Desk four surrendered two wristwatches and a flashlight to the satchel. The big drawer on the left contained a cloud of silvery mold oozing out of a box of donuts. She gently closed it while holding her breath.
Sitting in front of a computer felt weird while wearing a dog-leather poncho and nothing else. So much like the world she remembered, yet so different. The computer had clearly been an office machine. The only games on it had come with the operating system: solitaire, something with little squares to click on, and a cheesy 3D pinball game. Temptation got the best of her. She played pinball for a little while, but got bored of it in minutes.
Cabinets held copy paper, toner cartridges, and staples―nothing that seemed useful to tribals. She headed out of the room and stopped at a door on the left a few paces away, which turned out to be a bathroom. Five rolls of toilet paper went into the satchel without a second thought. Mine. Some things had too much value to trade away. She also snagged four plastic pouches of hand soap from wall dispensers.
The next door on the right opened to a break room where she examined a few horrifying vending machines, science projects in what happened to fake food after half a century passed. Finding nothing of use, she hurried down the hall to a corner. Another group of office workstations filled the next room on the left. She took a couple more solar calculators and a clock, as well as two e-readers and three smartphones with their charging cables, none of which had any battery life left. If Dad could charge them, one might have a game or something that still worked.
Her satchel grew heavier as she explored the second, much larger, office area. She rounded the plain grey fabric wall into the seventh workstation, stared for a second at a corpse slumped over in the chair, and screamed with a mixture of surprise and disgust.
A grey jumpsuit covered a dried out and blackened body. By the right hand lay a white and silver gun made of plastic. She would’ve thought it a toy, if not for the neat hole in the cube wall on the other side of his head. Once the initial horror at finding a dead man weakened, she crept closer. He’d lost his grip on the weapon after shooting himself. Kiera cringed, but reached up and grasped the pistol. She pulled it back, making his arm bump the mouse, which woke up the screen. The shift from black to white startled a yelp out of her. She patted her chest until her heart resumed beating. An email had been the last thing the man read.
To all employees: We have received confirmation that the air quality over most of the continental United States has reached a point where life is no longer possible outside managed environments. Our scientists have been unable to explain the bizarre and dangerous weather patterns forming out in the toxic soup. It is with a heavy heart that I report the last of the Cairns have been sealed. Of course, all personnel are welcome to a pod downstairs, but there will be no possibility of bringing friends or family into the facility at this time. Conditions outside are too dangerous, and if people had not already been in a secure location, the odds of their continued survival are too low to risk sending anyone out there.
We have done all we can. For now, we can only wait and hope the programmers had their game on.
Please note that our in-house Cairn will be sealed by 6:00 p.m. today. At that time, the medical staff will enter pods themselves and the vault will lock. Hope to see you all in the future.
Col. William D. Mullican, United States Air Force.
Kiera stared at the status bar, which showed this email hadn’t been opened until 7:10 p.m. She backed away from the desk, not wanting to disturb him. “Sorry.” She glanced down at the gun, which had a short length of clear tube sticking out the front end. It didn’t feel heavy enough to be a real weapon. “Laser pistol? Seriously? Yeah right.”
She pointed it at the wall and pulled the trigger.
A brilliant blue line of energy appeared in the dusty air, connecting the tip to the drywall for a split second, starting a small fire and leaving a hole the size of a dime.
“Aah!” she yelled.
The gun hadn’t jumped, twitched, or done much but emit a soft hum.
“Holy crap! A real laser gun!” She shook from fear and excitement. “I can trade this for like, all the food.”
For safety, she didn’t put it in the satchel, deciding to carry it to the next desk. A white cube with rounded corners, about the size of a Rubik’s puzzle, sat between the keyboard and monitor. Each face had a bowl-shaped pit surrounded by two half-circle ridges.
“Huh… what’s that?” She set the laser down and picked up the cube. It weighed more than she thought it would, but appeared to be plastic. The bottom surface differed from the others, having a metal ring with a shimmery purple crystal in it. “Ooh. This is pretty.” She turned it over in her hands. One corner had a tiny clear dot, like a power-on light. She picked at with a finger.
The cube beeped and floated up out of her grip. It spun like a top, perched on a fist-sized ball of pale blue light. Energy radiating from it made a few strands of her hair float. After a moment, the cube stopped spinning and hung motionless in midair.
“Wow.” She stared at it. “That’s cool.”
“Hello,” said a voice somewhere between little girl and teenager.
Kiera blinked. “Did you just talk?”
The cube glided a few inches to the left and stopped spinning. “Yes. I am talking.”
“Hi,” said Kiera.
“I am Pet. Or Peta if you prefer, but most people call me Pet. I have a one-petabyte memory core, which is the reason for my name.”
Kiera edged after the drifting cube, staring up at it with pure awe. “I guess they didn’t want the animal people to get mad.”
The feminine voice laughed, the light orb fluttering in time with the sound. “How do you know about that?”
“I’m… uhh, a lot older than I look.”
Pet floated up to her face. “Are you afflicted with a disease that prevents aging?”
“No. I’m really eleven. I think I was frozen.”
