“Oh, your library. Right.” Nate’s face fell.
D.D. felt her heart sink with it. “What’s wrong? Was it destroyed?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. We just made the rounds of the whole park, pulling out all the printed material we could find and putting it in the biggest building over there, the NetMicro one. One problem: no librarians. It may take a while to find your books.”
D.D. shrugged. “Hopefully not too long.”
Nate smiled. “Come on, let’s go to the main building. I can’t wait to get to introduce you.”
They went outside to hop on her ATV, with Nate perched on the seatback. They cruised slowly, him telling her where to turn and Kittykitty trotting cheerfully behind.
When she dismounted at the big building, she was met by a crowd. About twenty people, four of them women from what D.D. could see, stood in front of the entryway. The group skewed unsurprisingly young, with lots of smooth cheeks and sparse mustaches, though there were also a few greying beards and white hairs among them.
“Want some coffee?” someone said.
“You’re kidding?”
“No, really. We scavenged enough coffee for three or four years from all the breakrooms and kitchens in these offices. We ration it like gold now, but you’re a guest, right?”
Nate looked around and people nodded. Everyone went inside, and D.D. called Kittykitty, shy in the large group and mistrustful of the indoor space. But he stuck close to D.D. and followed them to the company cafeteria.
“How do you take it?” Nate asked.
“I like my coffee like I like my men: strong, hot, and sweet.” D.D. laughed. “Black, please.”
As Nate fixed her cup, D.D. found herself an object of attention of some sixty or seventy earnest young pairs of eyes. She was given the place of honor on a wooden crate with a larger crate for a table. Kittykitty sat sphinxwise at her feet. The rest of the occupants sat on pallets and blankets on the naked cement floor, all the plastic chairs and tables long since gone along with the linoleum.
Someone brought her a plain white mug full of pure, brown deliciousness. She felt like she was savoring a rare, old wine. She swirled it in the cup, enjoying the thin, oily film on top. She stuck her nose in the cup and inhaled the rich, smoky aroma. Then she closed her eyes and took her first sip. The bitter lusciousness hung on her tongue for one perfect moment before she swallowed. She opened her eyes and sighed. “I can’t even begin to tell you how wonderful this is!”
The ritual over, the techies realized they were staring at her. They broke up into their own little groups, got snacks from the kitchen, and left her with Nate and a few others. One of these was Alfred, a man D.D. guessed to be in his mid-fifties, close to six and a half feet tall and perhaps a hundred and twenty pounds with his pockets full, and sporting a belly-length beard and coke-bottle glasses. “Systems engineer, via cybernetics. Quantum computing, cybernetic intelligence and ethics, all that. Let me show you where the library is.”
The book room was not what anyone would call a “library” in any real sense of the word. Books were piled waist-high in stacks, bigger books on the floor, tapering to smaller ones on top. The stacks were distributed around the room semi-randomly, although here and there it seemed someone had made an effort to separate them in some orderly fashion: there was a series of stacks of all blue, all red, all yellow, and multicolored covers; here was a stack where the spines had at least been aligned to face the same direction to make them easier to see the titles.
“Oh.” D.D. said.
“Yeah.” Alfred nodded. “These guys have grown up with information all organized by computers. All they’ve ever had to do is click “sort by” to get everything in alphabetical order, or grouped by subject, or whatever. They have no clue how to maintain a physical system of organization. They have no idea how to use a book’s index, either.”
D.D. huffed in annoyance. “My cohort was the last one to learn about card catalogues and the Dewey Decimal system. But I’m not getting sidetracked into playing librarian while trying to whip this into shape. I’m hoping, at least, all my books got dumped near the same spot.” She walked to the nearest stack and started walking around it, reading titles.
“You want me to help?” Alfred offered. “I’m kind of stuck until someone else finishes their part of the project I’m working on…”
“Sure. I’m looking for my microbiology books. There’s a big one, a thick hardcover about this big, blue with white writing on the spine, title of Oceanic Microbiology by Elbaz and Ascani. It should be easy to spot. Being so big and thick it’ll be close to the floor, and I’m hoping the rest will be close by.”
