The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) (14 page)

Jack shrugged. It was food for thought but there was nothing
to be done about it now. He figured there was nothing more to learn from Teague
about his past, but there was still one thing that had been bothering him, and
now seemed as good of a time as any to bring it up. “How do you know what year
I was born?”

Teague looked at him in confusion. “Well, from your medical
records I suppose.”

Jack shook his head, “No, I don’t think that is it. See,
when I joined the military, I had a new I.D. forged. To get this, I paid a guy
I worked with who was dating a girl who worked for the county, and she filed a
revised birth certificate for me that showed I was eighteen years old instead
of sixteen, then I used that to get a new driver’s license and with that I was
able to join the military. Ever since then, legally I was two years older.”

Jack was watching closely as he revealed this information,
but Teague was either really good at hiding things or he simply didn’t know
what Jack was referring to. “Jack, I don’t follow.”

“The birth date you gave me when I woke up was my real birth
date, not the one that would have been in my medical or military history.”

The two men stared at each other, each looking for an answer
to a different question. “I will pull the images later and compare it to our
records. I am sure that whatever the medical records showed, that is what we
entered. Perhaps you revealed your true age to the doctors during an exam. Or
maybe this is an example of the damaged memories we were talking about.”

Jack nodded slowly. “Maybe.” But he wasn’t buying it. Teague
didn’t look like he knew anything about it, so he let it drop for now. Plenty
of time to get back around to it.

The elevator doors opened back up, and a small child ran
past followed a moment later by a middle aged woman. “Welcome to the family
level.”

* * *

Jack was disappointed, they had skipped to level three and
he had hoped to check out level four, the armament level. Looking at the next
question on the list he said, “So if most of the world is a wasteland filled
with radiation, how do we get to Montana? That’s a long way to walk, and I
imagine the roads are in pretty rough shape by now.”

Teague stepped off the elevator and Jack followed. The
hallways on this level were wide with higher ceilings, and, similar to the
cloning room, the light was brighter and much more natural. Unlike the cloning
room, the walls were painted in warm tones, not sterile white. Up ahead looked
to be a courtyard of some kind, and they were headed that way. As they walked, Teague
said, “The world up above us is not like you are used to, of that you can be
assured. But it isn’t quite the wasteland you might be thinking. We are in a
desert of course, so it’s pretty barren immediately outside the bunker, but
there are all sorts of climates out there, just as there were before. Much of
the radioactive areas have settled out, and there is very little of the
radiation and other contamination in the air, as there once was. Perhaps twenty
percent of the land is inhabitable, but the problem isn’t finding safe land,
its finding safe land that isn’t broken up by radioactive zones. Sometimes the ‘safe
zones’ are as narrow as fifty feet. Navigating from place to place is
difficult, and downright dangerous without the right equipment.”

They approached the courtyard and Jack was impressed. They
were at the lower of two living levels, and the courtyard extended up three
levels. It was about a square acre, and the ceiling was as bright as a noonday
sun. As they came out of the hall into the courtyard, the ‘sun’ washed over
Jack’s face. He felt his spirits rise instantly. Most of the courtyard was
covered in green grass, and air was incredibly fresh here, a big change from
the air a couple levels down. “This is amazing! To have an open area of this
size...” Jack had been impressed with the size of the cloning room, but he was
in awe when he saw the courtyard. Seeing more than one level from a “cross
section” like this allowed him to get an idea of how they had constructed the
bunker. In his day, they dug a big hole, built a strong building, and buried
it. If structures built in the decades after his death were all like this one,
he questioned again what value he could have in a world like this. So much had
changed.

There was a bench next to a walkway and they wandered over
to it and sat down, enjoying the warmth of the fake sunlight. “So there aren’t
many large radiation free zones? I mean, with enough room for farms and cities
and such?” He was interested in what resources humanity had left to work with.

“Actually, there are hundreds of areas, maybe thousands,
where people could start a good sized community, set up some decent sized
farms, and live in relative comfort. Some of those areas are more than a
thousand square miles, and could probably support a hundred thousand people. The
problem is, they are not interconnected. You can fly small amounts of people or
equipment in, but anything bigger than a bus you would have to build there. It
is not impossible, just impractical. Think of Hawaii. Plenty of land to live
on, but imagine if you couldn’t get a boat there. You could fly a plane over for
anything you absolutely needed, but if you wanted housing or transportation,
you would have to make it with the resources available.

