Deep magic second coll.., p.20
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 20
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
“As you can see,” Burke continued, “the walls also divide the facility into separate sections. The cars run on rails laid along the top of the walls. They can get us just about anywhere we want to go in the facility. It’s the best way to give people a sense of the operation. Let’s move around the outer wall.”
Lynda tapped a button on the control panel and the car hummed to life. They were so high above the ground that they hardly seemed to be moving at all, but Burke knew that they were actually hurtling along at over two-hundred kilometers per hour.
“Our facility is built in a circle fifteen kilometers in diameter. You’ve been to the central compound, which you can reach through a subterranean access road. Mostly we use these rampart cars when we just want to inspect. When we need to actually work with the trees—like when we treat them for borer infestation—we use the service roads you can see below you. We have roughly forty-five thousand trees, each pulling in more than one hundred times more carbon than a Leucaena leucocephala (the most efficient nonengineered tree) can.”
“Uh-huh,” Downs interrupted. “And they’re predatory, right?”
Lynda opened her mouth, but Burke spoke over her. “Yes, they’re meat eaters, kind of like giant Venus flytraps.”
Downs aimed his phone at Burke and muttered, “Record.”
“Why’d you engineer them that way?”
Burke took a deep breath and organized his thoughts, well aware that his answer would be smeared all over the Internet.
“Well, you’re right that we did engineer them. But it’s not like we intended to make them predators. Why would we? It was an unintended byproduct of the modifications we made to increase their carbon appetite. The way I’ve heard it explained is that the trees need more than just sunlight and water to support their heightened metabolisms. But look, I’m not a geneticist. If you want the finer details, you’ll have to talk to someone else. What I can tell you is that we absolutely have them under control in this facility.”
Jensen leaned forward. “Kevin, putting safety aside, I don’t think we should dismiss the implications of this genetic modification, which seems, to me, terribly irresponsible.”
Burke turned to look at the lawyer. The man was wearing a wool suit in the tropics, and his shirt collar was stained with sweat.
“Easy, Boss,” Lynda whispered.
“Irresponsible? That’s interesting. It took us twenty-two months and millions of dollars to cut through the b.s. and get this facility up and running. I suppose you think the lawyers who wrote those regulations were being responsible. If you ask me, I’d say it’s irresponsible to let industry ravage the planet while throwing up every possible obstacle in front of those people who are trying to fix the problem. We’re not engineering tastier corn or paler trout. We’re trying to save the planet.”
“I’m not questioning your motives, Mr. Burke, I’m questioning your priorities, and I think—”
Burke laughed loudly. It was a hard, angry sound. “I guess my priorities changed after Hurricane Barbara. My daughter was going to school in Gainesville.”
The car was silent. The passengers were each remembering the next-day news footage showing the tropical storm’s unprecedented destruction. At the time, Barbara had been touted as the storm of the century. But now, five years later, category 5 hurricanes ravaging the Atlantic coast were just a fact of life.
“Here,” Lynda pointed toward the ground. “We’re coming up on one of our herds of wild pigs. We keep them fed using automatic feeders around the grounds. When a particular field of trees is getting hasty—starting to move around, I mean—we direct the pigs there with food. That way the trees don’t have too far to go to look for a meal when they stir.”
“How’d you settle on pigs?” Jensen asked breezily.
“They’re easy. Easy to breed, easy to train, and the trees seem to like the taste.” At least they did until they grabbed Bill Adler last week, Burke added to himself.
“They’re treated humanely, though, right? They’re allowed to roam?” Downs’s brow was furrowed and he sounded uneasy.
Burke thought of the last kill he’d seen: the thick branch shooting down to impale the pig and hold it in place, the thinner vinelike arms creeping down, wrapping around the pig’s convulsing body, and then twisting its skin off—to be stuffed into a cleft in the tree’s trunk.
“Yes, we let them roam.” Burke said.
“Totally organic and cage free.” Lynda added with a smirk.
