The Omega Project (3 page)

I closed my eyes, willing her mouth to venture lower.

She stopped. “Keep talking, Eisenbraun. How did a young track-and-field nerd like you get involved with GOLEM?”

“My uncle was confident I could resolve the computer’s design flaws, so he assigned me to work under GOLEM’s director, Monique DeFriend, the former head of CSAIL, a prestigious artificial intelligence lab. She buried me in menial tasks, until I submitted a design for GOLEM’s DNA matrix that blew everyone away. Two days later she placed me in charge of GOLEM’s programming. I had just turned twenty.”

“Nice. So what happened?”

“What happened? The GDO happened. The world went to hell.”

Andria released me, her mood darkening. “Who are you to complain? You survived, Eisenbraun. You, with your solar panels and water filters and lake water. I didn’t have seeds and canned goods; I didn’t have a backyard filled with fruit trees.”

“You also didn’t have starving anti-Semites as neighbors. When the government collapsed, my parents preached secrecy to my younger sisters—
‘If the neighbors find out we have food, they’ll take first and ask for handouts later,’
but it’s hard for teens not to want to help when their friends are literally starving to death.

“I was on my way home from the chaos in Washington the day our neighbors struck. My parents and sisters were butchered for three bags of brown rice and a bushel of apples. The rest of our supplies were still hidden in the garage attic.”

“I’m sorry.” She lay back down, her hand draped across my chest. “After they murdered your family … what did you do?”

“First I buried my family behind the orchard wall. Then I used the rest of our gasoline to burn down the murderers’ homes while they slept. I’ve been alone here ever since.”

“You’re an angry little bastard, Eisenbraun, but you’re no longer alone.”

She climbed on top of me and kissed me, her tongue harsh as it probed my mouth, her hand stroking my loins until I entered her again.

3

There is love of course. And then there’s life, its enemy.

—J
EAN
A
NOUILH

SIX MONTHS LATER …

The August sunrise lit the sheer gray vertical cliff face into a canvas of gold, causing my heart to race. “Andie, I really don’t feel good about this.”

“You’ll feel better once we get started.”

“I don’t want to get started. When you said you knew how to cure my night terrors, I thought we were going for a hike.”

“We are going for a hike—straight up to the summit.”

“Without ropes and harnesses? This is crazy.”

“It’s not crazy, it’s called ‘free soloing,’ and you can do it.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You have the physical strength, what you’re lacking is the psychological control needed to stay on the wall. It’s all about learning to control your fears through Buddha breathing—in through your nostrils, filling the belly, then slowly exhaling through your mouth. Commit to the climb. Focus your fingertips on the rock; be light like a spider monkey. And whatever you do, Ike, keep looking up.”

*   *   *

Andria and I had been living together just over five months when I began suffering severe anxiety attacks. She had kidded me about feeling the pressures of being domesticated, and in a way she was right. Worrying about my own survival had been far different than protecting the woman I loved from the murderous gangs that roamed the countryside.

Fear entered my dreams in the form of night terrors. Ghoulish men would break into our home, the faceless demons raping and torturing Andria as they pinned me down and forced me to watch. Each night terror ended with her death, followed by my bloodcurdling scream.

Things grew so bad that we had to sleep in separate bedrooms again.

When my anxiety grew into a severe depression, Andria decided we needed a change of scenery. Claiming she knew the perfect mountain hideaway that would be free of the sociopaths, we packed supplies and rode all night on my battery-powered motorcycle, arriving just before dawn at the foot of Buzzard Rock, a 1,145-foot-high mountain located in Loudoun County, Virginia.

As she pointed out our route, I felt the blood drain from my face. “Relax, Ike, I’ve climbed this face a dozen times. I’ll go first, do what I do and you’ll be fine. And remember—”

“I know, I know … keep looking up.”

