by Peter Watts
A few years back, when he inexplicably went off his food, we spent three grand exploring a lump in his abdomen that the vet said was consistent with cancer. (It turned out to be gas.) He also had chronic tachycardia, which translated into a lifetime prescription for pricey little blue pills called Atenolol.
He would shriek like a banshee at 3 a.m. At first he did this in response to one of BOG’s (admittedly unwarranted) attacks—but after a few iterations where we responded by ganging up on BOG in Chip’s defense, he figured out how to use that. He would walk into whatever room BOG was minding his own business in, let out a shriek to wake the dead, and sit back waiting for BOG to take the fall. (It was much scarier when those two fought for real: they’d grapple in complete silence, no yowls no hisses, just a ball of teeth and claws and flying fur rolling down the stairs, locked together in combat.)
He was affectionate, although he tried to hide it. He would excel at being standoffish during the day (except for the usual refrigerator bonks at dinnertime). Late at night, though—after lights-out—he’d creep slowly onto the bed, edge along the mattress to the headboard, and sprawl across the head of whoever happened to be closest. Sometimes we’d wake up from the sound of the purring; other times we’d wake up suffocating, our mouths draped in fur. Either way we kept ourselves still so as not to startle him, but it wasn’t really necessary. Once Chip segued into Hat Mode, it would take an earthquake to dislodge him.
And who can forget the time he swiped the contact lens right off my eyeball with a single claw?
We’ve known for a while that he was living on borrowed time. Back during one of his endless savings-depleting trips to the vet the tests came back positive for both FIV and feline leukemia; the vet was bracing us for death in mere days, back then. But that was 2011, and ever since he weathered whatever misfortune that fucked-up physiology inflicted upon him. We’d forgotten how mortal he was. Even over the past couple of weeks, when he went off his food and started losing weight—when he turned his nose up at Wellness Brand, and flaked tuna, and the hypoallergenic stuff that costs the GNP of a Latin-American country for a single can—I wasn’t too worried. There he goes again, I thought. Another of his dumb attention-hogging false alarms. We’ll pillage the pones’s college fund and pay another few grand and buy our way out of it the way we always have. Dumb cat. He’d always pulled through before after all, always beaten the odds; and for the first time ever, his ears were actually improving.
So we took him to the vet, and his nictitating membrane was dead white. And suddenly I noticed that his nose—normally bright pink—that was white, too. And the blood tests came back, and his RBC count was about an eighth of what it should have been.
He was suffocating, right down at the cellular level. His resp rate was already elevated, trying to compensate—as if breathing faster could make any difference when there was so little pigment left inside to grab O2 no matter how much tidal volume ramped up. Chip’s marrow had died, his bones had hollowed out like a bird’s while we’d been busy not noticing.
Days, the vet said. And it won’t be an easy death, it’ll be horrible. He’ll die slowly, gasping for breath. A sensation of drowning that persists no matter how much air you take into your lungs.
So yesterday, we saved him the trouble. It wasn’t as peaceful a death as we’d been promised. The sedative did the opposite of what it was supposed to, started freaking him out and waking him up. I restrained his spastic struggles for a while and then let him go, followed him as he groaned and staggered across the room into a dark little toilet cubby that might afford him the comfort of close quarters, at least. Scooped him up there and just kept him company in the dark, until the vet came down with a dose of some new drug that please god wouldn’t fuck up the same way the last one did. His eyes were bright right up until they closed. We buried him out back, just a little ways down the garden from Banana, wrapped up in my very last Jethro Tull t-shirt (Rock Island: not one of their best albums, but great cover art). We buried him with a spray-bottle of pet-stain remover that we won’t be needing any more.
And entropy wins again, and now the universe is a little less complex, a little poorer. There are a billion other cats out there, and thousands more being born every day. It’s good that things die—I keep telling myself this—because immortality would deny hope to all those other creatures who need a home, only to find there is no room at the inn. But there are so many degrees of freedom, even in such a small furry head. So many different ways the synapses can wire up, so many different manifestations of that unique wiring. There are a million other fuzzbots, a million other bright-eyed puffy patchy white cats, but there will never be another Chip. That part of the universe is over now, and as always, I can’t help but miss it.
Goodbye, you dumb troublesome expensive cat. You were worth every penny, and so very much more.
Chamber of Horrors
Nowa Fantastyka Nov 2016
You may know that I was a biologist long before I was an author. You may not know how far back those roots extend, though: years before I ever stepped onto a university campus. Way back into childhood, in fact.
I was really bad at biology back then. I was downright horrific. Now I am old, and remorseful, and afflicted with some weird disease that nobody seems able to identify; so I figure I should make my peace. Consider this a deathbed confession, delivered early to avoid the rush.
My intentions were always honorable. I love other creatures almost as much as I hate people; the running joke of my life is that I’m a bad biologist because I have too much compassion, can’t bring myself to experiment on fellow beings with the ruthless dispassion that Science demands.
But I don’t just love life; I want to know how it works, I always have. I decided to be a biologist at age seven; by fourteen I was building metabolic chambers out of mason jars.
