Dan decided to drop by her place with her latest incarnation. Friends had sent him to Flickr for pictures of their trip to Australia, and there, in the background, behind a kangaroo, was a billboard with Gabe’s smashing XactlySo’s equipment. Some ad agency had doctored the photo of her, and tinted her red to make her look insane, then used it on the label for a screw-cap wine. Go wild!—Tasmanian Red! He thought she’d think it was funny. So he’d found a site that carried Tasmanian Red, got a bottle and showed up at her place: one of those old factories near the university that had been converted into the offices of a tech startup during the boom, then abandoned during the last tech bust and hadn’t been re-re-gentrified yet.
He could tell she was pleased to see him, even though she wasn’t thrilled about him showing up unannounced. With a bottle of wine that must have had a carbon footprint the size of Australia. But soon enough she was rooting around in the area that was her kitchen for a couple of glasses. “You mind drinking out of a jelly jar?”
While the sound of clinking dishes came from her kitchen, he looked around. Without her in the room, it was like he’d found her diary lying open before him. If she wasn’t an NGer, she at least sympathized with them. Her bike hung on hooks on the wall by the door. Another wall was a checkerboard of windowpanes that looked onto rooftop water tanks and pandemic gardens. Gaps let in light between the old, industrial window frames and the brick wall where mortar had crumbled out. She’d plugged the larger chinks with hunks of foam instead of doing a real patch. A drafting table was before the window, bathed in light. Sketches hung from a clothesline like laundry: drawings of robots and melting glaciers. A computer had been retrofitted to use a typewriter for its keyboard. Steampunk: the way the black water tanks outside were reminiscent of railroads and telegraph wires. The sticks of charcoal she used to draw robots probably weren’t all that different from the ones Neanderthals used to sketch animals on the walls of caves….
Then she was there, holding a couple of mismatched jars, half filled with Tasmanian Red. “What do you think?” she asked, referring to the drawings she’d found him looking at.
They were pretty good in that graffiti sort of way. He tried to be complimentary. No, he was complimentary. The drawings made a lot of sense once a person saw those black rooftop water tanks she looked out onto everyday—the way he’d once been struck, while walking down a narrow cobblestone street in Pisa, how Galileo must have walked those same streets, built before cars dictated the shape of cities in America—and made old European cities so much more livable now that cafés and subways and density and bikes made feet the best way to get around again.
She asked him if he wanted to see some of the drawings she’d already finished.
Sitting next to him on her couch, she pulled out a stack of handmade comic books. The kind of low-tech DIY print jobs they sold in racks at indie bookstores. When she had enough stories to make a collection, she was hoping to get it published but she had no idea who would buy it since her stuff wasn’t really Sci-Fi so much as Fi about Sci: more bio lab than saucer-eyed girls with ray-guns.
He could tell this one was based on the work she was doing in her own lab: drawings of fleas and other parasites spreading to what had once been cold climates. She’d collaged drawings from other plagues—medieval doctors wearing bird masks—and some of the Big Data graphs he’d given her: projections showing rates of extinction rising like a tide until the only mammals left on Earth were rats. Each page of her graphic novel was darker than the last, lots of black charcoal strokes: scientists in white lab coats trying to coax into life embryos of extinct animals. Then the next panel showed that the lab they’d been working on was located inside a big wooden boat: an ark that, when he turned the page, went plunging over a waterfall at the edge of a flat Earth.
“I guess the research you guys are developing isn’t going so well,” he said.
She sank back in the cushions. “It’s so messed up. We were at the point where we needed to process more human blood, then one of our two phlebotomists gets shipped off to the Congo.”
“Human blood? Why do you need human blood?”
“If you’re laying down the groundwork for humans you need human blood, of course.”
