by H C Edwards
Trey flipped on the navigation system, knowing that it would be spotty at best once he was outside, but it would do the trick. While he had been to New Charlottesville just once in all the years he knew he had only to punch in the coordinates and let the computer do the rest. Of course, that didn’t account for the radiation or the dust storms that were certain to crop up between here and there to play hell on the nav equipment but that was a bridge he’d cross if needed.
The ascent was a slow five minutes, enough time for him to run another systems check. He also walked around the inside of the transport and checked the seals on the bay door in the back as well as the cockpit door. Any amount of radiation he could keep out would mean that much more time before his body failed him. Once outside he wouldn’t be able to upload to the Cloud. The tower at the center of the Pantheon received the profiles and sent them down to the Quantum Cloud in the bowels of Akropolis. The electromagnetic field that encompassed the sanctuary kept out the radiation and fluctuating weather patterns but it also prevented his profile from reaching the tower, which meant that whatever happened outside of the Wall would be anyone’s guess if he never made it back.
Councilman Talbot had given him four days to retrieve the Quantum Cloud processor from New Charlottesville and set it up in the housing unit, as well as make it back if he could. It was a self-sustained nuclear power source that would protect the processor from the rads and weather exposure while also ensuring an uplink with any QUBIT’s within range, which would secure the memories and profiles of all those lost in the disaster when the tsunami struck. There was nothing Akropolis could do for those lives lost but they could give those citizens another chance at life as QUBITs.
The housing unit was a large cube measuring four by four meters, sitting on a track that would allow him to unload it out the bay door of the air transport, but it was too heavy for him to move once off the ramp. Wherever he set down, he’d have to make certain it was above water and on firm ground before he set off to retrieve the Quantum Cloud processor unit. A beeping noise from the console signaled that the overhead tunnel door was about to open. Trey quickly checked the straps securing the housing unit and then hurried to his seat, buckling himself in and turning the key to unlock the electrical systems to the rotors. Just as the tunnel door opened above him, he flicked the ignition switch and heard the engines roar to life, settling into a steady drone that was felt more than heard. In the old days the air transports were not pressurized but since they had been refitted to face the radiation and the elements of the New World, each one had been altered to have sealed cabins with its own oxygen filtration system. In this way, if an extended mission was necessary, it increased the chances of survival.
All the light came from the air transport, so that when the lift finally settled to a stop, Trey saw nothing but darkness out of the cockpit window. He flicked another switch on the console and the lights within dimmed to a degree that he could see out without the reflection of the cockpit to distract him. The headlights were next, great beams of white light that shot out from the front and sides of the air transport, bathing the desert floor in a radius of about thirty yards in every direction. Even that was not much, as beyond the scope of the beams everything was pitch black.
“All systems still green. Navigation up,” Trey said into his headset.
He tapped the touch screen of the NAV system and selected the coordinates for New Charlottesville. They were pre-programmed, which meant that the internal systems would gauge his progress so that if the outboard systems failed, he could still follow the offline NAV system to his destination…as long as the internal systems held up, that is.
The reply from air traffic control was half static but Trey could read between the lines.
“See you guys soon,” he said, and then grasped the cyclic stick and hit the throttle pedal.
Trey looked out to either side at the wings of the transport and watched as the horizontal rotors whirled fast enough to raise a dust cloud that encompassed the entire transport. He pulled back on the cyclic stick and felt the sudden drop in his stomach as he was lifted into the air.
“Whoa,” he said with a light chuckle.
It had been awhile since he’d flown one of these and he’d almost forgotten the power behind them. Back in the days of the last war these air transports had been outfitted as gunships and were as fast as they were maneuverable. Now they were glorified ambulances and scrap retrievers for short runs outside of the Wall.
Trey flew the transport straight up as fast as was feasible. Once he was above the low cloud coverage he tapered it off and settled about a thousand feet above. The electrical storms that raged across the desert were hell and if he was caught in one of them that would be pretty much all she wrote. Once he checked his NAV systems he put the transport into auto-pilot and settled back to look at the sky.
Up here above the cloud top the world looked almost as it did in the old days. Stars that he had not seen in decades twinkled like hundreds of little lanterns hanging in the sky. The radiation created a borealis effect. The colors green and blue could be seen like waves washing across the horizon. It was more than beautiful…it was breathtaking.
Barring any high winds, the trip to New Charlottesville would take about ten hours. Trey would have to stay alert, constantly monitor the weather patterns. Above the cloud top it could get cold quick. Ice formed easily even with the heat cooking up from the irradiated ground so far below and if that happened to a certain degree, the rotors would freeze and it’d be a short and quick trip down.
Still, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the view above him for longer than a few seconds. He wondered if it might be the last time he ever saw the night sky, and if it were, he didn’t want to miss a single moment of it.
