Removed – Chapter 7

We eat lunch together in the DataComm cafeteria. Sakai catches up on work on his tablet while I read stories from the Nishikyō News Service. Still no news about the old head of the Colonization Committee, Yamada.

Sigh. I move on to my favorite fiction sites instead.

I eat and glance up to find him staring at his work. His hair is gray along the temples, but his face is still young. If he were friends with my mother and father, then that would make him forty-two or forty-three now. My mother and father had married young, as most people do now, and had given birth to me at twenty-two.

I haven’t told Sakai, but on surveillance I’ve seen him, Jiro, and the other man he was with on New Year’s Eve meeting with Minamoto, Taira, and Maeda. It was a strange out-of-body experience to find people I recognized on the videos. My heart beat at ten times its pace watching Jiro talk to these dangerous men. I had almost forgotten about him — almost — though Miko mentioned him in her messages. We had a connection for ten whole heart-stopping seconds, and the magic evaporated as quickly as it began. I was close to calling up his records in the GDB one day but stopped myself. Sakai would find out, and it’s none of my business.

After lunch, Sakai leads me out of the building and into the transitway system.

“Where are we going now?” I sit next to him on the almost empty train.

“We have a few hours this afternoon, so we’re going to Ku 8. You’ve never been before.”

“No. How exciting! I’ve always wanted to visit the Extinction Ward.”

Ku 8 is off-limits to the public. You either are employed to work there or hold classified status like Sakai. He is constantly going places that require special access. Once while viewing video surveillance of Ku 1, I saw Sakai make his way towards Chief Administrator Coen’s private residence. I was nosy and spied on him for an hour after that, then I felt guilty. I haven’t done it again since.

“I’ve persuaded the administration into granting you access for today.”

Our train pulls into the Ku 8 station, and we disembark with a few other passengers. Palm scanners at each exit ensure no one is allowed to enter Ku 8 without proper identification and access.

“Everything in this ward will be packed up and shipped to Yūsei in the next few years, but still everyone is working on preserving what was salvaged from Earth before the Environmental Decline.”

Sakai leads me into one of several holding rooms outside the station exit. The room contains a window on one wall, a door on the other, a table with bins, and a young woman attendant.

“Place all of your belongings in the bins and step forward into the decontamination chamber,” the woman tells us. We are both only carrying our tablets in bags so those go into the bins. The young woman moves off to the right of the chamber to insert them into a machine in the wall.

“Walk in and raise both your arms to the side,” Sakai instructs me. “You’ll be doused with a low-level radiation which will kill any bacteria you brought in.”

I gulp. “Radiation?”

Sakai ignores me.

“On the other side, you will enter a locker room where we’ll store our bags and dress in hazmat scrubs.”

The decontamination chamber is cold and the little whoosh of air that precedes the radiation beep makes me shiver. I try not to think about the life expectancy of Ku 8 employees. You have to really love your work to be blasted with radiation every day.

I join Sakai who is already dressed, and holding the hazmat suit in my hand, I consider my tasks with a renewed sense of purpose. If Sakai and all the people who work here are devoting their lives to saving what’s left of Earth’s treasures, then this cause must be a worthy one.

Through the locker room door stands Section 1 of Ku 8. The Extinction Ward consists of twelve sections extending out from the city in a maze of spirals buried in the land.

“What is this section made of? It looks like… It looks so familiar.” I enter the long tube and wait for Sakai to follow. Stretching down each side of Section 1 are vast shelves stacked with thousands of artifacts.

“Airplanes. Or they were airplanes. The city engineers managed to save several dozen that were sitting in a graveyard in the South. Since they were going to be used for storage, they were buried as is. The design of Ku 8 is a side-by-side spiral so some of these sections are two or three planes wide. Section 1 here is artifact storage.”

He leads the way down the row of shelves, but I want to linger and admire every little thing. Each item is tagged, and, if my tablet hadn’t been confiscated at the door, I’d probably be able to access the section’s catalog. There are pots, jewelry, paintings (The paintings… So colorful), and two rows over are dead animals that are so lifelike, they’re actually a bit scary.

