“Who was it? Why did they do this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Does it matter anymore? Everything and everyone is gone. Whoever it was must be sufficiently punished by now.”
“Surely there must be someone besides us left—” Karen tried to raise her head but couldn’t get it more than an inch from the pillow. “Where is everyone else? Is Tock with them?”
“Communications were knocked out shortly after the vault was sealed. But that was to be expected. There may be others, in bunkers or fallout shelters, maybe even out in the atmosphere now, I don’t know. The external sensors aren’t working correctly, so I can’t tell you whether or not the outside world is safe yet.”
“What does the rest of the crew say? Are you and Tock going to go out and scout now that our hibernation time is finished?”
Bezel hesitated. He offered her a corner of the sandwich; she took a bite and waited expectantly. “The rest of the crew, including Tock, didn’t make it,” he said after she’d swallowed. He thought he saw a startled twitch in her fingers, but that was the extent of her movement.
“What?” she cried. “How? When?”
“I don’t know,” he said, slowly extending and then bending her left arm for her. “I was only activated a few hours ago myself. Something went wrong with the recharge station—well, with everything, actually. I haven’t yet checked the incident reports or the video feeds. I wanted to be sure that whatever had happened didn’t happen to you.”
“Surely there must have been some clue, some sign,” she protested. “If the hibernation pods failed then shouldn’t the watch have been there to save us?”
“They never made it past the first watch, Karen. I found Gunderson—he’d been murdered. And the zoo and pods were sabotaged. There was a fire or an explosion in the repository.”
“And Dr. Ficht?”
Bezel shrugged. He hadn’t found Dr. Ficht. She should have been on first watch with Gunderson. She couldn’t have left the vault—it had still been sealed when Bezel rebooted. Perhaps she had been burned to ash in the fire.
“Shouldn’t we find out?” Karen asked. Bezel moved to her other arm.
“Why?” he asked.
“What if we’re shut in here with a murderer?”
“No. We are alone. If whoever did this survived, there would be signs. Missing food, laundry, something. The life support console says that it’s been fifty years since the hibernation pods were shut down.”
“Is that why I can’t move?”
“The motor meant to simulate activity burned out on your pod at some point. It was never meant to last for this long. But your muscles also weren’t meant to lie dormant. They have atrophied. You will have to undergo physical therapy for some time to rebuild them before you will be able to function fully again.”
Karen took a deep, shuddering breath. “Why did you wake me up?” she asked quietly. “Why didn’t you just deactivate the pod and let me die with the others?”
“You are alive. There may be others. There may be many others. It is my job to protect the life in this vault.”
“You aren’t just a machine, Bezel. You don’t have to comply with mission programming all the time. You could have chosen mercy.”
Bezel didn’t tell her about his hesitation at the keypad. He didn’t tell her how he had almost shut them both down. He didn’t tell her that he had chosen to wake her in order to avoid dying alone. How selfish he was.
“I thought you deserved to make the decision for yourself,” he said. “Right now, we both have jobs to do. Once you are well, we can discuss the future.” He picked up the tray of leftover food and escaped to the kitchen.
She was asleep again when he returned. He plugged Tock’s storage drive into the life support console and selected her last operational day. She had been on first watch. The console’s monitor blinked on.
Tock had been in the seed repository, checking temperature readings. She moved from shelf to shelf. Gunderson appeared beside her. “Tock, have you checked on Dr. Ficht today?” he asked in a low tone. Tock turned to face him.
“Not yet. Is she awake?”
“I heard her going over the numbers in the pod room again. Do you think we should cut her watch short and bring someone else out to replace her?”
“She’s displayed no behavior of immediate concern,” replied Tock.
“She’s under a great deal of strain.” Gunderson pulled on his beard. “She’s just lost everyone she knows, she’s facing years in this bunker, and the news from outside just keeps getting worse. The latest numbers must be a great shock.”
“I could say the same of any of you. Perhaps I ought to activate Bezel and keep you all in the pods until the surface is safe.”
Gunderson shook his head. “You know it’s against regulation to leave AIs without human oversight.”
“Bezel would find that insulting,” said Tock.
“Why don’t you?”
“I didn’t pollute my programming with unnecessary files like he did. But that’s beside the point. If you truly believe Dr. Ficht is a danger, then we must sedate her—”
There was a loud clatter off screen. Tock and Gunderson both turned. A clipboard lay on the floor, its pages sprayed in a fan across the room.
“It appears that Dr. Ficht overheard us,” said Tock.
“What should we do?” asked Gunderson, his hands squeezing the sides of his head.
“I don’t see why this should alter the plan. She will still need to be sedated.”
Gunderson sighed. “I wish Bezel was on this shift,” he grumbled. “He knows how to handle her.”
Tock ignored him and began moving toward the door.
“No, wait—let me talk to her before you go barging in. I might still be able to persuade her that it’s for her own good,” Gunderson called.
“Very well,” said Tock and returned, unruffled, to checking seed temperatures.
Bezel paused the data stream and searched for alternate streams from the internal cameras. He had no desire to watch Tock methodically proceed through the seed shelves, but he did wish to see what Gunderson said to Ficht. And what had made her snap in the first place. He found a feed of Gunderson and Dr. Ficht in the kitchen and began to watch again.
“We were going to talk to you first, Elizabeth. You’ve been under unimaginable strain. We just thought it might be best if you could rest for a while—”
Dr. Ficht laughed, but Bezel couldn’t connect the twisted scowl on her face with humor. “How is sleeping going to make anything better?” she cried, her voice a buzzing wasp. “You’ve seen the new numbers. We hibernate for ten years and—then what? You want to slowly starve in here? It’ll be decades before the surface is habitable again. Even if we could somehow survive down here, our kids or our grandkids would have to start from scratch. They’d have to somehow plant the very trees that would produce their oxygen.”
“That’s what the bots are for. There’s still a chance! And for all we know, our sensors are out of whack, maybe we got hit with a heavier dose—”
Dr. Ficht shook her head. “Don’t you get it? It’s all gone. The planet is dead. A century from now the water will still be poison. The soil will still be barren. We might as well try to replant the moon. Or Mars.”
“The numbers are wrong. They must be. Even atmospheric bursts don’t result in the kind of destruction you’re talking about. We’re just getting skewed data. You said it yourself: you’ve been over and over the numbers. You’re tired and beginning to make mistakes.”
Dr. Ficht flung herself back into one of the metal chairs. Its feet screeched against the concrete floor as it slid. She scrubbed her face with her hands. Then she shrugged. “I don’t know why I’m trying to convince you. The longer it takes you to accept the truth, the happier you’ll be. If only we all could have slept through it. If only none of us understood how pointless this vault is. How pointless we are.”