Permian- Emissary of the Extinct

by Devyn Regueira

  “Today is just chock full of good news.”

  Brady had already set off down a brightly lit hallway behind their brooding entourage of two. Alvin pursued, taking a mental note that the corridor appeared to be furnished in the style of a prison medical ward.

  “Protocol One; keep your mask on. Always. Protocol Two; be polite at all times. Avoid any hostile words, agitating postures, or abrupt movements. Protocol Three; do not complain about the heat. You will sweat, but you’ll survive. Protocol Four; if you become lightheaded, apologize, excuse yourself, softly tap on the exit door, catch your breath, reenter the room, apologize again. Protocol Five, Six, Seven, and Eight: Do not ask any question that a reasonable person would not conclude to be essential toward objective attainability - in your case, that objective is complete and effective consultation on all things geology. You will teach her everything you know about the guts of our planet, past present and future, big rocks and little ones, everything. Are you following me?”

  Sedentary for the better part of six months, Alvin was having difficulty matching Brady’s pace as they approached the exit end of the otherwise doorless corridor.

  “In body - mind - and spirit.”

  “At least you’re not afraid to sweat. Do you have any questions?”

  “A few.”

  The quartet stopped at a plain door. Alvin was glad for the intermission, and he half expected someone to utter a secret password or initiate some sophisticated cadence of knocks. Neither happened, the door was unlocked with a single key, and their march continued.

  “Why will the room be so hot?”

  “I cannot comment on that until we’ve cleared this zone.”

  “Isn’t this the - Fine, okay, well, what about the lightheadedness? If I can expect to become more lightheaded than I am right now, I’d like to think I deserve some prep time.”

  “I cannot comment on that until we’ve cleared this zone.”

  “Christ, Brady. Your buddies show up in their Japanese tourist masks and you go all robotic on me. Can I at least get a sense of how long we’ll be chatting with your special mystery woman? If I’m gonna be, I don’t know, sharing whippets with this broad over a furnace, I think it’s fair to ask what kind of commitment I’m making.”

  “You, not we. I’m not authorized for contact. And you’ll have however long she’s willing to give you. Only in cases of distress or visible exhaustion does my team have the go-ahead to intervene. The first hasn’t happened yet, thank God, and like I said, we don’t expect her to start getting tired until around 7 o’clock tonight.

  “Oh and please, Alvin, don’t call her a broad. Nobody says that anymore, not least of all because it’s in clear violation of Protocol Two.”

  Alvin raised an eyebrow.

  “What time did you expect her to get tired last night?”

  “8:15 PM, give or take.”

  Strange.

  Alvin was no mathematician, but simple arithmetic fell comfortably within his mental scope. He subtracted the first time Brady mentioned from the second without using his fingers and arrived at a new and more demanding problem.

  One hour and fifteen minutes. Something in the neighborhood of five percent. The approximate difference between a modern and Permian day.

  The eight days that followed Every Daniels’ suicide had not been pleasant for Alvin. Worse than his struggle with the possibility that Every’s visit had been an unspoken appeal for help, an appeal that Alvin resolutely failed to regard with the appropriate seriousness, there remained the possibility that neither Every, his sudden interest in extinction events, nor his modern doomsday premonitions had been crazy at all. That possibility became slightly less distant when Alvin received his own ticket to Siberia, the proverbial ‘ground zero’ of the Permian’s Great Dying, and more credible still with Brady’s latest slip of the tongue.

  “So I’ll be consulting a narcoleptic? Compelling stuff, Brady.”

  If spending the last season of his life in a cell had taught professor Bonman anything, it was that there was no shame in playing dumb.

  “Something like that.”

  They arrived at a more formidable door than the first, and Alvin felt no relief when the secret knock he’d expected finally came.

  “Any more questions?”

  “I’m good.”

  Alvin had questions - countless questions heavy on his mind and precisely zero balanced on his tongue. He’d suffered enough unpleasantness throughout his confinement to recognize, regardless of zone or protocol, when it was prudent to withhold his curiosity and to bypass his more abrasive sensibilities.

