The End of the Beginning

by Eichholz, Zachary

  William put his head down in appreciation. “Chief, I… Thank you.”

  “De nada.”

  William rubbed his nose as Hernandez unwrapped his arm, “So, as chief of security, you lead ISAF here, right?”

  “Yes, indeed. Greatest private security force in history at your service.”

  “You know, to be honest, me and my Air Force buddies used to make fun of firms like yours when we were all in Korea. We never thought a hired gun could be as good or loyal as a head strong service volunteer.”

  Hernandez smiled. His teeth were the whitest William had ever seen. “An understandable preconception. Too often corporations have failed their stakeholders over greed, lies, and scam, perhaps made even worse in our line of work when the breeding of such sins results in the loss of the innocent, who paid for the basic God given right of protection. ISAF, I assure you, is different. My men and women, like those of UNIRO, share the common belief that this organization must work or there will be nothing left to protect at all. If ISAF fails, Captain, we fail the world.”

  “I like the way you talk, Chief,” William chuckled. “Perhaps you should be leading this base.”

  “No, no,” waved Hernandez. “That is a job for someone with the passion of the world behind them, someone like you, I believe.”

  “Me?!”

  “Sí. I fully expect you to be sitting in Hammond’s chair one day.”

  William smiled. Then, he noticed a red beeping around Hernandez’s neck. It was his glass tag. It glowed just as John’s did.

  “Um, sir, your glass tag is - ”

  “Ah, of course. Thank you for reminding me, Captain. I must be going. I am going to be late.”

  “Senior staff meeting right?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “A friend of mine is on senior staff. I was with him when he got the same call. Terrorist attack.”

  “Yes.”

  “ISIS?”

  “Worse,” said Hernandez shaking his head. “Terra Nova.”

  “Who?”

  “Come by my office sometime. We can talk more then. I would love to become more acquainted, Captain.” Hernandez tapped his right hand on his forehead and then held it out as he began hurrying away. “Until then, amigo.”

  To the west, the sun was setting in fantastic fashion. Layers of cirrus and low stratus clouds showcased pinks, yellows, and even golds that made the sky look like a seething blast furnace. Construction crews, working under light towers, were laying water pipes next to the road William was being transported on, readying to take desalinated seawater deeper into the BLOC Section’s housing and recreation areas. They shouted to each other in a language that was either Spanish or Portuguese.

  It’s been said that Rome was not built in day, but it seemed like this base was. These workers were certainly not abiding by that phrase. William noticed this about many people working here. Most of them, around eighty percent, he figured, were young, under the age of thirty-five; each one displaying a sense of urgency and motivation that was as electric as the conduit they were installing.

  All of these personnel used their youth and spirit to see that the world they would grow up in, lives that they would lead after their days in UNIRO, would be plentiful and without fear. They wanted to be the ones to take their future back from an unpredictable and crumbling world their elders’ narrow-minded practices had formed through gridlocked ignorance in decades past. They saw what was happening and wanted new results.

  Researching on his glass tablet in the taxi, William discovered that voluntary signups for joining UNIRO were full and an innovative labor program had been instituted so that the tremendous amounts of workers needed to build the organization's infrastructure could be found. An enormous guest-worker program was established with the founding of UNIRO. It tapped predominantly into the poverty prone Global South that allowed legal temporary migration of people looking for work and skill with the International Labor Organization acting as a watchdog agency, ensuring transparency and fair wages. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were opened with the construction of the bases. Adamant workers from Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Nigeria, Indonesia, Yemen, Uganda, Mexico, Cuba, Ghana, Rwanda, Haiti, even Somalia, flocked to the opportunities. Host countries took them in, fed them, held social programs, and trained them, adding to host economies and, eventually, with their new-found knowledge, the economies of their native homes back in the Global South once they returned. Renewable energy systems, infrastructure retooling, ecosystem resuscitation; skills that were all learned by the previously unskilled.

  This “drop everything and move” mentality had not been seen among countries since World War II. After seeing that a global threat was upon them, the Allies converted factories and industrial sites overnight into war machines for building tanks, jeeps, and battleships. Metal was taken from junkyards and rubber from tires, even food rations of meat began - anything to serve the cause of the Allies. Economy and industry re-tasked to become an agent of change, to fight a threat that was every bit as overbearing to what the world was facing now.

  Taking lessons from the “greatest generation,” mobilization with the urgency of war had been initiated to fight the threat of total ecological, and hence societal, collapse. Boeing was producing rescue aircraft. Siemens was 3D printing wind turbine blades. Tesla was organizing battery storage systems. Ironically, Shell was generating hydrogen. Nestle was engineering longer lasting non-cocoa based chocolate for climate refugees. Lenovo was hammering out processors. Haier assembled base appliances. Maersk was donating thousands of used shipping containers. IBM had designed the bases supercomputers. Hyundai made the bulldozers, Rolls Royce the hydrogen jet engines, private space companies the satellites and their launches, Mercedes the dump trucks, Suntech the solar panels, and the Global South provided a majority of the labor. Everyone contributed to the funds.

