The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy (16 page)

“But we solved the energy problem,” I say. “At least that’s what I learned. Don’t our wave generators produce unlimited power from electromagnetic fields?”

“Yes, they do,” he says, his shadow nodding. “But when corporate scientists discovered that technology, the rich few who controlled it withheld the energy supply to create demand, to keep prices up, to keep profits up. The entire world could have enjoyed free energy were it not for greed. Always greed. And so nothing was solved.”

Click—

A coastline covered in black oil.

Click—

An abandoned nuclear plant, its reactors cracked open and sinking into the barren and polluted ground.

Click—

Crowds of protestors encircling Washington D.C., their faces masked, their fists raised.

“Then the real trouble began,” he says. “The governments of other countries, nuclear countries, began to be overthrown by their people. Pakistan, then India. Russia, and even China, too. There was no way to keep up relations. No agreements remaining, no understanding that nuclear arms were off the table, no concern for mutually assured destruction. These young rebel governments began flexing their power. They used the threat of nuclear strikes to demand money and resources from countries that had them. They extorted us. Every day our government and its remaining allies were gambling with destruction, and the planet was being raped in the process.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, it became clear to me that I could never share our longevity breakthroughs with anyone. We knew the rich would hoard it and sell it. And even worse, we knew this one percent that pulled the puppet strings of government would have a thousand years to grow more powerful, more connected. And they would never allow an educated and healthy population to exist. They wouldn’t allow it because they maintained their power with instability and inequality.”

“Didn’t people check on what you were doing?”

“No. Our government partners were occupied elsewhere. They were occupied with the War.”

He clicks the remote again and a slideshow of horrific images flashes across the screen—

War and destruction.

Whole cities rendered into twisted craters of rubble.

Skyscrapers collapsed, ships blown out of the ocean.

And then the mushroom cloud of nuclear destruction.

A satellite image of the Hawaiian Islands. The next image and an entire island is gone beneath a haze of nuclear smoke. Pictures of both devastated U.S. coastlines—Washington, D.C. a charred nuclear wasteland, New York City one big pile of crushed concrete and twisted steel, Los Angeles ripped to shreds and flooded with polluted ocean waters.

And then I remember the missile I saw hanging from that ice-ceiling over that subterranean crater lake I fell into, and I know what Dr. Radcliffe is showing me is real.

He clicks the slideshow off, and the screen retracts into the ceiling. Then the shades lift and the light comes back into the room, cutting across Dr. Radcliffe where he sits solemn in his chair, cutting across our iced teas sitting on their coasters with melted ice and sweating glasses, cutting across where I sit and cutting up my body. Then the light comes on into my eyes.

“What happened next?” I ask.

He stands and walks to the window and looks out.

“Everything was destroyed,” he says. “Bases, cities, towns. There were many more missiles than anyone had imagined. Even our own government was bombed out of its bunkers. Seems nearly the only thing untouched was Holocene II.”

“Why weren’t we bombed?”

He turns to face me again.

“We were too new, too secret. Plus, our mission wasn’t strictly military so we never made it onto any target maps. We sat there forgotten, living in our self-contained city five miles under New Mexico’s bedrock.”

He sits again, crossing his legs and sighing.

“We tried, Aubrey. You have to know we tried. Everything we sent up to sample the surface told us it was uninhabitable. Radiation, disease, pollution. A nuclear winter dropped like a deadly curtain and the few remaining peoples suffered a terrible demise. Our resources were limited, our space confined. We didn’t know what to do. But it was clear that we would soon outgrow our own underground home. Then I had an idea. I had been working on virtual reality environments for the brain, and it occurred to me that rather than suffering a lifetime underground, people need only work their productive years and then we could deliver them into a virtual heaven and keep their consciousness alive for ever, even longer than if I kept their bodies alive with the medical discoveries we had made.”

“Eden?” I ask.

“Eden,” he nods. “The few of us on Level 1 created Eden. And so Holocene II as you know it was born. One level cut off from the next and everyone supporting the cause.”

“But I thought you were the first to go to Eden? You even said it yourself in the video they show us.”

He lowers his head.

“It’s the one thing I’m really ashamed of. But I had to disappear or the others would have questioned my never aging and all would have been lost. Sometimes the ends do justify the means, Aubrey. This was just one of those times.”

“But I still don’t understand,” I say. “I get all of this, but here we are on the surface, in the world. There is no ice. There is no radiation. Why can’t we live up here now?”

