Day One Hundred Eight:
So here’s the problem. We found the safe and it looks pretty safey. I am confident that Josh could open it with his impressive thermite skills but Josh is confident that if there is anything inside the safe, the thermite will incinerate it.
Any suggestions?
Haha, oh man. Remember Social media where you could actually ask stuff like that? Good times. Or hey, maybe I will just Google “How to open a safe with a ten digit combination lock” oh wait, that’s right. No internet. No anything. I suppose the library might have some insight as to how to get inside this thing but, christ… without a librarian I’m not sure trying to navigate the Dewey Decimal system would be any easier than trying to open this safe with a plastic spoon.
Instead we went through the drawers of the desk and tried to figure out who this room belonged to. After we had a name, Josh pulled out the driver’s licenses and military id’s of all the dead bodies we buried and identified one Dan Ganderfield who apparently was the man in charge behind the desk until the world went to shit.
Next we looked through every scrap of paper in the desk, every trace of information we could find in an attempt to provide us with a combination to the safe. Birthday, no. Address, no. Security Id, no. EOD date, no. No no no no no no no.
While we were doing all of this, Victor said “I got it open”.
Apparently Dan Ganderfield wasn’t too worried about people finding his secrets anymore since he left the actual combination still on the safe. All Victor had to do was pull the handle and make all of us feel like idiots for not trying the obvious.
Inside were documents sealed inside of a red folder with all sorts of warnings about how the information was sensitive and not to be viewed by anyone without the proper security clearance and even though the entire world is dead or mutant… I think all of us were worried for a second about getting thrown in prison.
Once that moment passed we opened the folder and found exactly what Josh was hoping for. Well, sort of.
It didn’t necessarily explain exactly what happened, but it danced around the issue long enough to create an image at least. Apparently NASA had been teamed up with an international symposium… is symposium the right word? Anyway, a group of countries and NASA all got together with the intent to figure out a way to make deep space travel possible.
No one seemed to be able to figure out how exactly to make cryogenics a reality so they opted for examining the hibernation patterns of animals and tried to create a way for this type of action to indefinitely suspend a human’s activity while they traveled across the universe.
Only problem is it didn’t work or rather, worked in ways they weren’t expecting. Instead of allowing human’s to hibernate, they created some sort of virus that instructed the body to cut off all non-essential brain functions and revert to what we see now with the ex-humes.
From what we can tell, it looks like the outbreak started overseas but it’s hard to decide whether or not that’s factual, or just the beginning of the finger pointing process. The message concluded with information that scientists were trying to reverse what they had created but were struggling to make any progress. It also mentioned that the mysterious people we found dead in this bunker were supposed to try to monitor the outside world and report if they were able to find anyone immune to the disease.
Last but not least was a scrap of paper with 39° 16′ 32″ N, 121° 49′ 45″ W hand scrawled across it. Obviously some type of location but where or why we have no idea. I really hope wherever that fucking location is at is close though. Because if not, I’ve got a feeling we’re about to go on a journey.
I confess I plugged those coordinates into Google and ended up at a CIA site! Hope no one's trying to track me now! :>) Interesting and actually believable explanation for the Ex-humes. Now I want to know what those darn coordinates reveal, for real.
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