laiming territory once colonized by people. Brad wondered if any of the people who had gone on those missions had ever felt what he was feeling now. There was something out there, waiting under the full moon, maybe looking up at the same red spot. Each month, the red spot was growing. Brad wondered if the same thing was perhaps happening out there in the wilderness, or maybe under the ocean.

  There had to be some scientific explanation for it.

  That notion sent a jolt through him. He remembered what Sariah had said about science. What if the scientific approach was no longer the best approach. As he understood history, civilization had developed basically as a result of cooking and agriculture. Humans developed bigger brains as they learned to get more nutrition from their food, and then learned how to cultivate food itself. His ancient ancestors had taken a step away from the daily battle against starvation.

  Then, with a surplus of energy and brain power, people had developed language, art, and science. It only made sense that science had flourished. The ability to manipulate and exploit the environment grew out of a systematic approach to learning.

  Evolution assumed greed.

  It also assumed death.

  Survival of the fittest only worked if parents eventually died. If they stuck around and competed for resources with their children forever, parents would have no incentive to produce healthy offspring. A lot of people saw mortality as a flaw. Brad saw it as an inherent trait in the system that had produced people in the first place.

  Was science the same way? Did a scientific path always lead to the demise of the people who embraced it? It certainly had the capability to act as a destructive force. Without science, people would have never created weapons that would threaten to wipe themselves out. They would have never created the surpluses that led to overpopulation, or the industry that led to global pollution. And, if he went along with Sariah’s theory, science had led to the infestation that had nearly colonized the planet.

  He stared up at the red spot on the moon. Was science responsible for that as well? Ashley had made a map of the moon at one point. The red spot was centered just below and to the right of the Tycho crater. The closest mission that NASA had ever sent was Surveyor 7, and it was more than a hundred miles away from the red spot. Although, according to Ashley, at the rate that the red spot was growing, it would overtake Surveyor 7 before the end of the year.

  Everyone had been alarmed when the red spot first appeared. They had quickly grown complacent. They had fought back against the infestation when it threatened Earth, but what were they supposed to do about the moon? Half the kids barely believed that people had ever been advanced enough to send people to space. They had no evidence. In a couple of generations, it seemed likely that kids wouldn’t even believe that the cities and machines left around were products of a once-great human race. After all, people around now were barely able to keep the buildings upright and the machines working.

  Brad could conceive of a world where kids started to believe that houses and machines were just like trees and mountains. Nobody had created them—they just existed as part of the landscape. Then, in a few more generations, maybe people would be living in caves again. Perhaps all the machines would fall into disrepair and everyone would travel on foot again. Without communication, pockets of humans would diverge and separate into factions. In a hundred years, most of the accumulated knowledge of the past thousand years might be lost.

  Would that be better or worse? Would those people be better adapted to live in the world? Living day to day, they might have less stress. People might return to a more natural balance with their environment. Sickness might shorten their lifespans, but that wasn’t a disadvantage. Any years lived past breeding age were a waste.

  Brad looked back at the bed.

  His brain was moving way too fast now. Sleep wouldn’t come back to him again.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and grunted as he bent to pull on his socks. He was almost dressed when he heard the sound of an incoming message downstairs.

  Brad read the note and then started typing on the terminal. He had to configure a special link in order to send his voice across the network. Since his new equipment wasn’t installed yet, he was using most of the capacity of the station. In the middle of the night, he didn’t figure that anyone would care.

  “Romie? You there?”

  He waited. Eventually, her voice made it over to him. Because of the hour, he expected her to sound tired. She only sounded mad.

  “I knew she was planning something. You should have seen the way she was moping around here before dinner. She’s pissed off that nobody wants to give her permission to do her project, so she has taken things into her own hands.”

  “Romie, she’s an adult. If she wants to go out on her own, then that’s her prerogative.”

  “She left in the middle of the night, Brad. Is that really how an adult acts? And Corinna helped her. That’s what really steams me.”

  Brad heard Lisa in the background trying to calm Romie down.

  “Just wait, Romie. How do you know that she has run off? Did she leave a note?”

  “No.”

  “Then maybe she just went out to the observatory,” Brad said.