“After the big war, almost all the ‘safe zones’ were
populated with the survivors. Some of those areas included entire cities from
before the war, and a handful had it pretty good, particularly in the grain
belt area where farms were plentiful and cities could generate electricity. Regardless
of the resources available to them, none of the communities ever got much
larger than a few thousand people. Life was hard everywhere, and even where
they had it good, things broke down fairly quickly. The problem was they were
isolated, cut off from the rest of the world, and with no government to enforce
the laws, natural selection took over. The strong ruled and the weak were
oppressed.”

“You said they
were
inhabited. What happened?” Jack
wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Disease, famine, inbreeding, conflict… you name it. The
ones that survived without some natural or man-made disaster killing them off
ended up trading or working with the EoS when they rose to power. There were
resources in some of these safe zones, and it was easier to trade a little
technology for them than it was to take it by force. The EoS wasn’t interested
in ruling anyone but themselves, but when the fighting broke out, no place on
earth was safe. Traders inadvertently brought man-made plagues to these places
and now they are, with a few small exceptions, all wiped out. If we had more
people and more resources, we could give those areas a try again but it will
take many more decades before we are ready for that.” He looked like he wanted
to say more but he left it at that.

“So with so much land broken up, finding paths through from
one safe zone to another is tricky, and of course sometimes downright
impossible. Since the air is pretty well cleansed of radioactive particles, air
travel is pretty safe. During the height of the EoS, flying machines were
commonplace, and luckily we got away with a few.” Jack made a mental note to
ask about space flight and if it ever played a role in the EoS. But right now
he was more interested in the flying machines they had available here.

“How many is a few?” You can’t lead men without knowing your
exact strength, so it was almost pure instinct to ask that question.

“We have two heavy freight haulers, four medium transports,
Two four man flyers, and a half dozen two man flyers. There is also a very
large hauler stored on the surface a few miles from here, but it requires a
runway to take off and land. We keep it maintained but it almost never sees use
because it is difficult to find a place to land, and we have not had need of
that kind of capacity. We were recently blessed with an aircraft mechanic
though, and soon she will be up to speed and will be able to maintain the
larger craft. She is already proficient with the small craft, and I understand
she has become quite the pilot as well.” He was talking about Wendy of course.

Jack wondered if air was the only means of transportation. “Do
you have any ground based vehicles?”

“We have a couple transports, and a dozen smaller vehicles
made for two or four people. They do okay out there, but some of the terrain is
challenging, and while their theoretical range is almost unlimited with the
power source they have, realistically they are only good for about two hundred
miles.”

Jack was satisfied, so he looked over his list of questions.
He was able to cross off the ones about where they were and how big the place
was they were in, those were all but answered already. He spotted one question
and chuckled. “What exactly is the food? And where does it come from?”

Teague smiled and said, “Do you really want to know?” Jack
nodded although Teague’s smile made him feel a little uncomfortable. “Okay, but
don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. Level six is the utility level, everything
happens there. Power is generated, air is filtered and exchanged with outside
air, water is brought in from some rain catchments up on the surface, and the
water we use is recycled. This includes water recovered from the air with
condensers, from the human waste, and gray water from the showers and cleaning
machines. We retain almost one hundred percent of the water in this facility
and we get the rest of what we need from catchment. The rain water is not
radioactive but it is dirty from all the debris still in the atmosphere from
the nukes. Water is filtered, then purified and stored. Everything else that is
waste goes into some large vats, where some very handy bacteria go to work on
it. They eat anything you give them except the lining in the vats, and they
excrete some very nutritious stuff.” Jack had gone a little green at the
thought, but Teague wasn’t finished yet. “The excreted goop rises to the top
and is scraped off and some of it is made into the sawdust like stuff in the
food. It is processed and cooked to kill off any biologicals, so it is totally
safe. It is basically like a super multi-vitamin, containing just about
everything a human needs to survive, with the exception of protein. The rest of
the goop is fed to another organism, this one is more like a worm. It feeds on
the goop and grows rapidly, and then splits, like a bacteria would, and
continues on as long as there is nutrition to eat. The worms are processed into
a protein paste, and a powder is made from that. When mixed with water, it’s
something of a gelatin. The machines mix that with some artificial flavors and
the sawdust-like nutrients, and it comes out of the dispensers in the mess
halls or in the kitchens of the apartments.” Jack felt positively ill now, and Teague
just grinned and said, “I warned you.”