A Klaxon sounded from hundreds of wall-mounted speakers.
Burke turned to Lynda. “This a test?” He knew that Lynda always tracked the facility’s “unscheduled” tests, which he thought undermined the whole point of the exercise. But he wasn’t interested in standing on principle at the moment.
Lynda shook her head. “I suspended all tests before we went out.”
“Excellent!” Downs held up his phone.
“Where?”
“Section twelve,” the radio squawked, “moving toward eleven.”
The team’s in eleven, Burke thought.
“How many?”
“The whole grove, I think.”
Lynda pointed toward the dashboard monitor. It was like watching a green tsunami. The camera shifted to show the field crew running toward the APC, the wave mere seconds behind them. Jets of fire hit the ground behind the runners, separating them from the trees. The trees stopped, milled around for a moment, and then began to move laterally, to flank the fire barrier.
“Can we go over there?” Downs asked.
“Shut up.” Burke batted the kid’s phone down.
“Get moving, Craig!”
“On it, Boss,” a tinny voice answered.
The APC lurched forward. The ops men were still mounted on their perches, laying down a river of fire behind them, as the vehicle drove off camera.
“Get them back, Janice!”
“Trying, trying.”
Burke barely breathed until the screen showed the APC driving into the underground tunnel.
“Everyone OK?”
“Affirm,” a voice answered. “Pretty shaken up, but everyone’s accounted for.”
Burke turned to face Lynda. “You sure there wasn’t any movement last night?” A frenzy like the one they had just seen was usually at least twenty-four hours in the making, with plenty of incremental movement leading up to it, plenty of warning.
“No.” Lynda bit her lip. She’s thinking the same thing, Burke thought. Without the warning period, this just got much more dangerous.
“Well, nothing to do about it now. Get some pigs over there and get those trees fed.”
* * *
They were nearly back to base when another alarm sounded.
“Damn,” Burke sighed. “What now?”
“The ents are attacking the perimeter wall!” Janice’s voice was tight with barely suppressed panic.
“Hey!” Burke barked. “I’ve told you not to call them that. They’re just trees!”
“I hate to interrupt this taxonomical discussion,” Lynda chirped. “But what’s the problem? Aren’t the perimeter guns keeping them off the wall?”
“That’s just it. They must have figured that out. They stopped just out of range of the guns, but we’ve got vibration alarms in the wall. Here, look.”
The car’s screens lit up again. Just as Janice had said, a line of clearly active trees—their limbs swaying and moving constantly—had stopped just outside the no-man’s-land along the perimeter wall. They weren’t advancing, but the sense of purpose and planning was unmistakable.
“The roots,” Burke muttered. “They’re trying to break the wall with their roots.”
He grabbed the car’s joystick, and the car flew forward, darting along interior walls toward the trees.
“Are you sure this is safe?” the lawyer asked.
Burke ignored him. A few moments later, Burke saw what he was looking for: they were approaching the grove of trees from what he thought of as the “rear,” from the interior of the facility. The trees didn’t have eyes, of course, but Burke thought that their attention seemed to be focused on the outer wall.
“Wait here.” Burke pulled down the red handle and kicked open the emergency exit window. He crawled out onto the top of the car. The glass-and-plastic top was smooth, and Burke’s fingers scrabbled for purchase. He slid face-first toward the rear of the car and landed in a heap. He jumped to his feet and pulled open the hatch. He had insisted that every car carry emergency supplies: water, food, and more importantly, a pyro.
Burke shouldered the weapon and inched along the wall until he found a descent pole. He clipped the safety line to his belt and then threw himself over the edge. He hit the ground hard enough to buckle his knees and started jogging toward the grove.
“What are you going to do?” Lynda’s voice said in his ear.
“You know how these things learn.” Burke gasped as he ran. Gotta get in more runs, he thought. “Knowledge is like a disease with them. One tree grabbed a human and suddenly they’re all mad for us. I gotta take these out or they’ll all be trying to crack the walls.”
