Primal Estate: The Candidate Species

by Samuel Franklin

  “I think so.” In the back of Tony’s mind the fact that Rick was a fed kept coming up. Normally he’d be very suspicious. But then immediately he remembered what he’d seen. The feds could stage a circle of light, they could stage destroying weapons, alien guy’s funky clothing. But how could they stage someone running down and killing a mountain lion. It was all too real. Before he had found Rick, Tony had come across the blood and hair that was left from the lion. He’d seen Synster throw the skinned carcass over his shoulder and carry the guts in the hide like a bag. When they had both disappeared, he had seen the white sphere and then the same thing again when Rick returned. He’d witnessed everything through his spotting scope from the top of the canyon. It had been as though he was standing right there with them. He’d even been sure to closely examine his scope for tampering as he waited all afternoon for Rick to return. Tony knew that what he’d seen was the real thing.

  Rick wasn’t sure what to do next. Were the plans to be in contact with Tony enough? Could he trust him? Would Tony start talking, and make a fool of himself? There was no way he could know. “Tony, I’ll change the dead drop during our first communication,” Rick whispered and couldn’t think of anything more. His pulse was rapid, but he was exhausted. He just wanted to get home. “Okay, when I take my arm out from under this rock, we can only talk like I was lost and you just found me. You’ll help me back up to my Jeep, and we’ll talk like we’re getting to know each other. You give me your history and I’ll give you mine. That way we’ll know who we’re dealing with and what our skills are. Make sense?”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “If we definitely need to say anything regarding a plan, we’ll have to call a stop to rest and write it down. No talking. Okay?

  Tony nodded.

  “Here we go.” Rick pushed the rock away, removed his arm from the sand, and thanked Tony for letting him rest. He added that they’d better get going and excused himself to call his son. Then Rick remembered he was in the middle of nowhere and there was no cell coverage.

  The two talked as if getting to know each other. By the time they climbed the long slope, picked their way up the cliff, and arrived at Rick’s Jeep on the mesa top, they did know each other.

  Rick only then thought to ask Tony where he was parked. “The other side of the canyon. I’ve been a lot more careful since the flat tire.” If Rick hadn’t been so tired, he would have felt sorry for Tony. He had miles of rough walking in the dark, back down into the canyon, across the bottom, and back up the other side before he could roll instead of walk. Rick knew the area pretty well but didn’t even know there was a road over there.

  “Oh, I almost forgot. Who put you on to me?” Rick inquired.

  Tony smiled and stared back at Rick, not sure if he should tell him. “Let’s wait a little on that. I don’t like to put out too much on a first date.”

  Rick understood and didn’t mind not knowing for now, but he would have to know soon. He’d get it out of him. “Be careful getting back to your truck, Tony.” Rick smiled at him, gave him a thumbs up, and wondered if he’d ever see him again.

  On his drive down the pine-crowded trail, Rick caught one last look at Tony, through the trees, trying to locate the best spot to descend. He kind of liked him. He wasn’t a bad guy, maybe a little misguided.

  Sleep again assaulted Rick’s mind as he started drowsing behind the wheel. After the third nod, he realized this wouldn’t do, and decided to pull over. The adrenalin crash from the abduction was hitting him hard. For hours, it had been pumping, and now all his mind wanted to do was sleep. Wouldn’t he feel silly, he thought, having survived an alien abduction, trip to Saturn, the needle probe harassment package, the pain bracelet, and the trip back right into the hands of an antigovernment militiaman, all so he could fall asleep at the wheel to be killed in a rollover. He’d already made it to the land he owned. He pulled to the side of the road, shut the Jeep down, and turned off the lights. He tried Carson on his cell and, to his surprise, he got through.

  “Carson, buddy, it’s me.”

  “Dad! You must have had a great hunt being out so late. I was worried sick,” replied Carson. “It’s past midnight.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, yeah, I got a big one, as big as they come.”

  “What, you got a lion?!”

  “No, I’m just kidding. I’m coming home empty handed.”

  “Are you okay? You sound tired. You haven’t been drinking have you?”

  Rick chuckled. “I wish. No, just a long hunt. I’m okay. But I am tired. I just pulled over at the Primal Estate. I’m gonna take a quick nap in the Jeep. Then I’ll be on my way.”

  “You want me to come out, Dad?”

  “No. Thanks, though. But if you don’t hear from me in an hour…I’ll call when I’m done napping…send out the posse, okay? I’ve just got to take the edge off.”

  “All right. I’m gonna go to bed, but I’ll have the phone nearby, so when you call…”

  “Thanks, Carson. Bye.”

  “Bye, Dad.”

  Rick put down the phone and looked out at his land. His eyes were adjusting, and he had a little help from faint moonlight. He had too much to think about and was too tired to do it. He wouldn’t tell Carson, at least not yet. It might be too much for him, and he didn’t need the stress. He’d keep it from him for as long as he could.

