Isle of Man Page 4

  “Jimmy, give me your knife,” I say. “If we’re not back in ten minutes, come after us.”

  With Jimmy’s knife in my teeth, I descend the short ladder into the dark submarine. I can hear Hannah climbing down after me. She places her hand on my shoulder and we creep along the narrow passageway. I begin to feel claustrophobic in the dark space, but soon a doorway comes into view, its hatch ajar and a triangle of yellow light slanting across passageway ahead. When we arrive at the doorway, I stand back and grip the knife in my hand. Hannah gets a hold of the heavy door and looks to me for a signal. When I nod, she pulls open the door, and I step into the room, leading with Jimmy’s knife.

  “Shazbit and sheetle stick!”

  The little old man sits in a control seat, mumbling strange obscenities as he fusses with nobs and levers. Junior is spread out on the floor at his feet, watching him intently.

  “Hello.” I don’t mean to whisper it, but I do.

  “You confounded fudderwacker!” The strange man slams the panel with his fist.

  Hannah pushes past me and steps toward him.

  She says: “You’ll respond this instant, rude sir.”

  Her commanding tone seems to get his attention, and he stretches out his arms and brings them together and interlaces his fingers behind his head, leaning back and turning to face us. He looks like some mad, frazzled scientist either surrendering or perhaps on vacation in repose.

  I step up beside Hannah.

  “Who are you?”

  He flashes us a strange and unsettling smile.

  “That’s an interesting question, young man. It could be answered in many ways. Who is anyone? Is anyone anyone? If a particle can be in two places at one time, couldn’t a person? Or even a fox?”

  “How about your name then?” I ask.

  “Benjamin,” he says. “Professor Benjamin Beckenbauer. But everyone just calls me ‘Moody’.” He slurs the word Moody while releasing his hands and holding them up, as if in some gesture of acceptance of a nickname which he hates. Then he spins around and returns his attention to the control panel in front of him, speaking over his shoulder to us. “Now, I’m not sure what you’re getting into, you two here and that other I saw on the boat, or what you have to do with this fragnabbled flood, but I have no time for shenanigans, or they’ll have me on the shock table again for sure. And if you see Dr. Radcliffe, please do tell him I’m working as quickly as I can.”

  “Dr. Radcliffe is dead,” I say.

  His hands freeze, and his head turns. He stares down for a moment, as if just now noticing Junior on the floor. Then he slowly swivels around to face us again.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “but would you mind repeating that?”

  I cast Hannah an apologetic glance.

  “What I meant to say is that Dr. Radcliffe passed away.”

  He leaps from the chair, throws his hands in the air, and jogs a small circle around the room, surprisingly nimble as his spindly legs lift high off the floor in the manner of someone marching.

  “He’s dead,” he chants. “He’s dead. The old boy is finally dead.” He stops abruptly and turns to face us. “How do I know you’re not lying? Wait. You’re his daughter, aren’t you? You look just like your mother. Yes, yes, you do. You wouldn’t lie. Let me hear you say it. Tell me your father is dead.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Hannah says. “He’s dead. And I am his daughter, so perhaps you could appear a little less happy about it. Now tell us who you are and what you’re doing.”

  He nods, seeming to calm down as he digests the news. “I’m sorry for my outburst,” he says, straightening up and standing formally before us. “They call me Moody because my moods are a tad bit unpredictable. At least I think that’s how it started. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Moody it is. I’m a professor of theoretical physics, but for the last several hundred years they’ve had me in charge of maintenance for our fleet. It’s quite beyond me as to why, really, except that no one else wanted the job. But I digress. May I assume, young lady, that you are in charge now? Professor Moody here, at your service. Although I’d like to officially tender my request for a new assignment, preferably one more fitting to my profession.”

  Junior gets up off the floor and trots past us. I turn and see Jimmy standing behind us in the doorway.

  “You guys all right?” he asks.

