The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) (12 page)

Tiny was impressed, but he was confused about the last part.
Officers didn’t dig holes, even really big ones. “What do you mean by holes,
Captain?”

Jack absently rubbed his face, where the scars used to be,
and smiled. “I had some experience in Korea with mortar fire, and when the war
was over I had a few words with some higher ranking officers about the
ineffectiveness of our bunkers. As a result, I was put in charge of a crew and
sent to a few newer bases to build some better bunkers. I took the job
seriously and when working with the engineers we were able to improve the
designs of the bunkers we built. It got noticed, and I got put in charge of
building some really big bunkers.” By nature, Jack wasn’t inclined to talk much
about the details of the projects he worked on. He supposed it didn’t really
matter now but it was habit.

Tiny mulled that over and then said, “Any chance you had
anything to do with the Freezer?” He had no idea what that meant, and it must
have showed. “The Freezer, you know, the ‘cryogenic facility’ we all came
from.”

“Oh, yeah… I guess I built it, just didn’t know what I was
building.” Jack liked Tiny. Gunnery sergeants were good at getting things done.
“So what about you Tiny, how long were you in?”

“I was at eighteen years when I had my accident. I saw a
little action in Iraq the first time we went in, but mostly we were chasing the
front line, and the Air Force was doing most of the work for us. I led a recon
platoon, and we did work wherever things were hot. Panama, Afghanistan, Kuwait,
places like that. I was working a joint task force with the air base up in
Great Falls, trying to figure out if we could help them set up a forward air
base inside enemy territory without the enemy knowing. We were doing a live
training mission where we moved in, painted the enemy with lasers, then the air
support bombed the hell out of the target and we secured the runway for them to
bring in troops and supplies. We had it down to a science and it was the last
training mission before taking it live to the desert, to try to get ahead of
the insurgents in Iraq. According to the records, there was an accident,
something about a laser guided bomb malfunctioning. I guess it killed about
half my team, and I was the only one to survive long enough to be a candidate
for the Freezer. My last memories were from just before we called in the
strike.”

Jack reflected on that in silence. He wasn’t sure what a
laser guided bomb was, but it wasn’t really important, he understood the gist
of Tiny’s fate.. What he was interested in was how many people, or rather
frozen bodies, were in the ‘Freezer’. The place was huge, but he had no point
of reference for how many dead people you could store in a facility that large.
Was the whole thing one big freezer or did they add rooms where the bodies were
stored?
Just another question to add to the rapidly growing list
.

Teague interrupted his thoughts and said, “Jack, you look
like you are done with breakfast, let’s go on that tour shall we?” Jack nodded.

As they were walking out, he turned back to Tiny and said
“Good to meet you Gunny. Or would you prefer I call you Tiny?”

“Gunny is fine, whichever suits you really, I respond to
either. What about you? You prefer Jack? Or maybe Sir?” The last part was said
with a little bit of a grin.

“My newest troops called me Sir, my friends called me Jack. You
can call me Jack, or if you prefer, some of my men called me Mad Dawg back in
Korea.” He chuckled and left the room before Tiny could respond to that.

* * *

They started the tour in the hallway. “Okay ‘Mad Dawg’, we
are going to talk about your new home.”

Jack shook his head, Teague seemed like a smart guy, but
socially he was a bit of a nerd. “This facility is geographically located somewhere
in what was once eastern Nevada. I can show you on a map later if you want. I’ve
found that some reborn are more comfortable knowing exactly where they are.”

“Eastern Nevada? I don’t recall anything military around
that area of the state.”

“What makes you think this was a military complex?”

“Obviously we are underground, and who else other than the
military had the kind of money to build something underground?

Teague nodded and considered this. “It was built after the
war started, before the nukes were used. From what we learned, it was
relatively secret, most of the government, or what was left of the government
at the time, didn’t even know about it.”

Jack filed that one away for later, he didn’t really feel up
to talking about the war yet.

“The facility is made up of six levels, all underground,
with level one starting forty feet from the surface. The EoS city that we came
from discovered it before things got really bad there, and a few members of
higher standing used their resources to retrofit the facility with some more
advanced equipment, like the frictionless plumbing and a power supply that will
likely last another thousand years before needing to be replaced or even fed
with more fuel. Some of the equipment, like the air filtration system and the
heating and cooling systems are old, and require constant maintenance.”

He took Jack’s datapad and tapped a few buttons, bringing up
a wireframe schematic of the bunker. He showed Jack how to use his finger to
spin the schematic so he could examine it from any level, and then how to zoom
in and zoom out so he could see the inner workings of the place, as well as all
the key points. When looking at a side view of the entire complex fully zoomed
out, it resembled a stack of pancakes. Each level was an individual pancake, a
large thin disc, with six discs in the stack. When he turned his viewpoint axis
so he was looking down at it at an angle, the pancakes revealed themselves to
be more like spoked wheels. Zooming in revealed the outer ring of the wheel to
be a corridor with rooms coming off both sides, and the spokes to be
passageways that converged on a central shaft. The shaft was like a big axel,
centered on all the wheels. The spokes were not symmetrical though, some were
spaced further apart, and between the spokes were larger rooms. Level four only
had two spokes with long rooms on each side of the central shaft. Levels two
and three had one large shared open space that occupied an entire half and even
extended up to the top level. There were rooms that looked like full apartments
surrounding this common area.

“We are here now, on level five.” He pointed to a section on
the fifth disc down from the top. This is mostly a medical level, with some
small apartments like the one you are in now. We use this level for the newly
reborn before easing them into regular living quarters. Those are up on levels two
and three, along with some family housing. Level four is armament and training,
and level six is mostly utility and control. Level one is primarily an activity
level, with some very large rooms for simulation training as well as
entertainment. There is even an underground park with a fake sun that rises and
sets.” He pointed to the huge open space on levels two and three. “That park
alone covers an acre of area. There are some community facilities on level one
as well, and on top of all that it is built to be a first line of defense for
if any enemy should breach the actual bunker.” As he talked about it, he
manipulated the schematic on Jack’s pad to show what area’s he was referring
to.