  All nine bases and more were nearing completion after only four years of construction. Nothing but beach and wetlands had been where the base now stood. Nearby Titusville and Daytona Beach were now boomtowns, flourishing from current base business and previously established social programs for the laborers. And central Florida, besides the Cape, now had one of the world’s unique treasures.

  A competition to see who would finish their base first had sprung up among the different bases’ work crews. Tranquility was second in the race, behind Base Defiant in Mumbai, India. The race was on and the prize was nothing less than the safety of the planet itself - and the right to host the opening ceremony for the grand inauguration of UNIRO in June. This privilege would be chosen in a month, when a better picture of who would be finished first would appear, allowing world governments time to begin planning the feat of sending their leaders all together for the celebration.

  William had ventured back to the seawall. It was now night. Out here, in what seemed to be in the middle of ocean, was a peace unlike William had ever known. He normally hated the ocean. but now, in the company of the base, he felt at ease. He felt home.

  He turned around and looked back in towards the harbor, leaning his back on the handrail. The access road was drenched in amber light emanating from LED’s in the handrails. It had something to do with sea turtles. Lights from the Port Section reflected on the harbor water. Distant announcements over loudspeakers carried well over the water through the salty air, reaching William’s ears with ease.

  The base was alive. William listened to its various calls and the sounds it made. He looked out over at the skeletal network of reinforced concrete and steel interlaced with a marrow of bio-based plastics and graphene lattices to hold it strong. Nerves of subterranean fiber optic cables leading to the brain sent terabytes worth of information on how its body was fairing, sensing pain on its runways or an itch in its energy output. All of the base’s systems had a healthy appetite for clean energy and water, so it naturally had a digestive system that fed off the wind, sun, and waves.

  Acting as the liver,
the desalination plant purified water and a heart of warehouses supplied the world with its new blood, giving life through transfusions of equipment and goods. Muscles of aircraft, vehicles, and ships helped the base to move its might at will. Finally, there were the cells, the people that lived and worked at the base allowing its function. ISAF security personnel were the bases skin cells, protecting it from potential hostile invaders. Technicians in the command center worked as brain cells, disseminating and storing information until it was needed; learning and making memories. Rescuers were white blood cells, defending from danger and keeping others safe. An act of biomimicry, the replication of nature in the best of what the environment had been doing for eons. It was just as William saw himself, a last chance for life in a world surrounded in death.

  From behind, a gust of wind jarred William from his thinking, knocking his beret off. He chuckled at the wind.

  “Don’t suppose that was you saying hello,” he said softly to the air. “I’ll try and make you guys proud. I’ll try…”

  CHAPTER 19: Suspicion in the Warehouses

  “Holy shit, that’s big.”

  “Language, Will.”

  “Sorry, Doc. Its just, well, up close it’s… even bigger.”

  “Single biggest structure on Earth. Ten floors of 4.8 million square feet and there’s forty-five of them…”

  “On Earth...”

  “Uh-huh.”

  In the shadow of Warehouse 1, on the northeastern end of the BLOC Section near the desalination plant, William and John, but mostly William, stared up in awe. Standing on the ground next to this great structure made one feel as if they were in the presence of one of the seven wonders of the world. William wondered how the giants didn’t just sink into the sandy Florida soil.

  Around the warehouse bamboo and palm trees intermixed with grassy lawns and narrow roads that connected in between each warehouse. Small electric pickup trucks, not much bigger than a king-sized bed, zipped on these roads, carrying two people at a time and sometimes small boxes and various articles of gear. Each one would come from one warehouse and disappear into another through small grated white doors.

  John and William entered the warehouse through an unassuming door at the western corner of the building. William looked up and over and almost gasped at the size of the sheer white walls, looking like a looming glacier that was heavy and old. It looked as though nothing could ever move these warehouses; they were to be a part of the Earth forever.

  They entered into an airlock similar to the one in the command center. As they waited for the room to become positively pressurized they were bathed in blacklight to rid them of unwanted followers.

  “There are crazy amounts of food and water in here. We wouldn’t want anything to get into those stores or it could ruin an entire crop,” John explained.

  William’s ears popped. The UV light turned off and a green indicator light showed them the airlock was ready. A second set of doors opened, leading into the warehouse. Inside the massive interior, it was cool and there was a distinct lack of humidity. A two-lane road ran by them, along the interior of the outer warehouse wall with some turnoffs disappearing into a mesh of black metal screens and rigging. Sixteen-foot-wide racks of shelving ran from floor to ceiling with pathways between them, half as wide as the shelving units.

  “Think of this mess as a Home Depot on steroids,” said John, pointing to the metal jungle. “But I guess I shouldn't call it a mess. It is storage perfection. Each floor has hundreds of rows of storage. Computer-controlled cranes and forklifts are sent information from the base’s supercomputer and track an RFID tag placed in all our pieces of equipment. Forklifts find it, grab it, and take it down to a series of conveyor belts that then transport it to waiting automated electric trucks at the eastern end of the warehouse, waaay down there at a distribution center.”

