by B. C. CHASE
“How many women have you killed?”
“I don’t know. Maybe thirty thousand in Baltimore. A very small number when you think of the billions of lives we will create.”
“Why not save the living? Why not take them to this new world?”
“We don’t have the time or the logistics. The portals will be closed. They have warned us.”
“Who has warned you?”
“There are beings in this universe that have existed before us. They are not physical. Some of them believe we are worthy of a second chance, and they warned us. Others believe we have not been good stewards of the planet we were given. They will close the portals and allow our destruction. We have very little time before they come. Now think about what you’re doing. I’ve given you the facts. Help us save the human race.”
Lady Shrewsbury said, “Why is it that whenever somebody is trying to save the human race, the human being is forgotten?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that that we are a race of devils, hell-bent on our own undoing. Without individuals, the human race is nothing.”
Henry said, “What is it exactly that you want from us?”
“I need you to lead us to Paradeisia.”
“You’re on Paradeisia!”
“No, I don’t mean this island. I mean the real Paradeisia. The new world.”
“Why don’t these beings tell you where it is?”
“They don’t speak to me.”
“To whom do they speak?”
“Abael Fiedler.”
“Well make him ask them because I don’t know.”
“He has been shot. He won’t live without miraculous intervention.” Babel said, “I’ve been more than generous. I’ve given you all the explanation you could want. I’ve given you all the time I can afford. But one of you must know.” Babel and the soldiers moved forward, backing them to the very edge of the precipice.
Henry said, “Even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Strong words from someone who has taken thousands of human lives himself.”
“I haven’t killed anyone.”
“The Biobots you purchased. Each one a life. Each one a human being.” Babel laughed, “The self gene doesn’t exist. It’s a marketing gimmick.” He sighed, nodded to the soldiers who raised their weapons at Henry, Lady Shrewsbury, and Gonzales. “Now, tell me how to reach Paradeisia.”
“We don’t know anything,” Henry said. “Least of all my Aunt. She is merely an investor who has lost her fortune.”
“Then she is expendable,” Babel said, smiling and redirecting his aim. He strode to her and shouted, “On your knees!”
She set her face, remaining erect.
She cried out as Babel sideswiped her face with his gun, knocking her hat back and off the edge. “ON YOUR KNEES!”
Lady Shrewsbury held her hand to her cheek and, with jaw trembling, kneeled. Blood streamed from her hand.
Babel pressed the barrel to her temple, “Where is Paradeisia?” His voice was shaking with rage. “TELL ME WHERE!” Babel screamed.
Suddenly there was an urgent voice behind the semicircle of soldiers. “Stop!” The soldiers spun around to face a man who was quickly approaching. He said, “Stop. They don’t know anything! They don’t have the truth!” His shirt was soaked with perspiration.
Babel demanded, “Who are you?”
“I am Doctor Viktor Kaufmann, Chief Scientist of Paradeisia. I’ve been here since it started. I have all the information you need.”
FlyRail Hub
Their footsteps echoed in the gigantic open atrium of the hub as the soldiers walked them between tables and chairs that made up a food court toward a pair of large double doors with signs reading “Authorized Bwanas Only.” Doctor Kaufmann led.
As they neared them, the doors swung open with a bang, revealing a long hallway. Another set of doors on the opposite side of this hallway opened to reveal the Command Center. The walls and ceiling of the massive room were entirely glass, the crystal clear starlit sky amazingly vivid. Twenty-foot-wide screens hung from the ceiling. Military personnel manned stations all over the room.
On the screens were boxes each showing a different shaky scene from a soldier’s headcam. They were scenes from all over the island. The soldiers were herding the tourists onto trucks and FlyRail gondolas. Women were being separated from their children, screaming.
A commander approached Babel, “Sir, a rumor has spread. The situation was getting out of control. We have had to resort to force.”
Babel sighed, “They don’t believe they are being assembled for viral decontamination?”
“No, sir.”
Babel nodded, “I was afraid that word would get out somehow. Do whatever you have to.” Then, to Kaufmann, he said, “Now show us.”
