Chapter 27: Identity

“Huh?” everything was going too fast for Drake. “So you didn’t call me to scold me about earlier?”

“Of course not. That would be a waste of my time. We have much more important matters to discuss.”

The situation had gone from Drake thinking he would be reproached for disrespect to seeing the leader of his country morph into a completely different person and tell him that a well-known doctor who was researching Mayhems for Rencia was actually an alien.

Drake scratched the back of his neck, trying to understand. “Wow… The alien thing was just a theory, but now you came to the same conclusion…? Hold on, why is Comma-… the General here? And why do you think Lazzie is an alien? And why are you telling me?” A lot had to be cleared up.

“Gunther, here, was the one that handed me the evidence for Lazzie being an alien.” He talked as if they knew each other, despite mispronouncing his name just prior, at the meeting. “I’ll show it to you in a moment. As for why I’m telling you, I’ve looked into you quite a bit, and you’re the only person on the Smu-… meeting board that I can trust.”

“Me?” Drake was surprised. “I’m sure there are others you know better.”

Atkinson shook his head. “You really don’t understand the political situation in Rencia, do you?”

Drake gave a confused look. Politics didn’t interest him much and he didn’t pay much mind to it.

The President sighed. “Well, that explains why you and Steve brought up and wanted the Expedition. You just had to drag our faction into it, too, by bringing it up in the meeting. Well, at least you’re not working for them, as I’d expected.”

Drake really couldn’t wrap his head around what this whole new man before him was saying.

“Let’s move on to the explanation,” Rein said. He’d been leaning against a wall with his arms folded, watching the whole situation without interrupting.

“Yes, I was just getting to that.” Warren Atkinson walked back over to the Tabel and started playing a video from his data cube. “Before you all left that SORS, Gunther managed to get a copy of the data of ‘that night’ from there. When you look at the CCTV footage of Beil, you’ll see that there was a camera in the woods near the ‘meteorite’ crash site.”

Drake approached and watched the video on the Tabel. It was the same low-resolution black-and-white video he’d seen at the radar station. The Defense Force members must not have noticed this camera’s feed among the fifty other ones on the screen at the same time.

In the playback, the dark woods near Drake’s house could be seen. He didn’t know the government had placed so many cameras in so many discrete locations. The view gradually became whiter and whiter due to the brightness of the meteoroid burning air above. Eventually, the screen went blank, but the time stamp could still be seen at the bottom right. After a few seconds, it became dark once again. One could now see a meteorite on the ground, in a crater in the distance, and several broken or burning trees around it. The smoke cleared slowly.

Wait, I thought the meteorite vaporized upon impact; it wasn’t there when Rein and the others went. Did they not see it, or…?

Now, from the meteorite came a humanoid figure. It was hard to see due to the poor resolution, darkness, smoke, and distance. Atkinson pinched the screen and zoomed in on it. It was quite blurry. The figure seemed to look at its hand for a moment, before changing form.

Woah, Drake thought as he watched it morph into a human. A chill went down his spine when he recognized that human. No matter how you looked at it, it looked like Dr. Lazzie. The hair, the figure, the details of the face as far as they could make out. It promptly walked out of the scene, headed in the direction of Beil.

Drake turned away. He wanted to watch it again and find some fault—something to use to point out that it wasn’t the Lazzie they knew that they were looking at, but he was too afraid he wouldn’t find any and too sick to stare at reality in the face.

“It can’t be her. She’s been working for the cure to the Blu-… Mayhem virus.”

“If seeing that wasn’t enough, we’ve been collecting info on her. She’s a very shady and suspicious person. Let me list out some stuff:

“She made her way into the government with her groundbreaking research in microbiology a few months ago. Her position grew until a month before The Day of the Apocalypse, by which point she was in a high position and moved her job to this city. She disappeared then, only to reappear at Rencia that day. She was given the position of Head of Research on Mayhems because of past research and competency, but no one knows what she did before joining the government. When asked for any IDs or documents, she told the city Register that she forgot them all in the chaos of the Apocalypse. In whatever databases we have, we can’t find any information on Jillian Lazzie, if that is indeed her name.

“While inquiring at her lab, her assistants and others she works with described her as ‘secretive’, ‘strange’, and ‘sometimes acting suspicious’.”

