End Sub
Private Sub Logon
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-l -t 00")
End Sub
Private Sub Exit
End
End Sub
End Class
Warning: Charging error. Power reserve low.
Bezel’s information feeds stuttered and then streamed a flood of data. He completed his maintenance check. He detached from the recharge station and walked down the cement entrance hall toward the vault. He’d have to borrow Tock’s station until his could be fixed. How long into the first watch were they? There was a book on the early domestication of wheat that he’d been dying to read. Perhaps if they were close enough to the swap, he’d just relieve Tock and sneak in some data processing time.
The shuttling commands on his priority list paused as he turned the corridor’s one corner. The walls and floor were blackened with soot. Something was wrong.
Bezel’s command priorities reordered and settled. He tried to log in to the LAN to access the vault records but none of the other computers responded. The connection must have gone down. He continued on to the seed repository.
When he arrived, he found the metal drawers lying open, strewn across the stone floor, their contents nothing but ash. Shelving units had been ripped from their tracks and tipped, the metal twisted and sagging away from the center of the room. The repository’s control center was just a crater of melted glass and dust.
The soot shifted underneath his feet as Bezel stepped into the vault. He pinged Tock, but she didn’t return it. He picked through the metal drawers, sifting through the soot a few grams at a time for any seeds that may have escaped, matching the serial numbers on the drawer to his internal database.
Malus sieversii. Malus domestica. Gone. No one would ever eat an apple again. All the Camellia sinensis cultivars, just smoke. No one would ever pick a tea leaf again.
He reluctantly passed several fallen shelves, recognizing that the crew was a higher priority. He knew from memory, though, that the loss would only become more profound the farther he moved into the room. No more medicinal herbs. No more vegetables for consumption. No more trees producing oxygen. It was all gone. A hundred thousand years of careful cultivation—wiped out. And millions of years of evolution before that. The only hope was that something outside had survived. That something had recovered, had clawed its way out of the irradiated soil, and flourished.
What had happened? Why had Bezel not been activated until now? And where was the crew? He felt lost, as if he had a parser malfunction, as if the world were one giant syntax error.
He picked his way to the far door, his bright chrome shell now a dusty gray, the ash clinging to him as it puffed up around his legs. The door was stuck open, the metal curled backward, dog-eared. Bezel slid through the opening into the frozen zoo.
The fire had extended to this vault too, but hadn’t swept the entirety. The outer shells of the nitrogen tanks were dusty with ash, but the metal appeared unwarped, the seals intact. And the control center looked untouched, although its blank, dark screens made Bezel pick up his pace.
When he saw the inside of the small glass room, he didn’t even bother flipping switches. There was an emergency fire axe buried in the far console, its red blade like a splash of blood on the clean white plastic. The power cords had all been chopped into small wedges of rubber and wire, and scattered across the floor. Bezel sank into the wobbly office chair and looked around at the dozens of silver nitrogen tanks. Now they were just tombs. No more elephants. No more dogs. No more snails or fish. All thawing, all rotting away.
He shot up again and raced to the nearest tank. Maybe it had only just now happened. Maybe there was still time to refreeze them.
He lifted the lid, hoping for tendrils of fog to curl around his chrome face. But there was no outrush of cold. The tubes were neatly stacked in their trays, but the tank was dry. Warm, even. The pressure releases had long ago let the nitrogen leak out in little puffs as it boiled away.
Bezel pulled out a test tube. Pan troglodytes. Man’s closest relative, the chimpanzee, was now just a speck of dust where tissue and living cells ought to have been. He carefully tucked the glass vial back into its rack and gently closed the tank lid.
What had Dr. Ficht called it? An ark, like the one in the story. They had escaped the flood, but the ark was now filled with corpses, with death.
Bezel turned and left the frozen zoo behind him, heading for the final vault.
The hall was clean, as if it had just been swept, and the door was closed as usual in its frame. The air was so still that Bezel could just hear the small electric hum of his storage drive and the rush of air through his heat vent. He placed a shining hand on the door panel.
Warning: Power reserve at thirty percent. Recharge to avoid loss of function.
The message cropped up in his high-priority list. Bezel ignored it and pushed on the door. It swung open, and the overhead lights flickered for a few seconds before deciding to stay on.
Tock was slumped against the far wall. Bezel hurried over to her, not even seeing the dark pods around him. It was only half of Tock, her snapped wires and drooping springs trailing over the hard floor. Her chrome body plates were scraped and punctured—probably by the axe that was now lodged in the frozen zoo’s control console.
Bezel picked up Tock and carried her to the power station in the corner of the room. He didn’t bother to stop when he passed her leg unit. With hope, he attached her to the recharge station—but then leapt back as a shower of blue sparks burst from her spine. Her lights blazed once, her head jerked to the side—and that was all.
Bezel detected ozone in the air and knew the power station socket had burned out. He slowly detached Tock and removed her storage drive, then he picked up her leg unit and laid it below her torso. The power station at the vault’s entrance had malfunctioned, and the ones in the seed repository and zoo had been destroyed. This one had been his last chance for recharge.
He looked down at Tock. His only other option seemed distasteful to him. Almost cannibalistic. Maybe he should simply shut down instead.
One of the pods pulsed with green light nearby. Bezel looked around the room, away from Tock’s shimmering right leg.
Only a single pod was lit. The others were globes of shadow filled with the delicate branchwork of bones. Bezel checked the glowing pod. It was Karen Epide, one of the interns. Doubly lucky. She had already been in Svalbard when the reactors had been hit, otherwise she would have been out there, with no ticket in, like everyone else. Now she was in the only powered hibernation pod. Maybe doubly unlucky, Bezel told himself. Why had she lived when everyone else had died?
He shook himself. It didn’t matter. What mattered was waking her up, making sure that she, at least, survived. He didn’t have much power left. A few days, maybe. Bezel glanced back to Tock. Her pack was probably full. He shook his head. It was wrong, like taking another’s last bite of bread.
The low-power warning flashed again on his priority list. He ignored it, and sat at the life support console. It seemed to have taken no damage, except that the gravity motor on Karen’s pod had burned out. The screens on the other pods were all blinking with the same date. Fifty years. Had he been inactive that long? His internal clock had glitched and reset during one of the maintenance processes. It would explain the low-power warnings. Fifty years. The pods had only been meant for ten. Even assuming her gravity motor had burned out only a few years ago, Karen’s muscles would be completely atrophied by now. She might have brain damage. The nutrient reserves ought to have run out years ago. The system must have been using the nutrients meant for the others.