They were stepping down flights of concrete steps into a dark area illuminated by a single light in the ceiling. A single rusted steel door was labeled “Utility.”
Doctor Kaufmann strode to the door and held his wrist to the frame. A beep sounded and the door swung open into blackness. Looking back at his followers, he warned, “Now you must be very, very quiet.”
Doctor Kaufmann shined a flashlight into the darkness. “I can’t switch the lights on here. It will break the sequence.” The space was vast, with the light illuminating a concrete wall at least a football field’s distance away. The space smelled musty.
Doctor Kaufmann wasn’t steady with the light, aiming it at the ground, and it ricocheted back and forth as he walked. It caught a glint of glass to one side, and he led them toward it. Through the brief flashes when he rose the light high enough, Henry was able to make out an unmistakable elliptical shape. The surface was crystalline.
It was a FlyRail gondola.
Water was puddled underneath it in a gulley that emptied into a trench that led to a gigantic, water-filled canal.
“Look, inside,” Doctor Kaufmann said, aiming the light to the interior of the gondola.
Henry and the others stepped up to the glass to peer in.
Bodies.
There were bodies. In the fetal position.
They were secured by the harnesses that Henry remembered from the first and only time he had ventured down the portal. But these seats were leaned backwards and leg supports were raised up. A strange apparatus with dozens of little suction cups enveloped every head.
His heart beat faster as he realized that he recognized these bodies.
Tony Bridges, operations chief was next to that conspiracy theory nut with the Hawaiian shirts, Scott Nimitz. The soldiers Tony had recruited. The Out of Africa ranger, Adriaan Holt. And beside him, Aubrey.
Henry stared in awe. Their eyes were all closed, but the lids were rapidly twitching.
They were fast asleep.
The team he had sent down the portal to investigate was in the gondola, sitting in exactly the same configuration as they had been when they left, sleeping.
He then noticed that one place was glaringly vacant. The seat that had been occupied by Doctor Kaufmann himself.
Henry looked at Doctor Kaufmann, said, “Why did you all come back? Did you find Andrews? And why are they all sleeping?”
Doctor Kaufmann shined the flashlight up the gondola, revealing that it was suspended from a green rail. As the light shifted upwards, it became evident that there were three levels of rails. The light tracked out and around the chamber, the immense size of the place becoming evident. Several other gondolas were hanging from rails. His face moist with sweat, Doctor Kaufmann replied, “We didn’t come back. We never left.”
Diyu
There was something heavy on his legs, but Gary couldn’t see what it was because his eyes were still adjusting from the bright white light. The dark interior of the submarine bridge came into view, and there was a shape on his lap. He blinked in disbelief.
It was Jeffery, his son, perhaps a couple years older than he had been, but the same boy without doubt. Not
a monkey: a boy.
Jeffery looked down over his naked body in shock. He surveyed his hands as he spread his fingers out. He checked for a tail—there was none. Then, he smiled, an embarrassed smile, but genuinely glad.
Stacy grabbed her child, enveloping him in her arms.
When Gary looked at Stacy, he was almost floored. She had changed, too. She was flawless: her skin smooth as glass, her eyes more intense, the lines and sagging weight of age vanished. The gray gone. She looked better than she had in the prime of her youth.
“Gary!” she exclaimed with a voice of crystal, looking up at him with happy, tearful eyes. When she saw him, her expression changed to disbelief and she said, “Gary?”
“You’ve changed,” Gary said. But the voice that spoke was not his. There was a more guttural, more expressive tone.
“So have you,” she said blinking obvious admiration.
From his seat, Doctor Ming-Zhen asked, “What’s happened to us? Where are we?”
As Gary looked around, he saw that even Yue Zhang—everyone, in fact, had altered. Everyone was unspeakably attractive, more muscular, and fitter.
Doctor Chao Han explained, “In this place, senescence ceases. There is no natural death, only traumatic, and the rate of apoptosis is dramatically increased. Transcription errors appear to be eliminated, resulting in perfect proteins. The laws that govern molecular biology are different here, better. The rate of autocatalysis is increased.
