Chapter 19

Several months had passed by after Conor's incident and his close brush with the FBI. A kind agent had paired up with a lawyer after hearing Conor's statement about the night at the lab and they successfully found evidence that the CCTV footage was indeed fake.

Mr. Atlas had apologised to Conor for the misunderstanding and promised better security at the lab. Conor approved of all that and asked for a small pantry too.

While Conor was away, research work did not stop. Data from the test sites near the poles were successfully gathered and almost all the simulations worked. Conor was very impressed and relieved at his team's work.

One evening after the tea break, Conor went to Alyssa who was still enjoying her cookie not knowing that break time was over.

'Excuse me, break's over.' Conor said. Alyssa's eyes widened in shock as she stared at her watch, not being able to comprehend why she was still sitting in the pantry.

'I'm sorry, I'll be going now.' Alyssa said as she stuffed the cookie inside her mouth and chugged water.

'Wait, wait. I want to talk about the research.'

'Oh sure, what do you want to know?' Alyssa asked.

'Well, Cooper said that the sims really did work successfully with possible outcomes for survival but he didn't tell me details. I want to know more, that's it.' Conor explained.

'Um, okay. Let me just grab my laptop.' Alyssa said and went to her workspace. Conor nodded and sat there waiting. Alyssa came back shortly after and placed the laptop on the countertop. The screen was showing several data charts.

'Well, you can see here pretty clearly. The success rate of the simulations was eighty-nine percent. This consists of all the different metadata of course and we re-tested each combination of variable three times for accuracy.' Alyssa explained.

'This look pretty fantastic; I mean eighty-nine percent is not bad at all!' Conor exclaimed.

'But um there's a catch. According to Cooper, the failed simulations showed a trend.' Alyssa said with a nervous voice. She changed to another window on her screen and it showed a table.

'No. You're kidding.' Conor said. The top row said: "Most likely reason for failure: unsustainable population".

Conor was speechless. This little thing meant that his whole research has failed, or at least is close to failing.

'Can't we fix that?' Conor asked.

'We were about to ask you that actually.' Alyssa replied.

'Don't you guys have any opinions-?' Conor asked back.

'Well, the geo team told us that they can go back to the charts and find more suitable locations but we don't know if we should let them start in case it becomes a waste of resources.' Alyssa said.

'It's fine, let them do it. We don't have any choice but to do it. Tell them to find more suitable location and update the botany team to find crops too. After all is done, run the simulators again, okay?' Conor ordered. Alyssa nodded and hurried off to brief the teams with their new duties.

Later that day, a small meeting was held between team leaders and Conor to discuss matters. They all sat down at the conference room and each took a cup of coffee with them.

'So, anything to report first?' Conor said.

'I have something.' said Lucas, the head of the geo team. 'We have found three more suitable locations with perfect climatic conditions for growth. Zachary here also confirmed that sustaining crops in all locations won't be a hassle.' He explained. Zachary who was the head of the botanical team, acknowledged all the information.

'Great job, no time was wasted which is essential. Cooper, anything from the simulations?' Conor asked.

'We re-ran the errant sims that failed before to see if they were just a miscalculation. The computer was set to run everything again at least twenty times but still the same.' Cooper announced.

'That's not a big problem now, we have solutions for that.' Conor said.

'We will be conducting simulations again tomorrow using the new data collected for the three new locations. I will hand you the report when it is done.' Cooper informed with a slight smile. Conor nodded slowly to acknowledge.

After a little bit more discussion, the meeting was over and everyone went back to their own places to clean up and sort out things before closing the lab for the day.

Conor went home after ensuring that the lab was securely closed and the guards came by the lab. As he opened the gate to his new apartment, he realized that something was poking out from under the door.

He opened the door slowly and picked up the object, which turned out to be a piece of paper. What he saw annoyed him and made him insecure at the same time. The paper was scribbled with the words: "Stop your research now!".

Even though it was technically a threat, Conor didn't even give it a second glance and threw it away. He took a cold shower after that and hit the bed, drifting to sleep almost immediately.