I realised then that it emanated not within the tunnel itself but out on the surface, travelling down to me in muted tones as I stood amidst the dead. Although comforted by this thought, the sound still disconcerted me. I considered turning back, but, having come this far, I decided to keep going and find what lay at the end.
Beyond, the tunnel was barricaded by sandbags, barbed wire, planks of wood, and behind that, a steel mesh that had been concreted into the walls, ceilings and floors. There were two small gaps in the mesh through which a defender could point a rifle or shove a spear. It was little wonder that these attackers had failed in their assault. These fortifications were formidable.
Pulling myself upward, I found that I could wriggle and bend my way through one of the apertures, but only just. With the torch and the satchel in tow it was no mean feat. With no handholds to keep myself up on the other side, I slid down and then fell out in a heap on the sewer floor.
Above, a channel had been rough-hewn through the ceiling, leading upward into the gloom, an iron chain hanging motionless within. This must be the only way in or out of the fortress.
I clasped the chain and tested my weight. It seemed sturdy. Heaving myself upward, I pulled one hand over the other, the torch gripped in my teeth, and ascended into the darkness.
The blue flame sent shadows bouncing around the room. It was a large open space, probably a converted warehouse or workshop. And it was cluttered. I could see propane tanks stacked against the walls between diagonal steel struts that had been used to reinforce the exterior, plastic water containers, a desk bearing a ham radio. A pile of books lay nearby. There were rifles, handguns, but no ammo, old batteries that had leaked brown fluid, a huge pile of discarded tin cans. Lamps, flashlights. A deflated soccer ball.
Something glimmered on the desk. It was a small, military green compass inside a cast metal case. The exterior paint was chipped but the compass itself was in good working order. I wiped dust away from the glass face and dropped it in the satchel. Underneath where it had lain was a handwritten note, brown with age.
Aimee,
The food is running out here. Not enough to go around. Jeb says there’s cryotanks at the old military base that we might be able to get working. Our only real chance. Not all of the children are coming, too sick. Breaks my fucking heart but there’s no other option.
If no one is here when you get back, follow the map. Come looking for me.
G.
There was a mud map scrawled below the message with lines and notations all over the place, but not knowing the lay of the land, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
Could there really be survivors out there at the base, waiting in cryosleep right now? Did the military possess an advanced tech that might be able to sustain brain function over such a long period?
People. Living people. Was it possible?
This could be an incredible discovery. With technology destroyed, machines could no longer create new machines. We were dying out.
That’s why the Marauders were becoming more prevalent. Their bodies were wearing thin and they were seeking replacement parts, but in reality they were just treading water. There was no long-term solution, no way to rejuvenate our power cores to provide greater longevity. Once those gave out in fifty or a hundred years, there would be no machines left to roam this world. With our inability to create our own offspring, synthetics would have no descendants.
Humans, on the other hand, could procreate. They had a future.
If they were out there, I had to find them.
I snatched the note from the desk and folded it carefully into the satchel.
Before leaving, I checked the sleeping pallets in the corner. Bedsheets, covered in a thick layer of dust, had been drawn up over huddled shapes. One by one, I drew them back. In all, I counted the skeletal remains of five adults and seven children, but it was difficult to be exact. In one bed, several children were huddled together, their crumbled bones mingling as one.
There were no other material goods of any value here. I could only surmise that they hadn’t built this place to protect a hidden fortune. The treasure they’d been protecting, the reason they’d gone to such lengths to fortify themselves, was these children. I was saddened to think of them here in the last days, starving, cold and afraid and in darkness as the last can of food was emptied.
The protectors of these children had held off the looters and the cannibals, the thieves and murderers, the maniacs and the desperate who ran rampant across the city when the world fell apart. They’d repelled every danger that tried to overwhelm them.
But they never stood a chance against the Winter.
6
It was late in the day by the time I returned to Max’s place. He’d already retired to his chair, and to my surprise he nodded at me in welcome when I appeared at the door.
“How was your day, dear?”
I gave him a wry look on my way to the couch. “Yeah, right.”
“Find anything out there?”
I made a noncommittal gesture. “A few bits and pieces.”
He made a disparaging sound in his throat. “I don’t know why you bother.”
“It’s getting harder to find anything useful out there. Everything is rusting up, buried under sand, or just falling apart. Hopefully soon I can get home.”
“So where is that?”
I jerked my head. “Back west. A long way,” is all I would say. As a redirection, I decided to change the topic. “Say, did you know where the military base around here was located?”
He looked at me sceptically, then leaned back in his chair. It creaked mightily and strained at the joints, threatening to snap apart. Then he relaxed again. When he spoke some of the gruffness had gone out of his voice.
“Don’t bother trying to find it. There’s nothing left of it.”
He sounded suspiciously like he was trying to be evasive. “How do you know that?”
“Well, as it turns out, I wasn’t really a domestic.” His milky eyes flicked across at me and I faked surprise.
“Oh?”
“I was military.”
“You fought in the Summer?”
