Only, the human race still existed outside.
A tear rolled down his cheek. It had been nearly a lifetime since he’d made the worst mistake of his life. Since he and a group of thirty intellectuals lied for the greatest purpose of all — to save the human race.
Habitat Zero was to be a shelter.
A nuclear bunker for humanity. Filled with the brightest minds of the time, selected based on their age, genetics, intelligence, and physical abilities, they joined a list of workers, totaling a community of just five hundred persons.
Given the worst-case scenario of all out nuclear war, Habitat Zero would provide shelter for a small gene pool of the best of humanity.
The obsidian sphere itself was provided by an ancient race, who had done a deal with President J.F. Kennedy.
To this day, he never learned what the president had traded.
In the end, what the sphere had asked of him — his soul.
He closed his eyes, as his mind retraced his history. They say road to hell was paved with good intentions. But he wasn’t so sure. There were plenty of times he could have chosen another path and the reason he didn’t had nothing to do with good intentions.
If he wanted to keep lying to himself as he did to all those around him, he would say that he did it all to protect them, to save humanity. Sometimes good things require people to do terrible things. He swallowed down the guilt, looking at himself with the hard vision of a man who had reached 100 and knew that his time on Earth was short. The Nazis might have made the same argument when they murdered the Jews, disabled children, and the elderly.
He did it because he liked it.
And the only way to make it work was to sever ties with his own government.
He played the image out in his mind. The idea was that the sphere would be towed by a ship out to a secret location and then its seacocks — the oversized drains at the bottom of a boat — would be opened, and the hull flooded, so that the ship and the obsidian sphere would sink to the bottom. In doing so, no one from the surface would ever find them.
The idea was that the sphere would intermittently — twice a year during summer and winter solstice — float a HF radio to the surface via an umbilical line and make a coded communication with the Pentagon.
They even kept in communications for some time, until there were talks that the Cold War was cooling down. The Soviets had lost their will for the fight. People had turned their attention to the space race.
The Pentagon had requested that the program be cancelled.
And Professor Ray Smyth permanently severed the umbilical line.
He told his people that the world above had indeed been destroyed. Nobody knows who fired first. But it no longer mattered who was to blame. The fact was, the world they had once known no longer existed, and it was up to them to survive long enough to see humanity survive.
It was this purpose which drove the men and women of Habitat Zero to continue. They worked hard, making improvements on biosphere technologies, computers, health, and science. When computers became vital to their progress, they built submersible mining machines to extract the vital materials needed to develop the microprocessors from the hydrothermal vents, including platinum, gold, and copper.
He wanted to succeed.
Truly, he believed in the cause, but in the 1960s, no technology was good enough to make a perfect biosphere, and soon it became apparent that they would eventually dissolve their progress and retreat into the dark ages, before starvation, infertility, and eventually death overcame their community.
Refusing to accept this, he sent his only son out into the world.
By sending him technology that they had developed, his son was able to build a tech engineering firm, which rapidly acquired many patents, quickly bringing in millions and eventually billions of dollars. Those dollars were spent purchasing new materials, equipment, and live animal stock to prop up his failing biosphere.
The sphere itself was designed to have four main agricultural rooms, in which animals could be moved from one to the other in an ongoing process to maintain the nutrients of any area. Smyth would then re-introduce new animals where need be in a secluded area, while the majority in Habitat Zero were no wiser.
With outside resources flowing in, Habitat Zero thrived.
Technology progressed faster than anywhere else on Earth. The brightest minds were all locked within a confined space, driven by the goal to save humanity, and in doing so they had overcome unbelievable challenges.
But as he looked out on all those smiling, happy faces, he felt nothing but guilt — for the lives that he stole.
“Is everything all right?” Someone asked.
He forced a smile. “Yes of course. I’m just a little nostalgic. That’s all.”
One of the miners came running into the obsidian cavern. The man was yelling loudly. People started yelling next to him, but Professor Smyth couldn’t make out what they were saying.
He stood up and spoke with the booming voice of a commander. “I will have quiet in the chamber. Tell me,” he said, looking at the miner. “What have you found?”
The miner was breathing hard. He stopped, leaning forward to catch his breath and said, “I found survivors!”
“What?”
“There were survivors on the seabed inside a submarine. I’ve brought them here!”
Chapter Fifty
Sam looked at Dr. Smyth. “You want to tell us what’s going on?”
Her brows furrowed. “An ancient race built this sphere so that humanity could survive in the event of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War between the USSR and USA. My grandfather developed the biosphere technology to make it hospitable for upward of five hundred people.”
Sam took in the obsidian walls. Of course the Master Builders were behind this. But he’d never known them to build a moving craft before. “How does it move?”
“It doesn’t. It was towed here and then its ballast tanks opened so that it sank to the bottom. It’s the obsidian that makes it so strong. It’s built the same why a termite might build its nest, with hundreds of passages and tunnels, surrounded by a single core of energy. This unique heating system allows the sphere to regulate its temperature, with warm and cold areas flowing naturally throughout.”
Sam asked, “What sort of energy system have kept them alive all this time?”
“Nuclear fusion.”
“You mean, nuclear fission?” Sam clarified. “The same sort of system you have on a nuclear-powered submarine — it’s used to propel the vessel and also to run the electrolysis which extracts oxygen from water molecules…”
Dr. Smyth smiled. “No. I meant fusion. You don’t really think that I as a nuclear expert I would mix the two concepts up, do you?”
“Nuclear fusion!” Sam said, his eyes widening. “That’s the holy grail of energy source. True energy. But it’s a myth! Just a theory. Something for the future.”
Marazzato said, “What the hell’s nuclear fusion?”
Sam said, “Fusion power is — or was — a theoretical form of power generation in which energy will be generated by using nuclear fusion reactions to produce heat for electricity generation. In a fusion process, two lighter atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus, and at the same time, they release energy. This is the same process that powers stars like our Sun. It uses hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium and tritium, which react more easily, and create a confined plasma of millions of degrees using inertial methods. The main benefit of the process is that it will provide much more energy than traditional forms of nuclear power, while releasing very little nuclear waste byproducts.”