by Rod Carstens
It didn’t take but a few seconds and Morgan said, “Got it. And it is good stuff just at a glance.”
“Is that all you need now, Doctor?”
“Yes, thank you, Colonel.”
Steiger, instead of leaving, turned to Cat and said, “Hello, Cat. Long time no see.”
Cat’s mouth fell open in surprise. She might have met Steiger once in all the years she was in Resource Control.
“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m Julia Rule. You can check my files.”
Steiger smiled and pulled out a piece of paper. It had Cat’s picture, Resource ID, and her DD314 with all of her history during her Resource Control years.
“I never trusted the tech they gave us. It was second- and thirdhand. I started keeping paper backups to my files just in case my computer crashed, and it regularly did.”
“But how did you recognize me?”
“You were part of a team that got me demoted and put back on the teams. You remember those people. How are Tanner and Matos?”
“Fine,” was all Cat could get out.
“What do you want, Colonel? They were just the instrument to find me. I was your problem, not them,” Rule said.
“I know, but if they hadn’t chosen to run and team up with you, then I would have had you and a promotion.”
“You sent a Spec Act Team to kill us!” Cat snapped.
“Yes, yes I did. That was Rand’s call, because Tanner was going to file an Internal Security Report on the mission and we couldn’t have people asking questions about the Free Fire Zone declaration.”
“You didn’t have to order it.”
“Oh, but I did. What I didn’t expect was that you three would take out the Spec Act Team and disappear along with Doctor Rule here. My beef is not with you, Cat. It’s with Tanner. If it weren’t for him threatening to throw a monkey wrench into everything, I would be a general by now. If I ever get my hands on him…”
Cat was standing very still. Too still. It was as if she were a tigress getting ready to pounce. Rule was afraid of what she might do so he repeated, “What do you want, Colonel?”
“I want to know what you find out if you’re able to fix the program. Rand and the Council are concerned about something, and for once in my life, I want to know what they know.”
“All right. But don’t you have this place bugged for sound and video?”
“Yes, but someone keeps periodically blacking out our feeds at particularly interesting points. My techs think it's that cute little thing over there. Morgan, isn’t it? But they can’t figure out how.”
Steiger walked over to Morgan and lifted her chin with a single finger. “You know, I think Madelyn and her husband would be very interested in an innocent girl from the zones.”
Steiger smiled an evil smile that said more than his words. Cat took a step forward. She had been Morgan’s age when they brought her into the City to become a companion. Years of being a sex slave came rushing back. Rule put up his hand to stop her.
Steiger looked over at her and smirked. “You don’t think you could take me, do you?”
Cat slowly smiled, her eyes hard, and said, “You’re Fuckin’ A right I can. You and me, we’ll dance one day.”
Steiger’s smile slowly disappeared as he realized just how serious Cat was. “I’m not interested in you any longer. The only thing I want is to know what Rand and Geoff know. I also know that if you brought Cat, then you are not going to be staying with us for long after you fix the program. Your escape could be easy or impossible, depending on what you give me. I’m working with Internal Security on this one, and we talk daily. So simply make sure I know, that’s all. If you don’t, just remember Morgan and what would happen if I turned her over to someone who could appreciate her innocence.”
With a smirk, Steiger turned and walked out.
Rule nodded to Morgan, and she blacked the bugs out. “Well?” Rule said.
“I think he's telling the truth. All he wants is what you find out. He’s got it good now and wants to keep it that way. Any information he has that might be valuable to the Council could only help him. He’s looking for leverage,” Cat said.
“What about our escape?”
“It suddenly got a lot trickier. When he recognized me, he figured out I was along as muscle just like we planned, and he also realized we were here just to get the pressure off the settlement. He’s a smart boy,” Cat replied.
“Do you think he knows about the Mall?” Morgan asked.
Cat looked at the door before she said anything. “No, if he did I think he would have used it as leverage with us. It’s a good thing I planted Vin’s civilian clothes the other day. Steiger will be watching me closely now. Why did he wait if he recognized me?”
“Cat, I don’t think he was sure until he saw your picture, and if he keeps all those files on paper, it probably took him this long to find it.”
“Doc, come over here and look at this data. It's a lot more complete than I could have ever hoped for,” Morgan said.
“You’re right. We need to focus on the task at hand,” Rule said.
“And I’ll worry about our little trip coming up,” Cat said.
As Rule walked toward the desk, he heard Cat say, as much to herself as to him, “We’re going to have to kill him before we leave here. I don’t want him looking for us, whatever his reason might be.” Cat glanced over at Morgan, who was typing furiously, completely absorbed in her programming. Her blood ran cold at the thought of him getting his hands on Morgan. She die rather than let that happen.