“In short,” he smiled warmly, “all life becomes flawless. The best version of itself. We are still trying to ascertain all the causes, but this place simply does not have the same laws of molecular or cellular biology that earth does.”
“This isn’t earth?” Doctor Ming-Zhen asked.
Zhang said, “The truth is we don’t know. It isn’t the earth we do know, that’s for certain. Whether we have traveled through time or through space is entirely conjecture at this point.”
Stacy said, “Earth or not, does this place have any boy-sized clothes?”
Zhang said, “Yes, we do, as a matter-of-fact.” He motioned to a crew member, who stood and ushered Jeffery and Stacy back down the hallway.
“Now,” Zhang said eagerly, “turn off the lights.”
When the lights extinguished an azure sea under a slowly, but dramatically undulating surface, was revealed, and gracefully gliding through it were massive turtles, each the length of three men.
“Archelon ischyros,” Jia Ling uttered in amazement.
“You think a big turtle is impressive? You have seen nothing,” Chao said, grinning, as he gazed lustfully at Jia Ling’s now-radiantly beautiful face.
Jia Ling cast him a hostile stare in return. Then, to Doctor Ming-Zhen, she said, “I didn’t know I knew what those were called.”
Zhang unfastened his restraint and rose, saying, “You’ll find you know a lot of things you didn’t think you did. You have a new, more powerful mind. You’ll have memories you had forgotten, abilities you never knew you possessed. The only obstacle in your way will be your suppositions about what is possible.”
The submarine began to move forward. The sea was shallow, a floor of vibrant coral and giant sea anemones with thousands of flailing tentacles were illuminated in the vessel’s lights. Brightly colored fish were darting about, playfully chasing each other. Dancing elegantly together were sea horses, and an octopus made its way among the rocks. A stingray was visible in the distance, calmly gliding through the water.
As he stared at the visually spectacular scene, Gary was impressed by the abundance of life. There were certainly more creatures in a patch of seafloor here than he had witnessed in a week of Hawaiian scuba diving.
The submarine pushed forward toward increasingly shallow waters. The marine wildlife ignored it, so much so that some creatures were pushed out of the way. They were fearless of it.
Something soon appeared that they did fear, however. All the fish scattered at the appearance of a group of bizarre organisms. Most were large, as long as a man, with rows of flaps on either side of their flat bodies, but there were some young that hovered near an especially big one. The flaps fluttered in waves down their lengths, propelling them through the water with astonishing speed and control. Two-finned tails further increased their speed, and two long barbs protruded out from under the tails. They had two large arms on their heads that looked like giant shrimp tails complete with leg-like spikes. Giant, black eyes on independently twitching stalks gaped in all directions. As one of the organisms swam above the large viewport, its round mouth with rows of concentric teeth was frighteningly close.
“Anomalocaris,” Doctor Ming-Zhen said with awe.
“Please spare us,” Zhang said. “If you label everything you see, we’ll feel like we’re trapped in an encyclopedia.”
“They are hunters … we thought,” Doctor Ming-Zhen said, hardly appearing to notice Zhang’s comment.
One of the anomalocaris lunged for a fish, curling its body around it and skewering it with the barbs. The fish immediately went limp, allowing the anomalocaris’s head arms to manipulate it toward its mouth. It twirled the fish around and around, like a spider wrapping an insect, but instead of wrapping it, it was peeling the fins off and feeding on the flesh.
Gary commented, “I wouldn’t want to get caught by one of those. Please tell me we won’t be swimming.”
Zhang said, “No, no swimming is planned.”
Ahead, where the sea floor shallowed to forty-five feet was a tangle of oversized roots. The submersible gradually slowed to a stop and then began to surface. Zhang said, “The easy-chair zoology is over. Time to get your feet wet—figuratively of course. No swimming.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen noticed that the water surface was extremely lively, and the waves that the inflatable boat pushed out from the bow were fast, tall, and unimpeded as they swept outwards. The water didn’t look like normal water at all: it was elastic and springy, practically dancing. The craft seemed to almost float over the surface, the waterline no more than two or three inches up the hull. Twenty-seven other boats were motoring toward an imposing line of mangrove trees some two hundred feet tall, their gray trunks looking like giant strands of gum stretching down to the water. Branches spread out widely at the top, blanketed with neon green leaves that contrasted vividly with the dark sky. Pelicans nested in the treetops and circled above the sea, sporadically diving at incredible speed and creating tall splashes of unusually large drops.
