“Won’t your roommates freak?”
“We never use the oven. It’ll be fine.”
“But if something goes wrong, Monro will look there first.”
“Yeah, well. It’s all I’ve got, though.”
“You could use mine.”
“Won’t your roommates freak?”
“Nah. I’ve used my kitchen for projects before. They’re used to seeing weird chemicals growing green shit all over the place. They should be cool.”
I smiled. It would be safer to keep the evidence out of my apartment. “Deal.”
***
The next three days were hell. I broke down the formal project, killing files and tossing notes. Of course, I found a moment to save to a jump drive copies of the most important portions of my work I had encrypted that first night. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought it strange that Digger McReedy seemed to walk past my workstation in the Pit about every hour, and I saw Monro stick her head into the lab more often than I had before. Yes, perhaps I was a little paranoid. I went to class as if nothing were happening, but all the while I waited for the samples to finish baking.
Come Saturday night, we were ready to test.
Three samples hadn’t yielded, but that meant 36 combinations remained—the last of my R. eutreepa.
If one of these didn’t work, it was truly over.
I borrowed more glassware from the lab, then went to Calley’s place, where we scraped samples of each configuration into separate solutions. We went out just past midnight, both dressed in black, toting our equipment like Russian spies from a bad movie.
“I feel like the guy on Mission: Impossible,” I said, slipping a basting syringe I had bought from the Kroger down the street into my belt loop.
“Kenton Ulay?” she said, naming the actor who’d inherited the MI franchise from Tom Cruise.
“Sure.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Guys.”
“What about us?”
“You’re all like children.”
I shrugged and smiled. “You think that’s bad, wait until you hear my Super Spider-Man story.”
“Super Spider-Man?”
“Yeah, my secret identity when I was a kid pretending to be a superhero, a combination of Superman and Spider-Man.
“Then what does that make me? Lois Lane, or Mary Jane? No, wait. I must be Lois Jane,” Calley said, laughing.
“Yeah, and I’m Clark Parker.”
“I like Parker Clark better.”
I smiled. “Sold.”
We stayed on the side streets where there wasn’t much traffic, looking for older cars that we could read odometers on. The first was a blue Alero. Calley thumbed in the license plate and model of the car, then indexed the sample I was preparing. I squatted down to its tailpipe, inserted the baster, and blew a liquid stream of R. eutreepa with an A. vulcanalis chaser into the muffler. It took several minutes to clean the syringe with alcohol, rinse it with water, and prepare another sample. While I was doing that, Calley shined a flashlight on the odometer, took down the mileage, and noted where we’d found the car. Then it was on to the next.
We returned Sunday night, scraper in hand, and took soot samples from the tailpipe of each car that had logged miles the previous day.
***
I could have cultured them at home, but that would have meant waiting several days. I needed to know now. So I went to the lab the next morning, planning to put them all under a scope. But it was busy, so I put the box in my cubby and waited for the evening when I could be alone in the lab again.
The text from Calley came mid-morning.
It read simply: They’re gone.
I closed my eyes and let the message settle. I got up as casually as I could, and went to the row of cubbies.
The box was gone.
The bastards had taken them.
***
I thought I’d covered my tracks well enough, but I knew the truth the second I saw Dr. Monro sitting in her office like a spider in the middle of her web. Something had gone wrong—we hadn’t stayed far enough underground, and Monro had sent a pack of her undergraduates to Calley’s place—probably led by that nose-picker Digger McReedy—and they’d almost certainly taken all our samples.
“Mark,” Dr. Monro said as I stood in the open doorway. “Just who I wanted to see.” I was not surprised to see my box of samples sitting on the corner of her desk.
She motioned me to a seat, sitting forward.
“Why did you take my stuff?” I asked, coming to her desk but not sitting.
She stood to meet my eyes. I felt the power of her height.
“I thought I told you the project was over.”
“I cleaned it all out Wednesday.”
Her gaze darted to the box.
“Then what are those?”
“Probably just a bunch of dead bacteria.”
“Mark.” Her tone was as heavy as a boulder. “Do not fuck this up. You are one semester and a defense away from graduating. If you don’t graduate from this school, you will not graduate from anywhere. Do you understand what I am saying?”
The hum of her computer was the only sound.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I most certainly do understand what you are saying.”
“Then you are dismissed.”
I went to leave.
“I’m on your side, Mark,” she said as I got to the doorway. “You’re a good clinician. Go back to your station and make fuel. Create short sequence techniques. Write a new paper and graduate to a very nice life.”
I called Calley when I got back to my desk.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to stop them, but they took it all. Damn Penny. I’m sure she was the bitch who told on us. I’ll kill her.”
“It’s fine,” I said, lying through my teeth in a valiant attempt to make her feel better. “It’s okay, really. I’m kind of glad it’s over. Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“That’s all that matters.”
I hung up and looked out the window.
My work was gone.
I was done. At least that’s what Monro thought.
