Origins (The Wasteland Chronicles, #2) (17 page)

“What is it?” I asked.

Samuel held up a hand. As he read, his expression became more and more disturbed.

“What’s going on?” Anna asked.

“Did you finish reading?” I asked.

Samuel nodded. “Yeah. You’re not going to believe where the xenovirus came from. Well, maybe you will, because I suspected it all along. But you will definitely not know
why
it’s here.”

“Well,” Makara said. “We have time. Tell us what you found out.”

***

“A
s I suspected,” Samuel said, “the xenovirus is not of Earth origin. Looking at the flora and fauna it creates should be enough indication of that.”

“It was inside Ragnarok, wasn’t it?” I asked.

Samuel nodded. “Yes. That’s the only way it could have come. In the Old World, NASA did experiments on how long bacteria and viruses could last in the vacuum of space. In some cases, it might be years or longer. The xenovirus was inside Ragnarok, and the rock protected it from the cold vacuum of space. That’s not all, though.”

“What else is there?”

Samuel sighed. “A lot.”

He paused a moment, as if collecting his thoughts. I had a feeling we were about to get a huge dose of information.

“Are you familiar with the Guardian Missions?” Samuel asked.

It
sounded
familiar, but it was a moment before the memory returned to me.

“There were three,” I said. “They were the world’s attempt to stop Ragnarok from destroying Earth. All of them failed.”

“That’s right,” Samuel said. “Each Guardian Mission had a name, also the name of the ship launched. The first, called the
Archangel
, was launched in 2024. It reached Ragnarok after a flight of six months. The story is that something went wrong with the landing gear, which caused the ship to crash.”

“Okay,” I said. “So what really happened?”

“There’s only a few paragraphs of it in here,” Samuel said. “But apparently it was something else. The ship landed fine. They were even able to install the rockets on the surface. But they were attacked.”

We looked at each other.

“Wait,” Makara said. “I can understand viruses and microbes surviving. But attacked? Anything capable of harming a person couldn’t withstand space. It’s impossible.”

“Whatever it was, it wasn’t built like we are. There are pictures, even. One of the astronauts managed to get a photo but it didn’t turn out well. You can only see a worm-like creature.”

We crowded around the computer. Indeed, there was a picture of something, probably living.

“Creepy,” Makara said.

“Looks like a crawler,” I said. “The shot is blurry.”

“Information about the attack was held back in order to prevent panic. Another mission was planned, with more people. This one was called
Reckoning.”

“I always did think that name sounded funny,” I said.

“They sent soldiers with this one, along with the crew. They had guns. Only this mission never made it to the asteroid in the first place. The story was that it was lost en route, and that one appears to be true, if what I read here is correct. Perhaps hit by a stray piece of rock or debris, or something wrong with the engine or hull.”

“No reckoning, then.”

“No,” Samuel said. “There was the last mission in 2028. The one that appeared to succeed, but didn’t. The
Messiah
mission.”

We all waited for Samuel to go on.

“Messiah
made it to Ragnarok, and landed without a hitch. The rockets were attached to Ragnarok. Like the
Archangel
mission, it seemed to work. When the crawlers or whatever they were came, they were driven back. Eventually, the astronauts were overwhelmed – but not before the rockets began to go off, doing their job in pushing Ragnarok off course.”

“Why didn’t it work?”

“Because the rockets needed a full week to do their job effectively. The astronauts did all they could – but they fell, one by one, to endless waves of attackers. Whatever was on the asteroid, it had planned on being able to defend it.”

“Defend it?” Anna asked. “Why? Did it want to attack us?”

Samuel nodded. “Yes. After this mission failed, the government said that they thought the mission was a success, but for reasons unknown, it didn’t work. From the Files, we know why. Ragnarok was pushed off course, but not by much. Not by enough.”

A horrible dread twisted my gut. I knew all this happened thirty years ago, but it was hard not to imagine how everyone must have felt as these missions failed, one by one.

