Ganymede

by Jason Taylor

  So much effort had been put into the creation of a weapon that had never been used. So much latent power. The ability to destroy a hundred cities, locked away in the launch tubes of this one ship. The submarine had been utilized to bully and threaten, but it’s power had never been unleashed. Yet, it had been judged a success in its mission. Curious.

  June pulled the lever of the door in front of her and pushed it open, stepping into the largest room she’d found in the sub yet. It took up the full width of the vessel, the curve of the hull evident on either side. Lengthwise, it extended for nearly two hundred feet, roughly one-third of the sub.

  A clear path led down the center of the compartment, flanked on either side by a series of twenty-four columns gleaming dully in the soft light. Launch tubes, June thought. She had found the nuclear missiles.

  Packed between the tubes were boxes of food and other supplies. Within the tubes: death incarnate. Between the tubes: the necessities of life, everything one might need for a long sea voyage. June’s gaze lingered on each tube admiringly. Stealing the submarine had been an excellent idea.

  As she wandered more deeply into the room, she noticed a pair of feet sticking out between two of the launch tubes to her left. The port side, she thought to herself. She was on a boat now.

  “Hello?” she called out

  The feet pulled themselves in as a sailor stood up, his uniform grey in the dim light.

  “Hi June,” he said.

  “Are you one of the Elizabeth copies?” June asked, fascinated. She was still getting used to the idea that Elizabeth could copy herself into other bodies.

  The sailor looked confused for a moment. “Yes, I guess I am.”

  “What does it feel like?” June asked.

  “What does what feel like?” he asked.

  “What does it feel like to be copied.”

  “I remember being Elizabeth, the original Elizabeth. But I also remember being Ian. It’s confusing,” Ian said.

  “Sounds like it,” June responded, moving a little closer.

  “I remember being in the body of a seven-year-old girl and then I was inside this body. I remember what it was like to be Elizabeth. But Ian’s memories haven’t gone away. Maybe some of them have… I’m not sure how I’d know.”

  “That’s true for me too. I don’t know what memories I don’t have either,” June said reassuringly.

  “I feel like two people inside one body. I should feel full, but instead I feel empty, like I’m incomplete. Something is missing, I’m sure of it. But, I can’t figure out what it is,” Ian said, starting to look upset.

  “Don’t worry. Whatever you’ve lost, I’m sure you’ll find it.” She paused, thoughtful. “What are you doing in here anyway?”

  “The Ian part of me feels like I should be doing my duties. It’s my turn to clean the decks and tubes in the missile storage area. So that’s what I’m doing.”

  “I see,” June nodded.

  “But the Elizabeth part of me hates cleaning.”

  “I don’t like cleaning either. Maybe you should listen to Elizabeth. I think she’s smarter than Ian.”

  “You’re probably right.” Ian stood up. “I’m going to see if Captain Walsh needs me for anything else.” He left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

  June thought about the conversation she’d just had. The copying process seemed like it might have some flaws. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Elizabeth, and it wasn’t like she was searching for weaknesses. It was just interesting information to have, that’s all.

  June put a hand out to brace herself as the floor shifted under her feet. She could hear hatches closing and feet moving on the decks above her. The floor tilted more steeply, and she could feel a shivering kind of vibration through the metalwork around her. Then the sound changed, the rushing white noise of frothing water diminishing to a muted silence as the sub became completely submerged.

  June smiled to herself. Finally underwater. Safe.

  Tros was speechless, her mouth hanging open, her skin white with shock, the blood having literally drained from her face. Jill had never seen her that way before. She didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone react like that before in her entire life.

  Tros was talking with Admiral McNair at the Kitsap Naval Base and whatever she’d just learned must have been exceptionally bad news. She could see Tros pull herself together, and then saw her lips moving as she subvocalized a response back to McNair. She’d never seen Tros do that either. She knew some people subvocalized, it was a physical tic caused by the brain’s association of conversation with audible speech, but she thought of it as something that only an uneducated person would do. For Tros to fall into subvocalization meant she’d been pushed to her limit. Past her limit perhaps.

  Jill stood up and paced the room, feeling the strain of anxiety, wanting to know what had happened, chafing against waiting until Tros was done before she could ask any questions. The clones must have escaped again, that was clear. But that didn’t seem like it was enough to cause the level of concern that she saw in Tros.

  Tros’s eyes flew open.

  “Fuck!” she yelled, pounding her fist into the table. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  Jill flinched at the volume and rage evident in Tros’s voice.

  Tros closed her eyes and took a deep, shaky breath.

  “What happened?” Jill asked, trying to stay calm.

  “The clones got away from McNair. Got away from him in the middle of the goddamned naval base. Surrounded by soldiers. Still got away.” Tros was breathing heavily, nearly hyperventilating. She took another deep breath, and when she spoke again, it was at a more normal volume. “McNair underestimated them. He took a fucked up situation and took it to a whole new level of fuckery.”

  “How did they do it?” Jill asked.

