Entering the kitchen, Juni blinked. The juxtaposition of the same exposed beams and planking with modern stainless-steel counters, a commercial refrigerator and freezer, a commercial range with a huge hood, and restaurant-sized mixers, bowls, pans, and utensils was stunning.
Akisni walked to the refrigerator and pulled out two of a dozen or so identical glass casserole dishes. She popped them into the microwave to warm.
“Beans, greens and cornbread,” Akisni explained. “We always set aside a few leftovers for snackers, and if it doesn’t get eaten it goes to the pigs.”
“How many of you are there?” Juni asked.
“Twelve of us live here full-time. We usually have a few people staying here as guests. Spiritual retreats, post-divorce recoveries, hippie dilettantes, and so forth. Used to have birthing moms, but not so much any more.” The microwave beeped and Akisni settled them at the trestle table with cloth napkins, silverware, and a ceramic ramekin of butter with little beads of water condensing on top. Juni’s stomach growled. She hadn’t had collards cooked with bacon since childhood, and she found these exceptionally delicious. Snowbear sopped up the liquid from the greens with his buttered cornbread, just like her grandpa used to do, and the familiar custom made Juni suddenly feel at home. Perhaps just being alive, after the way the past twenty-four hours had gone, added an edge to her hunger, but Juni ate like this pot-liquor-soaked cornbread was the best food she’d ever had!
Amit apparently felt the same way, because he savored every bite, chewing with an intensity Juni had not seen before in her normally delicate-mannered boss. He ate silently, and Snowbear sat across from him next to Juni. Akisni sat next to Amit, and when they’d both finished, Gillie, a young white girl with dreadlocks and a nose ring (Juni guessed this was one of Akisni’s hippie dilettantes) swept into the room and took their dishes and napkins, swirling her ankle-length skirt as she deposited them into the dishwasher tray and left.
Once his guests had eaten, Snowbear laced his fingers on the table in front of him and asked with forced insouciance, “So, what’s all this, then? Something up?”
Viswanathan took an unfathomable breath. “Yes, something is definitely up.
“The short version is that a bacterium has been released into the world which eats everything made of petroleum. Gasoline, diesel, plastic, asphalt, everything.”
Akisni remained silent, unreadable. Snowbear grunted his incredulity. “That’s a pretty wild claim.”
“Snowbear, you know me. When you and your crew were tripping on mushrooms, who made sure you were okay and tucked you into your sleeping bags?”
“True. You have always been the sober, skeptical one. That’s why you wound up a world-renowned scientist and Akisni, Les, Brownie, and I wound up living on a hippie commune…”
“Hardly a typical hippie commune. Science groupies, instead of rock stars. But it’s important you listen to me and remember who I am, who I’ve always been. Because this sounds incredible, but it is honestly happening.
“There have always been bacteria which eat petroleum. Oil deposits seep to the surface in the ocean and on land, and where there’s a source of nutrients, an organism will evolve to exploit it. The big secret to dealing with oil spills is that, if you just give those bacteria enough time, they will consume every drop of oil. In warmer climates, it can take months; in cooler climates, years or decades.
“The problem is, people are impatient. They don’t want to look at oil slicks and tar-soaked wildlife for all the time it takes. It's bad PR for the oil companies. So, in an ocean spill, they spray the oil with dispersants, which makes the oil droplets smaller, but also slows down the function of the bacteria.”
Akisni interrupted. “Wait a minute. So, when the oil companies treat the oil, it makes the spill take longer to clean up?” her expressive brow was furrowed.
“Well, it depends on your definition of ‘clean up.’ The big blobs of oil are gone, but the volume of seawater that’s contaminated is actually greater. But that’s not important now. I’ve always hypothesized that this could eventually force the bacteria to evolve more quickly. Several researchers have been working on developing a genetically-engineered organism which could withstand the dispersant. But this is different.
“I don’t know for sure if this is a naturally-evolved variant or a genetically-engineered bacterium. I have reason to suspect the latter…” He described the strange call from the Chinese physician.
