Finding Their Path

by Travis Mohrman

  “What the heck is an atlatl?”

  “They’re so neat. I didn’t have a clue what they were either. It’s a very primitive weapon used to throw spears faster and with better accuracy. Basically, they are a little piece of wood, maybe two feet long, that the back of the spear rests in and it actually comes up just a bit to notch onto the back of the spear. Then you hold onto the atlatl and swing it downward. It throws the spear with more leverage than your arm alone. It’s pretty tricky, but really fun to learn!”

  Kate did think that sounded like fun, but she also thought it sounded like more of a team building exercise. They had been proven time and again to help in isolated situations like this, to bring everyone together. She had a sneaking suspicion that she might be involved in organizing those gatherings.

  “That does sound like a fun way to spend a day,” she said, not wanting to reveal the true motives of a sound policy. “Well, you want to show me the rest of the place?”

  “Definitely, but don’t get too excited, this is the most awe inspiring room here. The rest is just various labs, but the technology behind it is pretty impressive. Come on, we’ll head back up the stairs.”

  Kate watched Laurel start back up the two flights of stairs. She couldn’t help wondering as she left the massive chamber what the purpose might be for so many vehicles if they never seemed to get used. Laurel had mentioned that they didn’t have very many military people here, but she had seen at least a dozen military fighter jets in the garage. Somebody had to be around to fly them, and she doubted it was somebody with the stature of Jeep. He didn’t exactly have the body of a jet pilot.

  +++

  They had looked at most of the labs, the cafeteria, as well as the sleeping quarters, and now the pair were heading over to her new office. Kate was stunned at the level of automation the building possessed. Most things were automated with voice commands all over the country, but this was a whole new level. She needed to ask for a chair in order for one to appear, but Laurel had explained that that was a temporary situation. By tomorrow, the AI Shunka would have learned Kate’s subtle cues for most of her needs and be able to offer them before she even asked.

  She would have doubted the efficacy of it had she not seen it in use, both by Laurel and many of the people in the cafeteria when they looked in there. Walls opened, tables slid out of nowhere, chairs grew right out of the floor, all without a single command other than subconscious motions. Many started sitting before the chair was even fully assembled, but every time their butt came down the chair was fully formed and waiting for them.

  The other amazing thing was the furniture itself. It was able to “grow” because it was made up of variously sized pieces of metal held together with super strong rare earth magnets made of neodymium. Because the furniture could shape itself to fit the user, everything she sat on was perfectly comfortable and was literally built exactly to the specifications of her body. Laurel had explained that Shunka even noticed unhealthy postures and created chairs and beds to help correct small spinal inconsistencies. Kate thought this was ingenious and was a great way to keep people healthy, happy, and productive. She knew from her own experience that nothing sours a day faster than waking up with body aches.

  As they approached the door that Kate assumed was her office, she heard a clattering from down the hall, followed by some laughter.

  “Oh great, I was wondering when this little miscreant would show up.” Laurel said. The sarcasm in her voice led Kate to wonder exactly who was coming.

  As she watched down the hall, she heard someone yell, “HEY! NO!” and out of one of the offices came a gangly dog with a towel in its mouth. As it ran full steam towards them, Kate was nearly hypnotized by the up and down flopping of the longest pair of ears she had ever seen on a dog.

  He initially flew right past the two of them, but then quickly stopped and dropped the towel. He came bounding right back to Kate and jumped high in the air all around her. He obviously wanted to jump on her, but resisted and settled on this routine. His nose was sticking straight up in the air as he hopped up and down, ears flapping. Within a few moments, he settled down and began sniffing her feet and legs. She noticed that his ears were so long that they actually rested on the floor while he sniffed her shoes.

  “Kate, this is Bender. He’s uhhh….kind of like a mascot I guess?” Laurel said as she scratched his rump.

  Kate looked at him again and noticed that even though his paws were huge, nearly the size of her own hands, he wasn’t a very large dog. He looked to be only around 60 or so pounds. As he stopped sniffing and looked up at her, her heart melted. He had the most thoughtful, sincere, honey colored eyes she had ever seen. His coat was mostly shiny black, but he had rich gold coloring around his chest, muzzle and all four legs along with a dark gold dot over each eye.

  Kate was one of the few kids she knew of that had grown up without a dog. Her mother had always said that they required too much work and would ruin the house, but Kate knew that the woman was secretly terrified of the furry beasts. Although she had played with the dogs in the neighborhood, she knew she had missed out on a great deal by never getting to live with one. Even after college she wanted to get a dog, but her ex-husband said the same basic thing as her mother, that they required too much time to train and they were messy. Kate was thrilled to meet this long eared little monster!

  “Is he just a puppy? He’s so beautiful, where did he come from?” Kate couldn’t get enough of the dog as he came in and was sniffing her face. His huge wet nose was less than an inch from her cheek. She had worried he was a face licker, but it was obvious he was only interested in sniffing all the various new scents she may have carried in from the outside world.

