“Before the accident. The tunnel. It was never your fault.”
Cass said nothing and continued down the frozen tunnel. Divots of ice that had been carved out by hand decades before gleamed like the facets of fist-sized diamonds embedded in the walls. The scritching noises of the hyper-frozen snow underfoot—the sound of walking in a world of Styrofoam—were loud in the small tunnel, creating the illusion that the walls were drawing inward and the ceiling shrinking until she was sure her head was brushing the roof above.
Her back felt wooden, as though a plank had been slid under the skin along her spine. Her hands and feet began to tremble, and she stumbled slightly, sending the light of her headlamp wobbling uncertainly. Tears began to well up and she shuddered with a barely contained sob.
“Cassie.”
She turned. Biddi had stopped in the middle of the tunnel. Covered in cold weather gear from head to toe, no part of her face was visible.
“You never told me about the accident, did you?”
Not trusting herself to speak, Cass shook her head.
“Ah, that was foolish of me, wasn’t it?” A pregnant pause followed, broken only by their breathing. “You know, my money was always on you.”
Cass rocked back on her boots, but didn’t move. “Why?”
“I handpicked every one of the subjects. Ferns, we called you. Do you know why? Because you were ‘plants.’ Some idiot at TransAnt came up with the name. But it fit better than they knew. Some of you stagnated, most died. But only one flourished.”
“Biddi, start making sense,” Cass said, her voice a whisper.
“You were part of a grand experiment, love. You guessed as much, as did the feckless Mr. Hanratty, who believed in his own delusion of control. But his scope, much like his heart, wasn’t big enough. Only the bombastic Mr. Keene guessed the truth. You were all part of the experiment. Even me. I might have been in charge of conducting the test, observing the results, but of course I’d been shipped along with all the other rats, hadn’t I? Dumped into the same maze, despite having never agreed with the psych team’s petty goals. Such small minds, such limited ambition. And yet, here I was, right in the mix. I was angry at first, of course. Then, I thought, what better opportunity to put my own theories to the test while simultaneously thumbing my nose at those little shites back in the lab? So I simply . . . accelerated the study.”
“It was you?” Cass swallowed. “You really killed everyone?”
“Of course not. Not directly. I inserted a catalyst here, removed a social barrier there. Not so very different than what happens in any true crisis, isn’t that so?”
“Why would you do that? What could be worth all those lives?”
“Oh, Cassie.” Biddi sighed in disappointment. “Think of every drought, every natural disaster, every man-made catastrophe you’ve ever heard about. What happens? Social constructs we’ve built up over thousands of years disappear in a flash. People kill one another for a crust of bread or a gallon of gas.”
“What’s that got to do with any of this?”
She lifted an arm, gesturing upward to include all of Shackleton. “The crises I fabricated here are nothing compared to what we’re going to face in the future. If we want to continue as a species, it’s not enough to know who can face up to a crisis and survive , we need to know who’s going to transform . And, more importantly, how.”
“You’re telling me this year’s winter-over was a dry run for the apocalypse?”
Her face was obscured, but Biddi’s smile came through her voice. “A wee bit melodramatic, perhaps, but yes. And you needn’t be so negative, dearie. We’re on the cusp of colonizing other planets, creating habitations in the Sahara and at the bottom of the sea, aren’t we? Extraordinary achievements that might be accomplished by exceptional individuals . . . but what happens when ordinary people are asked to do the same?”
“Did you learn what you needed to? Was it worth it?”
“On the whole, no. Our tests are already sophisticated enough to weed out the weak and the infirm. My models predicted nearly everything that happened—from Jun’s suicide to the final riot—on the basis of the psych surveys all of you took a year ago. But TransAnt’s little team of pinheads decided there was nothing like a field test to confirm the theory.”
“And did it?”
“Yes. The prognosis is not good. We started with forty adventurous, intelligent, resourceful subjects. Two of you seemed to show signs of crisis growth. You and Ayres had faced enormous personal, professional, and emotional setbacks only to come out stronger and better than when you went in. Both of you thought of yourselves as failures. Psychological messes. Dangerously fragile. But the truth is, you’re just the kind of people the world needs if we’re going to survive.”