Doll

Converted from a field lab, an armored van with a but-still-labeled Chemical Synthetics Inc stopped at the edge of the highway.

A few minutes later, the door on the driver’s side opened and a man in an oxygen mask and yellow protective overalls came out of the van with the corporation logo - a stylized image of a benzene molecule. There was not a single open area on his body: his head was covered with a hood tightly fitting to the mask, his hands were protected by gloves pressed by the cuffs of his sleeves, his trousers were tucked into high army boots.

Then the passenger compartment door opened and two more jumped onto the highway: a woman and a girl of about seven. Both were wearing oxygen masks and dressed in gray-blue chemical protective overalls without emblems.

“Ray, Susie and I will take a walk along the shore, I promised to show her the ocean,” the woman said, and taking the girl by the hand, she led her down the embankment, towards the ocean.

Over the decades since the last repair, the asphalt surface cracked and eroded, and only huge concrete slabs protruding from the sand like the bones of extinct giants of the Mesozoic era did not allow it to completely collapse.

Many years ago fields stretched around the highway; now, on one side, a dead plain with salty sand, clay, and several dried black skeletons of trees that managed to grow in the absence of a man, turned gray. After rare rains, the plain became gray-green for several days from the blue-green algae that was rapidly developing in excess of carbon dioxide. On the other - the ocean, due to the melting of the polar caps of the planet, bit off a significant piece of land, forming a shallow bay, and a section of the highway a hundred miles long was partially flooded.

Ray knew this, even at the station he was looking at satellite maps, he would have turned west much earlier, if not for the desire of a little girl who dreamed of seeing the ocean. He took the binoculars and, turning off the autofocus, which was useless under these conditions, brought it to his eyes. Above the surface of the water stood a yellow, barely distinguishable fog, consisting of small droplets of sulfuric acid, stained with nitrogen oxides.

The surface of the water, covered with small ripples, was covered with a thin brown film of hydrocarbons. Waves sweeping ashore left blurry rainbow spots on the gray sand. From time to time, gas bubbles burst on the surface of the water.

Jenny never saw so much water at once, a huge space suppressed and at the same time attracted her. And the girl did not seem to be impressed by the ocean.

“Someone is not alive,” she said disappointedly, “not like in the photographs.” He was blue on them, and this one was gray.

- These photos are many years old. At that time he was blue, and now he is just very dirty.

“Can you help him become the same?” Asked Susie.

“I don’t know,” said Jenny, “but we will do everything in our power.”

“You talk like doctors in films to a dying patient!”

Jenny smiled.

“Well, our patient is still ...” she hesitated, and a smile seemed to wash off the dirty ocean wave from her face.

- I need to take water samples, do you want to see?

“Nope,” Susie shook her head in the negative as far as the protective suit allowed her. - May I take a walk?

“Only not far,” the woman answered, “and be careful!”

Jenny opened the lab case she had taken with her and pulled out a telescoping tube sampler and a test tube box. Filling the first test tube into the device, she immersed a thin tube in water; then, when the test tube was filled with a cloudy liquid, she did the same with the others, immersing the tube in the ground at different depths.

The device showed a high content of methane, hydrogen sulfide and other vital products of anaerobic bacteria. The rest, including the composition of microflora, can be found in the laboratory.

“At least some life, if it was possible to organize a full-fledged expedition ...” Despite the internal protests, the scientist spoke again in it.

Jenny once calculated that even the modest amount of oxygen produced by the algae that live in open, least polluted parts of the oceans would be enough to maintain its concentration in the atmosphere at least fourteen percent, instead of the current miserable seven. But, as it turned out, almost all of it was immediately used by bacteria to oxidize a huge amount of organic matter washed away from the continents into the ocean.

“It is interesting,” she thought, “that if somewhere deep down, far from the ocean currents, the oases of life with pure water are still preserved?” It’s a pity that we will never know this ... "

The woman's thoughts were interrupted by Susie's scream in which Jenny made out only her name. Throwing everything, she abruptly jumped up, from which her eyes darkened for a moment, and began to inspect the surroundings in search of a girl.

Susie showed up a few hundred yards to the south, leaning over something. Jenny breathed a sigh of relief. “Everything seems to be alright with her, how could I forget about her? It was impossible to let her go alone. " Thoughts flickered in her head, like frightened birds. Noticing that Jenny was looking at her, the girl waved her hand.

The beach was littered with piles of rubbish that could be used to study the human history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Perhaps someday, they will become real finds for future archaeologists. The wreckage of televisions, glass bottles, rusty cans, plastic boxes of various colors and sizes, ragged rags that used to be clothes, broken telephones, pencils, framed mirrors, sunglasses ... The ocean kindly returned to the man his unsolicited gifts.

