6
THE SILENCE WAS
broken by the echoing sound of footsteps hurrying down the corridor from the elevator to the inner door. The loss of power had triggered a sequence that automatically released the locks on all the doors in order to provide a flow of outside air as well as an escape route from the underground chamber if a natural disaster compromised the air supply and threatened to entomb its occupants. The backup generator had failed to kick in promptly enough to abort the sequence. It was still not running. Ray stood helpless in the dark, holding his breath as the footsteps neared.
“Ray?” Lena’s voice came from an arm’s length away.
“I’m right here,” answered Ray.
“Oh! Thank God!” said Lena, moving toward the sound of his voice until she could embrace him. He didn’t return the hug.
“Where the hell have you been?” he exploded. Lena let go and took a few steps back.
“Screw you, Ray,” she shot back. “We’ve just been through an earthquake. I would have thought you’d be relieved that I was safe.”
“Sorry, Lena. Of course I’m glad you’re home.” It was still pitch black. He took a step toward her voice and reached out,
but grasped only empty air. Lena’s cold shoulder left him feeling even more alone than when she wasn’t there at all.
The ground began to rumble again, this time less intensely than before. After half a minute it stopped.
“We should get out,” said Lena. “We could wind up trapped in here if there’s another aftershock.”
“Guess so,” conceded Ray. He reached out, this time finding her hand, and they began moving together toward the corridor. Dying underground in a space dark to the data cloud would be one of the rare circumstances in which his newly activated contract would be worthless. At least the hazards of the aboveground world would provide him access to his backup life.
When they reached the elevator capsule, the door was open, but there was still no power. Once inside, he felt along the wall to the right of the door until his fingers found the latch of a panel. He tugged and the latch fell away. Inside, he found a foot wide rubber belt that fastened around pulleys above and below the capsule. With both hands he tugged at the belt by its edges and the capsule began slowly to rise.
“Let me help,” Lena said as she moved beside him and began tugging at the left side of the belt with both hands. Ray moved both hands to the right edge and together they pulled themselves up. Even with the mechanical advantage of the pulley, it took them nearly twenty minutes to rise the twenty feet to the surface. Light began to filter into their space as they approached the top. They were both too exhausted to be angry by the time they stepped into the sunlight.
“I’m ready for that hug now,” Ray said. Lena furrowed her brow, smiling like a mother bestowing forgiveness on an errant child and moved into his embrace.
When they looked around them, there were no signs of any damage from the quake. Traffic had resumed its normal flow
and people were walking about as though nothing had happened. They headed to the Blue Bottle on the corner, a throwback to the San Francisco of their youth, and went inside.
“What’ll you have?” asked the barista. They both ordered espressos. Ray looked into the scanner while the barista prepared their drinks and fifty-six dollars was debited from his account. Coffee was one of the small pleasures that Ray still cherished and could fortunately afford. The irony was that HibernaTurf was mostly responsible for its scarcity.
“We’ve got to get out of there, Ray,” Lena said once they’d sat down. “You know how much I hate it.” Lena had been lobbying to move ever since they married. It had been a major bone of contention between them, more than once threatening to break them up. Ray despised change, especially when it infringed upon his intricately crafted defenses.
Earthquakes had always been a flaw in his security plan, the one hazard that was arguably more dangerous underground, but Ray had always feared attack and disease more than natural disasters and had waved off Lena’s warnings that they risked dying in a strong enough temblor. His new circumstances now weighed heavily on the other side of the equation. Regardless of how he might die, it would now have to happen aboveground, where communication with the data cloud didn’t depend on a powered network.
“OK. You’re right,” he said, “Let’s move as soon as possible.”
Lena’s eyes lit up, then filled with tears. “You mean it, Ray? Please tell me you’re not just screwing with me.”
“Yeah, Lena, I mean it. I’ve been an idiot for not listening to you. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to see the light.” He could never tell her his real reason for changing his mind.
