Primal Estate: The Candidate Species

by Samuel Franklin

  “Not yet. Was he able to see the scanner?”

  “No, it was a chance occurrence. Not likely to happen again; in fact, we will make sure it doesn’t.”

  “Good. Conduct a level four surveillance on Thompson and give me a full report in 48 hours.”

  Layrd left. Synster sat in his office alone and realized his error. His conversation with his daughter revealed it to him. In his arrogance, he had overlooked a major element in the use of the Algorithm for this project. Just as the humans thought they could add a chemical to their bodies to repair a complex failing system, he thought he could manage deleterious effects of wheat to limit the advancement of technology. But the same effects that caused a myriad of health and psychological problems, caused them to also poison themselves in an attempt to correct it. Certainly, the Algorithm was incredibly complex as well as incredibly thorough. Intellectually, he had no doubt it should work. And yet, it stunk of the same pride the humans displayed in their audacity to think they could even begin to directly control the functional nature of their own physiology, the details and subtleties of which they had only begun to understand.

  Synster wondered about the future of the project. Had he been operating under the same audacity, so certain in his intelligence that he believed he could use computing power and algorithms to overcome the inherent uncertainties in all wave systems and predict outcome parameters over centuries and millennia? He was adding agriculture of an unnatural grain to a complex environmental system, just as they were adding drugs to a complex physiological system. Would he be as wrong? He was just as arrogant as they were. How could he be so stupid? There was no going back. He was completely committed.

  Chapter 8

  Quality Control

  Layrd had decided to personally supervise the sample collection. It would be a simple matter. He selected three sites. The first was centered in the North American Continent, political jurisdiction of the United States of America, State of Texas. The second location was in East Asia, political jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China, Guangdong Province. The third was western Asia, the political jurisdiction of Afghanistan, the outskirts of Sangar.

  Layrd chose to accompany the team conducting the sample harvest from the Texas location. Each area was chosen for its particular population density, potential drug availability, and level of technological development. Each location also had a natural event in progress that would easily mask the abduction without the notice of authorities. The Provenger were currently ramping up their own natural disaster program for harvest missions but didn’t yet have their technologies in place. In Texas there was a tornado, in Guangdong there was a typhoon, and in Sangar there was civil disruption during a dust storm. In each location, five samples were ordered, more or less, with a range of ages from childhood to elderly.

  Texas

  Forty-eight-year-old Sam Caldwell was just getting the grill heated when his wife, Kerrie, arrived from the kitchen with the burgers and sausage. “Are the buns defrosting?” he called to his wife. She nodded. Sam wanted to try a new Kielbasa with his burger, and their seventeen-year-old son’s birthday was the perfect excuse.

  Ron, Sam’s son, had decided he wanted to celebrate his birthday outside since the forecast was good, thinking it might be easier to sneak away sooner with his new girlfriend, Laura, who was also there. Aunt Ginny had just arrived, over from Oklahoma with her new friend, Pat, and they were getting the cake and ice cream out of their car. Other family members were on the way.

  Sam had just built a new shelter at his place in Bergman, Texas, and when he saw the tornado, he knew, revealing just a little satisfaction, this would be the first time they’d use it. They hadn’t heard any warnings on the radio, and the approaching tornado wasn’t that big. But they did see it coming in the distance, and it appeared to be heading right for them. It was unfortunate because it was an especially nice day and, though November tornados are rare, they do happen.

  Sam and Kerrie covered the food and brought what they could down into the shelter. It was only built for six with a little extra room for storage that hadn’t even been claimed yet, so the food had a great place to rest. They went back out, grabbed some drinks, and ushered the others to safety.

  From across the yard, Kerrie yelled over the increasing wind. “Sam, I shut the dogs in the house. They were getting into the food.”

  Sam waved his hand at Kerrie. “They’ll be alright. It probably won’t hit us.” Sam watched the twister as Aunt Ginny and her friend Pat, followed by Ron and Laura, walked down into the shelter. Sam held Kerrie’s arm as he helped her down last. He pulled the door closed just as the wind started to pick up. Maybe we will get hit, he thought as he reached up to bolt the door.

  At that moment, the door swung open. Sam was startled because he thought the wind was taking it. There was a large man standing there. He was bald and wearing a tight, gray, collarless long-sleeved shirt. Before Sam could speak, he yelled over the wind, “This is an emergency.” He gave six thick bracelets to Sam. “We have to get out of here. Give one of these to each carnate!”

  “What?” Sam yelled.

  “Each person, one to each person.”

