“Oh, my,” Cain said, fanning himself. “Seriously though, the birthing calendar is of the most importance. Just imagine it: at the end of the thirty years, we will have created the very first wave of stable, clean, and genetically pure humans!”
“Yeah?” Anette piped up. “For whom? For what?”
Bianca stood next to Cain as he coolly responded, “For the New World!”
CHAPTER 20
THE LOTTERY
‘I don’t get it,’ Chloe’s message read.
‘Well,’ Armada began typing, ‘we can pretty much count on Wyczthack and White having something up their sleeves.’
Armada sent his simple statement to Chloe, and immediately reopened the file folder named ‘Contestants.’ Awaiting a response from Chloe, he resumed his investigation by randomly clicking open the numbered subfolders.
‘Why number the folders?’ the next message asked.
‘I don’t know. But for whatever reason they’re collecting this volume of personal information, you can rest assured that it’s of major significance. You’re the engineer, you tell me what you think.’
He sent the message and opened the program monitor for the Master Server to see what programs were running in the background.
‘Oh, I agree with you … it’s something big,’ her message began. ‘Maybe numbering the folders instead of inserting an individual’s name is a secret method of identification. It’s like a placebo; they’ll make their decision based strictly off of data, not gender or race. Eight-digit numbers might mean one thing and six-digit numbers something else. Or maybe the first digit in the sequence is the identifying variable. Do you see what I mean?’
Armada quickly skimmed through Chloe’s message. He then opened the ‘Contestant’ tab, selected one of the numbered subfolders, and copied it.
‘Check this out,’ he typed, attached the copy, and sent the message.
While waiting for Chloe to examine the content of the folder, Armada reviewed the properties of the ‘Contestant’ file. It was massive, to say the least. More than seven million subfolders had been created in the last three months. On the day the file was created, its first subfolder was generated and given the peculiar title ‘Basket of Eggs.’ Armada was intrigued. However, upon reviewing the ‘Eggs’ file, he found a paltry eighteen thousand subfolders with the similar eight-digit numbered titles.
‘Did you look at each page?’ Chloe’s newest message asked. ‘I mean, are the pages in this file similar to the other files you’ve examined?’
‘Yes and no,’ Armada pecked. ‘Some have way more content than others, whereas a few I picked out have very little. And by little, I mean thirty to fifty pages. I did open one that was, at a minimum, a hundred and fifty pages.’
‘Judging from the information in this one file, it would appear that White and Wyczthack are conducting the same battery of tests and exams they subject us to. This woman, whoever she is, has normal levels of HDL, LDL, CRP, THS, U/E, and so on. But why subject millions of randomly selected people to this deep of an investigation? I see that she’s employed by Qualcomm and is one of their top microprocessor engineers. She’s divorced, twice, is forty-three years old, and smokes. So why pick her out of six billion people?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Armada stated and sent his answer.
‘Anything else of interest this evening?’ Chloe’s next letter inquired.
‘Yes,’ Armada swiftly responded. ‘In the parent file is a folder called ‘Basket of Eggs.’ But the files in that folder appear to have the same kind of content.’
‘Pick out five from Eggs and send them to me. You choose five from Contestant and we’ll compare them.’
‘Deal,’ Armada typed and sent his note.
He clicked the ‘Eggs’ tab, highlighted five separate folders, and copied them as an attachment to his message, ‘Don’t say I never gave you anything.’
Three years had quickly come and gone since he and Chloe began their secret late-night correspondence. Although he deleted all traces of their communications, Armada kept digital copies of every conversation. On the rare occasion he was unable to connect with Chloe, he would reread the transcripts until the early morning hours. He came to realize that she’d become a permanent and vital presence in his life. However long that life might last, he felt himself growing more and more dependent on Chloe for support, both mentally and emotionally.
After a good thirty minutes had ticked by, a message alert appeared on Armada’s screen.
‘What’s the answer to question twenty-five?’ Chloe jokingly asked.