“Well…” Drake said. “This could be some big misunderstanding…”

“Oh, come on, Drake. It took even us some time to come to face the facts, but this is a bit much. She literally ‘accidentally’ created a fluid that turns anything, including humans, into Mayhems! I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it at school, but Gene Mapping is a technology that we have. Either she created a more potent version of the Mayhem virus by altering the original, or the original was made to be a more passive version of whatever she naturally made, which further supports that this whole thing was intentionally done by aliens. She created the one thing, from within her power in Rencia, that can destroy whatever’s left of humanity!”

Drake couldn’t reject anything the President was saying, but he found it hard to believe. If the President had told him this months ago, he would have thought that he was crazy and laughed it off. “But why would she do this?”

“Who knows why. Our first priority is to see what her intent is.”

“But she’s been trying to help humanity. Her research into Mayhems…”

“She’s been making unrealistic strides in her research. No normal scientist could do that. You may attribute it to her being extremely good at research, but another thing to note is that a person who knows the virus well could easily direct research and easily pretend to make strides ‘discovering’ things.

“Look, we know two things right now: that the Dr. Lazzie we know is most probably an alien, and that aliens caused the Apocalypse.”

“How do we know it was intentional?” Drake asked.

“It could be that it wasn’t, but it very likely was. Let me explain through some history:

“A long time ago—back in the twenty-first century—there was a city that stood around where Rencia stands now. It was destroyed by a nuclear bomb during World War 3.”

Drake remembered the ruins that he saw outside the Walls during the Gorilla incident. Could those broken buildings once have been part of that city? It was hard to tell how much of the damage was caused by nature since then, but it explained why those buildings had been abandoned and left to be reclaimed by nature: nuclear radiation.

“Before the Space Wars began, the prosperous government of this country attempted to build a city upon the foundations of these ruins; since the blueprint of it was ready, all that was needed were some modifications to suit the advancements in technology, such as adding a trolley system and power hubs with SWET[1], and a city could then be built for a cheap price.

“Unfortunately, the Space Wars arrived then, and the government abandoned the project to redirect funds toward the development of rocket ships and spacecraft to fight the other nations. You know what happened after the War: the government became poor and corrupt, the economy never bounced back up, creativity and industry staggered, and have remained stagnant. The mostly-built city remained uninhabited and incomplete for nearly two decades. The only mention of it was in government documents. Politicians were interested in making quick money, not building a city and then selling it, so that was somewhat fortunate for us now.

“Then, six months before the Day of the Apocalypse, the government noticed an anomaly in space, detected by a radar station. There was a large presence in Low Earth Orbit which was emitting faint signals, almost as if there was an invisible object there that was trying to mask its presence by being invisible to any telescope. Due to the Space Treaty, all we could do was send an unmanned spacecraft up there to probe and gather info.”

Drake remembered last November, when the government tried to quietly send a spaceship into space. It attracted a lot of attention in the media and sparked a lot of theories ranging from ‘they sent a man on it to defy the Treaty’, to ‘the government is setting up a base on the moon for humans to survive on when the Apocalypse hits Earth’.

Warren Atkinson continued: “This ship was destroyed. At that point, the few of us in the government who knew about this classified information came to the conclusion that the presence was an alien spaceship. Them destroying our ships showed us hostility. We didn’t know what to do. We knew we didn’t have the technology nor the budget to fight them if it came to war, considering they had the technology for interstellar space travel and camouflage. So, we decided the best thing to do about it was to let the citizens of the country prepare and have us prepare as well.” He paused to allow Drake to catch up to what was being thrown at him all of a sudden and prepare for what he would say next:

“In order to do this, we had scientists and our media start talking about a possible Apocalypse that could take place in the near future…

“The word spread and it became a hot topic over time. The news that we didn’t control had to start talking about it to stay credible and up-to-date. It was a domino effect and our plan was a big success. This way, people were notified about the possibility of an Apocalypse and they would prepare but they wouldn’t panic…”

Drake was silent as he stared at the President’s fully serious face. Until now, Drake had been told that aliens existed and that the Dr. Lazzie was one and that she was probably responsible for the Apocalypse. This was the absolute limit of what Drake could absorb. But now, he’d just been told that all the theories about the Apocalypse that the news, top scientists, and literally everyone had been talking about were actually planted by his own government in an effort to warn them of the Apocalypse.