  “They took the Fisk Street Bridge. She waved to me, like it was all a big joke.”

  “Then maybe it is a joke, Romie. Stop worrying. Corinna is with her, right? They’ll be fine.”

  He could almost hear Romie’s frustration over the link. Even before their mother had died, Romie had been fiercely protective of the three kids. Ashley never had a single scrape or cut that wasn’t worried over by Romie.

  “Least you could do is get on that special line and get a message to her father.”

  Brad nodded to himself. Romie had a point.

  “Yeah. Okay,” Brad said.

  “Good,” Romie said. “Then get back to sleep. You sound terrible.”

  Brad laughed.

  It took Brad several minutes to configure the link. The emergency communication system was much easier to activate from Connecticut. To gain access remotely, Brad had to link through their New York network. It felt like every keystroke took several seconds to come back to his display. He double-checked to make sure that only Robby would get the message. The last thing he needed was to spread panic through all the linked communities.

  Brad hit the button and waited.

  He leaned his chair back to look at the moon again. It was climbing its way up through the sky, shrinking as it went. The Soviet Union sent an impactor probe up to the moon in September of 1959. The first pictures of the moon were sent back by another Soviet spacecraft in 1966. Those six-and-a-half years must have been an amazing time. Dozens of rockets were built, most failing to launch, while people waited eagerly to find out the secrets of their nearest celestial neighbor. That whole time, people could look up and see the dead, unchanging surface of the moon. It was so obviously uninhabited and billions of people had the luxury of believing that they were alone in the universe.

  The cursor blinked and then a return message came back from Robby.

  “Thanks. I figured. I’m going to meet them in New Jersey. Tell Romie that all is fine.”

  Brad laughed and shook his head. He disconnected from the emergency network and reconfigured to call Romie again.

  “He knows, Romie,” Brad said after she answered.

  “It figures. Heaven forbid he let any of the rest of us in on his prognostication. You know, he runs off, leaving me and Lisa to take care of these ruffians and then he doesn’t bother to let us know that his daughter is planning on running off on some…”

  “Hey, Romie? Romie? I have to disconnect. There’s a problem in the sub-stream, and…”

  “You don’t have to make shit up, Brad. You can just tell me to get lost and I’ll get lost.”

  She disconnected on her end.

  Brad laughed again.

  His smile fell and he sighed. It was going to be a long night of waiting. If his eyes w
eren’t so bad at night, he would get on the road. He couldn’t risk it.

  Chapter 6: Ashley

  “You know, every time you take one of your shortcuts, you end up costing us more battery than if you had just stayed on the main road,” Ashley said.

  Corinna lifted an eyebrow toward her. The sun was beginning to rise and they were both tired and testy.

  “I happen to know about some collapsed overpasses that aren’t marked on your father’s map, darling. If you’d like, I can stick to the main roads and we can turn around every time we meet an impassable stretch.”

  Ashley buried her face in the map again. There was no way that Corinna knew about every bad road, but she wasn’t willing to challenge her on the topic.

  “Turn right when you get a chance. We should be getting close to the…”

  “It’s right there,” Corinna said, pointing through the windshield.

  “Oh.”

  She was right. The post office had a flashing blue beacon on top. Corinna turned away from it and bounced their vehicle over the overgrown lawn of the police station so she could avoid a tree that had fallen across the road. Ashley studied the flashing pattern on the light.

  “Good,” Ashley said. “I can send a message while we charge.”

  “You can do a lot of things while we charge. It’s going to take several hours. I suggest you get some sleep and then go out and forage some food.”

  “I’ll forage first. I can never sleep in the daylight,” Ashley said.

  She gripped the seat while Corinna took a quick turn and then looped around a bush. They bounced over a curb and sped toward the loading dock where a yellow star was spray painted.

  “You better get over that,” Corinna said. “Sometimes, it’s better to move at night and sleep during the day.”

  They skidded to a stop and Ashley unsnapped the door. She hooked up the power cable and flipped the switch, running a finger over the display of the charger. Back in Gladstone, she had probably soldered the display herself. Brad had taught her to solder as soon as his eyes had started to go bad. The smell of burning flux still brought back memories of working in the shop on a winter evening while the snow fell outside.