by H C Edwards
The Pantheon
Walking into the ASF headquarters seemed strangely unsettling, as if Trey no longer quite belonged there. Not in all the years of his existence in Akropolis had he felt this way. It had been less than a week since he’d last tread the giant lobby with his booted feet, but he couldn’t help but imagine himself stepping onto a rickety wooden bridge suspended between two cliffs.
At the front desk were King and Patel, two veterans that had seen the watch with him for nearly a hundred years, having only been revived within the last fifteen. As seniors in life, they had been crotchety men whose aging bodies prevented them from making the rounds, even if it meant staying in the transports.
Trey had fought to keep them around when it was recommended they retire. Front desk duty was on a rotating schedule, but the majority of guards preferred not to be stuck in a chair. For King and Patel, it meant they could stay on doing the only thing they knew how to do, at least until they were revived. In this respect, they had become staples at the ASF for years, but once they obtained their new, ageless bodies, they had been given shifts in the city. Trey had seen to it himself, knowing how much time they had put in behind the desk. It was strange, and unexpected, to see them there.
Trey walked towards the two guards, catching the subtle glance they shared.
“Major,” Patel addressed him. “Haven’t seen you for a bit.”
Trey paused at the desk, the unease he had initially felt only increasing. There was something amiss that he couldn’t quite nail down.
“I was doing some work outside of the Wall, scouting for resources.”
This had been the original cover story from the beginning, and he felt no reason to stray from it now.
“Anything I need to know about?” Trey continued, feeling the flimsiness of his lie bleeding through in his voice.
“Actually,” Patel said, his eyes darting to King once more before continuing. “I…well, I’m uncertain if you’ve been briefed.”
“Spit it out, Patel, we’re growing old here.”
The guard cleared his throat.
“In the Outer Zone, a few days ago…we had a one eight seven followed by an eleven seventy-one.”
Trey stared at the man, hardly believing his ears.
“What?”
“Sorry, Sir,” King interjected. “We thought you would have known.”
“Who’s on it?” Trey pressed, feeling more than out of touch.
“Everyone,” Patel replied. “I mean…everyone we could spare, Major.”
Trey couldn’t believe it. Why did Talbot not mention this immediately after his revival? And then the answer became clear almost instantly. He had not mentioned it because there were more pressing matters to attend to…like covering up what happened at Charlottesville.
He wanted to ask more questions, perhaps read the reports, but he didn’t have time for it at the moment. There was too much at stake and the clock was not a friend to him today.
“I’ll read the reports tomorrow,” he said, not missing the identical looks that came over the faces of his fellow guards.
Clearing his throat, Trey tilted his head towards the lift.
“Heading down to the armory,” he continued, the words falling like lead from his lips. “I’ve been putting off this year’s inventory for too long.”
A moment of silence settled around all three men and for a brief second, Trey thought one or the other might speak up.
“Of course, Sir,” Patel finally replied, tapping on the screen in front of him and entering the Major into the logs.
Trey nodded at both of them before walking away, acutely aware that they were boring holes into his back. When he reached the elevator, he fought the urge to glance back to the desk as the doors closed.
Breathing a sigh of relief that he didn’t realize was pent up, Trey entered his security access codes in the panel and felt the lift’s slight jolt as he descended into the bowels of the headquarters.
In those few seconds he analyzed the reactions of the two guards, realizing that something was more than amiss. He could partially blame his own suspicious attitude but it felt deeper than that, as if his position had become…tenable in the short time that he’d been away.
After the doors opened he shook off the feeling. It wouldn’t do to nurture paranoia. He had more than enough of that right now and needed to focus on the task at hand, on the plan.
The halls were empty, which was a rarity, and then he recalled Patel relaying that every available guard was out looking for the suspect. He mulled over the shock he was still feeling over the crimes. It had been over a century since something like this had occurred, and he wanted nothing more than to be out there hunting down the perpetrator, pouring over evidence, finding the why of the matter. How could such a thing have occurred in this day and age?
And then it came to him, the fugitive that Misao had been chasing. The councilwoman had not explained the crimes of the Zhuk woman she was pursuing in the trade hub where she found Claire, but what else besides murder could prompt a council member to take up the task on their own?
It was more difficult to shove aside these thoughts, knowing what he did, but he couldn’t allow any sort of distraction in, not when so much was at stake.
Staring down the hallway and focusing on what was in front of him, he walked past the evidence rooms and the records hall until he stood in front of the armory gate. On the other side, Guard Bentley sat at a desk scrolling through her screen. When she looked up and saw him, her eyes blinked rapidly with surprise.
“Major?”
“Bentley,” he said, feigning languid boredom, doing a better job than he did in the lobby. “Mind opening the gate?”
“Of course, Sir,” she replied quickly, performing a few quick swipes on the screen.
The gate rolled open with a slight rumbling and he stepped through.
She stood, looking like a cadet on the eve of graduation, stiff and nervous.
“Everything okay, Bentley?”
