by Rian Davis
“Not that great,” he said, but I saw his wariness was being directed in other areas, namely my companions. The three walked in looking at the damaged tower in the distance. There was no doubt to anyone that they were military, and I could tell that Kraznow had a special distrust or even hatred of them.
I took the time to introduce my companions since it hadn’t been done yet. Hal was too busy trying to contact Command. Each gave a courteous but gruff response when I pointed them out.
“What’s going on Jen? Are we getting taken over by the military here?” Kranehouse asked.
“What are you talking about?” Hal said. “We came here to help save you guys.”
“Well, you’re doing a hell of a job. Jen, tell this man how we’ve lost three scientists already, we’re running out of food, energy, air, and then the attacks that—”
“I haven’t told them about that part yet,” Jen said.
“Oh you haven’t?” Kraznow said. “Well, now wouldn’t be a bad time, I imagine.”
“Yes, certainly. I’m all ears, though I must say, after that landing we had and the reception, I can pretty much imagine where this is going,” Hal replied in a sarcastic tone.
“Oh, but you really can’t,” Kraznow replied. “You probably wouldn’t believe it if we told you.”
“All right, let’s just put it out there. The reason that I went to find help, and ultimately ran into you guys is that we were hit by something big, and we’re not sure where it’s gone and when or if it’s coming back.”
“Oh it’s going to come back,” Kraznow said. “It’s just a matter of time. Tell the man what it is too.” He stood there smug in his doomsday look, like a prophet who is getting vindicated with the destruction of life on earth.
“We’ve been hit by a type of predator,” said a woman in her mid-thirties who had blonde hair and a kind smile. “Perhaps Jen tried to warn you about on the way over here. I believe—we believe after considerable debate—that there is an ancient predator out there that is perhaps 50 meters long.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” I said.
“Holy shit girl, you can’t be serious,” Hal said, equally unsettled. It was the first time I had seen him in that condition.
“No, unfortunately I’m quite serious. And I’m not a girl. I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry and neural anatomy, and I’ve been quite a few places and seen quite a few things.” Then she turned to us. ”My greetings to the newcomers. I’m Kathy Moragani. I’m here to study the life we’ve found.”
“She’s one of the world’s foremost experts,” Jen said. “And I can vouch for the ‘not being a girl’ part.”
“Well, aren’t you two quite the couple. Meanwhile, we’re all in real danger of dying down here if we don’t figure a way out of this mess.”
At that moment the other man who had been operating the harpoons swiveled his chair around. “I have to agree with him. I want to get out of here myself. I’m Joe Virchow by the way, one of the remaining technicians and computer scientist.”
“Nice to meet you all,” Hal said. “I’m sorry things got a little dicey, and the operation to see you folks out didn’t go through. I can assure you, my team is used to handling demanding situations like this, but we’ll find a way.”
“We’re under more than a mile of ice,” said Kathy. “How do you propose we leave now?”
“Ma’am, I’m going to think about that. We’ve got to work together and come up with a plan.”
“Kathy, leave him be. He lost one of his soldiers today,” said Jen, looking at Hal. “They came here to help us.”
“Thank you ma’am,” Hal replied. He then introduced the other team members. I looked around the room, hoping to find some of the specimens.
Kranehouse walked in. He looked agitated. “All right, since you’ve all introduced yourselves, we need to find a plan to get out of here. I should warn you first. There’s an issue.”
“Which is…?” Hal asked.
“We’re waiting on one of our scientists to return. He went out to study the far reaches of the lake, but he hasn’t returned.”
“How long has it been already since he hasn’t reported back?” I asked.
Kranehouse looked uncomfortable and turned to Mitchell. “It’s been a little over forty-eight hours.” He looked down. I could sense that the man has some kind of connection to the missing person. “His name is Dr. Alan Aspect. He was one of our best scientists.”
“The Dr. Alan Aspect,” I said. “The inventor of the theory of quantum gravity?”
“The same,” Kranehouse said nodding. “He’s been missing for a while. It’s why we’re all still awake here. We’ve been anxiously awaiting word on his return. We’ve sent some probes with the AI off to find him, but so far no use.”
“Obviously, Dr. Aspect is a wonderful scientist,” Jen said. “He’s older, but his mind is still sharp. He went off alone in one of the research vessels just over a week ago. We’ve tried numerous times to contact him, but we’ve gotten no response. And as Dr. Kranehouse said, after he didn’t report back, and we lost the signal to his ship, we sent an automated probe with the Evelin class AI. We named her ‘EROS, which is short for ‘Artificially Enhanced Robotic Operating System. The ‘A’ got dropped of course to change it to EROS.”
“My God! You’re naming them now,” said Alex. “And it’s a pretty peculiar name don’t you think?
Jen shrugged and folded her arms under her chest. “Eros, the god of love and desire, wanted more than anything to foster creation. For the first time in history, we made this system that has the ability to not only evolve, but also includes the instructions for rebuilding itself should it be damaged. In short, it has properties of the classic John von Neumann self-replicating automata. It was originally created from quantum computers, many of them working in unison.”
