Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2 by Elizabeth McLaughlin (reading list txt) 📗

to know me in a time of peace would help them understand all that had happened, and I could learn from them all that was to happen.

Every day more of the sick emerged from the shelter to join the colonists. I was pleased that people had adopted that word on their own. The sickness had driven them out of the shelter but establishing a settlement had motivated them to look outwards, toward the future. After the initial adjustment period had passed, people started to really enjoy the surface. More than once I caught Eliza sitting with her eyes shut, a gentle smile playing on her face as the wind whipped through her hair. Piece by piece things were coming together. Each tiny victory bolstered the confidence of the people. The day we got a reliable intranet connection running from the shelter to the surface brought such exuberance it was like Christmas morning. Very little work got done that day.

Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, we crawled forward towards a new life. By and large enthusiasm for the settlement was widespread. A few of Gabriel’s former confidants lazed around and needed some extra encouragement to perform their duties but there weren’t many bumps in the road. I kept myself out of the limelight as much as possible but there remained a never-ending parade of people coming to consult me on every small issue. Now that the settlement possessed the necessary elements of survival it was time to delegate out governance. I prided myself in physicality and my intelligence, but I was getting seriously too old for this shit. Marcus was showing strong leadership qualities and seemed to be well liked. Nicole and Jason had also stepped up, always trying to take items off my to-do list before I even knew they were there.

Killing Gabriel had a surprising unexpected disadvantage. The massive amount of information contained within the shelter’s databanks was still available to us, but most of the shelter—including myself—had grown up with the ability to ask the A.I. to conjure the information up for us. As it stood, we had two entire generations of people who had almost no experience using an operating system of any kind. What should have been a difficult task made simple was made all the much harder as people tried to get up to speed on working their tablets. The amount of information and routines they had to learn was staggering, and more than once I found tablets on the ground that had mysteriously cracked. As for our patience with each other, well, that vacillated too. No one disputed the fact that the settlement was a societal reset. There wasn’t a single person who was so ignorant as to think they were entitled to more than their neighbor. That truth may have been hard to swallow, but any disputes for food, property, or space where quickly worked out. If coming to an understanding meant that a couple of guys came to blows, we let them fight it out. Better they get the aggression out of their systems right away.

The days were getting warmer. I couldn’t have told you what month it was—the shelters were put on their own times and calendars to ensure uniformity—but I believed that Gabriel had exiled me sometime in the late spring. With the appearance of higher temperatures came the introduction of more insects. These varied in size from the tipi of my thumb to the width of my hand. Like their earth-bound counterparts, each bug bore a resemblance to the insects illustrated in our encyclopedias and databases but was markedly different. The insects that I came to know as dragonflies traditionally had a gossamer set of four wings firmly attached to their bodies. Their modern cousins possessed a third pair of wings about a quarter the size of the forward pairs. Evolution that would typically require thousands of years to pass had been shaken up by extreme weather events and radiation. Perhaps these insects had evolved the third set of wings to help them stay aloft in strong winds, or maybe a radiation leak had caused a spontaneous mutation. Either way, it was seriously cool.

The 3D printers were shifted over to producing the components for more permanent housing. There was a single ‘industrial grade’ printer that some lucky soul had found deep in storage. It took the input of five engineering enthusiasts to get the thing running again, but run it did. The machine could use a wide assortment of materials to extrude a concrete-like substance line by line. Sand, dirt, food scraps, even human waste could be substituted for printing ‘ink’. When programmed with a basic design, it was estimated that the printer could produce a family-sized dwelling about every two days. There was one problem. The printer was in the shelter. We would have to devise a way to bring it to the surface while still maintaining enough power to keep the thing going.

I pulled in some of the older people and asked them to meet me that evening around the biggest fire pit in the settlement. If we were going to do this, we had to go all the way back to the earliest method of consensus. I’ll summarize it for you; everyone agreed that there had to be a transition of power, everyone agreed that it should happen sooner rather than later, and absolutely no one could agree on who it should be. Marcus had impressed a number of people with his leadership skills during the sickness, but others maintained that installing him as next leader of the shelter would raise concerns of nepotism. Phoebe Rickman’s name was mentioned as an option as well; her stepping into Sophia Caruso’s shoes and working tirelessly as a physician and authority figure had catapulted her from a veteran member of the medical team into the spotlight as a leadership figure. A small but vocal minority of people believed fervently that Alexander Fang was the man for