But, of course, I wasn’t really done.
Monro had taken everything she could take, but there were still samples of my R. eutreepa out in the wild. I just had to bide my time, and I had to truly learn how to work under the radar. Dr. Monro had taught me her last lesson, and it was the most valuable one she had ever given me.
She had taught me just who I really was.
***
I threw myself into making fuel like no one had ever thrown themselves into it before. I picked up my virtual pen and wrote a hundred and fifty pages of the most unoriginal science I could imagine, revisiting the earliest optimization work out of MIT—which had been the first to develop a biosystem in bacteria that created harvestable isobutanol. I spent a full month, diligently adjusting the genetic makeup of more R. eutropa until I found a sequence that let it feed on base cornstalk—essentially making fuel from farmland waste.
That alone was enough to ensure my degree.
I will always remember shaking the hand of an Exxon rep. “Great work,” the man said, his hand firm and dry. “You’ve done your part to save the world.”
But we both knew that for the crock of crap it was.
As far as the energy companies were concerned, bacterial fuel was never going to be more than a loss leader designed to keep the real competition away.
I had them mail my diploma.
When it came, I left it in the scroll tube, propped up in the back corner of my room. By then I’d taken a job at a place called Earth Cares, a non-profit with the motto “Saving the Place We Live.”
***
In the meantime, Calley and I went back to the cars.
As each was driven, we cultured the bacteria from their mufflers. Three of them lived. I called them Odeen, Dua, and Tritt after characters in a book I had read as a kid. We
cultured full strains from each of the three, hiding multiple samples to ensure against loss.
Fridays and Saturdays became Date Nights, each starting sometime before midnight and ending around four in the morning. During that time, we dosed buses and trucks and fleets of rental cars. One weekend we did an entire neighborhood.
It was slow work. Too slow, really—three hundred cars a week at best—not enough to make a difference. And it dealt only with automobiles. If we were going to change the world, we needed help.
Thank god for the darker corners of the Internet, and for people who cared about doing the right things.
Of course, we called ourselves Parker Clark and Lois Jane.
We put the R. eutreepa recipe up on an anonymous website and dropped notes about it in a few key places, offering to mail strains of it to people who asked. It was cheap, we said. Simple. A solution that worked, and cost almost nothing but time. Within twenty-four hours four hundred people had downloaded it. We were mailing samples within a week. A month later we were hearing stories. Kids made midnight runs to dump “Treep” on taxi fleets, and did entire mall sweeps, hitting every car parked outside. Some raided factories and dumped Treep solutions into their stacks. Someone posted a video of a black-clad invader scripting a Treep raid on a power plant. Another bio-gen student said she’d built a Super Treep configuration with a custom gene that provided even stronger thermal resistance, then cut a deal with a willing aviation tech to apply it to jet aircraft.
We crossed a half-million downloads within three months. Within six months, an entire justice league of nameless colleagues around the world were staging late-night car runs and other interventions. A guy who called himself Johnny Treepleseed was rumored to be wandering Argentina, squirting spiked solution into every tailpipe he came across.
I saw Dr. Monro interviewed about these rumors, and she had something inane to say about how unlikely it was that such a bacteria could exist naturally. Seeing the pained look on her face was, perhaps, the greatest moment in my professional life.
A month later, a graduate student in Adelaide, Australia, announced in a press conference his finding of a bacterial approach to cutting emissions of CO2, crediting a pair known only as Parker Clark and Lois Jane, and hoping he would be able to thank them in person someday. The Aussie government was interested in helping develop his program.
***
We considered coming clean and revealing our secret identities. But there were years of politics left to play out, and neither of us could stomach the idea of getting caught up in it.
Besides, we had learned that real change only happens in the trenches, and we had Date Nights scheduled for this weekend. I was living my Super Spider-Man dream, along with my sidekick, Lois Jane. Who needed anything else?
Introduction to “Your Name Here”
Whenever I invite Laura Resnick into an anthology, I know I’m going to get a couple things. A great story, natch, one that often turns conventions of science fiction and fantasy on their heads, but that also contains a sly sense of humor, even when dealing with very serious topics. It’s a combination she pulls off effortlessly, every single time.
Author of the popular Esther Diamond urban fantasy series, Laura’s novels include Disappearing Nightly, Doppelgangster, Unsympathetic Magic, Vamparazzi, Polterheist, and The Misfortune Cookie (November 2013). She has also written traditional fantasy novels such as In Legend Born, The Destroyer Goddess, and The White Dragon, which made multiple “Year’s Best” lists. An opinion columnist, frequent public speaker, and the Campbell Award-winning author of many short stories, she is on the Web at LauraResnick.com.
About this story, she writes: “When editor John Helfers told me the theme for this anthology, population control was the subject that instantly sprang to my mind. Over-population is the single most significant factor—the one that affects all other factors—in the environmental degradation that’s endangering the whole planet. Then I found myself thinking of the exasperated, old joke that says people ought to have to take a test before they’re allowed to have kids, the way they have to take a test to drive a car… And I had my story premise.”
