LOG: 2

DATE: 24 December 2098

TIME: 10:23 AM

LOCATION: Army/Gov Research Laboratory. (No idea where.)

Dr. Ezra Mayur, Microbiologist & Epidemiologist. Expertise: Designer Pathogens. (I wish I wasn't)

Dad's birthday was two days ago. I've never missed it. Until now. And what a terrible way to miss it. He probably thinks I'm dead, and he won't stop until he finds my body. But here I am, alive and healthy. Maybe I'm closer to them than I think. What if this facility is close to home? An hour out? Under some obscure building? A ruin? What if it's in some basement? Sometimes, I feel like I hear the faint sound of trains above us. Sometimes I feel like I hear the city sounds. Other days, I feel like I can hear the thunder ripping the sky amidst mind-numbing silence, where there is nothing around us for miles – like today. The skylight, my only window to the world, feels small now. Small and so far away. I wish I had a ladder long enough to get up there and pop my head out. Get a lung full of fresh air other than this stale circulated air that carries with it the faint odor of men's sweat.

Ezra paused for a moment, eyeing the door to her room, her brows furrowed. Men. That's all she'd seen since the two months she'd been there. Men. Were there any women on this base? Maybe out of sight? Was the bunker attached to other bunkers in what looked like a futuristic, underground city, through tunnels, and they housed her in the men-only side? Were there any women out there nearby? Or was she purposefully isolated? More women would mean she didn't feel so alone, so alone and ready—desperate to do anything they asked of her for that tiny chance she'd see the world again? More women would mean more distraction for the testosterone-high, bulked-up men. What did they do? Spend hours in some gym, bulking up for hand-to-hand combat in the future?

To protect their ungodly project! She doubted any woman in her right mind would volunteer to come aboard such a project, no matter how its name made it sound like it was a saviour: Project Rescue. A devil in an angel's disguise. No woman would do it. Agree to be part of mass genocide, would they?

Am I the only woman here? She wracked her brain, trying to remember if, in all her weeks there, she'd spotted anyone remotely feminine, not that she expected army folks to look at all like the females she was used to. But if she could find a kindred spirit, another disturbed soul, maybe she'd find a way to warn the world, get a message out there, ahead of calamity. For she could see it now. There was no stopping this. Delay it, yes. A year, five years, ten, but in the end, one government or another would have to take drastic action or condemn the whole of humanity to terror and anarchy they can no longer contain, no longer return to order from. People, even good people, would kill to feed themselves and their families. Anarchy was only a few more mouths to feed away. In that way, Watergate was right. Something had to be done before civilisation collapsed beyond repair and the only way forward would be what you'd do with a pest out of control. Cull.

She saw it now. Even if she didn't want to and that familiar nausea she'd felt while writing her hypothetical paper came bubbling to the surface. A knock on the heavy, vault-like door interrupted it. If only there was a lock inside. Guess they didn't trust her enough to give her that level of privacy.

"Dr Mayur?"

"A minute please!" Ezra startled, scrambling off the bed, trying to figure out where she could hide the laptop.

Think, Ezzie, think. Where can I stash the laptop?

When another knock sounded, Ezra did the only thing she could. She threw it under the unkempt bed and hoped its many folds would camouflage that there was anything hidden underneath it.

In order not to look frazzled, Ezra untucked her pyjama top from her bottom, a habit she'd gotten into as a teen to keep drafts out while huddling, half shivering under the too-thin blankets with Shaki in her arms, hoping their body head would help them keep away hypothermia in nights they couldn't afford to heat their apartment.

She gathered her hair in one hand and opened the door, pretending she was in the middle of grooming herself when the disruption came. She stared at Millen, standing there before her, as she wrapped her hair in the scrunchy at her wrist. "What is it? I thought we had today off. What with it being Christmas Eve?"

"We do." He held a thin manila folder out to her—again, the reliance on the old paper ways caught her off guard. "But the Cap wanted me to give you this. It's been approved by Watergate and up."

Ezra took the offered file curiously and flipped it open. There was a piece of document inside, typed, and had a seal she never thought she'd see in her life. A seal that was a myth to most people, except a few who worked in her field. The Central High-Containment Library, aka The Disease Vault. The round, phosphorescence seal caught bits of light from the corridor fluorescent tubes and she stared at the thing in awe. It exists! It actually exists!

"What's this?" she asked again, dumbfounded.

"Permits. They've cleared you for access to small samples of whatever pathogen you require for your project, Doctor. General Watergate should be able to catch you up on what it all means if you're still keeping your lunch appointment with him." Millen clicked his heels, ready to leave. "I'll be by at 12:00 hours to escort you."

