The Eden Project: Humanity's Last Chance (15 page)

In the distance she thought she could see a couple walking hand in hand along the southern wall. Even though they were too far to see their faces, she knew it must be Ozzie and Maya. They were the only couple yet brave enough to hold hands in front of other kids. She knew that Cassie and Tuna had been holding hands in private since the relationship classes had begun. She and Zeke had held hands when dancing and then there was that strange moment when he had run his fingers through her hair in Audio Relay Systems.

She knew Zeke would sooner drink rocket fuel than kiss her now. The magical moments on the dance floor and the nervous moments alone together on dates, when even breathing was exhilarating, were lost forever because she was a singularly selfish and altogether silly girl.

Neither nostalgia nor regret reared their heads. Concern for the immediate survival of the project, and therefore the human species, dominated her thoughts. She could worry about all her terrible decisions later when the four ships flew quietly across the universe.

The only thing she cared about right now was talking to Tuna. He was not in his chamber and Cassie was with Sylvia. When she found him, she would have to first offer up a convincing apology for stealing his scrollpad and then she was hoping he could enlighten her on what all of this meant regarding their safety.

She was sorry, sure, but she really needed to know what was going on, what were the risks and would it all effect the plan for the future? Tuna was a close friend and her betrayal hurt him. She understood that and she was sorry. She went over it again, practicing her sincerity, as she approached Tuna’s trees.

Under the canopy of synthetic foliage, the half light was reduced to shadow. Stepping around the thick trunk of the final tree, she found him there, sitting by the window. Adam. She never understood why the light touched him differently than it did all others.

When he turned back and found her there, he said nothing. He hopped up onto his feet and considered her presence suspiciously. His green eyes glistened. What thoughts made his eyes water? What were the secrets inside his soul? She felt his loneliness within her loneliness. Her senses became alert. The smell of his skin overtook her. She saw the fabric on his chest moving almost imperceptibly with the pounding of his heart.

“Why are you here?” His voice was stripped down, a whisper only.

She gave him her eyes, every bit of them, silencing all the world around. “I don’t understand this,” she quietly observed. “Is it a sickness that I love you?”

He fought something inside himself. How quickly he lost the battle. He took her in his arms with a suddenness like violence, but far more gentle. His two lips took hold of her lower lip. Was this a kiss? Then he moved to her upper lip and finally his lips where everywhere at once. Her whole body felt electrified, amplified. She let go of everything. Her muscles failed yet he kept her from falling with his arms around her.

They kissed. She wanted to keep kissing him until the end of time. Let them come, she thought. She didn’t care anymore. She had already waited a lifetime for his kiss.

* * *

TUNA HAD BEEN WORKING something out in his head for months. The night they had been forced to watch the live feed from the destroyed city, questions arose while he lay awake in bed. Why did they have the feed from a faraway city? Where did they access the feed? What other feeds could possibly be accessed? And finally to the question that had been his obsession for months, could satellite feeds still be accessed?

When the doctors contacted him for use of his tech skills, he had to postpone his attempt to link to a satellite that night. He walked through the darkening dome considering the doctors’ request when it dawned on him that not only could he accomplish their objective but his own as well and he could do it in the very same place, the flight deck of ES2.

Claudia had instructed him to discreetly access the onboard sensory devices to push out the detection radius. In other words, she wanted to be able to monitor more of the surrounding sea for rogue activity.

Tuna had suggested an idea to help with perhaps a larger issue. The boy’s boat had been too small to be detected. He smartly had not run his motor. He traveled at night not to be seen. He did not make a bleep on any of the Project’s sensory technology.

Tuna’s idea was to manipulate the ship’s SAR mapping technology using a multi-channel phase interferometry technique in order to detect any movement, no matter how small, on the surface of the sea. He had read a legacy file on it the previous year. He reread it now walking up the ramp to his ship. Very interesting. The phase interferometry between two channels can be utilized to cancel surface clutter from one channel by subtracting a phase-weighted version of the image from the other channel. Easy. Sounds like a piece of cake.

A sense of awe overtook him. He entered the flight deck for the first time with an actual mission, a vital mission in fact. He felt his training days were slipping quickly behind him. Whatever was to happen in the coming days and months, he would be measured now by real world actions rather than scored capabilities.

He sat down and got to work. He clicked on the necessary systems, but made sure to keep all exterior lights off. Dusk was coming and he did not want to become a beacon to anyone traveling the sea at night.

His fingers worked their magic, rerouting all onboard detection devices to the control room for Claudia. She would take it from there while he tried to calibrate the SAR mapping tool per the model he had read about in the legacy file. The current SAR technology was many generations advanced which had a couple drawbacks.

First it was a streamlined and dedicated technology meant for geological examination of planetary surfaces, hardly a battle tool meant for mapping enemy movement across a body of water. He was sure he could get past that, but the second drawback would take some intuition. The evolution of programming code meant he would have to translate the recipe laid out in the legacy file to modern system language.

All that would take some time, so he decided to put that off until he dealt with the question that had been in his mind for months. Claudia would be busy monitoring distant stretches of sea using his ship’s detection devices remotely. She would not ask for an update on his SAR project for a while. He jumped right in and searched for a way to downlink from an active satellite.

He wanted his eyes on the outside world.

-21-

Claudia worked her keypad. The screens above her changed from darkening views of the surrounding ocean to digitalized grids with green pulsing lines sweeping from right to left across the grids. These were the detection sensors from Tuna’s ship intended to monitor the oncoming path of his starship in the farthest reaches of the galaxy.

