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.

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“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…