The Earth Is (Not) a Cold Dead Place

Chapter 8

They walked through the tunnel, which stretched a good hundred meters into the mountain. Along the way, Beth told John the basics about the place and how the group was using it.They passed an office, which was Beth's room as well as the administrative center of the Arkive. All incoming cargo would go there first in order for her to take a good look and determine what exactly they've got, and who could work on it. Additionally, if anybody had finished their part, she would go through the materials there to see if it was any good. All the pieces were to be constructed in such a way that someone with little to no background knowledge could grasp at least the basics of any particular topic, with more than enough clues and supplemental materials present for them to dive into, if they so desired.

At the end of the main hall were three storage halls, each almost nine meters wide and thirty meters long. Before the project had started, only one of them was actually used to store seeds from around the world, which was the original purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. They had decided to keep that room the way it was, out of respect for all the previous work.

One of the other rooms was used for the storage of the actual Arkive materials. Books, papers, and boxes full of near-indestructible disks were stacked there, organized neatly by their fields, subfields, and required background knowledge.

The third room was used as a living quarters and had some form of heating, as opposed to the other two halls, which were either kept below zero degrees Celsius by the mountain's permafrost or actively cooled down to even lower temperatures in the case of the seed storage area. They had recently turned the cooling system off though, in an effort to save energy. The improvised dormitory was divided into sections for all the members of the project to work on their subprojects and have some private space. Screens of what looked like canvas formed walls in all sorts of shapes. Desks consisted of more boxes, with rectangular pieces of wood or other materials they had around functioning as tabletops. Thankfully, there were actual chairs so they didn't have to sit on those boxes as well. Right by the entrance, the largest of these rooms functioned as a living room of sorts. Any big meetings would happen there, as well as dinner or other joint activities.

Members of the group then came in one by one—either from their own cubicle or from the central tunnel—and gathered around a large table, which was simply a collection of smaller ones. When Simon finally entered the room, Beth started the meeting and the six of them took their seats.

"Good... afternoon I guess, everybody. First things first, we have a new member to add to our team: John."

He instinctively stood up when his name was mentioned. Everybody turned their heads accordingly.

"Ah, yes. That would be me. Sorry to join you so late, as it seems I'm the first with any biology-related expertise. Before all this went down I was active in molecular biology. Feel free to ask for more details later, but for now I'd like to leave it at that if you don't mind, Beth?"

What followed was a brief introduction to the small group of people who had decided to join the project. There was Freya, a linguist who had arrived two days before. Rebecka, a historian who had joined shortly after the darkness had come and was preparing to leave with Simon on his journey back. And finally, Sven, a psychologist who actually lived on the island and one day came knocking on the vault's giant door. John didn't need to be introduced to Simon, but that didn't matter since he refused to take part in the formality anyways. He couldn't sit still and clearly wanted this to be over as soon as possible so he could make his way back down south. A handful of other people had come and gone since the sun's disappearance, but it was not a massive endeavor. No governments or international organizations were involved, and due to the remote location it was nearly impossible for most people to join the Arkive even if they wanted to.