Double Helix Ch. 13

Each room had its own decontamination chamber and isolated air and water systems. Running the ducting and pipes for that alone took nearly two weeks of hard work during the hottest part of the year. By the middle of August, though, all of the walls and ceiling panels had been put into place and the supporting systems were ready, and the long process of sterilization began.

Tilly and I continued our clandestine hotel meetings, turning them into a weekly ritual. We covered up the nature of our outings by turning them into shopping trips, bringing back supplies from town like dishes, tools, and hardware that we needed around the house and the farm. I fell more in love with her each time we went out together, and not just because of the sex. I enjoyed just being near Tilly. I had never known anyone else who could just sit and listen without becoming bored or passing judgment, but who was able to offer up cogent and startling commentary of her own. Her mother had designed her to love humanity in all its forms and with all of its foliables.

It was during one of these meetings, as we lay spooned together after another round of mind-blowing sex, that Tilly asked if I knew what day it was.

"August, uh, twenty-third, I think."

"Twenty-fourth," she corrected. "What happened one year ago?"

"Oh," I said. "Right. That must have been the day I arrived at Sasha's house."

"The day I met you," she said. "I came to the dinner table. Even in the depths of my depression, I was curious about you. But everything was pain to me then, Norm. Every time I let myself feel, it put me back in that attic, standing over the bodies of those men, full of rage and horror. I thought I was a monster. A few days after that, you brought me a cookie."

I felt a pang of embarrassment at the memory.

"No, you shouldn't feel bad about that," Tilly said. "Yes, I reacted poorly, but it was not your fault. Even back then, you were reaching out to me through the cracks in the wall I had built around my emotions. You were pulling back the veil that isolated me. That moment of pleasure you brought me, tainted as it was by the pain of feeling, that was the start. I began to remember what it was like to be human again."

She turned to face me and we kissed, long and deep. I put a hand on her hip and she ran her fingers through my hair, waking desire in each other. Making love a second time was inevitable, a slow, sweet slide into a joyous abyss that banished a barren and hateful world.

Midway through September, the greenhouse structure was finally complete. Every surface inside each room had been washed and treated with fungicide. Dealing with oomycetes lying dormant in the ground was by far the more difficult problem. During the Rot's initial spread, the spores had reproduced at a frightening rate, and had saturated the soil throughout all of North America as it killed off every species of grass and grain known to mankind.

Tilly's solution was to excavate the soil two feet down and pile it up, all 3700 tons of it, nearby while we erected the structure. We then set up a small soil-treatment plant that Tilly designed, contained within a balloon-like enclosure that isolated it from outside air, to sterilize and enrich the soil, then dump it into the primary decon chamber at the southern end of the complex, where we could pick it up and transport it to each room by shovel and wheelbarrow.

Moving and treating the soil was actually the single most time-consuming part of the process, but we were committed to accomplishing it in phases. Each time a room was filled, we would plant crops and bring the irrigation and ventilation systems online. It took nearly two weeks to get the first room filled with clean soil, but we learned from our mistakes and devised more efficient ways of doing things. Tilly was confident that we would have all sixteen chambers complete, with crops growing, before the year was out.

By the start of October, our hidden network spanned the world, with nodes in universities and private organizations in sixty countries. Nock, Stan, and myself had been dogged in petitioning Agency leadership to speak to us about linking up safe houses, and someone had finally agreed to listen to our case. After a teleconference, where we presented a high-level overview of the network's tech and its purpose, we were put into contact with the Agency's techs, where we were able to demonstrate how secure and difficult to trace our network and its traffic were. A few weeks later, we were approved to begin rolling out the technology to select safe houses in a pilot program.

However precarious our overall future was in the grand scheme, we had faced and tackled most of the problems that we could have any influence over. We had food, money, transportation, and growing resources at our disposal. Within six months, we would be growing enough food to reach self-sufficiency and start running a surplus that we could sell for profit.

It was in the midst of this new bounty and hope for the future that my carefully constructed double-life finally came crashing down.