Web of Extinction

by John Conroe

  “The public, Harper. Astrid, she never saw the show. She probably saw you guys inside the Zone, in person, right Harp?” I asked.

  “What?” Harper asked, shaking JJ’s hand. He was smiling at her, perhaps just a touch uncertain of himself and Harper hadn’t looked away yet. “Oh, yeah. You guys would pull up to stores and stuff and this one would get out in armor and knock the doors in with a sledgehammer. I think I saw you guys like twice. Once on Fifth Avenue, and once on Madison Avenue.”

  “Ah, it’s really nice to meet you, Harper. Ajaya’s told me a lot about you,” JJ said. They were still shaking hands, far longer than convention required, if you asked me.

  “Really?” Harper asked, glancing at me.

  “Yeah, really?” Astrid asked, her brow furrowing as she recalculated the situation.

  “Well, I was curious about you, because of all the neuroprothesis work he had mentioned. Fascinating stuff. He also said you were getting into fitness. I’m kind of into fitness myself,” he said.

  “No way, you?” she said with pleasant snark, eyeing his muscular form with a sly grin.

  Then the rest of everybody arrived. I made introductions to those people who hadn’t met her, like Brad, Martin, my grandparents, Sarah, and Hannah, then backed up a little, letting my mother take charge of the welcome. Harper responded with honest warmth to my mom, and the twins were even decently nice to her. I stepped back a bit more and bumped into Astrid, who leaned close, her breath tickling my ear. “I see what you did,” she said in a voice that sent a little shiver down my spine.

  I shrugged. “He already had a little crush, I think. So when he asked questions, I just answered.”

  “Smooth move, sniper boy,” she whispered, taking my hand in hers.

  With the introductions over, the group started to disperse back to whatever they’d been doing before Harper’s arrival, leaving just Astrid, myself, Mom, and JJ.

  “Ajaya, do you want to give Harper a tour?” Mom asked tentatively, eyeing Astrid’s hand in mine.

  “Actually, Mom, I was going to ask JJ to cover the basics and help her haul her stuff to the rooms you and Aama prepared. Lunch is coming up in less than an hour and I thought I could give her the full tour after that, if that’s okay with everyone?”

  “No problem, Ajaya. Glad to help,” JJ said, grabbing a suitcase in each hand and lifting them easily out of the back of the Jeep.

  “If it’s no problem, Mrs. Gurung, that actually sounds great. A quick look around, then lunch would be perfect. I’m sure everyone has important things to do,” Harper said.

  “Yeah, we’re just finishing up with Sarah. JJ, be sure to give her a glimpse of her computer lab,” I said.

  “My computer lab?” Harper asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, of course. What did you think we’d have you doing? Planting gardens?”

  “Well, no, although I would like to learn about that stuff. And more about fighting and stuff. Even how to grow food.”

  “Well, you’re in the perfect place, dear,” Mom said. “Between this motley collection, there’s quite a few skills. And my parents are both master gardeners. They’re always happy to have help.”

  Chapter 37

  “This place is really kind of amazing,” Harper said later that afternoon. True to my word, I was giving her a more in-depth tour of the entire facility.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty wild, isn’t it?”

  “What did they do here?” she asked.

  JJ had shown her around the main building, so she’d seen the command center, her computer lab, the living quarters, common area, big kitchen, little kitchen, commercial pantries, freezers and walk-in refrigerators, empty offices, and arsenal. I had just shown her the motor pool and mechanics garage, the power generation complex, the well head and water cistern, the central heating building which piped heat into all the buildings, the building supply and maintenance sheds, and now we were walking into the laboratory building through the attached greenhouse.

  “We don’t know. Brad couldn’t get a scrape of information on that, but we’ve found a lot of odd clues. For instance, this greenhouse is all set up for hydroponics. Some soil-based beds as well, so we should, according to my grandparents, be able to grow food all winter long. Point is, what the hell were they growing here that needed a greenhouse this big and this complex?”

  I opened the door into the interior hallway. “These all were labs of some type. It would be hard to tell, but because of the proximity to the greenhouse, we think they were biology labs, while the floor overhead seems like more workshop space than lab. But they’re all stripped clean.”

  “Biology and technology?” she questioned.

  “Seems like it. Now check this out,” I said, opening a janitor’s door.

  “Not that impressive, Gurung,” she said in a tone that questioned my intelligence.

