Chapter 40 - The Precipice of Genesis
Evelyn didn't wait for an answer.
With a final, feral scream of defiance that tore through the howling storm, she threw herself out from behind the compressor unit.
"ARTHUR!" she shrieked.
The contractors turned, their weapons barking instantly, pumping half a dozen high-caliber rounds through her torso. But the momentum of her hatred carried her forward. She didn't drop the grenade; she dove straight toward the open fuel drums lining the helicopter’s auxiliary staging area.
"Get down!" Arthur screamed, realizing what she was doing.
*BOOM!*
The fragmentation grenade detonated directly against three thousand gallons of aviation kerosene.
A wall of apocalyptic orange fire erupted into the sky, engulfing the entire starboard side of the helipad. The shockwave flipped the idling Chinook helicopter onto its side, its spinning rotor blades smashing into the concrete deck with catastrophic force, sending lethal shards of titanium spinning in every direction like giant shrapnel blades.
The contractors were instantly scattered, swallowed in the blinding inferno.
"Now, Daniel! Run!" Sarah screamed.
Daniel bolted. He hoisted Noah against his chest, grabbed Sarah’s hand, and surged through the wall of smoke and raining burning debris.
They reached the base of the communications tower just as Arthur Vance emerged from the flames.
The old man was a vision of absolute damnation. His clothes were half-burned away, his face charred to the bone on one side, but in his hand, he held a heavy tactical shotgun.
"SARAH!" Arthur roared, raising the weapon.
Daniel didn't stop. He threw Sarah and Noah through the heavy titanium door of the relay station, spun around, and kicked the heavy door closed just as a blast of twelve-gauge buckshot shredded the external frame.
Daniel slammed the master hydraulic lock.
Outside, Arthur was screaming, firing shot after shot into the reinforced glass viewport of the door, spiderwebbing the bulletproof surface.
Inside the quiet, hum-filled sanctuary of the relay station, the master satellite terminal glowed with ominous amber light:
*SYSTEM BROADCAST INITIATION: T-MINUS 60 SECONDS.*
*GLOBAL RECIPIENTS QUEUED: 41,200,890.*
*ENTER ROOT AUTHORIZATION OR PREPARE FOR DEAD-MAN DEPLOYMENT.*
"Put him on the sensory plate!" Sarah yelled, her fingers flying across the master console, bypassing the security firewalls with the override codes etched into her own mind.
Daniel placed the one-year-old child onto the circular glass biometric plate in the center of the console.
The moment Noah’s bare skin touched the glass, the entire room shifted from amber to an overwhelming, incandescent violet.
The computer monitors shrieked:
*PRIMARY BIOMETRIC MATCH: PROJECT EDEN - ZERO SEED.*
*CELLULAR CIPHER ACCEPTED.*
*WARNING: OVERRIDE WILL PERMANENTLY ALTER RETROVIRAL TRANSMISSION.*
*CHOOSE PROTOCOL:*
*[OPTION 1: NEUTRALIZE GLOBAL PATHOGEN]*
*[OPTION 2: BROADCAST SYSTEMIC RE-WRITE - GENETIC RECONSTRUCTION]*
Sarah froze, her hand hovering over the two glowing buttons on the screen.
"Sarah, what is Option Two?!" Daniel yelled, watching the glass door behind them begin to buckle as Arthur slammed an industrial breaching ram against the hinges.
Sarah turned to Daniel, her eyes wide with unimaginable, horrifying realization.
"Option One saves the forty million people from dying, Daniel," Sarah whispered, her voice trembling with cosmic terror. "Option Two doesn't just save them. It transmits Noah's genetic code to all of them. It rewires their DNA. It creates a new species."
*THUD!*
The heavy door gave way.
Arthur Vance burst into the room, covered in blood and fire, his shotgun leveled straight at Daniel’s chest.
"Step away from the console, Sarah," Arthur whispered, his finger tightening on the trigger. "Or I blow his head off right in front of your son."
Noah looked up from the glass plate. His eyes were no longer human. They were twin pools of blinding, infinite violet starlight.
The countdown hit zero.
*BEEP.*
*COMMENCING GLOBAL TRANSMISSION.*
A deafening, high-frequency tone tore through the speakers of the station, through the communications array, and across the radios and cell phones of every terminal on Earth.
May you like
Sarah’s hand slammed down onto the screen.
And across the world, forty million cribs began to glow.
