The Darwin Effect

by Mark Lukens

He stopped pacing abruptly as an image started coming to him. He could see the image in his mind beginning to form. It was almost there … and then it disappeared—lost in the fog of so many of his other recent memories.

  He rushed over to the circular window above the head of his bed and tore back the curtain. He hoped for a split second that this was all some kind of terrible nightmare he was trapped in. He hoped that he would see something different now when he pulled the curtain back.

  But there it was: nothing beyond the window except cold black space and the glittering stars.

  He exhaled a hopeless sigh and let the curtain fall back in place over the port window. He didn’t want to look at that never-ending space out there beyond the glass anymore.

  He plopped down on his bed and lay down. He stared up at the ceiling which in their quarters was a smooth sheet of plastic—no pipes, wires, or ductwork in here.

  Cromartie had called them together for a meeting for his astounding revelation that none of them were trained astronauts, so they must’ve been abducted and put here on this ship against their will.

  No shit. That was quite an observation that mastermind Cromartie had come up with all by himself. But Cromartie and the rest of them were missing a very important detail. There was something they hadn’t considered while they were busying themselves with their guesses of why they were all here on this ship. There was something they hadn’t asked MAC—a very important question, maybe one of the most important questions they could ask. The answer would be horrible, but the question was going to have to be asked eventually, whether they wanted to ask it or not.

  Ward stretched out on his bed and then turned over onto his side, facing the white wall. He had already explored the entire ship on his own, from the upper level down to the lower level which housed the walls and walls of storage units. But there was one thing that he’d seen on the upper level that still tugged at his mind and he couldn’t seem to shake it.

  He was going to have to go back and see it—he was sure of it.

  It was important. He didn’t know why it was so important, but it was.

  ELEVEN

  Abraham and Sanders helped walk Butler back to her quarters after leaving the dining area. She seemed to walk okay on her own, but it seemed like if they let her go she might just wander around aimlessly with that blank look in her eyes.

  When they got to Butler’s room, Sanders helped Abraham lay her down in bed. She curled up a little and lay on her side, staring straight ahead with that same vacant expression.

  “Just try to get some rest,” Abraham told Butler even though she didn’t seem to hear his words. She didn’t move a muscle, but she closed her eyes.

  Abraham dimmed down the lights nearly all the way and then he and Sanders left her room, closing her door softly.

  “Thanks for helping me with her,” Abraham told Sanders when they were out in the corridor, only a few steps away from the door to Butler’s room.

  “No problem,” she said.

  No one else was in the hallway, but they kept their voices low in case anyone from the other rooms could hear them.

  “You think she’ll get better?” Sanders asked Abraham.

  He shrugged and sighed. “I don’t know. I guess that would be a better question for Rolle since he’s a doctor. I guess he could give her some kind of evaluation later. Maybe after she gets some rest.”

  Sanders just nodded.

  “Maybe she just needs some more sleep,” Abraham said. “Maybe she just needs some time to recuperate, some time for her mind to heal. Maybe we all do.”

  “Are your memories starting to come back to you?” she asked him.

  He nodded. “A little, but there are some fuzzy parts. And I still can’t seem to remember anything about being abducted and put on this ship. It’s almost like that part of my memory has been blanked out somehow.”

  She sighed and glanced down the hall at the door to her room.

  “We should all get some rest,” Abraham said, noticing that Sanders was looking for a polite way to end their conversation. “We’ve all had the shock of our lives. Maybe we all just need some time alone with our thoughts, some time to relax, let our memories come back to us on their own.”

  Sanders just nodded again.

  “Good night,” Abraham told her and then smiled. “If it’s even night, that is.”

  “It’s always night here,” Sanders said and walked down the hall to her room.

  Abraham entered his room and closed the door behind him. He instinctively went to lock the door handle, but then he remembered that these doors didn’t have locks on them. None of the doors here had locks on them.

  He lay down in his bed on top of the white covers, staring at the white built-in desk against the white wall. Everything was white and sterile, washed out and plain. He didn’t plan on sleeping—he’d been asleep for a hundred years now so he was pretty sure the last thing he was going to do was sleep. But he felt exhausted. Drained. Overwhelmed. His body was sore and achy, and his mind was buzzing.

  His thoughts turned to Abigail, his wife. She had died of cancer a year ago.

  But he had to correct himself. She had died a year before he came on this ship, which was a hundred years ago now. He had three kids with Abigail, all of them spread out all over the country now, all of them doing their own thing. He kept in touch with them once every week or so. They were busy with their lives, with their careers, with their own families. He wished he could talk to them right now.

  His heart ached and tears slipped out of his eyes. Had they died in the nuclear apocalypse on Earth? They must have died. Everyone was dead according to MAC. There was nothing left to go back to, nothing but a wasted shell of the Earth, just decaying remnants of what human civilization was like on Earth.

  What a waste. Humanity had spent tens of thousands of years building their civilization just to wipe themselves out. If he and the others weren’t on these spaceships then the universe would never even know that humans had ever existed.