When Jenny came closer, she saw what caught Susie's attention.

On the shore in the mud lay an Asian articulated doll, about sixteen inches long. Time and aggressive conditions thoroughly shook her: the once blue dress and bright hair faded, the polyurethane skin swelled and cracked, and the inner cables weakened or decayed, as a result of which the doll was in an unnatural position, with twisted limbs, as if convulsed.

“Jenny, take her with you?” - asked the girl. - I will call her Lisa.

“Sue, don't touch her!” - shouted Jenny. - Look how dirty it is, it can contain dangerous microbes. We won’t be able to take it, and even if they did, the military wouldn’t let us in.

“But she is cold and painful!” Susie sobbed, as if it was her, not a doll, who was to stay on a deserted beach.

"Here is another problem ..."

Jenny looked around and noticed the remains of some kind of reinforced concrete structure sticking out of the sand five hundred yards to the north. Perhaps this was one of the pillars of the second canvas, which was never completed.

“Good,” she said, “we will take her to these fragments, they will protect her from rain and wind as much as possible.”

Jenny pulled sterile napkins from her pocket and, carefully wrapping them around the doll, tried to pick it up. The dirt resisted for several seconds, but in the end, sobbing loudly, let it go, making Jenny almost lose her balance. A lot of dirt poured into the hard doll itself, and this made it even harder.

Rusty steel rods protruding from coastal sediments, like giant petrified tentacles, twisted and pierced broken concrete slabs.

Leaving the girl at a safe distance from the support, Jenny walked around this symbol of former human greatness: there were no mosses, no lichens, or even algae on it - only gray-green spots of the bacterial film in damp places.

- Sue! - called Jenny, - there is a gap between the plates, a completely safe place for her. How do you think?

The girl nodded.

Walking close to the crumbling plates and trying not to catch the rods, the woman carefully put the doll in a niche, removed the napkins from it and returned to Susie.

“Well, that’s it,” she said, treating the gloves with an antiseptic spray. “Let's go to the van soon,” Ray must be worried.

She took the girl by the hand and they headed in the opposite direction. After a few steps, Susie suddenly stopped, turned to the side of an impromptu sarcophagus and shouted, “Farewell, Lisa, I will miss you!”

This cliche phrase, usually sounding fake from the lips of an adult, touched Jenny with her naivety and sincerity that she took her breath away.

A thought sounded in my head: “No, not now. I have no right to show my weakness. ”

But one stubborn tear still rolled down her cheek. Jenny ran her free hand over her face to brush her away unnoticed, but her hand slipped on the glass of the oxygen mask.

As luck would have it, the walkie-talkie turned on and Ray's voice rang out in the earpiece:

“Is everything all right with you?”

Jenny swallowed, gathered her thoughts and answered in a firm voice:

“It's okay, we're already coming back.”

Going to the place where she threw her tools, Jenny stopped and looked again at the dead ocean; her gaze first wandered aimlessly near the shore, and then suddenly fell off and rushed off into the horizon drowning in the fog, where the ocean met the sky, and it was no longer possible to make out where one ended and the other began, because they were both equally gray and dirty . And even the brown acid clouds thickened in the sky during their walk were reflected in the water by torn oil stains.

One cloud was like the tent of her Native American ancestors that her mother told her about. It seemed to Jenny that she was hearing the sounds of tom-toms, and she was already ready to see the running out Indians in national costumes and headdresses with feathers, but she soon realized that it was only blood that was beating in her temples.

These images evoked in her ancient instincts, lost in the fog of millennia, they held her mind and made her want to immediately tear off her mask and protective suit - this second skin without which a person could not survive in modern conditions - and finally breathe deeply, feel the smells of the world and feel the touch of the wind.

The woman did not notice how her hand reached for the overalls air valve.

“Jenny, what's wrong with you?” Asked Susie, startled.

Jenny came to her senses and drew back her hand:

“Nothing ... just a little thought ...” she answered, breathing abruptly, “go to Ray, I’m right now ...

“ God, what am I doing! ”

Sweat rolled across her face, her whole back was wet.

“Sigh - exhale, inhale - exhale, inhale - exhale. So much better".

Restoring rhythm and starting to breathe more slowly, Jenny stood for several minutes and looked at the ocean.

“Goodbye,” she said, disconnecting her connection, “I will miss you,” and she smiled.

Then she took out an old shabby photo from her overalls pocket, looked at her for the last time and, lowering her hand, furtively, as if ashamed of her act, unclenched her fingers, allowing her to fall on the dirty sand.

