“Abby, I need to get to my computer in my office to look into this more thoroughly. There’s got to be an explanation. Are there any more of these printouts?”
“Yes, about 100 pages; they should be done printing now. Would you like me to bring them in to you?”
“Yes, please. And thanks…I needed to see these as soon as possible. Good judgment!”
Abby genuinely smiled, a slight crinkle in the corners of her blue eyes belying the babyish dimples that emerged on her cheeks. She was plainly one for whom a little praise went a long way, belying stereotypes of her generation. She practically skipped out of the lab.
DD walked to the end of the lab and into her gleaming office with its brand-new glass and aluminum desk, track lighting, muted pastel draperies, and ample bookshelves. She settled into the black mesh chair and wiggled for a moment in joyful amazement at how well it supported her back. Her smile faded as she regarded the puzzle before her, though. She began to arrange the printouts on her desk with a furrowed brow.
XXII.
Eureka!
Hours later, the shining floor-to-ceiling windows had become mirrors of the interior, backed up to the darkness outside; the track lighting was softly glowing on the walls, and DD’s LED desk lamp was spangling a tight, bright constellation that illuminated the printouts. DD sat up straight. It’s got to be.
The p. davisii normally broke the crude oil into fragments of petroleum compounds, which quickly polymerized into longer chains. These chains had to be promptly and repeatedly dispersed into an emulsion by spraying with Corexit before the bacterium could continue digesting them, but the Corexit slowed the bacteria’s metabolism, so the breakdown ultimately was partial, and much slower than what they were seeing. DD had a sheet of scratch paper on the desk next to her. It’s the only explanation.
The scratch paper was filled with pencil equations and calculations. The workers had paused the spraying of Corexit when the slick started shrinking, as they always did, but it just kept shrinking, so they never had to start again. The amount of Corexit that was finally used was a fraction of what was expected.
The p. davisii is eating the polymers suspended in pure seawater. We’d no indication of this in the vat trials. What’s going on here?
She tapped her pencil on the desk absently. I should go out to the site in the morning. I can sit here and speculate all night with the data I have, but there’s bound to be some factor that’s not been observed yet.
She shut off her desk lamp and made ready to leave. She was the last one there, and as she walked out through the gleaming lab, she felt a proprietary thrill. She lingered a moment by the door. Mine. She glowed inside.
She stepped out the front door, keys in her right hand, her left hand on the KelTec in her pocket. Her car was the only one in the lot. She stopped dead as her mind made the transition back to the mundane world. I have no place to go.
She looked inside her car. Empty, but for her suitcases in the back. She entered the car, which still held heat from the afternoon sun. She turned the key and rolled the windows down a few inches to let in the Fall air, which had turned a little cooler, and pondered.
Her new apartment was bare walls and empty cabinets and closets; her belongings were presumably still somewhere on I-10. She’d become so absorbed in her work, she’d completely forgotten about the stalled truck! She’d spent the afternoon and evening, which she’d otherwise have spent supervising its unloading, poring over the printouts in complete absorption. She’d expected that the moving company would call when they arrived, but they never had. Presumably, that meant that her things were still in transit. I’m sure they’ll be here tomorrow, probably first thing in the morning. But for now, I need to figure out where to go tonight!
She shuffled through the printouts and found the GPS coordinates of the ocean water where the p davisii samples were being drawn from, over the spill. She consulted her smartphone for the location. A wry smile spread across her face. Eighteen miles offshore of the Bolivar Peninsula. How about that?
She checked the time on the phone: 8:45. The last ferry ran at 9:00, so she wouldn’t make it to Bolivar tonight; it was a two-hour drive to get to the ferry. So she couldn’t stay with Joanne tonight. But it was off-season still, so she should be able to find a decent room in Galveston for the night. Then she could call Amrencorp in the morning and arrange a trip out to the platform. She buckled up and started the car.
XXIII.
OCD
Amit watched the cab pull away with Juni in it. He stood for a few minutes with his hands in his pockets. The trickle of people leaving the building slowly coalesced into a river, which merged with a flood in the street before him. Like some strange species of insects molting en masse, they left tatters of pantyhose, soles of shoes, and shredded scarves and ties behind them. One woman clutched her disintegrating dress together, trying to preserve a semblance of modesty. Others had clearly given up and walked along nude or semi-nude. He figured out after a few minutes the degree of nudity depended on which garments were natural fibers and which were synthetic. Some were dazed, others seemed panicked, some women and a couple of men were in tears. A young man with a full beard and a surfeit of tattoos and piercings was grinning fiercely as he strutted along in nothing but his white cotton underwear briefs.
Traffic was at a near-standstill on the street, and as a passing car bucked to a stop, he realized how many components of vehicles were also plastic. But why was plastic suddenly dissolving into gels and liquids? And it was a variety of different types of polymers, too; he couldn’t think of one solvent that would liquefy all of them. He set out walking along Polk street towards his apartment. As he left the campus, he saw that the traffic lights were still working, though it didn’t really matter, as the proportion of stalled cars had increased to perhaps one in twenty, which was enough to block traffic completely. People abandoned their cars to walk, weaving among the vehicles trapped in gridlock. Many of the drivers leaned pointlessly on their horns as though they thought that would magically levitate the traffic out of the way. Others smoked, or bobbed their heads to music, trying to make the best of what they obliviously thought was just an unusually bad traffic jam in one of America’s biggest cities.