"Will you be there?" she asked, causing him to stop in his tracks and turn. "Or Captain Rai?" She didn't know why she asked that. She preferred Millen over Rai as an ally any day. There was something about the reserved Captain, the way he often watched her when he came down to the lab, that unnerved her.

"I'm no longer assigned to you, ma'am. They have promoted me. To Corporal. In charge of the entire lab and base safety effective 18:00 hours tonight." With that, Millen headed off.

At exactly 12:00 hours, he knocked on her door again. "Dr Mayur?"

Ezra was ready this time. She had found a place to stash her laptop safely in the room, and if by safe she meant with some handy duct tape and taped it underneath the sheet board of her king-single bed. She'd figured, since she was writing personal and tell-all accounts of her days in her own private logs, it was best not to keep it at the foot of her closet beneath jackets—donated to her by the men on the base—safe.

It was a quiet walk to Watergate's office. To some part of the bunker she didn't recognise. This was, after all, her first time returning to his office since they brought her in. Once there, Millen politely opened the door for her, waited for her to step inside, then closed it behind her.

Ezra stood staring at a large office that somehow looked cosy, with its thick Persian rug and an electric fireplace blazing quietly on one side. She was facing a large, minimalistic, and bare desk bar for a few stationary items. "General Watergate?" she called out, hearing a distant flush sound, but from where?

A minute later, a wall panel opened, and out stepped the General, minus his hat today. His uniform was ever so tidy that Ezra couldn't spot a single crease on its surface. "You asked to see me today?"

He pointed at the seat opposite from his and sat down, helping himself to the whiskey glass already sitting on his desk on top of a coaster. "Corporal Wesley gave you the permit?"

Ezra nodded.

"I need you to make a list of the pathogens you require. I trust they will not be identical strains to those Archer got, for safety purposes?"

Ezra nodded again. "Some strains—he used rather rashly."

Watergate sipped his whiskey and offered to pour her one. She felt inclined to decline, but then again, when would she get to enjoy the finer things, like whiskey, in life? She'd never tried it before.

Sliding a glass towards her with what she thought was a generous helping, Watergate gazed at the fireplace. "I could easily have the specimens expedited to the lab. Will take a week or so, depending on the measure of precaution we need to take if it's coming by sea and land, however, I was thinking—" he turned to her, turning his tumbler in his hand clockwise—"I'd like you to accompany Captain Rai and his team to the Vault. They have more information regarding each strain, rather than you picking them out from that list, like numbers on a lottery ticket. You'll be able to make informed choices. They are closed tomorrow, unfortunately, what with it being Christmas and all, but Rai departs with his team at 06:00 hours on Friday. I want you on that flight with them."

"You're allowing me to go off base?" Ezra blinked in shock. When the General requested they have a 'heart-to-heart' yesterday, she hadn't thought this is what he had in mind.

The man scoffed, amused by her reaction. "You'll be traveling with highly trained, deadly operatives on my payroll. I don't choose my men lightly. I doubt you could take them out."

Ezra sat stumped. He had a point. Just look at Captain Rai... the man barely blinks, for goodness' sake.

"When you're back, which I take will take you a couple of days, going through their archives, you can go back to playing god." He took a sip and place the tumbler back on the coaster.

"I'm not playing God, General. You are. I'm merely your pawn." It was her turn to scoff. "Why are you doing this, anyway? I thought the army was for people's protection."

Watergate laughed, actually laughed, bringing out the bottle of whiskey and topping both of their glasses, despite Ezra not having had a sip yet. "Since it's Christmas Eve, and you've caught me in a good mood, I'll humour you. I'll answer any burning questions you have. It's not like you can run off and tell Daddy what's happening here. Not in one piece."

His ominous warning said with mirth, made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle and she took her first sip of the amber liquid, shocked at how disgusting it tasted—not that she was going to show him that. "Who truly concocted this project?"

"You did. I told you this." He raised a toast in her direction. "You're the brains. Archer was the brawns."

Ezra shook her head and gulped down a mouthful of that burning liquid. "I told you. It was a stupid paper written for a hypothetical scenario, to get a job, so I could look after my family."

The General nodded. "Are you that naïve, Doctor? Archer was working with us for years before you came on the scene. It was his way, our way, of accessing cheap labour, using the resource at hand, to see if the collective, fresh minds could come up with ideas we hadn't thought of. While your idea wasn't singular, your method was. For years, Archer has been talking about the measures that needed to be taken to curb the human population. For years, he'd been trying to convince this government or that of some crazy program. And for years, the politicians and the powers that be called him a madman."

