by M M Buckner
She lay flat in the grass and studied the ravaged canal banks with her binoculars. The eroded places gleamed like melted glass. Four times she paged Max before he returned her call. Rory had him hustling with a repair crew, shoring up another undermined area near the Quimicron dock. He called her on his cell phone from the men’s port-a-let.
“A barge sank yesterday afternoon,” he whispered. “Merton, he say the canal stink like sulfur around that barge. He say the water eat through the hull.”
“Impossible.” CJ batted away mosquitoes and remembered the ruined dive-suit she’d had to pay for with her credit card. “The canal’s not acidic enough to dissolve steel.”
“I saw the hull,” Max said. “Eaten up with little holes. And some of the cargo leak out. It just disparét. Divers look all over to find it, but no trace left.”
CJ’s throat tightened. “What kind of cargo was it?”
“What they call ‘moly’,” he answered. “Merton say it’s the loa spirits. They outraged by how bad we disturb the Earth.”
She frowned. “You don’t believe that voodoo stuff.”
“Voudon,” he said. “Gotta go, lam. I see you later.”
CJ turned off her phone, rolled on her back and stared at the brightening sky. She thought about the stolen barge cargo. Was the colloid feeding?
The clear dry air chapped her lips, and she bit off loose flecks of skin. Moly. Molybdenum. She tried to remember what she knew about this element. Silvery-white, tough as nails, a transition metal used as a catalyst in petroleum refining. It was used for something else, too. Filaments. Ultrafine microscopic wires used in electronic devices.
Her thoughts kept circling the colloid’s response to sound. Sound traveled faster underwater, but what was sound? Compression waves. Crests and troughs of high and low pressure.
An owl flapped its wings and startled her. When it swooped down from a nearby tree, a small rodent screamed a death cry, and CJ jumped. Then she wrinkled her nose and tried to scratch an itch through her stiff coverall. She’d been working on another theory. Something about field attraction.
She knew an EM field could develop a kind of cohesion or coherence—like the surface tension on a water droplet. And its force could move charged particles. Could that be how the colloid maneuvered? Maybe, through alternating waves of attraction and repulsion, the EM field steered its charged particles through the water like a flock of birds. But what was controlling the EM field? A mix of curiosity and fear turned CJ’s skin to gooseflesh.
Reek
Sunday, March 13
6:42 AM
While CJ lay in the swamp grass, pondering riddles and picking at mosquito bites, Roman Sacony paced in the fifth-floor conference room of Building No. 2. The recycled office air smelled of bodily exhalations and cleaning fluid. None of the plate-glass windows would open. Elaine Guidry, Meir’s buxom blond assistant, sat watching him while he speed-read her memo. But the typewritten words filtered through to his brain more slowly than usual. He was still thinking about the Gulf-Pac exec who’d just slammed out of the room.
Elaine had written the memo at his request to remind the plant’s employees of their nondisclosure agreements and the penalties for leaked information. Elaine’s wording was too polite, and he feared it might not have the intended effect, but he had no leisure to edit. “Cut the first sentence, and send it,” he said.
Elaine batted her mascara-rimmed eyelashes. Most men paid her more attention. She wore her coral-pink cashmere sweater belted tight at the waist, and last night she’d touched up her highlights. But despite the rumors she’d heard about her lascivious CEO, Roman Sacony was all business. She gathered her notes and bustled out.
A line of people waited to see him, and a stack of message slips indicated the number of calls the switchboard had fielded. He wasn’t ready to deal with voicemail yet, but he flipped through the handwritten messages. Insurance people. Lawyers. Worse, Rick Jarmond had faxed another Corps of Engineers form.
Adrenaline flooded his muscles, and blood flushed his brown cheeks. He had never once lost a fight to the Anglo bureaucrats, he had never given ground. But this adversary in the water had no face. Why did it have to emerge on his property? Why now, when so many critical issues were converging? Jarmond’s fax shredded in his hands.
