The Man Who Ended the World (5 page)

I think it's what's
underneath
the car. 

But there's just junk underneath the car. 

Henry, she says, drawing his name out slowly. I think you're missing the point. You miss the point a lot. 

Hey, he says.

Do you think it's safe to go in there? she asks. Will he know? 

I don't know.

But you haven't seen him come out, right? 

Not since he went in. 

Which was, like, four days ago? 

I think so. 

Okay, she says. Let's go inside.

Henry says, I don't know. What if he comes out right now? 

Don't be a crybaby, Clarissa says. 

I'm not the one who --

Shut it. 

She points, and he leads the way to the Silver Cloud Lane side of the junkyard. He crouches beside a particularly rotted board, then carefully pulls it toward him. It's loose enough that he can swing it to his left. He holds it back and Clarissa squeezes through the space. 

He follows. 

The junkyard is quiet, which has always creeped him out. The sun is almost completely down, and it's getting hard to see. His instinct is to creep across the yard, but Clarissa just marches straight over to the old Corsica. She kneels down and squints up underneath it, and frowns. 

The entire car appears to be resting precariously atop a heap of scrap and discarded appliances. There's a microwave, a washing machine, a hair dryer, assorted sheets of metal and rusted wheels. It looks like it might come crashing down on top of Clarissa at any moment. 

He darts to her side, still crouch-running, and says, Careful, I think it might --

Clarissa grabs the microwave in both hands and shakes it violently.

To Henry's amazement, it doesn't budge. 

I knew it, she says. 

What did you know? Please be careful.

It's totally safe, she says. Look.

He scoots forward and looks where she is pointing. 

See it? she asks.

See what? 

The welding marks. 

Where? 

Henry, she says, exasperated. Look. Here. 

He follows her finger. She touches a lumpy ridge of metal that seems to connect the microwave to the washing machine just below it. 

You're right, he says. What does it mean?

It means, she says, that someone wanted this to look like a pile of junk. But it's really just the shape of a pile of junk. 

But why would you do that? 

You would do that if you wanted to hide something, Henry. 

Like... a secret room? 

Like a secret room, she says.

•   •   •

In school the only thing Henry can think about is secret rooms. He gets a library pass from his history teacher, who is happy to write it, since Henry usually just draws offensive reenactments of historical scenes on his desktop during class, and goes off in search of books about hidden spaces. 

He inadvertently missed his next class. He stumbled across stories about secret passageways in ancient monasteries, and hidden tunnels beneath the White House grounds, and speakeasy storage rooms hidden behind movable walls, and asylums with secret basements and "treatment" chambers. 

After school he waits for Clarissa to appear at his window. She starts to climb inside, but he shoulders a bag and says, Let's go. 

They wait at the fence for nearly an hour before Henry works up the courage to go inside again. 

What did you try last time? Clarissa asks. 

Nothing that worked, he says. I tried prying the trunk open with a pipe, but it didn't work. I tried going through the back seat. I tried using the trunk latch under the dashboard. Nothing happened.

What did you bring? 

He opens the bag and shows her. 

The Man and His Dream

During one of their early planning meetings, Steven ate lunch with Tomas on the roof of the Nucleus headquarters in Mountain View. He had already hired Tomas to build the space station, but they were still figuring out how many floors it required. 

Tomas didn't yet know how big the project was going to be. 

That afternoon, in the warm sun, they ate savory crepes and sipped imported beer, and Steven asked, Do you read much science fiction? 

Tomas shook his head. I wish I had the time, he said. 

There's a book, Steven said, about a probe discovered in space. It's passing close enough to Earth that we send men to examine it. The whole thing appears solid from the outside, but on the inside, it's a microcosm.

A microcosm, Tomas had said, dubiously.

Right. The men open it up and the whole probe is hollow, and there's a whole environment inside of it. There are mountains and oceans and weather systems and everything. 

That sounds pretty cool, Tomas said. What happened to the men? 

It doesn't matter, Steven had said. I want you to build that for me. 

A space probe? 

I want you to build exactly that environment, Steven repeated. But I want you to build it half a mile beneath the Earth. 

I don't know if I can do that. I don't even know if that's possible.  An ocean? Weather? 

I want the closest thing possible. It can't be that hard. 

•   •   •

Steven reflects on that conversation as he watches the sunset behind the trees. The branches wave gently in the wind, rocking to sleep the birds that have nested there. There's a slight chill in the air, the kind you feel just before an evening rain. 

And indeed it begins to rain. 

The rain falls lightly, then the volume increases until it's fairly pounding the ground around him. A thin mist rises upward, building a fog bank that clings to the trees and shrubbery.

Steven's no sadist, whatever Stacy may think of him. He double-stomps the earth beneath his feet, and the rain ceases to fall on the few square feet where he stands.

Stacy chides, That's not exactly preserving the illusion. 

What do you know about illusions? You're practically one yourself. 

Maybe one day I'll be a real girl, Stacy says. 

He can almost hear a tone of wishfulness in her words. 

You're not becoming sentient on me, are you? he asks. 

Stacy doesn't reply. 

He'll have to consider whether that counts as a yes.

•   •   •

Level two may be his favorite. It certainly was the most complicated to design and build. Unlike the other three levels, Steven had to stay mostly out of the labs and allow the experts to plan this level for him. The complexities of simulated ecosystems were outside of his area of expertise. 

But he could certainly program interfaces and behaviors into the room, such as the ability to disable weather in small grids at will. So he did. 

He sometimes calls this level the bay, because it reminds him of an anonymous bay that his parents visited once when he was too small to collect many details, such as its name. 

