Objekt 221 Page 7

  “We control our destiny,” Katie fired back. “Our actions directly impact the environment. Our pollution. Our land use. Our waste.”

  “Do you know how many lightning strikes hit the planet’s surface every second? One hundred. Every second. That’s about three billion strikes per year. One thousand tornadoes rip across the United States each year. 20,000 earthquakes are recorded every year…with millions more falling below the data threshold.”

  He paused for a second and took one final step forward, closing the gap. The rest of the protesters were staring.

  “We live on a violent, aggressive, ever-changing planet that was doing just fine before we arrived and will be doing just fine after our bones have turned to dust. You have a strong message, but it’s founded in crap. Rhetoric. A PR machine that is fighting to justify its own means. Pick a specific problem and attack it. Road blow, for example. Or sinkhole detection methods. Or medical science. Don’t try to save the planet—that’s not for you to do. Try to improve one little aspect of your world.”

  * *

  Ten years later, but 100 million years earlier, Damon Butcher smiled at the memory.

  “1,500 active volcanoes around the world and only 500 have yet to erupt,” he said under his breath, and continued to grin.

  “What was that?” came a slightly metallic but still oddly clear voice. It was Lazlo Hollyfeld. Damon had read his dossier during his downtime while waiting for the mission to start. Mid-twenties. Tall, lanky build with abnormally large hands. Hollyfeld had attained three tech PhDs simultaneously. Two at MIT and one doing online coursework because he was bored.

  “Talking to myself,” Damon answered. “Just a memory from my college days.” Miles didn’t respond over comms, but Butcher was certain he had heard a chuckle.

  The team stood in a vaguely defined group about 10 meters outside the huge steel door that protected Gamma Complex—the abbreviated version of O221 in the Cretaceous. Miles was reading something on the wrist-attached computer pad on his left arm. He finished reading, tapped the screen a few times, and the mission data appeared on everyone’s wrist pad. A single image appeared on their faceplate HUDs, replaced by a second and a third. They all dropped down to thumbnail size along the left edge of their vision.

  Flowers.

  “Today’s mission should be an easy one,” Miles said over the group communications net. “No animals. Just plants. Specifically these three. We need two of each of these three flowers. There’s a study about threat response that we need to populate.”

  “Walk to the end of the driveway and back,” Calvin Brunarski added and Miles nodded. Calvin was a stocky man—dark hair and dark complexion. He was late middle-aged and the most senior member of the team—at least as far as age and seniority with Allied Genetics was concerned. He wore a black Fu Manchu-style mustache and would never admit to darkening it with hair dye.

  “Exactly,” Miles said. “The challenge is 30 minutes. We split off into teams of two. Shouldn’t take all that long to find the six specimens. We should have a longer project tomorrow, but this is more to get Damon’s feet wet.”

  Everyone nodded. There was no hazing ritual at Allied Genetics, but a new recruit’s first adventure into the deep past was usually a short one. They were very aware of the potentially overwhelming experience.

  “Great,” Cadey Park said, tapping Damon on the shoulder. “It’s my turn in the rotation. I’ll show him the ropes.”

  * *

  Cadey Park was 30 years old but, perhaps stereotypically, you couldn’t guess her age by looking at her. She had defected from North Korea in her teens as a National Math Champion and had advanced her knowledge through various degrees in American colleges. She took on cryptozoology as a hobby and, according to Lofton’s hand-written note on the dossier he had given Damon, she knew more about the subject than Damon himself—who had an advanced degree.

  “So,” Cadey said. “Precision Robotics, huh?”

  The six-person excursion had divided up into three smaller teams. They were each looking for the different targets, but there was no competition. Ultimately, the goal was to finish up and head back to base for an evening off.

  “Yep.” Damon nodded. “I was heading up the theoretical biometrics department and doing some cross-training in programming.”

  “What brought you to our little corner of the universe?”

  Damon shrugged.

  “I knew Miles from college.” He paused for a moment, running his thickly gloved hand across a two-meter-tall shrub top. “Plus a raise and the promise of high adventure.”

  Cadey nodded.

  “That’ll get you every time.” She paused for a moment as both of them read the information on their HUD. One of the teams had grabbed a set of plants. “I did some consulting work for Precision a few years ago. Not a bad organization.”

  “Yeah. What kind of work did you do?” Damon asked, and then exclaimed as his HUD highlighted one of the plants noted in their excursion documents.

  Cadey reached down to uproot it and slide it into a protective bag.

  “They were doing some research on drone technology. Very hush, hush.” She stood up and clipped the bag to a metal ring on the outer edge of her right leg. Standing, she made a thumb gesture to her back, over her shoulder, indicating her bag. “It’s a hobby of mine, so I helped them out.”

  Damon made a move to look at her back, but she had turned away and stepped through some foliage.

  “Got another,” she called over the faceplate microphone.

  Just as quickly, Damon saw his own HUD light up with the six plant images—two for each of the three various plants—five of them now had red Xs across the image, indicating that they had been collected already. Soon, he heard Emi Tolliver’s voice over his speakers.

