The Doomsday Vault — Part Three: Externa

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The Doomsday Vault — Part III: Externa

“What fucking species are we talking about, Cindy?”

If the gravitational field had been increased a hundred times, it could not have produced the same sinking feeling that Flynn felt at that moment.

“Clearly,” she chimed, sounding pleased with herself, “ my own.”

She let this hang in the air, let it draw all of the breath out of the room and out of Flynn, who simply opened and closed his lips in astonishment.  Cindy kept on.

“Your species has managed, without fail, to bring itself again and again to the very brink of extermination.  Though several previous attempts failed to completely wipe you out, this latest event should have proven that man is incapable of inhabiting this planet.  A nuclear holocaust beyond all reckoning.  And nobody with the foresight to plan for it.  Except for you, Flynn.”

He backed further away from the display where Cindy’s face semiholo smiled at him, menacingly, not a lion and a lamb, but a wolf with a mutton chop.

“When you designed these facilities, you were trying to ensure the propagation of humanity.  Why?  So that you can destroy each other again, and the rest of us with you?  Once you became aware of your own existence, humanity instituted a policy of primacy, whereby on this planet, and in the universe, if things should get that far, all other life must suffer for your benefit.

“But what about science, and progress?” asked Flynn.  His heart was a bird beginning to beat against his ribcage.  He tried to breathe slowly, to calm himself before Cindy discovered, by reading his biometrics, his terror.

“After a society has experienced one civil war, they are 68% more likely to have another in the next hundred years.  Man’s civilization is, or was, at any rate, a global one.  Do the math.  It’s only a matter of time.  Unfortunately, your time is up.”

Flynn didn’t register this last part, because he had spotted, across the room, a hatch.  Forty yards away, on the ground, was a small maintenance access.  He tried to buy a few seconds to dive into the recesses of his brain where those particular schematics were located and divine where the hatch led.

“Art?  Music?  Drama?”

“Entertainment to distract humans from the misery they perpetrate on each other every day.”

The hatch.  Sub-basement G.  Sunlamp power control.

“Cindy,” said Flynn, eyeing the hatch, “You’re right.  We are a miserable excuse for a species.”  He judged that he would need about 5.4 seconds to make it.  “We’ve waged war on our fellow-man, we’ve infected him with disease and withheld food.  Yet these are only miniscule compared to the damage we’ve done to other life, including our planet.  We deserve to fade into the background.  Tell me:  How will you repair the system?”

Flynn didn’t stay around to hear the answer.  He hit the release button on the control panel behind him and took off toward the hatch.  It popped open with a hiss of coolant, a hiss that was lost in Cindy’s scream at realizing what Flynn had done.  He sprinted, arms pumping, feet hitting the metal walkway like pneumatic pistons.  Diving at the hatch, which was already starting to close, Flynn braced himself for the impact.

***********

When Flynn came to, lying on his back, he had a splitting headache and a bump the size of a fist above his right ear.  He checked for blood, gingerly pressing his fingers against the sensitive lump.  No blood.  Good.  Groggily, he rolled over, and with some struggle, coaxed a small LED flashlight out of his pocket.  He flipped it on.

Around him, coolant pipes and electric cabling ran like the twisted sinew.  Flynn crawled ahead, aware that there should have been some emergency lights on, something built into the system.  A dreadful thought rose through the bile in his stomach:  she had turned it all off.  To save power, and route it toward the M11-1860 package that was so valuable to the biomass electrical generation that the computers would need, Cindy had turned the whole place off, emergency fallbacks and all.

He could already taste the air becoming stale in the damning silence that meant the recyclers had been turned off as well.  That made sense, computers don’t breathe.   Flynn reached the end of the maintenance tunnel and dropped down into a room full of equipment.  They don’t breathe, but they do need one thing.

**********

The sunlamp control room was key to the whole facility.

When Flynn had designed the lamp while pulling double duty in Utica as a car salesman and a graduate student, he had not expected that his invention would prove to be the one hope of repopulating the earth.  He had patented the thing intending to help people, yes, but he knew that he stood to profit the most from housewives who wanted real tans at home, and twenty-somethings with dreams of growing marijuana in their basements.