“Couldn’t we try to capture them? I’m sure the docs would want to test them.”
Burke shook his head in amazement. Lynda was usually tough and practical—sometimes Burke even thought she could be too much of a hard-ass with Janice and the other control room staff. But when it came to living things—other than humans—she was completely sentimental.
“No time to discuss it. Burke out.”
He flipped the pyro’s safety up and triggered the pilot flame on. Emerging from the dense but still forest, he saw the active trees ahead of him. There was a fifty-foot strip of earth between the dormant forest and the renegades. Before the trees had a chance to react, Burke threw down a wall of fire, which pinned the trees against the invisible boundary created by the auto-guns’ firing range. If the trees moved forward, the guns would shred them; if they retreated, they would hit the fire wall.
Burke had left a gap in the flames just big enough for a man to step through. The trees were turning their attention to the crackling flames when he sprinted forward and leaped through the gap. A moment later, the wall of fire closed behind him. Burke lifted his pyro as the trees surged toward him. The trees couldn’t scream, but the sound of sap exploding and wood rupturing was pretty close.
* * *
Two hours later, Burke staggered into the command center. His eyebrows were gone and his hands and arms were heavily bandaged.
Lynda leaped up from her console and grabbed him in a hug.
“Ow.”
“Sorry!” Lynda hastily backed away.
Burke stumbled to the nearest chair and collapsed into it. “What happened to Twitterboy?”
“Left an hour ago. About when you got to the infirmary.”
“Well OK.” Burke closed his eyes. “Is Hoffman pissed?”
Lynda chuckled and Burke opened his eyes to look at her. She held up her tablet, which showed shots of him sliding down the wall, running toward the trees, hurling fire. Some of the shots were clearly from Downs’s phone camera, like the selfie of Downs and Lynda pressed cheek to cheek, but some had just as obviously come from the installation’s security cameras.
“Why the hell did you give him this?”
“Hoffman’s orders,” Lynda smiled, pulling the tablet back. “We got Downs’s endorsement. And he made you a bona fide twenty-first-century Rambo. You’ll just have to deal with it, because money’s been rolling in ever since.”
Burke shook his head. “I really don’t understand the world.”
“Yeah, no one’s disputing that, Burke.”
“Well, at least we should have the funds for the R and D I’ve been asking for now.”
“God, Burke, you really don’t get it, do you? There’s no way that work’s going to happen now. No one wants a kinder, gentler tree. You actually managed to make carbon-offsetting sexy. We’re not going to do anything to mess with that.”
“Damn,” Burke said, closing his eyes again. “I need a drink.”
“Finally, you’re making sense.”
A siren sounded throughout the room.
“Not again,” Burke groaned.
“I’ve got another alarm,” Janice whispered.
“Where?”
“The inner compound wall!”
Burke sighed and heaved himself into a standing position. He moved to stand behind Janice. He rested his hand on her chair and leaned down to see her screen.
“Show me where.”
Janice’s hands flew over the keyboard. The monitor showed only static. In the lower left corner of the screen “Comp.Int.West.102” glowed in green letters. The screen flashed to static again, and the word changed to “Comp.Int.West.103,” and then “Comp.Int.West.104.”
“This doesn’t make any sense!” Janice hissed. “All of the cameras on the west side are out—all of them.”
Burke walked quickly to the west side of the command center and looked through the observation window. That morning, a uniform fifty-foot-high wall had separated the tree fields from the inner compound, where the Gaea Installation’s 114-person staff lived and worked. Now, Burke saw an enormous hole in the wall; huge chunks of concrete and rebar dotted the ground. It looked like a giant had kicked it over. And through the gulf, an endless stream of trees was rushing into the inner compound. Burke watched, transfixed, as a huge, weathered tree—he couldn’t help thinking of it as a silverback—hefted a chunk of rubble the size of an ox and tossed it easily, almost lazily, at a supply shed, which crumpled like a soda can.