  It was then the door crept open. Revealed to him was a large room divided into twin sections, the one he was preparing to enter as utilitarian in its decor as the zone he was preparing to leave, the other furnished like a preschool behind the plexiglass divider.

  New questions arose, dozens, and still Alvin kept quiet, and so too did he then develop a peculiar hesitation in even thinking them when his eyes brushed the single form behind the glass.

  That hesitation, at least, he overcame.

  What is she?

  Was Every insane?

  Am I?

  “Hello, professor Alvin Bonman.”

  “Hello… ma’am.”

  Alvin was startled by the sound of the sectional door being sealed shut behind him, a squelch of air created when the vastly disparate climates were forcibly estranged once again.

  “You do not know what to call me. For that I cannot hold you accountable, nor should you fault yourself. Ma’am is acceptable.”

  “May I sit?”

  “Please.”

  “Thank you. How, how is - I mean, how are you today?”

  “You are rigid, professor Alvin Bonman. You have nothing to fear from me, nor I from you, least of all your offense. I would only ask that for the duration of our consultation, you behave as though the man you know as Brady Elway Thomas neglected to disclose its governing protocols during your brisk walk down the corridor system minutes ago. Do you accept?”

  Professor Bonman was sweating. It was not the balmy ninety-five degree temperature, he’d endured worse beneath the West Virginian summer sun, but the abomination in the plastic yellow chair.

  “I’m not sure that ignoring the protocols would be appropriate, ma’am.”

  Alvin glanced over his shoulder. Masked surgeons tasked with observing the inaugural slice of a graduate into living tissue - Brady and four armed men watched the early stages of this first exchange intently, conspicuous even as their complexions were smudged through a dividing plane of plexiglass.

  “They are watching, professor Alvin Bonman, but they are not listening.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve insisted.”

  Plans to ask the abomination how she could be sure they’d obliged her request, exactly which assurances she had that listening devices hadn’t been wedged into the stuffing of any of half-a-dozen teddy bears, were discarded. Alvin was not so eager to toss the list of protocols, chiefly Protocols Five, Six, Seven, and Eight, away on the digitized word of the creature across from him.

  “Does my voice unsettle you, professor Alvin Bonman?”

  Alvin’s eyes fell to the blinking black box. It was affixed to the collar that hung around what he only had the imagination to regard as her neck, clearly the device responsible for producing her synthesized voice.

  “Not unsettled whatsoever.”

  The abomination appeared to study him as he spoke and briefly afterward, although Alvin was wise to establish a distrust for his own assessments of her apparent social cues. Any interpersonal premises he’d developed during his fifty years of conversation seemed destined only to muddy the waters of this one; it was, after all, a conversation between himself and an individual whose physiology excluded her from any genus known or imagined, alive or extinct.

  “My organic voice is much too baritone for human recognition. This modulator was hastily built, you
see. I’ve requested something more natural, more human, but until its completion I can only hope you’ll find yourself becoming accustomed to it.”

  Alvin could not shake the same sense that he was being examined. That sensation persisted even when he recognized, in an instant of reluctant disbelief, that the examination she seemed to conduct was not visual in nature. Having stared intermittently, politely, and directly into them, Alvin concluded that what he had perceived to be the abomination’s pupils were, in fact, a pair of flexible nostrils.

  Comparable to the versatile eyes of a chameleon, membrane stretched from the outer boundaries of either fist sized facial depression to form central, nickel sized openings. It was not until his silence had endured decidedly too long, and her nostril sockets reoriented themselves more indignantly upon his face, and the openings constricted to pinpricks of suspicion that professor Bonman’s intrigue rivaled his disgust.

  “I don’t think that will be a problem. I’ll have plenty of time to adjust this afternoon, I hope.”

