The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy Read online

  “Lifespan?”

  “Boy, let me talk.”

  “Sorry …”

  “These advancements in longevity, or lifespan as you say, appealed to many people in positions of power for the obvious reasons. Men have always sought ways to defy their mortality, always. Even I. But my interest was for other reasons. You see, the planet had fallen victim to an emerging catastrophe that was centuries in the making. Our populations had swollen to record levels—levels not even imagined possible just decades before. Small groups of people in the world controlled nearly all the world’s resources. Billions of others lived in complete poverty, working almost as slaves to provide the luxuries my peers took for granted. And beyond the human suffering, there was an even greater cost. We were quickly destroying the planet.”

  “You mean global warming.”

  “Yes. That and worse.”

  “But I’ve read all this in lesson slates.”

  “You’re not a very patient fellow, are you?”

  “I just want to know what’s going on.”

  “Listen and you’ll find out.”

  “Okay. Go on—go on.”

  “One of my companies had been making great progress with senescence and liquid computers.”

  “Senescence?”

  “Aging. Biology. Biotech, my boy. It was the new frontier. We had created computers that could be injected into the body, becoming part of the human immune system. Tiny computers that reproduce themselves. Computers smaller than a white blood cell. Computers powered by the very glucose that powers our own cells. And we believed that these computers would make man immortal, or as immortal as anyone should ever want to be. We learned to rewire human DNA, allowing cells to reproduce without the telomeres shortening, totally eliminating the Hayflick limit that causes us to age. But cancer, you might ask, what of cancer?”

  He pauses, leans forward, gulps his tea.

  “We discovered that the aging process is partly a defense against cancer, and when we removed the limits on cell division, test subjects were overrun with cancers. But with this new liquid-computer tech, we solved the cancer problem. Once injected, these computers search out diseased cells, including cancerous cells, and they attach to the cell wall and release a protein that causes the bad cell to destroy itself. And we did it. We made it work, I tell you. First on rats, then on monkeys. Then we made it work on ourselves. We extended our lives a hundred years. Then five hundred. Now, we’ve refined the serum and we can extend a human life to almost a millennium. I was the first human to undergo the treatment and that was over nine hundred years ago.”

  “Wait just a minute,” I say, not believing what I’m hearing. “You’re telling me that you’re nine hundred years old?”

  My question hangs in the room. There’s a long silence and all I can hear is the ticking of the clock. Tick-tick-tick …

  “Nine hundred and seventy-three last May,” he says.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “That doesn’t make it any less true,” he says.

  “Well, if it is true, then I don’t understand. We’re all taught in Holocene II that we work until we’re thirty-five and then retire to Eden. We don’t grow old so we don’t burden society, so we don’t overuse limited resources. But here you are almost a thousand years old now? No sickness, you say? No burden? Please, just tell me what’s happened. I don’t understand.”

  “Here, maybe some slides will help …”

  Reaching to the table, he slides open a drawer and removes a small remote. He presses a button and the fire dies. Then blackout shades lower in front of the windows and the light disappears from the study in a retreating line that runs like a wave of shadow over me and the glasses of tea between us, and over Dr. Radcliffe until the last crack of light is sucked through the bottom of the shades and all is dim. A screen drops from the ceiling and lowers in front of us.

  He clicks a button and an image flicks onto the screen—

  An aerial photo of the ocean showing an island of garbage of all kinds floating off to the horizon.

  “Increased ocean carbon killed the coral reefs, killed the sea life. A billion people were short of protein.”

  He clicks another image on the screen—

  An image of mass exodus, refugees lined up as far as the dusty horizon to receive bags of biscuit powder being handed out from air-dropped pallets being guarded by U.S. soldiers.

  “Even genetically engineered agriculture had no chance of holding off mass starvation with rapidly increasing populations. And birth rates actually rose, if you can believe it. Seems the hungrier people got, the more children they had.”

  Click—

  Forklifts and dozers methodically pushing a wall of bodies, wooden and swollen, tumbling and piling into pits.

  “Overuse of antibiotics created resistant staph and these bacteria borrowed our own DNA to become hyper-infectious. Epidemics spread through cities in waves of putrid death not imagined since the Black Plague.”

  Click—

  Bodies in burning tenement doorways, tanks, and armored trucks passing through deserted streets.

  “Here we had known centuries of peace like none before, and we rewarded this good fortune by reproducing at record levels, consuming the planet. And soon, scarcity of resources led us back to our barbaric roots. But this time with better weapons. And this is why I agreed to oversee Holocene II.”

  I look at the screen, the bodies, the desolation.

  “But I thought we were a biological research center?”

  “We were,” he says. “We are.”

  “So how are we connected to the War? And how are you here after all these years? And why is there no ice up here?”

  “That’s what I’m getting at, young man,” he says, his voice irritated in the dark beside me. “Try to show some patience.”

  “Of course. Go on, please.”

