The Eden Project: Humanity's Last Chance Read online

  Zeke and Gen glanced guiltily at each other.

  “Better to ask yourselves,” Adam said, pointing at the screens, “will he move on? Will he forget?”

  The door slid open and Adam disappeared, leaving the intended couple alone with each other and thoughts too dark for words.

  Gen dished up a plate of stuffed cucumbers and placed it on the last tray. “That should be it, Ada. That one’s yours.” Gen wiped her brow as Ada grabbed the tray.

  “What about your tray?” Little Ada said, her eyes twinkling despite her concern.

  “Not hungry. I ate a bit already.” Gen removed her apron and began folding it.

  Ada smiled sweetly before she carefully backed through the swinging doors with her tray.

  Gen set her folded apron on a prep station and exhaled deeply. She squatted down to sit on the floor and rested her back against an industrial oven. She buried her face in her hands and then wiped her fingers down her face in frustration.

  “So stupid,” she said to herself, barely. She let her head fall back to rest against the oven.

  There was a quiet knock on the kitchen door. She said nothing, just waited for the doors to swing open. When Milo and Isaac entered, she was not surprised. She knew why they came.

  * * *

  DOCTOR BECKER SAT in her lab writing with a red pencil in a case folder. She reconsidered what she wrote, picked up an old circular eraser and rubbed out what she had just written. When she picked up the pencil again to rewrite her observations, Doctor Quarna stepped just inside the lab.

  “Excuse me, Lotte. We need you to…” He stopped suddenly when he noticed the pencil and the eraser. “Why do you still use those ancient tools?” He said, staring at the pencil in her hand.

  She studied the pencil curiously. “The pencil? Right. I was in a nostalgia club in college. I always liked how it doesn’t feel so final.” She set the pencil next to the eraser and turned her chair to face him.

  He quickly lost interest in the pencil. His usual intensity returned while he lingered by the door. “Interesting,” he concluded. “Sorry to interrupt, we need you to sit in on something.”

  “Sure. When?” she asked.

  “Briefing chamber 3. Now,” he instructed.

  * * *

  TUNA SAT AGAINST A TREE in the shaded nook near the western dome wall. This was where he went to get away when he needed a break from the non-stop preparation for the launch. They had been preparing for years before his birth and on every day of his life. Sometimes he needed a break from all that, to be lost from every responsibility and to escape even his own personality. Absolute quiet and solitude.

  He imagined he could breathe the air from outside, the air from the sea at night. The last of the sun lingered in the oncoming darkness. He waited, hoping that when the day finally ended and the world outside had faded to black, he would let his anger at Gen and the recurring memories of the destroyed city slip away with the light.

  He held his scrollpad in his hands. He stared down at the glowing screen and then touched a button on the edge of the pad to turn it off. His breathing became the only thing he thought about, an old fashion relaxation technique suggested to him by Doctor Becker.

  Breathing deeply from the abdomen captures more oxygen which in turn relieves tension. As he exhaled he could feel the anxiety leaving his body. Outside the dome the sun had vanished and the darkness seemed clean and quiet. This would pass he thought. They would all move on and friendships would grow through the years ahead, the celestial years, he thought with a smile.

  An orange flash of light flickered in the darkness. Tuna sat straight up. His chest went suddenly cold. His heart climbed into his throat. There was something out there. A small, moving orange light appeared and disappeared in an instant on the finger of rocky coastline between the dome and the sea.

  He felt around under the tree looking for his missing scrollpad. No luck. He looked down trying to spot where it had gone. There, he found it. He snatched it and gave it a quick check, then slid it safely into its holster.

  His deep breathing no longer relaxed him. The air had become a toxic gas. He was overwhelmed and unable to turn back to the outside. The terror suffocated and paralyzed him all at once. He knew he had to find the strength to verify that there was nothing out there, that it was only his imagination. Determination overtook him. He forced himself to ever so slowly turn around.

  Tuna leapt away from the glass and hit the back of his head on the trunk of the tree. He stared the creature straight in the eyes. Not eyes, some kind of thick, filthy metal goggles. The thing clutched an orange light. His skin was dark, no, dirty. A human, Tuna thought. Hooded, tattered, covered in filth, begoggled. Infected.