“That’s way above my skill-set,” said Hal. “I’ll leave the theoretical stuff aside, but Evelin class AI? What’s that?”
“It’s a state-of-the-art AI system that can handle many unplanned and demanding situations. It’s supposed to be able to make decisions in even the most complex circumstances. I mean, I don’t see how if it went out there and didn’t find him, we can do any better.”
“Has the AI that EROS sent reported back yet?” I asked.
“We’re still in contact with the AI unit, yes. It’s looking, but hasn’t been able to find him yet.”
“Is it possible one of those creatures has him? One of the large predators like the megalodon that we saw coming in?”
“It’s unlikely because Dr. Aspect is very aware of the dangers and how to avoid them. We honestly don’t know what happened. We can’t leave without him, nor make preparations until he gets back.”
“What if he never gets back?” Hal asked. “You’re essentially saying that you’ll wait forever in the case that he’s dead.”
“That’s enough,” said Kranehouse. “I won’t have you going on as if one of my friends and scientists is already dead. He won the Nobel Prize, for god’s sake. What will it say if we just left him down here. I won’t have it on this vessel. This is still my operation, and I’m not letting anyone talk like that.”
“You have to consider it,” Jen said to Kranehouse. “We can’t just assume he’s still alive anymore. The rest of the crew are definitely alive, and we have to start thinking about them too now.”
“You mean your life, is that it?” Kranehouse said.
“That’s unfair,” I said interjecting. Others among the crew were equally disturbed by what Kranehouse said.
Kranehouse looked stung by the criticism. He looked at the other crew members and saw their disdain for his decision. “All right, we can prep the ship for an evacuation. But we should at least try to find him first. If we can’t get a signal, we should make one more effort to save him. It’s not right to just leave him out there goddammit.”
“I agree,” Jen said. “Let me take a vessel out there. I can go find out where th
e AI probe is and then we can hopefully track him down.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Kathy said.
Jen gave her a wry look. “Now you’re turning on me too girl?”
“Only if you don’t let me go,” she replied.
“I’ll go too,” I said. “I can’t wait to see what’s out there.”
Hal shot me a hard look. What the fuck are you doing? it said. I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to discuss it with him. Technically I wasn’t under his command, even though he had tactical leadership. He knew it too.
“Oh you’re going to be surprised,” said Kraznow. “It’s pretty crazy out there.”
“What does he mean?” I asked.
“You’ll see soon,” Jen said.
“All right, good. It’s settled,” said Kranehouse. “You will go out there. Take this military scientist person with you and see for yourselves where in the hell Dr. Aspect got to. After that, we can make preparations to evacuate. We’ve sent out smaller probes before. This will have to be our last effort.”
“That’s great. You’re looking for a missing scientist, and we’re running out of oxygen. And how are we going to escape from this place?” Hal asked. “We don’t have our escape route anymore. It was blown up.”
“Oh, I think I have a satisfactory answer to that,” said Virchow. “I’ve been working on a plan B, if you know what I mean on getting us out of here, namely drilling another hole into the ice.”
“You can do that?” Hal asked with a wide gape.
“How do you think we got here in the first place?” said Virchow with a grin. “Anyway, maybe with the good geologist over here, I can help choose the route out of here. Basically I was thinking about making a hole through ancient moulins I’ve discovered in the ice above us.”
“How do you find the moulins?” I asked intrigued. I wasn’t a glaciologist, but I had some experience with them in my training. The truth was, I’ve always had an interest in the cryosphere because it was tangentially related to my main research interests, which was the origin of life. There were microbes in the ice, billions of them. The question was, what could they tell us about the beginnings of life.
“I use a probe that maps the interior formation of the lake,” he said pointing to his computer screen. “I use cracks like these here and here to infer that there may be some ancient fissure that I can work with, possibly finding a way out.”
“But surely there isn’t anything that still is viable to go through, especially at our size is there?” I asked.
“Of course not,” replied the grinning engineer. “That’s where explosives come in.”
“What? You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
“Don’t look so shocked. I said it was a plan B,” Kranehouse said. “We never really wanted to go this way and were hoping the route you came down would have been our actual way out of here. That’s what the original plan was. We’d just ride up the elevator, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work out that way.”
“What gave you suspicions that it was not going to work out?” Hal asked.
“Well,” replied Kranehouse. “For one, there was no communication on the station above us—”
“The Russians,” Hal said.
“That’s right. They didn’t answer any of our attempts to communicate with them. We were told that the elevator had to use sparingly, so we didn’t send anyone up in person to check.”
“Why was that?” said Hal.
“Because the original plan was to use the tunnel through which we came originally. We didn’t like the structural integrity of the elevator.”
“You mean you still have the tunnel from which you drilled this area?”
“Yes, but it was too unstable and collapsed. We should have listened to the engineers, but we thought we could insert some structural support to keep the tunnel open. That plan failed obviously.”
“Where is the driller now?” I asked.
“It’s nearby somewhere, but we can’t use it. It broke down, and it would probably be impossible to repair it without a whole lot more parts. What’s more, we don’t really have the necessary chemicals and such to do a proper drill from down here.”