He made it to the entrance of Arriga Park without further incident and crossed the park via its picturesque paths. The fountain wasn’t running. He couldn’t remember if it had been turned off for the winter already or not. Probably so, since it could freeze pretty hard in Chicago in October. He reached the other end of the small park and saw his apartment building. He reached into his pocket, and felt his polyester pants rip silently apart around the pocket opening, just from the pressure of his hand. The pocket was cotton, at least, and his keys were still inside. The awning above the building entrance was intact; he fit his key in the lock on the glass front door and it turned, but he had a moment’s panic as it refused to open. He put his shoulder into the door and, with a good shove, it released with a ripping sound. The weather strip around the door had become a gooey seal which dropped onto the tile floor in moist chunks.
He approached the elevator and pressed the button, flinching slightly as his thumb met a sticky surface. The button lit up and the light above the door began showing progress: 12…11…10… As he waited, he thought about the cables and pulleys that suspended the elevator, the insulated electrical supply to the belt-driven motor, and the insulated wires carrying current to the interior of the box suspended high in its shaft. He sighed, his elderly knees and arches twinging already from coming down the office steps, and walked down the short hallway to the staircase. Six flights, to his apartment on the seventh floor. He was panting when his key turned in the door.
The door swung open. He hesitated. He stood in the doorway, inspecting his apartment for signs of dissolving plastic. The laminate floor…the telephone on the wall…the acrylic vase on the coffee table…all looked normal. He rubbed his finger and thumb together where the stickiness from the elevator b
utton had deposited itself, and noticed it was gone, leaving only a faintly slippery coating. He put his fingers to his nose. He recognized the smell…it was familiar…where from?
His eyebrows shot up in recognition as he placed the aroma. Pseudomonas putida! He’d never forget that smell from his early, thrilling days of groundbreaking success at genetic engineering. And that was the same bacterium the Chinese doctor had been asking him about! Could it be? How? But it was the only explanation that made sense. That call, followed by plastic things suddenly starting to fall apart, and smelling like p putida: were they connected?
He decided to assume the conclusion he’d so rashly jumped to was correct. He stood in the doorway and stripped completely naked. Nobody came along, thank goodness, to see his stocky dark-skinned frame in the nude, his sagging skin sprigged with graying hair.
He extracted his keys from the pants pocket and then dropped all his clothing on the floor in the hall next to the door. He left the door open, not touching the doorknob. He walked warily down the wool runner in the middle of the hallway and onto the tile floor of the bathroom. He hesitated, frowning at the plastic shower curtain dangling by its plastic rings. He picked up a ceramic water cup next to the sink, tipping the toothbrush within onto the counter without touching it, and used the cup to push the shower curtain back. He stepped inside the tub and let the curtain drop closed, then used the bottom of the cup to tap on the cross-shaped spigot handles to turn on the shower, good and hot. He washed the cup first and set it at the far end of the tub, then scrubbed himself from top to toe, and back up to his head again, with hot, soapy water.
A third top-to-toe soaping was followed by a rinse. He turned off the spigots by hand. He opened the curtain. He opened the medicine cabinet mounted on the wall and took out a bottle of isopropyl alcohol he kept on hand for first aid, and poured it generously onto the strip of tile floor he’d walked across. He stepped out into the puddle of isopropyl and toweled off with a clean towel, which he then wrapped around his waist. He took a hand towel and draped it over his shoulder.
He had a pair of latex gloves on the first-aid shelf as well, and he put them on. Stepping into the hall, he carefully rolled the carpet runner up, touching only the edges and the back, avoiding any surface his feet might have touched. Feet straddled wide apart to step close to the baseboards, he waddled to the door, where he tossed the carpet on top of his clothing in the hall. He stripped off the latex gloves, which he then deposited on top of the pile. He walked back into the bathroom and washed his hands again, then took the remaining isopropyl and doused the segment of the entryway floor he’d crossed to reach the hall runner when he first came in. He blotted some of the alcohol up with the hand towel and used the alcohol-soaked towel to wipe the outside doorknob.
Then, and only then, did he shut the door. He turned around and surveyed his one-bedroom home. If he was right—and it was certainly the best guess at this point—this was the only place nearby that was sure to be free of the destruction and disintegration going on outside.
XXIV.
At Sea
DD had never felt so dainty in her entire life as she did on the boat out to the oil platform. She’d been a tomboy, and then grew up into the sort of woman many men found intimidating. Working in the sciences, she was used to ogling, sniggers, and putdowns both subtle and obvious. But the men on the boat with her, dressed in coveralls, or jeans and T-shirts, carrying backpacks or wearing tool belts, muscular and agile on the bouncing deck in the choppy water, radiated a masculine calm which made her acutely aware of her relatively diminutive and weak frame. Each one swept his eyes once from her ponytail, down past her clipboard, to her rugged hiking shoes, and back to her face. Once, and that was the end of that. No catcalls, no smirks, no posturing. All business. Guess these oil roustabouts have nothing to prove.