  Rick also decided not share it with any authorities. As he saw it, Synster wouldn’t have recruited him if he’d thought Rick’s alerting the NSA or any other authority couldn’t be managed. If Rick did convince anyone that wasn’t part of their plan, they’d probably just kill them and make it look like he’d gone nuts. That’s why they pick a mid-level guy, he thought. Rick knew he’d have to do this alone.

  Then there was the question of Tony. A nice enough guy; he might tell somebody, he might not, but that wasn’t something Rick could have controlled. If Synster had been surveiling them, he’d do something about it. If not, Rick would have to figure out how to manage him. Otherwise, he’d possibly have a group together in case an opportunity presented itself. But Rick doubted it would.

  The longer he thought about it, the more Rick doubted he’d be able to do anything with the people Tony put together. The concept was goofy, he thought. Rick recognized his whole encounter with Tony and the way he’d conducted himself had been under the influence of the trauma he’d just experienced. He’d been tortured and stressed in a very foreign place, and even though it hadn’t been for that long, only a few hours, it had stressed him enough to influence his judgment.

  The question remained. How could he get rid of the Provenger? How could he stop Synster, a superior being, who had superior technology, had been planning this whole thing with supercomputers and advanced biology, and had abilities of surveillance and weaponry beyond anything Rick could ever imagine? Rick rolled down his window and looked out into the trees on the edge of his field that he’d seeded days before.

  A magpie landed in a tree right next to the truck and called out. The moon was just coming up, and Rick could discern the distinctive black and white coloring of the feathers. He’d never seen them out at night before. Strange. This bird always plagued Rick, announcing his presence to the world whenever he was hunting. It would sometimes fly in and perch somewhere over his head and scream to all the animals in the area that he was there. This night the bird sat and looked at him, tilting its head to get a better view.

  The magpie made him think about the animals of the desert and how they interacted. Sometimes they were enemies, sometimes allies. The magpie made him feel very much more like a member of Earth’s animals, rather than a human separated from the others. Rick thought about the cougar that had stalked him. If only I could be so cunning. Then he thought about the one that Synster killed. He hoped it wasn’t her, but he suspected otherwise.

  Rick looked out over his land. In the distance he could barely see movement along a tree line. First, he thought he saw a tail, then a face, then the
whole cat. He believed he saw a mountain lion working the edge of his field not two hundred yards away. It stopped and looked directly at him, and Rick thought of Synster’s hunt. Was his mind playing tricks on him? Rick refocused his eyes and looked again. He thought he saw the cat walking into the cover of the trees as sleep overtook him.

  Images were suddenly crystal clear, smells formed landscapes filled with life, and sounds revealed the motives of plants and animals alike. Gliding through a forest making no sound, the structure of presence had its own existence. The hunt was not forced and fatigue was blind. Rick was stealth and patience, and silence was the spoor of the ghost. He felt his place. His dream was of existence, not as a man but as an animal of Earth.

  “Dad, Dad!” Rick woke to Carson yanking on his sweatshirt. For the second time that night, he’d been ripped away from his peaceful unconsciousness. His heart did a little dance in his chest, and before he could think, he said, “God dammit, boy! You scared the shit out of me!” But Rick had something on his mind that he knew was important. He had to write it down.

  “Dad, you okay? I never got a call from you, and I couldn’t get through, so I came out.”

  Rick needed to focus on what he’d seen and couldn’t talk. “Carson, go back to the car, I’ve got to write something down.” Rick found the pen in his pocket, grabbed a scrap piece of paper out of the glove compartment, and wrote down four words. I am the lion.

  Carson drove his father home, helped him into bed, and turned out the light.

  Chapter 16

  The dEbriEf

  “I think that went well,” Synster told Streyn as they sat in his office on the science deck. “Rick is a careful man and he won’t do anything stupid. You saw how he took a photo of himself with the window in the background? Humans can fake that type of picture, so he didn’t take it to prove anything to anyone else. He took it to prove to himself where he’d been, to eliminate the possibility that he’d imagined it, or been fooled in some way. He’s smarter than he lets on.” Synster had a lot of issues to deal with and was trying to console himself that things would go well. Inside, he was wound tight.

  “I hope so,” Streyn replied. “He’d better be because with conditions the way they are, we’ll barely meet our quotas. I know the third world sample statistics are suitable, but they are still so close to our margins, we have no room for error.”

  “We’ll reach our quotas through harvests from the less developed nations,” Synster stated confidently. “And by the time we have reached the optimal sustainable harvest from those nations, we’ll get the medical community and the developed nations’ governments to correct the errors of the last seventy-five years.” Synster, trying to think of ways they’d been lucky, asked, “Can you imagine if the subsequent run of the Algorithm hadn’t been done? Can you imagine this Project without the Finishing Protocol? We’d be finished.”

  Streyn admitted, “What concerns me is that the Algorithm suggested a course of action to serve one purpose, but instead it served to benefit us in a completely different way.”

  “Continue.” Synster was especially interested in Streyn’s analysis of the issue, since he was the one who led the Finishing Protocol.

