by George Lazăr
Absolute silence.
Chapter 24
Bolden bolted upright when he received an unauthorized transmission. It had come on his encrypted channel, which he used rarely and irregularly, to order supplies from his control center or to manage his business. It was a recording. The voice sounded familiar, but he couldn’t remember where he had heard it. The image, coming on his video channel, had been scrambled by the electronic devices of the space hotel. Although he was curious to see who was looking for him, he didn’t stop the scramble.
“Mr. Bolden, I must speak to you. It’s very important. We must talk. We must, sir…”
The message repeated itself. A string of numbers, representing contact frequencies, followed. He wanted to ignore the message and managed to do so for a few hours. He reached the conclusion that only The Guardian Angel could be behind it. He decided to answer, to find out how close they were. He stopped the scramble and dialed on his communication console the frequency he had received. Immediately, the screen was filled with the dusky complexion, full of dark circles under the eyes, of Yole Jeniko, the palmist in Paris.
“Thank God! We’ve been looking for you for a very long time, Mr. Bolden. You can still intervene. All is not lost yet.”
“What do you want? Folder had you looking for me?”
The old man hastened to answer.
“I imagined as much! You haven’t watched the news. You haven’t looked at your device.”
“You can’t blame me for all the bad things that are happening down there, with you, anymore. I would appreciate it if you told him that I would like to be left alone here. I don’t want to hear of The Guardian Angel ever again.”
“Yes, it is true, Folder asked me to contact you,” Jeniko said, a bit nervous.
Suddenly, Bolden saw everything clearly.
“It was arranged, wasn’t it? The palm reading thing. You knew from the very beginning. Actually, you are with them, aren’t you?”
Jeniko smiled sadly and sighed.
“You are a very intelligent person, Mr. Bolden. That is right – I am part of The Guardian Angel too. You came to me because of the envelope and the card, which suggested to you that they may come from a fortuneteller. And because Danielle had told you about me, I already knew. The taxi driver who brought you also collaborated. If you hadn’t come looking for me, other procedures, would have been applied.”
Bolden seemed not to hear him. He ignored the old fortuneteller and yelled, looking at the screen, over the palmist’s shoulder.
“If you are going to try to kill me again, it won’t be easy. In fact, I don’t think you can succeed. I’ve got weapons. Some of them don’t even exist on the market, not even for the Army. You can’t touch me. Not here. Tell Folder that.”
“We know that, sir. We have been following you. As you have guessed, the colonel told me to contact you. He is absolutely convinced that you hate him and that you won’t talk to him. He thinks I might have a chance if I can make you listen to me. If you had watched the news, you would have known. The Earth is going through a major crisis.”
“I don’t care about your crises,” Bolden said.
But his hands seemed to have acquired a life of their own. He frantically dialed something on the console and rewound the news of the previous week which had been automatically recorded, then those dating two weeks back and, even more, a month back. The effects of the economic crisis had intensified almost simultaneously, in several places on Earth.
It was as if it had been previously arranged, as many commentators had remarked. It started out with a food crisis. The energy crisis followed, alongside an unprecedented increase in prices. The desperate interventions of the governments, instead of lessening the crisis, amplified it. The wars for the control of resources had already started; for the moment, they were still just local confrontations, but they would expand.
The world had become a powder keg. India and Pakistan were now openly threatening each other with nuclear weapons. North Korea was threatening with South Korea. Russia had divided its army and sent the divisions to face the riots that erupted in the countries in the Caucasus. A conflict with Ukraine was smoldering already. In Europe, armed conflicts on ethnic grounds had started again between the countries of the former Yugoslavia, conflicts in which the roles of hunter and hunted kept changing. Even in South America, Argentina had invaded Chile with the intention of capturing its enormous natural gas reserves.
But the most worrisome tensest situation was the conflict between China and Taiwan. The Chinese bombed several industrial targets on the island’s east coast, and Taiwan’s army managed to sink some of their ships by attacking them with Tomahawk missiles. The intervention of the U.S. Navy to calm the situation only poured gasoline on the flames and the conflict escalated. The Chinese were preparing an invasion and had detonated a nuclear bomb which destroyed a quarter of Taiwan’s naval forces, concentrated on the east coast to prevent an invasion. At the same time, in a different place on the globe, another nuclear bomb had been detonated – Israel was defending itself from the concentrated attack launched by several Arab countries.
Other conflicts had broken out between the countries of the European Union, which was on the verge of falling apart.
It seemed as if all the conflicts that had unfolded on Earth during the last hundred years had broken out again simultaneously. No one listened to anyone. In America, bomb attacks had become part of everyday life.
Panic had set in across the planet. Group suicides. Survivalist compounds. Experts vied to make prognostications about the effects of the crisis, but their opinions differed greatly. They agreed about one point though: no solution to end it was in sight.
Bolden looked at the Device on his wrist. Its dials were indicating maximum probability; the needles had exceeded the scale, pointing beyond it, at values higher than those the dial could measure.
