I, Cassandra

43 | AMADI EZENWA

'Sir?'

He walks away, leaves me disoriented, confused and more than a little angry. If he thinks I am going to go into a hole in the ground to sleep for a millennium to wake up again to god knows what, he can forget it. I want out. I'm ready to check out. I have no intention of sticking around.

He stops at a sideboard where the bottle of 1938 Macallan waits. A soft pop as he uncorks it and pours two fingers into a clean glass. I assume it's for himself. I'm wrong. He comes back and hands me the glass.

I take it, but don't drink.

'The game has changed.' He folds his arms over his chest and looks out over the city, innocent and gleaming in its preserved sunlight. It's hard to imagine it all gone, a burned wasteland.

'G-II was meant to be nothing more than hibernation,' he continues. 'We would sleep while the rest died of hunger, as the human race ground to its miserable halt, leaving only its cities behind. It would not be easy, but once we woke up at least there would be something to start again from.'

I see where this is going. I drink. The Macallan sears my throat. Burns my mind. I like it. The drink of men filled with the promise of themselves. Of their capability to create. And to destroy.

'So now you are caught with your pants down,' I say, cold. 'And you want me to help you out of your mess one thousand years from now. The answer is no.'

His eyes meet mine. 'I am offering you a way out that's worth a billion dollars.'

I scoff and take another sip of the whiskey. 'You assume much to think I want out.'

Silence falls. He eyes me. 'It's been four years since Adiana,' he says, 'I had thought you were over it.'

'Well. I am not. Find someone else to save your neck from the others once they realise where you have taken them.' I laugh. 'It's what you deserve, for what you have done to this world with your insatiable greed. It would almost be worth it just to see you scrabbling in the mud for something to eat.' I take a drink, caught in an undertow of bitterness. 'Because of them, Adiana is dead. And now you will die, too. Poetic, isn't it?'

He waits. I empty the glass, drinking my way through a four-year haze of rage, of the buried fury I eat, sleep and shit twenty-four-seven.

'Then come and watch us die.'

I hand him the glass. He takes it. I go to the sideboard and heft the bottle of Macallan and cradle it in my palm. Run my finger over the letters, written almost one hundred fifty years before. He thinks I will change my mind when I get there. Will try to survive. He's wrong. This isn't about me. It's about her, and her loss. I won't give up until every one of them is dead. I will be the last man on Earth, and her death will be avenged. At last. Purpose. I turn to him and hold up the bottle. 'This comes with me.'

He smiles. He thinks he has won. Just like always. But not this time. Not this time.

A billion dollars. That's what it costs to get a second chance these days. Buried deep under Alpha VII, I keep my expression neutral even as I marvel at the ultimate representation of man's determination to become a god.

It took several trillion dollars to carve and build this underground sanctuary out of solid rock. And it shows. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't this: Sleek. White. Curved walls with perfect lighting. It's like a set from a slick sci-fi film. Except it's not. It's real and chills me to the bone. The hubris of what Genesis II can potentially accomplish is stunning, a mortal dare that screams to be crushed into dust.

Above, the brutal weight of two kilometres of the Earth's mantle presses down on me. A tremor of claustrophobia shears my cells, the deepest part of me resisting where it should not be, far from the air, the sun, the surface. I smother it. I'm here now and won't be let back out. They hooded me before I left the Prime Minister's residence. I could try to find the way out, but I know it's pointless. I am free to roam, but only where the titanium bracelet loaded with all my data and blinks with a life of its own allows it. I roll my gaze back up to the curved roof of the corridor two meters above me, lit from an unknown source and suppress another wave of claustrophobia. It is what it is. I think of Adiana. Of what I intend to do when we reach the other side. It keeps me focussed. Clear.

I've had my debriefing and been assigned my pod in section C-3. I went to see where I would exist for the next thousand years in a state of sub-zero preservation. It's elegant—unnecessarily so. Then again, it's exactly what people who pay a billion dollars would expect for the price tag, not just a second chance but style. A lot of it.

Capsule-shaped and finished in brushed steel, one thousand of them gleam, quiet, in their fractal-like layout, laid out in perfect symmetry throughout the massive torus-shaped vault. Each pod a work of art that could easily be placed in a gallery—a monolith two and a half meters long and one meter wide. A diamond-paned window curves over where one's head would be. I peer in, expecting a jumble of equipment, but there is nothing more than the white interior of a pressure-sensitive mat and head cushion. I have been advised there will be injections beforehand loaded with chemicals, nutrients and 'other things' to help my system survive a millennium of deep cold.

'What 'other things'?' I'd asked the medic checking my vitals.

'Nanobots.' He'd answered without looking up from the tablet streaming the data that defined the essence of my existence.

He didn't expand and I didn't ask. I didn't want to know. If it worked, I would do what needed to be done to avenge Adiana. If it didn't—I would never know. Either way, Adiana would be waiting for me on the other side of this. I would find her, somehow. But right now, I've got thirteen hours to kill before they prep me for sleep. I decide there's no better time to drink to the dreams of men one hundred fifty years dead.