The Prometheus Effect

by David Fleming

  “What can I do for you, Mykl?” she asked.

  “Dawn?”

  Dr. Lee set down a stylus and asked Mykl to follow her. Dawn resided one room over. That made Mykl feel better. She hadn’t been stored away in some random out-of-the-way location.

  Dr. Lee slid open a side view panel so he could better see inside Dawn’s cylinder. Mykl tentatively touched the view window. It made a tiny fog spot at his fingertip, which rapidly went away as he withdrew it. He held his breath in order to better detect any movement from inside, but he observed no signs of life. A fine layer of rime dusted Dawn’s eyelashes.

  “By definition,” Dr. Lee said from behind him, “she is clinically dead. Biologically, her life is suspended in time. At 173 degrees Kelvin, she is in a dreamless sleep. Her cancer is no longer killing her.”

  Mykl tuned out after hearing the words “clinically dead.” “She can be awakened again, right?” A silly question. He knew that. But sometimes one needed to hear the answers to silly questions again and again before they could be believed.

  “The process is complete. We could start the reanimation procedure right now, but James wants to be present when we do. She expressed the same desire.”

  “So she’ll stay like this?” Mykl asked.

  “For as long as needed.”

  “What’s the longest someone’s been kept like this before reanimation?”

  “About fifty years. That was before I started here. Jack rescued a little boy in the late stages of a neuromuscular disease from a terminal care center. The boy had been bed-ridden for most of his life and knew very little of the outside world. He knew only that he was trapped in a body that had failed him. When our knowledge on nerve regeneration was sufficiently advanced, we woke him. We watched in amazement as his damaged myelin sheaths began to heal. Without this treatment, he would certainly have died.”

  “And he’s still okay now?” Mykl asked.

  “Of course. Except for being skinny and hating all vegetables. James has met him. His name is Timmy.”

  Mykl had seen Timmy in the hotel kitchen when he was searching the video feeds in James’s folders.

  “When we deemed Timmy fully recovered, he was adopted by one of our agents who works on an ambulance in Las Vegas. Considering that Timmy was thrust ahead fifty years in a time machine, he’s adapted beautifully. But he has no knowledge of the City or his father’s affiliation with it.”

  “How long is Dawn’s ‘time machine’ set for?”

  “That’s not preset in advance,” Dr. Lee answered. “It could be a day, a year, or a hundred years. Until the situation on the planet is resolved, it’s not safe, or fair, to wake everyone.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Lee. I’m going to go back to my room now.” Mykl gently rubbed Dawn’s cylinder. Whether for luck or goodbye, he couldn’t say. All he knew was the gesture made him feel less cold inside.

  On returning to his room, Mykl discovered a long section of toilet paper unrolled to the base of the windowed wall, its end shredded. Noah was asleep in the window slit, nestled on a fluffy white cloud of his own making.

  Mykl tore a few extra squares off the end of the roll and laid them over the sleeping mouse like miniature blankets. He remembered all too well what had happened to the last creature he had given protection from the cold. Too many mean people existed in the world. Acts of kindness went a long way.

  With Noah snoozing before a panorama of moon and Earth, Mykl decided to begin in earnest on Jack’s problem. His personal folder contained new files—a good sign. The contents of Jack’s “Operations” folder had exploded as well. If he had reserved secrets, it couldn’t be many.

  A new folder labeled “Children” immediately caught Mykl’s attention. Inside were alphabetized subfolders for all the world’s countries. There was also a folder containing video feeds, which Mykl began scrolling through. A rolling time stamp showed them to be live images.

  The scenes he witnessed made Lori seem like an angel. Thousands upon thousands of children were starving to death from too little food, while the men guarding them obviously ate too much. Boys not much older than himself carried rifles too big for their undeveloped muscles. Mass graves piled high with tiny bodies grew as expressionless men threw in more without looking back.

  How? Why? The stupidity of it all made Mykl sick. Don’t these people know they’re literally throwing away their future?

