The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (8 page)

"More like a computer engineer designing a circuit board," Lara said, when I shared my thoughts. "In the orchestra the players have choices. He's making choice irrelevant, reducing them to component parts."

She was right. It was stunning, and no wonder it had been such a bestseller that it still had a whole display to itself, because laced throughout all this scary thought-control type stuff was the incredibly empowering message- 'You too can control this.' You could be the god controlling your own experiences, by setting the bar high just like Mecklarin did. It tied in to common wisdom about surrounding yourself with high-quality people, seeking out positive experiences and avoiding bad ones, but did so with a depth of hard research never seen before.

"Wow," I said, coming up after finishing. Lara hadn't finished but, by a hissing campfire gaslight we'd set up when it got dark, she clearly shared my feeling. "It's a complete blueprint for taking control of your life."

"Or other people's lives," she said. "Maybe it'll be useful as mayor."

I hadn't considered that. We sat in silence for a time.

"You think this guy knew about the zombie apocalypse?" Lara asked, breaking the silence.

Anything seemed possible now. Mecklarin was a magician, wielding the kind of mind control tricks Hank would have killed to use to pick up girls. Could it be possible he'd known where the outbreak would start? Could he have been watching Lara and I, waiting for the unstoppable moment when we triggered the infection already dormant in every human alive?

It was weird. It flipped everything on its head.

"I'm going to find out."

INTERLUDE 2

The MARS3000 mission seemed the most exciting thing Salle Coram would ever do in her young life. At 26 and only three years out of Yale with her doctorate in 'Extreme' Psychology, specializing in the study of colonization stress and confinement, a place in superstar Lars Mecklarin's grandest experiment yet was a distant dream.

Still she'd applied. They'd contacted her, she'd gone in for interview at Mecklarin's stunning office in Manhattan and been wowed afresh by the scope and scale of his plans.

"We are going to Mars," he'd told her, leaning against a massive mahogany desk at the edge of an Oval Office-like room, with the window behind him looking out over a perfectly aligned view north up Central Park. "Believe that." The confidence in his voice and manner, his easy swagger, the curls in his expertly slicked hair, all made her feel like the girl out of 50 Shades of Grey: smitten, spun around and overwhelmed. 

"In ten to fifteen years," he went on, "with rockets from Open Origin or Steepletop, NASA or some other agency, it doesn't matter who, because it's happening. Humanity has a destiny and it's out there."

He pointed up and she'd actually followed his finger to the ceiling. He smiled at this and she went mushy inside.

"When we go, with our best and brightest piled into a rocket, when the engineering and rockets are all finished, they will turn to us. Our work will be the single most important domain left. How humans behave in close proximity for decades, how personality traits develop, how upsets become emergencies, how stress is both driver and destroyer. Our greatest enemy will come from within, and we need to be ready."

He stopped and grinned. Salle was blasted by the wattage. Sunk too deep in a leather armchair, she felt like a lowly cult member before a living god. His chiseled jaw, his cold and easy sense of command, his probing, intelligent eyes told her everything she needed to know. This was Lars Mecklarin, darling of Vanity Fair, star of Time and the New Yorker, upturning all our understandings of what it was to be human.

This was her future.

He asked questions; why she wanted to join the mission, where she saw herself in five years, and she'd babbled some answers, adopting some of his grandiosity in her comments and barely remembering a thing afterwards.

She didn't hear back for six months. Her calls and emails went unanswered, until finally she considered the opportunity lost. Headlines in the news sprang up every now and then about the crack team Mecklarin was assembling to go in his latest, greatest MARS experiment: three thousand specialists and experts packed into an entirely self-contained 'biosphere' somewhere in the US.

The doors would not be opened until ten full years were up. Mecklarin said it multiple times on TV. This was serious colony science combined with the greatest social experiment ever conducted. Apparently his funders numbered in the thousands; governments, corporations, space development companies, even aged billionaires were leaving him massive bequests in their wills, on condition that one day he scattered their cremains on Mars.

