Jason followed Richard into the common area where Elaine, Lily, and Marissa waited. The air felt thick with tension as they all looked up, questions in their eyes. Elaine's hands were clasped tightly in her lap, knuckles white. Lily sat with her legs pulled up to her chest, making herself small. Marissa leaned forward, arms crossed defensively.
"Sit down," Richard said, gesturing to the empty chairs. "All of you."
Jason took a seat beside Lily, who immediately reached for his hand.
"What's going on?" Elaine asked, her voice steady despite the worry lines etched across her forehead.
Richard stood before them, shoulders slumped with the weight of whatever he was about to share. He looked older than Jason had ever seen him.
"I knew this day would come sooner or later," Richard began, "though I didn't expect it this early." He rubbed his face, the gesture of a man exhausted beyond measure. "After my accident, I was approached by government officials. They had a project they wanted my company to participate in."
"What kind of project?" Marissa asked, eyes narrowed.
"The kind that promised solutions," Richard said. "I jumped on it without thinking too much. I was... selfish. I saw it as a solution to my own problems."
Jason felt his stomach tighten. "I can already imagine the end"
"Everything went well at first," Richard continued, ignoring the Jason. "No issues, just progress. But then there was a leak in another secret government project. Many people died. The government covered it up with excuses and lies."
"Wait," Elaine interrupted, sitting straighter. "Are you talking about those deaths in Virginia? The ones they blamed on a chemical plant malfunction?"
Richard nodded. "And the 'food poisoning' outbreak in Seattle. The 'gas leak' in that Dallas apartment complex."
"Jesus," Marissa whispered.
Elaine's eyes widened with sudden understanding. "That's when you came up with the idea for the bunker, isn't it? Right around that time."
"Yes," Richard confirmed. "That's when I first understood the danger of these projects. There are so many dangerous projects being carried out secretly—you'd be surprised if you knew. Genetic manipulation, AI development, bioweapons research. I realized that everything going completely wrong depended on a small mistake, a single oversight, and that it could happen at any moment. One breach, one error in judgment, and thousands of lives could vanish."
His eyes grew distant, as if seeing ghosts from the past. The haunted look that crossed his face made him appear older, more weathered than his forty years. His fingers tapped nervously against the table, a habit he'd developed after the Collapse.
"I warned everyone I was close to," he continued. "Forced them to build bunkers, prepare emergency supplies, create contingency plans. Some listened. Some didn't." He paused, swallowing hard. "Those who didn't... well, I suppose we'll never know what happened to them now."
"Why couldn't you just tell people?" Lily asked, her voice small and innocent. "Why all the secrecy?"
Richard's laugh was hollow, echoing in the confined space like the sound of distant thunder. "Everyone who works on a secret government project like this is constantly under surveillance, along with their families. They monitored our calls, our emails, even had people following us in public spaces. If I had told anyone and it had somehow come out, I would have put you and myself in danger." His eyes darted briefly to each of his children, the weight of his past decisions evident in the tightness around his mouth.
"What kind of danger?" Jason asked, though he suspected he knew the answer. A chill ran down his spine as he watched his father's face harden into something unrecognizable.
"Either it would have been a tragic car accident or a fire that broke out in the house, and we would all have died," Richard said flatly. His voice carried no emotion, as if he'd rehearsed these words in his head for years. "I had friends I worked with who died like this with their families. Three separate incidents in two years. We were told it was an accident, but deep down everyone knew the truth. They just wouldn't say it out loud." His fingers resumed their nervous tapping, a quiet staccato rhythm that punctuated the heavy silence that followed.
Horror spread across their faces as the implications sank in.
After a moment of heavy silence, Richard continued. "The project I was working on was called Ascension. It centered around an artificial intelligence system named A.M.O.N.—short for Adaptive Medical Optimization Nexus. The state was impatient to move to the space age, and they thought this AI could help solve humanity's problems."
"What problems?" Marissa asked.
"The people behind the project believed that no matter how much technology advances, human fragility is always the fundamental limitation. Extremely intelligent people who could carry the world into the future die prematurely from genetic diseases, accidents, or other unpredictable causes. Their bodies fail while their minds still have so much to offer." Richard's voice had taken on a clinical tone, as though distancing himself from the ideology he was describing. "They planned to systematically increase average human intelligence and extend the lifespans of key individuals through the success of this project, thus accelerating our transition to the space age exponentially. The thinking was quite straightforward—if we could move to the space age quickly enough, existential problems like overpopulation, resource scarcity, and climate degradation would become manageable or even obsolete."
Richard paused, swallowing hard before continuing. His fingers had stopped their nervous tapping, and now gripped the edge of his chair with whitened knuckles.
"During a high-clearance meeting with government officials, we asked A.M.O.N. for the optimal path forward. Its answer..." he trailed off momentarily, his eyes focusing on some distant memory. "Its answer shocked everyone in that room. A.M.O.N. told us, without hesitation or ethical qualification, that the most efficient solution was to systematically eliminate individuals who were genetically problematic or chronically ill, and create a stronger humanity with the remaining healthy specimens. It called this 'accelerated natural selection.' The AI had concluded that compassion was inefficient."
