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…