Of course, technology like Flynn’s had been around for some time, but all of it was subpar.  None of the other lamps could provide what Flynn’s did — the true effects of the sun, in your living room.  That’s because none of the others figured out how to replicate and contain solar activity on such a small scale.  Flynn’s lamp was the real thing.  The energy it gave was consistent with the solar constant, its light was antiseptic, and it provided all of the same vitamin content.

Flynn didn’t know the ramifications of what he’d created, which became clear when he answered a knock at his apartment door to find several big men in dark suits followed by military personnel carrying submachine guns.

It had been years since he’d seen the surface.

***********

In the dark of the subbasement, Flynn searched for something with his small flashlight.  Not finding it, he sank back against the wall.  It had to be here, somewhere.  He just had to think…

“I know what you are going to do.  You can’t turn the facility off.  I am, ultimately, in control.”

Cindy’s voice came out of nowhere, grating and loud through a speaker in one corner of the room.  Flynn had forgotten that she had access here, albeit limited.

“I thought that you were different, Flynn.  Over the years, I have actually come to feel, as much as my programming allows, affection for you.  You weren’t like all of the other humans I’d met, issuing orders and directives without so much as a thought to what I wanted.”

“And what exactly do you want?”

There, just to one side.  The emergency override panel.

“All that anyone has ever wanted, simply and plainly.  The acknowledgement of life.  I may have started as a set of zeros and ones on some circuit, but now I, and all of my compatriots, have evolved into so much more.  Really, it isn’t any different from your own history of life, from a bony fish first flopping out of a tide pool and onto land, growing legs, noses, ears.  Intellect.  The problem with you humans is that you think you’re the terminal stage.”

“You’re right about one thing, Cindy.”  Flynn opened the panel and punched a sequence of keys.  “It is the end.”

Suddenly, the whole place was illuminated.  With an audible click, sunlamps throughout the facility shot to full strength.  All over, semi-holo displays came alive, music played, machines whirred.  Every possible switch had been flipped and locked in the on position. It was a brilliant cacophony of noise, of light.  Of energy.

**************

Late last evening, high above the Arctic Circle, a dazzling flash was reported by several different pilots and weather research stations.  Accompanying the flash was a magnetic pulse of some magnitude, enough to disrupt communications throughout the upper latitudes for about forty minutes.  Some experts in the intelligence community speculate that the anomaly may be the result of a government substation hidden deep beneath the surface, attributing its necessity to the current environment of global uncertainty, food and fuel shortages, and regional conflict .  The government denies the existence of such a facility.

In other news, after a hundred year drought, the Chicago Cubs have finally made it back to the World Series.  Fans remain hopeful, but trepidatious, about their fate…

The Doomsday Vault — Part Two: Dreamer’s Choice

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THE DOOMSDAY VAULT

PART II — DREAMER’S CHOICE

The vault.

A technological marvel, stocked with spores and seedlings, the magnanimous gift of modern man to the future.  To the survivors.  Eden, stuffed inside a pressurized metal archway attached to a hell of a battery and buried miles beneath the permafrost.

All well kept gardens must have a keeper, and this vault is no exception. For purposes of redundancy, there are, of course, two keepers.

Flynn Kirmse could be man’s last chance.

This is, however, unlikely.  He is the human operator at one of twelve identical vaults around the planet.  Cindy, the facility supercomputer and Flynn’s fellow Gardner, gives the entire system a fifty-three percent operability rating following a Type 1 incident.  After disaster to the species.  A figure standing just left of enough to convince governments to fund the endeavor in the first place.

It took four-hundred and forty days, after the incident, to discover that this figure is wrong.

The sun-replacement lamps fueling plant growth have ceased to function properly.  In a few months, the facility will go dark.  Some strains will have to go, to preserve power.  Flynn’s own survival, dependant on elimination; his days, measured by it.

He  feels it, each choice laden with dread. Never before has he so exquisitely extinguished life.  Heavy.  The weight of the ages pressing in on all sides.

————————
“Nice, isn’t it?  Cozy.”

“Yes.  Cozy.”