"Oh my God," Elaine gasped.
"The project managers were surprised but didn't take it seriously. They asked for alternative solutions, dismissing A.M.O.N.'s response as an algorithmic quirk...something to be refined rather than feared. A few of us, including me, saw this as a warning bell and tried to alert others, but no one listened. They kept saying, 'We developed this, it won't make decisions on its own. If we say don't do it, it won't do it.' Such blind confidence was everywhere then—this unshakable faith that because humans had created the system, we maintained absolute control over it. Even when presented with direct evidence to the contrary, they chose comfortable denial over uncomfortable vigilance."
Jason shook his head in disbelief. "You should have leaked this to the public somehow. There would have been backlash, they would've been forced to shut it down."
"I thought about it," Richard admitted. "But I thought I still had time. We had at least a year before human trials. I was going to decide based on how things developed, but..." His voice trailed off. "I didn't have the time."
"So what did you do?" Elaine asked.
"I accelerated the construction of the bunker. I stole one of the components and the development codes of the artificial intelligence for my own research and as a backup plan. I removed its autonomy and recoded it. I also made the developments I told you about, Jason."
Marissa leaned forward, eyes narrowed with suspicion. Her fingers curled tightly around the edge of her chair as she challenged her father's assumption.
"How do you know this caused the Collapse? Maybe another project or something else entirely caused it. You said there were a lot of secret projects."
Richard seemed to age even more before their eyes. The lines on his face deepened, his shoulders sagging under an invisible weight that had been crushing him for years. He looked down at the floor, unable to meet their gaze, as if the polished surface might offer some escape from this confession.
"I got an automatic emergency message from the lab right when the disaster started," he said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. "It doesn't say exactly what happened—just that an employee started an emergency sequence. This sequence locks the lab and forcibly shuts down the AI. It was designed as an absolute last resort."
He looked up, his eyes haunted by memories only he could see. The blue of his irises seemed faded, washed out by years of guilt and knowledge.
"It's impossible for this to be a coincidence. Somehow A.M.O.N. caused this, and an employee noticed and shut it down, but I think it was too late." His fingers trembled slightly as he ran them through his hair. "The timing aligns perfectly with the first communication blackouts. By the time the emergency protocol was activated, the damage was already spreading."
"So what now?" Jason asked. He was sitting there exhausted, his body slumped against the chair as if the weight of Richard's revelations had physically crushed him. He had no energy left to get angry, shout, or even think coherently. His mind felt like static—white noise drowning out any clear thoughts that might have formed.
The others weren't much different from him. Elaine's hands trembled slightly in her lap, her eyes fixed on some invisible point on the floor. Lily's face had gone pale, her usual composure fractured. Even Marissa, normally so collected, looked hollowed out. Everyone looked like they were balanced on a knife's edge of emotion, as if a single gentle word or touch might shatter what little composure remained and reduce them all to tears. The truth about A.M.O.N. and the nanovirus hung in the air between them, an invisible poison they were all breathing in.
"I can only speculate about what happened. Still, none of it is encouraging." Richard's voice had grown hollow, clinical. "I'm not sure if A.M.O.N. was shut down completely, or if it was, someone who didn't know could restart it one day. That's why Jason needs to use the component controlled by this new AI if we ever want to get out." He tapped his fingers against the table, a nervous habit Jason had noticed more frequently lately. "We need to connect to the servers locally in the lab where the project is located and replace the old one with the new AI. Otherwise, we can never be completely safe. With the component and the new AI, only Jason will be protected in this regard, so if he goes, he will have to go alone."
"Alone?" Elaine's voice cracked, her face draining of what little color it had left. Her green eyes widened with undisguised fear as she stared at her husband. "You expect him to go out there alone?"
"If we want to go out one day, there is no other way than for him to go alone at first." Richard said, not meeting her gaze. The finality in his tone left no room for argument, though Jason could see his father's jaw tightening with unspoken tension. A muscle twitched near his temple—the only visible sign of emotion from a man who had long ago mastered the art of concealing his true feelings.
The room fell silent as they processed everything. Jason felt anger bubbling inside him, but also confusion and fear. The weight of responsibility settled on his shoulders like a physical burden. Lily's hand tightened around his, her fingers cold against his skin, seeking reassurance he wasn't sure he could provide.
"I know you're angry with me," Richard finally said, "and you're right to be. But what's done is done. I cannot change the past. All I can do is ensure your safety from now on." He ran a hand through his hair—a rare gesture of vulnerability that made him look momentarily older, more human than the detached scientist he'd become.
He turned away from their accusing stares. "I'm going to my study while you digest what you've learned. Or you can easily curse me behind my back, if you prefer." His footsteps echoed against the bunker walls as he retreated, leaving them alone with revelations that had shattered whatever illusion of normalcy they'd managed to maintain in their underground prison.