“So basically bacterial poop and worms. I ate some crazy
stuff in Korea and Japan, from fried bugs to dog stew, and most of it tasted
worse than the food here, so I guess it isn’t all that bad. Far better than
C-Rations too.” Trying to take his mind off the food, he looked at his list
once more.
Cross that one off and never bring it up again,
he thought. He
didn’t see any more questions he wanted to ask right at the moment, but then he
remembered the question that came up when he was talking to Tiny. “By the way,
Doc, how many frozen bodies are at the site in Montana? You have revived about
fifty, right?”

Teague nodded, “Yeah, about that many. Like I said earlier,
our success rate is now about half, but that includes all the ones we have to
weed out due to condition and reason for death. If they died from massive head
trauma, the chance of cloning is lower, and if they had a brain disease like
Alzheimer’s, we have to take a shot in the dark on where to cut off their
memories, or we end up with complications. We had one unfortunate case...” He
stopped, obviously not wanting to talk about failures. “Anyway, the facility
was built to hold three thousand, and was about eighty percent occupied at the
start of the war. We estimate that we can save perhaps twelve hundred more,
give or take.”

That many?
“How many people can this facility
handle?” This place was large but that’s a lot of people to feed, clothe, and
take care of, not to mention how quickly that many people could make babies. Given
that men will spread the gene pool around and be encouraged to have more than
two or three kids each, within twenty years the population could easily hit six
or seven thousand, and then the next generation will be having babies.

“About two hundred families of five. If we are successful in
this, we will outgrow this facility within the next four or five years.”

“So what are you planning on doing then? Are you going to
move everyone above ground? Try to make a go on the surface?”

“We aren’t sure, but a lot of it depends on you.”

“Me!?” Jack exclaimed. “What do I have to do with this?”

“We were hoping that you could build us a new home, actually.”

Wendy was working on the cooling system for the armament
level, but her mind was not on her work, and it was going slow. It was unlike
her to not be able to focus like this, but she knew the reason why. She was
almost in a manic state now, compared to the depression she had felt pretty
much since she woke up four months ago and found out she had died. If her
family or friends had ever had to describe her normal emotional state in as few
words as possible, it would probably have been ‘mellow’. That wasn’t to say
that she didn’t have the typical mood swings that any woman is prone to having,
but extreme highs and extreme lows were not a normal part of her life.

When she woke up four months ago, and the situation was
explained to her, she sank into a deep depression. She was good at covering up
her feelings, something that made life in the military much easier. It was okay
for a man to get drunk and whine to his buddies when he got dumped by a
girlfriend or missed a promotion, but one Goddamn tear from a female soldier
and it was all about how women are too emotional to be in the Army.

Outwardly, she hid her depression by appearing introverted
and shy, which also served to keep the men at bay, at least most of them. The
men here were typically not at all inconsiderate about the situation. In fact
it was quite the opposite. The woman was expected to approach the man whose
seed she was interested in, and if anything, the other women were the ones
pressuring her to get pregnant. Aside from the women in the community, Teague
was the only one who had even brought it up. He reminded her on multiple
occasions that the reason they went through the trouble of bringing her back
was to expand their population, and she understood that. She just wasn’t okay
with the idea of sleeping around trying to get knocked up. He had talked to her
about other methods of getting pregnant like insemination, but the thought of
them squirting sperm into her with a syringe was almost as bad as having sex
with the men in the first place. The best option so far was IVF, where they
harvest her egg, fertilize it in the lab, and then plant it in her womb. Anything
that avoided having sex with someone she didn’t know was a good option. Her
history of sexual encounters had left her somewhat jaded about sex in general,
and not very trusting of either men or women.

Wendy knew she was attractive, and she learned early in life
that while she could use that as a tool to get what she wanted, it was a double
edged sword. Her first boyfriend in high school had been very persistent about
getting into her pants one night, and although he had come to his senses before
it turned into rape, she came to the realization that she needed to be able to
defend herself. She enrolled in a kick boxing class, but it was geared more
toward getting in shape than self-defense. Luckily, one of the students knew of
a small school where they taught Jujitsu, and for the next four years before
joining the Army, she spent four nights a week learning the martial art, and
two nights a week practicing kick boxing. The combination kept her in perfect
physical condition, and gave her the confidence to be around men without fear.

