Do Not Resuscitate

by Nicholas Ponticello

  The Koryo travel agency had confiscated our passports when we landed in Pyongyang, and we didn’t see them again until we were boarding the plane to leave. The whole time I invented scenarios in which the North Korean government discovered my passport was a fake and carted me off to prison camp, where I’d spend the rest of my days scratching tallies in a granite wall and whittling blunt daggers out of bars of soap.

  But as it was, the experience proved to be entirely painless, except for the nervous moment in the metro station when I made contact with Rowan’s inside man. Otherwise, the tour was nothing more than an international field trip with a couple of very fussy chaperones.

  And the result? There it sat, centered perfectly, in the backseat of my 2007 BMW. The contents of the red cooler.

  There were a few other cars parked in the lot, each of them in designated spots with initials. There was a beat-up 1984 Honda Civic parked in the spot labeled “R. K.”—Rowan Krasimir. For a car that was almost thirty years old, I’d say it was in pretty good shape. But I also had to wonder how this guy could afford to pay me fifty grand for what amounted to an all-expenses-paid vacation in East Asia and not afford a nicer ride for himself.

  The automatic doors at the main entrance of the building slid open as I approached. Just inside, a young receptionist greeted me and asked me to take a seat. She picked up the phone and exchanged a few words with somebody on the other end, and then she stood and said, “Follow me.”

  I clutched the red cooler instinctively. It hadn’t left my side since North Korea.

  The receptionist swiped her badge and led me through a nondescript white door into a long, sterile hallway.

  On my first visit, the receptionist had taken me through a door marked “Administration,” down a flight of stairs, across a hall, and into a small subterranean office. I had found Rowan Krasimir at a desk peering down his long nose at a jumble of code on a computer screen.

  He had said, without looking up from the monitor, “Greta tells me you’re my man.”

  But this time the receptionist coasted past the door marked “Administration” and led me to another door, farther down. It was labeled “SHEM Labs.” Here she swiped her badge again and instructed me to enter. The first room was a small antechamber with a sink and an emergency eye-rinsing device. There were stacks of freshly pressed lab coats in a large cupboard, and safety goggles and latex gloves.

  “Suit up,” she said.

  When I had pulled on a lab coat and goggles and gloves, the receptionist punched a code into the keypad on the wall and ushered me through another door.

  We entered a wide, low chamber cluttered with technicians in white coats bent over trays and microscopes and vials of yellow fluid. Not a single one looked up when we came in.

  I waited in the doorway while the receptionist signaled to one of the technicians.

  It was Rowan Krasimir.

  “Jim Frost,” he said walking over. He clasped my hand warmly. “Thank you,” he said to the receptionist.

  She smiled and slipped out the door.

  “So you made it back in one piece,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good, good,” he said, his eyes darting from me to something on a nearby monitor. “One moment, if you don’t mind.” He turned and gave some instructions to a huddle of technicians. Then he turned back to face me squarely. “So are you ready for the grand tour?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If you have time. But I have no idea what any of this is.”

  “You are standing in the heart of the Seed Hibernation and Environmental Management facility,” he said. “This is the primary lab were geneticists map and catalogue DNA codes.”

  “Dustin said something about genetics,” I said, trying to put two and two together.

  “Yes,” said Rowan. “All my technicians are trained biogeneticists. That’s how I found Greta. Her former advisor is a colleague of mine.”

  He was talking about Gerard Boule.

  Rowan led me across the room to a set of glass doors.

  He continued, “She’s quite a find, Greta.”

  “Uh-hum,” I murmured, unsure of his meaning.

  “It’s too bad I had to ground her,” he said, “She is our best agent. She has an instinct for this kind of work. She can spot an RGV a mile away. She usually has some basic sequencing equipment in the field, but you try running an SEQ when you’re being chased by the KPA.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  We passed through the glass doors into a narrow room with several large machines lining the walls.

  “The Dehydration Lab,” Rowan explained, walking straight through to a door on the other side. “This is where we prepare the seeds for storage.”

  We passed into another room, almost identical to the first. There was a buzz coming from somewhere, I think a large ventilator on the opposite wall.

  “She must like you quite a bit,” Rowan said over the din, “or she wouldn’t have recommended you.”

  He took me out into a hallway where there was an elevator. He pushed the call button.

  We took the lift up two floors and emerged in the blinding light of day. We had, in fact, emerged in a steamy antechamber that marked the entrance to a large greenhouse. The midafternoon sunlight streamed through the glass panels in the ceiling.

  “This is where we work on our tans.” Rowan chuckled.

  He punched a code into a control box and ushered me into the greenhouse. Rows of shallow planters were arranged like squares on a checkerboard across long tables. In each planter, there were sprouts in various stages of growth, some just seedlings, others tall and budding.

  “The Regeneration Room,” Rowan said. “Just one of our six greenhouses.”

  He examined a few of the saplings carefully. There was a woman on the far side of the room. He called her over, and they exchanged some words in what sounded like Russian. Then he turned back to me.