And then I remember the moral dilemma question on my test. The very last question that I blindly answered with a stab of my finger. And it hits me why I’m here. Why I was chosen. Not just for my test score, but because I must have answered that I would keep the infected level locked to their fate to prevent the spread of a virus that could wipe out our species.

“Do we have a virus in Holocene II?” I say. “Something that will infect the planet? Oh, no! Did I bring something up with me when that train crashed? Please tell me I didn’t.”

“You’re half right there,” he says, blinking and leaning forward to rest his hands on his knees. “What I’m about to tell you may be a shock at first.”

I lean forward to listen. “Tell me.”

“Eventually, we discovered the ice retreating, the radiation fading, and it was safe for us to investigate the surface. What we found surprised us. With no humans on the planet—or almost no humans, anyway—the Earth had begun to heal itself. Species we thought to be extinct had returned. Endangered species were flourishing. We discovered paradise in the making. A real Eden right here on the planet. Then we found humans. Small nomadic groups of them. Primitive. Violent. Descendants of survivors on the surface. And they were beginning it all again. Starting everything over. Rummaging through the rubble of cities, discovering their grandparents’ technology, developing weapons. Fighting one another. Slaughtering species wholesale for food and for fun. Breeding. Multiplying again unchecked.”

“But did they have a virus or something?” I cut him off. “Some infectious disease that put life on the planet at risk?”

“I thought you’d have figured it out by now,” he says, blinking and shaking his head.

“Figured out what?”

“We don’t just carry an infection, Aubrey—we are the infection. Humans are the virus. We’re parasites.”

“What? Parasites?”

“Yes, the worst parasites. We reproduce with no internal limitations. We consume and destroy and make war. We have no predator except ourselves, and left unchecked we destroy ourselves every time. And we destroy the planet along with us. Humankind is the thing that must be contained. Man must be checked. We were nature’s mistake—the only species worth extinction is our very own.”

“You’re the Park Service?” I ask, my voice cracking, my legs shaking in the chair. “You’re the ones who slaughtered my friend’s family in that cove?”

“I know nothing about that,” he says, blinking three times before his face falls into an almost believable look of sadness. “We made a choice long ago.”

“What choice?”

“The only choice.”

“What choice?” I shout.

“We dedicated all of North America as National Park and we swore to protect it. And we must protect it, Aubrey.”

“Your plan is to exterminate all humankind?” I say, my voice sounding suddenly small and far away.

“Our plan is to prevent another apocalypse. To let the Earth exist as it was meant to exist. To let some better species evolve. And the plan is working. But not fast enough.”

I shake my head, confused.

“What about Holocene II?”

“We kept it for its production capacity, of course.”

“You mean those drones we make?”

“And food, and supplies. And now you.”

“Why me? Why am I here?”

“I’m dying, Aubrey. My wife is dying. We’re all dying. There is a limit to our longevity, and we’re all reaching it fast. We had hoped to accomplish our mission in one lifetime. To wipe out the human race and then, at last, ourselves with it. But we’ve failed. It’s taken longer than we thought it would—the human disease has proved a resilient one. Luckily, we had frozen Catherine’s eggs and my sperm and we were able to use a surrogate to have Hannah. Our lovely daughter Hannah. And now Hannah is ready for a mate, a partner to continue the mission after we’re gone. And that mate is you, Aubrey. You’re the chosen one. Your DNA is a perfect match. Our models say it will combine with Hannah’s in all the best ways.”

“You want me to have kids with Hannah?”

“Yes. Don’t you see—you and Hannah and your children will finish the work we’ve started here.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I need to know if you’re on board. There’s not much time, Aubrey. We thought you were lost for good, dead in the park, and we’ve already begun harvesting donor sperm from lesser candidates down in Holocene II. Of course, having you here is so much better than that.”

I sit reeling in the chair—sweating, sick. The study spins, my head throbs. The clock ticks the loud seconds by. The ice tea glasses stand before me in agate pools of sweat dripping from their sides, the golden liquid catching the light like some foreign elixir of a world too contrary even to fully imagine.

A tap on the door, it opens. Mrs. Radcliffe looks in.

“Lunch is ready, you two.”

“We’ll be taking it to go,” Dr. Radcliffe says.

“To go where?”

“I plan to show Aubrey here the Park.”

“Oh, sweet Cosmos,” she says, as if cursing or calling on some higher power “Hasn’t he had enough of your lecturing by now? I’m sure he’s just exhausted.”

I sit and watch their banter volley across the room as if I’m not really here. Perhaps I’m still in a theatre watching the drama unfold onscreen, or maybe reading it in some lesson slate play.

“Aubrey ...”

“Huh? What?”

“Are you allergic to anything?