  “Got the last one,” she said. Emi was another young, female researcher on Lofton’s team. She was in her late 20s and kept her head shaved. Language, it seemed, was her hobby as she had degrees from around the world and spoke three languages fluently. Born in Boston, her first language experiment was to completely remove her accent.

  As Damon recalled this note from her dossier, he also noticed that Cadey spoke with only a hint of an accent. He realized that she had spent the first half of her life—the formative years of language—in her native North Korea. There should have been some vestiges of an accent. He was only picking them up on random words.

  “I was noticing your accent,” he said as she emerged from the small group of trees. “Or, rather, your lack of one.”

  Cadey nodded as if this was a discussion she had been through on numerous occasions.

  “During undergrad, I sought out friends who were from accent-neutral parts of the U.S. Northern California. The central Midwest. Places like that. I worked to emulate their speech.”

  It was Damon’s turn to nod.

  “So, you have a drone in your backpack?”

  “Yes she does,” came Miles Lofton’s voice over the plate speakers. And, just like that, all six members of the research team were back in the same area forming a natural semi-circle. “It comes in handy, sometimes, when we’re trying to peek around certain corners. You know. To stay safe.”

  “Can I try?” Damon said, turning from Miles to Cadey after the question was asked…seeking permission from both at the same time. Certain that he didn’t want to offend anyone. “I’ve never actually flown one.”

  Cadey looked to Miles who made a dramatic motion of checking the non-existent watch on his wrist. Everyone had a small box of text data in the bottom-right corner of the HUD that, oddly, expanded when they looked at it, and contained the current time at O221, the local temperature, and relative humidity.

  “Sure. Five minutes.”

  * *

  It felt like someone had taken a video game controller, broken it in half, and added a computer tablet in between the two handles. Damon held the controller comfortably. It was a bit heavy, but rested easily in the palms of his hands. His le
ft thumb controlled the elevation and his right thumb controlled lateral movement. The left trigger controlled the zoom of the camera and the right trigger controlled lateral speed. As a lifelong gamer, the control interface was intuitive and easy. Within moments, he was a pro.

  He watched the drone zoom up and away from the group and began to familiarize himself with the camera screen.

  Damon was flanked by Miles and Cadey. The other three researchers busied themselves with other projects. Calvin was cataloging each of the six plant specimens, all laid out on the ground in front of him. Emi was tracking a dinosaur—noted as BPS-N651—and snapping photos of him. It was the size of a large dog, a deep brown color, with a spiked tail jutting out twice the length of his body. Lazlo stood by the airlock door, running various environmental tests, gauging air composition.

  Cadey leaned in closer to Damon and started pointing out various elements of the display.

  “Elevation in meters, remaining battery, distance from base—which is you—and effective range, horizon indicator.”

  Damon was grinning broadly.

  “Yup,” he said. “Just like a pretty basic flight simulator.”

  He was manipulating the device this way and that, watching the screen like a child with a new toy. The image and the metrics all blended into one simultaneous input. Damon soon began to attempt new button/control interface combinations. Suddenly, the screen went all topsy-turvy and Cadey jerked in reaction.

  “What happened?”

  “Yeager Roll.” Damon smiled.

  As the screen image stabilized and the horizon once again indicated level, a quarter of the right side of the screen went black. Damon frowned.

  “What’s that all about?” he asked.

  Cadey furrowed her brow and looked at the distance and coordinates.

  “That’s a geo-error,” she said, Miles also leaning in closer. “There are some spaces that are blocked from our equipment. Some sort of electromagnetic interference. We have a team at 221 trying to clear it, but it’s a pretty consistent error.”

  Damon swung the camera around directly toward the error. Slowly, as if it was panning from right to left, the entire screen went black.

  “Hmm,” Damon said to himself. He didn’t turn to look, but spoke to Miles.

  “Did you try—?” he started.

  “Yeah,” Miles answered, assuming the first solution Damon would have reached. “We tried to calibrate with Gamma Complex’s equipment.”

  “What if you—?” he started again.

  “It’s no use to feed the uplink right into the faceplate,” Miles said. “There’s not a stable way to boost the signal without frying capacitor-G.”

  “Hmm.”

  Damon started to lower the elevation of the drone, slowly. The screen remained black until it became static and then cleared. Damon halted the descent. According to the display, the drone was about 10 meters above the surface, looking at dense foliage another five meters directly in front of it. He cocked his head sideways and began to spin the drone in a 360-degree movement. Directly behind the drone was a huge clearing. When he came back and faced the foliage, he paused.

  “Okay,” Butcher said.

  “Let’s wrap it up,” Miles said, tapping his imaginary watch. The rest of the team heard this and began finishing their individual projects.

  “Hang on,” Damon said.

  Cadey leaned in and looked at the screen.

  “I learned this from a video game.”

  Slowly, the drone began to ascend and pull backward at the same time. Damon increased pressure on the analog trigger to slowly zoom the little camera. As the drone backed up and elevated, the zoom kept the trees clearly in focus. Soon, he reached the level where the static assaulted the screen.

  “Okay,” Damon said, leaning in toward the screen. He continued his backward ascent. The drone cleared the static and, instead of going black, the screen remained active.