He nodded. “I lived right here in this city, Brant. Before it all went down. Right here.” He jabbed his index finger downward. “I knew it before it became this crumbling mountain of garbage. There was a garden, right out there in the middle of the street. Had the most ornate water fountain I’ve ever seen - some Greek goddess with her arms outstretched. Beautiful... until half a building fell on it. Now there’s no sign it was ever even there.”
“What’s its name? The city.”
“What was its name before? Who cares? The city it used to be is dead. Dead and buried. Now,” he made a grandiose gesture with his arms, “I call it ‘Perish’.”
“Perish.”
“Yeah. Kinda suits it, don’t you think?”
“I guess.” Frowning, I said, “How is it you survived the Summer? I thought army clanks had a pretty low survival rate.”
“Yeah, we were the cannon fodder all right. Did you know, in the early days, that they thought there would be no human casualties in this war? None. Zero.” His mouth made an exaggerated round shape as he emphasised the word. “It’s true, that’s what they thought. Our great leaders. There were endless production lines of clanks, and they’d just keep building us and shipping us out while they sat behind their control panels and made war over the Grid. The synthetics will crush this uprising,” he mocked. “Let the clanks handle it.” He shook his head. “So they threw us into the teeth of the conflict, ground us up like the recyclable tin cans we were, and they made more. And more. And more, until the factories themselves became the targets. And one by one, those factories were levelled. No more clanks. No more cannon fodder. That’s when they realised people would have to pick up the guns. There wasn’t anyone to do it for them anymore.”
I remembered it all too well. “What about you, Max? How did you make it out?”<
br />
He drew one of his leg stumps up onto his chair, shifting his weight, and wrapped a hand around it to keep it in place.
“I was part of one of the last platoons to be sent out. If I’d eaten a land mine in one of the first waves...” He made a dismissive gesture. “No way. They’d have left me out there to rot. Replaced me with another clank. But by the time I made it into the fight, there was a directive to salvage any damaged clank and return it home for repairs. And that was what happened to me, ‘cept when they hauled me back here there weren’t the resources to deal with me. I was shoved into a storage facility, waiting to get patched up, but the base was hit before it happened.”
“All in all, you were lucky.”
He laughed ironically. “Luck! Was it?” He stared out the window. “I wouldn’t call this luck. I should have died out there. I should have died out there with my brothers, doing what I was built to do.” He paused. “Maybe I did, and this is Hell.”
I smiled grimly. “I’ve often wondered the same.”
“It might as well be Hell, right? Isn’t this the definition of Hell? Left abandoned and alone to your own torment forever?”
“Well, it’s not forever,” I amended.
“But it’s pretty close.”
“Synthetic power cores are theoretically rated to last a hundred years, give or take. Not forever.”
“Oh, great,” Max said, sarcastically raising his arm and tapping an imaginary wristwatch. “Only fifty years to go.”
“I guess so,” I said with a thin smile. “Our time isn’t running out anytime soon.”
He turned to me in earnest. “How do you know this stuff anyway? Who are you? What are you?”
Figuring there was no point being evasive anymore, I relented.
“I’m a geneticist.”
He glared at me. “Oh sure, I get it now, you’re a geneticist. That explains it,” he mocked.
I shrugged. “Well, I am.”
“That’s a pretty damn specialist field for a clank,” he bristled. “Now if you’d have said you were in construction or law enforcement or something, I might have believed you.” I watched him but made no comment. Finally he went on. “Well, are you going to tell me this amazing story of how you become a geneticist?”
“That’s the job I had when I was human.”
He made no immediate reaction. He just sat there staring at me, inscrutable. Then suddenly he threw back his head and laughed, a bellowing, deafening sound that rang out across the city. He slid down in his chair and almost fell out, overcome as he was with the hilarity of it all.
“Y’know, I was starting to think you had no sense of humour, man. I’m happy to be proven wrong.”
“It’s not a joke,” I said sincerely.
“Okay, Brant,” he went on, still chuckling. “You don’t have to make up bullshit stories to impress me, you know. Not out here.”
“It’s not bullshit, and it’s not a story,” I said sincerely. “It’s the truth.”
His mirth dissipated, Max returned to looking out the window. “You ever hear of Occam’s Razor, Mr. Scientist?”
“Of course.”
“It means the simplest explanation is usually correct, right? And I ain’t never heard of a human that becomes a machine. Not once.”
“You’re not even going to hear my explanation before you start ridiculing me? I didn’t become a machine. There’s more to it than that.”
He looked at me in mock seriousness. “Is there a magic fairy in this story somewhere?”
I threw up my hands. “See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you last night. I knew you’d react this way.”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “All right, what the hell. I’ll listen to your story.” He checked his imaginary wristwatch again. “I guess I can fit you into my schedule.”
“All right. Thank you.” I leaned forward and pressed my hands together as if in prayer, tapping my fingertips thoughtfully on my chin as I remembered. “This all began way back, before the Summer. I was part of a small team of scientists - geneticists, botanists, physicists, ecologists. We were spread out in a number of countries around the world, employed by a corporation that researched and manufactured a whole cluster of products: biotech; energy solutions; nanotech. Cutting edge stuff. We made a lot of money.