“Cryogenic stasis.” Pet orbited her head. “Your identity implant matches. Quinn, Kiera Ann. Birthdate: 9, November, 2022. One moment, accessing network resources. File transfer in progress.”
“Identity implant?” She looked at her hand, thinking about waving at the egg every day to pay for her lunch at school. “Oh… now I remember. I’ve got a chip. Mom made me get one. That’s why the door let me in.”
The cube’s glow flickered rapidly, reminding her of the network activity light on her Supernova 2 console. After a few minutes, it slowed to an intermittent pulse.
“Hey, Kier,” said Pet in a slightly different—but still childish—voice as it glided in a lazy circle around her.
She wandered to the next desk, the floating cube following. “What do you do? What did you download?”
“Software update. Mostly I talk. I have wireless, so I can look stuff up for you or send emails or order items. I can navigate, too.”
“Umm.” She sat on the chair and pulled open the drawer. “None of that is really going to work anymore. The world’s broken.”
“Broken?”
Kiera told a quick version of her story thus far while collecting a few more bits of electronica from the last of the desks. Pet followed her out into the hallway and across to a conference room, which had nothing of use. An elevator at the end of the hall displayed an error, so she entered a stairwell. Pet’s glow created an azure band on the walls that sank in time with their descent. The little cube glided over the railing and sank straight down the middle of the shaft.
“How are you flying?” asked Kiera.
“Micro ion-thruster. I can travel up to ninety miles an hour, which would be dangerous since I’d break myself if I collided with anything.”
“Right.” She stepped into ankle-deep water at the bottom, cold enough to make her squeal. “Eee!”
“Why did you scream?” asked Pet.
Kiera pointed down. “C-c-cold.”
Eerie shadows stretched around the walls as the cube glided to h
over by her feet. Small sparks danced across ripples on the water when the ion thruster got close. Kiera sloshed forward a few steps and pushed the door aside, grunting with the effort necessary to shove it. The hallway beyond also had about two inches of water.
She walked from door to door, frustrated at finding yet more places she couldn’t open. Windows looked into conference rooms and one that appeared to be a lab or small medical facility. Kiera stopped at a four-way intersection, gazing around while her teeth chattered. It occurred to her that only Pet’s light let her see anything.
“Why are the lights off?”
“I don’t know,” said Pet, “But there is a door straight ahead that is open.”
“Okay.” Kiera crept forward to avoid splashing the icy water up her legs.
At the end of the corridor, one sliding door on the left had jammed three-quarters of the way closed. She squeezed past it into a huge office with fancy decorations. A glass-top coffee table sat on two silver orbs, fake plants lined the walls, and a desk straight out of a science fiction movie took up most of the distant corner.
She looted a bunch of little puzzles from a bookshelf, as well as a collection of figurines she recognized as comic book characters. They didn’t do anything useful, but someone might trade for them to amuse their kids. After, she plopped in the chair, which bounced and rotated. Grinning, she put her feet up on the desk to get them out of the frigid water, and reclined.
This is nicer than my bed. I shouldn’t stay here too long. Dad will be worried. I gotta bring him back here when his leg’s better so we can take this chair.
Still, she couldn’t resist kicking off the desk and spinning around in circles a few times. When she stopped herself with a foot on the desk, the screen came to life, a sheet of glowing light that unfurled in midair. This terminal had a holographic display the size of a small TV.
“Wow…” She stuck her hand through it, waved, and pulled back. “That’s awesome.”
Pet glided around to hover over her left shoulder. “This office was last registered to Quinn, Theresa, R. PhD.”
“Mom?” Kiera covered her mouth with both hands. “This was Mom’s office? But I don’t remember this place at all!”
“That’s what the file says.” Pet’s light fluttered. “Don’t cry.”
Kiera wiped her eyes. Knowing this chair belonged to her dead mother made sitting in it much less fun. “When was the last time she came here?”
“Umm, the file shows she last used this terminal on June 3, 2033. The most recent activity before logout was sending an email message to Michael Quinn that reads: We can’t stop it now. The project will never finish in time. If we wait any longer, we’re going to die. We have to go in tonight. I’ll meet you at home to get Kiera. Don’t bother packing anything. We won’t need it. Don’t be late or we will go without you.” Pet paused. “A reply came back, but she never accessed it. The response was: Leaving now. I won’t be late.”
Kiera pulled her legs up, feet on the chair, and buried her face in dog fur stretched between her knees. Pet muttered comforting things while she cried. After a few minutes, the crippling grief subsided. Still crying, she poked at the computer, searching for ‘project.’
The first link she touched brought up a page discussing Citadel Corporation, a manufacturer of technology used to process toxic waste and clean the environment. An embedded video showed a barge sucking trash out of a lake, another had a machine skimming oil off the surface of the ocean. Text explained that while Citadel remained the world leader in environmental purification, even their best technology could not keep up with the damage enough to prevent widespread loss of life. Related articles linked to thousands of lawsuits from private citizens, upset that Citadel hadn’t been able to stop the events that would ultimately become Cloudfall.