  -17-“Tuna!” His name was being yelled out. “Tuna! Are you there?” It came from behind him. Milo and Isaac.

  He took another long look at the filthy creature. “Stay right there,” he whispered motioning it to stay. Tuna stepped out from the shade of the tree. “Over here, boys!”

  Milo and Isaac ran around the backend of ES4 and spotted Tuna at a distance. He waived frantically to get them to run down the edge of the massive ship to get to him.

  “They want you, Tuna!” Milo commanded slowing to a walk and approaching the trees.

  “Never mind that,” Tuna said stepping under the cover of the trees. “They’ve found us.”

  Milo and Isaac followed him to the shaded spot. “Who’s found us?” Isaac asked, impatiently. Milo lifted a branch for Isaac to step under.

  “It’s right here,” Tuna explained, excitedly. “A human creature. I’m sure it’s infected. They’ve come for us.”

  Fear overtook Isaac. Milo’s eyes followed Tuna’s outstretched arm to a finger which pointed to the thick glass of the western dome. Milo squinted intensely at what he laid his eyes on.

  “What creature?” Milo asked.

  Tuna and Isaac turned their heads to see what Milo saw, the absolute black of the night outside. “He was right here,” Tuna said, uncertainly. “He had an orange light.”

  All that Milo and Isaac could do was to check the dark glass again and then glance to each other, deeply concerned.

  “Doctor Quarna has requested your attendance, Tuna,” Milo finally said. “They’re all waiting for you in briefing chamber 3.”

  Tuna nodded, barely, but kept staring out into the empty night.

  * * *

  DOCTOR QUARNA PACED back and forth. Claudia and Doctor Becker sat behind him. They looked through the glass at Zeke, Adam, Gen and Lexi.

  “Excuse me, Doctor Quarna,” Gen began, “Lexi did not know anything. I used my seniority to convince her to help. She never wanted to be any part of this. Can she go? Tuna will be upset with her.”

  Doctor Quarna stopped pacing to stare through the glass at Gen. “Well, thanks to you, she is a part of this. We can’t change that now.”

  The door slid open and Tuna entered in a daze. Milo and Isaac stayed outside.

  “Thank you, Milo and Isaac. Can you please join us?” Doctor Quarna said. The boys entered behind Tuna and all three took seats. The door slid closed.

  Tuna surfaced from a daze when he noticed Lexi in the room. She felt the weight of his disapproving eyes and could not return his stare.

  Gen realized the damage she had done even to Lexi. Regret welled up in her chest to the point of suffocation. Zeke and Adam were likewise riddled with guilt and sat uncomfortably in their chairs.

  “I’ve asked Milo and Isaac to join us because there has been a serious security breach.” Doctor Quarna stopped to make eye contact with each of the kids. “There has been verbal contact made with the outside.”

  Tuna sat up in his chair and turned to Gen sternly while both Milo and Isaac were completely dumbfounded. No one else was surprised.

  “Claudia has been aware of and tracked the boat for months.”

  All the kids listened intently in various forms of disbelief.

  “Until today,” Doctor Quarna continue
d, deeply disappointed, “this man was not aware of us.” His face flushed as if he was holding his breath. Rather than his breath, he was holding onto his rage. “I can hardly believe how reckless you have been! Do you kids have a death wish?” He threw his hands out to them, then turned around and walked away from the glass.

  Claudia and Doctor Becker watched Doctor Quarna walk behind them to the back of the chamber, trying to control his rage. They looked to each other and then to the upset kids.

  Doctor Becker stood and rolled her eyes at Claudia before she walked to the glass. “Let’s give Doctor Quarna a moment to collect his thoughts.”

  It was her turn to study each kid one by one before saying anything else. “It is natural curiosity at your age to want to discover what’s out there, but we are in a very unique situation here.”

  “I know what’s out there,” Tuna said quietly to no one in particular.

  “We know, but we don’t know.” Doctor Becker quickly responded. “You can understand intellectually about something, but still you have not experienced it. There are levels of knowing.”

