The Extinction Trials(31)

All eyes turned to him.

“I’m pretty sure I can use parts from the power plant to repair the boat’s engine. But the power plant will be out for good after that. Once we fix the boat, we need to go.”

“Yes, but go where?” Cara said. “Do we even have enough food to make it to another island or the mainland?”

“Well,” Maya said, “we certainly don’t have enough to stay here. And I didn’t see any animals out there. With the power situation, I feel like the longer we stay here, the more danger we are in. If the power is out, the scrubbers won’t run, and we won’t be able to refill the oxygen tanks. Our choices, frankly, are either running out of food here or running out of food out in the ocean. What we truly lack is a destination once we leave on the boat.”

“I think I have a solution,” Owen said. “I watched the Escape Hatch video.”

Alister rolled his eyes. “The Escape Hatch video,” he muttered. “What a crock.”

“Maybe not,” Owen said as he opened the door and hobbled out into the hall. He glanced left and right, then stalked towards the outer airlock, silently counting the pods. At the end of the corridor, he turned and walked the length of the hall, all the way to the control room, continuing to count.

When he re-entered the observation room, he paused, double-checking his math. When he was certain, he smiled. “There’s one very big problem with the video.”

“Yeah,” Alister said. “It’s useless.”

“No. It’s quite useful. The problem is the math.”

“Explain,” Cara said.

“The math doesn’t add up.”

Maya crossed her arms. “How so?”

“Specifically, the numbers of the trial participants don’t add up.”

“How do you know?” Cara asked.

“I just counted them to make sure,” Owen replied. “There are 12 pods, each with seven chambers. That’s a total of 84 potential participants. In the message, the proctor said that they had released a total of 59 participants, that 16 had perished during the trials, and that they still had 44 here at the station. That’s 119 total participants. They don’t have that many chambers—not even close. They’re short by 45.”

The group was quiet for a moment.

“Interesting,” Alister said quietly. “I never would’ve thought to check that. That’s genius.”

“Not genius,” Owen said. “Just professional habit. I’m used to hearing numbers of people in a building and instinctively checking those numbers, locating all those people. It’s how my job has trained my mind to work.”

“They could’ve gotten additional participants here at the site,” Cara said, “after some were released.”

“That’s true,” Owen said. “But the other issue is that it doesn’t make sense that the proctor would record a message like this talking about how many participants there were. Especially if he was in contact with Garden Station—which sounds like it was a central command. If so, it conceivably would’ve had real-time data up until this message was recorded. There would be no need to recount the numbers.”

“A fair point,” Maya said.

“Now,” Owen said, “if the proctor had created a running file that had data on the trials, that makes sense. But as it stands, the video simply tells whoever finds it what Garden Station would’ve already known at the time that they sent their terminal message. The last line is what I find most telling: sometimes the answers we seek are right in front of us. I think he’s talking directly to us with that message—encouraging us to look for the deeper meaning in his message.”

Maya cocked her head. “And you think you know what that deeper meaning is?”

“I do. I think Escape Hatch has nothing to do with the trials—or not really. Sure, telling us about the previous cohorts and their procedures gives us some sense of what they were doing here—running experiments on us and releasing cohorts out into the world to see what happened—if they could survive in the world after. But I think the file is something else entirely.”

“Which is?” Cara asked.

“A map.”

Will’s eyebrows knitted together. “I don’t follow.”

“Let’s back up,” Owen said. “First, a simple question: what’s the strangest thing about the video?”

When no one answered, he went on. “The strangest thing is that the numbers don’t add up. And as I said, it doesn’t make sense for him to put the numbers in there in the first place. So, the numbers mean something. There are six numbers mentioned. But how do we use them? Again, the answer we seek is right in front of us. In the boxes we found, there were several critical items: the tablet, the key, and importantly, one other item that could help us get some help.”

Owen waited, watching all eyes on him. “A GPS. I think those six numbers mentioned in the video have nothing to do with what happened here. I believe those numbers are GPS coordinates. And whatever is waiting for us at those coordinates might be our only hope of survival. The numbers—specifically, the coordinates—are our Escape Hatch. And now we have what we need to reach them: a boat.”





Chapter Twenty-Seven