“Oceanic microbiology? Are you working on climate change?”
“Not my field. I don’t expect there are any data coming in from the weather stations, and even if there were, there aren’t any supercomputers to process it. But they say the oceans are boiling, and I can’t imagine all that petroleum breaking down at once wouldn’t have a massive effect on the atmosphere. No, I look at very small micro things, not macro things like the entire planet. Easier to isolate the effects.”
“Which building were you in? When they were hauling the books, they started at the far end,” he gestured at one side of the room, “with the books from buildings further back in the complex, and then they worked from right to left as they worked their way out.”
“Well, that helps me tremendously already. Thanks! My lab was right by the front driveway. Let’s start over here.”
The two of them started spiraling around stacks of books, looking them over carefully for the books D.D. wanted.
“So,” Alfred said, “I can’t resist asking if the rumors are true: did you really create the machine sickness?”
This was the first time anyone had asked D.D. this outright. She took a breath and swallowed, her hands suddenly sweating. “Yes, I have to admit, it was me.” Alfred was probably the least menacing person she could imagine confessing this to.
“Great Mother of us all! Did you have any idea what you were doing?”
“No, I really didn’t. I hate to cop out, but it wasn’t really my fault. My assistant was swapping out the cultures behind my back in order to sell them to the Chinese. Along with some other strange dealings involving embezzlement.”
“Really! So the crazy rumor that an oil platform in China was the first place infected might not be so crazy after all. Interesting…”
“I never heard that.”
“A bunch of the fellows here lived on chat boards, Before,” Alfred clarified. “They’re always looking for freak occurrences—blips in the data, black swans, you know.”
“Well, it would make sense. I spent last winter with Amit Viswanathan. Have you heard of him?”
“No, afraid not.”
“Not unusual. No one outside microbiology and genetic engineering would have. He pioneered the field, patented the first genetically engineered organism. Anyway, he said that he got a strange call from China the week…Before. Someone calling about how to combat infections with one of the bacteria the machine sickness was based on. He didn’t think anything of it, but later, when he heard about the China connection in my lab, he put two and two together…”
“I don’t know whether to condemn you as a demon or worship you as a goddess.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes. I’m a goddess worshipper, a neopagan, now solitary because I’m cut off from my coven, and I don’t know what to think. Is the Goddess Mother Earth herself righting the mess we’d made of the planet, feeding her children with seabutter while culling the herd of the more violent, the passive, and lazy? Is this what the Hindus called the Age of Kali, the destruction of all that was?”
D.D. smiled. “I’m no longer religious myself. But I’m pretty sure if I were a goddess, I’d know it.”
“But,” Alfred crooked a finger and tilted his head in a comical way, “isn’t that just what a goddess would say?”
“Oh, oh, he
re it is! Here it is!” D.D. squatted down, pointing at the bottom book in a tall stack. “And look… Almost all the books in this stack are mine. This is great!”
She and Alfred pulled the stack into smaller piles. D.D. flipped Elbaz and Ascani to the chapter on obligate hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria. “Here it is.” She ran her finger down columns of dense technical prose, moving her lips as she skimmed. Finally, she said, “Here. This is it! I knew it! OHCBs in anaerobic conditions —like on the sea floor—produce glycerol compounds with a profile almost exactly like that of olive oil! My theory is that combined with the protein and aminoglycan compounds of the bacteria themselves, and you get…guess what?”
“Seabutter!” cried Alfred, leaping to his feet and launching himself into the air with such glee and enthusiasm that D.D. thought he might actually flutter into space.
She laughed out loud despite herself. “I like you, Alfred!”
“I like you too, D.D. Now, let’s gather all your books up and carry them back to your lab, shall we?” He pushed his thick glasses up his nose, smoothed his now-wild frizzy white hair, and bent to the task.