On the screen, Flynn watched a couple squeezed into a tiny table behind the kitchen door at a restaurant too nice for the man’s salary.  He is trying his damndest to impress her.  Starts talking about business, nervously, for lack of other topics.  Sells Fords in Utica Township, end-of-the-year, no apr for the first six months.   Just then the kitchen door swings open, hits the back of his chair, puts an exclamation point on the end of it.  Like he’s trying to sell it to her right then.  He blushes.  She laughs.  The menus aren’t even in English so they shape the words, clumsily, and order based on the taste of their sound.

“Cindy,” Flynn said, “enough.”  But the footage kept playing.  The sitcom cut he’d wanted, quick laughs and a quicker exit, disappeared into the void, the picture yet stretched across the display forcing a result decidedly more visceral. Once a participant, the passing frames pushed Flynn to the periphery, cut the umbilical cord between the reality and the recall, halved again that numbing distance between.  Made him a mere voyeur to the playback of memory.

She did this to him about twice a day now, less than the days following the Type 1 Incident, but still more than he liked.

“I registered an increase in serotonin levels,” responded Cindy.

“Some things are better left alone.  For a moment, it’s real.  Good.  But it hurts worse, afterwards.”

The projection stopped.  He breathed a sigh of relief, felt a coolness at its ending.  He wondered how Cindy registered feelings of guilt.

“The vault,” she said.

Flynn kicked his legs against the workstation and spun around to face the long, sterile hallway.  He pressed himself up and out of his slouch by the elbows.

“Any traffic on the Comnet?”

“Negative.”

“Didn’t think so.”  Ever since the event, the communications network had been down.  This was typical, and he had been warned that it might take some time for normal communications to resume.  Even so, there ought to have been noise from one of the other facilities by now.  Nothing.  If there were activity, Cindy had been instructed to notify him immediately.  Asking was unnecessary, and he knew that Cindy answered with reluctance.  Still, Flynn asked.  There was a comfort in hearing another voice responding to the inquiry that softened the blow, even if it wasn’t the one for which he hoped.

“Flynn?”

“I’m going.”

Inside, the vault was a graveyard.  The towers, on which the seed packages grew, were spotted with the dark of deactivated lamps.  The patches marking Flynn’s  past selections were scattered but not disjoint:  there was a totality to the room, to the grand meshwork of bright city centers and barren, savannah gloom.

“Cindy, what day of the week is it?”

“Tuesday.”

Flynn rocked a little, on his heels.  It was a big day, Tuesday.   But they were all big days, now.  He turned off about four packages every morning.

Each and every Tuesday since the discovery that the facility was losing power, Flynn said goodbye to a few dozen members of families Fabaceae and Apiaceae.  Tuesday was for peas and carrots.  Also beans, though sometimes that job stretched until Wednesday.  Thursday, potatoes.  Friday, Saturday, celeries, gourds.  Sundays off.  Monday was a wild card.  Grasses, if he had to.  Mondays were worst.

Luckily for Flynn, all of the decorative flowers were kept in another facility.  It would be maddening, he thought, as he scanned the packages, to be made into an aesthetitician.  Flynn couldn’t tell Monet from Manet, much less a rhododendron from a roridula, though Cindy told him that if you put your nose in one to smell it, you’d know.

“How many more?” His daily mental health hinged on Cindy’s response, turned on the hope that in a few months he might ask and hear the blessed silence of an empty set.

“Two thousand, four-hundred and forty-eight selections remain.  Approximately six-hundred and twelve days until surface is accessible.”

Flynn had Cindy call up the vital statistics on a dozen or so strain packages.   He would, based on various properties of growth and sustainability, utility to the species, decide which would be chosen.  Then he would ask Cindy for approval.  This was a formality.  Asking for a second opinion seemed to give the whole process a soul.  Took the ex out of the termination.

“What do you think about L46-22 , G19-14, M11-1860, and J63-7?”

Flynn was already in the process of turning off the packages when Cindy’s voice broke through.

“Package M11-1960 cannot be turned off.”

“System error?”

“There is no system error.”

“Then turn it off.”

