Tent City

Chapter 2

It wasn't even a week after my parents died that people started to pester and beg us to swap shelters with them.

Their reason was that there were only 2 of us now, living in a 4-person tent. As space was at a premium, they thought they were entitled to my tent. I refused each request, my tent was my home, and strangers had no right to take that away from me. There were 5 years of memories in this tent, and I wasn't giving that up, even though they thought me selfish.

We weren't supposed to remain in the tent city for as long as we did. When we wanted to leave the first time, a new conflict forced us to stay put. The second time, my mother found out she was pregnant with Ben, and we decided it was safer to stay. She was better off giving birth here, in the tent city than on the side of the road. The tent city was a lot smaller back then. The doctors weren't overworked and had enough medical supplies to handle the number of people living in it.

My mother had quite an easy birth, with no complications. But not even a year after Ben was born, we were inundated with other refugees, displaced from yet another conflict. The medical supplies, food, and water dwindled quicker than they could be replenished, and soon, disease burnt through our city, carried by the numerous others displaced, like we were.

My father knew that we had to leave, but our rations were cut in half and soon we were too weak to travel, by this time we had resigned ourselves to staying where we were, we couldn't escape.

My dad would always reassure me that as soon as he felt stronger, we'd continue our journey to our destination. 

Our destination was an underground science/medical lab, located inside a large rocky mountain.

My Dad was the sole creator of a robot called MCHAP. My Dad also integrated AI ( Artificial Intelligence) into MCHAP's design.

By creating MCHAP, my Dad got to live or work in any lab that had MCHAP as a part of their infrastructure.

MCHAP was the only robot that was approved for use in this particular lab and many other labs that required MCHAP, to man them when the humans could not.

MCHAP was an acronym for the purposes he was used for within the lab, which were; maintenance, control, hospitality, attack, and protection.

He maintained the lab, farming pods, life support systems, waste systems, and security systems. He controlled the main computers and all systems used by the lab. He was in charge of the hospitality of those who were permanently staying in the lab and visitors to the lab. He had numerous attack modes used when he needed to eliminate a threat to the lab, an escaped experiment, etc, and finally, he was used as protection against threats from the outside world and as a precaution for any threats within the lab.

Not only was the lab located deep inside a mountain. The walls were made of thick concrete, but the laboratory also had protection by using the rocks and soil of the mountain as an extra barrier.

The lab had complex life support systems, there was a filtration system for the water, which was collected from a stream that ran beside the mountain and there were also collection points for rainwater, carefully camouflaged at various sections of the mountain.

There was a complex waste system that sterilised and recycled human and animal waste to be used as fertiliser for the crops grown in the farming pods.

The lab gained electricity from the stream and the sun. There was experimental technology that could access these resources but not be seen, by those who would wish to cause the lab and its inhabitants harm.

As for oxygen, there were artificial trees engineered that replicated the oxygen production of real-life trees, and the lab also used the oxygen from outside, which was filtered and released inside the lab and living quarters.

My father kept a black, worn leather diary in his possession. 

As I sat on my sleeping bag, I decided to have a good read of it.

In this old diary he'd record new ideas, upgrades for MCHAP, rough plans on new designs, and right at the very back, on a single blank page was a sequence of numbers, eight in total.

There was nothing else on this page, only the sequence of eight numbers. There were no instructions, no passages that needed the numbers to decrypt, nothing. My Dad died before I got the chance to read the diary and ask him what the numbers represented.

I sighed as I closed the book, I watched my brother sleeping, all be it restlessly. Small whimpers and cries escaped his lips, he even started to suck his thumb. I hadn't seen him do that since he was two. From how he slept and that he had returned to the habit of sucking his thumb, I knew that my parents' death had affected him more than I thought.