  “Seeds have expiration dates, too, you know,” he said. “Sometimes we have to harvest new seeds from old ones before our stores expire.” He indicated the little trays of recently harvested seeds. “Although under the right conditions, many seeds can remain viable for hundreds or even thousands of years.”

  “What constitutes the right conditions?” I asked.

  “I’m glad you asked.” He grinned.

  We took the elevator down twenty stories. Rowan explained that the facility had been built deep into limestone bedrock, where the temperature was naturally cooler. The building was retrofitted and reinforced and protected against every natural disaster imaginable.

  “It’s even bombproof,” he said on the ride down, “at least where we’re headed now. Safest place you could find yourself during a nuclear attack.”

  “Are you expecting a nuclear attack anytime soon?” I asked.

  Rowan smiled as if I had said something amusing.

  When the elevator doors slid open, a gust of ice-cold air rushed into the cabin. Artificial light from a thousand fluorescent bulbs streamed in. The chamber we stepped into was the size of an airplane hangar and lined floor to ceiling with glowing glass tubes. The floor of the chamber was littered with what appeared to be hundreds of bookshelves, all crammed together like stacks of dominoes. Here, too, the shelves were divided into compartments, each containing a glowing glass tube. Scattered about the room were little electric carts with mechanical ladders that extended into the ozone.

  “Welcome to the Vault.” Rowan grinned.

  My fingers were numb from the cold. I shivered.

  “We keep it at two below zero at all times,” Rowan explained, “but we also have a few smaller vaults for seeds that fare better in more moderate climates.”

  “There must be thousands,” I said.

  “Millions,” Rowan said, grinning with childlike excitement. “Come look at this.”

  He led me across the floor and down one of the many aisles that wove between the towering shelves. We came to row 16A, and Rowan turned the crank. T
he shelves groaned on their tracks, and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, an aisle appeared between 16A and 16B.

  Rowan led me down the narrow pass, his eyes searching the expanses of glowing tubes, which I now saw were canisters, each carefully insulated with several layers of translucent fiberglass.

  Rowan stopped in front of a canister labeled “PA-xiv.” He released a valve on the underside of the canister, and it let out a hiss as it detached from the wall.

  Rowan held the canister out for me to see. The seeds were visible through a clear plastic window in the frosted fiberglass—maybe a dozen or so black specks sitting like royalty on a little white cushion.

  “Papaver metus rhodai,” he said, “a variety of poppy believed to be extinct until only recently. This is one of yours.”

  He replaced the canister and then led me to the other end of the vault. This time he had to climb a ladder some fifteen feet to find what he was looking for.

  When he returned to ground level, he had another canister. This one looked a little more primitive than the first. Through the viewing window I could see a handful of yellow flecks on a foam sponge.

  “Solanum lycopersicum nihil,” he said, “a type of heirloom tomato grown in the Northern Himalayas. This was your very first delivery.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “It’s all catalogued in our system. The agent who identifies the RGV, the sandwich guy who delivers it, meaning you in this case, the date of delivery, et cetera. I checked the database before you arrived.”

  He showed me ink scribbles on the palm of his hand indicating which canisters were mine.

  “I see.” My head was buzzing. It felt like I had walked onto the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The humming ventilation system. The translucent tubes that made the place look like an alien spacecraft.

  And all for what? Seeds?

  “Okay, so let’s see what you’ve got for me this time,” Rowan said eagerly.

  I had forgotten I was carrying the cooler. I handed it over without protest. After all, he was paying me fifty grand for it.

  Rowan turned the cooler upside down, like he had shown me on my first visit to his office, and then, with both thumbs, he pressed the round dimples in the base of the chest, smooth indentations that were almost invisible to the untrained eye. The cooler gave a sigh, and a sixteen-square-inch compartment fell out of the belly of the cooler.

  Neatly folded into this compartment was a clear plastic baggie. Rowan held the baggie up to the light.

  There they were. Eight golden kernels.

  Zea mays matris, I explained to the court.

  Zea mays matris. In other words, corn.

  There used to be hundreds of varieties. This particular type was harvested exclusively in the mountain villages of Pyongan-namdo.

  Well, certainly, yes.

  Rowan Krasimir did.

  I had nothing to do with that.

  No, I was never invited back.

  Again, that was all Mr. Krasimir.

  I’m not a geneticist, so I really can’t say.

  No, I couldn’t tell you that either.

  Well, that’s easy. Because Zea mays matris is the only variety of corn on the planet known to be immune to Fetter’s Rot.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE MAIL FINALLY came today. It has been delayed two weeks because the manager of the building took a holiday and forgot to have the post forwarded to our pied-à-terre. All our mail has been piling up on the floor of his downstairs office these past couple weeks, unbeknownst to us, and finally today we got a stack several inches thick from a very apologetic young woman whom I believe to be the building manager’s eldest daughter.

  If I were a younger man or she were an older woman, we might get along very well, the building manager’s eldest daughter and I.