“Allergic?”

“Food?” she says. “Allergic to any foods?”

“He’s fine,” Dr. Radcliffe says. “He’s a healthy boy.”

“Growing fast as a weed, too, I’ll bet,” she says. “I’ll have Gloria pack him double sandwiches then and bring them out.”

She retreats from the room and closes the door.

Dr. Radcliffe reaches forward, picks up his tea, and drains it in one gulp. Then he stands and holds out his hand.

“Come with me, Aubrey,” he says, his blue eyes blinking. “I’d like to show you the world you will inherit.”

CHAPTER 26
The Foundation

I push his hand away.

Rush from the study.

Burst from the house.

A windstorm has risen on the lake, whitecaps chopping its surface, pounding the shore. The world seems different. Alien. Violent in its apathy. I want to scream. I want to run. I want to hide away somewhere and die. I feel sicker than sick, my guts twisted up in some evil fist of knowledge that won’t release me from its guilty grip. Jimmy was right—we didn’t know who these people were.

I feel a hand on my shoulder and turn—

Hannah stands beside.

“What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” I ask, mocking her. “Your father. You. This place. It’s all wrong.

“Why would you say that?”

“You’re the Park Service. You butchered Jimmy’s family.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she exclaims.

“Ships. Drones. The Park Service. They came in while they were hunting whales and murdered everyone. Even the kids in the cove. They almost killed Jimmy, too. Don’t you get it?

Hannah reaches for my hand. I pull it away.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I really am.”

“I had to collect the bodies, Hannah. I had to burn them. Have you ever smelled a burning body?”

“Please, just hear me out,” she pleads. “I promise you that I knew nothing about this. But I do know my father, and he’s a gentle man. He wouldn’t have anything to do with murdering people. Besides, you can’t do any good without knowing what the situation is, right? Let’s just go along and see for ourselves.”

I look at her emerald eyes sparkling in the stormy light, her red hair tossing in the breeze, a hint of freckles on her cheeks.

“Go along where?”

“To tour the park,” she says. “Daddy’s taking us on tour.”

“Oh, that’s just cute. A tour.”

“Come on. I’ve never left the lake house, and today we get to go and see the world. Don’t spoil it for me, Aubrey. Please. Don’t you want to see it, too?”

I look toward the dock where the waiting boat rolls in the waves, the metal step plate screeching as it loses its magnetic connection and grates across the wood. Dr. Radcliffe stands looking at us from the wheel, his coat flapping wildly, a streak of white appearing on his shadowed face when he smiles.

I cross my arms and plant my feet.

“I want nothing to do with the Park Service.”

“But how will we ever know?” she asks. “Let’s just go and see. This will all be ours someday soon anyway. We can change it then if we want to. Besides, what good can you do out there in the woods on your own? You can starve. You can die.”

She’s right. There’s nothing I can do out there. Jimmy and I were beat and starving when we stumbled on the lake house. Maybe I should just pretend to go along until I’ve heard them out, seen what there is to see.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll go. But just to see.”

Hannah smiles. Without giving me a second to change my mind, she grasps my hand and leads me to the boat.

Her mother runs from the house, holding a hat on her head and carrying lunches wrapped in cloth with her free hand.

“Are you coming, Mom?” Hannah asks.

“Not this time, sweetie,” she says, handing us the lunches. “I’m tired and need to rest. I’ll see you when you get back.”

The boat pulls away before the step plate can even fully retract, and I look back and see Hannah’s mother standing on the dock looking after us, holding her blowing hat, a strange look of resolved sadness giving her the appearance of Hannah’s forlorn reflection cast in shadows and retreating into the past.

Dr. Radcliffe adjusts the throttles and steers our course. Hannah and I sit on the bench behind him. She takes my hand in hers and puts it in her lap, and I let her even though I find small comfort in the gesture. The wind intensifies and the boat drives against it, my breath pushed into my lungs, my eyes watering. Dark clouds fly in with the wind and suck the color from the world, turning the water a lifeless gray. Even Hannah’s hair whipping about in the wind seems less red and more rust. As the boat battles the wind in its endless crossing, the lake house disappears behind us, the snowcapped peaks lining the far shore grow closer, and I feel like I’m on some underworld ferry delivering me to my punishment for some unforgivable sin I’ve committed, or perhaps for just the sin of being born.

The wind stops at once, and Hannah releases my hand.

I look back and see a strange visible line we crossed, where one side is gray and rippled with whitecaps and the other is as smooth as blue glass, like some border crossing with invisible guards blowing hell from their lungs.

“This is so exciting,” Hannah says.

