The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy (3 page)

A. Seal off the infected level and save Holocene II.

B. Render aid to those infected and risk total destruction.

I reread the question a third time. I’ve never seen an ethics lesson on my slate, and I’m unsure how to answer. These are the only options? Imprison and kill an entire level to save the rest of us, or take no action and possibly destroy humanity?

Not able to decide, I look to skip it. It won’t let me. Then I remember Mrs. Hightower saying we must attempt an answer for each question. I shut my eyes, making a blind choice. When I open them again, the question is gone—replaced with bold red lettering that reads: TEST COMPLETE.

The desktop slides shut.

I lift my head and look past my calculating classmates at the timer—two hours and nineteen minutes left. And I’m already done? Can that be? I listen to the other testers sighing with confusion as the clock ticks off another minute.

I went too fast. Didn’t take enough time. I begin second guessing my answers, thinking of other possibilities for each question. Whole sections of the test parade across my mind and now I’m sure I messed it up with overconfidence. And why is everyone else still tapping away at screen calculators, working out math problems from the first half of the exam? Did I miss an entire section? Did I miss two?

I grip the desktop, pull hard to open it again—it won’t budge. I jerk it harder, grunting without realizing it.

“Is there a problem?” Mrs. Hightower asks.

Everyone stops working and turns in their seats, curious eyes looking at me, waiting for a response.

“I finished early,” I say, “but I think I missed a few.”

Red grunts behind me. Someone chuckles.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Hightower says, “but your answers, right or wrong, are final. You’re excused.”

“I’m excused?”

“You may leave,” she says. “You’re disturbing the others.”

As I get up and walk to the elevator, my legs are shaking, so I breathe good energy in and bad energy out. The door opens, I step on, and look back. Everyone’s heads are bent over their tests again, except Red who’s glaring at me.

CHAPTER 3
What Did I Do?

When I arrive at our living quarters, my father isn’t there.

He’s probably still at his lab.

With my lesson slate abandoned in Mrs. Hightower’s bin, waiting to be rebooted and reassigned, I’m bored, with nothing to do. I head out, walking to the east side of the Valley where our social buildings cluster around the open square.

As I pass the public house, I hear the men and women laughing, and it hits me that I’m fifteen now and old enough to finally go inside, but the smell of the algae ethanol wafting out from the pub’s open windows turns my stomach sour.

A few buildings farther down, I spot the green light above our theater door, signaling that an educational is about to begin. Stepping inside the lobby, I pass by the check-in kiosk without scanning my palm, and slip into the dark screening room unaccounted for. I’d rather not be on the grid tonight.

As soon as I plunk into my seat, I notice a mother and her daughter sitting in the front row, the only other people here. I watch as the mother plays with her daughter’s hair, coiling it lightly in her fingers. I recognize the girl from the education annex where I think she’s a couple of years behind me.

“Your hair is getting so thick,” the mother says. “It must be the new oil rations you’re taking.”

They don’t appear to have noticed my entrance, and I feel guilty eavesdropping on their conversation. I consider coughing to alert them, but before I do, the mother continues:

“Have you met any boys in your class yet?” she asks, still stroking her daughter’s hair. “Anyone you like?”

The girl shrugs but says nothing.

Her mother continues: “I met a boy when I was your age.”

“Daddy?” the girl asks.

“No, I met your father later. This was a different boy, a boy who sat next to me in main group.”

“What kind of boy?”

“A handsome boy. Sometimes it was hard to focus because I kept wanting to sneak glances at him. He was very attractive. Thinking about him made me feel things in my body I hadn’t felt before. Things, well, you know ... down there.”

“Ooh, gross, Mom,” the girl says, turning her head away. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m telling you because you’re at the age where things are changing fast. Too fast. And that’s why I wanted you to see this educational. I want you to know those feelings are okay. That they’re normal. Sex is as human as any other impulse is.”