‘Stalactite,’ he replied in jest.
‘Oh, I put Sasquatch.’
‘Okay, professor, very funny.’
‘Are you ready?’ she asked. ‘What’d you find?’
‘For one,’ Armada started, ‘none of this is going through Engenechem HR. Whoever these individuals are, they’re submitting everything directly to Wyczthack and White. Moving on, I pulled files for both male and female applicants between thirty-two and sixty-one years of age from all over the world. All five are in positions of power and prestige within their organizations. I found a forty-three-year-old single father of three that’s the senior project manager at Imabari Ship in Japan. Next, a thirty-eight-year-old single mother of one who’s a senior site development manager with Glencore Xstrata, living in Australia. Third, and the oldest of the bunch, a sixty-one-year-old professor who’s the chair of Systems and Software Engineering at Cornell in Ithaca. He smokes a pipe, drinks, and underwent double bypass heart surgery two years ago. Number four, a widower from London who works in the Department of Alternative Propulsion for BAE Systems in England. He’s in his fifties, smokes, and never had any children. And finally, in fifth place, a married woman in her late forties, five kids, doesn’t smoke, drinks a couple glasses of wine a week, and works for Parsons Brinkerhoff Engineers as their Western Hemisphere senior site manager. She lives in Poulsbo, just out of Seattle, but travels all over. From northern Saskatchewan down to Chile, she goes everywhere. All of these individuals are supersmart and excel at what they do. Salaries range from a hundred twenty thousand dollars to more than half a million. Wyczthack and White went way beyond the conventional psychological profiling and physiological makeup of these people; they did a complete genome panel and ancestry search as well.’
‘All five of my picks had something in either their direct past or a close family member’s, like polio, influenza, diabetes, cancer, macular degeneration, ALS, Alzheimer’s; something hereditary and passed down through the bloodline. Going by what I’ve read in these random selections, Cain went back at least five generations in each of their family trees. A few had members who suffered from an autoimmune disease, whereas some were diagnosed as schizophrenic, clinically depressed, or had bipolar and multiple personality disorders. That about sums it up for me. What did you find?’
Armada dispatched his lengthy and in-depth assessment, and resumed his investigation into the background programs currently running on the Master Server.
As he suspected, Watcher was taking up a considerable chunk of bandwidth, followed by Grocery List. But the Contestant program occupied the lion’s share of available bandwidth space. Contestant had no less than two thousand users logged on at any given moment, day or night. The file history showed that, on average, Contestant was receiving, compiling, and storing a terabyte of data for fifty thousand individuals a day.
‘Are you ready?’ Chloe’s newest message asked.
‘Fire away!’ Armada answered smartly.
He waited and waited for a letter, but it never arrived. Just as he began typing ‘Hello,’ he received Chloe’s message.
‘I found many similarities between Contestant files and those in the Eggs folder. Like the individuals in Contestant, those in Eggs are at the top of the food chain. Plenty of engineers, managers, and designers. My five candidates, however, are no older than thirty-five and no younger than twenty-seven. Out of the five, only
one had children, and three of them, two male and one female, are still single. None of them smoke, but they all drink alcohol, mostly wine, and all five have a clean history for substance abuse.’
‘Their blood and genome panels are exceptional, and the ancestral ties are, for the most part, nil of anything significant. One individual, the principal engineer for Robotics and Nanotechnologies with Hitachi, had a maternal grandfather who died of leukemia. Other than that, nothing here to report. One thing I will comment on is that from all outward appearances, this information is identical to the oceans of data Wyczthack and White have been collecting on us for years. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m more qualified and have a current, hands-on education that far surpasses the vast majority of these people in three separate fields of study. Our IQ scores probably put all of theirs to shame. Plus, our DNA is pure. I don’t know what’s going on, but why go through the hassle and expense of selecting and testing candidates, knowing all the while that the person, and end results, will be inferior?’
