The Eden Project Pt 02 Ch 14

This chapter is non-erotic (but, like, pretty cool anyway)

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Chapter 14: The Academy

The image of Tara and Philip moaning through sweaty, obligatory sex -- in front of several watching people including herself -- preoccupied Ellie to the point that her vision clouded as she followed Tad to the front door of Recruit House. Ellie struggled to overcome the sensory overload. She thought about the two women on shameless display; visions of their cum-slicked pussies blocked her sight. She stumbled loudly as her toes hit one of the poufs in the living room and she nearly lost her balance.

Tad looked around. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, sorry," said Ellie. "I'm... processing."

"Do you need to take a break?" asked Tad. "You can take a seat and have a moment if you need."

"No, I'm fine," said Ellie. "Let's go."

Tad nodded and proceeded to the door with Ellie in pursuit.

She noted Tad's lack of explanation or apologies for what Ellie had just seen. He had offered no comment in the room either; had let Tara and Kelsey speak for themselves when Ellie asked questions. And through the bizarreness, the wrongness of it, Ellie strangely admired Tad's lack of comment on a burden that did not affect him the way it affected the women. Ellie half expected him to follow up with "So this is okay, right?" or else seek some kind of validation from Ellie that she wasn't alarmed. But he did not. He showed her, he let her ask questions, and then he kept walking.

What threw her the most was Tara's and Kelsey's cavalier attitudes. The way they spoke about the topic of their own mandatory breeding was as if Ellie had walked in on them practicing golf swings. It was deeply confusing and difficult to square with; she searched for a way to figure whether Tara's and Kelsey's easy demeanors were merely a product of brainwashing. Consent was important to Ellie, and compulsory sex ran against everything she believed.

To her own surprise, she wasn't running yet. She found herself following Tad to the next stop of the tour. And the indignation and rage that she expected against the idea that women in this place were saddled with such a burden... It didn't quite arrive.

"This is a job. They need me to have babies. We're doing something here."

And then Ellie remembered Riley's comment on the plane:

"It's a really powerful feeling if you let it be."

She struggled with disbelief that these women would merely accept their roles as broodmares to this Reset generation. And yet, she realized, their presence in this community was self-evident of their acceptance. Multiple people had corroborated their freedom to leave with all of the financial support in the world if they chose not to participate.

Ellie thought about all of her impassioned discussions with friends back home on the injustices around sex work; the lack of safety that prostitutes faced doing valid labor in a needlessly criminalized environment. Though she was never shy about speaking up on these topics in Pete's presence, he generally maintained a polite, if somewhat prim and disapproving, silence.

Why, Ellie had often appealed to her college friends in drunken rants, can't we respect sex work like we respect any other work? She asked herself now what the inherent difference was between traditional sex work and the breeding program she had just encountered.

Her own willingness to participate, she supposed.

Pete's voice floated into her head again: You shouldn't have to degrade yourself in this way.

He had spoken in reference to selling plasma.

Ellie had always thought Pete's use of that word, degrade, was filthy. She hadn't been selling her blood to vampires; her plasma was used to make medicine for people with auto-immune diseases. Pete's dismissal of the needs of others when it came to sacrificing one's own comfort was always something that chafed Ellie. This was perhaps no small part of why they broke up.

Were these women degrading themselves?

Ellie supposed it all came down to whether... It... was true. Was the end of the world in fact bearing down? Were these people suffering en masse under the delusions of a mega-wealthy mad man? Or did true circumstances necessitate their bizarre way of life? If the latter, Ellie allowed that the children these women produced were in fact crucially important.

IF it wasn't all lies, then --as Riley had said-- their uteruses might as well be solid 24-karat gold.

She hoped desperately in the moment that Riley was wrong.

Ellie panted again with the effort of following Tad higher up the hill. Just as with Hannah, she was embarrassed to notice Tad's breathing did not labor like her own. The modern campus above (The Eden Acadamy, Ellie now understood) bore down on them now, its observatory standing tall and gleaming white above like a great, sleek castle spire. She thought this building must be visible for miles around.

"How do you keep this place a secret?" breathed Ellie.

"You are surrounded by highly restricted federal land and airspace for about a hundred miles in all directions," said Tad. "Air traffic does not fly past here, and to trespass on this land is a felony. I presume you are aware of Groom Lake?"

"No," said Ellie.

"Area 51, as it is more commonly referred."

"Oh yeah, like with the flying saucers," said Ellie. "Yeah."

Tad laughed again; his bark traveled across the hillside. "If you like. Well, as you know, nobody can get near it and its radius is highly guarded. Same applies here."

"But I know Area 51 exists," said Ellie. "I've never heard any rumors about this place."