Humans? He sat there silently as she explained the program that her group was working on, looking for a way to inoculate humans against avian flu. As she talked, he saw how the version of the study she was describing differed from the version that Olympia had given his company. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen this: a PI giving the lab a different story about what they were doing than what they were actually doing. Or giving them part of the story, the way a bunch of chemists who worked at Dow Chemical during the 60s only knew the one little chemical reaction they were working on, not how others would put all the pieces together to make a jellied gasoline that would stick to skin and burn under water.
Then he told her so.
Instead of arguing, she only let out a sigh. Had she known? She must have had suspicions.
“Birds,” Dan confirmed, “all of the computer simulations Olympia has my company make are related to birds, not people. BioDefense they call it,” he said, though the ‘oh brother’ look she gave him made the euphemism sound ridiculous. ‘Preemptive strike’ was probably the excuse Cain used to brain Abel. He sat silently as she lamented all of this but when she finally wore herself out, he only said, “Your phlebotomist? You said he was sent to the Congo?”
“Bolivia or the Congo, or who knows where,” Gabe said, irritated, frustrated for being used as a tool. “At first Silpa, the one phlebotomist we still have, was able to keep up. But she can’t work like a machine. Then instead of hiring a replacement to help her, the study starts calling for half as many units of blood….”
But Dan’s mind was on the tweets he followed about ghost sightings, the latest ghost to have appeared also having been a phlebotomist when alive….
“But you think he was sent to the Congo?” he asked again.
“Yeah, Congo,” she repeated, “or at least somewhere in Africa,” agitated, all of it becoming a single fabric to her: the endless wars over conflict minerals, the military funding Olympia got, the lies she must have told everyone in the lab to keep it…. What was going on in her lab was just a microcosm of the bigger lie Guy and thousands like him bought into, joining the reserves…. “At least that’s what Silpa thinks,“ Gabe said, telling him about Guy but really meaning the whole, bullshit system.
“The two of them used to meet every Tuesday in W.2 but she hasn’t heard from him in weeks and she’s been worried sick about it. Everyone tells Silpa that it’s probably nothing. That he’ll pop up in Bolivia or somewhere and explain it all. But everyone knows it doesn’t look good.”
The more she talked, the more agitated she became, as if the whole lie of the lab had come to be epitomized by the lie of the wars: the U.S. blacking out pictures of returning coffins, then whole countries on maps, all while pressuring people at the Super Bowl to stand and repeat the Make America Great Again pledge….
As she spoke, she could feel herself growing as emotional as if she were talking about her own boyfriend; which in a way she was, Guy being a friend to all of them.
Looking at the drawings in her graphic novel, open on Dan’s lap, the reality of it came to her hard: the world was ending. Not just for Silpa and Guy but for everyone—the whole planet becoming uninhabitable though everyone continued to live as if it weren’t. They say that Homo sapiens began painting caves as Sistine ceilings of animals when they first noticed a difference between themselves and the animals. Was that where it all began to go wrong?—the first step out of an Eden of crazy abundance and Technicolor variety of plants and animals being the first step down an ever-narrowing path that would lead to a dead end? You’d think that the cave people who could paint those studied pictures of animals would realize that they were getting so good at killing them that they were driving their food supply to extinction. But even early naturalists denied that people had anything to do with the loss of the dodo bird—and every time there was a call to do something—drive less, eat less—people did nothing. Nothing but replace jet strikes over oil with drone strikes over water. Then there was the disaster of 11/9 and RedHatters kneecapped the planet’s last chance…. Now it was too late to do anything. Anything except watch Earth die.
She felt powerfully sorry for Silpa, for herself, for everyone…. All of them just going about their workaday lives like people with six months to live who continue to report for work because—never having faced anything like this before—they didn’t know what else to do. Was a lack of imagination what kept them going to school, checking in on Yelp, taking up tennis, doing whatever it was that they spent their lives doing: musicians who continued to play as the Titanic sank?... If so, they didn’t deserve the Earth and it would be better off without them….