Chapter Nineteen
Brandon Rule sat back in his chair, a stunned look on his face. They had just been through another full set of runs using the new population models he and Morgan had written over the last few days. He stared at the screen, not believing what he was seeing. Morgan put her head down on the desk. The predictions were always the same, no matter how they tweaked the parameters.
“It can’t be true. We need to redo the feedback loops. We did something wrong,” she said.
“Morgan, how many runs have we done and come up with the same predictions?” Rule said.
“This was our twenty-fifth run.”
“Has it changed its conclusions even once, no matter how we entered the data?”
“No.”
Rule continued to stare at the display. He leaned forward and whispered in Morgan's ear so the listening devices couldn’t hear him, “Send the pickup signal now, and add 911. We need to get out of here as soon as we can.”
Morgan changed the screens on the floating displays above the desk and sent the pickup signal to the settlement. “When are we going to tell them?” she asked.
Just then Alek Geoff and Ashton Rule walked into the room. When they saw the looks on the faces of Rule and Morgan, they stopped in their tracks.
“What’s the matter?” Geoff asked.
“What have you found out?” Rand added.
“We seem to have fixed the problem with the program. It needed more-sophisticated population modeling. So we designed a new model using city-state data as well as zone data. It has come up with a rather dire prediction.”
“Did you do another run?” Rand asked.
“Yes, we’ve done twenty-five now.”
“And the predictions were all the same.”
“Yes,” Rule replied.
“Goddamnit, why didn’t you tell me? You know Chairwoman Holm is on my ass for an answer. You’ve made all the changes you want. Now we need to get the predictions to her as soon as possible.”
“We didn’t believe the predictions at first. We wanted to be sure. We’re sure now. You both had better sit down.”
“Would you stop with the dramatics,” Geoff snapped, “and just tell us what the program predicts?”
Rule looked at Morgan before he began. “As I told you, we created two separate yet connected population models for the city-states and the zones—”
“I’m not interes
ted in a technical answer. I just want the predictions.”
Rule walked over to the large window that overlooked the City and touched it. More than a dozen different displays appeared, mirroring the ones on his desk. He touched one, moved it to the center of the various screens, and expanded it.
“All right. Before I tell you, I need to know something. Was the program telling you that the system was going to collapse unless there was a culling of the population?”
Rand and Geoff looked at one another before Geoff said, “Yes. How did you know?”
“The program simply did not have the data inputs it needed to give you a good projection. Once we added the right data, it gave us better results. It was sensing an event that was going to happen, but it couldn't accurately analyze and create a prediction to match what it was sensing. So once we gave it the additional data, it came up with an accurate prediction.”
Rand and Geoff leaned forward in their seats.
“The program is predicting a pandemic will occur within the next six months. There are new, virulent strains of flu multiplying rapidly in the zones all around the world, So no medical or other steps can be taken to prepare for it. It will be global in nature. It will spread rapidly through the city-states, given they are tightly coupled in their economic, trade, and travel relationships. There is something called the Pandemic Severity Index. It goes up to five as its highest ranking, and that is with about a two-percent death rate for those who contract the disease. The program could not come up with a pandemic rating for this illness because the impact was greater than anything the Severity Index was designed to predict. It predicts a fifty to eighty percent illness rate for those exposed to the disease. Which means that fifty to eighty percent of people exposed will contract the disease. Of those who become ill, the fatality rate will be between seventy-five and eighty percent. You can see the numbers in this display.”
Rule expanded the display so Geoff and Rand could see the percentages. They sat down in the two chairs opposite Rand’s desk. Rule pulled another screen to the center of the window and said, “We looked for a comparison with that kind of illness and death rate, and the only one we could find in history was the Black Death. As you can see here, during the Dark Ages when the Black Death pandemic occurred, they had similar death rates. Half of the population of Paris died. It killed between thirty and sixty percent of the entire population of Europe before it ran its course. It took years to burn through Europe, however because of their primitive travel modes. It will move much faster through our populations because of the speed of modern travel.”
Rule slid another display to the center. It showed a graph with a much steeper angle. “The program predicts weeks instead of years for it to spread around the world.” He touched the window and slid another graph to the center. “Typically there are three waves to these pandemics, each one killing more of those who survived the wave before it. According to the program, the three waves will be about three months apart, so the pandemic will last approximately a year.”
Next he brought up a visual showing food, power, water, and other vital systems. The graphs showed their output decreasing rapidly in sync with the waves of the pandemic.
“Because we are a technologically advanced society, we don’t grow our food or live close to a potable water source, so we depend on complex systems to deliver these vital supplies every day. For example, at any given point we only have seven days’ supply of food on the shelves or in warehouses in the City. As you know it must be brought into the city by armored trains every day, and it takes people to do this even with all the automation we have. Technicians work the systems that provide our water, sewers, and power. So as the disease burns through the population and the people who run those systems for us die, those systems will begin to fail. This will magnify the effect of the pandemic as the lack of food, water, medicine, and even power piles crisis after crisis on top of the disease. Eventually, the whole system will fail. Civilization as we know it will collapse.”