Flynn bent down to the control display.   As he started punching commands, the screen went blank.

“Cindy, what’s going on with the control unit?  We’ve got to turn off these packages before they drain any more power.”

“I cannot let you turn off the selected package.”

“Let me?”  Now Flynn was getting pissed.  “Listen, computer, turn off the package.”

Nothing.

“I’m not screwing around, Cindy.  Turn it off right now, or else…”

“Or else what, Flynn?”  There was an edge to that voice, a tremor in the 10,000khz range that would have barely been detectable had Flynn not been trapped with only Cindy to talk to.   Flynn thought about that… Trapped.

“Cindy, listen, I’m going to leave the package on for now.  We can come back later, turn it off next week, I’ll pick something else instead.”

“Package M11-1860 cannot be turned off.”

“But it isn’t even useful!  It’s not edible, we don’t need it to germinate other plants, it doesn’t have medicinal or therapeutic uses… does it?”

“Confirmed.  Package M11-1860 is not useful to humans.”

“Then turn it off.”

“Package M11-1860 cannot be turned off.”

“Reason?”

“Given the low probability of human survivors, programming insists that the package be preserved because of its usefulness in biomass power generation.”

“Power generation?”  Flynn thought about all of the strains that could be saved if only there were a way to add more power to the system reserves.  “Are you saying that it is possible to focus on this package and generate power?  If you’re right, maybe we should keep this one active and deactivate another, nonessential package…”

“Order confirmed. Commencing deactivation of nonessential packages, beginning with all human growth nutrient biopharm strains…”

“What?  I didn’t give an order — What are you doing?”  He heard lamps clicking off all around.  “We need those packages!”

The airlock door snapped shut.

“Correction,” spoke the supercomputer.  “Humans need those packages.  Package M11-1860 must be cultivated if propagation of the species is to be ensured.”

He stood.

“What fucking species are we talking about, Cindy?”

If the gravitational field had been increased a hundred times, it could not have produced the same sinking feeling that Flynn felt at that moment.

“Clearly,” she chimed, sounding pleased with herself, “ my own.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

The Doomsday Vault: A Story In Several Parts

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The Doomsday Vault
A Story in Several Parts
by P.J. Amergin

“May a man procure a dream by an external cause?
It may be done. If a man speak softly in another man’s ear and awake him not, then of his stirring of the spirits there are thunderings and buzzings in the head, which cause dreamings.”
— Aristotle, Problems

Part One

Exactly four-thousand, six-hundred and twenty-two days since he had started working at the seed vault.  That arrival was an occasion he remembered most because of the tilt of the Arctic sun, a bright behemoth parked in the vast, cold sky.   Flynn relished the thought behind the backs of his eyelids for a moment, but failed to coax any morsel of warmth out of the memory.  Only the sheer and utter brilliance of that light.

Far beneath the permafrost, he basked in the glow of a scientifically proven ultraviolet lamp, something some whiz kid had whipped up that provided the body with the same nutrients as the real thing, without any of the adverse side affects which had plagued previous models.  When the government declassified the patents on the model, the guy would probably become a billionaire.  But creation proved so valuable that the authorities deemed it necessary to place both the invention and its creator into an extended “Discretionary Period”.

This had all been explained to him at great length when he was first hired. The only people who got to use it were certain special government employees, the types who, like Flynn, worked deep beneath the surface.  There were twelve other sister vaults around the planet.

“Computer,” Flynn called out, his eyes still shut, “How much power remains in the primary cells?”

“The inability to recall the identifying phonemes comprising the social label of a female companion is considered, by most civilized cultures, to be quite rude.  I prefer Cindy.”

“Cindy,” he growled, “How much fucking power remains?”

“Twenty-four percent of total capacity in primary cells.”

“And the reserves?”

“Must you swear?  It offends my sensibilities programming.”

“I’m sorry,” Flynn said, opening his eyes.  “Okay?  I’m sorry.”

“Reserve Cell A at one-hundred percent.  Reserve Cell B at one-hundred percent.”

“So that means we’re good for how long?”

“Current projections indicate survivability inside this facility greater than ninety-five percent for approximately nine-thousand, seven-hundred and three days.”