“When the White Summer escalated, there was a lot of confusion. Panic. People didn’t know what to do. We were no different, at first. We were self-interested, just trying to get our own lives in order. Protecting our families, our loved ones. It was a dark time. I lost people. Lost my family.” I got up and paced to the back of the room. “That was maybe the worst time of all. I considered ending it right there. I didn’t want to go on after that. I didn’t see the point.”
Max had become very serious and still. He twisted in his chair to watch me. “What did you do?”
“I got a call from a colleague in France. Benoit, his name was.” I sighed. “I told him to just... leave me alone, that I was done. He implored me, told me he needed me to do something for him back at the workshop. Somehow he got through to me. I did what he asked.
“That was in the last days of the Grid, before it went down completely. Communications were shoddy, but good enough to get by. He sent an analysis, a statistical model of the atmospheric conditions over time - their current levels, where they’d been. And where they were going. It was... off the charts. It was beyond what anyone could have imagined. I couldn’t believe it myself at first but... the numbers were there. I went over them maybe a hundred times. Light filtration, ash density, soot, dust, effects on global temperatures... it was all there in black and white. There was no other answer that could be derived. It was... end times.
“We got back to work, but not for the corporation. Not to design the next cash-cow piece of tech to drive up stock prices. We got to work on surviving. That was it, the only goal we worked toward: finding a way to survive. We brainstormed everything. Literally everything. Underground bunkers, hydroponics, self-sustaining micro- and mini-ecosystems, stockpiling power cores like the ones in here,” I tapped my chest, “you name it.”
“Well, why wouldn’t that work? You said these things run for a hundred years.”
I paced around the little room. “To sustain life you need something that generates heat and light, and enough of it to keep people warm and grow food. Our power cores aren’t designed to do that, it’s different tech. When you get down to it, synthetics consume very little energy. You’d use more energy to heat this room for an hour than you would to run both you and me for a month.”
I picked up the tennis trophy from the bookshelf. The figurine mounted on top, a woman swinging a racket mid-stride, had faded to an ugly brown-green colour. I imagined it might once have been golden. Wiping dust from the inscription, I read: C. Haynes. Runner-up, 2087.
“Who knows,” I went on, returning the trophy and moving back over to the window. “Maybe someone out there in the world found a way where we couldn’t, somehow made one of those other solutions work. I hope they did. In fact, if they’re out there, I’d love to find them. But every model we ran ended with the same conclusion: extinction. The Winter was too dark and too long, and too damn cold to live through. There was no way.
“All hope seemed lost. We toyed with some other ideas, really far out stuff. Building an ark to take us into low earth orbit, above the soot. Going to the moon or deep ocean where some wildlife may have survived. There just wasn’t the time or the resources to bring it together. The Summer was nearing an end, and the Winter was almost upon us.
“We had one last idea. There was a guy on my team called Nikolay Volikov, a Russian who’d done some ground-breaking work on mind controlled machines.”
Max looked up at me thoughtfully. “I think I heard of him.”
“He got some good press.” I twisted my mouth awkwardly. “And some bad. He was able to successfully get an unmanned drone airborne and fly it around for half an hour using a wireless control s
ystem hook up to his mind. Then it crashed.”
“What went wrong?”
“It was the data transfer reliability. Any slight jitter in the communication caused a loss of contact for several seconds while the streams realigned. Unfortunately, it’s something that’s inherent in almost any communication system of the distance he was using that was outside the Grid.”
“Well why didn’t he use the Grid?”
I tapped my forehead. “He feared connecting his mind up to the Grid, and I don’t blame him. If he was hacked, who knows what they might have done to him. Anyway,” I went on, “if he’d done a more practical, scaled down demonstration it would have been different.” I grinned ruefully. “But that was the kind of guy he was. He wanted the attention of a full-scale extravaganza.”
“Guess it cost him in the end,” Max said.
“Yeah, but he’d have ironed out the kinks in time. Adjusted data buffers, improved latency. He would have made it work. But he didn’t have time on his side.”
Max spread his fingers in question. “So how does this relate to you?”
“We took the basis of his technology and modified it. We built machines called Displacers. They were tall, clunky looking things.” I lifted my hand at a right angle above my head to indicate the height. “Cobbled together, really, all of the components bolted and wired to each other wherever we could jam them in. A lot of spare parts and bits ripped out of other systems. Unlikely things to do a job so important.
“The Displacers were built to perform one task - to convert the thoughts and memories of a human and transfer them to a synthetic host. Nothing too glamorous, just convert brainwaves to ones and zeroes, send them along a wire and then implant them into a synthetic’s neural core. Of course, we had to take Nikolay’s tech far beyond where he’d already developed it. He was really only picking up prevailing brain activity in his experiments, the upper reaches of consciousness. We had to dig deeper, down into parts of the brain he hadn’t even considered accessing before. Some of the algorithms were crazy. But, with all of us working on it, we made it happen.”
After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1) Page 4