Permian- Emissary of the Extinct

by Devyn Regueira

  Coincidences aren’t real, they aren’t substantive, they are the hallucinated gravel we use to fill the potholes in our logic until half the road is paved in delusion. The Statisticians didn’t have potholes. How could they? One crack in the asphalt and the whole god damn thing crumbles ten million years before the first butterfly thought to flap its wings. It couldn’t have happened that way. If it had, this letter wouldn’t exist.

  That’s exactly what I told them, you know, when they asked me why the next five million slates are all pristine. Five million skies, no more blemishes. Five billion years, no more extinctions. They said it meant we’d make a comeback. I said they’ve got gravel in their pockets. I said that the next time death comes for us, there won’t be anything left to take.

  I won’t be around to see it. I won’t know which way it goes, how it will happen. If you’re reading this, I suppose it means means you’ll see for yourself. I suppose it means you didn’t understand. I forgive you, Alvin. And I’m sorry. Thank you for your friendship.

  Damned if we do, damned if we don’t

  Every Daniels

  There were many rocks worth studying at the excavation site, more than professor Bonman could have sifted in a thousand summers. No matter. Hard work and tall tasks were more appeal than deterrent for Alvin; a genetic seed his mother had sewn at conception and he’d put to a lifetime of good use.

  So when he was informed, already dressed for dirty work beneath the fine pink dusting of his first Siberian dawn, that his place would be far from the field - a chip appeared on Alvin’s shoulder. By the beginning of his second week, directed for the eighth consecutive morning toward the geology-wing of the expedition’s fast-developing pop-up town, waning patience and torrential frustration had eroded that chip into a gorge.

  “Why drag me all the way out here, fly me over the anomaly of a lifetime, refuse to explain what those holes are or how they got there, and then sit me in a god damn office chair?”

  “I told you, Alvin. It’s touchy right now. Need to know basis sort of thing. When you do need to know, you will! Besides, I haven’t heard any of your colleagues bit- complaining.”

  “Colleagues? You mean those pocket-protecting fucks you expect me to chit chat with all day? They don’t complain because nothing interesting has happened in their lives since the Nintendo 64. A bunch of virgins sitting around a table… you expect any good stories out of a group like that?”

  “You’ve worked with academics for thirty years, Alvin. Who did you expect? The A-Team?”

  “Maybe not. But I certainly didn’t expect your pool of geologists to be limited to anyone with an active PlentyOfFish account. I got to talking to them, you know, and not one of them is married. That’s strange. Out of forty-five geologists - no kids, no dependents, no grandparent at home with an ass to wipe. That’s statistically strange. Digging through a bucket of shit this big, hell, statistics say you should expect to find a piece of corn or two.”

  Professor Bonman quite enjoyed getting a rise out of the American who, still in his early thirties, was engulfed at all times in a loose fitting air of inexperience.

  After sputtering through his own name at introduction, Alvin’s ‘assigned contact’ had developed the embarrassing tendency to become defensive any time his identity was called, however innocently, into question. Alvin did not hate the man, and perhaps they might have been friends elsewhere, but the boredom that plagued him had a face - and that face belonged to the person with an obvious pseudonym pinned to his lapel.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Bonman. And I can assure you that all selections for this team were strictly merit based. If you do not enjoy your present company,” a laugh came in preparation for his own quip, “perhaps you can at least be grateful that you aren’t bunking with the geneticists.”

  “Geneticists? What the hell kinda business do geneticists have at a paleontological dig?”

  Red cheeked and spontaneously flustered, Alvin’s contact looked as though he’d just heard his real name revealed over the intercom.

  “They are conducting independent research and we - we leased them the available facilities until the rest of the geology team arrives.”

  “Independent research on what? Siberian pine diversity? A hibernating bug that just-so-happens to hunker down for the winter three miles from the dig site?”

  “That, Mr. Bonman, is need to know.”

