Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Hope. If they ever run out of spilled oil, there’s old pollution they can eat.”

  “And when they run out of that?” What-ifs spun in my brain. I got into trouble in school over that, thinking too fast and far ahead of my teachers.

  “I suppose they can move on to the dead zones that collect plastic dumped in the ocean. Plastic is processed oil after all. By the time you graduate from college our oceans will be clean again. We can take endangered species out of aquariums and zoos, thaw frozen embryos and put them back in the wild.”

  That seemed too far-fetched even for me. Might as well ask for help from aliens.

  But Daddy might get to come home.

  “What happens to the bacteria when they run out of pollution and trash?”

  “One step at a time, sweetie,” Mom said, finally looking at me. “One step at a time.”

  I worried my bottom lip with my teeth, aping my Mom. Our chins trembled in unison, neither of us admitting how much we feared that the solution might be more dangerous than the problem.

  Suddenly my twelfth birthday didn’t seem so important.

  But I still wanted my cake.

  ∞

  Fast forward six years. Another birthday. A different cake. Mom scrolled through the news while I fixed cereal. Mom now spent more time in the field. I could take care of myself when neither she nor Dad was around. Often I didn’t know where in the world she’d gone. On my beach patrols, scooping up globs of oil and taking oil-drenched birds to sanctuaries (how could they call it volunteer work when graduation required a thousand hours of cleanup duty?) I noticed a little difference in the intensity of pollution and damage. But more just kept coming.

  I think I cried myself to sleep every Saturday night after my patrols, even if I’d had a spectacular date—rare enough when all the boys I liked had as much or more homework and independent projects as I did. My few dates were usually a productive session in the lab at school.

  Today Mom was home for my birthday and she made a cake, of sorts.

  Dad still captained a skimmer ship in the Bay, patrolling for leaks from gypsy (i.e. illegal) wells. My attention was on the chemistry text on my netbook. If I aced the second period semifinals, I could cinch early placement at University of Virginia in pre-med.

  I’d given up showing my worry when either or both my parents were gone, or my short-lived relief when one or both came home. It was a big, ugly, dangerous world out there and most sensible people stayed close to home.

  Once I graduated and became a legal adult, maybe I could make a difference. Find out what was really going on in the wider world.

  At home our world had closed in upon itself. Only government agents, like Mom, got to travel. Somebody who claimed more smarts than me said if we all conserved oil, drastically, then the need for more drilling and the leaky, half-assed gypsy wells would no longer be profitable.

  I didn’t believe it for a minute.

  “Mom, may I have a piece of cake if I come home for lunch?” I asked as I crunched through plain shredded wheat with soy milk (we saved the goat milk from our neighborhood herd for cheeses). No fresh berries this time of year. Six weeks from now, for my graduation breakfast, I might find a few strawberries in the back yard—if the goats and the chickens didn’t eat them first.

  Since gasoline rationing, we didn’t import produce from California anymore. We depended more and more upon what we could grow in our own yards or neighborhood communes. Having eggs to make a cake meant I traded my breakfast scrambled eggs for cereal. Gone was the bleached white flour and processed sugar for my cake. Mom made do with rough-milled flour, eggs from our backyard chickens who weren’t laying well right now, raisins from our own grape arbor, and local honey for a dense and chewy slab. Good, but different. I’d given up hope of ever having my cake again.

  “The ocean has been clean for a year, you’d think we’d get a relaxation of petroleum rationing. Your father could come home. Instead, the government just announced new restrictions,” Mom whined.

  “He promised to come home for my graduation.” I didn’t like the whine in my voice any more than in hers.

  “The press conference says that the resources saved in this new round of restrictions will go back into scientific research,” she mumbled. I pretended I didn’t hear several curses that followed under her breath.

  “Will they restore SETI and the space program?” That kind of research might be useful. Maybe we could drill Europa for clean water or get help from aliens. We weren’t helping ourselves much.

  “Doubtful.”