“We are convinced that it was you who has triggered all this,” said the old fortune teller after patiently waiting for Bolden to go through the recordings of the news bulletins. “You know very well that it is so. And you also know how this could end.”
“What have I got to do with your wars?” Bolden growled. “Let us assume I believe that a force wants to kill me at all costs and that every time it tries and fails, more and more people die as collateral victims. How do you think a war happening between you people, down there, could kill me?”
Jeniko quickly exchanged a glance with someone who was outside the camera’s field of view. The gesture didn’t go unnoticed.
“In a way I understand you, sir. I am a gypsy, among the few who are still left. I came to Paris forty-five years ago, from Romania, a country in Eastern Europe. I begged on the streets to survive. I know very well what being isolated means, what being seen as a potential danger is like. And that wasn’t just because of the color of my skin. And yet I fought hard, I managed to study at Sorbonne and get my PhD. I thought this way I would get respect. But after all of this, do you think anyone took me seriously? I was still a gypsy. Perhaps I was a special gypsy, one who attended higher schools – but that made me even stranger in the eyes of others.
“That is why I am saying I understand you, Mr. Bolden. I have had times when I felt I wanted to take revenge on everyone, to hurt them. But that never exceeded the level of a simple intention. Even so, I had remorse. I can’t hurt anyone, sir, although I have had my share of blows in life.”
“The hell you understand,” Bolden gnashed his teeth. “No matter what you are – gypsy, black or yellow, no one has ever stalked you. No nameless force has hunted you. No, I don’t think you understand. In fact, I haven’t asked you to understand. All I have asked is to be left alone. Is that so hard?
“After all, what do you want? You want to convince me that it is better for me to die, to kill myself for the greater good of the planet? I die and the global crisis suddenly ends and everyone is happy, is that it? It’s absurd!”
The old man shook his head.<
br />
“No, sir, it’s not more absurd than what has happened to you up to now. But a history crisis is coming. The biggest ever recorded in the history of the Device. You will certainly die.”
“We all die one day. But, until that day, I want to live,” Bolden grumbled.
Ever bigger waves came rushing over him. He escaped one, but there were others coming, bigger, wilder and more destructive.
“The balance was always restored,” he heard Jeniko’s voice as if in a dream. “This time we think that, before that happens, a great part of mankind will perish, perhaps all of mankind. So in the name of all human beings I ask the ultimate sacrifice of you. Never in history has there been anything more important than this. No one got nearly as close to the destructive potential you have accumulated.”
“You and Folder sacrifice yourselves. Don’t forget to sacrifice The Guardian Angel too,” Bolden shouted as he terminated the connection. “And I don’t need any of your supplies. I can handle everything by myself, thank you!” he added, yelling at the empty screen.
Chapter 25
The impact warning suddenly came to life, signaling that the trajectory of the station was intersected by another celestial body. Folder and The Guardian Angel couldn’t resist the temptation of trying to destroy him. An anti-satellite missile came out from the Earth’s shadow; at the speed it was going it was to hit the space hotel in a matter of a few minutes. The hotel’s defense immediately intervened and annihilated the intruder, vaporizing it with the high-power laser of the meteorite protection system.
A satellite that was orbiting a few kilometers away exposed its military nature and started making various maneuvers, re-orientating the part that was pointing to the Earth, towards the space hotel. Bolden programmed the computer that coordinated his defense to take it down the next time it happened to pass in sight. He reprogrammed the defense system to annihilate all the satellites that were in its range.
Even so, he couldn’t withstand them for too long. His defense system, no matter how advanced, had its limitations. The U.S. Air Force’s Space Command had plenty of resources, and now that they’d found him it was only a matter of time.
They were going to attack him indefinitely, stuck on the idea that they had to kill him in order to save their planet. Both sides were extremely motivated. They were fighting for their lives. On one side there were billions of people. On the other side, there was only him.
He had foreseen this.
He tore the necklace he was wearing and unfastened a key that was attached to it. He introduced the key in a slot on the desk and turned it. Two buttons that started blinking were simultaneously activated.
Protected by a trigger meant to avoid accidental touches, there was the button that commanded the rocket engines of the waste storage facility. He had programmed in advance the sequence that, instead of stabilizing the orbit, was going to direct it towards the Earth, sending it right in the heart of Eurasia. It was going to reach the Earth in less than a day, accelerating as the rocket engines consumed the fuel and the gravitational attraction became more powerful. The place of impact wasn’t that important, but The Guardian Angel and Folder were in the States. Bolden would have liked them to die last, after witnessing the effects of the crash that were quickly going to show all over the world.