  “Really? You don’t think so?” I asked, reaching over to a red fire alarm switch and lifting the cover on it to reveal a concealed keypad. Quickly punching four digits into the panel, I stepped back a bit so she could fully appreciate the metal shelving unit and the wall behind it that was now swinging open to reveal a tiny room.

  “Secret rooms?” she asked as I led her inside.

  “Close. Secret elevator,” I said, punching the down button.

  The floor dropped and she yelped a little. “A little warning next time would be appreciated, Gurung. That thing isn’t safe,” she said, nodding at the concrete side of the shaft sliding by rapidly where the open door had been a moment ago.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” I asked as we descended.

  “How did you find this? Not like the place came with a manual, right?”

  “No, it didn’t. The twins found it. They were hiding from a work detail, didn’t like cleaning the leftover nutrient muck out of the hydroponics tanks, according to Mom. I was still in the city at the time. Anyway, they hid in here and one of them, Gabby I think, was messing with the fire alarm box because, you know, teenager, and found that it lifted up. Immediately they realized a keypad was hella unusual so they told Martin and JJ. In fact, it was JJ who figured out the code.”

  “Really? Brains and brawn and looks? Where the hell is his wife?”

  “No wife, not even a girlfriend at the moment.”

  “At the moment? He’s a player, isn’t he?”

  “I used to think so, but the reality was he never had to play at all. Women just threw themselves at him. He picked a few up but threw them all back. Movie star looks and celebrity status and the family wealth that came from the show. He learned about gold diggers quick.”

  “Men must do the same with Astrid?” she asked carefully.

  “Males have always done the same with Astrid. From middle school on. Grown men hit on her when she was the same age as the twins are now. Which is why I get a little wiggy when my sisters are out in public… men are dogs.”

  “So you have to guard your sisters and your girlfriend,” she said.

  “Ah, sisters yeah, girlfriend, not so much. She’s been handling admirers most of her life. She’s adept at it and if they don’t back off, she’s got serious skills. Don’t tell her I said this, but she shoots almost as well as me.”

  “Nobody shoots as well as you, you freak. But that’s cool—about her handling herself. Being out in the big wide world, I got a little taste of the whole male thing myself. If you can believe it.”

  “Of course I believe it. You’re pretty as hell. You should take JJ up on self-defense lessons; he’s got black belts in karate and jiu-jitsu.”

  “Maybe I’ll do just that,” she said. The elevator came to a stop, the concrete wall suddenly opening into a corridor. LED lights blinked on, one after another, illuminating the stark concrete walls, floor and ceiling in a harsh white light that my mother had called clinical.

  I led her out of the elevator and showed her the rooms branching out on either side of the central hallway.

  “Some look almost like cells?” s
he said.

  “And some are clearly more labs. Hard to tell, as they took everything except some papers,” I said, picking up a pile of unlabeled diagrams from the floor.

  “Okay, this looks like plans for drones? At least like artist renderings of possible future drones,” she said.

  “That’s what we thought.”

  We toured the rest of the underground facility, but it had been thoroughly sterilized other than the sheaf of drawings that had somehow been left behind.

  “Okay, I’m creeped out enough. Can we go back up?”

  “Yup. Let’s go.”

  “I’m going to hang on to these, if that’s okay. No reason to leave them down here, right?” she asked, shaking the sheaf of papers.

  “Nope, none at all.”

  Chapter 38

  Harper quickly moved into her computer lab, enlisting both JJ and Martin to haul more than half the contents of her Jeep to the room we had set up for her. She smiled at the stock of equipment that awaited her, but it was the smile of a concert pianist for the efforts of a third-year piano student.

  What came out of the boxes from her Jeep was all state-of-the-art equipment, some of it running into the tens of thousands of dollars in cost. If JJ had admired her skill and knowledge of all things cyber before, he was in total awe now. And as soon as she had it set up and functional, I gifted her with the Rikki chip.

  “You already backed this one up?” she asked.

  “Twice. But it’s the original.”

  “Well, no offense, but I’m going to make my own copies and test them before I use them. And I’ll never directly expose this to the net.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “Gonna knock that seven-legged horror out is more like it. I’ve been down the three days it took me to drive here,” she said, staring at the chip as it lay in the palm of her hand.

  “But you’re back up now,” I said, waving a hand at the screens, server racks, and CPUs stacked in strategic manner about the room. They gave off so much heat that we were using corner door fans to disperse it into the neighboring hallways. Harper’s lab was on the ground floor, by design, both for protection and because heat rises. The massive main building, constructed of thick slabs and poured concrete walls, would be an excellent heat sink in the summer, while the warm air generated by her equipment would possibly help raise the overall temperature of the building in the cold Vermont winters.