  “Well, well,” the professor mumbles. “If it isn’t Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”

  “Who?” Hannah asks.

  He waves her question off.

  “Just some old story.”

  After introducing ourselves, we circle up on the floor and discuss our situation, passing a water bottle and a welcome bag of algaecrisps produced from a cabinet by the professor. He shifts between manic rants, which he quickly apologizes for, and depressing claims that we’d all be much better off if we’d drowned along with the others. And although it’s clear that he is slightly unstable, he proves very willing to submit, especially looking to Hannah for reassurance when answering questions.

  We tell him all about the wave and about Dr. Radcliffe’s apocalyptic doomsday plans, including flooding the Foundation, which happened, and flooding Holocene II, which didn’t. He listens and nods and seems surprised by none of it. He says the water should drain back to level in time, and that we need only wait. And he seems little concerned about the lack of power, insisting that the flow of electricity from Holocene II where it’s generated is constant, and that the batteries are capable of powering the Foundation for many years, even if there were an interruption. I ask why not use the dam for hydro power locally, which seems to impress the professor. He explains that it was used as such once, but that the turbines proved too costly in time and materials to maintain when the rail tubes between the Foundation and Holocene II proved to be a perfect transmission line for the power collected by us there from the Earth’s magnetic fields. When we begin debating the advantages of Magnetohydrodynamics over geothermal power generation, Hannah and Jimmy begin to moan with boredom until we move on to discussing our more immediate plans. That’s when I ask the professor how to stop the drones.

  “Stop them?” he asks. “Why?”

  “Because that’s what we intend to do,” I answer.

  He scratches his chin, lost for a moment in thought. Then he turns to Hannah.

  “Do you agree with this? Are you officially abandoning our mission statement?”

  “I certainly think it’s time to review it,” Hannah replies.

  He furrows his brow and nods.

  “Well, then, I never was a big fan of old Radcliffe’s radical ideas. I’m happy to leave the politicking to you three.”

  “But you did go along with Dr. Radcliffe’s plans,” I say. “You sure didn’t protest if you maintained the fleet of drones.”

  He nods.

  “I did, I did. But you might have, too. He could be very persuasive, Robert could. Especially if you were here to see the destruction and horror mankind leveled on itself.”

  “Still, how do we know we can trust you?”

  “Kid,” he says, sighing. “I’m really, really old, and now I’m dying. I don’t care two hoots what you do.”

  “Okay. Then tell us how we stop the drones?”

  “That’s no easy task,” he says. “We’ll need to wait for the power to come back on and reboot the system. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

  “But you’ll help us?”

  “Keep me off the shock table, and I’ll help you.”

  “Shock table?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says, shaking his head and shivering at the very thought. “They claimed that it helped with my moods.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Sorry, Jimmy, I’m with Hannah

  The power does turn back on.

  But I almost wish it hadn’t.

  For three days, we collect bodies. The dead scientists float bloated to the surface, or are exposed trapped in their rooms as water is pumped away. Jimmy
and I use the boat to patrol the underground bay in the dim, gray glare of LED lights, towing the floaters back to shore where we drag them with ropes to what’s left of Eden. The water from Radcliffe’s flood had washed away most of what the fire we had set didn’t destroy, but the steel-lined killing room is eerily intact.

  It’s hard for me. I remember looking into that monitor and seeing my father’s head opened before his body was sloughed off into the trap door in the floor. Turns out that trap door leads to an industrial-grade meat grinder that renders bodies into a paste before flushing them down sewage pipes the length of the step locks into the Pacific. So we toss the dead scientists in and grind them up and send them as fish food out to sea. It’s a much better burial than they deserve, if you ask me.

  Fortunately, almost all of the materials used down here are either synthetic plastics or metals designed to resist corrosion, so there is very little damage from the flood. Hannah and the professor—we refuse to call him “Moody,” like he asked—spend most of their time restoring the critical mechanical systems around the Foundation: heating, lighting, waste-water pumps. But even though the computer systems are water-tight, designed with heat sinks instead of cooling fans, we decide to let them dry for several days, as a precaution, before rebooting to see if we can take control of the drones.