Jack pointed to what looked like a long tunnel coming off of
level one. “What is that?”

Teague zoomed the schematic out and pointed to the other end
of the tunnel. “This is a railway that connects to our flight deck. It is about
five miles long. Externally, the bunker is built near some natural rock
formations, with well camouflaged ventilation and access points.” He brought up
some exterior drawings and even some photos of the area.

Jack was struck by the scale of the place.
An acre? And that
is only one half of the diameter of this place?
This was larger than anything
he had ever even thought about building. He was no engineer, but even he wasn’t
sure how they could construct a building like this. “Any ideas on how they
built this place?”

Teague shrugged, “Not really my area of expertise, but we
think maybe they drilled it out then reinforced the walls with concrete. Look
at the corridors, they are all tubular on the outside, and square on the
inside.”

Jack wanted to study this for a while, but there was much to
see yet. He asked how to get back to this on the pad before they moved on.

“Let’s head to the medical facility on this level. It’s down
this main corridor, and past it is one of the two lifts that you can use to
access different levels. As we walk, you can start asking questions. We have
most of the day, and then we have some work to talk about.”

Jack didn’t waste any time. He pulled up his notes, took a
moment to review them, then said, “Okay Doc, first question. You said an
engineered virus wiped out the ability for the scientist’s children to
reproduce. Why is it you can’t just reverse engineer it and cure the problem in
yourself? You said you cured Cancer, and even for me you said my DNA was
altered so I would never get it. Seems after all that a little problem like
infertility would be a walk in the park.”

“Well, you just jump right to the tough questions, don’t you!
To answer this, I will need to summarize a few technical details.” Teague
mulled it over for a moment before starting. “When cloning a person, you take a
fertilized egg, remove the DNA, and replace it with the DNA of the person you
want to clone. From there, nature more or less takes over, with the exception
of the acceleration process and the part where we write in your memories.” He
paused to make sure Jack was following.

“DNA is made up of millions of pieces, and certain sequences
of those pieces make up your ‘genes’. We can modify genes to a certain extent,
but it is a very limited science. Usually it just means looking for certain
genes and rendering them ineffective. To change a gene from one sequence to
another is far more difficult. Usually we use a modified virus if we need to
change something, but the research to get to that point took many years and
required very specialized equipment to create. What we have here is a fairly
basic setup of predefined modifications we can use to fix things like your
cancer. We also have modifications that can make you more healthy, allow you to
live longer, and even give you better vision and better motor control. We no
longer have access to the computers and equipment that allowed us to create new
fixes and cures. But even if we did, it isn’t as simple as making a cure.”

They stopped at a doorway marked with the same symbol he had
put on Jack’s datapad to get in touch. “Before we go in I will finish the
explanation, so that we don’t get sidetracked.

“The reason we did not know of the virus’s effect for so
many years was because it took out a chunk of DNA in the next born child, yet
everything else remained the same. The child grew up healthy and normal, and
our screening processes only looked at a few thousand genes for known problems
and defects. However, at puberty, the part of the DNA that tells the body to
start making sperm was there, but it was being suppressed by another gene. There
are still many genes we have never identified because instead of being
responsible for something developing in the body, they are responsible for
suppressing something from developing in the body. Remove the right combination
of these genes from our DNA and we might grow wings, for all we know. Our
current level of technology just isn’t sufficient to experiment on this level. Some
scientists have tried, and the results were, well, we can talk about that
later.

“The last research done that I know of suggested that the
virus caused a series of genes to change, on top of removing a key piece of the
DNA. Technically it’s possible to splice the missing gene back into the DNA
strand, but if those researchers were right, it would also require manipulating
some other combination of genes. Given enough time and an incredibly powerful
computer, it might be possible to figure out how to restore the proper sequence
of genes and cure someone like me, but it is so incredibly complex that nobody
has bothered to try. Even if they found a way to do it, the only reliable way
to introduce the cure would be by cloning, and if you haven’t figured it out by
now, that wouldn’t do anything for me, just for the next copy of me. If we hadn’t
found some fertile men and an immunization for the virus, we might have
continued on that path, but for the few of us left, it is a waste of effort. There
is one more reason as well – risk. When splicing genes, you can’t be completely
sure of the results. We only get one shot when transferring memories from a
dead body to the clone. If we tried it, and it failed, we would be permanently
damaged, or worse. As old as I am in my head, I am not ready to die willingly,
even if it gave me a shot at having a child of my own.”

The explanation was a little over his head (and he imagined
it was dumbed down for him already), but it made enough sense to him to satisfy
his curiosity. He did get the feeling that Teague wasn’t telling him the whole
story, but it seemed irrelevant. He scratched the question off his list and moved
on. “Okay, so yesterday you told me how they used to make twins of living
people, just with their DNA. Why aren’t there a dozen little Teagues running
around?”

“That one is really simple. What would be the point? Another
version of me without my knowledge would just be a waste of resources for
another infertile man.”

“Sure, but it would be one more person who could be working
on the problem. After all, you are obviously intelligent, and that isn’t a
learned trait, even I know that.”

Teague looked a little uncomfortable, and Jack wasn’t sure
if it was the subject, the compliment he just paid, or something else. He
decided not to press the issue and shifted the question slightly. “So what
about making twins of the fertile men you found? If the issue with making twins
of yourself is that they are infertile like you, what about those men who aren’t?
Seems like having thirty or forty of them would be better than only having
eleven.”