Burke whirled around and ran to the emergency alarm. He smashed the protective glass with his elbow and yanked the emergency alarm down. Janice shrieked.
Burke’s voice echoed over the PA system “All personnel, report to the emergency bunker immediately! Active trees have breached the inner compound!”
Janice was already running toward the door, but Lynda was standing motionless at the window. “It’s captivating,” she muttered under her breath.
* * *
“We’re double-checking the roll call now, but it looks like everyone has reported in safe and sound,” Janice said.
Burke nodded. “Good. Hoffman sending backup?”
“Yep, should be here in thirty minutes.”
“Thanks. Go get some rest.”
Lynda slumped down next to Burke on the metal bench.
“Exterior wall still secure?”
Lynda nodded. “They seem content rampaging through the compound while we hide down here in this cave.”
Burke leaned back and closed his eyes. “Be thankful for this cave. At least they can’t get us down here. ”
“I think I know what happened, Boss.”
“The wall just collapsed on its own?”
Lynda chuckled without conviction. “Sadly no. I’ve reviewed the video logs from before the cameras went dead. The trees got right up next to the wall—”
Burke swiveled to look at Lynda. “How could—”
“Don’t interrupt me and I’ll tell you.”
Burke held up his palms in apology.
“They crept in. They moved at about one foot every fifteen minutes. The sensors aren’t calibrated to detect that kind of movement.”
“OK, it’s not great that they figured that out. But the vibration alarms should have activated the moment their roots started cracking the wall.”
Lynda hung her head. “Here’s where I resort to guesswork. I don’t think they cracked the wall directly—I think they figured out what would happen if they did. The alarms would sound and the guns would cut them down.”
“Yeah?”
“So I’m guessing that they worked together to dig a huge trench under the wall’s foundation—which is fifteen feet belowground, by the way. While they dug, they held the wall up with their roots, and then, all at once, they pulled the support out—and the wall just crumpled.”
Burke struggled to visualize it but couldn’t. “I don’t know, Lynda.”
“If you’ve got another explanation, I’m all ears. The guns were working. So were the vibration alarms. I checked.”
Burke nodded. In all matters related to the computer systems, he deferred to Lynda entirely. And he had to admit that, given what they knew, her theory was logical, so he considered it again. This required a staggering amount of coordination, Burke realized. This is problem-solving intelligence, coordinated, cooperative behavior.
“I don’t think we have this under control anymore.”
“I think that’s the understatement of the day, Boss.”
Burke hesitated for a moment. “Hoffman may kill me, but I’m calling it. This got too dangerous in the last few hours. These things are just too smart now. I’m initiating Clean Sweep.”
Burke walked over to his emergency terminal and pulled up the command screen. He typed in his ID and password, spoke his name, and scanned his retina.
“We can start over. The facility is still sound. I’m confident of that. We just need a more docile and, frankly, a dumber ent.”
The screen blinked: “Confirm Operation Clean Sweep.”
Burke hit the confirm button.
“Operation Clean Sweep Unavailable. Do you want to try again?”
Burke hit the confirm button three times and got the same message.
“Lynda, what’s going on? It’s saying Clean Sweep isn’t available.”
Burke then noticed that Lynda was crying softly. “I’m sorry. I disabled it before I came to talk to you. I can’t let you do it.”
Burke turned slowly. Lynda’s tattooed arms were wrapped tightly around her chest.
“What are you talking about? This is a safety issue.”
“No, it’s a moral one. I wouldn’t let you slaughter a thousand dolphins or chimps, and we just saw that these trees are at least that smart.”
Burke walked over to stand before her. “I’m giving you a direct order. Reinstate that command right now.”
Lynda continued to stare at the floor. Burke grabbed her by the arm and started to drag her toward the terminal. She yanked her arm away and glared at him, her eyes red with tears.