  The American adjusted his name tag. Brady Elway Thomas. To Alvin, it was a habit in line with the unconscious way a pudgy boy tugs at his shirt in those years before puberty comes in relief.

  “In any case Alvin, I must assure you that your pretenses regarding the members of your team are misdirected. Any criteria you may have… construed as bias based on factors of your personal lives are, plainly and simply, coincidence.”

  That word stuck out like a shark tooth from an eons-dry riverbed.

  “I think that I’d like to go home now, Brady. On the next truck out, if there’s a seat.”

  “You signed on for a full month, professor Bonman.”

  “A matter worth discussing. And I think that conversation would be best had with someone a little higher up the chain. What’s your boss’s name, Brady? Should I be asking around for a Young Montana? Is there a Manning Vick I can speak to?”

  “That’s funny, Mr. Bonman”

  The red in Brady’s cheeks contested that claim.

  “If you must know, my father is a die hard Patriots fan and my mother grew up in San Francisco.”

  “You were in middle school when Tom Brady was drafted and Elway played in Denver.”

  “I think we’ve chatted long enough, Alvin. I’ll walk you back to the dormitories. Maybe you can try and make some friends today.”

  “I have more friends than I need at home, Brady, thank you for your concern. I may be twice divorced and more sterile than Mars, but there are people who will wonder why I haven’t been texting back. If we could make a pit stop to wherever it is you’ve stored our phones, I’ll be happy to let them know that I’m just fine and dandy.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.”

  When the man resumed fiddling with his name tag, Alvin regarded it as no more than the continuation of a nervous tick. Brady regarded it as no less than his last resort.

  “You don’t want to go this way, Brady. I’ve got thirty pounds and forty years busting rocks on you. Take me to a truck or my phone and your face might still be pretty tomorrow.”

  It took seconds of blind searching before Brady’s thumb brushed the subtle protrusion on the back of his name plate, and only the briefest moment to decide to press it.

  That discreet little button, affectionally known among the site’s upper strata as the “Oh Shit Protocol”, was reserved for use under conditions which “warrant immediate action” and “threaten objective attainability”.

  Brady would be the first to resort to that protocol. A number of men with similar roles around site, and doubtless a handful of his authority superiors, would be glad to hear it. First to the “Oh Shit Protocol” was no yearbook accolade, and Brady already knew that some of his colleagues had placed wagers against him.

  “You’ve grown on me in the last week, Alvin. That’s why I’m going to dedicate the next twenty seconds to keeping you alive.”

  Footsteps thrummed from a hallway at the far end of the linoleum plateau; a middle-school chic cafeteria still half-an-hour away from the lunch rush. Alvin nodded, his situation getting clearer by the stomp of a booted foot.

  “You aren’t here as a punishment. Nobody had an ounce of ill will toward you, and you were not in danger ten minutes ago. That is no longer the case… necessarily.”

  Brady glanced toward the hallway. Three men with as many semi-automatic rifles between them had already rounded the corner at full sprint. It was his ‘Oh Shit Protocol’; performing as advertised.

  “Don’t look back. Just listen.”

  Brady half-wished the response team had taken l
onger as he leaned in for a parting sentiment with the geologist who he imagined, elsewhere, might have been his friend.

  “Where they’re taking you will not be comfortable. They will push your buttons - hard, sometimes. If you want to survive, play nice. They need to know you’re more asset than burden. If you seem unpredictable, the needle moves in the wrong direction. Got it? They can’t risk one of their consultants going haywire at the wrong time. That would threaten objective attainability. Do you understand, professor Bonman?”

  “I understand.”

  A disobedient glance over his shoulder meant that Alvin had broken his first order and, in so doing, already nudged his needle into the perilous red. Five seconds and their guns would be pressed cold to the nape of his neck. At least he knew there was time for a question.

  “Who am I here to consult?”

  “That’s on a need to know basis, professor Bonman, and you’re chin deep in a big bucket of shit. Let’s hope someone decides you’re worth digging for.”