“That’s not much to go on.” Snowbear commented.
“True.” Amit conceded. “But there’s something else. There’s a bright—no, brilliant— young researcher who was working with alkanivorax and p. putida strains. I never had the privilege of meeting her, but she recently left academia to work in the private sector. I saw a Power Point of hers online. I downloaded it; I can show you on my laptop. I was hoping you had internet here, I’d like to finish downloading her most recent papers.”
Amit put his hand on his laptop case, by his side on the bench, ready to show them the Power Point, but Snowbear waved his hand dismissively. “Okay.” Snowbear stood up.
“Okay. I believe you.” He put both palms flat on the table and bent forward slightly, looking his old friend in the eye. “I believe you, Amit. You don’t need to show me more proof.
“So. What should we do?”
Amit felt a knot in his chest unclench which he hadn’t known was there. “Actually, you are probably in pretty good shape out here; that’s why I came here. I did my best to disinfect before we got here, so hopefully we haven’t contaminated your dwelling. You’ll want to disinfect the tires of Juni’s car, and make sure the children…you do have children here still?”
“None younger than ten at the moment.”
“Just make sure they don’t walk across the tire tracks and distribute the germs that way. However, no matter what we do, it’s just a matter of time until it makes it to you. It’s in the irrigation rigs of the fields nearby. Animals will track it in; it might even hitch a ride on windborne seeds or pollen. There’s so much I don’t know yet about this new hybrid.
“So, longer-term, you want to make sure anything you rely on which is plastic is replaced. Electronic devices will melt, or simply stop working. Do you buy propane gas?” He nodded at the stove.
“No, it’s methane. It's homemade biogas. We have a micro plant which harvests it from our sewage and farm waste.”
Amit’s eyebrows shot up. “Really! That’s impressive! I’d like a tour later.”
“Yes, it’s taken us years to work out the inputs; the right mix of anaerobes and how to know when to flare the gas…but it sounds like our urgently pressing concern for right now will be to figure out which components of it are plastic and how to replace them.”
“Might I suggest looking at bone and horn as hard-plastic substitutes? They were used for similar purposes a century ago. In India when I was growing up, a lot of things were made out of them that are plastic here nowadays. My biggest worry is pipes and electrical insulation. It didn’t take long at all, a matter of hours, for electricity, phones, and internet to go down in Chicago. I think the bacterium must use biofilms to migrate along the insulation.”
“We need to call an emergency meeting. We have an electrician and a civil engineer in residence. But the more minds working together on this, the better.”
Juni felt more secure, just knowing there were people here who understood the problems they faced and could work together to solve them. Juni’s eyes began to drift shut, and as her awareness sank into her belly, full of warm, wholesome soul food, she was ready to cuddle up and fall asleep. She suddenly realized she had no one to cuddle, and tears began to trickle silently down her cheeks. Akisni took note and walked around the table to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Honey, are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“My husband.” Her throat constricted in a sob.
“Is he—it’s okay, honey.” Juni’s shoulders began to shake. “Come with me.” Akisni draped a warm, s
oft arm around her and maneuvered her from the kitchen. As they walked through the swinging double doors at the other end, Juni lost control of her weeping and began to moan.
XLVI.
It’s Only Natural
Each day that the internet failed to come back on was one rung further up the ladder of resignation. The people of the Sutokata Center gave up checking after about five days. They were all hard at it anyway: swathing electrical wires and PVC water pipes with pine-resin-soaked strips of felt and canvas, excavating plastic parts out of devices and connectors, carving bone substitutes, experimenting with oils and animal fats to see what would serve best as lubricants, and standing watch.
For it didn’t take long for the surrounding folk to realize that the people of Sutokata were better-situated to survive the machine sickness than anyone else. Friends from the community stopped by to ask for help: goat’s milk for a baby whose mother ran out of formula; a supply of sterile bandages for an elderly neighbor dealing with a slow-healing wound.