“So back to the original question: how are you going to get us through those small holes you were talking about?” Hal asked.
“We’re going to blow something up,” Virchow said. “Now I know what you’re thinking. I’ve been working on a solution here. Ever since things started going south with the equipment, I’ve been working on some calculations.”
“I’ve been helping him too,” said Kraznow. “When I was getting my Ph.D. in math at Yale, this wasn’t exactly what I was specializing in, but I think it can work.”
“It had better work,” Kranehouse said. “Or we’re going to end up as the world’s hottest popsicle.”
Kraznow and Virchow gave back a knowing grin.
“If any of you need medical attention,” Hal said. “Dr. Leonard Laennec here is your man. He’s one of the best in the world.”
“Greetings,” said a man of brown hair and medium height. His hands were in the pockets of his white jacket. He seemed to be impervious to any cold. “I’ve heard of your work Dr. Bloom. We share common interests. In fact, I too am interested in the origin of all life. That’s what brought me here.”
“How fascinating Doctor. We will have to talk later sometime about it. Please call me ‘Jake’ by the way.”
“Dr. Bloom—Jake, “Laennec said to me. “I wanted to show you one of the specimens we have on board. I’m the doctor here, so I have some training in physiology, but I heard from Jen that you have training in paleobiology. If it’s OK with you, I’d like your opinion on a specimen we’ve found.”
Jen looked at me. “It’s obviously too late to go tonight. We’ll leave tomorrow morning, so if you go before then, it’s fine with me.”
“What do you need us to do?” Hal said.
“Relax gentlemen,” said Kranehouse in reply. “You can put the guns down too. You won’t need them down here. World War Three hasn’t broken out down here—at least not yet.”
“’Not yet’ is right,” said Hal looking uncomfortably at his fellow soldiers.
I moved off to follow Rich, but Hal intercepted me and pulled me into a small private office.
“This whole situation is beyond saving. We need to move out of here ASAP.”
I looked at him and shrugged. “What do you want me to do? They’re right. We blew the way out, quite literally, in fact.”
Hal cursed and slammed his fist on the wall, causing a loud bang that caused the footsteps in the other room to stop. He knew I was right. Nonetheless, the questions remained on his face: Where would we go? How would we get there?
“I don’t like it. We’ve got to get out of here—now. We don’t have time to look for this old man who’s probably dead anyway—or worse.”
“What can be worse than death?” I asked.
Hal just looked back at me with a look that told me not to push it.
“I can’t do anything. I’m not in charge, Hal. You should be glad we’re not fighting the Russians down here, or whoever the hell it was up there.”
“I’ve lost a man already, dammit. How can I be happy with that. It’s not my orders to let these scientists finish their experiments.”
“It’s not an experiment. They’ve lost one of their own—a man who happens to be one of the greatest scientists ever known. Besides, they’re going to have to clear out of here soon Hal. The oxygen here is running out—you heard Kranehouse. We’ll have to be out of here soon in one way or another.”
“I still don’t like it,” Hal said. “You need to come back as quickly as you can. Once it gets down to about twenty-four hours of oxygen, I’m going to assume you’re lost and then it’s time to look for a new path out of this frozen icicle.”
“Noted. Now look. There’s plenty of war going on up above the ice,” I said pointing upward. “But down here, there a
re some amazing things to see—things that shouldn’t be here. Hal, look at this place man. Look around you. We didn’t think there’d be any oxygen or any kind of life down here simply because it was so far away from the sun. Not only is there life, but it’s ancient large complex life. That’s something every scientist in the world would be curious to know about. You’re telling me you want to return to the war posturing and possible breakout of the next and probably last world war? Do you have such a large death wish?”
Hal looked at me as if I were crazy. “You scientists are all the same. I don’t care if you do have military training and have done some missions. You’re all nuts.”
I left the room in disgust and found Rich without looking back. Hal did not try to stop me, but I knew that he was watching me as I walked off. I could do nothing about his displeasure, however. I knew that I wasn’t calling the shots in terms of the escape, nor could I help make that decision. I was as much as a prisoner as he was, but I did no favors with Hal by stating the obvious.
Exhausted after a full day of movement, I looked at my watch. It was ten AM Falklands time, which meant it was about two AM McMurdo time. I had forgotten to adjust it. My mind, body and spirit were completely exhausted from the day’s events, and I found a bed to rest in shut off the light in the tiny room and fell asleep instantly.
Chapter 6
I found myself on a lake. My father, a lifelong fireman was fishing on a rowboat with me in the back. It was perhaps six AM, and I recognized the lake even though I had never been there since his death. His back faced me, and I could only make out his brown beard.
The day was rainy and the clouds had blocked most of the light. It was a perfect time for fishing. A few ripples in the water appeared. I looked down but didn’t see any fish. Instead, I saw fingers emerging from the surface of the water. Whose fingers they were could be anyone’s guess. The water was ink black as if comprised of oil. I could not see whose fingers they were. I suddenly felt very afraid of falling into that water as it looked to be very deep—deeper than the Marianas Trench.
“Daddy, did you catch something?”