  Installment Three

  “How is it going?”

  “How is it going?”

  Melissa O’Lear turned from the artificial daylight of her desktop for the first time in thirteen hours, cradled her chin on her shoulder, and brandished a pint of off brand peppermint schnapps.

  “It bloody went!”

  “Wait - really? Are you certain?”

  Through a veil of dim light and matted hair she’d neglected into the consistency of algae carpets on the bellies of forgotten tidal shipwrecks, Guo saw his colleague’s lips unwind into a grin. It no trivial achievement, that, after abounding effort and a briefcase of Vyvanse saw to it that they’d been epoxied together for the better part of a month.

  “Come take a looksie.”

  Chinese Communist Party premier geneticist Guo Chen set a napkin on a table, and his morning dose of Jade oolong tea on the napkin. He approached Melissa O’Lear, British software developer and bereaved mother of once, too eagerly to prevent her eighty-proof drool puddle from tarnishing the sleeve of a freshly pressed button-up.

  “Oh, so sorry, Guo. I do expect you’ll find it in yourself to forgive me. If not, you’ll surely find it here.”

  With fingernails maintained to a standard in agreement with any random sampling of surprise divorcees prone to bouts of depression, Ms. O’Lear scratched at the computer screen which had, in her four weeks of knowing it, come to represent both habitat and horizon.

  “I do not write computer code, Ms. O’Lear. You must explain it to me.”

  Melissa stared up at him, her expression playfully cross.

  “Oh dear, quite right. Well, why not drink some of this then?”

  She offered the geneticist the butt end of the schnapps.

  “A few sips and everything starts making sense.”

  Guo tilted his head for a line of sight around the bottle, still attempting to derive sense from the onscreen gumbo of letters and punctuation despite himself.

  “No, thank you. How can you be sure you’ve finished the software?”

  “Testing and prodding and retesting and re-prodding and on and on. You see, as you slept soundly in your quarters, my friend and I,” she dangled the pint in his face, “reacquainted ourselves. Seems to have been just the inspiration I needed to get this program off the ground.”

  Melissa fumbled for the mouse and began a long, enthusiastic vertical scroll of nine thousand lines of C++. At the summit of her document was a cluster of lines sandwiched between forward-slashes and asterisks - a digital high five Melissa once described as the mechanism by which the program knows to exclude any encapsulated code from being executed. The very first such line read ‘Process Outline’, and, to Guo, all subsequent lines like nonsense.

  “Behold, my dearest Guo.”

  Haphazardly she highlighted the rows of text. Guo, she made certain, would at least know where to look.

  “I was keen enough to jot the key points down last night before even my inaugural sip, tempting a thing as it was to try and talk myself out of. I had anticipated the chat we’d be having this morning, you see, and am not beyond admitting that - that to describe in layman’s terms the mechanics of this software would be of an intellectual demand beyond my present acuity.”

  Melissa exaggerated her already aggressively posh accent and, by her waning sentiment, flirted with the very brink of absurdity.

  “Sit, please.”

  “Of course.”

  Guo brushed the remnants of his colleague’s midnight appetite off the nearest chair, set it tidily beside hers, and settled in.

  “Please, Ms. O’Lear, proceed.”

  “Proceed I shall!”

  Melissa, without deference to the entirety of her previous statement, attempted to read the first line of her own conceptual outline, failed, and resolved to explain instead off the cuff.

  “You’ll recall that our early estimates regarding the time table for the imaged sequence transcription software were dreadfully optimistic. Two weeks or bust.”

  Guo didn’t like to be reminded.

  “Yes. We are two weeks over deadline. Six more days and the authorities will proceed with the relocation and integration of auxiliary developers.”

  “And geneticists.”

  Guo despised being reminded.

  “And auxiliary geneticists. I’ve also been told our consistent overruns have resulted in considerations regarding the commission of a novel and, until recently, prohibitively expensive, sonar device to act in the stead of our image transcription software.”

