“Sophia,” she repeated, more forcefully. “It’s an emergency.”
“She went to check the west track. But you shouldn’t—”
Jenna didn’t hear the rest. She angled the Jeep toward the rails directly ahead and punched the accelerator. She bounced over the rails without slowing and then steered onto the access road that ran parallel to the tracks. A cloud of dust rose behind her like some kind of biblical pillar of smoke, marking her presence. Cort would have no trouble tracking her. The speedometer ticked up—fifty miles per hour…sixty…seventy. It didn’t seem fast enough.
She passed an enormous hangar-like structure, easily as large as the Aerojet silo building in the Everglades. The side facing the rails was open. A massive antenna stood inside, undergoing some kind of maintenance. The dish was pointing straight up, like an enormous chalice waiting to be filled.
Beyond that building lay several empty pads, each with three concrete footings that rose up from the dusty ground like grave markers, then a dish, then more pads. She checked each without slowing, looking for the track maintenance vehicle that would indicate Sophia’s location. Three long minutes later, she spotted what she was looking for: a Chevrolet pickup truck that had been modified with flanged steel wheels to run on railroad tracks. It sat parked in front of a towering antenna dish. As she got closer, she saw movement high above, on the staircase that led up to the base of the massive dish.
Jenna stopped the Jeep and got out. A dark haired woman wearing blue coveralls, descended the staircase, taking several steps at a time with the agility of an experienced parkour athlete. Even from a distance, Jenna could see the resemblance; the woman—it had to be Sophia Gallo—looked just like her.
Sophia paused on the lowermost landing just above the concrete pillars upon which the antenna rested. There was an unmistakable look of excitement on her face, and Jenna found that she too had broken into a broad smile.
“Come on up.”
Without waiting for further prompting, Jenna mounted the short flight of stairs to the landing, where she found Sophia waiting with open arms. Jenna fell into the embrace without the slightest hesitation.
The sense of kinship—sisterhood—was overpowering. The bond she felt with Mercy was only a shadow of what she now experienced. This woman didn’t merely share the same DNA. Sophia and Jenna were the same person, only separated by age and experience.
Sophia released her and held her at arm’s length. “You’re new.”
It sounded a little strange, but Jenna understood. It wasn’t just that Jenna was young. Sophia was a connected part of a family that Jenna had only just learned about. “Yeah,” she replied. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“I’m Sophie.”
“Jenna.”
“Wonderful.” Sophia laughed with undisguised joy, “Well, you’re timing couldn’t be better. Come on up to the vertex room. You can tell us both.”
She gestured to the ascending stairs, which rose at least another forty feet above the landscape.
“Both?”
“Oh, sorry. I guess you really are new. Jarrod is up there.”
Jenna was not the least bit surprised that her intuition had been proven correct. Everything was happening according to plan. She started up the stairs behind Sophia, and with each step, she felt herself moving closer to a pivotal moment in history. The moment everything would change. She wondered if this was how the crew of the Enola Gay had felt one early August morning in 1945, as they took off from the Marianas Islands with a cargo of nuclear death in their bomb bay. The world was about to change, and Jenna would bear witness.
Sophia passed a gently chugging compressor and ducked under one of the large curving gears that allowed the dish to tilt. She continued up another flight of stairs that ended at an innocuous looking door right below the dish. She opened it and allowed Jenna to step inside first.
The room looked empty, like a disused storage closet. A small raised metal platform provided access to the upper reaches of the pyramid-shaped space. Several large cylindrical objects reached down from overhead. A man stood in front of a cylinder. She recognized him, both from the picture Cort had shown her at the safe house and from the uncanny resemblance to the face she saw in the mirror. Jarrod Chu. He held a laptop computer trailing a thick cable connected to the cylinder.
Jarrod showed only a trace of surprise at seeing her, and then his face broke into the same smile with which Sophia had welcomed Jenna. Sophia stepped in behind her and made the introduction. “Jarrod, meet Jenna. She’s new.”
“Very new,” Jarrod remarked. His voice was a deeper version of Jenna’s. “You must have slipped through the cracks. Last generation?”
Jenna risked a quick glance at the computer screen. It showed a download progress bar, about two-thirds green.
I’m not too late, she thought. And then, Too late for what?
“I think so,” she answered. “And I only learned about…all off this...a couple of days ago.” A small lie, but one she delivered without the slightest hint of dishonesty. Jarrod gave no indication of registering the falsehood, and Jenna realized that, despite his training as an FBI special agent, he wasn’t adept at reading people. She pointed at the laptop. “Is that it?”
“This is it,” he confirmed. “In about two minutes, give or take, it will be done.”
Two minutes. Jenna felt a tingle of anticipation. All I have to do is stand back, let it happen and the world will change.
I told Noah I could stop it.
Stop it? Why?
“What exactly is it?”
Jarrod cocked his head sideways in a look of mild surprise. He glanced at Sophia then back at Jenna. “You mean you don’t know?”
Jenna gave a helpless shrug. “Still catching up.”