There were those they couldn’t help: the diabetic neighbor who showed up with his wife, asking if they knew where he could get insulin. They didn’t. They’d walked eight miles, since their vehicles were all disabled, and without being asked, Juni drove them back in her car, spreading canvas over the seats and carpet in the back so they wouldn’t contaminate the vehicle with the machine sickness. Juni stopped at the end of their half-mile-long driveway to let them out. Knowing that the man would die a slow and miserable death in front of his wife, and there was nothing they could do to prevent it, left the entire household morose for days. However, they aided anyone they possibly could, on the principle of human kindness.
But one day, a few weeks after Juni and Amit arrived, Brownie was carrying feed to the pigs when he spotted a small group of armed men roving up the track towards the compound. They were spread out, but he thought he counted eight or nine of them. He hailed them, and instead of advancing to greet him, the men ran away at a dead run, scattering in all directions. Brownie immediately came back to the main house and told Snowbear, who called a consensus meeting that evening.
The residents of Sutokata were, by and large, left-wing. They didn’t like guns and they perceived that gun violence was a huge problem. However, in light of the fact that they appeared to be under imminent threat of violence and law enforcement was apparently not accessible, they were forced to consider means of self defense.
Akisni had long insisted that Sutokata be a “place of peace,” which meant many things. One thing it meant was that anyone arriving with a firearm was expected to lock it away in a large gun safe in the sheep barn attached to the house. Akisni held one key to the gun safe and Snowbear had the other. Many people had come and gone over the decades, and not all of them had retrieved their guns before leaving, for various reasons. So, to Akisni’s chagrin, when the gun safe was opened, it was revealed to be crammed almost full of firearms of various types. If not a literal arsenal, it was at least a solid defensive collection.
All of this had been summarized by Snowbear at the beginning of the consensus meeting. All 16 residents of the collective, plus Amit and Juni, sat in the great room in chairs or couches. The young and limber sat on cushions or sprawled on the floor.
Akisni was sitting cross-legged on an oversized leather armchair. She was breathing deeply, sitting upright, but tears were streaming down her face. She was holding a ten-inch dowel wrapped in colorful string, the talking stick. “I believe in non-violence,” she stated. “I would rather not live, than live in a world where I have to be violent to live.”
Snowbear knelt on the floor in front of her, took the talking stick, and looked her in the eyes.
“I would kill and die rather than see a hair on your head harmed.” He rose to address the group. “I don’t believe in attacking other people who mean me no harm, but when someone threatens to harm me, or those I care about, I believe in striking back.” Akisni fixed her gaze towards her hands in her lap.
Gillie stood up and took the stick from Snowbear. “I agree with Akisni. There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
Jesse spoke up. “I grew up around guns in southern Georgia.” Gillie handed him the stick, which he took absent-mindedly. “I know how to handle guns. I like guns. They’re tools for hunting, they’re fun to play with, for plinking at bottles back in the woods. But they’re also for self-defense. You ladies say you’re against fighting. If someone was on top of you,” he looked right at Gillie, “choking you and about to rape you, would you fight him?” He held the stick out to her, but she shook her head and looked away, pressing her lips together angrily. “If you’d fight to protect your life, your body, your loved ones, then you owe it to yourself to have the best chance possible of winning.”
Murphy took the stick next. “It’s not women against men, and I think that’s kind of a sexist implication. I’m a man, but I don’t believe in warfare or aggression either. I believe in peaceful resolution of problems. But I also don’t believe in being a victim.”
The discussion went on and on. Everybody present spoke at least once, several spoke many times. Sheila stood up, her skinny 10-year-old frame poised amongst the adults, and said simply, “I don’t like fighting and killing. They’re wrong.”
Finally, after an hour and a half or so, there was a silence. Everyone was fatigued.