  “Oh. Wow,” Cadey said. “I need to play more video games.”

  Damon reached the tops of the trees and they found themselves looking into a clearing much like the one that was at the rear of the little drone.

  “Holy shit,” Damon said and paused the ascent of the drone. He zoomed the camera in full.

  “It’s a road,” Cadey said, breathlessly.

  * *

  The five members of the expedition team crowded around Damon. They were all staring at the screen. Miles had forgotten about his fake countdown.

  Through the short prairie grasses was a clear road—an artificial path. A dead-straight, slightly indented path that ran for just more than 100 meters and disappeared behind another huge clump of trees.

  “I don’t know what I’m seeing,” Damon said, maneuvering the drone back and forth, testing the geo-error area. Suddenly, an area snapped into focus. It was hard to accurately estimate due to the height of the drone, but a section of hard, smooth pavement appeared. It was a chunk of ground five by five meters square. Even though nature had reclaimed the vast majority of this area, a small section remained visible. It was clearly artificial.

  “I don’t think we should be seeing this,” Calvin said from behind Miles.

  Miles turned his head to look at the team. Cadey, in one smooth motion, pressed a small thumb drive into the side of the control panel and pushed an icon labeled “record local.” Damon looked at her out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t react.

  “Let’s pack it up,” Miles said, facing away from the display screen. “We’ll discuss this at the next team meeting. For now, we have loads of data to prepare.”

  Cadey, again, in a quick motion, pulled the thumb drive out of the machine and the “record” icon, previously lit, went dark. All told, she had recorded roughly 20 seconds of data.

  Miles turned to look at Damon.

  “Alright,” he said. “Let’s bring it down.”

  “You got it,” Damon said, nodding. Finally, he cast a sideways glance at Cadey Park who hefted an eyebrow as both a challenge to say something and an imploration to stay quiet. “Comin’ down.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Road

  IT WASN’T quite a conference room and it wasn’t quite a break room. It wasn’t quite a living space. Lofton’s expedition team had found a little-used room that was somehow in the middle of all of these functions. There was a small kitchenette in the corner and a slim refrigerator full of soda, snacks, and bottled water. Of course, the dominant feature of the room was the large circular table in the center.

  Miles Lofton sat in one of the Spartan cloth and wood chairs. He had a legal pad flipped open in front of him with a variety of pens at the ready.

  “But our debriefings are typically in 206,” Calvin Brunarski said.

  And he was right.

  Most often, the expedition team would discuss their latest excursion in the large, official conference room in MV206. They would compare notes and discuss anything that needed to be fixed or addressed by management. In this instance, Miles steered them into the first open room.

  “You’re right,” Miles said. “But since this is more of an anomaly, I wanted to get into a room and talk about it ASAP without having to schedule our regular area.”

  Calvin nodded.

  “Okay,” he said and looked around the table, still nodding, to gauge any dissent. There was none.

  He sat next to Miles. Cadey Park sat on the other side of Miles with Emi directly next to her. Damon and Lazlo rounded out the seating.

  “It looked like a road,” Emi Tolliver said as she rubbed her right hand up across the crown of her head. She, at once, hated and relished the feel of the stubble there. Time to shave.

  Miles nodded his head.

  “That’s what it looked like,” he said. “I agree. But I caution you all to fall into the trap of matrixing.”

  Damon nodded in reply. He had heard of this phenomenon.

  “I don’t get it,” Lazlo said.

  Cadey was leaning forward on her elbo
ws, chin resting in the palm of her right hand.

  “Matrixing is when the brain tries to make sense of its surrounding by arranging random objects into a recognizable pattern,” she said. “People who see faces in wood grain. Or puppies in clouds.” She paused for a moment. “Miles is suggesting that we didn’t actually see a road, but disparate elements that arranged themselves to resemble a road in our brains. Right?”

  “Exactly,” Miles said. “It’s a perceptive trick to assume that straight lines and right angles don’t appear in nature. They’re there. All the time.”

  “I’m not sure of what we hope to accomplish here,” Damon said. “Not to speak out of turn, but, why don’t we just go out and take a look in person?”

  Calvin and Miles shook their heads at the same time. Calvin spoke first.

  “First of all, an unsanctioned trip is against the rules. These things are carefully planned and scheduled. Company resources and all that. These trips aren’t free. Second, there is the added problem of us looking into a geographic lock. That zone was off limits to us for any number of reasons. Dangerous predators. Volcanic activity. Heck. Residual toxic waste from a bygone meteor shower. For whatever the reason, the company decided that area was not to be explored.”

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Miles said.

  There was silence around the table. The implications of a super-ancient civilization were huge.

  “It sure looked like a road,” Emi said again. This time resting the palms of her hands flat on the table top. She looked like a teenager who was just told she couldn’t go to the mall with her friends.

  Miles shrugged.

  “Look,” he said. “There’s no use for prediction without fully exploring the area.” He paused. “We’d have to put a team together consisting of engineers, geologists, and us. Probably a few soldiers, too, in case things got weird. Let’s put this whole discussion on hold until I’ve had a chance to talk to the boss. Maybe we can plan an excursion. But don’t get your hopes up.”