  Then he came to the girls…

  He closed the files immediately. That was enough. He couldn’t watch anymore.

  Jack couldn’t save them all; there were too many. And Mykl knew for certain that any one of those children, given the chance, would gladly live in the conditions of the Box. Even with Lori running it.

  Mykl rubbed his cheeks. He didn’t realize he had been clenching his jaw for so long. Any solution he came up with would definitely take into account the children of the world.

  Intelligence gathering reported massive troop deployments on every continent. Navies had stepped up patrols and established lines of defense at major ports. All except China and Russia, who appeared to be playing a game of cat and mouse in the Indian Ocean, heading toward East Africa. Mykl couldn’t find any reports to explain the strange convergence of so many vessels. That was undoubtedly one of Jack’s secrets he didn’t care to share.

  Mykl set his wall globe spinning and made the computer plot in red every city currently targeted by nukes. His room turned eerie from the haunting glow. He then computed the affected areas after detonation and overlaid those in pink. The color completely saturated every landmass. The only unaffected areas were deep in the oceans. He adjusted to show one week after an all-out nuclear event. Now even the oceans filled in with the deadly color. He saw no need to run the mortality rates. This could never be allowed as a solution.

  With two keystrokes, Mykl brought back the normal globe. If it were only that easy, he thought. He brought up a saved picture of his mother. She had lost her life working on the front lines of this battle; Mykl felt like he was letting her down. Before he knew it, he was scrolling through every picture of her. It was far better for his psyche than the graphic scenes he’d discovered in the other folders.

  He wanted to see more pictures, so he entered a search for her cover name. A police evidence file sat at the top of the list.

  Don’t open it, he told himself. Nothing good can come of this.

  He removed his hands from the keyboard and placed them in his lap. No one had ever told Mykl how his mother died. Only that she had been killed.

  He hopped off his chair. It wouldn’t make any difference to know the details.

  He drifted to his bed and took Stinker in his arms. It won’t change anything. It won’t bring her back.

  He stared at the computer screen, a debate rampaging in his brain.

  He finally retook his seat, with Stinker in his lap. Uncounted reasons swam in his head telling him why he shouldn’t open that file. But his need trumped them all. I have to know the truth.

  Firmly holding Stinker to his chest, he opened the file. It contained all the official documentation on the incident. Police reports, coroner and witness statements. The presence of an attached security video clip caused Mykl the most fear. Can’t stop now.

  He played the clip—and immediately froze the blurry image. His mother was walking toward what appeared to be a back entrance. At this moment in time, she still lived. He could leave it at that. Shut off the computer and walk away with that memory… and be forever haunted with not knowing.

  He allowed the playback to resume.

  Two masked men rushed in from opposite sides of the frame. One drew a long knife hard against her throat while the other pulled her to the ground. The buckles on her boots glinted in the harsh lighting as she thrashed and kicked at her assailants. They were too strong. Again and again and again, they raised knives high in the air. After each plunge, the blades came back up a darker shade of red, until the kicking stopped. The men ran in opposite directions.<
br />
  Mykl watched the pool of blood grow. He leaned forward in his chair to analyze the scene. Muddled emotions sloshed in his mind. Absentmindedly, he rubbed one of Stinker’s ears between two fingers. He truly experienced sorrow for this woman who had been so brutally killed. But—this was not his mother. She had worn boots with laces that evening. Not buckles.

  The first thought in Mykl’s mind was to run and tell someone. She could still be alive! Then he realized no one was more suited, or motivated, to find out what happened than him.

  There have to be more camera angles, he thought. City technology had the capability to tap into any security system. He located the address of the strip club from the police report. It took him only seconds to access the club’s video archive. While the club itself didn’t store records for very long, the City boasted virtually unlimited capacity for data storage. What others deleted, the City archived.