They climbed the highway along the same gentle slope along which they descended earlier to the shore. Opening the door of the van, Jenny first helped Susie come in, then climbed herself. The vacuum mechanism pulled the door into the slots and fixed it tightly, after which the cold synthetic female voice of the on-board computer sounded:

“Attention! Camera purging; do not remove protective suits. ”

The air pumps began to rustle, and cold pulled through the cabin.

After the noise died down and green letters lit up on the wall, Jenny happily unfastened her jumpsuit, took off her mask and helped Suzy to undress.

In the air for several minutes, a fresh smell of ozone was felt.

“Jenny,” Susie called softly.

- What, my dear? - Jenny sat next to her.

- Lisa is probably very sad alone now. Tell me, ”she suddenly raised her head and looked at Jenny with her big blue eyes,“ will you leave me? ”

- Of course not! - Jenny hugged her. “You are the most precious thing I have.”

“And we will never part?”

- Never! - she stroked the girl on the head. “Now take a little rest, we still have a long way to go.”

She lowered the chair, laid Suzy down and covered her with her jacket, after which she left the passenger compartment and, closing the door behind herself, fell into the passenger seat. Her head simply cracked from obsessive thoughts and sensations that she experienced on the shore.

- How did everything go? Ray asked. He sat in the driver's seat, his eyes fixed on the void and his hands on his knees, not moving, like an antique plaster statue; only his eyes from time to time looked at the screen with a satellite map of the area and again returned to the contemplation of the highway.

Slim, Ray was one of those who are called people without age: if you do not look at the fine wrinkles near the eyes, he could equally well be given thirty, forty, and fifty.

On his face froze an eternal indelible sadness, mixed with indifference, like the imprint of a deep personal tragedy experienced many years ago.

“I wonder if I should tell him about how I nearly committed suicide?”

“Great,” said Jenny.

- You won’t tell me.

- Just a terrible headache. - Jenny for a long time could not get used to his slightly sarcastic manner of communication, but in the end I realized that he could not otherwise and had learned to ignore. Especially if her father considered Ray his friend, despite his amazing ability to offend everyone around, not noticing it himself. Although Ray himself, in her opinion, did not consider anyone else as a friend.

“Have you taken the samples?”

- Yes, they are in a thermostat.

- Anything interesting?

- Nothing special, methane and hydrogen sulfide in huge numbers indicate the presence of anaerobic bacteria, gasoline there, probably, no less than water, even salts of heavy metals - the electrical conductivity is just off scale. You will do a detailed analysis without me.

There was a pause in the air for several minutes. Too tense to last longer.

“This is a point of no return,” Ray said, once again looking at how the small green numbers in the corner of the screen counted down the remaining air supplies.

- In terms of? - Jenny did not immediately understand what he was driving at.

“Now you can still come back, but if you change your mind later, there’s only enough oxygen for the return trip, and if you turn on the air filters, there’s not enough fuel.”

“I won’t change my mind,” Jenny answered dryly, “I decided everything many years ago.”

“Do you think she will be better off with the military?”

- And we are not going to live with the military.

- Here is how? - Ray did not look surprised. “So you decided to stay in Albuquerque?”

- Exactly, you heard that the military restored several skyscrapers in the city center, sealed them with foam and put air filters. There are greenhouses and a pool. They relocated some civilian families with children in them, so Susie will have someone to play with.

“Still stupid of you.”

- And why is that?

“There is forty miles between the military base and the city, if anything happens to you, the military may have neither the time nor the desire to save you.”

“I know,” said Jenny, “and yet I want to live in a comfortable apartment, fall asleep and wake up in bed with my loved one, look at the Sun, just walk down the street in the end!” Even if in overalls ... I know that this is just an illusion, but I want at least the illusion of a normal human life - and at your station minus fourteen floors of glass and steel, I feel like in prison, and I don’t want to, so Susie feels the same way.

“But why are you sure that she will feel bad at the Vault?”

“Because I see how she has changed, she always looks sad.” Suzy increasingly draws attention to the fact that the world that she learns from your studies and the information network is not at all like the world on the surface. She is always upset when it turns out that an animal or plant from a photograph disappeared many years ago. Just like me at one time. But I had a father and mother, I had a sister, I had a childhood, and she had nothing but endless examinations, tests, classes ... Damn it, I wasn’t even able to see her!

“I'm sorry,” Ray said in his characteristic manner, “that the best research center of our Corporation has left you such negative memories, but let's look at it a little differently.” At the Station, she will be able to get an excellent education, she will have excellent conditions for self-realization, and, just as importantly, her life would be better protected than anywhere else. This is your future and the future of all mankind ...

