They were all men. If they’d once had hair, it had gone now, the skin bare even where their eyebrows and eyelashes should have been. Their fingernails were so long that they dragged on the base of the tanks, tangled like the dangling roots of the swamp trees near New Hobart. The nails on their toes had browned and curled tightly. One of the men had his eyes slightly open, but they revealed only whiteness. It was impossible to tell whether his eyes were rolled back, or whether all the years of immersion had bleached his irises.
When we’d sailed to the island, Kip and I had seen jellyfish floating in the dark water. The men in the tanks reminded me of those: the formlessness, and the puffy, sodden texture of their flesh.
Piper moved closer to the tanks. His mouth was twisted, his nostrils narrowed—his whole face distorted with disgust.
“Are they alive?” he asked.
I looked more closely. In the front row of tanks, nearest the door, there were still tubes in the men’s noses and wrists. The flesh had grown around the tubes so that it was hard to tell where the skin ended and the tubes began. I pressed my face to the glass and stared at one of the men’s wrists, where a fleshy tuber protruded, swallowing the first few inches of the tube. The machines above the tanks still thrummed, and the man vibrated, nearly imperceptibly, with the machine’s pulse.
In the back row of the tanks, however, the machines had been dismantled, and the tubes stripped away. Two of them still held men, but they floated utterly motionless, the surface of the liquid undisturbed by the electric hum.
I pointed to them. “These ones are dead,” I said. “The liquid’s kept them from rotting, but the Council must’ve taken the machines apart, to see how they worked.”
The last three tanks in the back row were empty, their lids open. The liquid had been drained—only a few inches remained, a sticky puddle at the floor of each tank. Over the lip of one of the tanks, two tubes hung limply.
“And these ones?” Piper gestured his head at the front row, below the intact machines.
“Not dead,” I said. “But not alive, either. There’s nothing there—just their bodies.”
“Are they really from the Before?”
I didn’t need to tell him. The scene in front of us was its own answer. The ancient tanks; the flesh that had grown over the tubes; the skin bleached of color, steeped in centuries of silence.
“Who did this to them?” Piper said. “I thought this started with Zach. Why would somebody tank these people in the Before? They didn’t even have twins—not proper ones like we do.”
I shook my head. “I think they did it to themselves.”
I should have known that the idea for the tanks would have its origin here. The Council, or perhaps Zach himself, had found this and replicated it. In Zach’s hands, these ten tanks had spawned thousands of others. The ten glass tanks in this room had begun something that would be the end of all Omegas. Where Piper and I saw a ghoulish and futile exercise, Zach and the General had seen an opportunity.
I walked to the side wall. A plaque was mounted there. Rust from the wall had corroded it, but when I raised the lamp I could see that somebody in recent years had scraped clean the words engraved in the center, so that they were legible.
HERE THE SURVIVING MEMBERS OF THE ARK’S INTERIM GOVERNMENT ARE PRESERVED, IN THE HOPE THAT IF HUMANITY HAS SURVIVED ELSEWHERE, WE MAY BE FOUND, AND AWAKENED, TO SHARE THE KNOWLEDGE OF OUR TIME, AND TO PASS IT ON TO NEWER GENERATIONS.
“The knowledge of our time?” I said. And I found myself laughing—a hacking laughter that my body threw up as a final defense against what I was seeing. “Waiting, all this time, for humanity to find them. When they knew, all along, about the survivors above them.”
I moved to join Piper, back by the tanks.
“They must’ve realized, in the end,” I went on, “that nobody was coming to find them. They’d heard the message from Elsewhere, but nothing else. All those years. Decades.” I wrinkled my nose as I stared at the bodies. Despite the bloatedness, the men had no deformations. No extra limbs, or missing eyes. Each of the floating men a piece of pickled perfection. They were saving themselves—but not for us. I stood next to Piper, his single arm