  “First, I’m a pacifist, Aubrey. You must know this. I’m a scientist, a lover of nature, and my entire life has always been about working to improve the planet and our life on it. And that is why I agreed to do the research I did in Holocene II. We believed the overpopulation problem was really a health and education problem. We believed that an educated and healthy society would lead to lower birth rates and manageable resource practices. And in my innocence, I imagined a perfect world where humans lived to be a thousand, where populations were stable and small—a utopia where a man’s wisdom could grow for a millennium before passing the torch to a new generation. I believed in a world of peace. But while we were doing our work in Holocene II, the world was anything but peaceful. We sucked the Earth dry of its oil reserves and built nuclear power plants at record levels in spite of the risks.”

  “But we solved the energy problem,” I say. “At least that’s what I learned. Don’t our wave generators produce unlimited power from electromagnetic fields?”

  “Yes, they do,” he says, his shadow nodding. “But when corporate scientists discovered that technology, the rich few who controlled it withheld the energy supply to create demand, to keep prices up, to keep profits up. The entire world could have enjoyed free energy were it not for greed. Always greed. And so nothing was solved.”

  Click—

  A coastline covered in black oil.

  Click—

  An abandoned nuclear plant, its reactors cracked open and sinking into the barren and polluted ground.

  Click—

  Crowds of protestors encircling Washington D.C., their faces masked, their fists raised.

  “Then the real trouble began,” he says. “The governments of other countries, nuclear countries, began to be overthrown by their people. Pakistan, then India. Russia, and even China, too. There was no way to keep up relations. No agreements remaining, no understanding that nuclear arms were off the table, no concern for mutually assured destruction. These young rebel governments began flexing their power. They used the threat of nuclear strikes to demand money and resources from countries that had
them. They extorted us. Every day our government and its remaining allies were gambling with destruction, and the planet was being raped in the process.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, it became clear to me that I could never share our longevity breakthroughs with anyone. We knew the rich would hoard it and sell it. And even worse, we knew this one percent that pulled the puppet strings of government would have a thousand years to grow more powerful, more connected. And they would never allow an educated and healthy population to exist. They wouldn’t allow it because they maintained their power with instability and inequality.”

  “Didn’t people check on what you were doing?”

  “No. Our government partners were occupied elsewhere. They were occupied with the War.”

  He clicks the remote again and a slideshow of horrific images flashes across the screen—

  War and destruction.

  Whole cities rendered into twisted craters of rubble.

  Skyscrapers collapsed, ships blown out of the ocean.

  And then the mushroom cloud of nuclear destruction.

  A satellite image of the Hawaiian Islands. The next image and an entire island is gone beneath a haze of nuclear smoke. Pictures of both devastated U.S. coastlines—Washington, D.C. a charred nuclear wasteland, New York City one big pile of crushed concrete and twisted steel, Los Angeles ripped to shreds and flooded with polluted ocean waters.

  And then I remember the missile I saw hanging from that ice-ceiling over that subterranean crater lake I fell into, and I know what Dr. Radcliffe is showing me is real.

  He clicks the slideshow off, and the screen retracts into the ceiling. Then the shades lift and the light comes back into the room, cutting across Dr. Radcliffe where he sits solemn in his chair, cutting across our iced teas sitting on their coasters with melted ice and sweating glasses, cutting across where I sit and cutting up my body. Then the light comes on into my eyes.

  “What happened next?” I ask.

  He stands and walks to the window and looks out.

  “Everything was destroyed,” he says. “Bases, cities, towns. There were many more missiles than anyone had imagined. Even our own government was bombed out of its bunkers. Seems nearly the only thing untouched was Holocene II.”

  “Why weren’t we bombed?”

  He turns to face me again.

  “We were too new, too secret. Plus, our mission wasn’t strictly military so we never made it onto any target maps. We sat there forgotten, living in our self-contained city five miles under New Mexico’s bedrock.”

  He sits again, crossing his legs and sighing.

  “We tried, Aubrey. You have to know we tried. Everything we sent up to sample the surface told us it was uninhabitable. Radiation, disease, pollution. A nuclear winter dropped like a deadly curtain and the few remaining peoples suffered a terrible demise. Our resources were limited, our space confined. We didn’t know what to do. But it was clear that we would soon outgrow our own underground home. Then I had an idea. I had been working on virtual reality environments for the brain, and it occurred to me that rather than suffering a lifetime underground, people need only work their productive years and then we could deliver them into a virtual heaven and keep their consciousness alive for ever, even longer than if I kept their bodies alive with the medical discoveries we had made.”

  “Eden?” I ask.

  “Eden,” he nods. “The few of us on Level 1 created Eden. And so Holocene II as you know it was born. One level cut off from the next and everyone supporting the cause.”

  “But I thought you were the first to go to Eden? You even said it yourself in the video they show us.”

  He lowers his head.

  “It’s the one thing I’m really ashamed of. But I had to disappear or the others would have questioned my never aging and all would have been lost. Sometimes the ends do justify the means, Aubrey. This was just one of those times.”

  “But I still don’t understand,” I say. “I get all of this, but here we are on the surface, in the world. There is no ice. There is no radiation. Why can’t we live up here now?”

  And then I remember the moral dilemma question on my test. The very last question that I blindly answered with a stab of my finger. And it hits me why I’m here. Why I was chosen. Not just for my test score, but because I must have answered that I would keep the infected level locked to their fate to prevent the spread of a virus that could wipe out our species.