#
A few weeks later, D.D. was sitting in her office, going over some notes from the day’s trials. It was slow going without a full staff of lab assistants. A couple had some background in biology, there were two pharmaceutical chemists, but the vast majority of people here were engineers. Working with bacteria entailed a steep learning curve. She was consulting with the biobattery people about culture techniques and nutrient flow management, and there was an amazing project run by one of the physics think tanks, where she’d helped with some of the genetic engineering to speed up the routing of biocomputing synapses. She couldn’t begin to understand the quantum circuits they were designing, but she could understand the tolerances and conditions they needed to create in order to conduct signals in living tissue networks.
But she’d also gotten some cultures of P. davisii going, and she’d established that they were, indeed, producing something like seabutter. It was composed of predominantly oleic acid, triolein, and oleyl oleate in a matrix full of ruptured bacterial cells. She was on to the step of trying to establish the composition of the rest of the matrix components and figure out what was causing the cells to rupture.
Alfred stuck his head into the office. “I’m going shopping. Want to come?”
D.D. was living in the lab now, her ATV secured in the parking garage beneath the building (in the VIP spot, take that, corporate bigwigs!). “I’d love to get out of here! Y’all are nice people and all, but these four walls are closing in on me.”
“I was hoping we could take your vehicle,” Alfred admitted. “I think it will pull the little handcart we usually use.”
“Sounds like a plan!” D.D. followed him as he bounded down the stairs two at a time. The cart was designed to be pulled by a riding lawnmower, so hitching it up to the ATV was a minor kludge.
“I don’t guess this is street legal.”
“I don’t think there are any traffic cops out there to care anymore.”
D.D. started the vehicle up, and Alfred collapsed himself down like an ironing board onto the seat behind her, his impossibly long legs on either side, his knees almost touching the handlebars of the 4-wheeler. “Wheeee!” He cried, his long beard flapping over his shoulder and his elbows winging gaily on either side as they rode off. Kittykitty was patrolling the grounds briskly, as was his daily routine, and he loped along behind them now.
He directed her to the marketplace where everyone gathered to barter and trade. D.D. was intrigued to see people exchanging items for rounded coins which they called Pelicans. Alfred had a few, and he’d brought some items to sell for more: shewanella-powered calculators with glass-embedded biocomputer circuitry, the size and weight of a shoebox; hand-printed charts predicting the next year’s tides and lunar phases, calculated by those in the complex who could solve integral equations in their heads while sorting their socks and humming a tune.
Once Alfred had sold what he’d brought, they went to seek out the items they needed for the Complex Complex. They needed food, of course. The seabutter at the first stall was nixed by Alfred. “Too gritty. We’d have to render and filter it before we could use it.”
They picked up vegetables and some live chickens (Alfred, a compassionate vegan, actually teared up at the thought that they’d be dead soon). They were starting to run low on paper, so they bought some samples of what was available, which proved to be halfway decent in quality, if not consistent from batch to batch. They bought some other odds and ends. At the end of the row, they sauntered down was another seabutter stall.
Alfred picked up the jar and said, “Now, this is what you want in seabutter.” He pointed to the viscous substance inside, and D.D. had to tilt her head back to look at it even though he held it low in front of his chest. His lesson in the finer points of seabutter was aborted, however.
Kittykitty barked a sharp alarm.
“D.D.?” she heard.
The sound of that familiar voice shocked her with recognition. “Jeremy!” She didn’t even have to look at him. She just turned and threw her arms around him. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I might ask you the same.”
“I decided it was more important to figure out what was causing the seabutter than it was to make it back to Tallahassee. I was afraid the people I care about there might… not be there anyway. How’s your family?”
“Well, actually, I never made it down to Corpus. I guess I was kind of afraid of the same thing. But I figure I’d better make it there soon. I’ve got big news.” They were still half-embracing, forearms latched together, and he put his hands on her shoulders. With a gentle, concerned look in the eye, he said, “Gaby and I are getting married.”