  “We sometimes try to say he’s a puppy, but he’s been here for close to three years from what I have heard. He was a stray who wandered in and the director decided it would be a good thing for morale if he let him stay.” Laurel sighed as she stopped petting him and looked over to Kate. “Don’t get taken in by his looks, he is a mischievous little chump and he’s acutely aware of his level of handsomeness. I’ve seen him sidle up to someone, then bat his eyes and pounce around like he wanted to play. As soon as the person got up to play with him, Bender snuck around him, stole his sandwich and ran off!” Laurel laughed a little as she told the story, but Kate could tell the story was real.

  “You’re just a little devil aren’t you?” said Kate, continuing to scratch his long ears. Finally, she held the tip of each one and lifted them up. She guessed they were almost 10 inches long. “I’ve never seen ears this long on a dog before!”

  “One of the labs worked up his genetics for fun; turns out he’s half black and tan coonhound. That’s what gives him the color and the incredible ears. The other half is Redtick Coonhound, which Jeep says is responsible for him being a sneaky scoundrel. We had a betting pool going about what he was made up of. No one got it right because most people said he was half Loki. ”

  “Loki? I’ve never hear of that breed.”

  “That’s because he’s not a breed. He’s the god of mischief, Norse I think.” Then Laurel continued on about the legend of Loki.

  As she explained all this, Bender stopped sniffing and simply walked away. Kate was still scratching him, but he didn’t seem to notice. “And then there’s that,” said Laurel. “Once he realizes you don’t have anything he wants, he just walks away. It’s some of the weirdest behavior I have ever seen.”

  “He’s a dog who has priorities, I guess. I can respect that.” Kate smiled as she watched him lope down the hallway, his nose sniffing incessantly as he went. Looking into the office in front of them, she asked “So, is this my new place?”

  “Yup. It’s a pretty standard office, but you can build things up however you want. Other than the conference room, this office has the largest video screen. The old doctor used to set it to look like a window or something like that, at least when I was in here.”

  “I guess that makes sense.” Ka
te said as she looked around. The room was large, at least 750 square feet. It had lots of room for chairs and couches and all kinds of things. She had been told that when she was talking with staff, she could choose any of a number of topics to research and nest them inside her sessions. She hadn’t picked one yet, but after seeing this place she was leaning towards looking into the effects of isolation on a small group of highly educated individuals. “Hey, you never showed me where your lab was!” Kate exclaimed.

  “That’s because to get into it you have to put on a big white space suit. Bio-hazard, remember?”

  “I know, but didn’t you say it was a level below? What else is down there?” Kate asked, genuinely curious to find out as much about the site as she could before she began trying to help others work through their problems. She knew she needed to understand them to help them.

  “Most of it is dedicated to the seed vault, then there’s my lab and that’s about it.” Laurel had grown tense at the question. Kate had quickly noticed it and decided to not push the issue further.

  “Tell me more about the virus you’re working on? How many people have it?” Kate had bolstered her courage to hear more about this virus, and earlier it had seemed like a topic Laurel enjoyed talking about.

  “Not too many, a couple hundred that we know of. It’s not deadly or anything, just seems to give the host a fever for a while and then slink away.”

  Kate nodded her head, relieved to hear that it wasn’t deadly. “So, to what end are you working on it?”

  “I am just trying to figure out more about it. We have no idea where it came from; it seems to be mutating or actually adapting to our human tissue samples. Usually DNA viruses are very stable, but this one acts…differently.” Laurel had picked up a little wonder in her eyes as she talked about it. “It doesn’t go away, though, it stays behind, changing little bits of code. Nothing that seems to affect us, just little odds and ends here and there as it replicates.” Kate could easily see how much the other woman truly loved her work.

  “That sounds really interesting. I knew viruses could mutate, we all learned that during the badger flu pandemic from 2026, but this one sounds like it can actually ‘think’!”

  “Badger flu happened when I was only 3, but I remember reading about it and studying it later. That was a weird one. Quickly put an end to the burgeoning badger milk business too.” Laurel seemed lost in thought for a second, but quickly regained herself. “Okay, well, I do have a few things to check before I punch out for the day. We all eat around seven, usually. Come on down to the caf and you can meet all the other people we didn’t bump into today.”

  “Sounds like a plan. I’m going to go sort out my things in my bedroom and I’ll meet you there in a few hours.” With that, Kate watched Laurel head back down the hall. Seconds later she heard a “NO” and then saw the little dog go flying down the hall, deftly maneuvering around several sets of legs with the skill of a fighter pilot doing a canyon run. Kate smiled and thought that of the many things she had expected to find in this mysterious place, that little troublemaker had never even begun to enter into her imagination.

  5

  As Kate was unpacking her books onto the freshly created bookshelf, the video screen in her bedroom slowly lit up. As she stared at it, a voice gently glided out from the unseen speakers. “Hello, Kate. I hope you’re getting settled in nicely?” the computer asked.