Salle watched it with excitement but also the glum pit of failure in her guts. To watch the very best of her age go under the soil without her was agony. It seemed every day they were doing some kind of technological exposé, making suppositions about the secret details of the plan on Discovery or National Geographic, guessing at three decks of greenery including a rainforest zone, a CO2 scrubbing system big enough to clean a coal plant, thousands of gallons of liquid oxygen, enough water to fill Bryce Canyon, plus thousands of groundbreaking closed environment experiments planned.

Mecklarin showed off his 'Bible' of all possible human choices to journalists from Vanity Fair, patting a solid-state super computer on their web video.

"It's all in here," he said cheerfully. "The most accurate modeling programs in existence, built on every study ever done, to forecast, mold and adapt human behavior. We perform extensive psychometric tests on the 3000 to determine all aspects of their personality and history, along with genetic propensities and family traits. We enter it here and set the model to churn. The results come out, predictive and getting more accurate every day, driven by the smartest AI yet. We know what our people will do when faced with any number of variables. We know what they'll say, what small talk they'll share on the lift, who they'll partner up with, everything."

The journalist looked interested. "So it's like playing God? It puts you in the position of a higher power?"

Mecklarin took it in his stride with ease; that charming grin and that galling confidence. "It's a closed system we're putting our people into. There's no outside line from God. Everything can be observed, understood and cataloged. MARS3000 is not only a full-bore test of every life support system we'll ever need for colonization, it's also the most powerful microscope on the human mind ever devised. What goes in must come out, and we will refine our understanding of each and every variable down to the last dotted i and crossed t."

The journalist frowned. "So you're going to bottle the human spirit?"

Mecklarin grinned. "And ship it off to Mars."

Salle got the phone call from Mecklarin on the drive up the MIT campus road, where she worked on a small-scale research project in the AI division. Coding responses to be algorithmic was a large part of her work, essentially designing underlying mechanisms that allowed for true AI learning, with the power to self-write and self-erase neural connections.

They hadn't progressed very far. True AI was hard, and a lot of their early programs had simply committed suicide, using their powers of erasing to erase themselves completely. It was a thorny problem to overcome, and an incredibly delicate balance to walk: how to motivate an AI to want to live, when it was trapped inside a computer with no drive to procreate, no hunger for praise and no sense of fear or pain.

"We need you in MARS3000," Mecklarin said, his voice so unexpected but thrilling. "Second psychologist on deck 3. The research opportunities will be enormous. You'll walk out of this made for life, if your research and intuition are half as good as I think they are. The only condition is you need to be here today. We're sealing the Habitat tonight."

"Tonight? I thought it was due to close in three months."

"The schedule's changed. I've sent a helicopter for you already; it'll be there in minutes. You only need to get in it. Bring a few mementos if you like, a small bag. Can I count on you?"

A dozen thoughts ran through her mind. Call her father. Tell her boyfriend goodbye. What to pack? Ten years was a very long time.

"Salle?"

"I'm in."

"I'll see you in two hours."

When she parked in her spot and turned the engine off, the chop chop of helicopter rotor blades was already thrumming overhead. What followed was a dream, like something out of a movie. The helicopter came down in the middle of a football field, surrounded by students staring.

This was hardly protocol.

A man in a black suit got out, ignored campus security completely, and escorted Salle on board. He briefed her as the helicopter took off moments later, not bothering to share his name or any other information. The rotor blades were a storm and they flew north.

Within two hours they were pulling in over Mt. Abraham, and the man in black pointed out the approximate locations of MARS3000's various facilities. There was almost nothing left above ground; no sign of the vast earthworks they'd dug under the mountain to augment an existing nuclear bunker, no parking lot, only a single winding road tracing through a gorgeous scene of snow-capped mountains and spruce forest.