“That’s so stupid. They didn’t cause it!” She sighed, shaking her head.
“Some people accused Citadel Corporation of working with the companies responsible for most of the pollution, claiming the cleaning technology was all made up as a scam for money.”
“Sorry, Dad, but I don’t think anyone needs lawyers now.”
Pet laughed. “Oh. I’m sorry. That wasn’t funny.”
“What’s the project Mom was talking about?”
The display shifted on its own, reacting to her voice. A page came up with the title: ‘Citadel Rebirth.’ Kiera read, dragging the page up a little at a time by swiping a finger into the screen. The file detailed how Citadel Corporation, in cooperation with the remains of multiple national governments, constructed citadels all across the globe. The scientific analysis mostly sailed over her head, but she grasped enough to understand the Earth’s biosphere had been dying rapidly. The citadels were enormous machines that could clean the atmosphere… once they were finished. A report put the fastest date to complete them at more than twenty years after estimates predicted every human on the planet would be dead.
“So… people went into freeze tanks waiting for the robots to finish making the citadels?”
She poked a link and a map appeared. Green circles winked in one after the next, each with a flattop pyramid graphic. Lines formed between them, creating a hexagonal grid that wrapped around the planet. The next closest Citadel looked to be north, in Nebraska, with another about fifty miles over the Canadian border. A yellow line circled each one, indicating a radius of a hundred miles. The map areas not inside the circles had dark shading with the word ‘toxic’ repeating over and over.
“Oh, whoa… no wonder there’s villages by the Citadel… it’s an air-cleaner. It’s making the bubble we’re living in.” She pictured the tornado perched atop the giant pyramid, and the constant, rotating wind. According to the information on the screen, it took about thirty-six years for the citadels to create these pockets of livable space. A red band at the top marked the Citadel System as offline. “Offline? How can it be offline? It’s running….”
“Citadel system awaiting authorization code to initiate primary processing,” said an adult woman’s voice from the ceiling.
“What does that mean?”
Pet’s glow fluttered rapidly for a few seconds. “The citadels are in a standby mode. When they’re turned on, they’ll clean the air, reseed the biosphere with animal and plant life, and filter toxins from the oceans.” The cube glided around and hovered over her feet.
“Why haven’t they turned it on yet? That’s stupid!” She lowered her feet from the desk, leaned forward, and slapped the glass top on either side of the keyboard. “Turn it on! What are you waiting for?”
The screen flashed black.
“Unauthorized access attempt detected,” said a man’s voice from the ceiling. “Requested function not permitted from remote. Terminal locked down. Security log recorded.”
She sighed. “I guess I need to contact my systems administrator.”
“There is no support…” Pet paused. “Oh, duh. You’re joking.”
Kiera stood, cringing at the cold water. “Yep.” She shouldered the fat satchel and picked up the laser. “I need to go home before I get in trouble.”
“Can I come with you?” asked Pet.
She grinned, sloshing out the door. “Yeah. And I promise I won’t let Dad trade you.”
Pet glided after her, a faint hum emanating from its thruster. “That is most reassuring. I do not think I’d like to be traded.”
Kiera smirked, thinking of the bandits. “Yeah. I know exactly how you feel.”
20
Left Behind
Kiera hurried down the corridor, splashing. “Why wouldn’t the system turn itself on when it was finished?”
“I don’t know.” Pet zipped along behind her and above to the left. “Searching.”
She held the laser up to keep it clear of water and ran to the stairway. A few steps up on dry ground, she stopped, shivering. “I can’t feel my toes.”
Pet glided down, hovering over her feet. The blue glow emanating from its thruster radiated
a small amount of warmth, though it tingled.
“Thanks.” She giggled.
A few minutes passed before the little floating robot glided up to eye level. “I’ve found a document. Apparently, once the final citadel had been completed, the system was supposed to thaw out the executives so they could review the situation and make the decision to activate or not.”
Kiera patted the overstuffed satchel and headed up the stairs. “Why wouldn’t they? Who’d want to leave most of the planet deadly? And that machine’s going to bring back some animals, right?”
“In theory.” Pet glided by her right shoulder. “I’ve found a few files in the legal drive that refer to a former employee, Jeanne Greer, PhD, who claimed to have found a design flaw. According to her, turning them on would cause all the citadels to detonate in thermonuclear clouds.”
“Oh.” Kiera nodded on the way up the last set of stairs. “That’s a good reason not to turn them on.”
“None of the executives appear to believe it. Documents, some of which were written by your father, show that their opinion of Greer’s claims amounted to a disgruntled employee attempting to sabotage the project. I’ve found two other analyses that could not replicate the supposed flaw in computer simulations of the activation process. Also, there are long email chains where both sides accuse each other of lying.”
Kiera walked out into the upstairs hallway, smiling at having warm metal beneath her feet instead of icy water. “What happens if they’re never turned on?”
“Searching,” said Pet.
“So, the company made this giant network of machines that can take all the poison out of the sky, and there’s more than one citadel…” Kiera walked around the corner, bursting with eagerness to tell this story to her dad.
Citadel: The Concordant Sequence Page 20