  “I read a paper last night that suggested we should start mining asteroids for new fuel sources.”

  “Wishful thinking,” Mom grunted.

  Humans had closed in on themselves into small communities, keeping all facilities within walking distance. We no longer looked to the skies for answers or inspiration.

  “The p-rats are the best thing that happened to us,” I told her snootily to hide my true disdain of the polluters who were the source of the problem. But they were corporations contributing to the health of our economy so they couldn’t be to blame. “We’re healthier, walking and eating fresh food grown without petroleum-based fertilizer and preservatives. Obesity is almost obsolete. Type-two diabetes has fallen below epidemic levels. Air pollution has reduced 63.8%.” I read the data off my Modern Problems research paper due tomorrow.

  I saved my extra credit term paper to a data crystal. Part of the p-rats was a reduction of plastic. DVDs and flash drives had fallen before the mighty crystal grown in factories from easily mined minerals. In fact the oil-laden sand we hauled off the beaches made a splendid silica base for crystals.

  “Rudi Czerna just announced a new bacteria to eat the old one that has mutated to eating plankton,” Mom nearly shouted. Then her face fell.

  “And what happens when that bacteria runs out of food?” I asked the question I knew hovered on her lips. I had a few ideas gleaned from bits and pieces of Mom’s reports I’d stolen looks at and phone conversations I’d eavesdropped on. She knew I knew more than I was supposed to. She didn’t go out of her way to hide supposedly secret UNOMA stuff from me.

  For six years I’d studied bio-chem in and outside of class. I had a twenty terabyte crystal the size of my thumb with all of my notes and scientific articles. The thing had cost three months’ allowance. I wore it on a neck chain with a wire basket for the crystal. All the girls wore their crystals as status symbol jewelry. My big one held more than school work. I recorded my own research and ideas for a better tomorrow on it.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if St. Rudi offers any real hope,” Mom said quietly. Then she looked up, her expression brightening. “Here’s your birthday present a little early.” She held out a data crystal almost the size of her palm. It rested in its own gold mesh cage.

  “What’s that, Mom?”

  “Hope. Keep it safe; even if you can’t open it with your current computers, you will be able to when the time comes.”

  I didn’t know if she used my name or if she defined the crystal. Maybe both. That made me think long and hard. But I had to say something.

  “Gosh, it looks like an alien artifact!”

  “Never say that in public,” she warned. “Never, if you value your life and mine, let anyone know you have this, or where it came from.”

  “Okay.” Um . . . something was up. Something weird. From the stubborn lift of Mom’s chin, and the cold glint in her eye I knew she wouldn’t say anything more. This was something she’d made sure I didn’t know about until now.

  I took the crystal and strung it on my golden neck chain. Thought better of it and tucked it into the special pouch on my netbook case for crystals. It hid quite happily beneath three smaller ones.

  But I wanted to wear it. No one else in my class had anything as big or bright or uniquely faceted.

  Three hours later, after I aced the chem test, some friends and I loaded onto a bio-diesel bus
for a field trip to the UNOMA offices in Norfolk. The crazy Czech was in town for a conference at Navy Fleet Headquarters—which now included the skimmer ships. He’d agreed to speak to a select group of students. I had more than a few questions for him.

  Rudi Czerna made his appearance twenty minutes late. I fidgeted and found metaphors for his tardiness in the timing of his work. He never released it until almost too late. A miracle in the making.

  Was that his way of making people love him as the savior of humankind when all he did was cause new problems?

  When he finally made an entrance, flanked by seven Secret Service agents—why did he need those?—we could barely see his short, square form behind all the black-suited male hunks.

  Guess who got most of my attention. Not the little man with a nervous tic in his cheek.

  He talked of generalities in engineering bacteria. Most of us knew how to do that sophomore year. He kept looking around nervously.

  “Sir, what about the ethics of science?” I asked as he closed his state-of-the-art netpad. I stood so he could not ignore me. One hundred bored teenagers heard me. I knew that by the sudden silence that followed my words.