Too few were privy to the view he was admiring. Three hundred years ago the skies were filled with planes and drones and transports. The sanctuaries were considered experiments then, self-sustained bio-domes that were initially designed for off-world colonization. But resources became scarce quickly. Mining comets and asteroids came too late and did not yield the amount of materials or metals necessary to produce the equipment to take them off this planet.
It became apparent all too quickly that water and food and medicines were rapidly running out for a world that could no longer support its population. Countries tested each other’s borders. Squabbles became battles which became war. The great machines began to roll over the cities. To escape the onslaught people flooded to the sanctuaries, most of which had been built in the U.S. The best and the brightest of the race were already there, and though some sanctuaries welcomed the refugees, others kept them at bay behind the walls.
Trey was still human then. The military had started experimenting with storing consciousness as a data profile in a what was even then being called The Quantum Cloud. In its initial stages, the Cloud was a global satellite system maintained by constant sharing of information back and forth.
Trey was one of the first to be installed with the uplink. He knew that they were creating biotech humans in which to deposit these ‘profiles’ in the underground factories of the sanctuaries, androids that could be the continued work force for colonization on other planets.
He volunteered on the condition that his family would be given the same treatment if the experiment was a success. He had seen enough to know that the future of their world as they knew it was a flimsy shell. It seemed like a dream that would never need to be a reality. The world had its problems and though war was breaking out all across the globe he never once thought that it portended the end.
When Manhattan came under assault he was in Washington. He acquired the quickest transport he could but the city was already on fire, the machines rolling across the city when he arrived. He didn’t make it in time to save his family, and though he held onto hope at the very end, knowing that their profiles were stored in the Cloud, it turned out that the tech was still a bit shaky. Some profiles were corrupted compl
etely and unable to be restored, while others were baseline enough to ensure a stable return. Unfortunately, he was the latter while his family consisted of the former.
He was offline when the bombs first started to drop, but there was only a dozen or so as opposed to the hundreds that could have been. Even at the very end when all seemed hopeless, the four greatest nations decided to withhold their arsenals, which probably saved the human race. The sanctuaries that were completely self-sufficient used their electromagnetic fields to hold off the radiation that flooded the planet. Had they to contend with actual nuclear blasts there would have been nothing left. As it were, the last vestiges of civilization took shelter within the walls of only a dozen sanctuaries, half of which were in North America. Everyone else in the world lasted a few weeks at best.
When they revived Trey, it was because they had downloaded what they could from the global satellite Cloud into their own self-sustained one in Akropolis before the radiation completely covered the entire planet. They maintained communication with their sister sanctuaries through landlines but they couldn’t reach the satellites anymore.
Trey was one of the first QUBITs to be ‘born’ in a sanctuary. They had retrieved the majority of his personality profile but had lost huge sections of his memories. That was the problem initially. The QUBITs they revived had difficulties with integrating, having so little of what made them human intact. They went mad and either committed suicide or atrocious acts that demanded they be put down.
It didn’t take long for the scientists to figure out that in order to maintain the so called sanity of the earlier models, there needed to be memory implants, fabricated experiences that adhered and supported the personalities of the revived. This worked for a few dozen years until the Quantum Cloud was perfected.
Back then the QUBITs had a shelf-life of about a decade, and when the Cloud finally became stable and the new models of QUBITs could function indefinitely, the older models opted out of revival, knowing that for most of them, who they actually were as people was probably fifty percent or more fabricated. Unfortunately, the majority of these were soldiers, Marines who had signed up at the beginning of the Cloud with the hope of existing beyond death. Once they realized that they were no longer needed for war and had been reduced to policing a mostly meek society, not to mention most of them having lost their own families, they no longer had the will to continue on as synthetics.
Trey had been the only one who survived this transition, perhaps because the most powerful memories he had were of his family, and had been real. All the other experiences in his earlier life, from childhood to adolescence and some adulthood might have all been fabricated but it didn’t matter to him. All that mattered was Shai and Hannah had existed. His life with them happened. Whether he lived for a thousand years or only for the next one, he was content knowing that someday he would be with them again.
It was this knowledge as well as his sense of duty that saw him through those first few decades, while all the others eventually opted out. That had been the most difficult time for him, realizing that his mortality was not based on a ticking clock anymore, that he could very well exist for hundreds or even a thousand years in this state.
Trey threw himself into his work, training his Marines to repel attacks that never came, participating in dangerous excursions beyond the Wall to retrieve necessary materials for the betterment of the sanctuary, and drilling for containment or evacuation procedures should there be a breach in the Wall. After a half century of this he realized that as soldiers they were near obsolete and instead focused on transitioning them into a police force.
He was on his third synthetic upgrade when Talbot came along. Trey recognized the fire and dedication of a Marine from the old world, but he was a young man displaced in time.