  The professor walks us through the Foundation and uses his codes to unlock the few remaining rooms we haven’t been able to check for bodies. He takes us into the sintering plant, where Hannah and I stood with her father and watched the missiles being built. Although pools of water remain on the floors, everything seems operational enough. Still, we all hold our breath as he opens the munitions room door. But there, too, everything seems to have been moved around by the water but hardly damaged at all.

  “Why is that here?” I ask, pointing to the strange black box marked with red letters that read: ANTIMATTER.

  The professor squats and peers into the box’s blue-glowing window.

  “This little baby here,” he says, running his hands over the box as if petting it, “contains almost a trillion dollars-worth of worldwide scientific work.”

  “What’s a dollar?” Jimmy asks.

  “A measure of currency, when the world used money.”

  “Oh. Like pearls or somethin’?”

  “Like pearls,” the professor says. “But the money aside, this represents an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, like everything we lousy humans did, it was only produced because of its potential use in weaponry.”

  “How much is in there?” I ask.

  “A little over 200 grams,” he says. “But don’t worry. The design of this case, really a large battery itself, keeps it trapped in permanent suspension. Unless it’s detonated, of course.”

  “Whataya mean by detonated?” Jimmy asks.

  “Let’s get something to eat,” the professor says, changing the subject. “My stomach is growling loud enough to be rude, I’m afraid.”

  We’ve scrounged up enough sealed rations to eat fairly well, heating our meals on the cook stove in the living quarters. But with the rooms still drying out, Hannah, the professor, and I sleep on separate bunks in the submarine, while Jimmy sleeps outside the submarine in the boat with Junior.

  On the fourth day, with no bodies left to be found, Jimmy, Hannah, and I gather at the command center door and wait for the professor to let us in so we can reboot the computers.

  “What’s that say?” Jimmy asks, pointing to a metal plaque mounted next to door and engraved with the words:

  MISSION STATEMENT

  THE PARK SERVICE THUS ESTABLISHED SHALL PROTECT AND CONSERVE THE NATURAL BEAUTY OF THE EARTH BY EMPLOYING ALL AVAILABLE MEANS TO ERADICATE FOREVER FROM THE PLANET THE VIRAL SPECIES KNOWN AS HUMANKIND.

  To my relief, before I can read the plaque to Jimmy, the professor shows up and punches his code into the keypad and leads us inside the command center. It reminds me of the safe room at the lake house, only larger and more sophisticated. It has a concave wall lined with LCD screens in front of several cockpit-style chairs, complete with joysticks for controlling drones and fire switches to release weapons.

  I sit in one of the chairs and notice that the seating surface is heated with buttons for vibration-massage settings, just in case you need to relax a little between kills, I guess. I imagine Dr. Radcliffe and his team of environmental terrorists spending countless hours down here “working.” I wonder if they enjoyed the hunt. I wonder if they kept score of their kills. The thought of it makes me really dislike the professor, and I wouldn’t be able to forgive him except he claims the command center was off limits to everyone except Radcliffe and a select few others, and I’m tempted to believe him because he doesn’t seem very familiar with the room.

  After mumbling many pseudo-profanities, the professor finally locates the mainframe racked up in a server closet and tells us to hope for the best while he reboots the “Big Iron.”

  The computers are noiseless. The screens flicker, then run a dizzying display of code before going dark and coming back on again with a patchwork of vibrant scenes from around the park: a snowy sunset high in the Himalayas; a gorgeous view of blue ocean waves breaking on a tropical coast; a prairie caught in the gold light of sunrise; a billowing dust storm in a desert; a peekaboo view of reflected moonlight in a tangled marshland as a drone glides on its mindless midnight mission. Lowlands and highlands, rivers and lakes—it’s an orgy for my tired eyes, which have been four days in this gray and dreary underworld looking for bloated cadavers in the dark.

