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"What Wayward Pines is Ethanit’s the last town on earth A living time capsule for our way of life For the American Dream The residents, the crew, me, youwe’re all that’s left of the species Homo sapiens" "And you know this how?" "I’ve sent out a handful of reconnaissance teams over the years Those who inable Without the protection and infrastructure of a place like Wayward Pines, no one could survive Since o, we’ve had a radio beacon continuously transency frequency I even made the decision to broadcast the coordinates of Pines on the remote chance there were other humans out there No one’s shown up on our doorstep No one’s ever made contact I said this is Boise, but it’s not There is no Boise, no Idaho, no A" "How did it all end?" "We’ll never knoe? I went to sleep shortly after you so I could still have twenty-five years in Wayward Pines postsuspension And after 2032, ere all sleeping in the uess? By 2300, I esti up And with diversity being the raw material of evolution, by 2500, we could’ve been classified as a co closer and closer to so less and less huine the social and economic ramifications An entire civilization built for huenocides Maybe the end came over forty terrible years Maybe it took a thousand Maybe a full-scale nuclear iped out billions in the span of a ht it was end tie All we knohat’s out there now" "And what is that?" "Aberrations We call them abbies Those translucent-skinned creatures that nearly killed you in the canyon Since co out of suspension, I’ve traveled only three ti today It’s quite risky Farthest we got was Seattle Or where Seattle used to be We had to haul fuel Barelyfrom what I saw, there must be hundreds of millions of those creatures just on this continent alone They’re predators, of course, and if their population is as healthy as I’ deer or other ruminant population It’s even possible that so the plains in large numbers "Because we can’t leave the valley to conduct research, we have only a se which species survived the last two thousand years unscathed Birds seeh unaffected So 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 nas through the prisood or bad It rewards efficiency That’s the beautiful sin to environ our world, we forced our own transformation into a descendant species froh 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""Froely problereat apes and exponentially ressive We’ve captured a handful over the years Studied them Tried to establish coth is e Neanderthal row 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 anyh, 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 residentsthey 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 progra 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 theratulations! 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 the" "And?" "Within two years, thirty-five percent had committed suicide Another twenty percent left town and were slaughtered Nobody nant 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’ ouralrowing our population that we’ve landed on" "But they alonder, right? About what’s out there? About where they really are?" "So, like good hu as it isn’t completely devoid of hope"