  “Vhat you mean?” he asked in his fake-sounding thick accent. His eyes riveted on the crystals on my necklace. Seeking something like the big one hiding in my case? Or maybe just my meager cleavage.

  “I mean, you created a life form with a finite food supply. Did you just expect them to all die of starvation when our use for them ran out?”

  “Is bacteria. Not true life. We kill bacteria every time we wash hands.”

  “But your artificial bacteria didn’t die. They didn’t resort to cannibalism. They mutated and started eating plankton, and now our entire oceanic ecosystem is threatened.”

  “That’s classified information, Miss,” one of the black-suited hunks said sternly.

  “No, it’s not. It was on all the news channels three weeks ago,” the young man next to me shouted.

  “I fix with new bacteria,” St. Rudy said with a dismissive gesture.

  “And so we have an endless round of solutions becoming as big a problem as the mess they were supposed to solve.” I parroted my mother on this one.

  That got me a round of nods and whispered comments from my fellow students. We’d discussed it endlessly, and quietly, over lunch every time a popular blog or indie news site disappeared from the internet. We knew enough to keep our opinions under the governmental radar.

  “By time we need fix, I fix. No time to do more. Never enough time . . . to understand.” Then he dismissed the group by turning his back on us.

  “Which means we have to ricochet from disaster to disaster because you can’t think far enough ahead to build an end-scape into your work?” I asked as loudly as I could before he and his protectors could escape.

  His eyes widened and his florid face paled in panic. Four agents gathered in a tighter circle and literally pushed him out the door.

  Three agents jumped off the stage and made their way toward me. “We’re just curious kids,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. Ten of my friends sided with me.

  The agents backed off. “We’re watching you,” one muttered. I couldn’t tell which one. They all looked alike and stood shoulder to shoulder.

  I sank into a depressed silence on the ride home.

  I fingered the bulge of the data crystal in its pouch. Memory of Mom’s intensity sent warning tingles up my back.

  That’s when I noted the big black SUV following our bus. Only official government types could afford that much fuel for their vehicles. Every time I turned to look at it, it dropped back behind a dozen little electric cars.

  Once home I didn’t bother looking for a slice of birthday cake while I searched the news sites for rumors and background on Rudi Czerna, PhD. I found precious little. His personal website waxed poetic about his credentials from a European university I’d never heard of, nor could I find a website for it. Then nothing beyond his early employment with a European conglomerate. A patent for a gene-splitting technique that made genetic engineering easier filed with the Russian government and the US patent office. I used that method in middle school biology classes two years before his patent.

  After that I found only government “Classified” stamps on everything; layers and layers of encryption on a dozen dead links.

  Okay, the US government didn’t want anyone replicating his current work. So I hit the blogosphere looking for people who had tried to reverse engineer his first oil-eating bacteria and the new bug-eating bug.

  Nothing. All shut down. The same with generic rumor-mill blogs. At the first mention of St. Rudi they disappeared.

  No wonder he had massive Secret Service protection.

  Strangely, at every place St. Rudi held a conference or met with governmental officials I found an increase in UFO sightings. Coincidence?

  Not bloody likely. I remembered Mom’s warning when I suggested the crystal looked alien . . .

  There was a lot the government didn’t want us to know. Like the weekly report from the Center for Disease Control. I’d started monitoring that site as soon as I’d decided on med school. I flipped through CDC lists of outbreaks, projected vectors, and cure ratios.

  Nothing new reported for six months.

  Call me paranoid, but I decided to hide the crystal in a niche at the back of the chicken coop.

  When I came out and latched the cage, I noticed a big black SUV parked across the street. I caught a glint of a camera lens or binoculars in the setting sun. Maybe I wasn’t paranoid after all.

  Two weeks later Rudi Czerna PhD died of mysterious causes. No details, no rumors, just gone with only a bare bones (as in scrubbed clean) single paragraph obituary. If anyone bothered to ask questions on the internet, their email and blog got shut down within seconds. Who knows what happened to the person behind the question? St Rudi became little more than a footnote in the history books.