Jarrod tapped the touch pad and then turned the screen so she could get a better look. The display was filled with ones and zeroes, a binary code. After just a moment’s scrutiny, Jenna recognized the pattern. It was identical to the DNA message Soter had received thirty-seven years earlier. But then an impossible detail leapt out. A change. Something in the code had been modified, added, but why?
She almost asked for an explanation, but before she could phrase the question, she came up with a possible answer on her own. The DNA message was a unique recognition code. Sending it back to the source would be a way of signaling that it had been read and understood. The addition revealed that the language could also be spoken by those on the receiving end.
“You must have talked to Soter,” Jarrod continued. “How is our dear father?”
“Uh, he seemed kind of confused actually. He didn’t think any of us understood the last part of the transmission.”
Sophia grinned. “He still thinks it’s from aliens.”
This time, Jenna made no effort to hide her ignorance. “It’s not?”
Jarrod laughed. “You do have some catching up to do.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but instead he returned his attention to the computer, closing the window with the message and checking the progress bar. Three-quarters done now. Ninety seconds? Less? And how much time was left on Cort’s ten minute countdown, to...what? Nothing good.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Jarrod continued.
“You do?” He does? I doubt it.
“You’re wondering if this is the right thing to do,” Sophia said.
“We’ve all thought it,” Jarrod said.
Jenna gave an involuntary gasp. Of course they know. We practically share a brain. “Is it?” she asked, abandoning all pretense. “Destroying the world?”
“Destroying?” Jarrod exchanged another meaningful glance with Sophia. “Jenna, we’re saving the world. Saving it from this slow death called humanity. I know it’s a lot to process, and I know you want to believe there’s a better way. We all did. We’ve spent years trying to find a better way, but the message…”
Sophia picked up the thread of his explanation. “You only need to look
at a newspaper to see it. We—humans—either consume with no regard for the future, or hide our heads in denial while the problems multiply.”
“We’re omnivores,” Jarrod said. “In the truest sense of the word. We devour everything. And we congratulate ourselves on our ability to adapt when we exhaust one resource, even though our miracle solution drives thousands of species to extinction.
“Did you know that in the 1960s the human population was poised to exceed carrying capacity? The planet could not produce enough food to feed everyone. The population was about three billion, and one third of them were just a drought away from starvation. But then we discovered new ways to extend the food supply. New strains of wheat and rice, fertilizers made from petrochemicals, new farming methods, intensive factory fishing. And what has happened? Ninety percent of the world’s forests have been cleared for agriculture. The seas have been emptied of fish and are poisoned by fertilizer run-off. Worst of all, instead of stabilizing the food supply to feed three billion, the so-called Green Revolution fueled a population explosion. It took thousands of years for the population to reach three billion. In the last forty years, it has more than doubled. And by the middle of this century, there will be ten billion people.”
In the back of her mind, Jenna could see the seconds ticking away, but she knew that Jarrod wasn’t stalling. His intention was to educate her. To help her overcome her moral reservations about what they were doing…what they were destined to do.
“No one even realizes what a disaster it was,” he continued. “Human society congratulates itself on their ability to squeeze the Earth’s limited resources even harder, ravaging the natural world, heating the planet with our waste until the oceans turn to acid and the land becomes a barren desert. Only when we have killed every other living thing will humans admit to folly, and then they will say ‘Why didn’t we do something about it?’ Well, we are doing something.”
“We aren’t destroying the world,” Sophia said. “Humanity is doing that. We’re saving it. Treating the infection before it kills everything.”
Jenna felt the truth of the words. Humanity’s fatal flaw was the ability to ignore dire generational problems while focusing on short term gratification. It was written into the human genome as surely as this moment had been written into her own. And she knew, without a shred of uncertainty, that it would never stop. There would be no great awakening. The human species was a runaway train that would destroy all life on Earth with its inevitable crash.
All I need to do is let this happen, she thought.
There would be survivors. As if awakening to another implanted memory, she realized that the others had already made preparations for it, and once the ashes of World War III cooled, they would step forth and begin building a better human society, one in which the rapacious appetites of Humanity 1.0 would be bred out.
“A lot of people are going to suffer and die,” she replied in a small voice that didn’t feel like her own.
“They’ll suffer and die if we don’t take action,” Sophia countered. “We cannot afford to cling to the illusion of false hope.”
A faint chime sounded.
It was done. The signal had been sent. Jenna had failed to keep her promise, yet somehow, it didn’t feel like failure.
Sudden nausea swept through her, bending her vision, moving through her body, head to toe, like a wave of energy. It staggered her, but passed in a second and left her feeling...invigorated. Renewed. Stronger. Sharper.
What the—
She glanced up at Sophia and Jarrod. Neither seemed to have suffered the same effect, but they were different. The chestnut-brown hair they all shared was now black. And their eyes, once dark brown like Jenna’s, were now fiery brown, almost orange. There was no place to see her reflection, but Jenna’s hair was long enough to pull around and see. She did it casually, as though nervously playing with her hair, confirming that the fine, straight strands were now as black as theirs. Given their lack of reaction to her eyes, they matched as well, still doubles, but not in Jenna’s memory.
They didn’t notice the change, Jenna realized. The fact that it took place a moment after the signal was sent wasn’t lost on her. The modified DNA...