“But I already know all this, Mom,” the girl says, huffing. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

“Then you know that it’s against regulation for you to date before you test, right?”

“I said I know.”

“You have to wait for your test card,” the mother says, her voice now filled with authority. “And even then, when you do meet someone, you have to check in with the health office to avoid genetic conflicts. Are you hearing me? Molly? I asked you a question. Are you hearing me?”

The girl folds her arms.

Her mother gives up.

They sit in their seats, both of them looking straight ahead, staring at the blank screen. A quiet eternity seems to pass. I’m aware of my own breathing, and I make an effort to be quiet, wanting to remain undiscovered. At last, the screen hums to life, glowing a dull silver, the mother and daughter silhouetted against its bottom edge.

Without taking her eyes off the screen, the daughter says:

“What happened to him?”

“What happened to who, darling?”

“The boy.”

“Oh, him ...,” she says, her response quiet and delayed, as if maybe traveling to her lips from the distant past. “He didn’t test well. They sent him down to Level 6.”

The educational begins with an image of a cell suspended like a Mylar balloon in a black sky. Music fades in. The cell divides into two daughter cells that grow and then themselves divide, making four. The tempo quickens. The cells divide again. Four into eight, eight into sixteen, and soon the entire screen is filled with thousands of cells nestled together like algae muffins on a baking sheet. The camera pulls back, revealing the cluster to be an egg. A hundred thousand sperm swim at it from every angle, bashing themselves against its outer walls.

Symbols clang.

Again and again the sperm push against the egg until one slips through and slithers into its center, coming to rest.

Quiet now.

Violins.

The black background changes to a deep red that gradually lightens. A drum roll. The triumphant sperm combines with the egg, becoming a zygote, then the zygote dividing and folding and growing into an embryo. As the drums fade to silence, the embryo develops into an alien fetus floating in a soft pink sea.

Cut to: Ancient footage of gorillas in a zoo, before the War, before they were extinct. A silverback sitting on a rock, a female circling him, her behind pumping high in the air—one, two, three revolutions around his rock she turns, taunting, tempting. The silverback surrenders to the dance and rises from his rock as the female shrinks away, subservient, waiting. When he mounts her, she closes her eyes. He pumps fast, his head turned to gaze idly at something off screen. Almost before he’s begun, the silverback is finished. He returns to his rock and sits while the female rolls away to lie on her back, cradling her hairy belly as if already expecting something there.

My eyes droop, the picture fades ...

No longer in a theater five miles underground, I’m tucked away in my mother’s arms. I see her face, the face I imagine from my father’s descriptions, her hair brown and soft and straight. She smiles down at me and rocks me, and for the first time I feel safe.

I look up and watch her fade away.

When I wake from my dream, the theatre is dark. Nothing on the screen, no lights except the soft LED glow of the aisle markers. The mother and daughter are gone.

Stepping from the theater into the dark square, it appears to be long after curfew because nobody is out. Even the public house is shuttered and dark. Now I’m in trouble. Not from the police—we have very few, and they don’t enforce curfew—but from my dad. The last time I came in this late he grounded me. There seems no point in hurrying back to my punishment, so I take my time walking through the dim Valley.

In the breezeways between dark buildings, I catch glimpses of lit doorways, seeing something strange that I’ve only seen once before when I was young: neighbors visiting neighbors.

I stop and lean against a building to watch. On every floor, people are coming from their housing units onto the walks and knocking on doors to either side, passing some news. The last time I saw this happen was when Joel Limpkin tested so poorly that he was sent down to Level 6, despite his parents’ protests.

Suddenly, my father’s waiting punishment seems silly.

What if it’s me this time? What if I flunked?

The visiting slows, moving away like a wave, and by the time I reach our unit, only a few distant doors bang shut on the other side of the Valley.

I breathe good energy in, breathe bad energy out, pull back my shoulders, and prepare for my father’s anger.

When I open the door, my heart skips a beat—

A dozen different voices scream: “Congratulations!”