"Because nobody is paying attention," said Tad. "Groom Lake is no longer a well-kept secret. In fact, I suspect our government encourages the public fixation on it to prevent curiosity from wandering to other places -- like here. Between that and the rather loud display Fyodor makes of building rockets to Mars to draw the eye, we are gifted with a healthy obscurity."

Ellie felt silly for asking: "Do you know what's happening at Area 51?"

"No," chuckled Tad. "I wish. Security clearance is given on a need-to-know basis. I do not possess any government secrets that I do not need to do my job, and I suspect that is true across the board."

The ground leveled out, and they now stood at the beginnings of a space that had nearly nothing in common with the cascading mountainside village below.

The grass here was monoculture and manicured. It was crisscrossed by paved walkways that Ellie found familiar, resembling the campus sidewalks at her own community college. The key difference, however, was the obvious lack of regard for expense in the buildings themselves. This campus had clearly been built to the tune of tens of billions.

Closest to their left was the smallest building that must have been the clinic; it resembled the suburban, 3rd-party stand-alone emergency rooms sprinkled about Ellie's neighborhood back home. To the right, Ellie observed a far more massive building, windowless, unapologetically brutal, and more than large enough to house a football stadium.

Directly ahead stood the observatory, identifiable from the airport when she had arrived. Its base was wrapped in chunkier sections of building, but the predominant feature was its whitewashed skyward shaft. An enormous telescope lens protruded from a slit across the dome up top.

Ellie clocked a persistent, soft hum traveling through the earth and the air around her -- almost more of a vibration than an actual noise -- and she realized that the top of the observatory was not a stationary structure. The dome itself rotated clockwise, very slowly to the point that the movement was almost imperceptible. She had to squint at the base of the dome to be sure that it was moving at all. In lock-step time, the lens at the top creeped skyward with equal subtlety.

It was quite phallic, and Ellie wondered if that was intentional.

She walked with Tad, gazing around at these impressive surroundings. Tad bore right suddenly and Ellie nearly walked into him.

"This building houses our space training facilities," said Tad, indicating the massive, brutal structure that he now led her towards. "At the risk of boasting, I must say that it is quite a place to behold."

A revolving door was set in the front of the windowless facility. Tad went through first, Ellie occupying the compartment behind him.

She stepped into a cavernous, multi-story lobby. It was windowless but well-lit by white LED strip lighting bordering the floor and ceiling. Ellie expected a reception or security desk but there was none. Besides a few sterile, corporate clusters of lobby furniture, the space was empty. Ellie's flats echoed across the lobby as they slapped the floor.

Two escalators -- one up, one down -- hummed prospective passengers to and from the second-story promenade above. Currently there was no foot traffic in the space.

"It's quiet in here," said Ellie's echo.

"Because everyone is in the middle of training," said Tad. "I reiterate, it is quite a thing to behold."

Tad led Ellie down the center of the lobby, past the escalators, to a pair of metal double doors. He swung a door open for Ellie. A dense, humid smell of chlorine smacked her in the face.

"First I will show you where the Resets practice extra-vehicular activity. Spacewalking," he explained in response to Ellie's flummoxed silence. "Right through here, please."

Ellie stepped into a dark and immense room. The far end, more than a hundred yards away, was barely visible through the humid haze. Most of the floor space here was occupied by a massive swimming pool, and the only lighting on offer came from the pool lights beneath the water. Aquamarine ripples danced across the walls and ceiling above her.

Walkways with safety railing surrounded the pool on all four sides. Technicians in lab coats stood or walked here, fidgeting with iPads and observing the pool beneath. Their level of dress contrasted sharply with the other colonists.

Ellie became aware again of her lack of pants. Nobody gave her a second look, however; the air was thick with chlorine and intense, professional focus. It was nearly as quiet as the lobby, save for the steady drone of unseen equipment that churned the pool, and the ever-so-soft sloshing of water.

"Take a look," said Tad quietly. "Go ahead."

Ellie stepped forward to the railing in front of her and gazed into the water beneath.

As if having suffered an embarrassing crash landing, a massive chunk of space ship was submerged in the pool, which must have been at least fifty feet deep.

Her eyes scanned the equipment. She came to understand that this was not meant to represent an entire space craft, but part of one. The curvature of its outer edges and the hacked-off appearance of the sides suggested it was perhaps 1/20th of a massive bicycle-tire-shaped structure large enough to house a great multitude of passengers.

The pool walls were not solid. Broad windows could be seen underneath the water to grant a lower vantage on the structure, behind which Ellie saw three more observant techs donned in lab coats.

She also saw space suits floating around this structure, about eight of them, and for a foolish moment she thought they were empty until she noticed that the arms and legs of the suits moved through the water with a clumsy rigidity.

"Casey, I don't hear you on comms," said a technician near Ellie. He was speaking into the spindly headset he wore. "Communicate. Use your words."