It took D.D. a moment to process the information. She felt a mad spark of joy explode within her—happiness for her two friends. It was with no falsehood or hesitation she cried, “That’s wonderful! Oh, I’m so excited for both of you. When’s the wedding? And where? And am I invited?” If that was a test, my heart passed with flying colors.
Alfred cleared his throat. DD turned. “Oh, how rude of me! Alfred, this is Jeremy, Jeremy, Alfred. You remember me talking about Jeremy, who I traveled down from Indiana with?”
“Oh, yes. So pleased to finally get to meet you!” Alfred was…yes, definitely…flirting! Not that his batting eyelids and coy look were particularly effective, as he looked down at Jeremy from a good eight-inch height advantage. And not that he was remotely Jeremy’s type. But it confirmed D.D.’s suspicions about Alfred. Kittykitty licked Jeremy’s dangling hand and insisted on an introduction as well.
Jeremy shook his hand firmly and continued, “D.D., I know Gaby’d love to have you at the wedding. She’ll be delighted to see you again. We’re getting hitched out on Bolivar. Her family’s coming, Ed will be there. It’ll be, let’s see, four months from now.”
“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away! Well, Alfred here is one of my roommates at the lab. He was just telling me how to tell a good jar of seabutter from a bad one.”
“You’ll find no better seabutter than the Bolivar Partnership sells.”
“He’s right,” Alfred agreed. He pointed out some features of the jar which let one know it had been properly refined, sealed, and was not adulterated. They packed the jars carefully, finished the rest of their marketing, and headed back to the lab.
Cold War
By Halloween, a foot and a half of snow was layered onto the ground, and the Sutokatans had resigned themselves to the premature winter. The hectic chaos of trying to salvage what they could of their ruined agricultural output had exhausted all of them except little Ozark, who spent most of his time making contented little humming noises from his sling across his mother’s chest.
The consensus meeting on rationing was short. No one needed convincing that their situation would become dire by the time April brought her warmth again. They all im
agined too clearly the months waiting for the first early plantings to bear.
“No matter how we scrimp, we’ll be eating early dandelion and violet leaves (and glad to get them) before we get any yields,” Akisni said. She and Gillie sat stuffing feathers from the ravaged flock of chickens into rough homespun duvets.
“At least one of us will get enough to eat.” Josh nodded at pure, oblivious Ozark, freshly burped and sleeping on his mother’s shoulder.
“I’m more worried about Sheila,” Akisni said, and the girl’s mother nodded. “She’s about to go through her final growth spurt, and she’s at that age when kids burn through food like nobody’s business. She’s going to need double rations. Jessica will need a little extra to support breastfeeding…”
“No, I’m too fat anyway,” said Jessica. “If I burn off some extra calories nursing, that’s fine.”
“Jessica, you may be carrying a little pregnancy weight still, but none of us are going to be what anybody could conceivably call ‘too fat’ by spring.”
“Have you seen photos of the Bangladeshi famine in the 70s?” Amit asked. Snowbear and Akisni nodded sagely, but the rest of them, younger, looked clueless. “Really? No one? Where the government was stopping grain convoys while people starved? Children with stick arms and legs scratching the ground for worms to eat?” They looked around at one another, shaking their heads. Some shrugged.
“Calm down, Amit, man. We get the picture,” LaDwon said.
That night at supper they all looked down silently at their tiny portions. They ate carefully, chewing each bite with great attention and scraping the last morsel from each plate. All except for Amit. He left a quarter of his piece of chicken behind and pushed his plate under Sheila’s nose. “Here you go, child. I’m stuffed.”
Amit continued to feed Sheila. He’d sometimes pass off a crust or morsel to Jessica as well. But one evening in late January, after they’d all consumed their scanty meal, Josh could be heard raising his voice. “No, buddy. I won’t eat your food!”
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