He filled his lungs with the sweet, cool air, feeling invigorated. The sky was dazzling with stars. A group of giant dragonflies appeared, flapping their two-foot wingspans alongside the boat. Doctor Ming-Zhen was surprised by how easily they flew, how relatively slow the batting of their wings was. It was apparently not increased oxygen alone which had powered the flight of such giant insects. Something else was at work here, he thought.
Interrupting his thoughts, there was a powerful rumble behind them. He looked back just in time to see a tower of white and black water shooting high into the sky in a massive explosion. Before the water had time to begin to fall back down, another blast rocked the still surface, followed by five more. As the water rained down, the looming black form of the tail of one of the subs was visible rising up off the surface and then dramatically sinking.
The pilot had stopped their inflatable. Everyone on the boat stared in daunted silence.
“Sabotage,” Zhang muttered under his breath. “Someone must have planted bombs before we even came down.”
“Who?” Doctor Ming-Zhen asked. “Americans?”
Zhang laughed, “I know it’s not Americans.” He shook his head, “Could be anyone. At least we got onto the boats before it went off. That was a miscalculation on their part.”
“Shouldn’t we go back for survivors?” Doctor Ming-Zhen suggested.
“We don’t have time,” Zhang said grimly.
“But—” Jia Ling started to protest.
“We don’t have time!” Zhang loudly repe
ated.
The boats proceeded into the mangrove swamp. There was a great deal more space between the mangrove roots than it had appeared from the distance. Several long, floating logs punctuated the surface of the water, obscured by a mist which rolled over them.
Zhang shone a flashlight past the bow, and two spots on the nearest log flashed brilliantly. The logs were not logs at all, but enormous snouts with two bulging eyes at the back. One of the snouts silently slipped under the water.
“Are those sarcosuchus?” Doctor Ming-Zhen asked in awe. The heads were some ten feet long.
“If you mean giant crocodiles, then yes,” Zhang replied. “As long as we keep our distance, they won’t bother us.”
Despite the reassurance, Doctor Ming-Zhen did not feel entirely at ease. The mere size of the jaws was enough to cause him anxiety.
One of the crocodilians’ tails rose into view some thirty feet behind its head, exposing the length of the creature to be greater than a semi-truck. The water between the tail and the head began to roil and churn. The crock opened its jaws and bellowed an almost inaudible roar that shook the boat.
“Have you been here before?”
“No, but we’ve seen those before and they don’t bother us.”
“We shouldn’t be anywhere near them,” Doctor Ming-Zhen warned.
“I told you, they haven’t taken any interest—” Zhang said.
“That’s a courtship display,” Doctor Ming-Zhen said. “He’s telling us to get out of his territory. If we don’t leave, he will charge.”
Zhang suddenly looked anxious. “We don’t have time for diversions.” Eyeing Doctor Ming-Zhen, he said, “But you seem quite sure.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“All right. We’ll find a way around.” Zhang raised a communication device to his lips, but before he could say anything, the crocodile thrashed wildly in the water, sending a three-foot wave of water rushing toward the boats.
The true cause of the crocodile’s agitation became apparent as a fast-moving, long fin appeared, slicing through the water nearby. Another fin appeared on the other side of the boats, then another, forming a circle. The first fin was quickly approaching the boat Doctor Ming-Zhen was in, and before they had a chance to react, it struck nearly capsizing the boat as it rose under the craft, using its powerful, thick neck to push it off to the side. A fish with a long saw-like protuberance flailed wildly in a futile attempt to free itself from spikey teeth as it became the creature’s next prey. The creature with the long fin rose fully out of the water, thickly muscled legs launching it up onto a shallow embankment where it lay down under a mangrove tree.