  “Uhh…yes. Everything is going fine.” It was really going to take her some time to get used to such a human sounding AI system. It was just strange to hear actual emotion in the voice of a computer.

  “That’s great. I assume you noticed the screen shift color? I usually do something like that to let people know I am going to talk to them. At first I would just start talking and in situations like this, the person would usually be startled.”

  So, this machine can adapt, truly fascinating. “That’s very kind of you Shunka, I would have been startled for sure. I was lost in thought as I was arranging my books.”

  “It’s my pleasure. This is not merely a social call though. The general would like to meet with you in his office; he said it won’t take long. Will you able to meet with him in few minutes?”

  Kate didn’t really have anything better to do at the moment. “That won’t be a problem. Can you generate a map or something for me? I don’t remember which one was his office.” Kate was chagrined that she wasn’t able to recall how to get there. It was a big facility, but she had seen the maps and hoped she would at least remember how to get to the office belonging to the man in charge.

  “I can do better than that. I am theorizing from your wardrobe that your favorite color is purple. Just follow the purple line running along the wall, and it will end at his door. I’ll let him know that you will be there shortly.”

  She watched as a purple line, no thicker than a pencil, lit up on the side of the wall, a few feet off the ground. She touched it but found no recess where a strip of LED lights could be embedded. It was almost as if the grey concrete and metal wall had just had this thin line painted on it. She knew that wasn’t what happened. Kate made a mental note to ask Shunka or someone else about how in the world the lines were created later; right now she didn’t want to keep the general waiting.

  Setting the rest of her books on the shelf, she strolled out the door and began following the purple line out into the hall. It was nice because the line wasn’t set at such a height to be distracting to other people. It was all very well planned out.

  In short order, she found herself outside the office of the general. She was fairly certain she would have found it, but the line certainly sped up the trip and she avoided walking around looking lost. She knocked briefly, but the door immediately snapped open and disappeared into the wall.

  “Come on in Kate, have a seat. This won’t take long at all.” the general said in his low baritone. He had been staring into the video screen that was displaying images of large, anvil-shaped clouds floating around.

  Kate stepped into his office and found it to be almost the same size as hers, but slightly bigger. This office was well decorated with many medals and commendations hanging on the walls, as well as dozens of pictures of the general smiling in what seemed to be various parts of the world. It had a very warm feeling for the office of a director of a facility that sits entirely encased in stone. Kate liked it. It felt very lived in.

  “I trust Laurel showed you around?” he said without looking up. He continued to shuffle through the papers on his desk as he waited on her response.

  “Yes sir. This place is amazing. Some of the tech is simply off the charts!”

  “Well, we’re happy with it. Listen, I just wanted to explain the ropes to you real quickly and...AHA, here it is!” the general said as he triumphantly raised a single piece of paper up into view. “Now that you have seen the place, I will need you to sign this agreement if you want to stay. Feel free to read it and bring it back if you want. It basically says that you have seen the place and still agree to work here.”

  Kate skimmed it over and decided it was a standard boiler plate form. Much shorter than the multiple non-disclosure agreements she had to sign before she even came here. Those things had to have every page initialed. Her wrist was still sore from that. She signed the paper and slid it back to the older man.

  “Great, great, welcome aboard and all that. Now, I’m getting hungry for chow, so I’ll cut to the chase. You are here to keep these people mentally healthy, happy, and productive. That’s about it. Most everyone here has their doctorate, so everybody just uses first names. I have one in military history, but my first name is Dana, so call me General.” The general laughed at his own joke for a second and then continued speaking. “We’re a laid back bunch, just doing our work and keeping this location fully operational.”

  Kate wanted to tell him that she thought his name was fine, not something to shy away from. She had known several men named Dana and it wasn’t strange. As she started to say som
ething, she was interrupted.

  “You might be wondering why we have all this equipment and everything laying around.”

  “Actually yes, General, I was wondering that. Especially all the jets and military equipment in the garage.”

  “Never waste an opportunity. That’s what I say. When this place was built, the Joint Chiefs figured it may as well function as another emergency site should something really bad happen. This whole bunker is set up for whatever eventualities may come our way. We can provide shelter for vast amounts of people, and we have the food and medical depositories to keep everyone healthy. Plan for the worst and hope for the best!

  “That’s very impressive, General. I didn’t realize this place was set up for that.” Kate was honestly surprised. It had never come up in any of her pre-meetings about the site.

  “Now, understand we hope to never have to use it for such a purpose. It’s just better to be prepared than not be.” The general clicked the pile of papers into a neat stack on his desk and slid them into a drawer. “All personnel on site are required to meet with you once a month. Talk about whatever it is you need to talk about. Make no mistake; I am not a man that pushes aside the mental health fields. I have seen many men be reduced to rubble because they thought it was shameful to talk to somebody about their problems. That’s not how I run this operation.”

  Kate was simply nodding. She was beginning to get the impression that the general was a man that talked at you rather than had a conversation with you. Their sessions would be very interesting.