Within the week, they had located a building on the corner of Powell and Sacramento that met as many of Ray’s criteria
for safety and defensibility as possible. They chose the penthouse apartment on the twentieth floor. Twin pillars of titanium and concrete flanked the huge central room and went all the way to bedrock. The building had been completely rebuilt following the great earthquake of 2022. The only buildings that survived had been constructed with pillars like these that were now required in every new structure.
The outer perimeter of the apartment was constructed almost entirely of glass that met the most stringent standards of durability. It had enough flexibility to withstand an earthquake, but was tough enough to be impervious to any impact short of an explosion. Just as in his underground lair, all the materials of the structure and its furnishings were completely fireproof. That had been an absolute requirement for anyplace Ray lived ever since the childhood catastrophe that turned him from a rambunctious daredevil into a fretful recluse. Most important it was completely permeable to communication with the data cloud and the UDB.
All that was left was to build in security from intruders and a system to sanitize anything that entered the space. Lena reluctantly conceded that the furnishings from their former residence could come with them. She would have preferred to leave behind the hard slick surfaces and create a more tactilely soothing environment, but she was grateful enough to leave the windowless dungeon that she was willing to make the compromise.
The move to the penthouse was the most significant change in Ray’s world since the nanoparticle infusion conferred upon him the promise of immortality. It was astounding how little else had changed. He still took every possible precaution against infection and remained convinced that everyone meant him harm. Avoidance of risk was deeply ingrained in his way of life and was not about to dissipate just because
the stakes had changed. Peace eluded him. His life remained dismal and filled with dread.
For Lena, the earthquake had been a godsend. She could finally awaken to a sunrise across a magnificent vista and gaze at the moon and stars at night. Ray still closely monitored her comings and goings, but he never again asked where she’d been the day of the quake.
7
MARCUS WALKED THROUGH
the greenhouse past tray after identical tray of HibernaTurf, looking for evidence that any of the samples was responding to his treatments. He shook his head. It was a sea of uniformity. In his months of study so far, none of his interventions had made any difference in growth rate. Even when he fed the results of the trials back into his scientific database, the algorithms failed to improve enough to yield a solution.
As his frustration grew, he worked more and more hours until he was spending all but a few hours of each day in the laboratory and the greenhouse, sleeping in catnaps and eating while he worked. Corinne watched from the sidelines with increasing alarm. While his body showed no visible signs of fatigue even on just a few hours of sleep a day, the stress was telling in his mood and behavior. In their brief moments together during those months, he was preoccupied and emotionally distant. Even lovemaking seemed incapable of distracting him from his work.
“You’ve got to take a break,” she insisted one day. “Let’s go away for a while. We desperately need some time together. The project will still be there when we get back.”
Marcus grudgingly agreed to a vacation. His efforts were producing diminishing returns and he acknowledged that some time away might help him get a fresh perspective when he returned. It would be a mental reboot. They settled on a week in Hawaii and left the following weekend.
The moment they entered the tube transport to Los Angeles, he began to relax. By the time they boarded the plane to Honolulu, all he could think about was the enchanting woman beside him, the way her eyes shone in the moonlight, and what it would feel like to make love to her on the beach. But his fantasies paused as they circled Honolulu and he saw the monotonous swaths of HibernaTurf blanketing the city and radiating into the countryside in all directions. He flashed momentarily back to the relentless march of HibernaTurf that marked the kiss of death for his parents’ farm and livestock. His right hand moved unconsciously to his chest, his index finger tracing an invisible outline. By the time they landed, he was back in the present and Corinne was all that mattered.
They spent their first night on Waikiki Beach and flew to Maui the next day. As the plane approached the airport in Kahului, Marcus was again struck by the expanses of HibernaTurf covering the landscape even in what had once been a tropical paradise. But when they got closer, he studied the pattern on the ground and noticed it petering out at the edges in a single direction. He made a mental note to explore that area during their stay. He didn’t dare, however, give Corinne any inkling that he was thinking about work.