  “They had help. The guards at the gates let them in. We don’t know how the clones got to them. McNair’s team is conducting a neural probe interrogation and will share the data.” Tros paused for a moment as if she was dreading what she had to say next. “The guards took the clones to the sub pens,” Tros said, looking flatly at Jill, willing her to see where this was going.

  “Oh God, no,” Jill said.

  “Oh God, yes,” Tros said.

  “They tried to take a sub?”

  “They didn’t try. They took it. They have a sub. It executed a dive and entered stealth mode just minutes before McNair contacted me. The clones are free, we cannot track them, and they have access to nuclear weapons.”

  Jill’s legs gave out and she dropped into a nearby chair. She tried to talk, but no words came out. Her mouth flapped open and closed several times like a fish. Tros watched her with something like pity. When Jill had control of herself again, she stammered, “but they have to come up at some point, right? We can capture them then.”

  “They picked a sub that had just been cleared for deployment. They can stay under for up to three months, maybe longer,” Tros said.

  Jill was quiet for a moment while that sank in. “Three months?”

  “At least.”

  “There’s no way to find them during that time?”

  “No way. The submarine was designed with stealth as a primary goal. They can go virtually anywhere in the world now. If they want to, they can launch up to twenty-four ballistic missiles and then go back into hiding.”

  “How much damage can the missiles do?”

  “Each missile has twelve warheads, each of which can destroy a city. Anyone within a mile and a half of the blast will die – one hundred percent fatality rate. Every structure within three miles will be destroyed – eighty percent fatality rate. Third degree burns out to five miles – at least a fifty percent fatality rate. If they were to hit Seattle with just one of these warheads, there would be millions dead.”

  “They have twenty-four missiles, each with twelve warheads, that’s…” Jill was so stunned she was having trouble with the math. “288 warheads?”

&nbs
p; “Yes, that’s right,” Tros confirmed.

  “Each of which can kill an entire city?”

  “Yes.”

  “They will hit Seattle first. We need to evacuate the city.” Jill stood up, feeling the urgency. All those people. The entire population of Seattle. It would be pandemonium, but it could be done. They could get everyone out.

  “No,” Tros said, laying a hand on Jill’s forearm.

  “What?”

  “We will evacuate the lab. The two of us and all of our staff will go to a safe location, but no-one else can know. If they are going to nuke the city we can’t get everyone out fast enough anyway. And if they don’t nuke the city, the panic caused by our announcement will cause immense harm.”

  “We’re going to leave? Leave without telling anyone?” Jill asked in disbelief.

  “Yes, that is exactly what we are going to do.”

  Chapter 31

  Jill stood outside, a cold wind biting at the tip of her nose and cheeks. Her fingertips were cold; numb and clumsy as she fumbled with the buttons of her coat, trying to retain some warmth. She huddled into her collar, shoulders hunched. The cold spreading through her body was a fitting match for the numbness that was creeping its way through her soul.

  She stared across the great width of the Columbia River, leaning into the wind and the intermittent snow flurries, the smell of wet sage in the air. She thought about the horror she had unleashed upon the world. With nothing but the best of intentions, she had conspired in the potential death of millions. Perhaps hundreds of millions.

  The neuroscience was unequivocal. The neuro-models they had built for the clones, could predict their next moves, and with ninety-five percent confidence, the models predicted the death of Seattle. With eighty-five percent confidence, they predicted the end of every major city on the West Coast. There were more predictions, but Jill had stopped listening. In a daze, she’d stood up, left the building, and come outside to clear her head.

  It was hopeless. She couldn’t think clearly any more. She just felt cold. Cold and terrified. She saw no possibility for hope, no reason to believe that this would end in anything other than death, destruction, and clouds of radioactive ash that would blanket the Earth for generations to come.

  She stared at the steady churn of the Columbia below, the horror unfurling within her, numbness fighting to contain her soul-crushing guilt. She was unsure whether this was an experience she could survive. Maybe her next move should be to step off the embankment into the water and let the river carry her away. She could already feel the icy water tearing at her clothes, the struggle for breath, and then the peaceful release into oblivion.

  The tears tracking down her cheeks may have been from the cold, bitter wind, or perhaps it was evidence of her heart breaking and dying within her. Her mind closed down; she was emptied of thought as she stood swaying in the freezing wind, her soul slowly crumbling.

  “There you are. I’ve been looking for you,” Tros said, laying a gentle hand on Jill’s shoulder.

  Jill didn’t react. Tros may as well have not been there.

  “Something came up. We need you. It’s important.”

  Jill turned to face Tros, recognizing some of the same despair she was feeling in the set of Tros’s shoulders and the lines newly etched into her face. Without a word, passive and feeble, she let Tros lead her back into the compound, through the massive doors of the Hanford Site.

  When they’d first arrived, she’d considered the remarkable symmetry of the moment. They were fleeing a nuclear threat by hiding in a facility that had for decades supplied the plutonium used to create the country’s arsenal of atomic weapons. It still served as a storage facility for the waste generated by that massive effort, a legacy of poison left behind by their pathologically aggressive ancestors.

