Isonation Read online

  “I’ve reached out to some people, and they’ve agreed to help us. So, here’s the plan: Your family is due to get your supply drop off tonight. I’ve arranged it so instead of the normal delivery drone, you’ll have a repurposed class 3 personnel carrier arriving at your house tonight. It’s rare when scheduling mix-ups like that happen, but not so much that it’ll draw anyone’s attention.

  “You need to be on that drone before it’s finished offloading. I’ve sent a file to Heelo, and he should be able to get you onboard and safe until we meet up in Seattle. I’ll reprogram the guidance system to take you there. You won’t have to worry about a thing.”

  Zoah’s head swam. They had talked about this. Well, they had talked like star-crossed lovers about finally meeting face to face despite being half a world away from each other, making plans and promises, daydreams. Once they started this whole thing, the two had also discussed contingencies and emergency scenarios, including hijacking a pair of drones to make their escape, but the likelihood of that happening had seemed so distant to her. Now here it was.

  Heelo buzzed an alarm. Someone was coming. Zoah tossed off the goggles and spun in her chair just as a knock came to the door. The drone flew back to its spot on the nightstand and went dark.

  “Come in,” she said, the request signaling the electronic lock on her door to disengage. Zoah’s mother, Madeline Lightsea, opened the door and leaned against the frame, her arms crossed.

  “Locking the door in the middle of the day?” Madeline asked.

  Zoah shrugged. “Thomas always interrupts me when I’m studying. I’ve got exams this week.”

  Her mom smiled to show she was letting it slide. “Can you pitch in with a little mise en place? I’ve got a huge stack of veggies that need cutting. It’s family night, you know.”

  “Dad reminded me already,” said Zoah. “Let me finish up here. I’ll come help in a few minutes, okay?”

  “Everything alright? You’ve got that furrowed look thing happening.”

  “I do? I mean, it’s nothing. Honest.”

  Madeline sat on the bed next to her daughter’s chair. “Your father told me about the conversation you two had earlier. You know he means well. It’s just sometimes he gets a thought in his head…”

  “I’m fine. Really.”

  “You say that, but what I see on your face tells me otherwise. I don’t want you to worry about Captain Air Force, what you’re going to do after college, the future. It’s all possibility, not absolute probability, Zoah. Only you have the power to choose what it is you want to do. We may try to nudge you a bit from time to time, but the final decision will always be yours to make. I promise, so burrow that furrow, okay?”

  “I will. Thanks, Mom.”

  Zoah watched the door close behind her mother. All she could think about was how in the world was she going to convince herself to leave her family? How could Milton expect her to go against every fundamental doctrine, every childhood boogeyman warning that had been engrained in her for as far back as she could remember? The world was dangerous. Literally dangerous. You stepped outside, you died. It was that simple.

  Zoah remained preoccupied with her thoughts through the rest of family night. She helped her mother prepare a vegetable lasagna, suffered terrible losses through several rounds of gin rummy and got confused in the plot of a movie called “Donnie Darko.”

  She was about to excuse herself to bed early when a message flashed on their screen indicating an incoming call for Dr. Lightsea. It was marked priority/secured. Zoah looked at her dad, who glanced soberly in her mom’s direction before getting up to answer it. Her eyes followed him as he went into his office, closed the door and locked it behind him.

  The truth was Zoah didn’t know much about what her father did for a living. When she had asked him, he said his research was valuable in nature and subject to corporate espionage, which explained the cloak-and-dagger private meetings and secret memorandums. She’d gotten used to his weird hours and behavior when it came to his work.

  All that mattered was how he was as her dad, and as far as Zoah was concerned, he was great—devoted and above and beyond for them all the time. He loved them, cared for them. The rest until now had been unimportant.

  A few hours later Heelo was buzzing again, and this time it woke Zoah up from a troubled sleep. In her dreams the Zombie Flu had ravaged her body, taken her mind and reason. She couldn’t imagine being that helpless and out of control. Zoah was happy to be awake and away from that horrible image, a world without hope or happiness.

  Now sitting up in bed, she looked at the little drone, thought of her dad and the rest of her family, then made her decision, which wasn’t a decision at all. Zoah had no choice.

  It was time to go.

  CHAPTER 4

  The board was green.

  Theodore Ogden allowed a faint smile to creep up the left side of his mouth. On a good day when the weather was fair, the schedule light and the workers adequate, the status updates for shipments around the world would all light up green indicating everything was on time and operating at efficiency. He looked across the six-foot-high display that comprised the entire east wall of his office—a map of the world that offered real-time updates on all of Ceres Corporation’s varied business concerns.

  Ogden sighed and closed his eyes. If only it could last, but it never did. Right on cue, the Mediterranean hub turned orange, creating a ripple effect shown by a small spider web that quickly cascaded into a sea of tangerine. Soon, several dozen other points around the globe also changed from green to yellow, orange or red. This was what business as usual looked like, even if the young CEO demanded otherwise.

  Still, despite the occasional delay, Ogden thought his father would have approved of what his company had become: no less than the very savior of mankind—humanity’s life’s blood.