That’s actually easier than it sounds. Stick a straw (A) through the lid of a mason jar. Put some CO2 absorbant (B) inside (I used Drano). Insert an animal, tighten the lid, and—this is the cool bit—seal the end of the straw with a soap bubble. Animal inhales O2, exhales CO2; Drano absorbs CO2, reducing the volume of gas in the jar and pulling the bubble along the straw. If you know the straw’s volume, you can measure the O2 consumption of anything inside by timing the rate at which the bubble moves.
Cool, huh?1
One thing, though: Drano is corrosive, so you want to keep it away from your animal. I kept mine safely under a plastic grille (D) that served as the floor of the chamber. It worked great. The only potential risk was when you took the animal out afterward, which you did by sliding the grille from the jar like a tiny drawer.
Especially if the animal was a jumper. A toad, for instance.
In my defense, the mouth of that jar was a pretty small bullseye given all the directions in which he could have jumped. Any random leap off the grille should have missed it completely. But maybe this particular toad liked that jar. Maybe he felt safe there. For whatever reason, he jumped unerringly off the grille, back into the jar, and landed smack-dab in the Drano.
I grabbed him instantly, of course. Ran to the sink, thrust him under the running water to rise him clean and his back half just—
—washed away . . .
I kept the front half—still blinking, a little confused—in a shallow bowl next to my bed so I could check on it during the night. I was a wuss as well as a bad biologist, you see; I didn’t have the heart to smash the little guy with a hammer, put him out of his misery. (I got better at that over the years, at least. You don’t spend a lifetime with cats without learning to put small things out of their misery. Remind me to tell you sometime about the bouncy, impact-resistant, almost indestructible elasticity of various kinds of eyeballs. They ought to build cars out of the stuff; I’m sure it would save lives) I guess on some level I held out hope that he might survive.
He didn’t. He was dead by midnight, and I had killed him.
Maybe I should have laid off the whole experiment
al-biology thing at that point. Maybe I would have, if I hadn’t discovered a frog someone had been using for target practice, down at the local pond. He’d healed but you could still see the BB under the skin, roll it between your fingers when you palpated the abdomen. And those pellets were made of lead. Toxic stuff. This frog had survived the initial gunshot, but the shrapnel inside might kill him yet.
So I wasn’t just curious, this time. Now I was being downright noble. I would heal the poor thing. I would remove the bullet. But cutting into an active frog would only compound one cruelty with another. No, first I’d need to anesthetize the little guy.
Canadian frogs hibernate, as it happens. As it also happened I’d upgraded my metabolism chamber, added new Drano-proofing features and—more to the point—temperature control. Metabolism Chamber Mk. 2 was jacketed in the blue gel that fills freezer packs (E): pop it in the freezer until it hardens and you’ve got a nice subzero environment when you take it out. Use an aquarium heater (F) to control temperature as desired.2
I put my patient in the fridge for a while to get him in the mood, then slid him into the chamber and gradually lowered the temperature until the little guy was out cold. I cut the teensiest incision in his belly, just big enough to remove the pellet. It popped out easily; froggy barely even twitched. I brought him slowly back up to ambient, transferred him to a private terrarium for recovery. Soon he was hopping around as if nothing had happened. It was one of the proudest moments of my young life.
How was I to know that frogs get frostbite?
He started chewing his digits. I didn’t worry at first—lots of people chew their nails, after all. The difference is, most people don’t chew their fingers to the bone; this frog was skeletonizing himself, chewing flesh that had frozen and gone necrotic. It was looking bad.
Not wanting another horrible death on my conscience. I took him back to his pond and set him free. When I last saw him he looked perfectly content, sitting in shallow water on hands and feet of barest bone.
I’m sure he pulled through, though. Yeah. Let’s go with that.
Eventually I outgrew basement science and graduated to the real kind, where—thankfully—my kill rate dropped to zero once I hit grad school. (It spiked again briefly years later—if you’ve read the snake-gutting scene in Echopraxia, you’ve caught a glimpse of my ill-advised 2006 post-doc in genetics—but that was an anomaly.) And while I’ve since taken in more than my share of wounded and/or brain-damaged creatures, it’s been a long time since I’ve been the cause of such carnage.
Just for the record, I’d like to keep it that way.
1 I wasn’t smart enough to invent this apparatus on my own, in case you were wondering; I got the plans from Dr. Mengele’s Book of Science Activities for Young Boys, or some such title.
2 Now this, I did come up with on my own.
The Best-Case Apocalypse
Nowa Fantastyka Apr 2018
There’s this guy I’ve known since the eighties: evolutionary biologist, parasitologist of some renown, has a cabinet full of awards and accolades acquired over the course of his career. His name is Dan Brooks (if you’ve read Echopraxia you may find that name vaguely familiar). He’s retired now, lives in Hungary while he and a couple of colleagues finish off a book on the epidemiological consequences of climate change.
Dan has these friends: physicists, climatologists, biologists. He calls them The Cassandra Collective. Five, ten years ago their Facebook timelines were full of links to their own research, to the latest findings in their field. Today, those same pages are festooned with cat pictures and selfies from Alaskan cruises.