They’re all crowded into our small room—our neighbors and a few of my father’s coworkers and friends.

My father steps to the front of the crowd, his posture tall and proud, and instead of sending me upstairs and grounding me, he wraps me in his arms and lifts me into the air.

“You did it, son.”

“What did I do?” I squeak, my feet dangling, my breath caught in my father’s embrace.

“You’ve made us all proud.”

“But what did I do?”

“Perfect score, son—an absolutely perfect score,” he says, setting me down again and gripping my shoulders.

I look up at him, confused. “You’re not mad?”

“Mad? Why would I be mad?”

“Because I missed curfew.”

“Didn’t you just hear me, son?” He gives me a little shake. “You’re going up. Up! You’ve been selected as a fellow at the Foundation. Nobody’s gone up before. You’re the first, son. You’ll be making a real difference now. You’ll be helping the best and the brightest up there figure out a way to get us back above ground someday. Free men again. I knew it would be you. Maybe you’ll make a discovery to reverse the ice age, eh? Return our atmosphere? Maybe even terraform Mars?”

Someone clears their throat. Everyone’s staring.

Still gripping my shoulders, he stops and looks around the room, caught off guard and embarrassed by his outburst of enthusiasm. His posture wilts slightly. Releasing my shoulders, he brushes them off as if clearing away some invisible lint.

“Sorry. I get a little excited sometimes,” he says, looking at me but talking to them. “Of course, we’ll all be retired by the time you get your fellowship anyway.”

After several quiet, uncomfortable seconds, someone says:

“Let’s have a toast. To Aubrey.”

“Yes,” someone else says. “After all, he is a fifteen now.”

Smiling with relief at the suggestion, he leaves me standing before the group to go retrieve his ration of algae ethanol. Now the visitors stare at me with a mix of pride and something else that might be envy, or even pity covered up.

CHAPTER 4
I Love You, Son

The week passes fast.

Before the test nobody wanted to talk to me. Now, I can’t leave the house without being stopped and congratulated. But as annoying as their new friendliness is, they’re the only thing saving me from Red.

I see him lurking everywhere I go, his green face fading by the day but still shocking against his red hair. But every time he approaches me, he’s interrupted by some well-wishing Valley resident clasping my palm and smiling. And I’m glad because I don’t want to go up to the Foundation with a black eye.

Without a lesson slate now to distract me, and with classes at the education annex over for fifteens, I spend most of the week hiding out in the theater, watching educationals.

I’m nervous now about going. My father’s work has taken him up to the Transfer Station on Level 2, even once or twice down to the crops and algae refineries on Level 5, but nobody has ever been up to the Foundation headquarters on Level 1. Nobody. At least not from here. Everyone goes up that way to retire, of course, but nobody can come back from Eden.

Besides managing Eden, the Foundation has the important job of guarding the surface exchange chambers, of making sure that no toxic material makes its way down to Holocene II. Plus, they launch our unmanned exploration craft and analyze the data that returns. And that’s maybe the only thing I am excited about—getting closer to the surface and seeing images of the outer world, no matter how desolate and depressing they are.

It’s already Sunday again, and I’m back at the beach.

As I sit on the sand watching the mechanical waves roll in, I see past the illusion for the first time. It’s remarkably real. Or at least it’s how I’d imagine a real beach must be. But when I gaze at the horizon and let my eyes drift, focusing on nothing in particular, I see a line where the pool ends and the projection screen begins. And now I notice the sky is a little too blue, the clouds a little too perfect. Then there are the gulls. They scatter on the shore, making short flights between perfectly bleached pieces of driftwood, but they never fly off into the horizon to join the other gulls forever flapping in the virtual sky.

“Hey, look—the pride of Holocene II,” Bill calls, jogging over from his guard tower, his bare feet kicking up sand.

Stopping, he rests his hands on his hips, breathing heavily.

“I’m getting too old for this job,” he says, smiling. “When I come up to retire in a few years, you better remember me.”