During basic training in the Army, her beauty was a huge
liability. One moonless evening while returning to her barracks from dinner, a
man jumped out from some shadows and struck her in the head. She was dazed long
enough for him to get her on the ground and get her pants unbuckled, but she
recovered and put a knee in his groin, punched him in the nose, and nearly
broke one of his fingers getting out of his grasp. In the scuffle she caught an
elbow just below her right eye, and by morning it had turned into a nasty
looking black eye. That pissed her off almost as much as the man’s intentions
had. She went to report it, but her superiors made it clear that if she chose
to file a report and try to pursue finding the man, they would make life very
difficult for her. Most of the men in the Army were against women in the common
ranks, and as far as they were concerned, rape was just one of the many
problems associated with mixing a lot of sex starved men with a few women. They
figured it was what the women deserved for wanting to join a ‘men’s club’.

That was not acceptable to her, so rather than go through
official channels, she decided to take the matter into her own hands. It had
not been hard to find the man, after all she had injured his finger and bruised
up his nose pretty good. She waited until the sergeant was getting his platoon
ready for PT, then confronted him in front of everyone. She didn’t say much,
just walked up to him, looked at everyone around him and said, “The next guy
that thinks he can try to fuck me without my permission is going to end up like
this piece of shit.” She paused a second to make sure everyone’s attention was
on the private in front of her, then took him totally off guard with a shot
straight into his nose, this time breaking it. He had tried to fight back, but
he didn’t stand a chance. Normally something like that would have landed her in
jail, and possibly discharged from the military. In this case, however, the
sergeant figured out right away that one of his men had tried to force himself
on a female soldier, and if he put her in jail, he would have to put the man in
jail too which would not look good for either himself or the Army. So he had
let her finish, sent the man to the infirmary, and filed the whole thing as a
training accident. Nothing ever came of the incident, and nobody ever tried to
force himself on her again.

That’s not to say that they still didn’t try to get in her
pants, they just tried to use their charms to do so. She had dated a little,
but on the few occasions that she went to bed with them, not only was she
disappointed in their performance, but inevitably they would brag about it, and
sooner or later it always got back to her.

It wasn’t just the men either. Not at all surprising, some
of the women in the military liked women more than men, and seldom were they
shy about it. They usually tried to start a relationship after she had dumped
the latest asshole, but in the end they were after the same thing. It had been
tempting, occasionally, and although she wished she could forget about it, she
had found herself in bed with a fellow female enlisted after a late night
drinking binge. Not to say that it wasn’t sort of fun, but the woman just didn’t
have what it took to satisfy her, and in retrospect she wished she had not even
opened that door at all. Just like with the men, it got around pretty quickly
and she had to deal with those types of women even more often, not to mention
the men who heard the rumors automatically assumed that she ‘swung both ways’
and hence would be willing to get into a threesome.

It didn’t take long for her to come to the conclusion it was
unlikely she would find someone in the military she could fall in love with. Wendy
wanted what most young women wanted, a real relationship with a man that truly
cared about her. One afternoon, while test flying an apache, the pilot started
telling her about this program he had joined where they would freeze his body
and try to revive him in the future when they could fix anything wrong with
him. It had sounded romantic, being brought back in the future to start over,
so she made some inquiries and discovered they were always looking for
volunteers, but didn’t make it public knowledge. She had just broken up with
yet another man and was so frustrated in trying to find a decent relationship,
she signed her death away. Then, while visiting her grandparents on a weekend
leave, she had met Gene.

She was hardly a religious woman, having been the by-product
of ‘free love’. Her grandparents had lived in a commune in California, and her
mother was born there. By sixteen her mother was pregnant, due to her loose
morals and even looser knees. Wendy had loved her mother (still did), but they
never got along too well, and the only father figure she ever had was the ‘man
of the month’ her mother brought home. She got to spend the summers with her
grandparents though, and over the years they slipped further away from their
hippie heritage and closer to God and religion. Wendy respected this and when
she visited the last few years, she even went to church with them.

