The Extinction Trials(48)

Alister looked around at the group, seeing that he had their attention now. “I’m at work, early, fixing a bus. On my armband, I get a notification that a bus has had an accident—a strange one: it drove into a police precinct. My first instinct is that the only way it should have done that is to preserve human life. Or if there was some bizarre mechanical failure. There were still only a few people at work. A few minutes later, another bus slammed into a military base. And another into a fire station.”

“They weaponized the buses,” Maya said.

“Yes,” Alister said. “I did the only thing I could think of. Something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time. I picked up a tire iron and I walked into the server room, and I started bashing that thing’s silicon brains in—like that old guy at the station did to Bryce. I got zapped with electricity a few times, but I kept going. It was a mess of smoke and electrical fire and suppressant squirting out of the ceiling and my coworkers yelling at me, and then I hear this deafening crash. I looked through the glass windows and realized I had made a mistake.”

He shook his head and laughed. “The thing about getting to work early is that you get things done. I had managed to fix the bus I was working on. It barreled through there like a missile—right for me. I ran deeper into the server room but there was nowhere to go. Last thing I heard was it crashing through the wall. Then, I woke up in a chamber in The Extinction Trials.”

Owen paced the deck, pinching his lower lip with his pointer and thumb. “Interesting. It still doesn’t explain why there was no folder for you?”

“Maybe I’m not special enough to leave a care package for.”

“What strikes me,” Cara said, “is that you stand before us, completely healthy. We all are.” She eyed Maya. “Well, almost.”

“Clearly, ARC is good at putting us back together,” Owen said.

“Yes,” Cara agreed. “And they seem to have a cure for the Genesis Virus that Maya and I were infected with. It seems clear that ARC had two potential therapies for GV, and only one worked.”

Maya again felt a flare of hope. A cure was out there waiting—if it hadn’t been lost to the sands of time. A headache began then, a low droning that pressed at the back of her eyes. She reached up to rub her temple, willing the motion to provide some relief.

Owen leaned closer to her and whispered, “Another headache?”

“Yeah.”

He exhaled heavily. She had only known him a short time, but she could read what he was thinking. It was the same thing on her mind: I’m running out of time.





Chapter Thirty-Eight





On the boat’s main deck, Will volunteered to share his story next. Moving quickly, he descended the staircase to the staterooms and returned holding his envelope.

“The thing about what was in my folder,” he said, “is that I’ve never seen it in my life. It’s not like the pocket watch for Maya, the fire pin for Owen, or the shard for Cara—those were items that shaped your lives.”

Will reached into the envelope and drew out a small silver metal cylinder that was about as long as his hand and as wide around as two fingers. Each end was capped with a clear glass.

“It’s a monocular,” Owen said, reaching out for the small device. He held it up and peered through it, expecting the sea in the distance to come into focus. But it didn’t. He checked up and down the small object for controls or switches but didn’t find any.

“It doesn’t work,” he whispered.

“It doesn’t seem to,” Will agreed. “It’s like a prop or something.”

Alister threw his head back. “Oh, please, no—don’t say it.” He waited for the group, but no one took the bait. “I’m just going to go ahead and guess that the point is we see what we want to see, and that glimpsing the future or far away things doesn’t solve all of our problems.”

Owen couldn’t help but laugh. For someone who resisted philosophical thinking, Alister certainly had a lot of philosophical thoughts, albeit sarcastic ones.

“I wasn’t thinking that,” Cara said. “I was thinking that whatever it was built to identify isn’t in sight right now. Perhaps it’s a specialized night vision scope. Or infrared.”

For once, Alister had a blank look. “Oh. Yeah, that’s probably it.”

“Why do you think they gave it to you?” Owen asked Will.

“I have a theory. It has to do with the last project I worked on. It was called Revelation.”

Alister closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids. “Why?”

“Why what?” Will asked innocently.

“Why do you programmers have to name everything so elaborately? Revelation. Insight. Transcend. I mean, get over yourself. You know what we common people call things? Wrench. Screwdriver. Hammer. Ax.”

“The project nomenclature hardly seems pertinent.”

“I rest my case,” Alister muttered.

“What was Revelation?” Owen asked, hoping to move on.

“A big data project. It was a simple premise. If you design a system with enough processing power and you give it massive—and I mean absolutely massive—amounts of data, it will arrive at answers to questions no one even knew to ask, big conclusions that could change our understanding of everything. It was the most interesting project I ever worked on.”