  An expression of distaste and the unfulfilled expectation of perfection lurked in Melissa’s periphery and very nearly muddied her mood.

  “Now, now, Guo. Don’t go cross on me just yet. I can only hope those nice auxiliary teams didn’t already go through the trouble of packing their bags and stamping their passports, and that the authorities have imagination enough to preserve their budget into next quarter some other way.”

  “If you’d ask me to share in your optimism, I’d ask that you explain your cause for having it. How exactly did you correct the problem?”

  “I only had to visualize it!”

  A sip of schnapps and a snort of a laugh that had been endearing when she was young and sober. Unabashed, she sealed the lid and tossed the pint out of reach, its purpose fulfilled.

  Manipulating the mouse was Melissa’s next challenge, conducted with the concentration of a man performing his field sobriety test after refusing a breathalyzer as a matter of principle. Eventually she found the application she was looking for, and two clicks of the mouse revealed the high definition image of what had been the bane of her existence.

  “I have seen all the sample pictures, Ms. O’Lear. They are of little use to me until we can translate the sequence into a digital format.”

  “Until when exactly, Mr. Chen?”

  Melissa spoke from the corner of her mouth, her eyes affixed to the desktop and her fingers extensions of the mouse. Guo looked on with diminishing optimism as she dragged the image of a short series of granite inscriptions to the fringes of the screen, riffled digitally through a cornucopia of blue folders, copied with great difficulty the address of a single file, pasted it snuggly into her code, and announced her victory in a shower of flammable spittle.

  “Behold, my dearest Guo!”

  Guided by a reservoir of muscle memory two decades deep, a simple keyboard command was entered. Melissa’s program ran to completion, and Guo’s optimism was replenished.

  “Amazing, Melissa. Perfection.”

  Hardly one sixtieth of one second divided Melissa’s command and Guo’s praise. The product of the first was the catalyst for the second - nothing more than a single text file, populated by a single row. Melissa read its contents aloud, tenderly, as a new mother might announce once and for all her child’s name to the crowd of doctors and nurses, and to the child, and to herself.

  “GGGTTTGGGTTAAGTATGAG.”

  Cautious by beauracratic
design, Guo cross referenced the letters, in the course of her speaking them, against the sequence strewn across the sample image.

  Line segments to‘G’. Triangles to ‘A’. Points to‘T’. No ‘C’s. No squares. Perfection.

  “The authorities will be very pleased with you, Ms. O’Lear.”

  Melissa beamed at the sentiment.

  “Would you like to know what the stitch in our side had been for all this time, Mr. Chen?”

  A polite nod came in answer; compelling enough for Melissa.

  “See the shadows? Just there - ‘round the symbols.”

  “I do. I was of the impression that they had been accounted for.”

  “As was I. Therein lies the problem. Most of this code, frankly, came straight off of Google. There’s normally a ‘best’ way to achieve something programmatically, you understand - so, once a fellow in India or someplace has sorted out which way that is, it’s mostly a matter of cut and paste for the rest of us. No need to re-scramble the eggs when they’re already on your plate.”

  “Genes have the tendency to operate in a similar way, Ms. O’Lear.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. I spent the last month cannibalizing bits of code from open source handwriting transcription applications, cuneiform translators, even a lovely bit of facial recognition software. Be sure to thank your government for that particular contribution, on my behalf.”

  Melissa winked. Guo blushed.

  “Up until I dug a pinch deeper into the facial recognition code, I’d largely overlooked the importance of shadow. More specifically, I gave no thought whatsoever to the disparity in shadow to be expected given the location, time, or canvas.”

  With pride seemed to come some measure of sobriety. Melissa wove her way through the file directory, dredging two more sample sequence images with relative ease.

  “These two were taken at the same time, one day apart, from opposite sections of the crater which, as you know, is nearly circular. You see the difference?”

  “Yes. In the shadows. They extend in opposite directions.”