The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4) (11 page)

She had sex a lot at first. Everyone was free and excited to be part of such an important step forward for the human race, like hippies at the start of a new commune. She forgot about her old life and her boyfriend.

Months passed. She rarely saw Mecklarin, though he was always there in the distance, striding around and glad-handing people, cheerful and in charge, passing in and out of zones that had not yet opened to her. He was a great man at the head of the trenches, a visionary leading them forward.

The research she did when not partying sucked her in; some of it intensely complex, trying to root into problems that had challenged both psychologists and philosophers for generations, like what is love, what is happiness and how can it be maximized, what are all the regulatory functions of emotion. Everything fed into some part of Mecklarin's algorithms, themselves a search for some core, elegant truth underpinning all of human programming.

And they were getting closer. Every day their refinements improved Mecklarin's algorithms, making their predictions more and more reliable. The progress they made in unlocking the brain outstripped any work done in the past fifty years.

Months passed, then years, and with the passing of time her zone of exploration opened up. She gained access to floor 1 where they had an actual circus, to floor 3 where they had an Arctic zone complete with ice and penguins. She was promoted to head psychologist for all three of those floors, overseeing twelve hundred people. Soon she was meeting with Mecklarin on a weekly basis, then daily, until they started seeing each other at night too, and he whispered his dreams for the project in her ear, pressed close together in the narrow confines of her single bed.

"Let's go to your room," she'd say, but he only smiled.

"You don't have access to that area yet."

Everything was perfect. The research was plowing ahead, the innovations and discoveries they'd set out to find were pouring in every day, not only in the realm of psychology but also in botany, engineering, even theoretical physics. The experiment was working, Lars Mecklarin was her lover, and they were on their way to Mars.

Then the revolution began.

* * *

Four years in, it started with rumors.

No one knew where they began, but they were insidious and creeping, always lurking behind Salle's eyelids in the dark after the colorful rooms and busy lives and fully-packed event schedule were eclipsed by the dark, and she lay alone in the too-long night, waiting for a dawn that might never come.

All the rumors were different, but they all contained the same central thread: the people of MARS3000 were alone. They'd been buried alive under the mountains of Maine like three thousand corpses, and no one was ever coming for them. There'd been a nuclear apocalypse and the air up above was radioactive, so they'd never be returning. They were actually in the hold of a colony ship, smuggled aboard while they slept and packed off to Mars without their knowledge. Zombies had struck and killed every soul above ground, leaving nothing behind but empty buildings.

The rumors started as a kind of joke, gallows humor whispered in bars as pick-up lines, repeated with increasing urgency as bodies pressed against each other hungrily in the dark. Was three thousand enough? Could any number ever be enough? They grew and spread like a cancer, an infection that at first fascinated Mecklarin, as it played into none of his predictions, but soon came to plague him as productivity plummeted.

Everything changed one long, slow morning over Irish coffee.

"I have no idea," he said to Salle, sitting in her room looking out of the TV window onto a view of blue sky and clouds. He looked hung-over, with dark bags under his eyes and a weary gray cast to his usually ruddy, glowing skin. Many people were behaving erratically now, breaking from long-held patterns that led them to sleep in too long, party a little too hard and argue a little too much, losing the healthy balance that had held them all in check for so long. "I'm not sure I can control it, and if I can't control it…" He let his voice ebb out.

Salle had seen the infection in herself as well. It was everywhere, haunting everyone. The thought that nobody was left outside was a crushing notion, even if it was only a joke. But was it a joke? The more times she heard the story, the deeper that crack of doubt grew in her mind, and the only way to test it was to hear word from outside, or to go outside, or to have someone from the outside come in.

But none of those things were possible. Every one of the three thousand in the Habitat had signed a contract committing themselves to ten years. To exit now would not only mark every one of them as failures, but also deal a crushing blow to the human race at large that said it just couldn't be done. Self-contained colonies on Mars were an impossible pipedream, without each mini society descending into stress-induced mania, which led to areas she didn't really want to think about. A prison-like atmosphere. The carrot and the stick. Brutal, unyielding authority, like something out of the novel 1984.