The artificial asteroid made up of over three million tons of waste was going to rotate half a circle on its own axis, reaching the opposite side of the Earth with the help of the engines for orbital stability. Then, accelerated by the thruster engines and the Earth’s gravity to the speed of fifty kilometers per second, it would have hit the planet causing a devastating catastrophe, similar to the one that caused the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
The waste storage facility had become the biggest artificial celestial body located close to the Earth. Once it started on this path, it couldn’t be stopped. The blow given to the Earth would have opened a Pandora’s Box of deadly viruses, extremely toxic chemicals and radioactive waste. He had played the simulation many times: one quarter of the containers, the ones that were located on the outer part of the storage, were going to disintegrate upon reaching the atmosphere. Their deadly contents were going to fall slowly, scattered everywhere by air currents. The containers located at the core were protected. They were going to hit the Earth like a compact steel fist, and the kinetic energy released by the impact would bring about the extinction of life on the planet.
Next to the button that was going to save his life there was another one, which was activated simultaneously when he introduced the key: the self-destruct switch. He had never looked at it directly, although he knew it was there. He didn’t even know why he allowed them to install the mechanism. The button commanded the extraction of the graphite rods from the nuclear reactor, which ensured his energy needs. The fissionable material was going to reach critical mass very quickly and explode. It would vaporize everything in a fraction of a second. His finger hesitated between the two buttons. Beads of cold sweat filled his forehead. He turned on the screen of the communication console again.
Images of the disasters that should have killed him appeared in a succession on the screen: the crash of the Boeing, in which Danielle had died, the tsunami wave, the great Californian earthquake, when Los Angeles disappeared – destruction and a death toll beyond the limit of comprehension. In the background, Jeniko’s voice was begging him:
“…it’s you or us all, the people still here on Earth. Make a choice: you or us? Is it you or us all? What is more important?”
He thought about his life, about these last years he had spent hiding from death, trying to fool it. He had paid the price: his girlfriend Danielle, his son Norton. His world, the world he had lived and felt safe in, in which tomorrow was a day he eagerly waited for, had disappeared. It had been replaced by a different one, in which he had to constantly guard himself from death. Once he would have thought it absurd for his death to be equated with the deaths of billions of his fellow human beings, with the extinction of mankind even.
During these last years, under the protection of The Guardian Angel, he had miraculously survived. He had been close to death too many times not to realize that, in a way he couldn’t imagine or accept, his physical demise would save mankind. And, most of all, that if he had allowed himself to be killed, many people would still be alive.
“…is it you or us all?” Jeniko lamented, flashing images across the connection: a dead child, clasped to his dead mother’s bosom, her life sacrificed in an attempt to save his; a church collapsed atop the faithful who had sought refuge inside; an old couple on an improvised raft made of shattered scraps, scrutinizing the horizon and waiting for help that never came; the flooded streets of a city.
He had thought about this moment a lot. He knew the time would come when he would have to make a choice. He had gotten several recordings of catastrophes that had taken place on Earth, when people found themselves in the situation of saving their lives or sacrificing it to save others. Most of them did everything they could to survive, without caring in the least about what happened to others who were also in danger. They were the ones who acted naturally, according to Bolden. They were listening to the self-preservation instinct nature had endowed them with. Others, very few, came to the rescue, taking irresponsible risks, as if they were listening to a completely different instinct that dominated the self-preservation one. They were the ones who puzzled him and he was absolutely certain that, when they were performing their act of heroism, they didn’t realize at all they were risking their own lives. They were simply doing it, without thinking further.
He couldn’t draw any conclusions.
He had snatched these last years with great difficulty from death’s claws. They were worth something too. In fact, they were priceless. And just as priceless had been all those millions of lives ended before their time by that force of nature that was trying to kill him.
What was the limit? How much was his life worth? Was one life wort
h more than another? - More than two lives? -More than a thousand or a million lives?
Was the life of a rich man more precious than that of a beggar? Or was it more precious than that of a genius? Was the life of the genius more precious than the life of an entire city or all the lives of a nation?
It wasn’t at all simple and it couldn’t be measured quantitatively, like money, for instance, where a hundred dollars is worth a hundred times more than one dollar. And death reaped lives just as easily as it took a single life.
History mentioned, in accounts about the wars long ago, leaders who fought each other to decide the fate of the battle and spare the lives of their soldiers. They didn’t do it out of kindness; they did it to maintain their military forces untouched, with which they were going to pillage, to rape and to destroy the conquered places. And they also did it to prove their bravery.
He didn’t have to prove anything to anyone. He didn’t lead nations and he no longer felt any ties connecting him to the Earth.
“…is it you or us? If you escape now, what will there be to destroy next time in order to save your life?”
There were also countless examples of altruism, people who sacrificed their lives so that others could live. They were the victims of the manipulation carried out through movies, songs, fairy tales and literature.
“Yes, death is something deeply personal!” he screamed in his mind. The answer didn’t lie in the examples given by others, whether recorded in history or not. There were also arguments in favor of the survival of those below, on the planet. For one, there were the artists, the scientists and the geniuses who had made humanity touch the stars in a very short period of time. They had ensured progress and had made everything possible, including the Device. They had built the Elevator with which he had lifted the waste on the orbit, only to throw it back at the people who made it. If he was to sacrifice himself for their survival, he would have done it.