“What?” I say. “You’ve never been on the boat?”

“Of course,” she says, “but only on cruises around the lake. We’re going down. I’ve never been down.”

Dr. Radcliffe looks back at us and grins like a tour guide, steering the boat toward a towering concrete dam stretching between two mountain peaks in front of us. On one side of the dam, the steel doors of a giant mitre gate stand open like jaws, and we cruise through them into an enclosed chamber. The gates grind against the pressure of the water behind us and the daylight fades to just a sliver. Then the doors snap shut, leaving us floating in total darkness.

Hannah takes my hand again.

LED lights blink on and the chamber is lit with an eerie glow that reflects off the oil-black water and shimmers against the gray concrete walls. The water level begins to lower, being sucked away somewhere deep beneath us. The boat sinks into the chamber locks, and the LED lights shrink above in the receding ceiling. We drop twenty, fifty, a hundred meters. Then we drop more, descending until all around us is murky black. I can just see the outline of Dr. Radcliffe’s shadow sitting in the captain’s chair ahead of us, as if he’s piloting some boat-sized casket down into a watery concrete tomb.

A great sucking sound rises from the far concrete wall and the water begins to turn in a boil there. Then the crescent of an arch appears and grows as we drop until a tall set of steel doors are exposed. The water levels off, the doors swing open, and a cryptic underground channel of water stretches away in the dim glow of more LED lights. The boat’s silent engines engage with a slight jerk beneath my feet, and we glide into the channel.

I watch the tunnel walls slide by for what seems like hours because there’s nothing here in the gray underworld to mark the passage of time. The LED ceiling lights pass over us in a hypnotic pulsing of light and shadow, light and shadow, and I watch Dr. Radcliffe’s image fade in and out ahead of us as if he were being passed over again and again by some searchlight.

Now a red light appears in the distance, as if some sleeping cyclops crustacean burrowed here beneath the mountain lake has sensed our approach and opened its evil eye. The red light grows closer; the end of the tunnel comes into view. The boat cruises into a cavernous underground shipyard bay. Ceilings draped in shadow, inky water eerily still. Silhouettes of waiting cranes hovering over deserted docks. The cold glint of steel. A submarine moored in a maintenance berth, the Foundation Valknut crest etched on its exposed side.

“Ouch,” Hannah says, “you’re hurting me.”

I realize I’m squeezing Hannah’s hand without meaning to. She winces with pain and pulls it away.

Dr. Radcliffe guides the boat to a berth, the magnetic step plate folds out. Then he steps onto the dock and turns to help us from the boat. Hannah takes his hand. I refuse it.

“Welcome to the Foundation,” he says.

The red light casts the cavern bay in an eerie illumination, playing shadows on Dr. Radcliffe’s face, as if some hellish fire were burning deep beneath the ink-black surface of the water

“This is gloomy,” Hannah says. “You and Mom spend all that time away down here?”

“No, no,” Dr. Radcliffe answers with a chuckle and his trademark blink. “This is our office, so to speak. We work here, but much of the time we’re out touring the park.”

“What is this place?” I ask.

“You know it as Level 1,” he says.

“But this is nowhere near Holocene II.”

“You’re quite correct, of course. This was an underground military installation we discovered after coming to the surface. For some reason it was left intact.”

“So we’re beneath the lake right now?” I ask.

He nods. “The lake is three hundred meters above us. The dam allows us to flood the locks and pass small boats between here and the surface of the lake.”

“How did that submarine get in here?”

He points to a taller archway on the other side of the bay.

“That tunnel leads in a series of step locks all the way to the Pacific. Most of our vessels are out working, of course, but they cycle home for maintenance.”

“Yeah, right,” I huff. “Working.”

“What about the other coast, Daddy?”

“Great question, Hannah. We have plans for an Atlantic tunnel, but the distance has proven difficult, even for nuclear borers. Right now, we go around using a deep-water channel where the Panama Canal once was. It does leave us weaker in the eastern seas, though.”

“Where does the train come up?” I ask.

“Follow me,” he says. “I’ll give you the nickel tour.”

“The what tour?” Hannah asks.

“Oh, just a silly saying from when people used money.”

He leads us from the docks onto the shore where several metal buildings stand, their alloy walls reflecting back the red light that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere in this dungeon place. Stopping at a door, he punches a code into a keypad and the door slides open.

“This is our sintering plant.”

“What’s sintering, Daddy?” Hannah asks.

“Well, the long name is atomic diffusion manufacturing. It’s how we produce what we need without having complex assembly lines or scaled economies. You would have seen these on Level 4, Aubrey, if you’d gone down instead of up.”

