The Extinction Trials(98)
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Despite the cold around her, Maya felt sweat breaking out on the hand Owen was holding. He gave her a gentle squeeze, then released her and moved to the closest body lying by the door directly ahead. It was a woman, and she was wearing a diving suit. She had taken her helmet off, which lay nearby.
From what she saw, Maya didn’t know how long the woman had been dead. She wondered if this place had preserved the body somehow.
Moving quickly, Maya and Owen surveyed the other bodies. There were clues as to who the people were. Two were wearing the ribbed sweaters Maya had worn after waking in Station 17. They had been in The Extinction Trials. They had made it here. Just like her. And no farther. That sent a spike of fear through her.
Was this her end? If so, it would be with Owen. That was something. They had tried. Given it all they had. What more could a person do?
She pulled back the sleeve of the soaking wet sweater she was wearing and pressed her thumb into her forearm, where words appeared.
MeshOS Initiating
54% Loaded
As she pulled the sleeve back down, Maya realized how badly she wanted to get out of the damp, frigid clothes. Her only option was to take clothes from the dead, and she was just about to raise the morality of that when the door ahead opened.
Owen moved between her and the door, his hands held out at the ready.
A faint white light oozed into the room and two figures stepped through the opening. They were people Maya knew.
One was a mirror image of Will. The other looked like Bryce, the proctor from Station 17.
“Hello, Maya. Hello, Owen,” the Will clone said.
Maya’s eyes had adjusted to the light now, and behind the two androids, she saw stacks of glass tubes similar to the chambers from Station 17. They stretched back as far as she could see, like rows in a field with no end. They were filled with human bodies, as though waiting to be harvested and released into a world that was ready to grow again.
“Congratulations,” the Bryce clone said. “You have reached the end of The Extinction Trials.”
Chapter Seventy-Nine
For a long moment, Owen and Maya stared at the two androids.
“We’ve been waiting a very, very long time for you,” the clone of Will said.
“First things first,” Owen said. “What should we call you?”
“The names you know are fine. Bryce and Will. We saw and heard everything you experienced.”
A million questions swirled in Owen’s mind. He addressed the biggest one first. “How could you see everything?”
“The Fall was a long time ago. Our technology has advanced quite a bit since then.”
“If that’s true, why haven’t you saved the world?” Owen asked.
“The answer is obvious,” Will said.
“Not to me.”
“Yes. It is. You recognize patterns, Owen. It’s what your brain is genetically wired to do. You already know the truth.”
Owen studied the two proctors. When he considered it closely, the truth was obvious to him. But it was one he hadn’t even entertained until he had seen the bodies lying in the sea and in the corridor outside—the breadcrumbs along this deadly path. He said the truth he was fairly certain of: “You have a cure for the Genesis Virus.”
“Yes,” Will said. “We’ve had it for quite some time.”
“And the storms,” Owen said.
“Also, true. We have found the keys to enable humanity to survive in this ruined world—biologically.”
“Then why are we here?” Owen asked. “Why haven’t you released the humans you have? If you’re not ready to repopulate the world, why did you let us in now? Why did you leave so many to die out there in that corridor—and across this ruined world?”
Will cocked his head. “You already know. You see the pattern.”
“We’re different from the other cohorts.”
“Yes.”
“We’re smarter.”
“No. Smarter people than you have failed to reach this chamber. What you have is something far more important. Do you remember what Bryce told you at the beginning, in that observation room in Station 17?”
Owen thought back to that moment in Observation Room Two. “Yes. He said that the trials were an attempt to find a cohort that can survive in the world after The Change—that whatever those differences were, they were the key to saving what’s left of the human race.”
Will took a step deeper into the room that held the rows of glass chambers. “We were given a simple task: to alter these survivors so that they could restart the human race. Simple tasks are not always easy tasks. Ours certainly wasn’t. We had two tools at our disposal. One: trial participants like yourselves. And two: we had the Revelation program.”
“The big data modeling project our Will described to us.”
“Correct. With Revelation, we were able to simulate the world after the trials—a world in which we released the survivors with a cure for the Genesis Virus and modifications to survive the storms.”
“Interesting,” Owen whispered.
“Do you know what our simulations revealed?”