- Ray, wake up! - exploded Jenny, - all the time I try to tell you, but you can not hear me! Mankind has no future, and we do not have it. Just look around to see this. You, you are all in the corporation, still living in the past, as if nothing had happened, trying to save all this. Why Ray? Isn't it better for all of us to just disappear? After millions of years, the planet will be cleansed and become habitable again, and bacteria and algae will evolve into new diverse species that will fill it, as if it had always been; only we will not be there anymore, but this is for the better - we did not deserve the right to live on Earth after what we did to it.

Jenny, without fully understanding why, deemed Ray's strange devotion to the interests of the Corporation deeply wrong. In the current circumstances, when the time of mankind was coming to an end, and nothing could stop its final disappearance, it seemed to her somehow wrong against ... - she could not find the right words until it finally dawned on her: against the natural course of history ! Exactly! Trilobites, stegocephals and dinosaurs - they all eventually died out. Of course, they, unlike people, did not have a mind, but there was something better: the instinct of self-preservation. They desperately resisted to the best of their abilities, trying to adapt to new living conditions, a possible cause of which they themselves were changing. And yet they became extinct. Evolution always reserves the last word.

“It is better to leave yourself quickly and painlessly than to stretch the agony for several generations. Otherwise, our children will curse us for giving birth to them in a planet completely unsuitable for life. "

- You know, sometimes it seems to me that your leadership has long realized the meaninglessness of all this imaginary struggle. When was the last time they contacted you? I would not be surprised if they left their headquarters in Osaka to spend the rest of their time with their families. Can we all do the same? Oh yes! You have no family!

Jenny was silent, she hoped that Ray would at least somehow react to these, as it seemed to her, insulting words for him: raise her voice, slap her face or comfort her. But he was silent.

“No, humanity has a future, perhaps too distant, but it does,” Ray said after a minute in his usual calm voice. “This little girl — your niece — is the future.” She’s the first child artificially raised outside a woman, she’s smarter, she learns faster, she needs less oxygen, and she can tolerate more pollution ...

“First of all,” Jenny interrupted, “she is a child who needs a family, not your experimental rabbit .

“The experiment was a condition that your sister herself agreed to.” We acquainted her with all the information regarding the project and the participation of her unborn child.

“It was probably easy to bargain with a dying man,” Jenny thought with resentment, and said out loud:

“But she had no choice!”

“Everyone always has a choice,” Ray answered, “it's just that everyone has their own price.” Your sister made her choice consciously, and thanks to him you now have this girl.

“Ray, why have you never called her by name?” Is she just an experiment for you?

Instead of answering, Ray pulled a small silver plate from his pocket and laid it on a chair next to Jenny.

- What is it? She asked.

“Her medical record,” said Ray. “I wrote it just in case, I hope you do not need it.”

Jenny knew this was classified information, and Ray could be in trouble if it became known. Suddenly she felt guilty. In the end, Ray did more for them than he promised, despite the fact that after her father died, there would be no one to influence his decision.
“Ray,” she whispered, “I'm sorry ...”

Jenny bent to hug him, but Ray turned away without answering, and Jenny, embarrassed, returned to her chair.

She did not know what Ray was actually guided by when committing these risky acts: firstly, having decided to personally accompany them on this journey, and secondly, having copied secret information - Ray was always a mystery to her, but she wanted to believe that the main reason was Susie’s concern, not the desire to preserve important scientific results. Well aware of the naivete of this hope, Jenny, however, could not help herself.

“Hug him goodbye,” she promised herself.

In the meantime, Ray put his finger on the fingerprint scanner on the control panel, and a green laser beam ran through his eyes.

- Ray Galacher, status: access is allowed, control mode: manual. Welcome aboard, Ray. - came from the speakers.

Jenny involuntarily cringed.

This nasty mechanical voice again, she thought. “Was it really impossible to record a living person, or at least make it a little more natural?”

No matter how far they went when she heard this voice, it seemed to her that she was still at the Station, that the voice of the on-board computer was the voice of the Station, cold, emphasized synthetic, devoid of any emotions - it was a reflection of her atmosphere, from which Jenny wanted to leave.

The van started off softly, smoothly taxied to the middle of the highway and began to pick up speed. When he was already hiding in the morning fog, a sudden gust of wind turned over a photograph thrown on the sand. It captured a tropical beach with white coral sand, green thickets and an ocean with blue clear water.

A few hours later, the rays of the sun looked into a niche with a doll, illuminating her forever open blue eyes, the same color as Suzy.