  Her stereoscopic nostril holes relaxed in their sockets, and Alvin risked a glance higher up her face. He was rewarded with the reassurance that she did have eyes, hard to spot as they were; small and listless and physiologically dispensable things, proverbial pinky toes, granular pock marks of evolutionary decay spaced widely up high on her skull. Alvin resolved, in his way, that they were useless to an extent that no DMV in the United States would bother asking for proof of address.

  “Speaking of which, I was thinking we'd begin with a lesson, and that you can just let me know if I’m getting too stiff with the protocols. How’s that sound?”

  “Acceptable.”

  “Good. I understand that this isn’t your first consultation with a geologist, is that correct?”

  “It is the fifty-seventh.”

  “Good - excellent. What did you cover during those consultations?”

  “Section One: The Scientific Method. Section Two: A History of Geological Science. Section Three - ”

  “Just the high level concepts are fine.”

  “Sediments. Minerals. Sir Charles Lyell. Geothermic processes. Dating methodologies. Continental drift.”

  “Good - excellent. Can you recall where you left off specifically?”

  “Subduction.”

  “Right, one of my favorites. Before we get into it, or under it -” the abomination didn’t laugh, it remained unclear whether she were capable “- do you feel that you’ve been able to grasp those concepts in their entirety?”

  “I do. Perhaps you might test me on them to be certain.”

  Now it became Alvin’s burden to do the studying. Her voice was emotionless, inflectionless, pristinely synthetic - and still he was certain that in it he’d been able to detect a sprits of indignation. He canvased the thing with his eyes, almost unabashedly now with such solid evidence that she hadn’t the sensory organs to see him do it. So long as he did not allow long breaks in conversation to betray his impolite research, the abomination could be none the wiser to it.

  “I like that idea, ma’am. Let’s start with the basics. How old is our planet?”

  She placed her forelimbs on the table. They were not hands, not nearly, but stumps, more perfectly suited for a lumbering quadruped than the vaguely humanoid thing capable of sitting for long durations in a chair tailored for human children with vertical spines.

  “Four-point-five-three-six-two billion years, although it depends to some degree on your perspective.”

  Alvin listened only passively as she gave her answer; he’d shut her out completely before the third decimal place. His primary attentions remained on her stumps, and the bulk of his mental processing capacity on the logistical problems they posed.

  “You’re a fast learner. Alright, we’ll need to up the stakes if I’m going to figure out where to start this lesson without boring you with redundancy. You’ll need to draw from a few of those major concepts you mentioned and use them to draw conclusions outside of textbook dates, figures, and definitions. Sound good?”

  “Acceptable.”

  “Mars has about one tenth the mass of the Earth. Given that disparity, what we already know about our own geological processes, and evidence suggesting an abundance of material similarity between the two planets - why, in geological terms, is Earth green, blue, and bountiful, while our goldilocks neighbor remains bleak and sterile?”

  That was an extra credit problem Alvin had offered on every final exam since 2005. He had no qualms giving extra credit, nor did he mind recycling the question for his students, human or otherwise. Alvin also well understood his present objective - Brady had a knack for emphasis - but to waste his history-altering opportunity concocting mundane questions seemed sacrilege, and he would not squander it thus while there was so much more value in placing his focus elsewhere.

  Even for all the madness of the moment, for all the unasked questions like sulfur burning their likenesses into his throat as he studied the creature, what plagued Alvin most of all were thoughts of his friend Every Daniels. If Alvin had helped him to see that the value in living was a constant, a concrete law, an unimpeachable value toward which no hardship or circumstance could bare physical influence - perhaps his friend would be present to explain the conundrum that was the abomination’s physiology.

  “Would you like the answer or the explanation, professor Alvin Bonman?”