“The Bunker Program began immediately in 2020, the beginning of what came to be called the Dark Decade. Ragnarok was to hit Earth on December 3, 2030 – Dark Day. The Bunkers were never meant to be a reality. They were only a fail-safe. The government believed that if Ragnarok did impact Earth, they needed enough people underground to come up and rebuild once it was all over. The key to this was making well-trained soldiers of all underground U.S. citizens. The Bunkers altogether, assuming no losses, had enough space to hold close to 60,000 people. Given they were all well-trained, that’s still a sizeable force for an army. But as we all know, that wasn’t to last. The world became much darker than anyone expected. Things broke down. As far as we know, there are only two Bunkers. Maybe even they are gone.”

“How come Ragnarok took so long to detect?” I asked. “You’d think they would have found it much earlier than they did.”

“In the Old World, NASA funded the NEO Program – the Near Earth Object Program, designed to do just that. Asteroids the size of Ragnarok or larger were all accounted for, but Ragnarok went rogue, somehow. It changed course in what seemed to be an impossible manner. No one knows exactly
when
this occurred, but it took a while before people noticed. To this day, no one knows how it was done. But we know
why
it was done.”

“Why?” I asked, dreading the answer. “Why did it change course?”

“Don’t you see?” Samuel asked. “We’re being invaded.”

“A
liens?” Anna asked. “Real-life aliens? I can buy a virus. That makes sense. That is clear...”

“Nothing else explains the attacks on Ragnarok’s surface while it was still in space,” Samuel said, “or how something the size of Ragnarok could suddenly change course like it did.”

“Maybe something else hit it,” I said. “Another asteroid. It’s possible, right? It could have been hit and been put on a course to hit Earth.”

“The odds of that are so small that the alien scenario becomes much more likely. Given enough energy, Ragnarok’s course could have been switched. It’s mind-bending mathematically, but maybe they could do it.”

“And who are
they
?” Makara asked. “Those creatures that have been attacking us? Because they don’t seem to be that smart. Their strength is in numbers.”

“I don’t know everything, and the Black Files don’t speak to that. But there does seem to be
something
that demonstrates intelligence, something referred to in the Files only as ‘The Voice.’”

“’The Voice?’” Makara asked. “Are you kidding me?”

Samuel shook his head. “This is the meat of the Black Files. Everything I explained was only the first twenty pages. The rest of it is about this – the xenovirus, the xenofungus, and the Voice. And a day in the future called Xenofall.”

“Xenofall?” Makara asked.

“Xenofall,” I said. “Is it what I think it is?”

“Explanation, please,” Anna said.

“Let me start at the beginning,” Samuel said. “Ragnarok hit in 2030, as you all know. Almost immediately the virus took effect. The first instances were noted as early as 2031, in Bunker 23 out in western Nebraska. It was the Bunker closest to Ragnarok, and it was the first to go offline in 2034.”

“It wouldn’t be long until others went offline, too,” I said.

“That is true,” Samuel said. “And most Bunkers failed for reasons having nothing to do with the xenovirus. Interestingly, the xenovirus’s main job is not to infect life-forms on Earth. It’s to create xenofungus.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s the food source for all xenolife,” Samuel said. “Yeah, xenolife will eat animals, or even people, from time to time. There are nutrients there. But even I noticed in my research that xenofungus is nutrient and calorie heavy. It is death and poison to any of us, but it sustains anything infected with the xenovirus. It could be that the xenovirus is as much an enzyme as it is a virus, an enzyme that can process the fungus and make it edible.”

“So the xenofungus is like...alien farms?” Anna asked.

“Yes. That’s a good way to think of it.” Samuel paused. “It also does other stuff. It reproduces rapidly, and can survive in very harsh environments. It doesn’t need much water. It doesn’t mind the cold, or the dryness of the Wasteland. It’s as if it’s been engineered to survive almost any sort of environment, and
especially
environments without much sunlight. It’s perfectly adapted for surviving in a world that is cloaked from sunlight by meteor fallout, which explains how it is able to spread so easily while everything of Earth origin dies off. We’re in the process of being transformed from Earth into something
not
-Earth.”

“What about the monsters?” I asked. “How does the xenovirus do that?”