He needed data. Solid ground beneath his feet. He was tired to death of these fluid situations. He spread the torn paper on his desk and took a calming breath. His priority had to be containment—in every sense. Contain the damage, contain the information, contain himself. He waited for his spate of anger to recede.
This morning, the Corps permit had come through, and he’d ordered a pair of coffer-dam gates to close off the canal. The gates were made from a new nanostructured carbon composite, impermeable, hard as diamonds, the toughest building material ever developed. Horst Corporation used the gates to hold back thousands of tons of water while they constructed bridges. Roman would use them to trap his faceless enemy and put an end to his cash drain. Then he would make the colloid disappear. Imagining this end, he almost smiled at Rich Jarmond’s form.
Already, the gates were steaming up the Mississippi River on a barge, accompanied by the diesel-powered crane that would lower them into position. He expected them by noon. Until then, he would force himself to remain calm. He flipped his cell phone open and called Yue. “Has it moved?”
“No change in location,” she shouted. Roman could hear a lot of background noise. Yue was speaking from Gulf-Pac’s loading dock. “It’s completely invisible. Some trick of light. I’m tracking its energy field.”
“Still expanding?” he asked.
“Correct,” she said archly. Li Qin Yue resented anything she couldn’t explain.
“E-mail me.” He ended the call and marched to the window, willing the watery picaro to show itself. But the canal rippled the same sluggish gray as ever. Yue said the colloid simultaneously reflected and refracted light, like a million tiny mirrors and prisms, so all you could see was dappled water.
He paced to his desk, then returned inevitably to the window. Sealing the canal would be time-consuming, but straightforward. More difficult would be the task of sealing people’s mouths. Over a hundred Quimicron employees and twice as many Gulf-Pac people knew about the cave-ins. Another twenty workers had witnessed the damaged barge.
The barge was lying dead in the water even now, listing on its side for all to see. Roman leaned against the window and frowned at the lopsided hull. The concurrent timing could not have been worse. Employees were already buzzing that the canal was “hexed.” Somebody put a gris gris on the water, they said. In an hour, Meir would call them into the warehouse for a stern lecture on confidentiality. But Roman doubted that would be enough. Everyone had smelled the acid reek in the water. His enemy would not be so easily covered up.
He checked e-mail. Damn the science team. Yue and Vaarveen were his best people, yet they had no coherent facts to give him. The water registered temperatures near the freezing point, and they’d confirmed the electromagnetic field, that was how they finally located the colloidal mass. They’d also verified the electric current and the ionization Reilly predicted, and they’d found wide variations in pH. Their other findings were so contradictory and improbable that Roman might have questioned Yue’s competence—except he knew his team leader too well.
Li Qin seemed grave when she showed him her scans. She’d found astonishing structure. Complex accretions of microchips and proplastid drifted through the water, invisible to the naked eye, detectable only through the SE microscope. Yue found them always in paired chains, electrically positive and negative, circulating randomly through clouds of ionic fluid, constantly disintegrating and reforming. Yet the structures persisted like a chemical host—a chemical “ghost,” Yue said in her weariness.
Further sample analysis turned up more exotic techno-trash: molecule-size electronic switches, radionuclide microbes designed to absorb nuclear waste, tomato DNA laced with goldf
ish genes, silver nanoparticles created to kill odor in athletic socks.
He checked her data. He trusted her method. He just couldn’t absorb how fast the technology of the very small had accelerated since the turn of the millennium—or how fast its detritus had spread into the waste stream.
But that wasn’t the worst. Yue could not explain why the EM field had increased 12 percent in strength. Nor could she say why the colloid’s volume had doubled. The expansion alarmed Roman more than anything. The field now measured forty yards across, and Yue estimated its volume at eight liquid tons.
Vaarveen had a bundle of probes and sensors dangling in the water, and Yue kept drawing new samples, rerunning her data. But that flakey brat, Reilly? She’d gone missing. For all her brilliant gifts, she was about as dependable as a brush fire.
