They passed through a series of old hatchways, taking ladders down deeper and deeper. Finally they came to a door that looked just like the ones to the weather shelters. A glowing keypad was mounted on the wall beside it. “Rory and I found this place years ago,” she told them. “We hide down here during the purges.”
“The purges?” H124 asked.
Rory looked up at her, his mouth set in a grim slash. “Every few months the media troops sweep through the streets and take hundreds of people.”
H124 frowned. “Where do they take them?”
“We’re not sure. But we never see them again,” Rory told her.
Rowan met her gaze. “But after a purge, there’s always a surplus of food cubes.”
H124 didn’t get his meaning right away. “As compensation for taking their friends?”
Rowan shook his head. “No. Remember when I said on the roof of the PPC tower that there wasn’t enough food grown in the gardens to feed everyone? Rumor has it there’s not even enough to feed the citizens who are plugged in and maintaining the city’s infrastructure. The media elite gets food from the plants, and everyone else gets . . . other food cubes.”
Her eyes went wide. “So you’re saying . . .”
“Afraid so.”
She couldn’t believe it. “So the new food cubes are made from . . .” She swallowed. “And that’s why they don’t wipe out everyone in the streets? Because they need them for . . .”
Rowan nodded. “That’s the rumor.”
Rory gestured toward the door and its glowing keypad. “Tessa and I have survived dozens of purges thanks to the tunnels. And now this bunker. No one else knows it’s down here.”
He entered a code, and the door hissed open. He turned and waved them in.
As they stepped inside, Rowan gave a long, low whistle. The area beyond was huge. H124 took it in. It certainly wasn’t a weather shelter. They walked into a cavern of floating displays and servers like the ones in the PPC towers, but much older. It didn’t have the sleek appearance of new tech. Shelves lined with books stood in the center of the room.
“Come look at this,” Rory told them, leading them into the next room. This one was even bigger than the first, with a ceiling at least fifty feet high. On the floor lay a huge silver bag attached to a complex machine with readouts and transmitters. She had no idea what it was.
“What is this place?” Rowan asked.
“We weren’t sure at first, either,” Tessa told him. “But look at this.” She led them back to the anteroom and sat down in front of one of the hovering displays. She waved her hand through it, bringing up a video of the silver thing, now fully inflated and floating up into the sky.
Rory stepped forward to lean over Tessa. Then he turned to them. “We figured out that this thing took off into the sky and sent back information. Not sure why, though.”
“What kind of information?” Rowan asked.
Tessa pulled up a series of text and numbers. “This kind.” It read:
TEST: 1456.3
APOLLO ENGINEERED PARTICLES: detected
PERCENTAGE REMAINING: 92%
H124 remembered Raven’s video about the Apollo project. “Wait—I know about this.”
Rowan looked astounded. “You do? How?”
“I found this old PRD in one of the weather shelters. On it this guy said that a long time ago they sent these sulfate aerosol particles into the air in hopes of reversing the damage humans did to the climate. But it all backfired. It didn’t act the way they’d hoped. Instead of it reflecting heat, a lot of it became trapped. Then one day it came crashing down and made everything worse. So they sent up a different engineered particle, one designed to stay up longer. And it never came back down.” She looked back to the deflated silver object in the other room. “They must have sent that thing up to see if the particles were still up there.”
Rowan looked around. “It’s no artifact. This is relatively new tech. This has got to be Rover.”
She waved her hand through the display, moving between what looked like different projects. One read General Climate Model (GCM), listing a number of different factors beneath it:
Enter Variables:
Methane (CH4 ) content: 3000 ppm
Carbon Dioxide (CO2 ) content: 600 ppm
Nitrous Oxide (N2O) content: 450 ppm
Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Increase: 3°F per century
Prediction: ~7°F temp increase over next 100 years
She noticed she could enter new numbers for any of the variables. “This looks like a way to predict what’s going to happen to the climate in the future. You put in a possible scenario, and it gives you an end result. So they’ve been studying this . . .”
Tessa turned to her. “That’s why we thought of you. If they’ve been sending these sensors up, maybe they could also send one of those things up into the air to divert the space rock.”
H124 didn’t know how it would all work, if it was even possible. She stepped closer to the display, seeing a small line at the bottom. It read: NASA Langley Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment VI Satellite: offline.
NASA. She knew that word. Pulling out her PRD, she brought up the videos she’d taken back in New Atlantic. “I know this word too,” she told them. “It was some kind of organization that dealt with the asteroid pieces.” Hope welled within her. “If this terminal is somehow linked to it . . .”
Rory gestured for her to come closer. “I’ve heard of them too. Take a look at this.” He walked over to the shelves of books and pulled down a volume. It was called A History of NASA. In it, the NASA Langley Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment—or SAGE VI project—was mentioned. It was a satellite that orbited the earth, sending back data. It had been designed to study the effects of the artificial sulfate particles, the