Retire? It hits me then that I don’t even know how old Bill is. Never asked him. Never asked him anything, really. All these Sundays here and not once did I have the courage to start up a conversation. Maybe because of how everyone’s been treating me this last week, or maybe from desperation because I leave tomorrow, but today I stand up and run to Bill and hug him.

“Hey, there,” he says. “Okay, kid. We’ll miss you, too.”

As we walk toward the locker room, I look left to soak up one last view of the familiar fake horizon. It’s hard to believe only a week has passed since Red and his buddies buried me in the sand. It’s even harder to believe that I’ll never see any of them again. When I get to the door, I look up to say goodbye, but Bill didn’t follow me this time and he’s back at the guard tower with his head bent over a flotation device and some impossible lifeguard knot he’s tying. I lift my hand to wave goodbye, but Bill doesn’t look up.

I step into the shower and close the door.

Clean and dressed again, I stop on the outlook platform and take in the Valley one last time. All these years I’ve dreamt about leaving, but still, I’m going to miss this view.

It’s strange to think of the other levels buried beneath us—people living out their lives so close but yet worlds away. Maybe there’s a boy down there just like me, looking up just as I look down. Maybe he’s on his way here to replace me. I wonder if he’s nervous too. I gaze up at the sparkling benitoite and think of five miles of rock and earth pressing down on the cavern ceiling. I wonder just how far up it is to Level 1.

Back at our housing unit, I say goodbye to my things. My instructions said there’s no need to bring anything, only what I wear. I empty my water-jug weights down the bathroom drain and leave them standing outside the bedroom door. I lay out a clean jumpsuit for the morning. Fresh socks. My newest pair of shoes. Everything else I fold away neat in the drawers. Even my favorite hoodie, too worn and threadbare to wear up to Level 1. Shutting the closet door, I wonder what other boy or girl they’ll assign to my room once my father retires? Will they look out my window, and will they see anyone looking back?

There’s a tap on the door and then it opens.

“May I come in?” my father asks, his shadow filling the small doorway. When I nod yes, he steps into the light.

I’ve never thought of my father as big, but seeing him now in my tiny room, he seems to be a giant. He sits on my bed, the mattress sagging beneath his weight, and he pats the space next to him and I sit, too. We both look at our feet, his stretched out almost touching the wall, mine barely reaching the floor.

The silence is heavy, and after a few minutes, I can hear the soft whir of the ventilation fans humming in the Valley outside my closed window.

My father reaches over and rests his hand on my knee. I look up and see his eyes are wet, the same as they get whenever he talks about Mom. I feel a lump in my own throat, then my eyes get wet, too. I look back down at my feet.

He pats my knee and stands, and then I hear my door shut softly behind him as he leaves.

The next morning, I eat breakfast alone.

I know my dad’s no good with things like this, but did he really need to leave for work early? Today? Oh, well, maybe it’s easier if we don’t say goodbye anyway.

I just hope they have better food on Level 1.

When I finish, I stand to leave but stop in the doorway and look back at our living quarters one final time. We don’t call them homes because they belong to Holocene II and are often reassigned as people retire and others have children. We were lucky to get to stay here this whole time. It’s small and cramped and lacking anything too personal, but still, I can see imprints of our life here everywhere. Ghosts of my father and me. My height marks notched into the corner wall. Our matching elbow indentations worn into the table’s surface where we sat across from one another and ate five thousand silent breakfasts. My father’s faded tea tin of tobacco sitting on the counter, waiting for his ritual Sunday smoke. I guess this was a home after all.

Closing my eyes, I picture the room to make sure I have a snapshot memorized. It’s there all right, perfectly preserved in my mind’s eye. In that way, I’ll take it with me wherever I go.

The metal door bangs shut behind me one final time.

Unless someone is retiring, the platform usually sits empty and ignored. But today is a very big day: the great exchange of genetics and brains. Today, the platform is crowded.