At least the EM field allowed Yue and Vaarveen to keep tabs on the—what should he call it—pollution slick? Peter Vaarveen dubbed it the “Quimi-chimera.” Stupid Anglo, Vaarveen made everything a joke. Roman would never have hired him if Yue hadn’t insisted.
A chair got in Roman’s way, so he kicked it aside and resumed pacing. For the time being, he’d convinced the officials to keep this matter out of the press. Petroleum execs understood why this sort of business should remain private, and the agencies managing the river had no wish to stir up public anxiety. But this Corps guy, Rick Jarmond, he was a different animal. Young and green. He took his regulatory job way too seriously. Roman drummed his fingers and scrutinized the phone.
Instead of calling Jarmond, he looked up another number in his Palm—Oceano Mundial, a New Orleans-based company specializing in environmental remediation. Roman always counted on OM to clean up his oil spills at sea. They were expensive, but they got the job done. He regretted not calling them to deal with this toluene. Meir had downplayed the spill, said nobody cared about one more fish-kill in Devil’s Swamp. Meir swore he could handle the mop-up with some contract workers and a few loads of a genetically engineered bacteria. Bad decision. Roman flipped open his phone and keyed the number for Oceano Mundial.
Glitter
Sunday, March 13
11:05 AM
The coffer-dam gates arrived early. On a barge pushed by a line-haul tow, they glittered like a stack of colossal sky-blue platters lashed down with gigantic chains. HORST CONSTRUCTION gleamed in fancy script across the towboat pilot house. CJ slapped a mosquito. She often wondered why towboats never towed anything. They always pushed from behind. Max called to tell her about the gates. He’d been calling every chance he got.
Steam rose from the ground where CJ sat. Seeds swelled and sprouted. Insects swarmed, and birds plucked them from the air. She shed her heavy coverall and stripped down to shorts and T-shirt. Her swollen nipples hurt when anything brushed them, and occasional cramps stabbed her belly. She’d stuffed a box of tampons in her gear bag, just in case. As she waited for the towboat to anchor, she smeared mud on her neck, arms, and legs to deter mosquitoes. The fierce sun baked her like a clay pot, and beetles fell in her hair.
She studied the blue gates, and her binoculars caught the Queen Bitch and the asshole taking readings. They had about a million dollars worth of equipment sitting out in the sun, including the SE microscope. CJ gazed with lust at their multichannel analyzer. She’d used one like it at MIT. She could be down there now, learning more about the colloid. What was she doing skulking around like a trespasser? She scratched a bug bite. It was her own fault. She’d thrown a tantrum at the wrong time—again.
When she closed her eyes, afterimages of sparkling sunlight reminded her of the underwater flashes in the canal. Water and light. What was it about water molecules?
They were magnetic. H2O—one oxygen atom anchored the center, and a pair of hydrogen atoms occupied two corners. A pair of negative charges balanced the other two corners, which made each molecule a skewed bipolar magnet. She pictured the water magnets lining up in strong hydrogen bonds. Liquid chainmail. Their surface tension was really just magnetic attraction. So with precisely the right shifts at the right time, an EM field could make water dance.
Blackbirds crossed the sky, and as CJ watched them, she mused about rhythms, ocean tides, compression waves, heartbeats, drumbeats. The pond’s EM field had mimicked the rhythm pulsing from her iPod. Pulsed out as sound waves. Pulsed back as EM waves.
Like a cell phone, she thought. Cellular phones turned human voice into electromagnetic pulses. She imagined thousands of old cell phones chucked in the garbage. Crushed to fragments and dumped in landfills, they leaked into rivers every year. Their bits and pieces had been washing into Devil’s Swamp for decades. And thanks to the proplastid coating, many of their chips remained functional.
She wiggled restlessly in the grass. Her claim about a sentient computer network had sounded far-fetched even to her own ears. But what if? Might a zillion trashed microparts actually assemble a neural net? In the water? A neural net wasn’t like an ordinary computer network. Instead of crunching ones and zeroes, a neural net could learn new behaviors. It could recognize voice commands and images. Someone at Stanford invented neural nets back in the 1950s to imitate processes in the human brain.