There are evergreen trees on the north end of the space, collected organically to create a woods he can wander through. For now, they are not much taller than Steven himself, but over time they will grow, and he is curious what the bay will look like in ten years, or twenty. When he walks between the trees now, he feels a bit like a giant. 

The trees are in a meadow that gives way to sand and sawgrass, and as the space moves south, the land succumbs to sea. It is not a great sea, only an approximation of one. But the water here is cycled separately from the rest of the space station, and injected with salt. Artificial winds carry the tang of its scent across the entire vast room, so that even when Steven is out of sight of the ocean, he is able to smell it. The water laps at the shore, sometimes surging at it, powered by wave machines and supported with additional sound effects. If he wanted to, he could swim here, but he has always been afraid of the ocean, and he preserves that fear by staying out of his own false sea. 

There are no walking paths or benches. The ceiling of this room is higher than the others, and the artists who designed it have cleverly designed it to appear even more distant than it is, through a combination of layered weather elements, cycled artwork and natural, random light patterns.

There are birds here, but they are the only wildlife he would allow. He discussed the possibility of introducing more species -- the idea of riding a horse on his beach was appealing -- but ultimately concluded that the risk and maintenance requirements were too great. What would he do when one of his animals killed and ate another? It would happen. The idea worried his stomach. And so birds are all he allows. Their sounds comfort him. The birds are acclimating slowly to the environment. All of the deceptions he has constructed to make the space appear larger than it is have taken a toll on the birds, whose sad corpses he often finds strewn about, rendered lifeless by collisions with the walls or the ceiling, or, on at least two occasions, from flying into the atmosphere generators. If this continues, maybe he will not replace the birds. 

He is always amazed by the realness of the space, even the artificial clouds and rain. Here, it is always late fall, never winter, never summer. This room is the quiet space that, until now, has always existed deep within his own mind. 

He may call it the bay, but level two is Steven's Rama.

•   •   •

The various levels of the space station are connected by a warren of secret passageways, service tunnels and elevator systems. Though Steven never expects to be discovered, he has planned for the worst. At any moment, he can slip away from any level of the space station. Each passage is invisible, except to him, and can only be entered by someone possessing his biometric signatures. Each passage has an additional hidden door inside of it, and that door leads to his panic room, which is nearly as large as any one of the levels of the station. The panic room is essentially level 2.5.

In the event of a singular threat on his life, Steven will retreat to the panic room, which duplicates many of the functions of the rest of the space station. The panic room has a life support capacity of two years. He can also escape at any time to the surface, though the escape route is terrifying to him. He had asked Tomas for something more reasonable, but this was one area Tomas could not improve. To escape the panic room, Steven must climb a ladder half a mile to the surface, through a tunnel even narrower than the one by which he enters the space station.

He does not expect to use the panic room.

If something goes wrong, Steven prefers to visit level one. 

•   •   •

On their first meeting, Tomas said to Steven, Tell me why you want such a place. It is a great undertaking, and it will no doubt be a very exciting facility. But it is the most expensive thing I have ever heard of. Why do you want to build this? 

Steven had looked at him calmly and asked, Do you ever think about the end of the world? 

So, Tomas said, it is an elaborate bomb shelter? A survival complex? 

It is more than that, Steven had said. 

What is it for? 

Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be the last surviving person on Earth? 

Tomas shook his head. I have never really thought about it. 

I have. And so this building is not designed to protect me from the end of the world, from bombs or asteroids or chemical weapons or whatever. 

It would be strong enough for all of those things, I think, Tomas said. 

Yes, because I'd like to live. But simply living is not why I'd like to survive. 

What more is there?

I want to watch it all happen, Steven had confessed. I am completely fascinated by the concept of the end of our species. Somebody should witness it, catalog it, write about it, preserve the story of our disappearance from Earth, shouldn't they? Why shouldn't that be me? 

So it is... what? Tomas asked.

It is a time capsule, Steven said. Maybe in millions of years a new species will rise on our planet, and they will discover the remains of our civilization. And one day they might stumble across this complex, and crack it open, and discover a well-preserved moment in time. Who we were, what we did, how we died. All of it recorded here. 

Will you fire me if I express my doubts? Tomas asked.

I want you to embrace those doubts, Steven had said. Embrace them, and then build me something that puts even your doubts to rest. That's the building project of the millennium. 

A time capsule, Tomas repeated dubiously. 

A time capsule. 

•   •   •

Level one is Steven's contingency plan. 

He has protected the level and its contents even from Stacy. If the worst occurs, he would prefer to avoid the distraction of an AI. 

Level one is ominously sealed behind a very thick steel door. Warning labels festoon the walls around the door. There are cameras, lights, alarms. Other than the heavily secured front door, the only access to this level is through the panic room. 

Inside the room are enough weapons, vehicles, ammunition, armor and supplies to sustain a small army of survivors. The vehicles are parked on elevation platforms so that he can quickly ascend to the surface without exposing himself to harm. They are armored, sealed against contagions and hazardous substances, and have no exposed parts. 

Each vehicle has a mounted cannon. 

Steven does not expect he will ever need to access this room and its materials of war.

But it is there. From time to time he sends Stacy away, and then he slips into the passages that lead to his panic room. Inside the panic room, he rides a rising floor into the center of level one. He just stands there, studying his armory, the haz-mat suits, the body armor, the cases of automatic rifles, the canisters of blinding gas. 

Then he rides the floor back into the panic room, slips back into his quarters, and proceeds with his day. 

It is inconvenient that Steven has given Stacy a glowing avatar of light. When she 'leaves', her avatar scampers away and fades. Steven designed this as a comforting mechanism, so that he could do away with the irritating sensation of being watched all of the time.