Armada carefully pondered her questions. Chloe made a good point. Why indeed would Cain and Dr. White be gathering so much information on that many people? Why select thousands of individuals who, intellectually, were well below the par of those in the EC Program, and genetically flawed?
‘What would you say is the overall mortality rate of your kind?’ Armada asked, ‘Factoring in substitutions and end of cycle swaps, I’d estimate we’re at fifty percent.’
‘That sounds about right,’ Chloe replied, ‘Dr. White is releasing a new batch every month. But out of two hundred sisters, almost half die off within sixty days or so. How often does he release a batch for your kind?’
‘We received a new batch, the Hercules class, two months ago,’ he answered, ‘but ours are roughly three hundred in number, and die off is also in the fifty percent range.’
‘How many Clouds have you constructed? How many in total are scheduled for production? How many inhabitants can one Cloud house?’
‘Eight so far, ten, and forty-five hundred each,’ he swiftly responded.
Armada hovered in front of the Arena One communication kiosk, slightly illuminated by the underglow of the terminal keyboard. He spun around and gazed through the wide, panoramic window at the collection of Clouds, Arenas, Arks, and Eden. The mammoth structures loomed over the dinky, cylindrical dormitories connected to the Arenas. He focused on the three dormitories, then the Clouds, and then back to the dorms.
“The dormitories hold two hundred,” he whispered to himself. “Four dorm systems means eight hundred inhabitants. But two hundred experience end of cycle every two months. Two hundred die off, but two hundred are brought up. It’s a wash. They cancel each other out.”
“It’s a wash! It’s a wash!” he repeated, almost shouting. Armada glanced up at the video camera, and was relieved to find the green light still glowing.
‘Contestant, Eggs, and Grocery List are all connected!’ he speedily typed and sent to Chloe.
He started to expand on his epiphany when Chloe’s reply of ‘WHAT!?’ appeared on his screen.
‘Cain and Dr. White are using us to construct and assemble the Clouds, so that when the time is right, everything will be up and running for the people in the Eggs file. Do you get it? Wyczthack and White are putting all of their best ‘Eggs in a Basket.’ That’s why they’re purchasing a million toothbrushes, two million pairs of shoes, five hundred thousand packs of underwear. Engenechem is planning on some global catastrophe to justify taking the selected applicants up to the Clouds. It’s perfect!’
Chloe read through Armada’s letter three times. At first, she thought it too extravagant and elaborate of a plan to be pulled off. The second time, she started putting the pieces together and found herself growing angry as her pulse rate increased. When she read it the third time, a chill ran down her spine and a wave of fear, panic, and dread washed over her.
Chloe began crying as she typed, ‘Oh, my gosh, Armada! What are we going to do? I don’t want to be killed off.’
‘You’re not going to be killed,’ he tried to console her. ‘You’re not going to die, not if I have a say in it. Let’s think this out. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ she replied.
‘Do you trust me?’ Armada inquired.
‘Yes.’
‘All right, we’ll be just fine. First, let’s assume that I’m correct and Wyczthack and White, and you and I, are the only ones who know about the end game. If too many are in on the plan, it’ll create a panic and chaos. Cain doesn’t want that; he’s a spoiled brat and a control freak. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ Chloe typed, wiping her nose and eyes.
‘Good. Who’s your buddy? Who makes you laugh?’ he pecked, smiling to himself, knowing it would cause her to smile and lighten up.
‘You.’
‘Okay then, moving on. Cain needs everything to run smoothly to pull this off. Whoever he’s working with, they’re either not fully aware of his ultimate goal, they’re just plain stupid, or they’re in on it. Next, Wyczthack and White can’t initiate their plans until the Clouds are finished. We’re currently working on Cloud Eight, and modules for Cloud Nine have begun arriving at the Aerie. I can slow things down for a little while with staging, but as a long-term stall tactic, that won’t work.’
‘Who can we tell? Isn’t there someone we can talk to and explain what’s really going on?’
‘I wish there was,’ Armada answered.