  Recalling the date of the incident was an easy matter. One does not readily forget their own birthday. He found dozens of security cameras within a one-block radius. The club’s camera on the employee entrance confirmed her showing up to work with lace-up boots. Mykl fast-forwarded the playback of an interior camera a few minutes before the woman’s attack. He caught someone briefly conversing with his mother. They pointed, as if describing something behind the club. His mother rushed outside. The same camera that recorded the murder confirmed her leaving. But it wasn’t her who came back.

  Odd.

  He needed another camera angle. An industrial building directly behind the club granted a high, wide-angle view. Mykl entered a timecode thirty minutes before the attack and fast-forwarded. A truck driving through the club’s rear parking lot stopped, then suddenly backed into his mother’s car. Then drove away. No wonder his mother rushed out. As she surveyed the damage, a dark van, with its side door open, blazed into the lot and screeched to a stop behind her. Three men jumped out and muscled her inside. The camera showed no other people who could have witnessed the event.

  As the van’s side door slammed shut, the passenger door opened, and a woman got out. She looked identical to his mother, and she was dressed the same—except for the buckles on her boots. She spent a moment adjusting her hair after the van drove off. So, she was part of it. But surely she didn’t know what her assignment was. Her grisly death was about to be used to cover up an abduction.

  Still alive, Mykl made himself believe. But where?

  Enough cameras existed along the van’s route for him to track it to one of the city’s smaller airports. Men removed his mother’s limp body from the van and carried her into a private jet. She’s drugged, Mykl thought. The alternative was unthinkable.

  The jet’s registration number indicated that it was of Chinese ownership with diplomatic status. Its flight plan showed its final destination as Cabo San Lucas. From there, Mykl had to dig into the City’s archive data on aircraft tracking. If the plane had a computer chip, all movement was logged, regardless of whether or not it filed a flight plan. He found airport security footage that confirmed each landing and refueling of his mother’s plane as it made hop after hop to the tip of South America. But it wasn’t until an airport serving Punta Arenas that he finally reconfirmed his mother’s presence. Her body still limp, she was taken from the plane, and new faces loaded her into another van.

  Mykl wiped his moist hands on Stinker’s fur. If they’re going through this much trouble to move her, they aren’t going to kill her. Rationalization gave him courage to keep going.

  The van proceeded to the docks, where his mother was loaded onto a large vessel registered as a Chinese research ship. Not only were the ship’s onboard cameras turned off, which normally wasn’t a problem for City technology, they were also completely shrouded. So—the people behind this were so suspicious, they didn’t trust the surveillance cameras on their own ship. Mykl instead had to use satellite imagery from the City tracking database. For three days, the ship cruised along Antarctica’s coastline. Then it anchored in an iceberg-clogged bay. He could only enlarge the image so far before it began losing critical detail. He detected a helicopter leaving the ship, but could not positively identify his mother being transferred aboard.

  Deep in the Antarctic wasteland, the helicopter landed next to a track-wheeled snow vehicle. Mykl strained his eyes to make out details in the pixels of those who left the helicopter. Three people. He could be sure of very little, but he was certain that one was smaller than the other two. That had to be her.

  He brought up another screen to show the same image in infrared. The ice and snow turned black; anything with warmth glowed brightly. The glow of the ice vehicle floated along a curving path as he sped up the playback. It finally came to a stop at a base station made of square buildings. Mykl pulled up the informational report for the base coordinates: Kunlun Station, one of the coldest places on Earth. The perfect place to interrogate a spy without fear of them escaping.

  Mykl zoomed in on the base, now tracking both normal and infrared side by side. No one would leave without him seeing. He gradually increased the speed of the playback.

  One day… two… three… Only a single person at a time ever left the buildings.

  Four days… five…

  Finally, on the seventh day, a person came out and entered a tractor to take it beyond the base perimeter. Mykl ignored it. Soon after, three people emerged from a central building.

  Mykl clicked the playback to normal speed. The person in the middle glowed brighter than the other two. It dawned on Mykl that the other two must be wearing climate gear to protect them from the cold. They walked in the direction the tractor had gone.

  No!