She was escorted to the galley of the boat, where she sat down at a small, bolted-down table with a technician, who sketched the basic process of underwater drilling for her.
“So, first we drill the well with joints of pipe, then we insert the casing once we’ve got it as far down as we want it go.”
“So, is this like the Deepwater Horizon well?”
“Nah. Those Macondo wells are way offshore, just because the tourists and the greenies up there don’t want to see the platforms from the beach. That’s what made that spill so hard to cap off. They were in, what, 5,000 feet of water?”
DD gave him what she hoped was an alert look. Considering I’ll be working in this industry I should know more about it.
“We’re in 500 feet. Big difference in pressure. What is it you said you do?”
“I’m a microbiologist. I just developed a new strain of bacteria to eat oil spills.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard about that! They said it worked faster and cleaner than any of the bacteria they’d used so far. Almost no Corexit needed, right?”
DD smiled proudly and sat up straighter. “Yes, that’s p davisii, my baby! Actually, I’m headed out to the platform because it might be working too well!”
Jeff, the tech, tilted his head. Eurasian features, round face, sparse beard. It made him look younger than he must actually be, for him to be out here. “How so?”
“Well, it looks like p davisii might be able to eat other types of petroleum-based polymers.”
“Hmm. Interesting.” She could tell he wasn’t one given to thinking things through and imagining conclusions. Well, and I’m probably being too imaginative. At least I hope I am.
“Yes, well, so…you were explaining how the drilling process works…” She steered him back on topic.
“Oh, yeah. You know, it would be easier if I could draw it. We’re almost to the platform and I’ve got paper there to draw on. Do you drink coffee?” He got up and went to the urn on the counter; she followed him. He picked up a Styrofoam cup off the top of the stack next to the urn without looking, obviously a motion he’d repeated many times, and the cup underneath stuck to it. He gave a quiet, surprised giggle, looking at it. One side of the cup looked slightly melted. The four top cups were fused. He pouted his lips in brief confusion, shrugged, tossed the warped ones in the trash, and drew them each a cup of coffee.
XXV.
The Length of the Handle of the Pump
In the compact, functional office of the platform, Jeff drew a diagram. A box up on top of the water, “That’s us,” a long, thin, double line down to the ocean floor, “That’s the drilling pipe.”
Then a big block under the line representing the ocean floor, “Once we find the oil deposit,” he scribbled a big black oval just beneath the block, “we put a casing in at the end of the drill pipe. It’s really wide in diameter, and we keep putting smaller casings inside bigger casings, like a telescope, until we finally meet the oil deposit.” He’d drawn a fair representation of a telescope reaching down to just above the blob of oil.
“Isn’t the oil under a great deal of pressure?” Asked DD.
“Oh, yeah! It sure is!”
“Well, so,” DD asked, “How do you keep the oil from shooting out?
“That’s where these geologists and drilling experts make the big bucks. They tell us exactly how deep the oil is and warn us before we get to it. They stop just short of the oil deposit and run a production line down into the deposit.” He drew a line down through the drilling pipe and the casing and into the oil itself. “There’s a packer around the production line which seals around it inside the casing.”
“Like a ring on your finger?” DD glanced at his hands, and the young guy was wearing no ring. “Or a watch?”
“Exactly.”
“But, how do they get this packer thing to seal to the casing?”
“Oh, it expands.”
“How does it expand? Is it, like, some sort of spring mechanism?”
Jeff smiled. “Not in this depth. The deeper wells have mechanical packers because they have to hold up to really high pressure. But ours are just elastomeric donuts. They soak
up oil and expand, and the endcaps are also designed to squish them vertically a little so that they expand out instead of lengthwise.”
DD looked at him. “Tell me you didn’t just say the packer is plastic.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“Tell me, Jeff, what is plastic?”
“Well, there are lots of different kind of plastic,” he began, but she interrupted.
“What do they have in common?” DD demanded.
“I’m not sure what you’re driving at,” Jeff said.
“They’re polymers.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I am 99% sure at this point that p davisii eats every type of polymers!”
Jeff frowned. He sat silently for a moment. DD could practically see the gears turning inside his head. “Oh, shit! If that’s true...the well could blow!”
“Not just this well; the assay ships have showed growth rates consistent with mutated p davisii throughout the entire drilling field. Any well with a plastic packer is going to start gushing oil. It’s not a matter of if, but when!”
“Shit.”
“Damn straight. You know what happens when the wells start to leak? It’s a giant p davisii buffet. Each and every oil plume is going to be inoculating the ocean for miles with a blooming colony of mutated p davisii.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“I don’t either. Remember your stack of ruined coffee cups?”
“On the boat? Yes, what about them?”
“That Styrofoam was probably infected with p davisii.”
She watched the reality of what they were talking about sink in, and his eyes grew wide as he considered the implications. “There have got to be hundreds of wells with plastic packers in the Gulf alone…thousands in the world.”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 8