"And they listened? Eventually? To this madman?"

"You don't know the extent of what's happening out there, do you?" The General rose from his seat, downed his drink, and nudged Ezra to follow him. "You may as well see the devil we are fighting."

We? Ezra refused to believe there was a 'we', but she wasn't about to dismiss him then, not when he was as candid as he'd ever been. Probably started on the drinks really early... So she followed him, despite her feelings.

Minutes later, down several spirals of staircases, Watergate led her into a large communications and surveillance room. One entire, vast wall of it was covered from floor to ceiling with screens upon screens, playing news and CCTV footage from around the world. She recognised a few of the landmarks from her Capitals of the World book she used to love reading as a child.

On the screens were visions of poverty, malnutrition, chaos in law and order, looting, murder, sales of children, diseases, crops dying or barely alive, vast lands that were nothing but dust bowls, water resources such as dams and rivers all but dry, medicine shortages leading to outright fights at pharmacies, hospitals with no more room for patients that, and morgues with backlogs of rotting bodies nowhere to store, housing shortages leading to an astronomical number of homeless on the streets that are no longer safe.

"Everything of any value in this world—food, medicine, land, housing, water, clothes, crops—you name it, it's going to the highest bidders or the brawniest gangs. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, Dr Mayur, and this isn't even the worse of it." The General stood beside her, his gaze moving from one screen to another. "Just last night, violence broke out in many cities when the news broke that staples like paracetamol and ibuprofens were in short supply. Simple medicine, Doctor. The medicine you and I would have popped like candy when we were young."

"Children are dying of hunger because there's no more milk, not at their mother's breast, not at the cows, not even in tins." He turned to her. "World population will reach twelve billion in a matter of months, despite the violence and lack of life-sustaining resources. At that point, what you see on these screens will happen in every corner of every country around the globe. Humanity has run its course—by our own doing. So you tell me, what's a more humane way to ease the burden on mother nature's resources? Drop bombs willy-nilly in any high-density pops? Would that be fair? To that one population we eradicate? Kill the poor, save the rich? Where would your family be in that equation, I wonder?"

Ezra stared wide-eyed at the General. "You wouldn't."

"No. I wouldn't. You may think me heartless, Dr Mayur, but I refuse to leave this world in the hands of the greedy few." He turned back around to face the wall of screens, terrible images his men sorted through behind computers. "I want to level the playing field. Rich or poor, diseases don't discriminate. At its core, Project Rescue is the survival of the fittest. We're not in the business of killing humans, Dr Mayur, we're just here to help mother nature speed up the evolutionary process. Have you ever seen a society collapse, Doctor? Can you imagine what it will be like, lawlessness? Right or wrong? Right now, it's only a few countries. By the end of next year, it will be the globe. Anarchy. Pure anarchy. A mother murdering another for a pint of expired milk or a moldy slice of bread. Imagine."

Ezra didn't want to imagine. She truly didn't. "So, this is your answer?"

"This is our answer." He nudged his chin towards the wall of screens. "This is a joint venture, Dr Mayur. Finally, most governments around the world saw what Archer saw, and they gave him the license to kill." He turned to her expectantly.

"License to kill?" Was she supposed to know what that meant?

"Bond?" The General sighed. "You don't know the classics, do you?"

Ezra shook her head. Not everyone could afford to spend free time on classics. But that's not how the General took her response. On their walk back, as he escorted her to her room, the man explained to her where the phrase had come from. In a strange way, he reminded her of her father and the game she used to play with him.

"Do you have a family, General?" she asked at her door.

"I used to." The General gave her a faint smile. "Pack warm clothes, Doctor. I hear it's freezing at the Vault."

A/N: Well, that wasn't exactly how I saw this chapter going when I started writing it this morning, but there you have it. Ezra is going somewhere she didn't even know truly existed until now.

According to CCD, they started setting up HCL (high-containment lab) sometime around 1967 (I read it on their website, and don't know how much of it is still true, etc), but there are many who think, just like the global seed vault, one exists out there for world's deadliest diseases. Who knows how much of this rumour is pure speculation (probably all) and how much of it is true, but for the sake of my fictional world, I chose to go with the 'it exists' scenario.

I hope you enjoyed the chapter. Any speculation of your own as to what is to come?

What did you think of Waterford's argument?

(FYI: Total word count is now 27.7k!

Four chapters to go till 'The End'. 13 days to finish it. Can I do it? Let's find out. Wish me luck!)