  There were several items in there for Spencer, stuff having to do with his job back home. There were also several letters from Eugene’s paranoid agent in New York. Apparently he received the Jolly Roger manuscript and loved it! He just had a few notes on the character of the badly burned space captain. He wanted to know more about the nuclear blast that melted off the captain’s face. How it came to be. What had happened to Earth. Et cetera.

  Eugene’s going to try to fit it in somewhere that the nuclear blast went off in New Delhi in 2198, when the captain was but a wee lad combing a deserted shipyard with his father. Turns out the captain’s father was a junk dealer specializing in used spaceships—my idea, inspired by my very own junk dealer father.

  When the bomb goes off right there in New Delhi Square, marking the beginning of the end of Earth, the captain’s father is blown to a billion tiny bits. Everyone within a fifty-mile radius is blown to a billion tiny bits. But by some miracle of miracles, the captain, a small boy then, is spared. He happens to be digging around in the torn-up cockpit of an old Indian Starfighter. The radon-enforced blast shield of the Starfighter protects the boy from the worst of the nuclear explosion, and the boy emerges badly burned but alive in a completely barren wasteland.

  That was my idea, too.

  Apparently, several Russian military rescue crews arrive on the scene and find the young boy, the lone survivor of the blast, and take him aboard a Russian Galaxy Fighter and fit him with robotic tissue replacements and all that. Somehow, in all the confusion of all-out nuclear war and the destruction of Earth, the Galaxy Fighter loses contact with the Russian space fleet, and the boy finds himself the adopted member of a renegade space crew.

  What do you think?

  We think it’ll sell.

  Eugene’s got some work ahead of him now, fitting all that into the story. And he already has his eighty thousand words.

  Not me. Not me. Sorry, Sam.

  There were a couple of things in the mail for me, too. One was a letter from Duncan. He must have sent it just before he died. Magnum Opus. He’s got a picture in there of him and Greta standing on the Pont des Arts with the river Seine flowing under them, and the sun setting over the Louvre. The railings of the Pont des Arts are littered with silver and gold padlocks, which couples fasten to the bridge as tokens of their love, and which are glittering in the pinkish light of the setting sun.

  Greta and Duncan are both very young in the photograph. Duncan has a full head of hair, and Greta looks like she could still be in high school. I flipped the picture over. On the back, scrawled in Greta’s familiar handwriting, it reads, “Paris 2004.”

  Duncan writes, “I thought you’d get a kick out of this photograph. Hard to recognize us from way back when. Who are those people? Ghosts.”

  The second item that came for me is from Pilar Rochac. She has written a note saying that the house on Gough Street is in good shape and not to hurry home because it is terribly hot and humid in the city. Several elderly people have died in their homes from heatstroke, she says, and the city has just issued an air quality alert.

  “It’s not the San Francisco I grew up in,” she writes. She immigrated to San Francisco with her mother in 2014.

  Different times. Different times.

  Pilar has enclosed a letter from the Vatican, which came for me in late July and which she felt ought to be forwarded to me immediately since it looked important.

  It is an invitation to a ceremonial mass in honor of my sister, the beloved Saint Marilee Lorenzo of San Francisco, as she is being conferred the title of Patron Saint of Earthquakes and Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

  Magnum Opus.

  The final letter comes to me from the FedEx headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. The chairman and president, Abel Eisentraut, writes that he is very sorry, but the package I mailed “express” on July 27, 2056, from Paris, France, to San Francisco, New Shasta, United States of America, has been lost in transit. Unfortunately, there is nothing he or his staff can do at this time to recoup the loss. A FedEx representative will notify me immediately if anything turns up.

  If.

  He ends the letter by thanking me for my business and asking tha
t I continue to choose FedEx for all my future delivery needs.

  Eliza has, of course, been on the phone with FedEx all morning. It turns out that if you type the tracking number into an online system, the last place the microchip with my brain, and Greta’s urn, and Bentley the Stuffed Crow turn up before vanishing into thin air is the Queen Beatrix International Airport in Aruba.

  Do I think Greta is up there somewhere laughing her ass off?

  Okay, why not.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANK YOU to Mom and Dad, the earliest supporters of my work, to Joey, the most judicious, and to Danny, the most enthusiastic. Thank you to Kim Krizan and Dean Gualco for spending time with my work, and for helping me navigate the world of self-publishing. Thank you to Erin, my editor, who only goes by Erin. I also owe a huge thank-you to Tyler Thompson, who appreciated my work when I couldn’t stand to look at it, and to Sarah Prestwood, who was Sarah Smock when this book was first conceived. And finally, to the Monkey, who makes this whole monkey parade worthwhile.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NICHOLAS PONTICELLO is a high school mathematics teacher in Los Angeles, where he lives with the art historian Nico Machida and their five freshwater fish. Nicholas received degrees in mathematics and astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. He is the creator of the web-comic Simply Nick. Do Not Resuscitate is his first novel.

  For more titles by this author, please visit www.booleanop.com.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12