  Mykl backed up the recording to the point where the tractor left the base. This time he followed it. Just past the base perimeter, it stopped and made a deep pit in the snow pack. Cold fear flowed into Mykl’s soul. There was no question what—or whom—that pit was for.

  The three glowing dots approached the edge of the pit. Mykl zoomed in as far as he could. The person in the center no longer glowed as brightly as before; the cold was taking its toll. For several minutes, the dots barely moved. Then an infrared flash scattered incandescent bits of the center person toward the pit. Tiny heat signatures disappeared quickly as the warm blood droplets froze. Then the person fell into the pit, unmoving.

  With the execution complete, the tractor pushed broken ice and snow to cover the body, and the warm glow of Mykl’s mother disappeared.

  In desperation, he ran the satellite feed all the way to present. Nothing changed. He rested his forehead on the desk and cried.

  CHAPTER 80

  Lawrence’s shift had so far consisted of an uneventful morning and afternoon, so what happened in the early evening balanced everything out. In the twistiest part of North Shore Road, at the far border of his patrol area, he came across fresh skid marks intertwining through a blind curve. The right-angle start to them meant a significant impact had occurred.

  Heavily damaged vehicles had ended up on opposite sides of the road. The first was a classic muscle car—or had been. Its mutilated corpse now lay belly up to the dimming sky, and its driver was sprawled halfway out a shattered window, cold and stiff. The accident must have happened after the end of Lawrence’s rounds yesterday. The driver had apparently lived long enough to enjoy one last beer, judging by the half-empty can still clutched in his hand. Numerous others littered the scene and the interior of his ruined ride. At least he was the only one in the vehicle.

  Lawrence notified his dispatcher to send a coroner. Nothing worth saving remained on this side of the road.

  He hustled over to the other side, hoping, but not betting, he would find a brighter outcome.

  Scorched desert painted a sooty halo around the charred husk of the second vehicle. Lawrence knew no life existed in the burned car, but he executed a thorough search of the area in the dim hope that someone might have been ejected from the vehicle. He found nothing.

  Reluctantly, he
then inspected the burned car. He needed the VIN number and an occupant count. The tally-box for total fatalities on his accident form reported the number as “two” when he was done: one in each vehicle. The VIN came back with no registered owner, and there was little to identify the victim. Jane/John Doe temporarily filled the ID section of his report. He thought the victim might be female, but he couldn’t be certain. Fire does horrible things to human flesh.

  ***

  After helping the shorthanded coroner load his vehicle and signing the tow man’s book, Lawrence returned to his truck. Time to call it a day. Reheat some dinner. Rinse. Repeat.

  A clicking sound came from underneath his right boot as he stepped from the desert back onto the road. He reached down and pried off a shiny object stuck to his sole.

  “Damn thing. Why won’t it stay put?” He wiped sooty dirt off his nametag and went to refasten it to his old jacket. But then he blinked in confusion. He was already wearing a nametag.

  He shrugged. “Must have been an extra that fell out of my pocket. Heaven knows I’ve bought enough of them in my career.” He pocketed the extra nametag and started home.

  ***

  Five hours later, warm light from a sputtering old kerosene lantern cast flickering shadows in the stillness of Lawrence’s trailer. The lantern’s constant noise sounded to Lawrence like an exhaled breath, which made him think of it as a living entity, glowing brightly, providing warmth and security. It masked the sound of his finite heartbeat and the deadly silence encroaching from outside. Almost out of fuel, it hissed and coughed. None remained to refill it. A half-melted emergency candle sat at the ready. After that burned away, the only light would be from stars and the glowing orange smoke plumes beyond the nearest mountain.

  Lawrence had been a soldier and a survivor. He would survive this too. Every electronic device in his domain now lay dead and useless. Even the battery-powered ones. He’d had to walk the last five miles home after the flash scuttled his truck. A military-grade EMP was the only reasonable explanation. If so, it would take years for the government to remedy that—and that was if something worse didn’t happen first.