“Wow! Mark, look!” I pull on his arm to get him to stop. I’m no longer twenty but four years old, apparently. Down an adjacent section is a container that could hold a whole human. Glittering in gold, red, and blue paint, it stands behind a shelf of pottery.

“Yes, an Egyptian sarcophagus, and we’re lucky to have that. The museum in New York City was burnt to the ground during the riots. Thirty percent of everything the museum held was lost.”

“I wish I could touch it.” I think, if I ran really quick, I could probably reach the sarcophagus before Sakai caught me.

“Come, Sanaa. These things are all interesting, but they don’t bring back what we’ve lost, just remind us of it. The next section is where the real work is done.”

Through the next doorway is an immense lab, and I count at least sixty people working at stations. “These scientists are replicating the genomes of almost all the animals lost during the Decline. Cell and culture samples will be frozen and shipped to Yūsei so we can populate the planet with species we’re familiar with.”

“Do you think there will be life on Yūsei?” I ask. “Everyone has a theory, but the administration is quiet.”

“That’s because no one knows. The planet is definitely habitable. Right temperature, right atmosphere, right size, but that’s all the data we have.” Sakai clears his throat and motions to me to stay out of the way of a woman carrying a tray of pipettes. In the next aisle over, a distracted man, holding a tray of pipettes in one hand and reading his tablet at the same time, knocks into a cubicle divider and drops everything. Glass shatters, and two people jump to the side.

“Oh ffff.” He closes his eyes and clenches his mouth shut, stopping a swear. “Smitty! Call the clean-bots over here, please.” He sighs and looks miserably at the floor. “A day’s work gone.”

With a flurry of activity and screeching of tiny wheels, the clean-bots zoom in and clear the mess while others walk around like nothing happened. I want clean-bots (I hate cleaning), but they are such a luxury. Only the commercial zones of Nishikyō use them.

“Everyone here is working double shifts. There’s much to be done before we depart.”

“I remember.” I nod at Sakai, and he averts his eyes. Back at my former job, they are working long hours without me.

“You look weary but there’s still much more to see here, including the zoo.”

“Really?” A zoo!

His eyes light up at my exclamation of delight. “I’m now sure this was the right trip for today.”

Through two more sections, Sakai leads me on an extensive tour of the zoo. All of the animals here are less than ten years old. Nishikyō has tigers, lions, giraffes, an elephant, sheep, goats, llamas, horses, birds, reptiles, and a huge tank of fish. Space is so limited, though. Each of these animals (except maybe the fish) will be put into deep sleep for the flight to Yūsei like most of the human population. I gaze into the eyes of a llama and wonder what he will think about hibernating for a few years and waking up on some hostile planet. Probably the same as me if he were aware of his surroundings at all.

“Will scientists replicate cats and dogs and other house pets? I see them in movies but no one has owned one for hundreds of years.”

Sakai ends our tour after the zoo and brings me back to the locker room after the main shift leaves for the evening.

“I believe so. They’ve been cataloged and stored, but none have been replicated. Fish are fairly prevalent as pets in the city, though, especially in Ku 6.”

He takes our hazmat suits and places them in the auto-hamper, then smoothes out his clothing. I catch a glimpse of his tattoo again, and this time Sakai catches me peeking. His hand moves reflexively to his neck, and I turn away. I’m so curious. Now I definitely want to see those tattoos.

“Sanaa…” Sakai’s mood cools considerably. “Tomorrow, I’ll be taking you to meet more people from my clan. Another sensei who you’ll be training with for some time.”

“What sort of training?”

Aren’t I already doing enough? I’m being worked to the bone, and I’m barely sleeping, for obvious reasons. I’m so tired, and he wants to throw more work my way?

An employee enters the room and Sakai’s eyes meet mine. He no longer wants to talk in front of anyone else.

Whatever it is, I’ll find out tomorrow.