Mecklarin took a long swig of his coffee. It was almost more whiskey than coffee these days, but Salle couldn't judge him for that. He was Mecklarin the great man, a magician to the world, revealing secrets to the populace about themselves that only made them throw their panties at him and beg for more.

But perhaps it was all BS. They'd talked about all of it countless times, as the algorithms increasingly suggested steering actions that no longer worked on these hyper-stressed people. Facing the notion that his model for human interaction might be built on unstable foundations was terrifying for him. People, perhaps, were not the creatures he believed them to be.

Salle studied her map of the Habitat and the upcoming event schedule. They'd started going into the office later and later each day, as their research subjects and colleagues came in drunk, late or not at all. At first they'd taken it in their stride, as the two topmost authorities in the psych team for all three thousand, but now it was getting out of hand.

"We could open up the last few areas," Salle suggested, sweeping a hand across the map. "Merge all the levels and throw a four-year blowout party."

Mecklarin waved a hand. His eyes didn't glow as much as they used to. "Chaos. We can't do that, not with things like this. If anything, I was thinking about shrinking the zones."

Salle frowned. "How much whiskey have you had?"

Mecklarin smiled tiredly. "I know. We're all about motivating with inspiration here, not the threat of punishment. But Salle, darling, you can see that's not working anymore. I can't just recharge it. Offer motivational speeches; pump them up about the future on Mars? I've done it on every deck so many times I feel like a robot. It's not working. That carrot is no longer effective."

Salle slumped back. Watching him drink Irish coffee made her want to drink too, but that would be no kind of answer. She'd had her fill of screwing around in the first few months.

"So close the zones," she said, scanning the map. "Offer a warning. Back to third positions, or second?"

"First," said Mecklarin.

"First? That's eight separate pools of around four hundred people each. You know half of these people have made relationships across boundaries? Look at you and me. You'd be breaking us up. And how would we even do it? We don't have much of a police force down here, and those we do have will hardly be on our side. We can't hope to force everyone back across their boundaries."

He nodded. "I know it, Salle. I've thought about it for weeks. But the algorithms are useless now, they can't predict a thing. We're left to our best judgment, and I'm down to thinking the stick is the way, and if you're going to use the stick, then damn well use the stick. We announce the barriers are returning to first positions, we let people choose their zone, and let the chips fall where they may. It's a last stand, really."

Salle frowned at him. "This is the whiskey talking."

"Do you think? Salle, you've heard the rumors. People are scared, and you can't motivate scared people with a distant hope. You can only let them run or contain them. But how long can I contain unruly people, no matter what contract they've signed? There are video feeds of all this going out, you know, my grand experiment. Millions are watching out in the world. They could come down and arrest me at any time, if I breach human rights. I can't let things get out of control. Returning to first positions, that's not illegal. If it tamps the fuses down a while, then we can think."

Salle shook her head. "That's bullshit. This is important, you told me that. I believe it. No one's going to come shut us down."

He laughed. "Seriously? Ah, Salle, I suppose I hide it well. Have you any idea how much pressure there is on me to just open the doors and let everyone out? Do you have any idea how many appeals I get every day, pleading with me to just open the doors for a day, for a few hours, for a few minutes? Let them go out and see their family, or just see the sky, then they'll come running back in with their heads down and their tails between their legs, ready to work hard. They're begging me constantly! Can you imagine what it's like to keep saying no?"

Salle set the pencil in her hand down. They were beyond making notes. "I never heard any of that."

Mecklarin sighed. "I have the computers route it all to me directly. People are sending you these messages at the rate of about, oh, twenty a day."

"Twenty?"

He nodded. His eyes seemed to have a drunken film over them.