  “What she’s trying to say,” Claudia clarified, “is that if you want to explore and be a self-destructive teen, you are not just going to be scolded and sent to your room by your parents.”

  “You’ll bring about the end of the human race,” Doctor Quarna said, finishing off the warning his colleagues had begun. He had gathered himself, but was still nowhere near friendly. “This will be your final warning. The next act of any type that puts this project at risk will be met with a sudden finality you dare not even consider.”

  The kids sat stunned. The last of those words started to sink into their minds. Doctor Quarna would not kill them, surely, but he might remove a kid from the dome, perhaps even quarantine them in isolation until the ships launched without them. Once the ships were gone, he would probably free you so you could go out and die with the rest of the world.

  “None of that matters anymore, Doc,” Tuna declared impatiently.

  Everyone turned to Tuna in shock. “What was that, Secondborn?” Doctor Quarna had to fight from going off again.

  “They’re already here,” Tuna said glaring at Milo and Isaac. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all.”

  The doctors turned to each other for an explanation, but they were all equally in the dark.

  “He tried to show us a creature outside the glass,” Isaac explained. “There was nothing there but rocks.”

  “I saw it,” Tuna said angrily. “It was dirty and it wore goggles and it carried an orange light.” He grew angrier seeing doubt in everyone’s eyes. He decided to give up. “Whatever.”

  “How could he have come across the sea, Tuna?” Milo asked. “A boat would have shown up on our radar.”

  Tuna just shook his head, unwilling to repeat himself.

  “Let’s all just slow down here,” Doctor Becker interjected with a reassuring voice. “We don’t have to rush to judgment. Tuna has been under a lot of stress.”

  Tuna glared at Doctor Becker, offended by her unintentional suggestion he was losing it. “I assure you I have not lost my mind, Doctor Becker, and a rush is exactly what we need!” In that very moment, a screeching siren wailed proving Tuna’s point better than he ever could. Tuna stood, approached the glass and stared gravely at Doctor Quarna to make him understand. “They’re here.”

  Terror swept across the other kids’ faces. Doctor Quarna considered again Tuna’s intensity before he followed Claudia who hurried out the door.

  -18-

  A small, white light buzzed about in the dark illuminating the rocky shore from above. Inside the dome, Milo struggled to run the controls of the flying camera while he stood at the glass up on the lookout post.

  Two other twelve-year olds, Jax and Riley, worked the fixed cameras and the radar at the console. “Right there, Milo. That’s where we saw it,” Jax said pointing at the screen displaying the flying camera images. “It jumped down onto the rocks and out of sight when we put the flood light on it.”

  Tuna, Zeke and Adam stood behind Jax watching the screen while Milo tried to find any sign of life among the rocks. The tide crashed against the rocky shore while the white light darted back and forth.

  “Maybe some of the rocks are overhanging the water,” Zeke suggested. “Maybe take it out a little, hug the camera down near the water and turn it back toward the rocks.”

  “You want me to hug the camera down near crashing waves at night?” Milo considered the option. “We’ll lose the camera doing that. It will end up at the bottom of the sea.”

  “Dude, you need to do this,” Tuna commanded as he put his hand on Milo’s shoulder. “We need to see what’s out there.”

  Milo reluctantly focused in on the task at hand. Everyone watched the screen. The camera moved quickly out over the dark waters. When the camera twisted back to view the island, the view suddenly tilted and surf splashed onto the lens, blurring the view.

  “You see! I almost lost it there. It dipped into the water.” Milo flew the camera up higher so the angle displayed the top of the rocks from a distance, only a slightly better view than directly above the rocks.

  “You’re too far and you’re too high!” Zeke yelled.

  “There’s nothing there. It’s not worth risking the camera.”

  “Give it to Adam,” Tuna suggested. “He could fly that camera in and out of a gnat’s behind.”

  Gen stepped off the ladder to the lookout post. Adam turned away from the screens and spotted her offering a hand to Lexi. Both girls now stood on the lookout level with the boys. He smiled to her and for the first time his smile was welcome.