Rule touched the window and pulled another display to the center. “As you can see with this graph, the program gives us six months after the first outbreak before the collapse. I feel that’s optimistic. I think it will fail sooner than that.”
Rand was the first to recover from the shock of what Rule had said. “This is not the Middle Ages. We have modern medicine.”
“Pandemics have outstripped the medicine of the day regularly for thousands of years. Everything from the great influenza outbreak during the early part of the twentieth century to the Plague of Athens in ancient Greece. I think the program is simply predicting another regularly occurring event. Our medical system will naturally try and find a cure for the new disease as quickly as possible, but it will not save the first-wave victims.”
Rule slid still another display to the center.
“If you follow those two lines, one being the number of medical professionals who contract the disease and die with the other being the amount of time it will take to find a cure, they intersect here, before a cure can be found and distributed. Simply put, too many medical professionals will die of the disease. Modern medicine can perform miracles, but it can’t find a vaccine overnight. It takes time, and that is something we just don’t have enough of.”
“But we live in the city-states! We control the movement of the populations. We can quarantine the sick.”
Rule gave a rueful smile before he said, “Let me ask you something. How many people did you come into contact with today? By contact I mean just walked by or rode with in some sort of transportation or elevator. A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? How many? Do you know?”
“I don’t know, maybe two hundred. I don’t use public transportation.”
“This will be an airborne virus. According to the program, it is the only way something like this can spread so rapidly through a city. You only have to be in the same area as someone who has the disease. That is two hundred chances you will contract the disease without knowing it. It will be some sort of new flu virus, and so people who are sick typically won’t have symptoms right away, but will be contagious. You could be standing next to someone who will make you sick and never know it.”
“But…”
Rule pulled down another chart.
“This shows mass extinctions of much of the life on Earth since it began. There have been such mass extinctions of species on Earth time five different times in Earth’s history. It looks like this is our turn.”
Rand and Geoff looked at each other. Then Geoff said, “Extinction?”
“Not complete some species have always survived. But humans are the target of this one and only a few humans will survive.”
“Did the program give us a time frame?”
“It predicted anytime within the next six months. It could already have started, but we just haven’t recognized it yet.”
Both Geoff and Rand sat there with a stunned look on their faces. “I don’t know how we can tell this to the Council. They are used to controlling events. To tell them that there is an event that will cause society to collapse and they won’t be able to stop it is—”Geoff stammered his face turning pale.
“The entire society won’t collapse,” Rule said.
“What!”
“This society will collapse.” Rule spread his arms wide, indicating the room and building they were standing in. He walked over to the window and pointed out the zones. “Some of them will survive because they have been learning how to live off practically nothing for decades. Sure, some of them will die, but many will survive because they don’t live up here. Because they know how to live without being dependent on technology to provide for them. They will survive for all the reasons you and those like you won’t.”
“You said fifty to eighty percent illness rate. How do we know who won’t catch the disease?”
“They did studies of the families today that can trace their lineage back to the Black Death, and they found they had specific genetic
markers that gave them the ability to survive. They were genetically wired not to catch the disease. Since we don’t know what form the flue will take, we won’t know who has the genetics to survive. We will all have to find out the hard way.”
“What do we do?” Rand asked.
“I have no idea. There’s not much you can do,” Rule replied.
He exchanged a glance with Morgan. There was a lot he and the settlement could do, and after the communication Morgan had sent to them the plan was already in action. Tanner had insisted that the settlement have a “bugout plan,” as he called it. It was a plan that spelled out how, for whatever the reason, they could pick up everything and move to another location as quickly as possible.
Vin had divided the settlement up into groups by their daily duties. Now they would begin to get ready to move. The motor pool, as he called it—the men and women who took care of the vehicles—would be going over them and making sure they were ready and that they had as much biodiesel as they could produce. The food group would be collecting plants and seeds to start another garden when they reached their destination. The animal group would get cages ready to put on the vehicles, so they had seed stock when they reached their new home. And so it went all the way down, to the smallest detail. Everyone knew their jobs and would be working to get them accomplished.
The big question was where they were going to go. If they could find a good place to settle away from the city-states, they stood a decent chance of weathering this by founding a solid settlement and self-quarantining until the pandemic was over. It was their only chance, and time was of the essence.
“I think a private briefing with Madelyn will be the best approach,” Geoff said. “She can tell us how to proceed. She would want to know before the others anyway. I’ll contact her immediately and see how quickly we can get on her calendar.”
“Rule has to do the briefing,” Rand said.
“That goes without saying.”
Geoff stepped to the side and called Madelyn’s office. Rand looked at Rule and said, “It’s so hard to believe.”