She met him at a church function, and he was about as far
from the typical military type as she could ever expect to meet. They dated a
few times during her leave, and the most he had ever tried to do was kiss her. She
had returned to base the next week, and for the next two months, they
corresponded through phone and email. He visited her once, despite being three
hundred miles away, and still he had not expected her to have sex with him. She
asked about it, fearing that maybe he was gay and she was misreading the
situation, and he simply told her that when the time was right it would happen.

The night before her accident, she had talked to him on the
phone. The following weekend kicked off a one week leave, and they had booked a
room at a romantic resort in Colorado. She had every intention of taking the
relationship to the next level, and hoped that things went even further than
that. Then she had to go and die. When she woke up to learn that not only was
there very few men left in the world, but they were going to be expected to
impregnate a number of women, her hopes and dreams of finding the perfect man
and having a monogamous relationship with him were about as dead as she had
been for the last three centuries.

The thought of her grandparents and mother living to see her
die combined with missing out on what she was certain would be the one true
love in her life had really weighed heavily on her heart. Adding the idea of
willfully having sex with exactly the type of men she avoided her entire life
had put her into a depressive state that she could not escape.

There wasn’t much sympathy to be found here either. Most of
the women were from this era, not hers, and they took for granted that they
would have sex with any man that was convenient, in effort to expand their
family. There were eight other Reborn women who did not see things the same way
as the natives, but neither did they see things the way Wendy did. Usually when
someone volunteers to have their dead body experimented on after they die, it’s
because they don’t have anyone in their life that would care what happened to
them after death. Wendy had a family, a man she thought she was in love with,
and a life in the military that she enjoyed. Teague could sympathize, but that
sympathy always carried the caveat that despite her dislike at the situation,
she still needed to have a baby. Try as hard as she could, she simply couldn’t
shake the depression.

Then a couple months after her rebirth, she flew with a
recovery team to the cryogenics facility, and while she had waited for them to
get what they came for, she started exploring the facility. Way in the back she
came across Jack’s cryo-tube. The tube itself was unique. It was similar to the
other old tubes, but it had more gadgets connected to it. Also, there was a
lockbox attached to the end of the tube. None of the other tubes she had seen
had a lockbox like this, and it had piqued her curiosity. She got some tools
from her pack and managed to pick the lock on the box. It had been vacuum
sealed, and in it were several well preserved documents and a diary with a worn
black leather cover. She had looked around to make sure nobody had seen her,
then stuffed the diary and papers in her pack.

They brought back two more heads to try to clone that day. She
found it a little morbid that they only took the heads, but that was all that
was needed and there was not a huge amount of room on the transports. She never
looked for her tube, and had no interest in seeing her three hundred year old
frozen headless corpse.

Back at her apartment, she took out the diary and documents.
She didn’t know what had prompted her to take them in the first place, and once
she had them in front of her, she felt a little guilty about it. At the same
time, however, she had felt a tingle of excitement at the prospect of reading
something that was not intended for her eyes. Being depressed all the time had
really been a burden, and this sudden change in the normal day to day boredom
had already lifted her spirits a little, and it even got her mind off of having
a baby.

All the medical records for the inhabitants of the
cryogenics facility had been stored on the central computer, and when the place
was first discovered, it hadn’t taken long for their advanced computers to hack
the ancient systems and get all the information translated into a format they
could use. The leaders of the community reviewed the information in the files
and selected the candidates based not only on being male, but also on their job
before dying, their psychological reports, and their medical history. Wendy had
been selected because she was a mechanic and an amateur pilot, or at least that
was what they had told her. They needed someone to fix their aircraft and even
to fly them, and aside from some massive body trauma, she was in great shape. The
man whose body was in that tube was different. He predated the computer system,
and had never been added to the database. The documents Wendy had found were
all the information on this guy that existed.

Most of the documents were medical reports detailing his
illness, the treatments, and the time line. Cancer.
Man what a crappy way to
go,
she had thought.
Much better to go down in flames
. Of course she
had no idea what it was like to go down in flames, or to crash at all, as she
had no memory of it.

There was a personal letter in the documents, and Wendy had
felt like a voyeur reading it. It was from a woman named Mabel, addressed to
this man as if she was sure he would be revived one day and would want to read
it. It talked about how they had spent some time together the last year and she
was very happy that he had reconnected with her, then wished him a long and
fruitful life.
Was this his girlfriend?
Wendy was intrigued, and next
she had taken out the diary.