Dissonance - Book One

six

"I've been put in charge of sharing classified information with you, which many think is risky, but I've got some pull with the General," Aveline informs me as she leads me down a dimly lit corridor. She stops in front of a large steel door and enters a code. A panel is revealed and a device scans her retina. Once this is cleared, another panel is revealed for fingerprint identification. I get the feeling that, wherever she is about to take me, is somewhere that very few people are allowed to go.

The steel door slides upwards. I hesitate for a moment before stepping through. She motions for me to follow her and, reluctantly, I do. Once I step through the opening, the door lowers quickly and I hear the sound of a locking mechanism engage. Even if I wanted to turn around now, I couldn't. This place is as difficult to get out off as it is to get in.

The room before me is immense. It's at least the length of a football field and the ceiling stretches nearly as tall. Enormous cylinders, one after the next, reach almost all the way to the top. As I approach one of the ginormous tubes, I see that it is divided into individual pods, each with several flashing lights. The pods are filled with a liquid, something thicker and cloudier than water, within which floats an odd looking shape. I step closer, trying to make sense of what I see. The shape looks almost...humanlike.

"What is this?" I ask in astonishment. I take a step back, stunned by what lies before me.

"It's the future of the human race."

I make my way around the cylinder, examining pod after pod. Inside one, I can make out the shape of fingers and toes. In another: a head, nose and eyes. And then I realize what it is I'm looking at.

"You're breeding humans?" A sick feeling washes over me at the realization of what's being done here.

"So to speak. I prefer to think of it as assisted reproduction."

I walk from pod to pod, astonished and frightened by the enormity of this science experiment. My mind races with questions that I want to know the answers to. I shake my head in disbelief.

"What?" Aveline inquires, having noticed the look of bewilderment on my face.

"I have so many questions."

"By all means," she replies, waiting for me to begin my interrogation, but I don't know where to start.

"Why here? In this mine? In Utah?"

"Lots of reasons. Utah is practically uninhabited now thanks to the inversion. Those that remain, keep to themselves and don't leave their dwellings much since it requires a ventilation mask. Plus, when the program started, no one really paid much attention to this place. Everyone wrote it off as a state filled with zealous polygamist Mormons. Bigotry kept people out. And then there's the fact that Utah's landscape is the only place on Earth that mimics other planets. Lake Bonneville, which evaporated to form the Great Salt Lake, is very similar to the Jezero Crater on Mars, an ancient lake that dissolved as water vanished from the surface of the planet billions of years ago. Studying what happened to the Great Salt Lake, and the microbial organisms preserved in the salt crystals, helped us to understand the transformation of life on other planets and ways to possibly bring it back. It's why they built the Mars Desert Research Station here. Plus, Thiokol provided a rather large arsenal of weapons, not to mention the technology for the space program."

Thiokol. The name triggers something in my memory. I remember learning about the company a few years back. They were once part of the conglomerate Morton-Thiokol, until the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986. I read about it while bored in my advanced physics class, having already taught myself, the lesson the teacher was trying to impart into the brains of uninterested teenagers. It caught my attention because it was a story of hope, of the first teacher pioneering into the unknown, which ended in immense tragedy. Morton-Thiokol was blamed for the disaster due to a defect in the O-ring seals. After the catastrophe, the company split and Thiokol moved to Northern Utah where they continued to be a part of the space program, while also creating weapons for the military. It made sense that a powerhouse like Environettix would be working with them.