We began our ascent. I carefully measured the first fifty handholds, my body trembling in fear as I learned to balance myself on a rock wall. After a while my fingers, hands, and feet became fleshlike pinions, adhering me to the cliff face. I learned to cleave to inch-wide grooves between the slabs of slate; the toes of my running shoes sought the tiniest of perches to bear my weight as I flattened my body to the unforgiving mountain.

Ten feet turned into fifty; fifty became a hundred, each arm length accompanied by controlled breathing and the occasional “I’m okay” in reply to Andie’s query. We paused, poised on a three-foot ledge 372 feet above our starting point that offered us a treetop view and a place where we could rest and eat.

I bit into a ripe pear, my body tired, my muscles taut. “Andie, this was an amazing workout, but I’m shot and we still have to climb back down. Seriously, I never thought I’d make it ten feet, let alone this high.”

She was lathered in sweat, her high cheekbones darkly tanned, accentuating her heritage. “We’re going all the way, Ike. Trust me, the hardest part is over. From here on up it’s a cinch.”

I trusted her.

Foolish, foolish man.

The next few hours of climbing were slightly easier as the cliff face was shredded in three-inch cracks that helped get us to another perch just below nine hundred feet.

I pointed to a rusted pinion embedded in the rock. “Pussies.”

Andie smiled, tearing into an apple. “You’re the man, Eisenbraun. When we get up to the summit, I’m going to fuck your brains out.”

I glanced up. The good news was the appearance of dry-rotted roots sticking out of the cliff face. The bad news was a five-foot curl of rock that protected the summit like a protruding lower lip. “How do we get around that ledge?”

“I’ll show you when we get up there. Ready? I’m getting really horny.”

We started out again, my fingers by now raw and blistered, the sweat on my palms becoming a new threat as the midday sun beat down upon us. The roots were a mixed blessing, offering us handholds we could grip—along with palms full of splinters.

And then we arrived at our final perch, the two of us staring at a ceiling of rock that jutted five feet out over our heads.

Andria pointed to a series of roots along the outer lip. “This will sound scary, but what we have to do is lean out and grab on to that root, then invert and blindly work our feet and legs up and over the ledge.”

“You’re insane. I’m so tired I can barely hold on.”

“Which is why we have to reach the summit, so we can rest and climb down tomorrow.”

“And just how are we going to get down?”

She flashed me her shit-eating grin. “We’ll take the trail.”

Anger shook me as I cursed my companion to exhaustion. I felt utterly helpless, my existence forced into a do-or-die situation that was as frustrating to fathom as it was insane—as insane as what had happened to my family and the rest of the world, as insane as the psychopaths that roamed the countryside and haunted my dreams—only this time I had a choice. This time I could save my life or at least die with some dignity.

“Embrace the fear, Ike. Use it to focus your strength.”

“Okay, Andie, but I’m going first.”

“That’s not a good idea. I’ve done this before—”

“Bullshit. You’ve never climbed this mountain; if you had you wouldn’t have taken us up this route. I knew it back on the last perch when I saw your face. You realized you had screwed up, but as usual you tried to wing it … control the moment. You’re right about one thing though, if we don’t get over that summit now, we’ll never make it down, not in the dark. So we’ll give it a try, only I’m going first. Not because you’re a woman or some other bullshit sense of male chivalry, but because I love you and I just … I just couldn’t bear to watch you fall.”

Tears flooded her eyes, marking the first time she had shown me any real vulnerability. Reaching carefully into her backpack, she removed a twenty-foot length of nylon rope. “Tie off,” she said, securing one end around her own waist, handing me the other. “When you reach the summit you can pull me up. If something happens, then we’ll die together.” She leaned over and kissed me. “You’re the only man I’ve ever loved, Eisenbraun. Don’t fuck this up.”

I looped the rope tightly around my waist while drawing deep breaths into my gut, summoning every reserve of strength I had left. For the first time since we began the climb I felt truly alive, knowing in my heart that no matter what else happened to me in the days or weeks or years ahead, that right here, right now there was no possible way I was going to allow myself to fail.

