Resurgence: The Ship Series // Book Five

by Jerry Aubin

  The screens all went blank and the images were replaced with two words.

  SIGNAL LOST

  Rilee shook her head in disappointment and then continued.

  “We’ve lost connection to the satellite network. That either means our antenna array has been destroyed, or there’s already so much dust and debris in the atmosphere that we can’t lock on the signal. It should be the latter since it would have taken a direct hit to destroy the antennas, but we can’t be certain without more time and analysis.”

  Rilee paused and Kalyn raised her hand. Rilee acknowledged her with a nod.

  “You said this place—this Ark—was designed as a long-term shelter. Just how long can we survive down here?”

  “You—at the display—can you figure out how to call up a map of the Ark?” Rilee paused for a few moments until all of the screens displayed a schematic. “It’s hard to appreciate from just this simple diagram, but we’re in the center of a massive complex that contains nearly two million square meters of physical space. If we were in our physical bodies there would be more than enough emergency rations to keep a group this size fed for a thousand years or more. We’re sitting atop a geothermal spring, so we also have unlimited water and enough energy to generate artificial sunlight and support agriculture once those supplies are gone. Of course, if we remain Uploaded in the virtual representation of the facility like we are right now, there’s no physiological reason we can’t survive forever.”

  What Rilee didn’t want to consider were the mental health problems that would almost certainly prevent everyone present from thriving in an Uploaded state for such an extended period. Even those people in the East who long ago decided to remain Uploaded full-time acknowledged it was critical for their mental wellbeing to spend regular cycles experiencing the full gamut of physical stimulation within an actual Skin. All of those who had been previously granted a slot in the shelter had been screened to ensure they would survive extended periods without corporeal experience, but the random group who had actually made it to safety would have had no such evaluation.

  The compartment was quiet as Rilee’s words sank in. Finally, Randel spoke. Unlike Kalyn, he did not raise his hand but instead just blurted out his question.

  “Who’s going to be in charge?”

  16

  They have to find out if it worked!

  Rilee was the last to enter the Command Center in response to the alert. When she did, she was struck by how much the tableau reminded her of the very first time she had visited the room. Back then, thirty-six people had stared at the screens in horror as billions of lives were extinguished in a matter of minutes and the Earth was left a ruined husk. Twenty years later, the group present was even smaller but filled with hope for what might soon appear on those same screens.

  Hope was a tricky concept for those who still called the Ark home. A complete lack of it had killed one of the original thirty-six survivors the very first day they arrived. A second followed her lead and purged his consciousness less than one week later. Ironically, the survivor who had long been the biggest champion for hope and always fought to boost the morale of others had finally announced that hope was a farce and purged herself just a few days ago. If only she had held herself together for seventy-two more hours, she too would have been part of the hopeful pilgrimage to the Command Center.

  Kalyn sat hunched over a workstation. Randel stood beside her and drummed his fingers on the table. A couple of others were gathered nearby, but most of the survivors wanted to give Kalyn space to work and instead stood back along the periphery to watch the large overhead screens. As they had for twenty years, the displays read SIGNAL LOST as Kalyn attempted to communicate with the satellites. There had been a short blip of connectivity thirty minutes earlier, and that had triggered the alert.

  Rilee waited for a few minutes and was about to give up and go back to work when suddenly the screens were filled with an image of stars. Contact! A cheer went up from the assembled group. Someone to Rilee’s left yelled out.

  “Satellite must still be running its automatic program and sweeping for near Earth objects. Reorient the sensors to point back down at the planet.”

  Kalyn didn’t need to wait for the obvious suggestion but was already working furiously. A few seconds later, the display changed from a star field to a wide-shot of Earth. What had once been a brilliant blue and white marble that shone like a beacon against the cold black of space was now a sickly gray splotch. Ashen clouds covered the vast majority of the planet, but there were enough gaps that charcoal-colored land and slate gray water were sometimes visible. The view revealed a lifeless planet, but it was nonetheless their first exposure to the world outside of their deep underground shelter. Some of the survivors appeared forlorn at the ghastly sight, but most chatted excitedly about the radical expansion of their worldview.

  With all of the other survivors engaged with the images from the satellites, Rilee put her plan into motion. She had spent the last five years doing the lab work necessary to prove her hypothesis, and the only question left to answer was whether her findings would hold true in the real world. There were others on the team who agreed with her assessment, but unfortunately there was enough dissent that Randel had rallied sufficient votes to overcome her bloc of support on the Leadership Council. They denied her request for a field experiment by claiming the resources necessary were too valuable to waste on something they deemed unlikely to succeed.

  Unfortunately for the Leadership Council, Rilee had anticipated their lack of determination to aggressively attack the nearly insurmountable problem they faced. If the Council wasn’t willing to take bold risks to reseed life on Earth, she was prepared to force their hand. She exited the Command Center and made her way to the Skin production facility. Once there, Rilee keyed a secret command sequence that overrode the security monitors and provided a scant two minute window to get her consciousness into a Skin without triggering a notification back in the Command Center. Rilee initiated the transfer.