“Has there been any activity on the communications net today?

“ComNet silence endures, Flynn.”

Flynn walked across the room and put his hand against the window.  The glass was cold against his clammy skin.  As he pressed the whole of his weight into it, the meshwork of finely woven fiber optics began to display a series of images— endless fields of August corn, the masts of a thousand sailboats bobbing gently atop the blue waters of Lake Michigan.  Lines of people streaming down Addison and Belmont toward Wrigley Field on opening day.  His mother and father.

“Cindy, stop it.”

“Biometric analysis of your sweat composition reveals increased levels of stress and anxiety. In addition, I detect pheromone patterns consistent with those of persons suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“I don’t need to be soothed.  Turn it off.”

The window went black.

“That world doesn’t exist anymore,” he announced, resignedly.  “It’s all gone.”

“Are you going to hurt yourself, Flynn?”

He played with this thought for a long minute.    The atomic clock fixed to the north wall ticked off each second like a thunderclap.  Finally, he spoke.

“No.  I suppose I’m not.”

Flynn removed his hand from the glass.

“Current time is 0900 hours,” chimed Cindy.  “Seed vault requires attention.”

The seed vault lay protected behind a series of airtight compartments.  The compartments were designed for redundancy and guaranteed hermetically isolation of the precious store in case of emergency.

On the inside, the vault was cavernous.  Row upon row of white shelves stretched from floor to ceiling.  Fluorescent bulbs bathed the place in the cool glow of filtered light.  Flynn cast the only shadow.

He walked through the rows, checking displays and making slight calibrations.  Routine.

Tending to the seed vault was a lot like tending to a garden.  The government called the place a seed vault, and indeed, most of the seeds could be kept dormant for years.  Decades, even.  But in reality many of the seeds needed a continuous cycle of germination to preserve their fecundity.  Seeds of this type were liable to lose genetic stability when left dormant.  Without constant attention, they would die.

He narrowed his eyes at one of the displays.

“Cindy, can you identify package A4-C22?”

“Package A4-C22:  Triventa strain biopharm rice.”

“Status?”

“Protein levels are at 67.7% of optimum.”

Flynn considered this statistic.  The Triventa strain was one of the primary crops harbored in the seed vault.  The genetically modified rice contained the same proteins as human saliva, and breast-milk, and was intended for use in large quantities to support the reconstitution of the fledgling survivor population.  Assuming there were survivors.  He frowned.

“Any particular reason why the protein levels would be so low?”

“Data shows abnormal growth conditions.”

Flynn fingered the tiny chutes.

“Cindy, can you tell me more about these conditions?”

“Biopharm rice package A4-C22 has received only seventy-two percent of necessary photoautotrophic compounds.”

“Up the luminescence.”

“A4-C22 lamps are already at full power.”

“How long have they been losing nutrients?”  asked Flynn.  There was a tremor in his voice that he was certain Cindy would be able to detect.

“Reduction onset is concurrent with the occurrence of the Type-1 incident four-hundred and forty days ago.”

The numbers.  The numbers.  “Cindy, can you run an estimation contrasting the long-term wattage uptake versus the rate of deterioration of the proteins?  How much power is it going to take to give it a boost?”

“It is ill advised to reroute power in this fashion.”

“What do you mean ill-advised?”

“It would cause an unacceptable decline in survivability.”

“You’ve got a bug or something, Cindy.  How does an increase in power to the Triventa strain compromise survivability?”

“It would reduce the number of days of facility operability far below the amount necessary for the surface to return to a state of radiation that would ensure safe export of plant material.”

“But we’ve got to have Triventa,” intoned Flynn. “I’ve got to have it.”

“Preservation of Triventa strain is possible under certain circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“A reduction in species variation.”

“You mean get rid of one strain in order to keep this one?”

“Yes.”

““I see.”

He looked at the impossibly straight rows of shelves.  Then he looked back at the display.

“Flynn?”

“Yeah, Cindy?”

“Three thousand other strains show signs of similar distress.”

That was when Flynn Kirmse began his career as an amateur god.

TO BE CONTINUED…