Brian Evenson - Immobility

“When the time comes for what?”

“When the time comes for humanity to return.”

“Return from where?” asked Horkai.

“From extinction,” said Mahonri. “We’re here with the sacred calling of watching over the records, of preserving them and keeping them safe. And now you are here to join us.”

“Just records?” asked Horkai, thinking, How can anything come back from extinction?

“Excuse me?”

“What about the gardening you’ve been doing? Or is that on your own time?”

“No…,” said Mahonri, dragging the word out long. “That’s part of it, too. We’re much more than clerks. We’re keepers.” He gave a guileless smile. “Would you like the tour?” he asked.

Horkai hesitated, then nodded.

Mahonri set off again, continuing straight ahead. Horkai banged the wheelchair along the cabinets, trying to keep up.

They came to another break in the row, and this time Mahonri turned right. Horkai followed him past aisle after aisle, until they hit a wall. Here, they turned left.

“This all was meant for records, too,” the man said, his voice deadened by the closeness of the cabinets. “But it became clear we needed the space for other things.”

The cabinets abruptly ended, the final one mangled and only half there. Mahonri touched a switch, and an LED bulb came on overhead to reveal an open space a little over two hundred feet square, bound by granite walls on two sides. Filling it were eight man-sized storage tanks arranged like the spokes of a wheel. Six were currently iced and buzzing. Around these were a series of sixteen smaller titanium cylinders, each about three feet in diameter and three feet tall. Only four were iced.

“Power was the hardest thing,” said Mahonri. “At first there was an emergency generator we could use, but we rapidly ran out of fuel. So, we converted to solar cells. You saw them in the parking lot, no doubt. They’re all over the far side of the mountain as well, thousands of panels. Even with that, we still have to keep most of the lights off, and we can never use all the storage pods at once.” He looked around him, gestured to the pods. “Lehi’s in the one closest to us, followed clockwise by Zarahemla, Teancum, Helaman, Enos, and Jonas. Originally we thought we’d save the tanks for humans, freeze them and use them to start over with later, but we couldn’t manage to get any back here without them dying.”

“But aren’t you human?” asked Horkai.

“Of course not,” Mahonri said. “And you’re not either. If you were still human, you’d be dead by now.”

“If we’re not human, what are we?”

“Lots of theological debate over that one,” said Mahonri. “You can look at the commentary if you’d like, the notes that each of us makes when the others are asleep—our thoughts on our callings, our religious musings. The Scriptures aren’t clear about it. Helaman believes we’ve had our actual bodies taken away from us, replaced temporarily by organic machines that are neither hurt nor affected by what destroys an ordinary body. Jonas believes that God works by natural means and that he’s allowed us to be infected by a polyextremophilic bacterium, some sort of Deinococcus, say, or perhaps by a variety of bacteria, and that this has given us our resistance.”

“ Dino- what?”

“Teancum wonders if we’re becoming transfigured beings,” said Mahonri, ignoring him. “Translated by the finger of God from mortals to immortals. The fact that our bodies seem exceptionally resilient seems to support this, though the fact that we seem also to continue to age, albeit somewhat slower than humans, does not. Enos has been very compelling with his arguments for why we’re not human, but seems to have no thoughts on what we actually are.”

“And you, what do you think?”

“Me?” said Mahonri. “I think we’re the guardian angels of the human race,” he said. “We know our calling and we strive to fulfill it. The specifics don’t matter much. That’s enough for me.” He turned and pointed at the storage pods. “I occupy one of the two remaining pods when one of the others wakes up. You can use the other.”

“Why would I want to use the other?”

“You can’t stay awake all the time,” said Mahonri. “You wouldn’t last long enough if you did. If we’re going to be any use at all, we have to stay alive until it’s safe for humans outside. We’ll add more solar panels somehow and work you into the rotation. Instead of being awake for one month and asleep for six, we’ll now be able to be awake for one month and asleep for seven. Thanks to you, we’ll be alive for eight lifetimes instead of seven.”

“Hold on just a…” Horkai started, but Mahonri had already turned away, was approaching one of the nonfrosted titanium cylinders.

“Plants,” he said. “Seeds. They’ve all suffered at least slight exposure, but they’re resilient. Some might grow. Indeed, as you’ve seen, some have.” He walked over to one of the noniced titanium cylinders and opened it, beckoning Horkai forward. Horkai rolled up until he was beside it, used the arms of the wheelchair to lift himself and peer in.

There was a series of square plastic baskets inside, stacked on top of one another. Each was full of clear glass bottles, and each of these in turn was filled with seeds, all kinds, all varieties, each bottle carefully labeled.

“Don’t need to freeze these,” said Mahonri. “Just keep them dry and protected. Though we have a few frozen as well just in case. You can plant a seed that’s three thousand years old, and if it’s been kept in the right conditions chances are it’ll grow. Every once in a while when I wake up, I plant a few, just three or four, not enough to make a dent, not enough that they’ll be missed. Usually they don’t do much, but as you saw, the last batch is still alive. If this one is still alive when it’s time for me to go into storage, I’ll leave a note for the person who comes next.”

He closed the cylinder, turned back to Horkai.

“Don’t worry,” he said, patting Horkai on the shoulder. “I’ll go over it in more detail before I go into storage. I’ll write down what’s important, what you need to know.

“And now…,” he said, turning away, his voice trailing off. He took a pair of cryogenic gloves from where they hung on a hook on the wall and slipped into them. He removed a pair of tongs from its hook as well. He pressed a button on one of the iced cylinders. The lights flickered briefly, then came on a little stronger. The green light on the side of the cylinder went amber, then red.

“After a few moments an alarm sounds,” said Mahonri, “so we’ll have to be quick.” He had worked his hands deeper into the gloves and used them now to force open the cylinder’s lid. “The alarm is meant to attract whichever one of us is awake. If that individual doesn’t respond quickly enough, then it starts waking us up, one by one.”

He reached into the cylinder with the tongs, carefully slid out a small metal cylinder, held it near to Horkai’s face. Horkai could feel the cold radiating off it. No red letters on it. “Metal on the outside to protect it from external contamination, glass core inside. I can’t show it to you. The sample itself has been coated with cryoprotectants: glycols and DMSO. Should protect the sample for almost a millennium.”

“The sample?”

Mahonri looked at him quizzically. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were following me. I thought we were on the same page.”

“And what page is that?” asked Horkai, his voice flat.

“You’ve seen the plants already,” said Mahonri. “The seeds. These are the animals: fertilized embryos, thousands of them, from every kind of animal they could get hold of. This is the ark. What we’re living through now,” he said, gesturing at the walls, “is a modern-day equivalent of the Flood.”