The answer to one of her many questions resolved in her mind. She knew where the 1977 Wow! Signal had come from—the future. Her future. Her present. Jarrod sent the signal. Just moments ago. And he had sent the signal before. Each time, it contained a modification. A refinement.
But they were past that point. If further refinements had been sent, they had already been sent. They were beyond that point in time. She was now who she would always be, but she had no idea what that meant. Had no idea how that had changed things, or how many times this scene had played out, subtly changing with each transmission. How many different versions of herself had stood here before, watching the signal be sent? How many had failed to get this far? She’d barely survived the journey this time. Maybe this is the first time I made it...
If Sophia and Jarrod were any indication, she would be the only one who remembered who she had been before. I’m new, she thought, perhaps different enough from the others that the final change was not lost in a stream of new memories.
“Now what?” she asked, even more curious than before.
Jarrod’s smile broadened. “Now, we go on the offensive.” He set the computer down on the edge of the platform and opened an e-mail server.
I trust you.
Noah’s parting words echoed in her head. She made a promise. She asked him to trust her, and he had. “Who sent the message?”
Jarrod didn’t look up. “You still haven’t figured it out?”
“I understand that you—that we—just sent the Wow! Signal, but where did it come from? Who modified it?”
“Nobody modified it,” Jarrod said with a chuckle. “It is how it was meant to be. And we are where we were meant to be. It’s that simple.”
He doesn’t know. How could he? He doesn’t remember any other version of history than the current. There may have been a past where he knew the source, but the necessity to receive direct orders has been erased by the compulsion built into his DNA over unknown numbers of revisions.
Sophia took a step toward her, opening her arms as if offering an earnest embrace. “Jenna, it’s the Earth that gains, and all life on it, even humanity.”
Part of Jenna agreed wholeheartedly, but she knew those feelings had been programmed. They were powerful—stronger than before—but the knowledge of her past self buoyed her, gave her the desire to not be a slave to some mysterious coder of human DNA. Someone who had also figured out how to send a signal back in time.
Nurture is more powerful than nature. I raised you well.
For all his fatherly wisdom, Noah had never anticipated that she would be faced with a choice of this magnitude.
Jarrod finished composing his e-mail—a very short message—and was populating the address list. Jenna saw eleven recipients, eleven of her brothers and sisters. She wondered if there were still others out there like her, just awakening to the knowledge, or some who had perhaps refused to embrace the apocalyptic prophecy of their teacher—their creator.
She wondered how many had been wiped out by the Agency’s purge.
Maybe it is better to simply wipe the slate clean.
But she had made a promise.
“If everything you say is true,” she persisted. “Why did we have to send this message back to space? It doesn’t make sense.”
While she now had some of the answers—though she still couldn’t conceive why the signal was being shot into space—she was hoping the two of them might question their actions. Might open their eyes to the truth.
Sophia reached out for her arm, gently, shaking her head like a disappointed parent. “Jenna—”
Their beliefs were unshakable. Without knowledge of their true pasts, they could never be convinced to fight the desires being shouted at them by their very DNA.
Without w
aiting for an answer, Jenna leaped forward and seized the computer from Jarrod’s hand before he could hit ‘Send.’
60
6:07 p.m.
The move caught Jarrod off guard. Jenna snapped the screen down, and with a hard pull, she yanked it free of the connection to the receiver network. Then, she spun on her heel and bolted for the door.
Sophia moved to intercept her, but even with reflexes enhanced by superior DNA, her shock at this unexpected turn of events hampered her response. Jenna stiff-armed her into a wall, tore the door open and burst out onto the elevated landing.
Despite having the element of surprise on her side, Jenna was mired in guilt. She felt like a shoplifter, caught at the exit of a department store, hoping to outrun the security guards, while knowing full well that every detail of the crime had been recorded on video. She had just committed an unforgivable act of treason against her own kind. She was an apostate, reviling the creator’s message, clinging to the false gospel of human ingenuity and dooming the entire planet to extinction. Worse, what she had done would probably amount to nothing more than an inconvenience for Jarrod. She had failed the stop the really important part of the plan. The signal had gone out. She and those like her had been what...upgraded? What were they capable of now, that they weren’t before? And really, what had she accomplished aside from revealing her betrayal? Jarrod could send his message to the others from a cell phone. She had simply delayed the inevitable.
No, she thought. The computer had the names of all the clones. Cort could use that to track them down and—
Hunt them? Kill them?
—stop them from carrying out their planned terror attacks, or at the very least, use the information to prevent any successful terror attacks from setting the superpowers at each other’s throats.
The mental turmoil dulled her edges. Just as she extended a foot toward the first step, Sophia managed to reach out and snag a handful of her hair. Jenna’s head snapped back and her feet flew out from under her, causing her to slam down hard on the metal treads. The fall tore her loose from Sophia’s grasp, but that was about the only good thing to come out of it. The impact sent a jolt of pain through Jenna’s torso, driving the breath from her lungs. Worse, she started sliding down the flight, each step gouging into her skin as she scraped her way lower. Above her, the entire staircase trembled as Sophia descended.
Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) Page 29