  John pointed again to the east, but it was impossible to make out more than a few hundred feet down the internal road as everything blurred together in a metal mist. A conveyor belt about nine feet off the ground separated the road from the shelving units at their foot.

  An electric whizzing sound leapt out from between two rows of shelving, making William's eyes compete to see what it was. It was a tall automated forklift at full extension holding a white shipping container. With great precision, it lowered the container in hand with a robotic grace and gently placed it onto the moving belt. Then, like spooked prey, it whizzed back into the jungle of metal to find more equipment.

  “In the field, when UNIRO personnel are in need of new supplies and equipment, they will be able to access UNIRO’s own secure website over satellite internet with a username and password and ask for whatever they may need. Once they put in a request, it is routed up to a Phoenix 5 satellite and sent to the nearest supply craft in the area. Replacement requests are also then sent to the base’s supercomputer and restocking begins. These warehouses offer near certain assurance of a constant supply stream.”

  A bicycle bell rang out.

  “Whoa, watch it!” said William, jumping out of the way of a worker on a yellow cargo tricycle.

  “Don’t worry about them,” John said. “They don’t stop for anything. Warehouse personnel like to be on time and efficient, which is good. They need to be. Once a call comes in, we need to have at least sixty percent of everything that is supposed to be moved, moving within two hours of the call.”

  “That’s fast. I remember it would take us days to ship stuff in Korea,” said William.

  “We have to be. Every nanosecond counts for us. Failure by lack of logistics is not an option. It all needs to work. Many a past rescue operations have suffered and failed simply because help didn’t arrive fast enough, I’m afraid. With our centralized and focused response, UNIRO can have boots and machines on the ground anywhere in the world within forty-eight hours or less.”

  “Nice.”

  John put a hand on William’s back and started pushing him towards the shelving units.

  “As I was saying though, each warehouse has its own transport network with roads and trams because they are so big. Bikes are popular, as well as those tiny pickup trucks you saw outside. I could fit one of those inside my pockets, I swe- ”

  William saw John perk his head to one side.

  “Gosh darn it,” he said pointing to his ear. “Call. I gotta take this. Go have fun. Explore.”

  John ran back outside through the airlock they had entered in, leaving William alone. All that accompanied him were the whizzing of distant forklifts and the hum of the constantly moving conveyor belt. But under the choir of machinery, he thought he heard a muffled voice. Yes, someone was talking somewhere. He looked left, then right, and then left again.

  The voice was coming from inside the jungle of shelves. William ducked his head down and scanned through the screens, rigging, containers, and shelves. He walked closer to the rows, slightly crouched. The voice grew sharper. After checking around, William followed his curiosity into a new row. He marveled at how deep it ran and how quiet the air became. In here, he was able to discern it was female. The voice grew louder.

  William began jogging, making sure to stay crouched. About sixty feet in, he stopped. He found someone, a row over to his right. They spoke with a unique British accent. It couldn’t be her. Could it?

  Peeking up over the top of the container full of water filters, he saw a woman with her back turned to him speaking into an old landline that was plugged into a shipping container. No one used those anymore. The woman stopped talking, as if sensing his presence. She glanced over her shoulder. William ducked. He waited. She didn’t speak for what felt like minutes.

  William breathed steadily and quietly out of his mouth. He hoped John wouldn’t come back into the building and start shouting for him. The woman would definitely hear him.

  “Hello,” she resumed. “It was nothing.”

  William took off his beret and peeked over the container’s edge again. He finally got a good look at
her face. He knew it. It was Base Commander Hammond. What was she doing in the bowels of the warehouse talking on a landline?

  “I need information,” she said, her free hand balled up in a tight fist, veins pulsating. “You say something is coming but cannot tell me when or where. How am I supposed to prepare if I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be preparing for? I don’t even fucking know your bloody name!

  “Suspicion is beginning to grow among some in UNIRO,” she said, lowering her voice. “I can only hold off those suspicions for so long. I need more information from you so I can finish this.”

  She sighed.

  “But who?”

  She let out another long sour sigh.

  “The Jamnagar Refinery was just the start. I need to know what’s next.”

  Hammond looked in William’s direction but he ducked before she saw him.

  “Fine… But you get me something soon or else…”

  There was a long pause.

  “Toronto. Are you sure? How is that supposed to help me?”

  He heard her huff.

  “Hello… Hello… Bastard.”

  William heard her turn away from him so he looked over the container. She put the phone back into the shipping container it was plugged into, closed it, and then locked it via a thumbprint scanner. She stared at the lock for a moment. She swiftly looked both ways down her shelving row. No one was there. William ducked again. He heard her run off to his right. He stayed put till her footsteps were no more.

  He started running back the way he came till he was out of the shelving jungle. John walked back into the warehouse through the airlock and spotted William a ways down from where he had left him.

  “What are you doing down there?” he called out.

  William took a hasty look back down the row where Hammond had been. The only thing he saw was a robotic forklift a few hundred feet down. He looked at John and then back down the row, putting a finger to his lips.