“It’s all encoded in the xenovirus’s DNA,” Samuel said. “It does not have a double helix, like Earth-based life. It’s a very complicated cloverleaf structure, something that is very hard to imagine evolving in the wild – at least on Earth – which is also evidence in favor of the xenovirus’s being designed. But the cloverleaf lends certain advantages. It can hold more information. It’s more adaptable. It has the capability to mix and match genes of Earth creatures, creating entirely new forms of life – hence the crawlers. The xenovirus was created.”

“Created by whom?” I asked.

Samuel shook his head. “We couldn’t have done this. We don’t have the technology. It must have been created by an alien intelligence.”

“So you’re saying the xenovirus was
planted
in Ragnarok?”

“Exactly,” Samuel said.

“What about this Voice thing?” Makara asked. “You didn’t explain that.”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s like a sentience for all life-forms infected with the virus. It’s all based on the fungus, somehow. The fungus, in addition to being food, is also like a giant network. Fungus in one part of the world, as long as it is connected, can communicate with fungus in another part. It’s like a giant brain that can think – and yes, speak.”

“Speak? How?”

“Most of it is internal, and can’t be heard. The communication can’t be deciphered, much less translated in any way humans can understand. But nonetheless, it takes place. It creates sound waves, sound waves that directly affect the behavior of xenolife. During the attack on Bunker One, for example, the sound waves escalated as the Bunker began to be attacked. The Voice lends sentience to the entire invasion.”

“Can the Voice be killed?” I asked.

“You’d have to kill the xenofungus,” Samuel said. “Whether the Voice is actually connected with a physical form, the Black Files don’t say. I guess they didn’t get that far.”

“There is still so much we don’t know,” I said. “We don’t even know
if
we can stop this.”

“Yeah, that’s the bottom line,” Makara said. “Can we stop this? What’s the next step?” She pointed outside the lab. “Because if you tell me Lisa came out here and died, and those Files don’t tell us how to proceed, we wasted our time. We wasted a life.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Samuel said. “If this sentience, this Voice, were somehow destroyed, I guess that could make all xenolife directionless. I don’t know how we’d go about doing that.”

“Great,” Anna said. “This just gets more and more impossible.”

No one said anything. It was a lot to take in. Even though we knew where it came from, even why it was here, we were no closer to knowing
how
to stop the xenovirus. Nothing definitive, anyway. Kill the Voice – but how do you kill something that isn’t attached to a corporeal form?

None of this made sense. I was expecting the answer to be obvious. I was expecting something like a chemical or a drug that would kill anything that had the xenovirus – an actual cure that targeted the xenovirus, and eradicated it.

Knowing how something existed didn’t tell you how to make it no longer exist.

“Do the Files say anything else?” I asked. “Anything at all on how to kill this thing?”

“No,” Samuel said.

So that was it. If these researchers couldn’t figure anything out – in the Bunker with the biggest labs, the most computers, and most expertise – what shot did we have? We were only four. Other than pure guesswork, there was almost no hope.

Within a certain amount of time, the world would be covered with Blights. There would only be one Blight, and humanity would no longer exist.

We were facing extinction.

***

“T
here is one thing you didn’t explain,” Makara said.

Samuel looked up from where he had been hanging his head. His form was hunched in near defeat – it was disconcerting to see that in our leader.

“Explain what Xenofall is.”

“Xenofall is what it sounds like,” Samuel said. “Ragnarok was only the beginning. The writers and moviemakers in the Old World always thought aliens would attack with giant ships and lasers. Nothing is further from reality. It’s all biological warfare, and the most brilliant kind there is: the kind that harms your enemy, and only helps you.”

“So when Meteor fell, it was only clearing the way,” I said. “When the rest of them come, the natives will be gone, so to speak.”

Samuel nodded. “Earth is being terraformed. Not by giant machines of metal, but by tiny machines of life. When they’re through, Earth will not be ours anymore. We will have been long dead, and the planet will be ready for them to use. We are being colonized.”

“When will this ‘Xenofall’ happen?” I asked.

“The Files don’t say,” Samuel said. “However long it takes for us to die out, and however long it takes for the Blights to cover the Earth. But we’re the only ones who can stop it. That is, if it
can
be stopped.”