4

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

—M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING,
J
R.

A die-off provokes a different kind of fear than a war or a natural disaster. In war there is a common enemy; in a tsunami, earthquake, or hurricane there is a common bond among humans to aid those in need.

In a die-off, death is a game of musical chairs that begins as an innocuous boil. An occasional power outage evolves into rolling blackouts, followed by assurances from government officials that oil reserves will last another thirty years, even as prices spike and the lines at your local gas station stretch for miles. The grocery store becomes a battle front as every nonperishable left on the shelf is fought over in hand-to-hand combat and customers with loaded carts, refusing to risk their precious bounty, charge out the doors without paying. These scenarios degenerate into civil disorder and mandatory curfews, the protests and street violence that follow unleashing the military.

Stop the music and remove the chair known as “personal freedom.”

Phase two is rationing. Oil, natural gas, coal, firewood … food. Communication fractures into weekly assurances that times are tough but things will be improving soon. These pep talks from politicians, also known as lies, are designed to buy time—time being the variable that allows the weak to perish, either with a whimper (starvation) or a bang (riot police with orders to shoot to kill).

For the lower classes, the music has stopped.

A long winter without heat strikes next. Add in diminishing water and food supplies, not to mention a cessation of hospital services—and there goes the middle class—first in the colder rural regions, followed closely by the urban areas. As we remove this chair, the government shuts down, society collapses, and now it is officially every family for itself.

Dying comes in many flavors. You can starve, freeze to death, die of heat exhaustion, thirst, physical ailments, or perhaps you’ll be shot attempting to get food to feed yourself or a starving child. In the last few years I had seen it all, and the images never went away … the nightmares and the anger stuck with me forever.

In the warmer states, suburbanites had lasted a season longer than their city-dwelling counterparts, but a die-off, like musical chairs, is a zero-sum game. Eventually every family, save the farmer with his own well-armed private army of migrant workers and the inaccessible survivalist community, was forced to abandon their powerless homes and their gasless vehicles to search for food and potable water, joining a nomadic exodus that defined the postapocalyptic landscape. Hunters still hunted and fisherman fished, but the competition for food turned neighbor against neighbor, no catch safe among the hordes of the wandering desperate. Parents pushed their starving children in shopping carts and wheelbarrows, leaving the elderly behind to die with the family pet they could no longer feed. Unyielding hunger could transform a populace into a mob of borderline psychopaths, and western nations do not go quietly into the night like an emaciated African born into hunger. They go out shooting.

*   *   *

I had survived these trials and tribulations through preparedness, sheer luck, and a fear that spurred ingenuity. I accepted isolation over insanity, waiting out the first year within my fortress of solitude. What kept me going was a numbers game: without oil, the world’s population would drop from seven billion to just under six hundred million. If I could safeguard my chair, then maybe I’d live to see a different, wiser world.

Instead, I found myself quarantined against a society gone mad in every sense of the word. As fate would have it, after sixteen months of rationing, I was forced to venture out of my prison … and that’s when I met my new companion.

My initial impression of Andria Saxon, besides love at first sight, was that she was a natural warrior—a fearless hunter as at home in the forest as I was in the lab. As I grew to know her, I realized I was wrong.

Andria refused to give me many details about her family life, other than that she had been on her own since she was fifteen. Over time, I was able to put together the missing pieces of a difficult existence—her “toughness” forged in strip bars, street corners, and flophouses. Having lived in her deceased mother’s car for almost a year, Andria was as unaffected by the Die-Off as the Eskimos, Mayans, and other indigenous people who’d had little use for technology. What forced her from the streets of Lynchburg, Virginia, and up into the Blue Ridge Mountains was her fear of being sodomized and enslaved as livestock.

Andria trusted no one, especially men. I would learn later that her intentions at the time we met were to gain access to my safe house and kill me. What stayed my execution was her need to understand how everything in my home worked. It was only after our first week together that she decided I was worth more to her alive; after a month she knew I was not a threat.