An image of a mother hugging her child as their cabin filled with water…. Gabe didn’t want to go down alone, though. No one did. An image of those two old men on YouTube clinging to one another as they were swept out to sea: moments earlier, they had been strangers, sunning themselves at a hotel pool while someone on a balcony began recording with a phone, just another tourist posting a vacation panoramic of the hotel’s courtyard and pool on a Sunday morning when people started screaming, the courtyard suddenly filling with water, swamping the pool, camera-phone shaking, the water rising like a tide that wouldn’t quit until it nearly reached the level of the balcony, the camera jerking wildly, droplets on the lens, view of the wet floor, then dry-eyed heaven, then back down to the poolside bar and lounge chairs joining oil drums, broken trees, a vending machine and the other flotsam swirling around in the courtyard like hair around a drain, the men clinging to one another as the tide went back out to sea, carrying them with it.
Dan was close. He was looking into her eyes, somber. “Was his name Guy?” he said. “Your phlebotomist, I mean.”
The instant he said it, she knew how Dan knew Guy’s name and a sickishness washed over her. ‘Was.’ He had said ‘was,’ past tense, and an incredible weariness entered her body. She let her head sink to Dan’s chest, feeling awful, feeling like a fainting heroine in an opera—even though she knew it was just a sudden drop in blood pressure—she never used to believe in those things—W.2 ghosts or women swooning—but here she was, swooning over how hard Silpa would take Guy’s ghost…. Gory images from those videos Jak had pulled up flashed before her. She felt Dan’s hand on her back, tentatively tapping as though he didn’t know what to do. Then he held her more firmly, and she let him, a cry coming on.
The origins of Social Evolution: When the ground is wet and food plentiful, the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum lives as thousands of independent cells. But when food becomes scarce—that is, when the individuals have to pull together to survive—these thousands of cells independently seek each other out, becoming, without any queen or even a brain, a single animal that can creep along the jungle floor eating, growing hardier, making itself more able to survive.
It was a form of prayer, to hold a turtle egg. For 150 million years, countless generations of sea turtles had come ashore at this Costa Rica beach to lay their eggs, then return to the sea. Turtle eggs had been a delicacy among his people since before Columbus…. No more. The beaches were lined with hotels, and the lights from the hotels confused adult turtles, making it impossible for them to land. The young that did manage to be born were all female, the sex of a sea turtle being determined by the temperature of the sand that the egg was laid in, and so, with the rise in the temperature of all the beaches of the Pacific, only female turtles had been born for some years now.
Each night, still wearing his waiter’s tux after the last shift at the Playa Resort, José scanned the dark beach, thinking about all of this. On one of those rare occasions when he spotted one of the last adults come ashore, he followed her.
He watched her dig a hole in which to lay her eggs between tennis courts or casinos or wherever she could. When she began her return to the sea, he threw aside his cigarette, and went over to the spot and began to dig with his hands. He appreciated how much his hands, cupped to dig sand, were like the fins of a turtle, his ancestor, their myths said. He lifted one of the pearly eggs and cleaned the sand off to admire its rarity. Holding it was a gift, a reminder that he too was the last of a kind, he cracked open the egg and sucked out a delicacy that today not even kings, nor even the richest tourists, knew.
Gabe hadn’t been able to sleep, but she didn’t want to wake. Didn’t want to have to talk. Not yet. Instead she wanted to just feel him beside her and drift, so she pretended she was still asleep, her loft purple with predawn light, her bare legs twined with his as she imagined Guy adrift in W.2: What was it that Dan had said?: first someone disappears from the first world, then the online chatter about them accelerates, coalescing around a name and date of demise until a nexus forms, gathering to it the chatter and searches and memory caches, which coalesced as an avatar the way humid air condenses on cold glass. Since the avatar never buys anything, never updates its FB page, or does anything else online, it doesn’t take long for it to be shunted off into the Elysian Fields, and a pang went through her as she thought of Silpa, finding out he was dead by coming across his shroud-covered avatar, standing there mutely amongst other shades….