Your Name Here
Laura Resnick
“Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, maybe we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment.”
—Sir David Attenborough
***
It’s true that this job comes with a great benefits package, but in reality, that’s very modest compensation for how stressful it is. Sure, when you hear about my six weeks of annual paid vacation, the full-coverage I get for psychotherapy, and the excellent early retirement plan, you probably think, as people usually do, “I sure wish I had her job.”
But that’s only because you’ve never looked into the barrel of a gun while some deranged jerk threatens to blow off your head unless you immediately give his testicles your official stamp of approval (so to speak).
There really aren’t enough employment benefits in the world to make that worth putting up with.
I don’t do my job for the benefits. I do it because I believe in it. (And also because I can’t sing or dance.) But that doesn’t mean that going to work every day is an unmitigated pleasure—or even physically safe.
Today—a day in which I was nearly introduced to my maker by an enraged lunatic with a semiautomatic—is a good example of why, if you think you’d like to have my job, I really doubt you have any idea what you’re talking about.
I’m a senior service supervisor in the National Population Control Bureau, which was set up after the (third) Clinton administration ratified the international Population Control Agreement, ensuring the US finally joined the ranks of nations that require human reproduction to be responsible and regulated. (Better late than never.)
The beneficial, far-reaching, and urgently needed ramifications of population control had long been self-evident to anyone who could grasp information that one might reasonably expect a nine-year-old child to understand. Unfortunately, though, such intellectual attainments were well beyond the reach of the US Congress for the first few decades that the Population Control Agreement was in international circulation.
By the turn of the century, uncontrolled population growth was the common factor in a wide array of growing global crises, including: resource depletion; climate change; destruction of ecosystems; environmental degradation; increasing food shortages and incidents of famine; insufficient water supply and millions dying every year from contaminated water; the widespread resurgence of previously-eradicated diseases; overcrowding in schools and sharp declines in educational standards; dramatic increases in societal poverty throughout the world, and global decline in standards of living and quality of life.
It was in these circumstances that the international Population Control Agreement found its foothold, first among sane and well-educated societies, and then subsequently among nations that were traditionally less prone to embrace progress, but which wanted to survive into the next century.
The United States, though, remained stubbornly obdurate for decades about its “God given right” to continue overpopulating the planet and using up all remaining resources, regardless of the effect this had on other societies.
As time passed, however, this clearly became an increasingly untenable position, and several presidential administrations in a row vocally favored signing the Agreement. President Kennedy (the second one) was the first Commander in Chief to come out in support of the Agreement, a policy position that famously unfolded after his state visit to the Vatican. He was profoundly influenced by Pope Monica, who was the first female pontiff and the Church’s first proponent of regulated reproduction. The Lady Pope, as she was popularly known (Doña Papa in her native language), showed the Catholic president the bills for the Church’s worldwide programs to feed, water, treat, and house the poor—including the skyrocketing number of impoverished Americans.
President
Yanaba (“Brave”) Eagle, the first Navajo woman to sit in the Oval Office, was also an articulate supporter of population control proposals. First Gentleman Matthias Eagle, who was annually characterized by various members of Congress as a “Hitler-loving Marxist terrorist” because of his attendance at the International Population Control Summit each year, had a much-publicized vasectomy during his wife’s second term in office, which helped popularize the practice among the educated urban elite. Even the short-lived (fourth) Bush administration supported reproductive regulation, though evidence later presented at former President Bush’s trial indicated that in this, as in everything else, he was merely acting as a puppet of the Saudi royal family.
However, despite the evolution of global opinion and growing international agreement on the matter, the US House and Senate remained so vehemently opposed to population control that reproduction remained unregulated in this country long after it had become the norm in numerous other nations.
This opposition sentiment manifested in numerous bizarre ways. For example, after Pope Monica influenced President Kennedy’s position, an angry Congressman became so anti-Italian that he proposed legislation to change the word “spaghetti” to “Freedom Noodles,” and he refused to withdraw this proposal even after being informed that Monica was Spanish, not Italian. Due to China’s prominent leadership in population control, several Senators urged Americans to boycott fortune cookies, although fortune cookies did not originate in China, are still largely unknown there, and do not contribute in any way to population growth or control.
Meanwhile, of course, the many American legislators whose election victories were purchased for them by gun manufacturers used population growth statistics, which were self-evidently alarming, to press for complete de-regulation of assault weapons, grenades, and hand-held rocket launchers. The more we encouraged Americans to gun down and blow up each other in our streets, schools, and homes, the less we’d have to worry about there being too many people. This same reasoning (so to speak) also fueled the rhetoric behind America’s wars in Bolivia, Switzerland, and the Seychelles during those years (an era of record-high profits for the arms manufacturers who were appointed on a no-compete basis by Congress to supply those wars).
Fiction River: How to Save the World Page 7