  “Is all this happening somewhere right now?” Jimmy asks, stepping forward and reaching out to touch a screen.

  “Yes,” I say, reminding myself that he’s never seen a video image before. “These are from cameras mounted on drones.”

  The screens change to new images every sixty seconds or so, and with the third changeover something terrible happens. All at once, the screens combine to create one image the size of the entire wall. The scene is of an ice sheet in the permanent twilight of early arctic winter. Several seal groups huddle beside blocks of ice next to their breathing holes. A handful of fur-clad hunters inches toward them, hidden behind a white, skin-covered blind that they push ahead of themselves on the ice. When they’re close, the hunters spring out from behind the blind and rush to the seals and crush their skulls with clubs.

  “Oh, no!” Hannah exclaims, beside me.

  A few of the white pups rush for the breathing hole but are caught up and clubbed, then hung from hooks on the wood framing of the blind, and bled. Several moments of butchery follow, and an impressive radius of ice around the scene turns blood-red. Just as I’m about to ask how far away the camera is, crosshairs appear on the screen. A few seconds later, two of the seal hunters explode, their severed limbs skittering, along with hunks of blubber, across the bloody ice. Another hunter is left in the frigid water, clinging to the icy edge of the hole blasted by the bombs. He struggles and kicks to climb out, scrambling up and running across the barren ice. The camera follows him, the crosshairs zero in again. One moment he’s running for his life, the next moment he’s a pink mist, and only a blood-stained hole is left in the ice to mark his life.

  The gory scene disappears as the screens change over to various peaceful views of the park. When I peel my eyes away and look around the room, I notice Jimmy clutching the back of a command chair, his face frozen in an ashen stare.

  “What’s wrong with him?” the professor asks.

  I put my hand on Jimmy’s shoulder.

  “He’s upset because he’s seen this before in person.”

  “Ah ... ,” the professor sighs, “it never gets any easier to watch. Especially when they club the little whitecoats.”

  “He’s not upset about the seals,” I say.

  Jimmy shakes his head and mumbles: “What in the hell’s wrong with you people?”

  “I’m sorry,” the professor says, “I didn’t mean to ...”

  “Let’s just s
ee if we can control the drones,” Hannah says.

  The professor hangs his head and approaches the panel of controls, mumbling as he types commands into the keyboard. “I didn’t mean to upset anyone. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Holy shrimp in the sea, there’s nobody stupider than me.”

  Red letters pop on the screens:

  COMMAND POST DEACTIVATED

  SITREP MONITORING ONLY

  “Oh, piffle!” He slams his hand down on the keyboard. “No good. No good at all.”

  “We’re locked out?” Hannah asks.

  “It appears so, young lady,” he says. “Flood triggered the emergency system. Just as Radcliffe planned it to, I’m sure. The command and control lines are severed.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “It means that the drones are now operating autonomously with their own internal software systems. They’ll continue to execute their mission. All we can do is watch.”

  “How many can there be?” I ask.

  “Many thousands of them,” the professor answers. “We’ve substantially increased the fleet over the years to cover more ground as ... well, as populations thinned.”

  “Don’t candy-coat it,” I say. “You mean as you killed more people.” The professor nods, apparently untroubled by, or at least unwilling to refute, my statement. I continue, “They can’t possibly run on their own forever, can they? How long?”

  “No,” the professor replies. “But they can operate in the theater for many years. The drones have solar skins and electric engines, and they’re loaded with enough traditional munitions to perform many hundreds of kills each. They have backup lasers that are of reduced effect but can still incinerate a biped from quite a distance. The ships will last even longer.”

  “Can we use the drones here to target the other drones?”

  “We might see what’s left in the hangar,” he says. “But when Eden caught fire they flew most of them as a precaution. And even if there are any left, and even if they’re salvageable, I doubt we could launch them with the system on lockdown, let alone program a new mission.”