Opposite the windows was a clothesline she’d strung to hang watercolors she made for her Sci-Fi manga: they depicted a man shivering in his living room, living the way they say Europeans used to, putting on a sweater when the weather turned chilly, opening a window when it got warm—instead of cranking up the heat or the AC in buildings whose windows had been made hermetically sealed, as in America.
In the next panels, though, the man wakes up, and he’s sweating profusely. He’d been dreaming. From bed, she couldn’t make out her drawings in the dim light, but she had them in her head: he’d woken up from his dream to the reality of the whole world overheating; as the polar caps melted, the shift in the weight of the oceans altered the wobble of the Earth on its axis, making its seasons more extreme. Only the thing was, everyone just kept going about their business as usual, complaining about the heat but still worrying about what color to paint the living room; still worrying about which gel to put in their hair; still making their retirement plans, and buying lotto tickets…. Last year, a working group within the International Commission on Stratigraphy lobbied to change the name of the Anthropocene to the Petrocene, arguing that the first name didn’t place blame on those who deserved it. When they didn’t get their way, they took the fight online to force a popular vote. Except the public, who were themselves mostly beyond caring what the heat was called, treated it like a joke. And in the end, there had to be a runoff between the top three vote-getters: the ‘You-Own-Too-Much-Shit-O-Cene,’ the ‘What Me Worry-O-Cene?’ and the ultimate winner, the ‘Strata-McStrataFace-O-Cene,’ and Gabe began to consider seriously, for the first time, the possibility that we were all going to die.
She should be angry.
What the hell was the matter with people? What had those old fucks been thinking when they were young, and ran governments and companies, and had been able to do something to keep the Earth from wobbling off its axis? She could see them now, with their bioengineered hearts and prosthetic hips in that Assisted Living Condo she biked past on her way to the lab: them and their withered asses, and daily newspaper—that they still printed out on paper!— They should have been bringing down governments, not running for office—no wonder so many young people thought they deserved to die in the last pandemic, or wanted to drag them out of their retirement homes and beat them to death—like dictators dragged out of their palaces and into the street. An Arab Spring for Earth, that’s what the world had needed…
But they had done nothing.
Now here she was, doing the same as the world went crazy trying to come up with desperate, last-ditch solutions: Big Ag pumping sulfur into the stratosphere to block the sun and keep corn crops in America from withering though the sulfur shut down monsoons in India; the Chinese gambling that geoengineered algae blooms the size of America could make oceans absorb more carbon. Even multimillionaires—complete amateurs with stupid ideas and unlimited money—were tinkering with the climate, using their own billions to make clouds more reflective, though their efforts just as often left huge dead zones in the oceans, or set off unexpected chain reactions….
She stroked back the hairs around the tattoo on Dan’s forearm: the Red Marble Earth that had been a battle flag until guys like Dan began to get one for the sake of fashion. Still, he seemed to have come around to ‘sincere,’ and she knew no one’s motives were completely pure….
After what he’d told her about Olympia, she felt stupid for not having said anything to the others in the lab though they’d all smelled something rotten the moment Olympia pulled their article.
Who am I kidding? Gabe thought. Even if she had admitted to herself that owning a phone in America meant child soldiers would die in the Congo, she would have answered exactly like those Dow Chemical chemists did back in the ’60s: that they were just doing their jobs. She hadn’t seen the movie Dan told her about, but she didn’t need to to know the kinds of things they would have said: that they were developing plastics that could make baby buggies safer, or chemical processes for fertilizers that would help feed millions. And they would have tried to not believe they had nothing to do with the fact that others might assemble their individual efforts into napalm. Tech was the problem, as a lot of NGers said. But it also was the only possible solution, she used to argue. If tech makes it possible for a disease to spread, you find a vaccine to shut down its vectors. But now, she couldn’t believe she’d ever thought that, lobotomizing birds—for their good, she’d once thought—preparing them so that they wouldn’t feel the pain of the lice she’d next infest their bodies with. She was just a biotech version of an arms manufacturer, she now saw, thinking she could make peace on Earth.