The four new grids joined the dome’s two standard grids. A small mark pulsed on one of the standard grids. The DJ’s boat. It did not concern her. Studying the new screens that scanned the waters farther out, she exhaled. She was relieved to find the ocean empty of all traffic.

She reached out to grab her mug of tea while the screens rolled through their progressions. Sitting back in her well-worn chair, she could not remember how many years she had been staring at these screens.

Her original duty on the ship was rocket propulsions systems which were buried beneath each of the Eden Sphere ships. Once that miracle of engineering and rocket science had been accomplished, the ships had been mounted on top of the rockets and then her work was covered by titanium flooring and hidden away from the world.

When the first two boys were born two days apart, little Z and Ty as the thirty Project staffers called them, she was in charge of sealing the huge Education and Launching portion of the dome so that no one could ever get in or out, except the children. She remembered visiting Lotte in the nursery and watching her use nursing droids and robotic arms to nurture the poor little infants through the early stages of infancy.

How things have changed. Little Ty was now known as Tuna and he was busy hacking into the SAR mapping software to reshape it for his own purposes, to somehow map the surface of the ever moving sea in order to detect small vessel movement.

She smiled with her next thought. More impressive than the fact he was attempting this impromptu alteration of the intricate device was the fact that she had never even considered he might fail in the attempt. Anything that boy had ever imagined in his head, he had been able to accomplish, bending one system or other to his will.

Nine years, she suddenly remembered. She was reassigned to the control room after Jim Regis was isolated and then laid to rest which was what they all preferred to call the fiery, gruesome end that came to infected staff members.

She heard the sound but did not see what screen it came from. She knew that sound, a bleep from the new grids, and she knew another thing even before she realized what screen it had come from. This was not at all like the boy’s small boat. It was a proper ship with working engines and it had already been out there.

The onboard detection devices were still going through the initial progressions when the ship was discovered. Due west. The kid’s side of the dome, the side the boy had come from. She touched the shape on the screen and data popped out in a small window.

Estimated length is 470 feet. Her jaw dropped. She grabbed her scrollpad and banged her fingers frantically on the screen.

“Ship. Ship! Big ship!” she yelled into her scrollpad.

* * *

DOCTOR QUARNA LIMPED into the lab and past Doctor Pappas at his console. He banged at the door to the boy’s holding chamber. He glared angrily back at Doctor Pappas. “Open this door! I need to talk with the little saboteur.”

Doctor Pappas hesitated to consider Doctor Quarna’s fury. “If that’s what you want, but you need to put on the suit.”

“The suit? I thought you told me he’s unblemished, untouchable, a celestial being?

“You’ve looked at the data?”

“Yeah. He’s a marvel of human evolution. Whatever. Let me in there. His hands are more dangerous than his blood and those are tied down. In a different time, under different circumstances, he could have been the missing link. In our world he’s more like an angel of death.”

Doctor Pappas eyed his frenzied boss, reached down to the console and buzzed the door. Doctor Quarna stepped into a small, all glass air lock where he immediately banged on the locked door on the other side, the one that would allow him entrance into the holding chamber.

He was locked in the air lock. He shook his head and turned back to Doctor Pappas who made a swiping motion over his face signaling him to close his eyes.

Extremely frustrated, Doctor Quarna relented. He closed his eyes. Doctor Pappas hit a few keys to begin a laser cleansing within the small air lock. Red lasers moved up and down the chamber covering all of Doctor Quarna’s body multiple times.

The lasers stopped, the door clicked and Doctor Quarna stepped into the chamber that held the boy who had tried to kill him. He appeared to be asleep, but the doctor’s first careful step registered in the boy’s ears. His eyes flashed open, his head turned to the side and he locked his gaze on the suddenly frozen doctor.

When the doctor took another step, the boy fought against his restraints. “Easy,” the doctor said. “I just want to talk.”

Outside the chamber, Doctor Pappas listened on the speakers. He touched his console intercom. “We don’t believe the boy speaks.”

Doctor Quarna glanced back through the viewing window at Doctor Pappas who continued on the intercom. “He has no vocal impairment, but he makes no verbal response.”

The boy watched carefully as Doctor Quarna observed his pale shoulders full of pink scars, including the prominent bite mark. “We know you’re not deaf, but are you dumb?”

Immediately the boy pulled on his restraints with rage. The doctor stepped back away from the boy. “So we know you are not deaf or dumb. We also know you are violent and extremely touchy.”

The boy watched the doctor with viciousness. Outside the chamber, Doctor Pappas could not help but grin. Doctor Naseer entered behind him, followed by Doctor Becker.

“Who’s on the big ship?” Doctor Quarna asked.

The boy’s face lost its defiance. The doctor was confused. For the first time the boy seemed human and worried.

“There’s a ship, a big boat, out there. Who’s on it?”

The boy shook his head from side-to-side.

Doctor Becker appeared at the viewing window. Doctor Quarna noticed. He quickly returned his attention to the boy.

“Your boat, the white boat, did you steal it?”

The boy shook his head again and tried his restraints one more time. He turned away from the doctor to the window. He could see Doctor Becker there. Her beauty awed and fascinated him. There is no beauty outside the dome.

“Right,” Doctor Quarna smirked. “I suppose the old Doctor just gave you the boat?”

The boy did not respond, but a new kind of seriousness overtook him. Doctor Quarna tilted his head to study this new reaction.

“Did Doctor Hossler help you?”

Again, the boy shook his head.

“Did you help Doctor Hossler?”

Nothing at first and then the boy nodded.

Doctor Quarna looked to Doctor Becker who watched him intently.