Nodding, she appeared about to offer more, but then sat back down almost abruptly at her desk.
Trey frowned inwardly, but kept his outward composure.
“I’ll just be a minute,” he said, not bothering to repeat the lie about inventory.
In his head alarm bells were going off.
The armory door opened as he approached. He listened attentively before stepping across the threshold, waiting for the squeak of Bentley’s chair, which would mean she had risen from her seat, but there was nothing, not a sound.
Trey quickly crossed the room, ignoring the rows of guns on the wall and past the riot gear, stopping in front of the explosives panel. He had to input not just the security codes manually but place his hand on the scanner to open the drawer. He was leaving a trail but couldn’t do anything about that. The best hope he had was that the job would be finished before anyone noticed what he’d done.
The drawer slid open automatically, slowly enough that his fingers twitched impatiently. When it finally stopped, he reached in and removed six small oblong objects, depositing them in his patch pockets on either side of his thighs. After a moment he reconsidered, transferring them instead to his boots, tucking them in past his pant legs. It took a bit of muscle to force them in and he had to pull out the pants a bit to cover up the bulge in his boots, but he felt that his paranoia warranted such subtlety. When he stood back up he grabbed a small square box from the drawer, the size of an old deck of cards, and slipped it into the tight-rolled sleeve of his arm.
Trey hit the button to close the drawer, not waiting for it to slide shut, walking across the room and leaving the armory. He did stop at the desk, however, staring down at Bentley, who couldn’t seem to hold his gaze for longer than a second. She dropped her eyes to the screen and opened the gate, still not looking up.
He didn’t immediately step through. Instead, he stared at the woman, recalling what he knew of her. He had personally supervised every interview of every age
nt since he’d adopted his post, taking very seriously the protection of his city, and not a man or woman under his watch held many surprises for him.
Bentley was a hire only ten years previous, but her father had been a guard long before that. He had never opted for revival, not for religious reasons but because he had always stated that one life was more than enough for any man. She had followed in her father’s footsteps as a guard, and while there was a husband and a child at home waiting for her, Trey knew that Bentley would not have a revival clause of her own.
“Bentley,” Trey said softly then thought better of it. “Maureen.”
He never called a guard by their first name. This familiarity prompted her to look up, surprised. There was another expression there that he recognized, though he hadn’t seen it in so long it took a second to label it.
Fear.
“Your boy,” Trey continued. “How old is he now?”
She licked her lips, her eyes darting quickly to the open gate and back.
“Eight,” she said, and to her credit, her voice didn’t waver one bit. “He’s eight, Sir.”
Trey nodded.
“He loves soccer,” Bentley added, as if to fill the void of silence, snapping her mouth closed right after, as if she regretted the words.
“So did your dad,” Trey replied with a wistful smile. “He used to watch the old vids of the World Cup all the time. Couldn’t get enough of them.”
“I know, Sir,” she replied with a twitch of her lip that couldn’t quite make a smile.
“He would have been proud,” Trey said, lingering for another second before walking past the open gate.
The ride back up, he was calm. There was no reason for it, except that he felt accepting of what was to come…and when the lift doors opened and he looked into the dozen rifle barrels aimed at him, he wasn’t surprised.
Misao knew that something had gone terribly wrong when the security transports swooped into the lot in front of the ASF headquarters.
She watched helplessly as a dozen guards swarmed out of the vehicles like locusts, converging on the front doors of the building, moving like a connected hive towards what she could only assume was the Major’s position.
Trey had insisted on leaving their transport at the far end of the opposite lot, near the entrance to the main street. Had they parked in front of the headquarters, she was certain that the guards would have grabbed her on the way in. As is, she was safe for the moment, though no doubt they would spot her on the way out.
Misao almost ordered the transport to drive off. Where to seemed unimportant, as long as it was away, but at the last moment she thought better of it.
How had the guards known where to find them? Had they been tracked…monitored somehow?
The realization sent shudders down her spine and finally prompted her body into action. Not wasting a second, she stepped out of the transport and began to walk in the direction of the street.
There was a grassy knoll with a crop of trees past the sidewalk to her right. She scurried to them, doing her best not to glance around anxiously. Once in the trees, she
ducked down behind some accompanying bushes for extra cover. She immediately tried to call the doctor from her forearm computer, all of them having programmed each other’s numbers just before they split up, only to find a message displayed that she had never seen before.
NETWORK UNAVAILABLE
“Dammit,” she hissed.
She had no doubt that whatever had happened at the ASF headquarters was linked to her inability to access the network, meaning that their small group was somehow suspect. How much so she hesitated to guess.
Misao did know, however, that if they already had the Major, then it was only a matter of time before they grabbed the doctor too, meaning she was on her own.
What the hell was she supposed to do now?
She rested her forehead against the palms of her hands and closed her eyes, a dozen different thoughts swirling around in her head, but none of them ideas.
There had always been a plan, or a course of action she could pursue. For the first time in her life she didn’t have the first clue as to what she should do.