CJ mused, how would a self-evolved neural net communicate through the water? An idea formed at the bottom of her mind, hazy and fluid, something about cellular signals, binary code—and zydeco.
Across the water, Max watched the barge crew unchain their blue gates. The fluted sections glittered like metallic paint. Max had never seen anything so shiny smooth and flawless. Rory told him the sections had to be hinged together, and Max was supposed to help the barge hands connect them.
The twenty-four steel hinges lay in a row, each one as large as two men. While they waited for the crane to lift them, Max squatted in the shade of a pin oak, playing with somebody’s coonhound, when suddenly one of his female coworkers screeched. It was Betty DeCuir. She was pointing at the canal.
Under a ten-foot layer of ordinary gray water, a wave of frost mushroomed outward, and something glittery white took shape. It looked like a diaphanous fan of milk. Betty ran toward the water’s edge, but as quickly as the vision appeared, it vanished. Betty picked up a handful of rocks and tossed them, hoping to stir it up again. Max tore loose a chunk of limestone riprap and chucked it in. Then he noticed the dog. The animal had gone rigid, all alert. Its ear was cocked toward the water. Max wondered what the dog was hearing.
Churn
Sunday, March 13
3:40 PM
“They’re ready to close the gates.” Dan Meir stood in a pool of sunlight at his office window, clutching a cell phone in one hand and a two-way radio in the other. He was overlapping two separate conversations, one with the crane operator, the other with his crew chief, Rory Godchaux.
At the desk, Roman nodded and ended his own conference call. Spreadsheets, photographs, and empty water bottles littered the conference table where the two of them had been working since early morning. “Wait for my order,” Roman said. “I’m expecting a ship.”
As they left the room together, Roman fished a red-and-black capsule from his pocket and swallowed it dry. Li Qin had promised it would help him stay alert. Until the canal was sealed, he would feel no peace, and the elements of his plan were not meshing smoothly. He couldn’t close the gates till the cleanup vessel arrived. Another wait.
Roman dreaded the overtime bill for this operation, but he had no choice. He had to staunch the flood of lawsuits. Numbers crunched in his head as he and Meir jogged down the steep hot pavement toward the dock. Heat radiated from the concrete. He felt its warmth through the soles of his running shoes.
Quimicron kept two speedboats to patrol the canal, both of them four-seater Formula FAS3Techs. A swarthy young crewman had one of them powered up, and as Roman stepped into the cockpit, Meir introduced him as Max Pottevents. Roman eyed the young Creole. The name triggered his memory. Max Pottevents had been with Reilly in the swamp. But Roman had no time to think about that now.
He knew the caving banks coincided with the spreading EM field. And the underwater photos showed the sand had not washed along the canal bed. It had vanished—just like the moly from the barge. Roman rocked as waves buffeted the speedboat.
Moly might dissolve in water, he reasoned, but silica quartz—common sand—would not. Breaking it down required the blasting temperatures of an electric furnace. Roman tried, but he could not rationalize the disappearance of solid quartz. His faceless opponent plied cryptic forces.
As they approached the Gulf-Pac dock, it was necessary to glide directly across the area inhabited by the colloid, and Roman noticed that Max Pottevents was growing edgy. The young Creole took off his bandana and mopped sweat from his face. When Pottevents murmured something about evil spirits, Meir joshed him for being superstitious. But when he eased across the buoy line and steered through the colloidal emulsion, the speedboat’s compass went crazy, and they all breathed easier once they stepped onto solid concrete.
Yue showed Roman her latest computer-generated map of the EM field. Vaguely ovoid in shape, the field floated directly in front of the dock. Nested lines of force emanated from its center, and its outer boundaries frayed to a thin chaotic fringe. The computer-generated image resembled a blot of slowly diffusing ink. Except it wasn’t diffusing; it was coalescing. Yue’s data showed that, every hour, it drew more and more canal refuse into its electrically charged formation.