  The Skin’s eyes opened with a start and its heart beat furiously against its chest. Rilee had preprogrammed the facility to dose her with a massive stimulant as soon as the transfer was complete. Her time was limited, so she had none to waste shaking off the fog typically experienced when jumping into a brand new Skin.

  After twenty years of living exclusively within a virtual world, every neuron in Rilee’s brain reveled in the physical stimulus that flooded her consciousness via the Skin’s sensory organs. She fought the urge to literally jump for joy and instead dashed towards the Replicator facility. She had fired off a job for the Replicator before her Upload, so the fabrication routine had already completed and her payload was waiting. Rilee grabbed the box and ran for the lift.

  No one was watching, but Rilee couldn’t help but grin at what a sight she would have made if they were. She hadn’t grabbed any clothes because she was on a one-way mission that would have rendered them a waste of precious resources. As a result, she sprinted through the cavern with the Skin naked as the day it had been cultured. She made her way to the lift and once again keyed a secret command override that blocked any alarms from her unauthorized ascent to the surface. The lift’s sudden acceleration created momentary heaviness in the pit of her stomach, and Rilee giggled at the sensation. As much as one’s consciousness could be convinced it was inside an actual body while Uploaded in a virtual environment, there was still nothing capable of replacing true physical experiences.

  The lift continued its long climb and Rilee bounced on the balls of her feet in anticipation of what she would find at the end of her ride. A light flashed on the lift panel to signal an inbound communication and then Kalyn’s face appeared on the screen.

  “What are you doing, Rilee? You promised me you wouldn’t do anything crazy like this without talking it through first.”

  “Kalyn—remember how you trusted me when I told you to run for the survival shelter twenty years ago? I need you to trust me like tha
t again right now.”

  “When Randel finds out what you’ve done, he just might try to get you purged.”

  “That’s fine.” Rilee smiled. “I might be gone soon anyways. At least this Skin will definitely be dead. Hopefully I’ll manage to Upload in time and survive, but if I don’t you have to promise me that someone will follow through on my experiment and discover if I was right. They have to find out if it worked!”

  Kalyn bit her bottom lip as her eyes betrayed sadness, but she nodded before cutting the connection. Rilee began to run in place to limber up the Skin’s legs. It was far from an ideal mission profile to jump into a fresh Skin and immediately perform under life and death circumstances, but Rilee didn’t have any other option. The lift reached the top of the shaft and the doors opened. Rilee sprinted out and turned left. She reached the main airlock a few seconds later and stopped to remove one of the two devices that was inside the box.

  Once she completed its activation sequence, the Upload amplifier broadcast its signal. The light from the controller on her Skin’s wrist glowed green and indicated acquisition of the Upload signal. Despite the current status, there would be limited signal strength for Uploads on the other side of the airlock due to the massive amount of shielding necessary to protect the Ark. No one had bothered to create a more robust Upload network on the other side of the airlock because it was always expected there would be nothing but certain death out there. Rilee’s hope was that an amplifier placed directly against the interior airlock would give her a better chance for propagating a signal sufficient to allow her return from outside, but it was impossible to be certain in advance. She couldn’t bring the device with her because its delicate electronics, although shielded, would never tolerate the tremendous amounts of ionizing radiation still present outside the shelter.

  Ironically, it was the presence of the radiation that made this mission too dangerous for a robot and much better suited for a human. The impact of such a large radiation dose on humans was well known. Rilee’s Skin would suffer devastating effects immediately and would be completely incapacitated within minutes. Despite this, she was nearly certain she would survive long enough to complete her most critical tasks. A robot, on the other hand, might fail in an entirely unexpected fashion when subjected to so much radiation. It might complete the mission, but it could just as easily be rendered useless within seconds. It was also important to consider that the biological inputs necessary to create a new Skin were available in far higher quantities than the precious materials needed to create a new robot.

  Her Skin was doomed without a doubt, but Rilee hoped her consciousness would survive. Even if it didn’t, she was confident the tradeoff was worthwhile when measured against the ultimate survival of humanity on Earth. Even though Rilee was a valuable individual among the survivors, she was self-aware enough to recognize that her nonstop chafing under the rule of the Leadership Council was not sustainable. Whether it happened in two more years or another twenty, without hope of walking the surface again she would eventually snap and purge her consciousness from the Ark. If she died as part of her mission, she hoped the loss would serve the greater good.

  Rilee clutched the second device from the box and opened the inner door for the airlock. Once she entered, she closed the door behind her and activated the outer door. Three different warning messages popped up about the radiation exposure she was about to endure, and the door finally slid open once she had dismissed the last of them. The Skin shivered immediately. Rilee assumed it was from the extreme cold, but it was quite possibly the initial effects of such severe radiation exposure.