  At first Sam thought they were radios. He quickly obeyed and as he did Sam realized they must be some kind of GPS, in case they were separated. Then he wondered how this man knew there were exactly six of them. As soon as he handed the last one to Laura, the bracelet in his hand moved on its own to his wrist. It clamped down, encircling it, making a distinct latching sound. A feeling of dread overwhelmed him as he heard the same metallic clamp from all the others. Sam’s vision quickly dimmed to black.

  Provenger Nation Ship, Physiology Unit

  Kwinon touched the green circle on the main panel and flooded the chamber with an imperceptible gas that brought the occupants of the “Texas” room awake. Kwinon turned to her coworker, Daytnin. “We’ll do the China and Afghanistan room after lunch. A class is observing for those also.” Daytnin nodded.

  The doors of the vivisection theatre room opened, and a class of sixteen-year-old students quietly filed in and sat in the graduated rows, behind glass, perched above the operating deck. Some looked nervous, others eager. Their teacher came in last and waved to Kwinon. Daytnin rolled out a table with instruments and walked to the first table.

  The subjects were all fully awake now. All six had been stripped of their clothes, cleaned, and dried. They were each secured to their own table with straps on their foreheads, necks, wrists, and ankles. The tables had a deep groove all around the edge that terminated with a drain at the foot.

  Daytnin approached the first table. This one contained an older man with a prodigious belly. It was truly large, and Daytnin wondered how he could keep his balance while walking.

  As the man became fully awake, he started to groan. “No, please, oh God, no…”

  The other five, secured to their tables, started begging and screaming, tugging with their arms and legs. “Silence,” uttered Daytnin. The tags vibrated on their arms and an excruciating numbness coursed through their brains. They all stopped screaming or making any sound at all, other than that created by the contortions of their limbs attempting to pull free. There was relative quiet. “Full live flesh sample array,” Daytnin commanded.

  A mobile arm appeared out of the ceiling, lowering itself just above subject number one. Daytnin selected a hose with a narrow metal tube resembling a thick needle at the end and prepared to take samples from this first subject. He would insert the needle, activate the crimp, then start the suction inside the ears, then nose, then mouth, working his way down the body, obtaining flesh samples of the mucosal membrane at various locations around and inside of every body cavity.

  In the auditorium above, surrounding the large white room, the teacher narrated in English, as was dictated by the language laws. These laws enforced the use of local language at all times when dealing with indigenous beings, that is, of course, unless the circumstances required secrecy.
The Provenger all knew these people weren’t going anywhere, so no effort at secrecy was made. The narration was broadcast into the operating room so the technicians could listen to their own progress and hear the students’ questions. It boomed and echoed through the flat-walled room.

  “Each insertion snips a small amount of flesh off that organ or mucus membrane. Each removal creates a unique sensation, resulting in a message being sent to the rest of the body, and especially the brain. This signal is recorded through the head brace sensors and analyzed. It measures the relative sensitivity of that particular tissue. Since mucosal membranes are our body’s interface with the external environment, this information is very important to assess the body’s progress in maintaining homeostasis with the external environment. This is why they need to be awake.

  “As you know, every organ of a living being communicates with every other organ on a continual basis, both through the nervous system and through many chemical and protein signals.

  “You’ll notice that the older humans on the table are all obese. We introduced Yngorn wheat agriculture for this species approximately twelve thousand years ago. High in carbohydrates, it was designed to both enable their population growth and improve their fat marbling. Since then, they have modified it through selective breeding and made it their major food source exactly according to our plan. The entire wheat family is now especially nutrient deficient when compared to the nutrient dense foods demanded by the physiology of the human species.

  “Humans evolved for over half a million years with a diet primarily of animals that they hunted, caught, or collected, as well as a large variety of minimally-used leafy plants, tart fruits, and roots, since these were accessed while moving to follow protein sources. This was how they were able to populate most areas of Earth. Anywhere animals lived, humans could also, regardless of climate. All the resources they needed to survive, from food to clothing, were provided by wild game. Vegetable food sources, on the other hand, changed region to region, being very sparse in many areas, and varied seasonally, making them unreliable and often nonexistent. Human population densities were necessarily very low due to the factors of predator-prey ratio. The top predators are always fewer than their prey.

  “Keep this in mind while you consider the following question. Since each cell in the body absolutely requires certain nutrients to function properly, if those nutrients are absent for that cell, what does the cell do?”

  A student stood up. “It dies?”

  “Why, yes, eventually, but living cells, just like the larger organism, want to keep living, and they are tenacious. What does the cell do before it dies?”

  Another stood, “It calls for the nutrient? It demands it?”

  “Exactly, like a sponge craves water. Since any organ is merely a mass of similar cells, you then have that entire organ calling to the rest of the body, especially signaling to the digestive system and the brain, for that nutrient. As we’ve already stated in our scenario, the nutrient is lacking.”