We Cover the Earth, said the logo she had hanging on her wall; What sick mind had ever thought that would be appealing?
The image of the Plasmodium falciparum that BubblyFish had projected during her concert came to Gabe.
Military funding, selling out to Big Pharma, cutting corners, sneaking in diseases: Anything to keep the machine moving. Even if it could bite a lab tech in the ass. Her ass.
Outside, there was the rumble of distant thunder. Soon Gabe could hear the sound of rain and she wondered if this was a natural or a forced, man-made shower. Dan stirred under her, his legs firm, like a guy, and she nestled against him, feeling as though they were the last people on Earth. Or the first. Maybe Silpa was right: the virus she’d spotted in Gabe’s blood was an antique strain. It lacked the mutation at the 17q12 position that would have made it deadly. But the general low-level crappiness that Gabe had been feeling since being bitten stayed with her. And she couldn't shake that dreamlike anxiety of time-out-of-time that came over people with lockdown fatigue; the fuzzy logic of streets deserted at rush hour; beautiful, sunny days masking an invisible killer that could be anywhere—on an ATM, in a summer breeze, or neighbor's hello, bringing down victims randomly. Like prisoners, they said, people needing to get out often dreamed of returning to their hometowns only to discover that no one there remembered them. They also dreamed a lot about tidal waves.
How had the world gotten so complicated?
Remington, said the gilt script on a typewriter whose keyboard she’d connected to her computer, a design from another age. Only later did she learn that typewriters were just a sideline for Remington, their real business having been rifles, and she remembered that video on YouTube by some lefty activist from the last century—wait! Was this the movie Dan was talking about? It showed a worker in a state-owned rifle factory disguised as a factory that made vacuum cleaners. His job was to deburr each part as it came past him on an assembly line and he truly believed that his one small job contributed to the assembly of vacuum cleaners. So he began to steal one for his wife, taking home a different part each day. But he couldn’t understand why, when he put the parts together at home, he always ended up with a rifle. The man who lived in the next flat, a political agitator, saw what was going on so he took a job on the line to prove it. Like the first man, he stole a different part each day but every time he tried to assemble them for members of the opposition, all he ever got was a vacuum cleaner.
Maybe everyone was complicit, as neo-Nazis, climate-change deniers, and other apologists always whined. But didn’t that also mean that everyone could be part of the solution?—like those crunchy women who laid down on an expressway to block traffic because gas-guzzlers were killing the Earth?
The thought gave her pause.
She couldn’t go into the lab and bust up equipment the way she’d hammered XactlySo’s sound system, though. That would be too obvious—and mean jail since Olympia had military funding and so any vandalism against her project would get classified as an act of terrorism—the way the women who torched an SUV dealership had been sentenced as terrorists to a military prison because the maker of the luxury SUVs also made military jeeps.
She lay very still, thinking.... There were other ways, though.... Ways to mess with procedures. Or data. Yeah, she could mess with the data.... In fact, it was hard not to: a louse from Anwar looked identical to one from Palestine so it was easy to mix them up. A mistake anyone could make. A mistake that would play havoc with Chen’s reliability numbers. The first time she’d done so it had been a real accident—a screwup she’d made because she’d been too angry, too distracted to concentrate and she’d messed up Chen’s data by mixing up the lice. Probably. She never was sure if that’s what actually happened, or if Jak was the one who screwed up, or if the data went south for a completely different reason. But now it seemed like poetic justice: the right solution for all the wrong reasons. Or as her mother had told her the time she’d come home crying from being bullied in a grade-school lab, Don’t be a victim; be a carrier. Don’t take any old shit the world brings you; you bring the shit to the world. Like Typhoid Mary.