  The creature tapped the table with one of four pseudo-articulated fingerlets curling from the ends of either arm - or foreleg - Alvin hadn’t decided which. Her fingers had not been first on his list of curious physical incongruities, but it was there that she drew his attention. The lower half of each fingerlet was fleshy - layered, as was most of her, in overlapping rows of dry, light brown scales. The upper sections were comprised of bone or keratin; hard, sharp, blind for lack of nerve endings. Partway between the specialized claws of an anteater and the multi-purpose digits of tool-making primates, they appeared transitionary; this creature, in terms of hands, seemed to fill the unfortunate role of intermediary in some Lamarckism evolution toward dexterity.

  “Professor Alvin Bonman?”

  “Yes? Yes - I’m sorry, ma’am The air is a little heavy in here and I think my brain is working overtime. Just answer as best you can and we’ll decide where to go next from there.”

  “For a time, Mars maintained a mantle of molten rock and an outer core of fluid metal. In conjunction with a smaller surface area and the lack of a large moon to generate consistent tidal friction, a relative lack of mass deprived that planet’s outer core of heat sufficient for liquid metal at such pressures. Convection of the Earth’s molten outer core generates a magnetic field necessary to insulate the atmosphere from solar radiation, whereas Mars’ atmosphere is wholly undefended. When its mantle solidified, volcanic activity drew to a halt and the fledgling atmosphere was no longer replenished by gases required to retain heat. Its atmosphere was blown away, and a planet one tenth the mass of our own has insufficient gravity to reclaim it.”

  Now Alvin had no course but to examine her head; to dissect with his eyes the scaly scalp that veiled some unexplored masterpiece of neurology, to notice for the first time those short whiskers like antennae surrounding a mouth filled with herbivorous teeth, to face the full weight of admitting that something so unlike himself could make masterful use of mankind’s most exclusive skill set.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Would you like me to explain it again, professor Alvin Bonman?”

  Professor Alvin Bonman risked another glance over his shoulder. None of the men across the divider seemed to have grown tired of watching.

  “I’ll rephrase. What I meant to ask is - how do you know that? You didn’t mention extra-terrestrial geology before. Are they consulting you on astrophysics too?”

  “They are. But they put a particular emphasis on smaller celestial bodies with less uniform orbits. It seems that parallel and disparate non-Earth planetary geology does not constitute a
ny substantial portion of that curriculum.”

  Another glance backward. The last one, Alvin resolved.

  “They are not listening, professor Alvin Bonman. I’ve insisted.”

  “Alright. May I - ask you another question, then?”

  “You may ask anything you like so long as it falls outside the pretenses of your given objective. I am reaffirming my earlier request to abandon your protocols. Do you accept?”

  “I accept.”

  How couldn’t he?

  “You may ask your question, then.”

  Teddy bears and colorful padded toys consuming the whole of his peripheral vision, Alvin decided on which question to ask almost in the midst of asking it.

  “How old are you?”

  “Biologically or conventionally?”

  Another stone removed from the wall of pragmatism Alvin had put up the moment Every left his office.

  “How about you tell me one, ma’am, and I’ll see if I can give you the other.”

  “Biologically, if measured from hatching, I am one-hundred-sixty-seven-point-eight-three days old.”

  Christ.

  This arithmetic would generally have called for a scrap of paper had he one available, and her use of the term hatching helped little in preserving the clarity of his thoughts, but Alvin eventually did manage to arrive at his answer - however far fetched it seemed to be.

  “One-hundred-and-fifty-seven 24 hour days. A little more than twenty weeks. Is that how old you are - conventionally?”

  “I am thankful that you are willing to demonstrate that you know more than you’ve suggested to this point, professor Alvin Bonman. Even indirectly.”

  “And what do I know?”

  “You know as much of your physical world as any human; your natural curiosity guaranteed it, your isolated childhood allowed for it, your stone quarry facilitated it. You know my origin, in a way, or something it; this world as it was in my time. You know what you have come to know of your own accord, and you know what professor Every Daniels managed to tell you on the morning of his death.”

  Alvin felt lightheaded.

  “You feel lightheaded, professor Alvin Bonman. The oxygen content is necessarily higher in my compartment, as is the temperature. You want a beverage.”