“Because we can’t leave the valley to conduct research, we have only a small sample from which to gauge which species survived the last two thousand years unscathed. Birds seem to have come through unaffected. Some insects. But then you’ll realize something’s missing. For instance, there are no crickets. No lightning bugs. And in fourteen years, I haven’t seen a single bee.”
“What are these abbies?”
“It’s easy to think of them as mutants or aberrations, but our name for them truly is a misnomer. Nature doesn’t see things through the prism of good or bad. It rewards efficiency. That’s the beautiful simplicity of evolution. It matches design to environment. In trashing our world, we forced our own transformation into a descendant species from Homo sapiens that adapted, through natural selection, to survive the destruction of human civilization. Line our DNA sequences up side by side, and only seven million letters are different—that’s about half of a percent.”
“Jesus.”
“From a logistical standpoint, abbies are hugely problematic. They’re far more intelligent than the great apes and exponentially more aggressive. We’ve captured a handful over the years. Studied them. Tried to establish communication, but it’s all failed. Their speed and strength is more in line with your average Neanderthal man. At sixty pounds, they’re lethal, and some of them grow to two hundred. You were lucky to survive.”
“That’s why you’ve built fences around Wayward Pines.”
“It’s sobering when you realize we aren’t at the top of the food chain anymore. Occasionally, an abby will get through, but we keep the outskirts of town on motion sensors and the entire valley under sniper surveillance, day and night.”
“Then why didn’t you just—”
“Take you out?” Jenkins smiled. “At first, I wanted the people to do it. Once you reached the canyon, we knew a pack of abbies was in the area. You were unarmed. Why waste ammo?”
“But the residents...they don’t know about any of this?”
“No.”
“What do they think?”
“They woke up here after an accident just like you did—reinjured, of course, in the appropriate places. Through our integration program, they come to understand there’s no leaving. And we have rules and consequences to minimize the complications that arise when someone from 1984 lives next door to someone from 2015. For the residents to thrive, to reproduce, they can’t know they’re all that’s left. They have to live like the world is still out there.”
“But it’s not. So what’s the point of the lie? When you bring them out of suspension, why not just tell them, ‘Congratulations! You’re the sole survivors!’”
“We did that very thing with the first group. We’d just finished rebuilding the town, and we brought everyone down to the church and said, ‘Look, here’s the deal.’ Told them everything.”
“And?”
“Within two years, thirty-five percent had committed suicide. Another twenty percent left town and were slaughtered. Nobody married. No one got pregnant. I lost ninety-three people, Ethan. I cannot—no—humanity cannot afford losses on that scale. Not when our species is this endangered, down to our last eight hundred and eleven souls. I’m not saying our method is perfect, but in all these years, and after trying almost everything, it’s proven the most effective system for growing our population that we’ve landed on.”
“But they always wonder, right? About what’s out there? About where they really are?”
“Some do, but we’re an adaptable species. Through conditioning, like good humans, most come to accept their environment, as long as it isn’t completely devoid of hope.”
“I don’t believe they accept that the world is still out there, when you won’t let them see it.”
“You believe in God, Ethan?”
“No.”
“Many did. Adopted moral codes. Created religions. Murdered in the names of gods they’d never seen or heard. You believe in the universe?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, so you’ve been to space. Seen those distant galaxies firsthand?”
“Point taken.”
“Wayward Pines is just a shrunken world. A small town never left. Fear and faith in the unknown still apply, just on a smaller scale. The boundaries of the world you came from were space and God. In Pines, the boundaries are the cliff walls that protect the town, and the mysterious presence in the mountains, aka me.”
“You’re not a real psychiatrist.”