“Highly unlikely doesn’t mean impossible,” Birdie said as she sat back down at the table with them.
“One way to get over an irrational fear is to—”
“It’s not irrational,” Birdie interrupted Kale.
Kale raised a brow at this. “On the contrary, an irrational fear is a fear that an individual experiences that doesn’t necessarily have any basis behind it.”
“But it does,” she argued. “And it’s not really a fear. If I fear anything, it’s the possibility of suffocation.”
“That is also irrational,” Kale replied. “For us, anyway.”
“I don’t care that it couldn’t permanently kill me,” Birdie retorted. “And I especially don’t like the fact that I could die on multiple occasions from the same thing. Oh… oh god,” a slightly horrified look plastered her face. “What if there are… people out there; Proprietors that haven’t been kept track of, and they died and were buried, and they woke up in their grave, only to suffocate and die and wake up again and again…”
“Whoa there, sis,” Brian put his hand on her shoulder. “That imagination. Sometimes it surprises me that you’re not the writer in this family.”
“Regeneration can’t process without oxygen,” Kale told her. “We’ve had to exhume bodies in the past. Our bodies don’t begin regeneration until the oxygen levels in the surrounding environment are normal or higher.”
“So, the same would happen for drowning, or being burned to…” Birdie’s eyes grew wide and she looked over to Brian. “We… we had you cremated!” she nearly shouted, then looked back to Kale. “We can come back from that?”
“Actually, no,” Kale looked back and forth between the two of them. “You signed off for him to be cremated. But he never got that far.”
“I have his ashes… I mean I had…”
“Funny thing about a lot of those places,” Kale told her, “Is they don’t mind ‘donating a body to science’ for the right price. What you had was beach sand mixed with fireplace ash and some crushed animal bones. You are correct, however.”
“Uh… about what, now?” Birdie was slightly confused as she was still processing this information.
“Being burned to death. If it’s to the degree of cremation, there is no coming back from that. At least, not to our knowledge. There have been occasions where we were too late to retrieve the body. Early enough before regeneration would’ve started, mind you. Some people waste no time putting deceased family members to rest.”
Birdie and Brian sat in silence for a few moments as Kale took a long drink from her coffee cup. “I guess it’s a good thing we waited,” Birdie said a bit quietly…
Brian led Birdie back to their apartment, through the tunnels. These tunnels were a lot bigger, of course. Aside from the obvious fact that they were underground, it was the same set up as it had been up top. The tunnels were wide and endless. Each standing structure that had been lowered into the ground had its own second foundation in the tunnels, with the lowering structure doubling as a support system for the high ceilings. Birdie felt a little better that she wasn’t having to duck as she walked. The ceilings were at least thirty feet high.
In the blue-tinted lighting, the copper-colored metal and gears took on a more dazzling look. They seemed out of place in the real world. She’d never seen anything like it, outside of fantasy movies she’d seen in her childhood.
“This place is kind of insane,” Birdie commented as they walked.
“I thought we’d already established that.”
“I mean, other than the obvious. The way this place was built, is what I’m talking about. Did the military build it? I know the debriefing area is an old submarine. And I get why it’s separate from everything else. But it seems so out of place compared to all of this,” she waved her hand around at the buildings.
“The military built the tunnels,” Brian told her. “That much I know. It was a lot different before they started constructing for life up top. Apparently there’s this guy, a First-gen, that was this brilliant scientist and mechanical engineer. He came up with the design for everything, and helped build the place. He created the energy system, too. Rumor has it, he was a bit claustrophobic as well,” he smirked. “The military’s system wasn’t adequate enough for his taste, and so he decided to fix it.”
“How do you know so much about that?” Birdie queried.
“Research,” he replied. “Sometimes when I’m writing about my own fictitious world, I tend to forget about the fact that I live pretty much in one, myself. I like to learn about this place; what they let us, anyway. A lot of it is very hush hush, top secret.”
“Why?”
“I think it has to do with whatever those military guys came over for. For safety reasons, I guess. They don’t tell us everything, because they fear if any of us run away, we might be a danger to the rest of us.”
“Makes sense,” she nodded as they continued to walk. “What was his name? The engineer…”
“It’s listed as Rowland ‘Rollo’ Oswyn.”
“That doesn’t sound like an American name,” she commented.
“He wasn’t American,” he confirmed, glancing at her. “That’s the first thing I noticed, too. So I dug a little deeper and discovered he’d come to America with his family as a young man. He was a brilliant inventor and engineer and they recruited him for the military as a strategist, for his renowned genius. His interest in science had him crawling all over the experimental serum, insisting he be part of the trial.”
“There’s public information about all of this?” Birdie looked doubtful.
“Not… really,” he replied. “Remember that friend I told you about?”
“The one that was arrested?”
“That’s the one,” he half-grinned. “He discovered this after years of prying with drunken First-gens on many lonely Friday nights.”
“Something tells me you carried on that legacy after he left.”
“What ever would give you that idea?” he raised a brow, a smirk playing on his lips.
Birdie let out an amused laugh. “So… Oswyn. I take it he’s one of the First-gens that is no longer with us?”
“No one seems to know the answer to that,” Brian told her as they came into view of their apartment building. “Rumor has it he left with the Defectors. But his interests seemed so loyal to this place, it doesn’t seem like that would be the case. He might’ve been killed. Like permanently.”
“Assassinated?”
“Who knows,” he replied with a sigh as they reached their front door. “It doesn’t make much sense, though, to kill off someone who was so important to this place.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed, then was overpowered by a yawn.
“Oh don’t start that,” Brian chided, then was hit with a yawn of his own. “Damn you!”
“Sorry!” she laughed. “I’m kind of exhausted.”
“Your first day top-side on Pritchard’s Island has been an exceptional one. And you just got a huge promotion, as temporary as it might be. I think you should probably get a little sleep before it starts all over again in the morning.”
As they stepped into the apartment, a realization dawned on Birdie. “Oh hell,” she shook her head.
“What?” Brian turned in question.