  If Ceres hadn’t been positioned with just the right projects at exactly the right time, the state of the world would have been very different than it was today, and the old man wouldn’t have been quite so venerated.

  Long before the pandemic, decades before mankind was nearly extinguished, humanity’s eventual salvation was already being shaped in Ravendale, a 1920s bungalow-filled neighborhood in Detroit that had long since deteriorated. Having finally succumbed to ruin by the consequences of a devastating financial sector scandal and subsequent economic downturn, homes there were left abandoned and overgrown—some set ablaze. Serious crime ran rampant. It was the perfect place for a miracle because it needed one—the kind of philanthropic, walk-on-water miracle that would change the world, shape the zeitgeist, strangle social media and, God willing, garner astronomical press and a Q score that would make your mother blush (not to mention generate a healthy long-term return on investment to boot).

  Ogden had to hand it to his father. He was a bastard but a brilliant one. Ceres had cultivated a string of advancements—including sensory high-definition displays, hydrogen fuel cells and soft artificial intelligence—into the largest IPO in history raising more than $500 billion worldwide. Now they were looking to the future, and Ravendale was the site where it would all begin. Their mission statement: to create the thing that Walt Disney envisioned but never fulfilled, the city of the future. Ravendale would be what Epcot never was—a living, vibrant, smart community completely self-contained, self-sufficient and engineered from the ground up to be the pinnacle of modern urban planning.

  Detroit’s city council was more than happy to help facilitate the forced relocation of some 30,000 citizens, most willing to comply since they had been compensated well above market value for their properties. Ceres then razed four square kilometers, clearing land in preparation for the largest social and technological experiment ever conceived. The idea was to create a clean energy community in an entirely closed system—off the grid and renewable—utilizing the latest in dynamic networking techniques to deliver energy and information faster and more efficiently than any method ever seen before in existen
ce. Each building would serve multiple purposes beyond housing—energy creation through solar windows, wind and the capture of excess heat; water collection through sophisticated catchment systems and recycling of waste; and food production from urban vertical hydroponic farms.

  Ravendale was a bubble community—those who lived there worked there and were not allowed to leave for the duration of their employment agreement. Healthcare, housing, food and transportation were all provided free of charge. The hope was that by measuring consumption, growth and production in a sealed, scrutinized environment, the solution to our worldwide natural resource crisis would somehow reveal itself.

  It took most of his father’s life and the first few years of Ogden’s own for Ceres to realize this vision. When the Zombie Flu reached Detroit, Ravendale was already operational. Not only was it spared from the epidemic, but the entire project was unaffected by it. Building a 10-foot wall around the insulated community wasn’t what saved them. It was their closed infrastructure that allowed Ravendale to continue long after the entire Midwest electrical grid failed, and supply chain collapsed.

  Before the rest of the country succumbed, the United States government reached an agreement with Ceres to construct six more cities on a larger scale across the continent, each to be populated by essential personnel who until completion would ride out the worst of the pandemic in underground shelters. Ceres reached similar agreements with several other countries around the world, each offering the company unlimited resources and budgets to ensure their people and way of life endured.

  As a result, the Ceres Corporation controlled the operation of every civilized human refuge left on Earth and maintained the distribution of all resources and personnel between them. The world’s leaders didn’t consider this arrangement ideal, but it was necessary to secure mankind’s survival. A shame the Zombie Flu had other ideas.

  A faint beep sounded, followed by the voice of Ogden’s assistant. “Theo, you requested a meeting with Dr. Lightsea... He’s waiting for you now.”

  “Thank you, Sara.”

  Ogden stood from behind his desk, then walked around and leaned against it, facing an empty chair. He crossed his arms and smiled. “Charles,” he said, “thank you for coming at this late hour.”

  An image of Dr. Lightsea flickered, then solidified in the chair. If you didn’t know he was a virtual image, you’d have sworn the man was sitting there. Ogden had the projectors recalibrated six times before he was satisfied—the skin tones, the shadows all in perfect sync with the lighting in his office. He could almost touch him, if only to slap the annoyed look off the doctor’s face.

  “Theo, I distinctly remember telling you I was spending this evening with my family...”

  “Did you? I do apologize,” Ogden offered.

  “I assume it’s important,” Dr. Lightsea said.

  “Everything I do is important. Perhaps I need to remind you of this as well: everything you do is important, too.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ogden walked across the room to his bar. “Refresh my memory, Charles. How long has it been since we began work together?” He poured himself a drink as Dr. Lightsea shifted uneasily in his chair.

  “Eleven years,” he answered.

  “If I remember, I resisted sanctioning your project. Thought it was just an academic sinkhole without practical merit, but you were very persuasive if a little obstinate. You convinced me there would be real-world applications for your otherwise esoteric theories. Now, here we are 11 years later, and it appears we both were wrong.”

  Dr. Lightsea rubbed his chin then nodded. “There have been…distractions certainly,” he agreed. “But we lost a lot of momentum when you moved us over to R&D. We’ve had to shelve experiments whenever my team was pulled into Ceres product launches, or to work on upgrades or workarounds.”