"That's one of our communications arrays," the man said, pointing at the one above-ground feature Salle could see, a tall metal pole sticking up from a large gray concrete block. "It's hardwired to the Habitat; thousands of cameras and data feeds, all of them feeding in only one direction." He gave a tight smile. "Out."

The helicopter came down and they switched to a Jeep, escorted by a brusque military man. The air was chill and fresh, tasting like winter though it was mid-summer. Nobody else was around.

"Is everyone already in?" Salle asked.

He nodded.

"But, how?"

"You're a replacement," he said. "Your predecessor got sick. She couldn't come in."

The Jeep raced up the winding road, at some point turned off then proceeded directly up the mountain off-road at a steep angle. After a few minutes they stopped, got out and walked, up onto the mid-slope of the mountain where the trees faded out and scatterings of uneven scree lay everywhere.

"All of this was dug up," the man said, gesturing. "All around you for hundreds of meters. You can't notice it, can you?"

Salle couldn't. It looked indistinguishable from any other part of the mountain.

"Here," he said, reaching a manhole cover in the ground. A silvery metal rod lay nearby, which he picked up and used to lever off the lid. It popped open with a slight gasp of air. "The fans are already up. The walls are coming down within hours. Let's go, Salle."

She hesitated for a moment, looking around at the world, at the sky, wondering if this was a mistake.

"My car," she blurted. "I left it parked. My father too, I didn't tell him."

The man nodded. "We'll store your car, and we'll tell your father. Unfortunately there's no time to call him now, and this is a communications blackout area. Delicate instruments are operating all around us."

Salle sucked at the air. This was her dream.

"I thought it'd be more like the Biospheres," she said, playing for time. "At least partly open."

"It was open, when the bulk of them were sealed in. Some of them have been down there for months already. A whole section there," he pointed at a barren stretch, "was open, and it will open again when the ten years are up."

Salle surveyed the empty stretch. "How?"

"There's a system. A lift will carry the three thousand up in one hundred person loads, and you'll be greeted as a hero up top. Now, Miss Coram, we're on a schedule."

He gestured to the hole. She took a deep breath, swallowed her doubts, and looked down. The ladder chute was well lit and walled with clinical white plastic, stretching down several stories. She stepped above it, took a deep breath, and started down.

"There are two elevators down there," the man called from above. His voice startled her and she looked up to see him silhouetted against the disc of blue sky.

"Are you not coming?" she called back.

"No. Only the one on the left functions, and someone will be at the bottom to meet you. The one on the right was used during construction; now it's sealed up."

There was a grating sound, and the manhole cover crept across the disc of sky like an eclipse, leaving her with only the bright white strip lighting built into the chute. Last time to see the sky in ten years. Loud metal clanks signified the manhole locking.

"Damn," she muttered to herself, and continued climbing. As she descended the strip lights above her cut out, plunging the depths above into darkness. It was creepy and hurried her along, like a rat being driven through a laboratory maze, until it felt like the darkness was about to overtake her. Just past the midpoint a strange wave of nausea washed over her, like the world was flexing in on itself, but she was moving too urgently to stop and kept climbing through until she reached the bottom, panting.

The lights above snipped off right above her head, leaving her in a small circular room, just big enough to contain two metal doors with a metal button between them. She caught her breath and gradually the nausea ebbed, though the sense of disorientation remained for hours, like she'd left part of herself behind.

"Don't be a chicken," she muttered under her breath, and pushed the call button. At once the elevator on the left opened, as big as a shower cubicle, clean and simple in white. She got in, the doors closed and the elevator descended. Some twenty seconds passed, then the doors opened on something wholly unexpected.

Lars Mecklarin. He was standing in a large, warm and summery hall, grinning. Salle stared. The walls were orange, the tall ceiling was yellow, there were flowers on a long wooden table down the middle, and there were huge windows showing a pastoral scene of green fields stretching into the distance.