"When were you going to tell me?"

"I'm telling you now. We're in something of a crisis, dear. It's first positions or open the damn doors, crank up the lift and call the whole thing a failure."

Salle looked at him. He looked broken.

"It's just a damn rumor."

"Loose lips sink ships," he said. "They said that in World War Two, and it applies now just as much as then. We called this place a cruise ship, yes? This rumor could be our iceberg."

They looked at each other. Salle stared at him, daring him to overcome this challenge. He was Lars Mecklarin, her lover and a man of almighty vision, but a few words spoken in bars were breaking his will.

"Someone started this rumor," she said, "someone's spreading it. We'll find the bastard and-"

"And what?" he interjected. "Gut him? Hang him? Maybe the chair? Salle, if we do anything like that we are without doubt breaking human rights. I am not vested with the powers of a judge, and no person can sign away their human rights in a contract. First positions I can do. Perhaps ration some of the alcohol, chocolate, other treats? We can explain these things away. But I'm worried they won't work, and will instead only inflame things. Can you see people going back to work after this? We could end up with a goddamn bloodbath."

Now his eyes were glowing. He took a big sip of his Irish whiskey.

"What?" he demanded.

"Nothing," Salle said, but it wasn't nothing and both of them knew it. He'd given up. "First positions then. I'll get it started."

He looked away, toward the blue sky through the TV, and a dream of what remained above.

* * *

She made the announcements. She sent out the messages. First positions, and the security zones walls were shrinking down for purposes of a new experiment within 24 hours. Supplies of alcohol and other luxury products would be secured and rationed in the future.

She clicked send on her email program. So simple, really, to drive the axe in like that. To kill the dream. Nothing changed at once, there was no hue and outcry in the corridor, just a gradual hunkering down inside the minds of all three thousand people they were seeking to manage. A withdrawal to first positions, as once-laughing, joyful, playful and hedonistic scientists and researchers looked inside themselves and saw naked, ugly fear looking back.

No choice, Salle thought. They were leaving them with no choice.

The riots began on the first floor within five hours, and spread quickly after that. They were silly and fun at first, more like parties spiraled out of control, but as they went on, and the lack of control became apparent to everyone involved, they grew darker. The first murder came within a day, though nobody knew about it until much later, when the body count had spiked much higher.

People fought for resources like chocolate and liquor, for land and zones like the forest and soy farms, driven by a maddening fear that the outside world really was gone. To them it seemed that the security zones coming down was the first step in isolating unnecessary sectors, after which they would be purged. Three thousand people split along mob lines, cliques bunching together and taking all the food, water and other resources they could, that they felt they needed. They forced their way to the upper decks, closer to the lifts that would surely now open to release them. They holed up and fought off anyone who tried to push them back.

It was crazy. It was a pressure cooker that had been turned on for four years with no escape valve for the steam to get out, and getting drunk or high and having sex was just not going to cut it anymore.

Salle and Mecklarin first tried to reason with several strands of the mob, but were ignored, mocked, and one attacked with canes. They barely managed to escape, taking shelter in a room on the second floor, while outside mobs closed in on Salle's private quarters on the third floor, holding table-leg clubs and looking for blood. It was hard to believe, watching on the video screens as peaceful botanists and engineers prowled the corridors smashing art and TVs, knocking back vodka in one last frenzied blowout before the big lifts opened, out of their minds on years of doubt and fear.

By that point Mecklarin was drunk and ranting. Salle clung to him still, and he patted her back.

"They're coming," he said. "The doors will open any minute and a peacekeeping force will flood in. It's a failure, but we'll learn from it. We'll do better next time, five thousand people and fifteen years. The algorithms can compensate for this. We must've got something wrong from the start. Any minute now that door will open and we'll be saved, and the world will still fete us. It's an ugly side of the human spirit, but it's good we expose it here, where it's safe, and not up on Mars. Salle, don't you think?"