  “Well, the Algorithm identified the goal of the Finishing Protocol as making wheat universally available for consumption soon before our harvest in our high population areas. It would allow two full generations’ time for wheat to become dominant in these diets, and assure us the carcass fat content we desire. While this was certainly accomplished, one side effect was that the human turned to drugs for the illnesses that resulted, making them inorganic and therefore undesirable. The other side effect was to make wheat available to developing nations, something that wasn’t our focus. It is what has saved this project. It was a huge digression. Very disturbing. We can’t rely on luck to muddle our way through this Project.”

  Synster considered the implications of this. Streyn was right. It was a huge digression. The Algorithm had told them to conduct the Finishing Protocol to make wheat more productive to grow, as well as a little more addictive. This would fatten large population groups prior to harvest. It did. But it simultaneously made them sick and subsequently drugged by their doctors. The only large groups left for harvest were in developing countries not part of modern pharmaceutical distribution systems. It would be a longer and more troublesome harvest. This kind of error was very disturbing. Could there be a major flaw with the Algorithm?

  Perhaps, Synster thought, there was something they’d missed in the Algorithm’s motive. Their method of getting the proper breed of wheat to the humans had been complex and had many risks. They’d had to conduct their intervention covertly. They couldn’t just deliver a bag of properly hybridized wheat seed with a sign on it that said “Use this really great stuff!” without raising some suspicion. And they could plant it somewhere and wait for it to be discovered; it couldn’t reproduce independently. They had to spoon feed it to the humans so they would think it was their own.

  “Streyn, I want to test my thinking of the Finishing Protocol. Give me a concise synopsis of your perspective of the development and execution of this Protocol.”

  “Certainly.” Streyn cleared his throat, reflecting on his own involvement. “As we gradually phased out of gravitational dilation during our arrival, initial scans of the populations indicated that strong cultural influences, even in high population density areas, had prevented the full adoption of wheat products, to the extent that it would limit the optimal fat marbling in those populations during harvest. Since the completion of our phase travel would encompass many years on Earth, we ran the Algorithm with the new information and determined that in post industrialized societies, a reduction in the price of wheat flour would result in its almost universal use by food companies as well as adding to availability for animal feed.

  “They would reformulate wheat flour into a large variety of foods tuned specifically to the flavors humans crave most, to which they are most likely to develop addictions. This phenomenon would be strong enough to break the cultural bonds with traditional food choices and render these new products a universally-used commodity among diverse cultures in high-population areas. The best way to reduce its price would be to increase its yield. So the Algorithm’s intent was primarily to break culturally-guided food habits by decreasing price by increasing yield. It would serve as a pre-harvest fattening program.

  “To that end, in August of 1950, Earth time, I took a team in to begin this project. Since we wanted Kylamity Base anyway as a safe haven for terrestrial Provenger operations, we took corvettes of the First Brigade – my cousin, Ryolf, is their commander – and established the base on the North American continent in the mountains of what is called the State of Idaho. Great hunting up there, by the way.

  “From that location, I established Class II contact with scientists Orville Vogel in Pullman, Washington, and Norman Borlaug in Mexico City, Mexico, as selected by the Algorithm. Both were working on methods to advance the productivity of wheat agriculture and appeared to be on the correct path for our needs. Over the next fifteen years, we fed them information that guided development of the strains of wheat we needed to make it a universally, economically desirable product. Vogel contributed the dwarf wheat aspect while Borlaug hybridized Vogel’s contribution with his work on the problems farmers were having growing wheat in tropical and sub-tropical environments. You know, drought and diseases.”

  “Stop!” Synster interrupted. “That’s it. Tropical and sub-tropical environments! The location of most developing countries on Earth. If the Algorithm had suggested some scientist working in North America, then the strains we prompted them to develop would have been adapted only to temperate climactic environments, theoretically.”

  Streyn interjected, “Borlaug was working in North America when he was identified by the Algorithm. He moved to Mexico later, before we got to him. I don’t know why the Algorithm didn’t see that.”

  “The only answer would
be that the Algorithm was hampered by its information collection during the phase cycle, so it was not as complete as it would have been otherwise. We were making choices and decisions on old information and acting on it at a much later date. Elements had changed between the data collection and your deployment. There were too many confounding variables. We should have run the Algorithm again immediately before we made contact with Borlaug and Vogel, for the best outcome.

  “So with the development of highly-productive tropical and sub-tropical adapted wheat, we inadvertently saved the project. If I recall correctly,” Synster continued, “so that Borlaug could increase the rate at which he could crossbreed, you suggested he get two crops per year by growing one in northern Mexico then another in the more tropical south. This led to a sub-tropical adapted wheat. Isn’t it great how things always seem to work out right?” Synster mused.

  “Yes. You know, he didn’t initially want to try the double crop per year cycle. He thought that the wheat grain needed more time to rest before it could germinate. Remember how I convinced him?” Streyn asked.