  When Milo hesitated, Tuna snatched the controller out of his hands and handed it over to Adam. Milo became irate. He turned to Zeke looking for help.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Zeke said, frustrated not to have the controller in his own hands. “Just get the camera in there and let’s take a look.”

  Adam took the controller, stepped away from the monitors and peered out into the night. He could see the white light fluttering over the distance rocks. He tested the controller and the light zipped straight up. He tested the controller again and the light zoomed first far left then far right still high above the ocean.

  “What’s he doing?” Isaac asked.

  “He’s learning his aircraft,” Zeke said.

  Adam glanced dismissingly at Isaac before gripping the controller. The camera dove to the water’s surface, whizzed rapidly toward the rocky shore, slowed through the ocean spray and came to a sudden halt just feet from the rocks.

  Gen moved to the screen to see what everyone saw. Through the misting lens of the flying camera, under overhanging rocks, a somewhat diffused image began to take shape. A small inflatable boat.

  A sudden confusion and then an emerging fear overtook the boys, but not Tuna. The corner of his mouth turned up slightly, pleased. Now they would have to believe him. He had not lost his mind.

  The lifeboat was empty and wedged between rocks on a small patch of shore. The tide ran up the sand and slapped hard against the base of the boat, then receded.

  “Can you get in there closer, Adam?” Zeke said.

  Adam nodded and edged the camera closer to the boat. He too stepped over to the lookout screen to get a larger perspective of his target than the controller’s small viewfinder could provide.

  As the camera inched slowly in under the rocks and over the boat, Riley screeched. Inside the lifeboat, lying motionless on his back, the infected boy clutched onto his orange light and stared up through his goggles at the camera hovering above him.

  * * *

  DOCTOR BECKER GASPED at the screen. The four doctors stood in various states of concern behind Claudia who sat at the control panel. Claudia hit a button and the feed from Adam’s flying camera projected onto all the screens in the control room. The goggled boy lay motionless holding his orange light.

  “Is he infected?” Doctor Naseer wondered
aloud. The others studied the image on the largest screen looking for the answer.

  “Freeze that shot, Claudia. Freeze it there,” Doctor Quarna directed.

  “I think he’s trying to look infected,” Doctor Becker observed, “but he’s too calm. The skin is too smooth. Filthy, yes, but his face, even his hands, they seem unblemished.”

  “It makes no difference if he’s infected or not,” Doctor Quarna reminded them. “What I don’t understand is how did he get past our radar?”

  Claudia pointed at the screen. “The lifeboat, it’s too small and I don’t see an engine on it. He paddled in after dark.” Doctor Naseer and Doctor Pappas were perplexed by Claudia’s explanation.

  “That means he came from a bigger boat,” Doctor Quarna added, deeply concerned.

  “Yeah, but not much bigger because its lifeboat was just a small inflatable,” Claudia clarified.

  “I know what boat it came from,” Doctor Becker said, with a sense of wonder emerging in her features. Everyone turned to her confused by her statement.

  “What are you saying?” Doctor Quarna asked impatiently.

  “That lifeboat, I recognize something on the back, those markings.” She walked to and touched the screen just above the boy’s head and below the markings on the back of the boat. “They’re initials. See that? E and P.”

  “The Eden Project,” Doctor Pappas said slowly realizing.

  “Yes,” Doctor Becker said, turning back to meet Doctor Quarna’s eyes. “That lifeboat is one of our own. It had to have come from Doctor Hossler’s boat.”

  Doctor Quarna looked back listlessly at the screen to see the fateful initials and the strange boy at the bottom of the boat.

  * * *

  JUST AFTER DAWN in the dim morning light, Gen climbed the stairs to the lookout post. All the boys were still there. Milo sat alone at his console monitoring the screens. One of the regular dome security cameras was pointed at the rocks near where the boy and the boat were hidden just below.

  Adam was the only other kid still watching. He stood at the glass with his eyes fixed on the same stretch of rocks. The rest of the boys sat on the ground with their backs leaning against the glass. Tuna was hunched over and fast asleep. Lexi was no longer with them.