  The airlock had deposited her inside a large cavern. The last defense for the shelter was to have its sole vulnerable opening shielded under a mountain of solid granite. There was always the risk a direct missile hit might have buried the access shaft, but the East had bet that its extreme secrecy would prevent the mountain from ever becoming a target. Starting out surrounded by rock, unfortunately, was the worst scenario for Rilee’s mission. She needed access to open sky, so Rilee charged forward with all the speed she could muster. The light gray of the cave mouth was straight ahead, and she pumped the Skin’s legs ever harder. Rilee’s nose began to run, and when she reached up to wipe it her hand came away streaked with blood. A few paces later she coughed and was overwhelmed by the taste of copper.

  The outside world was only a few paces away, but Rilee was forced to stop for a moment. She bent over and retched pure blood onto the ground while her bowels simultaneously voided. The Skin was dying even faster than she had calculated. With one last push, Rilee staggered ahead until a final sprawl sent her torso out from under the overhang of the cave’s entrance. The wind howled in her ears, and Rilee smiled with the knowledge that the gale would aid her effort. She stretched her arms as far as possible while holding the device and used her right thumb to activate its ignition sequence. Three seconds later, a blast of propellant sent her rocket with its critical payload soaring a hundred meters overhead, where it burst with a pop barely audible above the shrieks of the wind.

  Her most urgent task complete, Rilee turned her attention to the Skin’s Upload controller. Its light shone a faint red. Her mind flashed back to a mission from a lifetime ago, when she had faced a similar situation while on Adan’s damned asteroid. She hadn’t allowed the man to beat her then, and she was determined to achieve that outcome again. The outer layers of skin on her limbs were scorched from the radiation, but Rilee fought through the pain and regained her feet. With an agonized scream, she propelled her body back into the cave and hoped that inertia would carry her within range of the Upload amplifier.

  One step.

  Three steps.

  Ten steps.

  Rilee locked her eyes on the controller as she lurched ahead, with a finger poised to trigger Upload as soon as there was any glimmer of signal lock. This meant she wasn’t mindful of the path and a small bump tripped her up. As she stumbled forwards, Rilee resigned herself to knowing the Skin would never stand again. After a final, unbalanced step, she pitched forward just as her eye caught a flash of green from the controller. She jabbed at the button just as the Skin crashed to the ground. Lifeless.

  17

  All of you will get a turn with it.

  As Rilee approached the door, she paused for a moment to appreciate the sounds from within. On the other side was a room filled with boisterous, high-pitched voices unlike any she had heard for hundreds of years. Children’s voices. They belonged to the first generation born after Adan’s Destruction. Conceived using genetic material harvested from millions of people that had been stored for safekeeping by the East when the shelter was originally built, they had gestated within the same artificial wombs used to culture Skins. A myth that Rilee recalled learning as a child had described a simple wooden ark built to protect an ancient family of humans and the animals they had gathered two-by-two. Thousands of years after that fictional disaster, it was time for her to tell a group of children the true story of an Ark of a very different sort—a technological marvel built underground that saved life on Earth from a man-made cataclysm.

  Rilee opened the door and the children settled immediately. Their teacher must have warned them in advance of her impending arrival and requested their best behavior. Rilee smiled at the man, one of the other patients from the clinic who had escaped with her to shelter on that fateful day long ago, as he rose from his seat to address the children.

  “Thank you for such polite behavior, class. I’m pleased to introduce an amazing woman who saved my life the day of Adan’s Destruction. She gathered me along with a small group of other people and brought us to this facility called the Ark. Our early years here were difficult as we didn’t know if the Earth would ever support life again, but this woman single-handedly saved our planet with her brilliance and bravery. It’s my pleasure to introduce a founding member of our Leadership Council, Rilee.”

  The man moved to the side and Rilee took his place at the fron
t of the room. She set the case she carried on the floor and appraised the group with a wide smile on her face. The children, five boys and seven girls, sat on the floor with their legs crossed and stared up at her wide-eyed and expectant.

  “Good morning, class. I’m very excited to join you this morning, and I believe you’ll be very interested in what I’ve brought along to show you. First, though, I need to check how good a job your teacher is doing.” Rilee winked at the man and he smiled back at her. “He just mentioned Adan’s Destruction. Who can explain what exactly he’s talking about?”

  All twelve children shot their hands up—some so excited to answer they waved both arms in the air. Rilee pointed at a girl who sat at the back and had first caught her attention due to her thick locks of flaming red hair. The girl rose and confidently spoke.

  “Three hundred and ninety-two years ago, Earth was nearly destroyed. A terrible man named Adan had built a spaceship intended to take a group of humans out into the stars. He wanted to save our species from the planet’s failing ecosystems by scattering colonies across the universe. Adan betrayed the Earth at the last moment before he left. He launched a rain of nuclear missiles, murdered billions of people, and wiped out nearly all life on the planet. Thirty-six people made it to the safety of the Ark, and twenty-seven of you are still with us today.”