  “Do we have a virus in Holocene II?” I say. “Something that will infect the planet? Oh, no! Did I bring something up with me when that train crashed? Please tell me I didn’t.”

  “You’re half right there,” he says, blinking and leaning forward to rest his hands on his knees. “What I’m about to tell you may be a shock at first.”

  I lean forward to listen. “Tell me.”

  “Eventually, we discovered the ice retreating, the radiation fading, and it was safe for us to investigate the surface. What we found surprised us. With no humans on the planet—or almost no humans, anyway—the Earth had begun to heal itself. Species we thought to be extinct had returned. Endangered species were flourishing. We discovered paradise in the making. A real Eden right here on the planet. Then we found humans. Small nomadic groups of them. Primitive. Violent. Descendants of survivors on the surface. And they were beginning it all again. Starting everything over. Rummaging through the rubble of cities, discovering their grandparents’ technology, developing weapons. Fighting one another. Slaughtering species wholesale for food and for fun. Breeding. Multiplying again unchecked.”

  “But did they have a virus or something?” I cut him off. “Some infectious disease that put life on the planet at risk?”

  “I thought you’d have figured it out by now,” he says, blinking and shaking his head.

  “Figured out what?”

  “We don’t just carry an infection, Aubrey—we are the infection. Humans are the virus. We’re parasites.”

  “What? Parasites?”

  “Yes, the worst parasites. We reproduce with no internal limitations. We consume and destroy and make war. We have no predator except ourselves, and left unchecked we destroy ourselves every time. And we destroy the planet along with us. Humankind is the thing that must be contained. Man must be checked. We were nature’s mistake—the only species worth extinction is our very own.”

  “You’re the Park Service?” I ask, my voice cracking, my legs shaking in the chair. “You’re the ones who slaughtered my friend’s family in that cove?”

  “I know nothing about that,” he says, blinking three times before his face falls into an almost believable look of sadness. “We made a choice long ago.”

  “What choice?”

  “The only choice.”

  “What choice?” I shout.

  “We dedicated all of North America as National Park and we swore to protect it. And we must protect it, Aubrey.”

  “Your plan is to exterminate all humankind?” I say, my voice sounding suddenly small and far away.

  “Our plan is to prevent another apocalypse. To let the Earth exist as it was meant to exist. To let some better species evolve. And the plan is working. But not fast enough.”

  I shake my head, confused.

  “What about Holocene II?”

  “We kept it for its production capacity, of course.”

  “You mean those drones we make?”

  “And food, and supplies. And now you.”

  “Why me? Why am I here?”

  “I’m dying, Aubrey. My wife is dying. We’re all dying. There is a limit to our longevity, and we’re all reaching it fast. We had hoped to accomplish our mission in one lifetime. To wipe out the human race and then, at last, ourselves with it. But we’ve failed. It’s taken longer than we thought it would—the human disease has proved a resilient one. Luckily, we had frozen Catherine’s eggs and my sperm and we were able to use a surrogate to have Hannah. Our lovely daughter Hannah. And now Hannah
is ready for a mate, a partner to continue the mission after we’re gone. And that mate is you, Aubrey. You’re the chosen one. Your DNA is a perfect match. Our models say it will combine with Hannah’s in all the best ways.”

  “You want me to have kids with Hannah?”

  “Yes. Don’t you see—you and Hannah and your children will finish the work we’ve started here.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because I need to know if you’re on board. There’s not much time, Aubrey. We thought you were lost for good, dead in the park, and we’ve already begun harvesting donor sperm from lesser candidates down in Holocene II. Of course, having you here is so much better than that.”

  I sit reeling in the chair—sweating, sick. The study spins, my head throbs. The clock ticks the loud seconds by. The ice tea glasses stand before me in agate pools of sweat dripping from their sides, the golden liquid catching the light like some foreign elixir of a world too contrary even to fully imagine.

  A tap on the door, it opens. Mrs. Radcliffe looks in.

  “Lunch is ready, you two.”

  “We’ll be taking it to go,” Dr. Radcliffe says.

  “To go where?”

  “I plan to show Aubrey here the Park.”

  “Oh, sweet Cosmos,” she says, as if cursing or calling on some higher power “Hasn’t he had enough of your lecturing by now? I’m sure he’s just exhausted.”

  I sit and watch their banter volley across the room as if I’m not really here. Perhaps I’m still in a theatre watching the drama unfold onscreen, or maybe reading it in some lesson slate play.

  “Aubrey …”

  “Huh? What?”

  “Are you allergic to anything?

  “Allergic?”

  “Food?” she says. “Allergic to any foods?”

  “He’s fine,” Dr. Radcliffe says. “He’s a healthy boy.”

  “Growing fast as a weed, too, I’ll bet,” she says. “I’ll have Gloria pack him double sandwiches then and bring them out.”

  She retreats from the room and closes the door.

  Dr. Radcliffe reaches forward, picks up his tea, and drains it in one gulp. Then he stands and holds out his hand.