  Abraham pictured the wasteland the Earth must be now. He pictured weeds and vegetation taking over buildings, some kind of life thriving no matter how bad the radiation was. Life was tenacious, and if humans killed themselves off—along with many other species—then other species would evolve and take over. Life would go on. He imagined mutated insects and rodents as the only form of animal life, and they would probably be the only form of animal life for millions of years to come.

  “Oh God, why did we do it to ourselves?” Abraham whispered and then he closed his eyes.

  He didn’t want to go to sleep, but to his surprise he found that he was getting tired. Maybe he needed to sleep; maybe he needed some real sleep, not suspended animation.

  TWELVE

  Rolle couldn’t sleep, and he didn’t want to lie on his bed in his room. His muscles felt sore and even his bones seemed to ache. He felt tired, but he also felt like he needed to move. He grabbed one of the white bath towels that he’d torn out of the shrink-wrapped plastic pack and took it with him down the hall to the rec room.

  He thought one of the others might’ve had the same idea about working off some steam, but no one was in the exercise room when he got there.

  The rec room was pretty big. A row of storage lockers took up one whole wall to the left, and against the back wall was some dusty old exercise equipment. To the right was a set of different sized dumbbells lined up on a metal rack bolted to the wall. The whole middle of the room was taken up by sections of plastic-covered foam mats laid out on the floor.

  Rolle walked over to the rack of dumbbells. The wall above the dumbbells was one whole mirror and he looked at himself for a moment. He seemed thinner than he remembered and he’d never had a full beard and long hair like this before. He planned on eventually shaving his beard off and cutting his hair, but he was surprised to find that he kind of liked this look—maybe he would stick with it for a while.

  In one corner of the rec room, next to the rack of
weights, was a metal bin with an assortment of workout equipment and accessories stuffed down inside: workout gloves, a jump rope, stretchy cables with handles, hand grips, weighted bands for wrists and ankles. In the other corner there were a few large plastic balls held in place by cargo netting.

  He inspected the four pieces of exercise equipment next. It was pretty standard stuff: a treadmill that was plugged into the metal wall; a stationary bike; a rowing machine; and a four-station exercise machine with stacked weights, a pull-down bar, a leg lift, a pullup bar, and a bench press.

  With a sigh he laid his towel down over the seat of the exercise machine. He decided he would pass on any weightlifting for now and maybe just do some cardio … start slowly and build up his stamina and strength. He had no idea how his body was kept alive and functioning inside the cryochamber these last hundred years, frozen somehow MAC had said, but all he knew was that he felt like shit.

  He hopped on the stationary bike and slipped his sneaker-like shoes into the stirrups on the pedals and the display screen came to life automatically, beeping and lighting up. As he pedaled, the large black screen displayed information in bright green numbers and letters: his pulse, his distance, his speed, calories burned. Just like any other exercise machine he’d ever used, he thought.

  The bike was quiet, the front wheel he powered with his pedaling whispered along. It didn’t take long to build up a sweat and soon his heart was pounding inside his chest. He wished he would’ve brought along some water in a cup from his bathroom, but he didn’t plan on working out too long, just enough to get his body used to it.

  His mind began to drift as he exercised, and he tried to remember his past. He was able to remember a lot about his life: his childhood, his college years, opening up his psychiatric practice. He tried to remember his patients from the last few years (but still over a hundred years ago, he had to keep reminding himself). He tried to see their faces in his mind, and he tried to recall their names, the problems he was trying to help them solve. He could remember some of them, but others were eluding him.

  Then he tried to remember the last memories he had before waking up on this ship. He concentrated for a moment, pedaling a little faster almost like the mental frustration was manifesting itself in his physical output.

  For a moment he was back in his office in Manhattan. He had seen his last patient for the day … but he couldn’t remember who that patient was; he couldn’t remember if that person had been a man or a woman, young or old.

  Rolle closed his eyes as he pedaled harder and he tried to think back to that memory. He was at his desk … there was a knock at the door. He was about to tell the person to enter, but he remembered thinking it was odd that anyone was there. It was late in the day and his secretary had gone home already.

  Two men entered his office. They were both tall and sturdy-looking, their faces set in serious expressions even though their faces were a blur to him right now. They both walked right towards him, a purposeful gait.

  He still couldn’t see their faces no matter how much he tried to concentrate on the memory. But he remembered their stone-cold voices.

  “Simon Rolle, it’s time to go,” one of the men said.

  And then … and then …

  … darkness.

  “Rolle,” someone whispered.

  Rolle opened his eyes and stopped pedaling the exercise bike. He saw the flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and his eyes darted towards the wide archway that led back out to the corridor.

  Someone had been there, he was sure of it.

  Someone had whispered his name.

  He got off the stationary bike and stood next to it on now-rubbery legs. He hurried over to the exercise machine to grab his towel, his eyes still on the archway the whole time.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  He waited for an answer. He listened for sounds from the corridor.

  Nothing.