Maui was like a glimpse into the past. Except for the invasion of HibernaTurf, the island looked much like it had around the turn of the century. Roads of asphalt were populated by antique vehicles that rode on wheels. Hovercars were absent. The roads were not adapted for them and the distances were short enough that they wouldn’t have provided much
advantage anyway. Away from the towns, the roads narrowed and branched into tributaries of dirt.
Marcus relished the sensation of tires bumping along an uneven road. What he’d loved most about riding his motorcycle in the days before Terra had altered the course of his life was the feeling of intimate connection with the earth that he’d enjoyed as a child on the family farm. He smiled as the electric jeep moved over the rugged terrain when they left the highway for the sparsely traveled roads in the boonies. They were headed for the place he’d seen from the air where the landscape changed. Even the dirt roads were surrounded by HibernaTurf for miles beyond the highway.
Then suddenly what he’d come to see was upon them. Sprigs of foliage began to pop up among the grass, getting closer together and taller as they drove. At last, they were surrounded by a dense wood and there was no more turf to be seen. He stopped the car and got out, arms outstretched, turning around and around, almost dancing until he dropped to the ground and looked up at the patch of sky surrounded by exuberant thickets of towering bamboo. And he knew he had found his answer.
Corinne watched the light go on in Marcus’s eyes as he lay among the bamboo looking into the sky. She was grateful for what she saw even if she didn’t understand what had just happened. She didn’t ask for an explanation and he offered none. But she trusted that he’d tell her about it when the time was right.
The rest of their vacation was bliss. Marcus was more present in the moment than he’d been at any time since their relationship began. His passion for her was alive. His body seemed to channel the rhythm and power of the surf when he made love to her on the beach. When they were done, she sat at the water’s edge and watched as his body became one with the
waves, skimming on the crests until they broke, then surging to her feet in a cascade of foam. And as he stood before her, the glowing image on his chest that was now so familiar to her faded in time with the receding waters behind him.
Back home, Marcus was eager to get back to work. By the end of the first month, he’d replaced the HibernaTurf in half the greenhouse with trays of seedlings and cuttings of dozens of varieties of bamboo. As they matured, he pulverized roots and sequenced their chromosomes until he’d identified the combination of genes responsible for their remarkable rate of growth. The final step would be to splice this genetic blend into the DNA of HibernaTurf.
Marcus treated only two of the hundreds of trays of HibernaTurf in the greenhouse. The very next morning he was greeted with a lush growth in those trays that spilled over the sides of the table. By the following morning, a ring of growing turf surrounded the original trays, and by the end of a week, the greenhouse was so filled with growth that he had to squeeze between the tables of lush vegetation in order to pass from one end of the greenhouse to the other.
When he analyzed the content of his hybrid grass, it was rich in nutrients and passed every test of safety for consumption. It was virtually identical to the naturally occurring grasses that predated HibernaTurf, except for the presence of the bamboo genes. Since these came from a natural source, the scientific community was quick to conclude that Marcus’s grass presented no health risk either to livestock or people.
Once introduced into the wild, Takana Grass, as it came to be known, rapidly proliferated, spreading even more swiftly than had HibernaTurf when it was first introduced. By the end of a year, there was hardly a blade of HibernaTurf left in the Western Hemisphere. Within two years, it was completely eradicated throughout the world.
Takana Grass proved as nutritious and benign as the studies had predicted. Livestock flourished in revived pastures and herds regained strength. Dairy products gradually began to reappear in the food supply. The nutritional value of the milk from these freely grazing animals proved exceptional. And within the first five years, livestock had recovered sufficiently around the world to resume slaughtering for the production of meat that was lean and rich in protein. The only people who were disturbed by these developments were the animal rights activists, who had been happy to see the livestock industry die, and the stakeholders of the in vitro meat industry.