Run, a voice inside of her spoke, and the moment that word appeared in her mind, it seemed as if nothing else could enter. She tried to shake it off, but the fear had taken hold of her, clenching its fist tightly around her heart and mind, squeezing the air out of her lungs. Her temples began to throb, a dull painful thud that drove all else from her head.
What were they thinking? They were small, much too small to believe that they could stop the engine that had been running for over three hundred years. And she…she was foolish to think that there was ever a chance for any of them to pull this off. It was as her mother had said. She was naïve.
Run
Misao could do that. But run where? There was nowhere she could go that she wouldn’t be found eventually, no hiding spot that couldn’t be ferreted out. Oh, she could take to ground like the woman Mia had, find a way to block the quantum signature that they would inevitably use to track her down, and maybe buy a few days to figure something else out, except what options did she really have?
Run
She could go beyond the Wall, escape to another sanctuary.
Misao almost laughed at the thought. With Charlottesville gone, the closest was The Mountain.
If her mother were her she would call her a fool.
I am a fool, she thought. We all are.
Run
Where?
Run
No.
Run
“No,” MIsao said out loud, and as if the mere word were a talisman, the thought of fleeing seemed to shatter like glass and dissipate into dust.
The pounding at her temples subsided almost instantly, and the air whooshed back into her lungs. She didn’t realize that she had been holding her breath.
Still crouched, Misao crept through the bushes to the closest tree, peeking around the trunk towards the ASF headquarters, a little over fifty yards away. She waited with baited breath but didn’t wait long. Within half a minute they came out, the Major in the midst of the guards, hands cuffed together in front of him.
Two of the guards detached and took the Major to the lead transport and secured him in the back seat, then entered in the front. The rest of the guards hung back on the steps and watched as the transport drove away.
Misao ducked back behind the tree trunk as the transport approached and listened as it drove by on the street below. When the sound of it faded away, she peeked out again, only to see the remaining guards filtering back into the headquarters.
She presumed that they were taking the Major to the Pantheon, to Talbot…and finally, Misao had an idea.
He stood at the edge of the Gardens, just south of the Pantheon, staring up at the pinnacle of their civilization in the mid-morning light. He remembered the first time he and Rose had laid eyes upon it, a technological wonder that rivaled the ancient pyramids of Giza. It was awe that had suffused him at that moment, a mixture of wonder and humility, as if he stood before the god of science. In a way, that was exactly what the Pantheon represented. The most brilliant minds in the world had conceived of the sanctuary, and at the epicenter the structure that earned its namesake, borrowing the moniker from the ancient city of Athens.
It was fitting, as the Greeks and their innovations had paved the way for future civilizations, and so it was that Akropolis was meant to spearhead the next phase of humankind. Unfortunately, the dream had fizzled over the centuries. They had become doomed by their own technology, condemned by their advancements. Despite all the wonders at hand, they had fallen into the same trap that man had before them, except instead of war, they were killing themselves from the inside out.
Looking at the Pantheon now, Griffin didn’t feel any of the wonder that the spectacle provided before. Rather, he harbored a deep sadness, a melancholy for what could have been. He wondered how long the council had suspected
the true source of the genome defect, if they had made their own findings long ago, or merely verified the data when it had been presented by Rachel Talbot. He didn’t think it was an answer he would ever receive, and it didn’t really matter anyway. They had chosen to hide the truth, ignore it in their hubris. Whatever justification they invented he could not fathom, but no matter the reason, it was not good enough.
This Plan of theirs, the ship that was being built, could very well be the salvation of their kind. To think that such a feat had been put into action, the actual colonization of another planet, pieced together from the concerted effort of two sanctuaries. Had the procurement of the resources not been obtained by the horrific slaughter of an entire city of innocents, Griffin might have been excited by the prospect.
No, that wasn’t quite correct. He was excited by the idea. In fact, if he allowed himself the time to consider the ship, he felt as if he could be lost in the possibilities. There was no doubt that they had appropriated a lot of the tech he developed into the ship, the least not being his cryo-sleep program that was designed in conjunction with the Cloud, which also begged the question…were they planning on bringing their own quantum computer on board?
It was the only hardware powerful enough to run the Cloud, and if the humans were indeed in cryo-sleep for the majority of the trip, wherever that may lead, then there would need to be synthetics to man the ship and maintain it.
And then it occurred to him.
The quantum processor in Charlottesville, the one that the Major had been tasked with retrieving. It had been put into a housing unit to keep it stable. They had assumed it was to power the Cloud for the workforce that would arrive to scavenge the resources needed to complete the plan, and that was most likely true, but now Griffin wondered if the true underlying motive for the attack on the sanctuary was to pilfer the processor to run a smaller quantum computer onboard the ship. If the journey was very long indeed, the people would need to be in extended cryo-sleep, their biological functions slowed to the extent that the genetic unraveling could take centuries to cause any real damage, maybe more than enough time to reach whatever destination was in mind.