  “Yup, online.”

  “And? How’s it going?”

  She looked at me for a minute. “Actually, your software is doing really well. I used my own copies to send out more Rikkis, but this one is right up to the final minute stuff. It has the directive you gave him—to hunt and kill the Spider.”

  “You say that like it’s a big deal,” I said.

  “You are Rikki’s prime programmer. His command hierarchy has you at the top. So when you issue a directive, it changes his programming at its core. No one else has that effect. It makes him… this is going to sound corny, but it makes him kind of fierce. He goes after the mission with all his considerable resources. So a fresh copy, made from the most motivated of Rikkis, is a powerful weapon.”

  “Are we winning?”

  She shrugged. “No damn way to really tell. Too many freaking computers and AIs in the world to know. My feeling is yes, and with this, likely. Not sure if it’ll be enough though.”

  “Well yeah, there is that. But if we can slow the decline, it’ll give mankind time to prepare. If we have years instead of months or days, we can build some close-knit societies that might endure.”

  “And this place is your plan?”

  “The core of it, yes,” I said. “See, if we can equip this place with the tools of long-term sustainable survival and populate it with the right people, we have the seeds of recovery.”

  “You have a real plan, don’t you? Not just a compound but an actual plan?”

  “Yeah, we do. This place was a godsend, not just because of the facilities, but because of the location of the facilities. New England in general, and Vermont in particular, have been experiencing a cultural shift toward sustainability for decades. Seventy percent of the farms in this county are either organic certified or close enough that it doesn’t matter. Sixty percent use CSA, Community Supported Agriculture programs, to stay funded and ensure markets for their produce. We’re in the process of joining all those and started with a couple as soon as we got here. That’s the twins’ job, by the way. Community outreach. With the help of my grandparents and my mom, they will become the face of this compound to the people in this region. We’re buying all of our produce from these farms, as well as the seedlings from them to plant in our own greenhouse.

  “We’ve also started to buy all of our beer, liquor, wine, soaps, shaving bars, lotions, baked goods, wheat, corn, and meat from local sourcing.”

  “Won’t they recognize the twins? I mean, two beautiful young identical girls of Nepalese heritage who’ve been on the most popular show in the world? People here can’t be stupid.”

  “Yeah, they figured it out right off the bat. Didn’t help that we had to use the names Johnson and Gurung on the CSA paperwork.”

  “Was there concern? That the Johnson clan of Zone War fame and the family of the Zone sniper himself were settling here?”

  “You’re pretty sharp, Harp. See what I did there?” I asked, grinning. She rolled her eyes. “Yes, you’re correct. The community has been a little… uncertain, but Mom jumped onto the problem right away. Went to the very first town meeting that she could and introduced herself and the girls. Then she took questions and there were lots, as you might imagine. People thinking we would lead the drones here, people thinking either the government or the Spiders themselves would somehow resurrect and attack.”

  “Oh, but let me guess… she went with the whole who would you rather have on your side when the world ends bit, right? The Johnson Clan and the Gurung family. The people that not only survived the Zone but thrived in it and the punk who killed all three Spiders, right?”

  “Right again,” I said. “Mom threw you under the bus as well.”

  “So you buy lots of local goods to curry favor?” she asked. “See what I did there… curry?”

  “Not just that. See, we’re buying more than we can use. The stable, storable stuff, we sock away, grains and such, but the fresh, perishable stuff we either use or donate to the local food banks.”

  “Sort of a dual support, huh? Buy from the farmers and crafts people, help the food insecure.”

  “Exactly. See, it’s how we evolved. Hunter-gatherers very much food pool among their group, sort of a socialism for food so that no one starves. But with that food supply system, one never really gets ahead either. Agrarian societies, on the other hand, especially centered around traditional family units, favored the more successful, the harder working, the talented. And this in turn increases the ability to food pool even more. Wealthy communities can give more to support the less fortunate than can a group of hunter-gatherers. And humans are about to get knocked back down the ladder to the Stone Age. Our goal is to cling as high on the rungs as we can and hold up the area around us.”

  “Admirable. So when does your mom throw you into the dog and pony show?”

  “We’ve just started. I’m going with them when we pick up food and when we deliver excess to the food pantries. Starting slow.”

  “How’s that going?”