As he was about to elaborate on his hypothesis, the monitor suddenly went dark as well as the keyboard. Armada looked for the illuminated power button, but that, too, was dark. He turned his attention to the video camera and the miniature green light refused to shine. Once more, he pulled himself to the large panoramic window and peered out at the hovering community of metal structures. He was shocked to find that the power failure had not affected Eden, the Arks, Clouds, or Arenas and dormitories. In fact, looking down he noticed that the exterior lighting for the staging zones, the Aerie, the four SPUDs, and all five CARBEL Halos was fully functional. Even the SUBOS appeared to have avoided a power outage.
Chloe, in the meanwhile, was awaiting a reply from Armada. Suddenly her computer screen flickered, and the window with Armada’s last message disappeared. She fell back in her chair and held her hands up in confusion. Her mouth was agape in shock as an automatic notification flashed in the bottom right corner of her monitor: ‘Terminal Error: Source Signal Lost.’
“Oh, no,” she mumbled. “No, no, no, no! Armada! Don’t leave me hanging!”
She restarted her terminal server and immediately looked for any incoming messages. There were none. Again, Chloe felt the nervous panic building inside her. Her heart pounded fiercely, and she could feel the heat in her face and cheeks radiating to her throat and upper chest.
“C’mon, Armada,” she whimpered softly, scooting closer to the monitor. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Please, answer me!”
Chloe refreshed the mailbox, but no new messages were received. She pushed away from her desk, buried her face in her hands, and silently wept.
Please! she thought to herself, This can’t be how it ends! It just can’t. Armada, I need you! Please!
***
Armada was stumped as to why the Arena would experience a loss of power. He again glanced up at the video camera and still no lights, red or green, showed from the base. He pushed away from the wall in the direction of the kiosk, and before reaching out to grasp a hand bar, something caught his attention. The tunnel connecting the dormitories was not fully lit. Normally, a quartet of powerful LEDs, placed every ten feet, illuminated the tunnel in brilliant, white light. Now the tube was very dim, and the source of light was moving.
After timidly sticking his head into the tunnel, he looked to his left and to his right but observed no one. What he did observe was the movement of a faint glow at the end of the tunnel, and the video cameras weren’t functioning.
“What?” he asked out loud, as he withdre
w from the tunnel back into the Arena.
Armada turned around to make sure the camera on the ceiling hadn’t been activated. It sat motionless.
He pulled himself completely into the connecting tunnel and noticed that the light hadn’t changed its position. But as he began to propel himself along the hand rungs, the glow continued to advance ahead of him. If Armada stopped, the light stopped. He tried playing a trick by stopping and backing up to see how the opaque and transparent orb would react. Surprisingly, the glowing apparition reversed itself and waited.
Whatever path the light traveled, Armada noticed that all lights and video monitors ceased to function. He followed the sphere all the way back to his dormitory entrance portal. Once directly in front of the portal, he felt compelled to pursue the light rather than enter the dorm and go to bed. He made the conscious decision to evaluate his situation, how he felt, and make a mental note of his thought process.
Armada turned to face the hovering beacon and pushed away from the dorm portal. He trailed the cloudy mass past the remaining dormitories, Garret’s private offices, the communications center and kitchen, until it finally stopped at the EVA prep area, Arena One docking station, and air locks. Just as he noticed the absence of electrical power in the connecting tunnel, so, too, was the obvious lack of energy in the receiving bay.
He had a firm grasp on one of the hand rungs and maintained his position at the entrance to the bay. The translucent orb floated further away from him to the very end of the docking station. It stopped moving once it reached the last staging zone and pressurized air lock. Armada fixed his gaze on the ethereal cloud. The hues in the vaporous mass alternated continuously from warm yellows and orange, to cool shades of blue, green, and purple.
‘Okay, what now?’ he half-jokingly and silently asked himself.
He stared and waited, not fully knowing what he should do next.
“Go to her,” a voice called out. “Go to her now, and fear not.”
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