  Another student immediately stood and blurted out, “And since we get nutrients from eating, this need causes the brain to tell us to eat more.”

  “Or it can steal the nutrient from other organs!” another student chimed in.

  “Very good. And sometimes, if it is really desperate, it will use some similar nutrient, but not exactly what it needs or prefers. All this, of course, creates problems. It’s nice to see that some of you did your reading. I like to see this kind of involvement.”

  The teacher paused to collect her thoughts. “So, any species that does not eat what it was specifically designed to digest is likely to have nutrient deficiencies. Each living organism has spent millions of years adapting to a specific niche in its environment. We’ve found that the first major mistake that an emerging intelligent species makes is to think they can eat foods that they weren’t designed to eat. They fall into this trap because they develop the technology to prepare the food in a manner that makes it taste good and allows them to digest it. But this still doesn’t mean that it is food appropriate for the species. It can still be harmful to the intestinal environment in a number of ways. It also acts as an inferior substitute to what the species should be eating.

  “For the long-term health of the organism, the internal environment is much more important than the external. Just as a hostile external environment can kill over the short term, a simple deficiency of the internal environment can kill over the long term. It gradually prevents the body’s systems from doing their job.

  “You see this here,” she said, pointing, “in our first subject. Even omnivores have relatively narrow parameters for food types, as they need to maintain an optimal environment in their digestive system to maintain homeostasis. All ingested material effects the internal intestinal environment. Some foods contribute to nutrient yield, some are neutral, and others are inhibitory. Some fit all categories regarding different nutrients. The foods a species has evolved to eat fall mostly into the contributory and sometimes neutral categories. Disease results to the organism that consumes predominantly the neutral and inhibitory foods for too long of a period.

  “Homeostasis is an important concept. It is the body’s task to continually maintain its healthy internal environment despite outside conditions. The digestive system can be considered somewhat of an internal outside environment. It is the outside that we have taken within. If those conditions are hostile to the digestive system, failure begins, systemically. Because of their contact with the outside, the intestines provide the source material for all functions as well as act as a gateway to the immune system.

  “Imbalance over the course of their lifespan can lead to the majority of their non-infectious disease. And in case you were wondering, we generally harvest before these diseases take their full effect. So please don’t leave perfectly good fat and protein on your plate and tell your parents that it is diseased.”

  The technician working on Sam had almost completed the tissue sampling, and the increasingly bored students were eager for their teacher to stop droning away. They wanted to see the interesting part. The teacher read the expressions on their faces and thought she’d better start getting them refocused.

  “After all the tissue samples are taken, the technicians will work their way back up the subject, removing those organs of interest for further, complete compositional analysis, as well as nutritional and flavor assessments. For instance; knee caps, testicles for the male, sections of skin, bladder, uterus and ovaries for the females, intestines, liver, kidneys, pancreas, gallbladder, and stomach are all taken for testing.”

  The students noticed all the bodies increased their writhing on the tables, testing their restraints, trying to pull free. But not a sound came from them.

  “As I understand it,” the teacher smiled to Kwinon through the glass, “we are going to see the removal of a heart while it is still beating.” Kwinon raised one hand in the air to acknowledge the students’ applause. “As each organ is removed, arteries and veins are tied off or cauterized to prevent exsanguination, so that the subject’s brain wave readings are still available for measurement.”

  Daytnin worked up the torso, making a cut starting at the groin and only going so far as to accommodate the removal of each organ. He tied off the veins and arteries first, removed an organ, setting it aside in a special container for that organ on the rolling table next to the subject, then cut further up the torso for the next.

  Three professional Provenger tasters enter the room and filed directly toward Sam, stopping next to his slab. Looming over him, they made final adjustments to their headset, inputting their personal identification numbers. The mechanisms created a neural connection directly with their brains and made accurate records of what they were actually tasting. They eliminated the many variable individual factors that influence the enjoyment of food to include whether they were hungry, feeling well that day, or just had an argument with a friend.

  The headsets were connected to a long
tube, the end of which was affixed with a pincer that would cut off and hold a morsel while simultaneously extracting and preserving a small sample of the material being tasted. This sample would be assessed for nutrients. In this manner, the flavor could be directly related to the nutritional value.

  Sam felt more than just the cold of the slab on his back. He saw, out of the corner of his racing eyes, his own body parts and internal organs being placed on the table beside him. He felt the vibrating pain of another cut, like scissors through nylon fabric, up his abdomen. His prodigious belly suddenly sank and became flat, as gobs of yellow fat interlaced with intestines were placed on the table next to him.