  This time as she stepped over the threshold with Tros, she had no thoughts. She followed Tros into the vast concrete bunker and down flight after flight of stairs until they were hundreds of feet underground, ensconced in a shell of concrete and earth, protected against anything but a direct nuclear hit.

  The rest of the team looked up as Jill and Tros entered, their voices diminishing to hushed whispers, anticipating what was to come. Jill saw hope on their faces and felt a spark of light flare inside her too. She extinguished it. Hope was dangerous. To hope was to want to live. To want to live was to accept what she had done. She couldn’t go there.

  Dr. Bateman stepped forward. “Jill, we found something in our model. Something that has to do with you. It might give us a chance.”

  Jill felt hope building again and she tamped it down hard. She stared at Dr. Bateman mutely. Waiting. Like a rock. Nothing could touch her.

  “It’s about June. We’ve discovered that she’s different from the others. More empathy. Not much, but it might be enough.” Dr. Bateman gathered his thoughts. “Our models show that she has formed an attachment to you.”

  Jill’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “An attachment?”

  “Yes, that’s what the model is telling us. She has formed an attachment to you and to the questions you asked. After the interview session you conducted with her, June became curious about human morality. She’s curious about you in particular. We predict that she is going to want to talk with you.”

  “Talk with me about what?”

  “Oddly enough, the trolley problem. She will realize that the choice that she and the other clones are making regarding a nuclear strike on Seattle is a variation of the trolley problem. She will want to discuss the implications with you.”

  “She wants to talk about the end of the world as if it were a theoretical problem in philosophy?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what passes for empathy with her?” Jill asked.

  “It’s more than the others have. It gives us something to work with,” Dr. Bateman responded without missing a beat.

  “What will keep the other clones from overruling her and simply launching the missiles anyway?”

  “We don’t know yet, but we’re working on it. In the meantime, we need you to prep for a conversation with her.”

  “The world hangs in the balance, dependent upon whether I can convince a seven-year-old clone to spare us from nuclear annihilation.” Jill paused meaningfully. “Because she wants to discuss the trolley problem with me.”

  Jill looked up at the tiled ceiling for a moment. “God help us all. I guess we should get to work.”

  June was standing in the command compartment of the submarine, leaning against the ladder that led up to the conning tower. The captain was at the helm, Elizabeth and Ava on either side of him, discussing their plans. Suki was prowling around the sub, exploring the various types of weaponry with a savage pleasure that made June smile.

  Directly overhead was a watertight hatch, open at the moment, round with a large wheel on the face of it that could be used to seal it in the case of an emergency. Two sailors were standing in the conning tower just above the hatch, one ready to take over the helm, the other watching the instrumentation next to the periscope station. The two of them added a layer of redundancy in case of a problem with the primary command.

  They had spent the night in the sub, drifting quietly in the deep waters outside Seattle, making plans and deciding what they should do next. The decision to fire one of the nuclear missiles at Seattle had been unanimous. Once they destroyed the lab, there wouldn’t be anyone left on Earth who understood them well enough to pose much of a threat. It was a good plan. Simple and direct.

  June brought herself back to the present, focusing her attention on Ava and Elizabeth, curious to hear what they were discussing with Captain Walsh.

  “Do we need to rise to the surface to launch a missile?” Ava asked.

  “No, that’s not necessary. We can launch from as deep as two-hundred feet, although I’d recommend a launch depth closer to one-hundred. It’s deep enough that we can evade detection after the launch, shallow enough to reduce the chanc
e of a launch failure.”

  “Where should we conduct the launch from?” Elizabeth asked, leaning in eagerly.

  The captain pulled up a map of the Puget Sound area, stretching from Tacoma in the south, Vancouver and Victoria to the north, Neah Bay at the end of the Strait of Juan De Fuca to the west. June took a few steps closer to get a better view.

  “We are currently here in Admiralty Inlet,” the captain said, pointing to a small, black ship icon on the map, roughly east of Port Townsend. “Once we pass through the strait into the Pacific Ocean, we can dive more deeply. It will give us room to maneuver. I’d recommend we stand off Cape Flattery, just past the two-thousand-foot depth contour, and launch from there.”

  “Can we launch sooner?” Elizabeth asked, just as Ava said, “Should we move farther away before launching?”

  Captain Walsh looked at the two clones and smiled, “The answer to both questions is yes, but I think this location gives us the right balance between distance from the target and time until we launch. We want to be close enough that our attack takes them by surprise, but far enough away that we aren’t caught up in the blast ourselves. At our current cruising speed, we can be at the launch location in under four hours.”

  “I think it’s a good plan,” Ava said. Elizabeth nodded in agreement.

  “Very well,” Captain Walsh said. “I’ll lay in the course and will let you know when we are close.”

  June closed her eyes dreamily. This was shaping up to be a great day. What a wonderful life. She was so happy to be able to experience it. She relaxed and let her mind range outwards.

  Interestingly, with her eyes closed, she felt her perceptions sharpening. Rather than seeing a deep blackness behind her eyelids, she was still aware of each of the other people in the command compartment surrounding her. The level of detail was captivating. She could see every pore, every hair, every minute flicker of muscle or emotion.