We pass through the door into a wide hall of bright-white light. Dr. Radcliffe leads us to a glass window and stops. Inside, a series of robotic arms move in precise and mindless jerks, guiding laser beams down to nozzles spraying bursts of metal powder. As they work, gleaming titanium cylinders grow like tall mushrooms on platforms.

“What are they making?”

He points to an LCD display.

Revolving there against a black-grid background is a virtual three-dimensional rendering of a small silver missile.

I look back through the glass as the missiles take shape on their platforms. When they’re complete, the machines pause to cool them with bursts of nitrogen, and then the platforms open and the missiles drop onto a conveyor belt to be carried away. The lasers begin again and more missiles sprout from the alloy.

“Can’t they make other things?” Hannah asks.

“Oh, yes,” he says. “Anything you can dream up and draft into the computer. And not just alloys either, but plastics too. We have much larger machines down on Level 4, of course.”

“I’ve seen enough of this,” I say.

“Let’s carry on then, shall we?”

He leads us away from the window and down the hall and through a door into another room. This room is dim and cool with fans whirring in the ceiling and black tables illuminated by hanging spotlights. Stacked on the tables, garish and gleaming, an array of newly minted munitions casings wait to be loaded. Behind the tables, against the wall, I spot canisters marked with chemical names, some of which I recognize from lessons:

POTASSIUM PERMANGANATE

AMMONIUM PERCHLORATE COMPOSITE

MAGNESIUM POWDER

MERCURY NITRIDE

TETRAZINE

Against the farthest wall stands an indestructible black box riddled with rivets and hinges and small windows glowing blue. Red lettering on its side reads—ANTIMATTER.

We cross the room in silence, our footsteps echoing loudly on the concrete floor. I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until we exit outside into the cavern again, back in the low red glow, standing in an open-air courtyard looking at a hologram starscape hanging above a bubbling fountain. The courtyard is surrounded by upper floors of doors covered in scaffolding.

“These are our living quarters,” Dr. Radcliffe says. “As you can see, we’re doing a little maintenance.”

We cross the courtyard and exit beneath an archway onto a pathway leading to a footbridge over a sunken channel of train tracks. The tracks arrive from a tunnel with a closed iron door and pass beneath the bridge to a terminal. And there, next to the terminal, beneath me on the bridge, is the source of the red glow: a circular building sunken into the carven floor, its dome ceiling opaque and throbbing with deep-red light. An LCD sign above the door reads WELCOME TO EDEN.

“That’s Eden?” I ask. “Under that dome?”

“Yes,” Dr. Radcliffe says. “This is where we would have received you had the train not been crushed in that rockslide. And had you made it here, we could have prepared you more slowly for your new role and the shock of seeing the surface.”

“Why was the train on the surface anyway?”

“Well, even though we’re below the lake here, this is still quite an elevation, and there’s a nasty fault line to skirt in the pass. I’m hoping to find a workaround. Maybe you can help.”

I look down at the train dock at Eden, an offshoot channel obviously designed to receive a car of retirees in a narrow corral with a small platform leading only to the metal door.

“Can we see it?”

“See what? The fault line?”

“No. Eden.”

“Let’s save Eden for another time,” he says, turning away. “Right now I want to show you both the world.”

Hannah steals a look at me and smiles. Her face is the only thing that seems alive in the red pulsing light rising up from the dome of Eden. I wish I were as excited as she is. I follow along, reminding myself I’m just going to gather information.

We move from the bridge onto a tarmac surface, walk past another row of metal buildings, and pass through one of several open hangar doors carved into the cavern’s far wall.

The tall, curved ceiling is lit with the familiar LED floods, and lined up on the polished hangar floor is a fleet of gleaming PZ-51 Ranger drones. At the far hangar wall, a steel door sits open, revealing an upward sloping runway disappearing into the cavern wall. A drone taxis toward it and stops. An old man with an electronic clipboard steps up and inspects the drone, circling it slowly, touching the missile batteries hanging from its wings, and checking them against his clipboard. He’s the first person we’ve seen down here. When he’s finished counting the warheads, he steps back and gives a thumbs up toward the mirrored glass of an elevated office overlooking the hangar. The drone noses silently forward, its front wheel sinking into the runway channel and locking into an electromagnetic shuttle. I recognize the catapult launch system from an engineering lesson plan. There’s a moment of silence followed by a steadily building whine and then a loud click as the drone disappears in a flash of gray up the runway shaft, a sucking sound filling the vacuum of its exit. It’s there and then it isn’t.