  “And that has always been part of my agreement with the government since I allowed your team access to our infrastructure,” said Ogden. “If Ceres and Homeland Security weren’t so in bed together, it would’ve been easy for us to part ways long ago, but you have a few friends in so-called high places. Still, make no mistake—it’s only because you’ve proved somewhat useful on a few minor projects that I’ve allowed your department to remain, despite what some mindless bureaucrat may want to believe. The government just thinks they’re running this world, but you and I know better, don’t we?”

  Ogden took his drink to his desk and sat down behind it. Even though Dr. Lightsea didn’t have a glass, Ogden lifted his and tilted it toward his virtual guest before taking a quick sip. “Tell me, Charles, do you enjoy the relative autonomy Ceres has granted you?”

  “What’s this about, Theo?” Dr. Lightsea demanded.

  “You see this board behind me? When studied, one might surmise that the lights on it represent drones traveling the globe with materials, food or personnel. Perhaps you might see electricity being transferred or oil and natural gas, even water flowing trans-continentally. You would be right. You would also be missing the point entirely—all of this keeps all of us alive,” said Ogden who was now sitting with arms wide sweeping them across the large-screen display for effect. “And not only do I run it with precision and purpose, I know what’s happening everywhere. Like for instance…here…”

  Ogden tapped the air above his head and a digital window on the display expanded near the eastern Asia coastline. He used his fingers to find a file then stabbed his index finger at it to start a cued video. “What do you see? Anyone familiar?”

  Dr. Lightsea squinted his eyes. It was dark, probably night. It seemed to be a masked man. He was dressed in black. He was being pursued, and it appeared the footage was taken by one of his pursuers from a body camera. The renegade eluded them through several turns until he was cornered at a dead end. The man turned back to the camera, pulled off a mask and revealed his face. Ogden paused the image and zoomed in.

  “Who is he?” asked Dr. Lightsea.

  “Now, now, Charles. You’re supposed to tell me that.”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, this vid was captured at the Busan warehouse a few nights ago. That’s one of yours, isn’t it?”

  “There was an intruder,” Dr. Lightsea said. “But nothing was taken. Security chalked it up to a failed black-market burglary. We swept the area, doubled the details and moved on.”

  “And yet none of your recent reports mention anything about this intruder.”

  “I didn’t think it warranted--”

  “Didn’t think?!” Ogden growled and stood from his chair. “How do you presume all of this works here? We just allow every vice president, director and peon the liberty to do whatever is on their feeble minds whenever they feel like it? That kind of freedom of thought is reserved for kindergartens and socialist democracies. At Ceres, our success is predicated on information flowing up the chain of command so that its leaders, so that I, can make sound decisions based on fact.

  “If your head of security hadn’t sent this along with his weekly report, no one would have known it had happened. One failed burglary is a minor incident, but six incursions each at different Ceres sites by the same suspect? It becomes a legitimate concern. We were lucky that our analysts were diligent in their research and found that pattern, but a company like ours doesn’t succeed by luck. No, we make it. We manufacture it by being proactive and damn scrupulous, and your failure to contribute to that pattern of success is a problem. One that I hope you’ll choose to correct.

  “So, as I hope you can now see, Charles, everything you do is important. Every single thing you do is important enough for me to know about and for you to perform properly in the way we expect you to. There is no acceptable alternative.” Ogden consumed the remaining liquor from his glass and set it down firmly on his desk, smiling at Dr. Lightsea.

  “I, uh, well I can see now how much you value that kind of oversight,” Dr. Lightsea said, “and fully recognize my error in not telling you what happened. Th
ank you for the time you’ve taken to explain this to me in detail. All I can do is promise it won’t happen again.”

  “Your promise is all I need,” Ogden replied. “Now, I know it’s late. Please extend my apologies to Madeline for interrupting your family’s evening.”

  “I will, of course.”

  “Oh, and one last thing. The missing burglary report?”

  “You’ll have it within the hour,” said Dr. Lightsea.

  “Perfect. Thank you, Charles. Good night.” Before the doctor could reply, the virtual link was severed, leaving Ogden a quiet beat alone to sit back and relax in his chair. Then he activated the intercom. “Send in Nox.”

  Across the room a door slid open revealing a tall wiry figure with a shock of white hair dressed in urban fatigues. The man glided the 20 steps to Ogden’s desk then stood in front of it at attention—this always impressed the CEO. The military had it right. If only his vice presidents afforded him the same level of respect. He waved at the soldier to relax.

  “You heard all of that?” asked Ogden.

  Now at ease, hands clasped behind his back, Nox replied, “Yes, sir. I don’t believe Dr. Lightsea is a suspect.”

  “No, I don’t believe he is. Cross him off the list. I want you to find this man,” Ogden said pointing back at the frozen screen capture on the wall display. “I want to know how, and I want to know why he’s been breaking into our facilities.”

  “Sir, my flight is already fueled and ready to go.”

  “You know what we do here at Ceres. We make it possible for all the people in the world to live in impossible times, and this terrorist may very well be endangering our way of life,” Ogden said. “Get him. Find out everything he knows, then bring him to me.”

  Nox stared at the grainy image of Milton Lee and resolved to capture him for his employer no matter the cost.

  CHAPTER 5