They’ve all gathered to say goodbye. Mothers combing hair and pestering departing sons with last-minute instructions on hygiene and manners. Father’s issuing stern and final warnings to departing daughters about lower-level boys lurking in wait to take advantage of them. Promises from scared and embarrassed fifteens that they’ll raise their own kids to study better than they themselves did; promises that the next generation will return the family name to Level 3. Best friends clinging to one another, crying, waiting to be pulled apart, knowing they’ll never see one another again until retirement, when we’re all reunited in Eden.

It’s all a wild flurry of nervous energy, leading up to those of us who are leaving being herded into the waiting elevators destined for our new levels. And once we’re all gone from here, the waiting will begin—waiting for the arrivals. I know because I’ve been here to see it myself in prior years. I’ve seen the families double-checking the names on their slips and wondering about the new boy or girl assigned to them. I’ve seen lab managers and engineering leaders eagerly expecting a new crop of capable young apprentices that they can train to replace themselves when they retire. And, of course, I’ve seen the most excited group of the bunch—the lucky fifteens who’ve tested and are staying here at Level 3, the girls and boys now free to date and dying to lay first eyes on any cute newbies stepping off when the elevators arrive from other floors.

I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around ...

Red is standing over me. The green dye has faded to just a birthmark-like shadow running from his forehead down to his neck. I close my eyes and brace for the blow. It doesn’t come. When, I open my eyes again, Red is turned away, staring down. He kicks an invisible stone and then sighs.

“Guess this is goodbye,” he says.

“You mean you’re not gonna hit me?”

He shakes his head. “Nah ... not this time.”

“I’m sorry about your face,” I say.

He shrugs. “Sorry about treating you so mean.”

“Well, why did you?”

“Maybe I just didn’t think you’d like me,” he says, kicking another invisible stone. “Guess I’m not so smart.”

All this time he’s been knocking me down, pushing me around, burying me in sand, and he’s been doing it because he didn’t think I’d like him? People are funny.

“Is that why you were trying to corner me alone all week?” I ask. “Not to beat me up, but to tell me you were sorry?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

I’m not sure what to say. I stick out my hand: “Friends?”

He reaches over and clasps my hand in his and we shake. My first real friend, I think. Releasing my hand, he walks away and joins the small crowd of fifteens waiting by the elevator that will take them down to Level 5.

All the elevator doors open at once ...

No warning, no fanfare—they just slide open, revealing sterile, empty cars big enough to transport an entire class of fifteens if necessary. The sobbing begins. Quiet here, hushed there, but with a sort of repressed dignity. Then, as if being counted down by an invisible clock, the fifteens hurry onto the elevators despite their obvious desires to linger with their loved ones in farewell. The few low-testing fifteens going down to Level 6 step boldly into their car, not smart enough to understand what lies ahead. I see the back of Red’s head, tall above the others, as the fifteens going to Level 5 crowd into their waiting car. Then the elevator to Level 4 fills with a handful of fifteens heading down to work as welders and riveters in the plants that build parts for the exploration drones. And because Level 2 above is not a full living level, but just a Transfer Station worked by the shipping and receiving teams moving supplies, I step alone into the only car going up.

Inside, I turn and look out—

The elevator is big and empty and its steel walls and LED lights create the illusion of me floating in empty space. The open door in front of me looks like a disappearing window into an already distant Level 3. Waiting for the doors to seal, I scan the crowded platform. Last week I was the talk of the Valley, but now everyone’s attention is on their own family and friends, loaded into the other cars and about to leave forever.

I hear him before I see him.

“Aubrey!” he calls out, his voice strained and breathless.

Then he bursts from the crowd onto the platform and rushes toward the elevator. I step forward to meet him just as the door begins to slide shut between us. He reaches into the shrinking opening and presses his pipe into my hand. He pulls his arm back out, and as the door seals shut, I swear I hear him say it for the very first time—

“I love you, son.”