Having personally seen this desensitization propaganda and the scale of it and its influence for months, it was truly difficult to believe. Drake wasn’t sure of what to feel. On one hand, the government had genuinely tried to warn people of danger while ensuring no chaos was created in the process, but on the other, a lot of death could have been prevented if people had known that the Apocalypse wasn’t some nonsensical conspiracy theory but could actually happen. If people had known, couldn’t they have prepared better? Would it have been worth it? It was a difficult decision, especially considering they didn’t know the aliens’ exact intentions back then. Drake had personally mentally prepared himself for an apocalypse, but, thinking that it could happen was different from actually experiencing it. How much preparation would have been enough?

“Meanwhile,” President Atkinson continued after a second brief pause, “the government directed its efforts into preparing for the Apocalypse through Project Ark. We chose this nearly complete city for time purposes, built a wall around it, and renovated it to look new.”

Drake remembered his father telling him that the city had been there before he’d gotten there six months before the Day of the Apocalypse. This also explained why the city’s housing capacity exceeded the number of people it could feed. The farmland wasn’t planned and the Walls were constructed so that the farmland it encircled would be small, probably to save time and money.

“We had to be secretive about it, but even when people started rumoring about it, it didn’t worry us. It could benefit the… ‘propaganda’ if people saw that even the government could be preparing for it.

“Unfortunately, corrupt politicians who didn’t know what this project was about or didn’t care about it sapped away the funds, most of them choosing, instead, to build their own, private, survival bunkers, and the Walls had to be built on a tight budget. Your father, Bill, did an excellent job designing and overseeing the construction of the Walls despite the restrictions in cost and time, and secrecy required.

“By some good luck, the aliens chose to deploy the Mist curtain after we’d nearly completed the city.

“A select few of us politicians and government officials that helped build this place in exchange for seats in it, and refugees and survivors would come here during the Apocalypse. We would gather here to survive against the Mayhems. It was intended that we would refuge for some time, and once we were ready, we’d go out and fight back. This city would be humanity’s ‘Querencia’,” the President concluded with dramatic effect.

“Nice lesson,” Rein said from the corner of the room. Drake had to admit he looked cool, barely talking and with the posture with his arms crossed and leaning against the wall. The two still hadn’t talked much since the incident. “Now let’s get to the important stuff. What do you think we should do?”

“Me? Why do you need my advice?”

“Every brain counts, and you have a pretty unique one from what the former General and I have observed—way of thinking, that is.”

“Well,” Drake thought, “In order to know more about Dr. Lazzie, we’ll have to confront and interrogate her about this. But if she suspects that we’re onto her, she’d probably be prepared to flee or fight back against us, which means we have to corner her, armed with weapons. We don’t know what kind of abilities she has as an alien, so we need to prepare for all sorts of possibilities. For example, in case she can fly or something, we’ll need to confront her indoors.” Drake thought of this possibility thanks to sci-fi entertainment.

“Hmmm… good idea,” the President said.

Rein agreed. “I would have cut her down the first chance I got: at the meeting. But I thought it ought to tell Warren first.”

I’m sure you could have single-handedly killed her, Drake thought. Rein’s strength was incomparable among humans. In a fight against Rein, no matter who the opponent possibly could be, you could assume that the now-General would win. Arthur had had good technique, but having been old and feeble, couldn’t have won either.

“Alright. Then we need to find a good place in the city to ambush Dr. Lazzie,” Drake said. “We could ask the city Register where she lives and look at a map of the surrounding areas. Then, we’ll get soldiers from the Defense Force…”

“I’d prefer to keep this secretive—with as fewest people knowing as possible,” the President said. They had no idea whether and how many people Lazzie had working for her nor where they could be, observing or living as spies for her. “Only the three of us, along with my trusted secretary know of this operation, and we should be careful about others that we select.”

“That’s true…” From what Arthur had taught Drake in strategy, one should apparently surround themselves with as few and as trustworthy people as possible; these people should be very competent at their jobs. “We’ll need someone who knows the city well and can also give good advice for the plan. Someone trustworthy and wise…” From those parameters, Drake could only think of one person: “My father fits the criteria,” he offered.

Drake’s father, being the overseer of the construction of the Walls, knew the city’s blueprint fairly well. He also had access to the Register and wouldn’t catch any attention if he did look into information from there.

“Bill Vandigg, huh?” The President stroked his chin in thought. “I don’t know him very well, but if you say so. Gunther?” he looked at General Rein.

“From our few encounters at the meeting, I found him to be quite mysterious… but if Drake says he’s trustworthy, then sure. Let’s go talk to him about it.”

[1] Short-range Wireless Electricity Transfer