  The government sealed his lab. Mom’s team at UNOMA petitioned to get their hands on his notes and samples. They and every other scientist in the world were denied access despite loud outcries that the government didn’t really want a clean-up of the pollution or reversal of the damage Rudi Czerna caused. What was the government trying to hide?

  Mom asked if I still had the big data crystal safe.

  She scared me.

  “Helen is sitting on it, hoping it will hatch,” I mumbled, referring to our oldest and crankiest chicken. She was also our best broody hen. She’d sit on anything.

  “Good. Give her this one to brood as well.” She handed me another crystal, as big as the first one.

  ∞

  Dad came home for my graduation and extended his leave to a full year. He got to share a birthday with me. Then UNOMA and the Navy called him back to corral more oil from abandoned, as in uncapped and unmonitored, wells that continued to leak. The bacteria hadn’t eaten all of the oil-based pollution after all. And now that uncontrolled but useful bacteria had been eaten by another artificial bacteria.

  I wondered if the world was coming to an end.

  My dad died at sea of some mysterious illness. I cried and wailed in private. I’d grown too good at hiding my true emotions to ever let anyone, including Mom, know what I truly felt. Then I wrote six dozen letters because the Navy wouldn’t let us bury him in a cemetery. They dumped him in the sea. Oh, sure they had a respectful ceremony, but Mom and I, his family couldn’t be there. I wanted to know why and no one, absolutely no one, gave a straight answer. If they bothered to answer.

  Mom and I paid an exorbitant fee for a grave marker for him within walking distance of the house. An empty grave. “I didn’t want him buried at sea,” Mom said and sniffed away her tears. “But he was a sailor born and bred so I guess that was the natural place for him.”

  Mom continued her work for UNOMA as a “site analyst.” I suppose her PhD made her an ideal field agent. I thought her over-qualified.

  Time passed in a blur of stu
dies and exams and med school applications. I got too busy to worry about the data crystals, by now thoroughly buried under straw and chicken shit. The government picked up the tab for both my undergrad and medical school based on my academic performance and my side forays into bio-chem. I guessed they needed someone to replace St. Rudi.

  My scholarship committee handed me special lab work commissioned by the FBI. Not the CDC. Not UNOMA. The freakin’ FBI. St. Rudi’s sloppy fingerprints were all over the data.

  The UFO sightings increased, and the CDC came back online with no explanation for the year-long blank spot in their records.

  I took the crystals with me to med school. I tried accessing them—four of them now, all birthday gifts from Mom—on every computer at home or university with no luck. Each one was just too big or too sophisticated. So I petitioned for use of the university’s biggest computer, the one used for sophisticated experiments and was denied. It was fully booked by the government.

  I couldn’t even use it for my secret work for the FBI. Then my third year they handed me soil samples from five different locations. None of them identified. As usual I slipped into a lab around 2 AM with the sealed tubes. The security officer knew me and only took a cursory look at my government ID. My student credentials didn’t give me access to this wing.

  I scrolled through test after test, comparing, separating, diagnosing . . . not enough of the bacteria that gave soil the organic chemicals to nurture plant life, in any of the samples.

  I sat up straighter, swallowed my yawns and tested again. And again. The soil was almost dead. And then I spotted another spike in the chemical graphs. Something that should have been worm poop and beneficial, wasn’t. It looked frighteningly familiar.

  I needed a more powerful microscope and a data file left over from my high school research and the old CDC articles. The crystal was in my backpack, as always. The only microscope powerful enough was on the other side of a locked door, accessible only with a faculty ID key.

  Strangely, my government ID opened that lock—but not the one with the super computer. I set everything up, pulled up the slide and compared it to old data on my class work computer. Another slide, and another. All looked exactly like the second bacteria St. Rudi had invented. All had strange similarities to the flesh eating bacteria that periodically spilled out of remote jungles.