Talbot was the first to volunteer for any excursion beyond the confines of their sanctuary. He stood stalwart and forefront during the human riots in the recycling belt, and when their Wall was bombarded for the first and only time by refugees from a collapsed sanctuary that had somehow made it to their borders, Talbot led the assault that chased them back into the desert where they no doubt perished in short time. That day they had lost two hundred Marines, all of which who had opted out of repeated revival. It was a crushing blow to their sanctuary, losing almost a third of their defense force in a day, but the standout was Talbot, who had proven he was of the old blood even if he were the youngest human in the Marines.
When another decade passed and all sanctuaries but four had fallen, the council finally disbanded the Marine Corp and replaced them with the Akropolis Security Force. Talbot became Councilman Talbot and turned his energies towards ensuring the existence of the human race, no small feat by any means.
Three hundred and six years. That was how long Trey had lived as a QUBIT. He had seen four upgrades, the last of which was over ninety years ago. Each upgrade had come with a sense of newness, almost as if he had been reborn. But it had been a long time since he’d opted for another. There had been three new models since, and he had denied each upgrade. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was because he didn’t want that feeling of rebirth, the wiped slate.
It was a widespread belief that he was the oldest QUBIT in the sanctuary. He knew this wasn’t true. There was one other whom he had formally met just once, the man who oversaw his first revival. Trey wouldn’t forget that face, for it was the first time he had ever truly laid eyes on a conscious synthetic. He was also the one who had broken the news that Trey’s family had been lost in the Ether and was irretrievable.
Over the years Trey had seen the man here and there, always around the Pantheon, and while he appeared slightly different with each upgrade, Trey never forgot the face, mostly because his memory engrams wouldn’t allow him to. A name, however, had never been presented. Trey could have easily solved this mystery but he never felt the need to, and it had been nearly thirty years since he had last seen the man. For all he knew that QUBIT had opted out of revival, though that seemed unlikely after all this time. Still, Trey wondered if the sense of hopelessness that had started to creep into his own life might have started to affect the other man as well.
It had started only a few months ago, almost immediately after his last scheduled maintenance took him offline for the first time in half a century. He awoke and felt little difference until he noticed his mind begin to wonder more frequently. He would catch himself daydreaming about his life before he awoke in Akropolis, a life where Sai and Hannah were alive and the world, while shit, was still whole and unbroken. Almost every night he dreamed of them; sometimes they were good dreams of birthdays and barbeques, but mostly it was the dream where he failed to save them, or did and awoke with a feeling of bitterness so overwhelming he felt like breaking anything at hand.
Each day became a trial, a tribulation of duty and protocol and paperwork, beset with that feeling of despair, as if every action he took didn’t matter in the long run, that sooner or later the human race would give out its last dying gasp despite all their best efforts, a sound that would only be heard by synthetic ears. And then what?
All these years he had done everything he could to protect the last vestiges of humanity, as he could not for his own family, and despite the centuries he had given they were only falling further into extinction.
Had it been a hopeless battle this entire time? Were they doomed the moment they had closed themselves off behind the Wall?
Trey’s reverie was suddenly broken by the blaring of an alarm on the console panel of the transport. He stared at the bank of switches and buttons and located the source of the problem. The air above the cloud top was too thin and making the rotors work harder to compensate. The engines were starting to overheat.
This was not too surprising in retrospect but he cursed himself for not considering this. He switched off the autopilot and cut his speed. Then he descended gently into the clouds and finally below them back into the bleak darkness. He hated to lose the sight of the sta
rs yet knew it was necessary if he were to keep the transport working as long as he could amidst all the radiation.
Once below the cloud line he had to pilot manually for a bit, if for his own peace of mind. He was somewhere in the vicinity of what was once known as The Great Divide and the winds here were unpredictable, changing directions randomly, warm air from the ground mixing with the cold cross winds and causing air pockets that jolted the transport and caused it to lose altitude here and there. There was no real danger of crashing due to these pockets but Trey always felt better with the controls beneath his hands.
After an hour he was beyond the range and was able to settle back into autopilot without anxiety. He did another systems check to make certain the electronics were still functioning perfectly and then left the cockpit for the cargo hold to prep the housing unit.
It was a very well built piece of tech with its own power source, shielded from extreme radiation, but also allowing low wave quantum frequencies to permeate. If he could somehow reach the lower flooded levels of New Charlottesville and extract the quantum processor, the housing unit would set up a temporary uplink that could operate for a few years without having to be replaced. It would also make certain that all the people lost in the disaster could eventually be revived from their Cloud profiles, once the council was able to transport the processor back to Akropolis safely.
The housing unit was keyed to Trey’s quantum signature. It was smooth and unblemished all around except for a symbol in the shape of a swirl that was etched at about shoulder height. Trey placed his hand on this symbol and it glowed a light green before a two meter panel slid aside, revealing the cubical drawer where he would place the quantum processor when recovered. There was a bank of switches that he flicked, powering up the unit and turning on the lasers that created the miniature electromagnetic field within. A humming sound began to emanate from the depths. Trey then touched the swirling symbol again, causing the panel to slide closed.