Ellie didn't hear the response, but the technician did apparently. "That's okay; just tell Gil what you're seeing."

Down in the pool, Ellie followed the technician's gaze to one of the space suits holding on to the side of the submerged structure. Casey had removed a panel and was poking around with a tool at the tubes and wires beneath.

"It won't matter if they're live; your suit will insulate any shock," said the technician in his headset. "But you should've cut this circuit before you started working anyway. Did you remember to do that?" Another pause. "Okay well, we'll remember next time. This is why we practice."

"WOW," Ellie finally said. The technician near her started slightly. He glanced at her and walked a few paces away to reclaim his concentration.

"Not so loud," said Tad, now standing next to Ellie at the railing.

"Sorry."

"It's alright, I should have warned you." Tad was smiling now, more broadly than Ellie had seen before. "Wonderful, is it not?"

"This is... this is... Jesus."

"This is my favorite part of the tour," said Tad. "Fyodor has spared no expense."

"I gathered," said Ellie. "This is really cool."

"And essential," said Tad. "Every Reset older than fifteen will spend many hours in this tank over the next few years."

"Gives me anxiety just looking at them," said Ellie. "I could never do this."

"Then it is fortunate that you do not have to," said Tad, and Ellie heard a dark undertone to this statement. "Time is of the essence; we should proceed upstairs." He tapped the railing twice as if to punctuate the experience, and walked back toward the doors.

Ellie left the railing reluctantly, tearing her eyes from the transfixing sight below, and followed Tad back to the lobby.

Tad mounted the escalator to their right and Ellie followed. "Upstairs is G-force training."

Ellie had a vague notion of what that meant and didn't ask questions; she was lost again in her own thoughts.

No part of her doubted at this point that Fyodor Yeltsin and his bottomless wealth was behind this project. As unbelievable as this all was -- from Hannah's initial story to Tad's and Riley's elaborations, and Ellie's surface-level openness to learn more -- a small voice in the back of her brain had insistently reminded Ellie all day that she was just the newest recruit into a delusional cult. What other reasonable conclusion was there?

The pool chamber they had just left -- the tangible expression not just of insane wealth, but also of engineering and scientific expertise -- was forcing Ellie to start adjusting her conclusions. This caused her throat to tighten. It was not reassuring to begin to doubt that it was all fanatic delusion. On the contrary, despite the airiness of the lobby around her, Ellie felt the walls beginning to close in.

Hannah's speech at IHOP twelve hours ago had made Ellie laugh with incredulity. She thought about the monsoon of conflicting emotions she'd encountered since then. Every component of Hannah's tall tale stubbornly continued to metastasize into reality. Now Ellie felt as though she were circling a drain, coming nearer and nearer to accepting an unacceptable truth.

She experimented cautiously with the thought that she would not live to see forty, and her brain shut it down forcefully. She still couldn't entertain it, but the cognitive dissonance was triggering a physical pain centered around her trachea.

They were on the second-floor promenade overlooking the lobby below. Tad had led Ellie to another set of double doors. He turned to look at Ellie, and apparently she was wearing her thoughts on her face.

"How are you?" asked Tad. His eyes suggested that he knew more than Ellie was letting on. How many recruits had Tad taken on this tour? How many young men and women had Tad stood next to while a terrifying, morbid reality collapsed on top of them right here in this building?

Ellie said, "I'm okay," but her voice failed and she whispered the words. Then she cleared her throat and repeated loudly. "I'm okay."

"Okay," Tad echoed. "We are almost done. Thank you for hanging in there."

They entered the next chamber, and though it was nearly as impressive as the pool chamber down below, Ellie found herself incapable of engaging with it. Her mind was making far too much noise, but she took in enough of her surroundings to get the gist.

This chamber was also very large and housed three massive machines. Technicians floated about the space as they did below, speaking into headsets and tooling with iPads.

The machines themselves were massive steel arms, suspended approximately eight feet off the ground, that each pivoted around a central axis affixed to the floor. On one end of each of these arms was a bulky counterweight, and on the other end, a pod with enough room to house three or four occupants.

Two of these machines were currently spinning rapidly, disturbing the air in the room with rhythmic whooshes. Ellie's hair fluttered in the mechanical breeze. The technicians spoke to the people inside. Trainees were unloading from the one stationary machine while other trainees waited to climb in after them. Ellie vaguely remembered something like this from the movie Space Camp.

More trainees stood against the walls waiting their turn. Most looked at ease and they were very young, chatting and laughing with their cohort, wearing blue coveralls.

Tad beamed at Ellie and waited for an impressed reaction that she couldn't give him. Then his smile dropped. The level of understanding in his gaze made her feel exposed.

"You seem to get the point, am I right? Okay then. We can move on."