They’ve given up, you see. For thirty or forty years they did the research, read the signs, tried to warn the world. World didn’t care. Now, they figure, they did their best and it wasn’t good enough. Now it’s too late. So all these people have quietly retired, and are just enjoying whatever time they have left before the ceiling crashes in. They’re not making a fuss—not any more. They realize there’s no point. They’ve just gone quietly into that good night.
What does it look like when the ceiling crashes in? Well, Dan and his coauthors have worked out a best-case prognosis—and the good news is, we’re probably not looking at outright extinction. People are everywhere, and enough of us are used to living under medieval conditions for Humanity to persist as a species. What we are looking at is the collapse of technological civilization. We can expect a series of rolling urban pandemics starting about a decade from now. (Monkey pox is apparently poised to make one hell of a comeback.) As much as 60% of humanity will be infected; maybe 20% killed.
A measly 20% dead might be something we could handle without too much trouble (and it would certainly be a relief for the nonhuman inhabitants of the planet). Sixty percent sick, though, not so much. Imagine half the people responsible for delivering your food, maintaining your water supply, and keeping your ATMs online call in sick for a few weeks; imagine that half their backups call in sick as well. Historically, once the infrastructure collapses even in a single city, it takes mere hours for people to start killing each other over food; check out what happened in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina if you don’t believe me.
Now, scale that up to every city on the planet.
If current trends continue, the world’s arable land will be exhausted by 2070. Here in North America the USA will have run out of fresh water long before then. (I expect they’ll have decided in the meantime that Canada has WMDs, and that they have to “liberate” us in the name of freedom and democracy. I expect this to happen around the time they finish sucking the Great Lakes dry.) Scandinavia and western Europe will be back in Little Ice Age territory when Arctic meltwater short-circuits the Gulf Stream. The good news is, Malaria and Dengue Fever will have spread to the Baltic before then, so the temperature drop will at least take out the mosquitoes.
That’s one prognosis—but it’s most likely not the road down which we are headed, because it’s a mainly disease-based apocalypse. It derives all its predictions from the fact that climate change promotes the relocation and spread of pathogens and parasites into new areas and new hosts. That 21% mortality—about 1.5 billion people—are just those who died because they got sick. It doesn’t include deaths due to social unrest, or the forced migration of environmental refugees (it’s been argued that the Syrian crisis ultimately tracks back to extended drought conditions in that country; get ready for a lot more of the same). It doesn’t factor in food shortages due to overfishing and ocean acidification. It doesn’t factor in the fact that it’s only taken us since 1970 to kill off half the animals on this planet, and apparently we’re just getting started. It doesn’t factor in crop failure: back in 1999, for example, a mutant strain of wheat rust appeared in Uganda and has been spreading ever since, helped by warmer-than-usual temperatures throughout that region; now it’s in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. It does not respond to any known fungicide. We could conceivably lose the world’s wheat crop within a decade.
Dan’s scenario doesn’t even touch on nuclear war, accidental or otherwise, or AI apocalypses or grey-goo rogue nanotech or mutable digital viruses evolving to shut down the internet or any of the other increasingly-less-science-fictional apocalypses that some very smart people are suddenly taking very seriously. It doesn’t factor in purely economic collapse—collapse not instigated by environmental or social stressors but by the inherent paradoxical dumbness of Economics itself. (Conventional economics is a pyramid scheme, predicated on a model of unlimited growth in a resource-limited environment; if it was a physics model, it would be perpetual motion. It’s bound to break sometime.)
Dan’s scenario is, in fact, way too optimistic.
A more plausible scenario might be found in a 2014 paper out of the University of Melbourne1, which factored in some of the variables not considered by Brooks et al; it suggests that population will peak around 8-9 billion over the next couple of decades, followed by a catastrophic decline t
hat ends up cutting our numbers almost in half by century’s end. This may also be naively cheerful, since it ignores the disease elements that inform Brooks et al’s models. But maybe it’s less naively cheerful.
As for me, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know how it’s going to end. All I know is, I never consciously plan on getting drunk when Dan blows through town and we meet up for beers and conversation.
But after fifteen minutes with the guy, I never want to be sober again.
1 Turner, G., 2014: “Is Global Collapse Imminent? An Updated Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data”, MSSI Research Paper No. 4, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. 21pp.
Nazis and Skin Cream
Blog Sep 18 2017
I went out drinking the other night with someone who punches Nazis.
Certainly, ever since Charlottesville, there’s been no shortage of people who advocate Nazi-punching. For a while there, my Facebook feed was awash with the emissions of people jizzing all over their keyboards at the prospect of punching Nazis. People who argued—generally with more passion than eloquence—that the usual rules of engagement and free speech don’t apply when dealing with Nazis, because, well, they’re Nazis. People who, in fits of righteous anger, unfriended other people who didn’t believe that it was okay to punch Nazis. I haven’t seen such a torrent of unfriending since all those die-hard supporters of fracking, omnipresent state surveillance, and extra-judicial assassination-by-drone rose up and unfriended everyone who hadn’t voted for Hillary Clinton in the last election. Even the ACLU has been bitch-slapped into “rethinking” its support for “Free speech”1.