  Rolle hurried across the exercise mats to the archway and looked out at the corridor. He looked up and down the hall, but he didn’t see anyone out here. He didn’t hear anyone; he didn’t hear any sounds except the non-stop humming noise of the machines behind the walls of this ship.

  Someone had been there, hadn’t they? He hadn’t imagined someone calling his name, had he?

  Another side effect from their suspended animation?

  He didn’t want to think about it—he just wanted to go back to his room and lie down. He dried his sweaty face with his towel and walked down the corridor to his room.

  THIRTEEN

  Cromartie didn’t think he was going to be able to sleep.

  He lay in his bunk and stared at the ceiling. He had the light on over the desk. He wanted the light on … he didn’t want to be in the darkness. Outside this ship was nothing but darkness and pinpoints of light that went on forever. He didn’t want to think about what was out there—he just wanted to lie in the light right now.

  The hum of the air handlers was constant, along with whatever other machines that ran ceaselessly behind these walls and ceilings. Those machines were the only sound in his room besides his slow breathing.

  He tried to concentrate on his breathing for a moment as he closed his eyes. He wanted to give his mind a break from thinking, but he couldn’t seem to shut his mind down.

  The same questions kept coming back to him over and over again.

  Had all of them really been abducted and put into cryo-sleep? Had they been stuffed into the cryochambers on this spaceship and then launched out into space? What had happened to his wife and kids back on Earth? He tried to picture them in his mind, but their faces seemed a little blurry to him. He could see them in his mind, and he knew they were his family, but it wasn’t like he could see them clearly enough when he tried to focus on their faces, like minute details about them were fuzzy.

  Tears leaked out of the corners of his eyes as he opened them again and stared up at the ceiling. He couldn’t help feeling that something bad had happened to his family. The possibilities that Sanders had listed were probably accurate: a missile blast that had wiped them out instantly, or a slower death from radiation sickness or starvation, or something else that had to do with the nuclear war that had devastated the Earth.

  Cromartie tried to concentrate on the rumors of war that had been in the news. It was one of the last things he remembered before waking up here. He remembered reports all over the TV news stations, in all of the newspapers, but the details were still a little fuzzy. He remembered that there were major threats of a nuclear war. Iran had built up a huge nuclear arsenal and they couldn’t wait to obliterate much of the Middle East, starting with Israel. North Korea had been threatening to attack both Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons. Russia, China, and America were all backing different countries. It seemed like the entire world was heading for war … but Cromartie couldn’t really remember the war actually beginning. Who had fired the first missile? Who had dropped the first bombs?

  He rolled over and closed his eyes, wiping away his tears. He was frustrated and he just wanted to give his mind a rest. He wasn’t particularly scared to die now that he knew his family wasn’t with him anymore. Even if they were alive, he would never know, and he had no way to contact them or travel back to them. They might not know where he was right now, they might be wondering if he was alive or dead. They might be wondering where he had gone, possibly thinking that he had abandoned them.

  And that was the worst thought of all.

  He tried to concentrate on nothing. He was surprised to find that he was actually tired, exhausted from all of the stress over the last few hours. He just wanted to drift away and think of nothing …

  Cromartie fell asleep and he began to dream.

  Random images of his life flashed by in his dream: a childhood memory of riding his bicycle down his neighborhood street at night, pot holes in the pavement filled with water from a recent thunderstorm, the smell of rain in the air; his first job on a construction si
te with his cousin; the first few months when he started his own construction business …

  Then those images morphed into a shadowy room where a man in a dark suit and tie was talking to another man who was mostly just a dark blob. Cromartie tried to focus his eyes on the men as they talked, but he couldn’t see them clearly. He tried to move but he couldn’t sit up—it felt like a giant hand was gently pressing down on him, holding him down on the table. The two men were talking, but their voices sounded garbled and so far away, like their words were coming to him from down a long tunnel that created a slight echo.

  “Hard to believe we wiped out our own planet,” the man in the suit and tie said. “We’re like a virus that has killed its host.”

  Again Cromartie tried to speak. He tried to call out to them for help. He needed help. He couldn’t move.

  But maybe these were some of the men who had abducted him and put him onto this ship.

  Panic surged through him. And then anger. He wanted to know where his wife and kids were. But he still couldn’t talk; he couldn’t even utter a sound.

  Then he heard MAC’s voice from somewhere in the dream. The computer spoke to him in its calm and unemotional voice. “There are answers on this ship, Cromartie. There are clues you need to find that will help you survive.”

  What are they? he wanted to ask MAC … but he still couldn’t speak.

  And then Cromartie snapped awake.

  He sat up in his bed and looked around his small room. The light was still on over the desk. He sat there staring at the light and listening to his own heavy breathing. He was sweating. He felt like he’d just been about to learn something important in the dream, some critical piece of information that could save himself—maybe save all of them—and then he had woken up.

  He thought about his dream, but the more he tried to remember it the faster all of it seemed to slip away.

  Did he have some kind of brain damage?

  Temporary short-term memory loss, MAC had called it.