“I call for a consensus,” said Josh. “The consensus is that those who are willing, will carry firearms on patrols. We agree that we will not shoot another human being unless it is clear that they have violent intentions towards one of us or the entire group.” He turned to his right, where Brittani was seated. “Do you consent?” He asked her.
“I consent.” She turned to Brownie on her right.
“I consent,” said Brownie.
Every member of the group consented until it came to the next-to-last, Akisni. “I do not consent,” she said.
Snowbear shook his head and took her hand “I consent.”
“We do not have consensus,” stated Josh, formally and rather unnecessarily.
The group took a break; some went outside to smoke in the cold night air, others did yoga poses, some went to their rooms or into a bathroom to wash up or use the facilities. Eventually they all drifted back into the room and re-assembled.
Jesse walked up and grabbed the stick. “I feel pissed off.” He stood in the middle of the room, facing Akisni. “I want to live in a world free of violence too. But that’s not the world we are living in. In spite of all the idealistic hippie stuff that makes everyone here so happy, we have to play the hand we're dealt. With all due respect, Akisni, you’ve benefited all your life from the presence of defensive weapons around you, or just from the presence of people who were prepared to defend you. If you deny the morality of self-defense while enjoying its benefits, what does that make you? A hypocrite! We’re not talking about invading a foreign country or drone-bombing innocent children at a wedding party here. We’re talking about you, me, little Sheila, and about everything we’ve worked so hard to create and build. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” He dropped the stick on the rug and took his seat on a wooden chair.
The discussion was directed at Akisni from that point on. Not everyone spoke this time around, but those who did, addressed their words to her.
Gillie, prattling her New Age phraseology, was kindest, “Akisni, I love you. I love your gentle spirit. I want the light of that gentle spirit to go on safely shining from the vessel of your body for years to come. I want you to be safe. You don’t have to be a fighter. Just let the fighters be the warriors they are meant to be.”
She held the stick out to Akisni. Akisni regarded her for a long time. Gillie was speaking her dialect, and she seemed to be mulling over what the younger woman said. She finally took the talking stick and unfolded from her perch in the armchair.
“I don’t like it. But I consent.”
“Do we have consensus?” Asked Josh.
Everyone was sile
nt.
“Do we have consensus?” He asked again. Everyone looked at one another for any trace of disagreement. Other than Akisni’s face, now stony and resigned, there was none.
“We have consensus.” A collective sigh went up from the group. It was after midnight. Sheila was asleep with her head in her mother’s lap.
Ammunition was in short supply for most of the weapons, but for the purpose of defensive patrols, which would shoot only rarely and sparingly, ammunition shouldn’t become an issue any time soon. Snowbear took one of the shotguns with him (best to use the shotgun shells up first, since the shells were plastic and sure to be infected eventually) and silently waited at a spot where their unwelcome invaders had been seen; he heard rather than saw them and fired two blasts in that direction. The aggressors weren’t spotted again, but all the willing adults who knew how to handle guns took turns on guard duty from then on. The collective spent some of their precious ammunition teaching Gillie and LaDwon the basics of how to shoot. Jesse, the ex-marine, was delighted to take this task on.
The day Amit and Juni arrived, the electrical meter stopped running and didn’t start again. It didn’t matter much; the whole-house battery array kept the lights on, though they had to conserve electricity during the day to avoid being without power after midnight. “It’s not a problem in the Summer, but we do normally have to buy electricity in the winter,” explained Josh, whose adolescent-like, gangling, six-foot-five frame, smooth beardless cheeks, and slow speech belied his degree in engineering and his years of experience as a union Master electrician.
Akisni started a small countertop factory to make tallow candles from the rendered fat from their meat meals. “It’s just a matter of time until the lights go out for good,” she explained in her serene, firm voice. “I want to be ready when it happens.”
A month after Amit and Juni arrived, there came a day when they woke up to find the entire world appeared to be benevolently enrobed in a thigh-high blanket of snow, the season’s first. The gleam of the pristine crystals dazzled like diamonds in the sunshine.
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 18