“Any other differences?”
“The rock faces are texturally dissimilar. Subtle crags and ruffles cast non-standard shadow across the sequence. Has your program been updated to eliminate shadow altogether, Ms. O’Lear? Is this your breakthrough?”
“No, I’m afraid. That would have been a simpler thing, really, and certainly the preferred approach were we transcribing ink from a page. For inscriptions, though, for carvings like these - shadows are your only genuine instrument for differentiating between symbols.”
“Why is that?”
“Don’t be silly, Mr. Chen, it’s as plain to see as storm clouds from your back. What is a carving, if not a hole? Tell me, dearest Guo, wouldn’t you - what is a hole?”
Guo thought before he spoke. It was a self imposed habit that endeared him in the eyes of his parents, and his professors, and, of late, his government. When finally he answered, the same effect was to be had on Melissa.
“An absence.”
She smiled, but she did not relent.
“How can you capture the image of an absence? What’s more, how might you expect a computer to quantify that image in any meaningful way?”
It was a problem equal parts science and philosophy, a river of brackish logic to be mused over.
“Only indirectly. Peripherally. You can know an absence only by measuring its influence on the tangible.”
“I love it when you talk cheeky, Mr. Chen.”
Guo averted his eyes and Melissa snorted.
“The influence we’d have been best served to measure all along is the shadow. Any given point or line or triangle appears black against the backdrop of granite because light is no liquid - it won’t fill a depression just because you’ve made one accessible. That shadow, sweet Guo, is the very impression of a hole; an absence of light that, by means of contrast, renders itself quantifiable.
“But once we have succeeded in operationalizing shadow, which I assure you I have succeeded in doing, our values must be conditioned to account for the coordinates of the measured sequence as they relate to the relative angle of the sun. Coordinates, by their very definition, are quantities. Quantities of left, of right, of up or down. After the shadows have been measured - as points or vectors of qualified hexadecimal densities, for what it’s worth - and the coordinates and date and time of day accounted for algorithmically, the last matter to address is the geometry of disparate rock textures - subtle as they are.”
Guo stood to collect his tea. It was half empty by the time he sat down, cold by now but still caffeinated to a degree that he hoped would sustain his mounting infatuation.
“How did you achieve that, Ms. O’Lear?”
“Didn’t have to,” she smiled and eyed his tea as though it were actual jade and she concocting a heist, “a nice fellow in India or someplace already had it worked out for me.”
Guo looked down at his tea, and up at his colleague whose blissful intoxication would inevitably cede to the headache of a generation, and offered it.
“Thank you, my dearest Guo.”
Melissa drained the cup as if it were a glass of champagne and she had been given reason to expect an engagement ring at the bottom.
“It is I who should thank you, Ms. O’Lear. I admit that our lack of progress had created in me a great deal of apprehension. How long, may I ask, until the entire genetic sequence is available? Perhaps then I might sleep more easily. Those hours before a day of principled work, it seems, are more restful than the anticipation of a day with assurances only for more anticipation.”
“How long? Well, that simply depends. How many drones are out canvassing the crater?”
“Presently? None.”
“None? Oh dear. Well, I suppose you have your answer, haven’t you?”
Both considered, independently, that perhaps the caffeine only served to hasten Melissa’s coming headache. It struck suddenly, that sensation of her eyes being evicted without notice from their sockets, as if the earliest indication of the alcohol’s diffusion from her blood triggered DEFCON 1 among all the pressure sensors in her skull. Melissa pressed two fingers to either temple and rubbed circles into the skin, and for a time with such intensity that Guo considered she might be trying to jumpstart her thoughts with static electricity.
“I don’t suppose I do, Ms. O’Lear.”
“Why would the drones be grounded, Guo, when the transcription of the genetic sequence is predicated on having pictures to transcribe from? Would they prefer we stroll along the crater ourselves, snap a few million lovely photos as we go? Hopefully a selfie stick or two can be pinched from the budget. Dangling from the edge with a rope ‘round our waists sounds rather dreadful, yeah? Perhaps even ropes will prove too frivolous an expense. All well and good, forget the sodden rope. Perhaps they’d prefer you hold my ankles -”
“Ms. O’Lear…”
“God knows it’s been ages since anyone’s grabbed hold of my -”
“Ms. O’Lear!”
In all the weeks of overruns and setbacks and frustration, for all the justification he’d have had available to him, Guo had not raised his voice to Melissa. The reward for his restraint before became extraordinary poignancy now.
“Ms. O’Lear - the drones are grounded because they completed their canvas of the crater’s rim two weeks ago, yesterday. Each of approximately six billion symbols have been imaged. Each image, with the exception of that image which constitutes the remainder, encompasses exactly two thousand symbols in accordance with your resolution standards. Two-million-nine-hundred-eighty-nine-thousand-and-two-hundred-eighty-five images were stored on a hard drive, and you yourself were present when, just days ago, from that very seat, that hard dive was installed. You have been given everything you need, Ms. O’Lear.”
“I suppose… I suppose I’ve forgotten in all the excitement. How very foolish of me.”
Flustered, Melissa fanned her face with both hands until she’d cooled the skin with a sufficient application of placebo.
“Well. Shall we begin transcribing then?”
“Certainly, Ms. O’Lear. May I first ask how long you expect the process to take?”
“We aren’t dealing with a sample of twenty symbols anymore, Mr. Chen. I would expect no less than twelve days before the full six billion are digitally available. Until then, I suggest you commit yourself to rounding up a crack team of biologists for another look at the egg fossils. I do understand your disappointment in failing to draw genetic information from them, but I’ve watched enough dinosaur documentaries to say that there is invaluable material information to be garnered from further study. When the genome is ready in… two weeks or bust, we’d have been prudent to collect enough calcium for the shell, say I.”
Melissa tipped the virtually weightless styrofoam cup into her mouth. Deprived of even a drop, she seemed almost as disappointed as Guo. With a mouth full of cotton and a brain chaotic with pressurized regret, she carried on.
“But fret not, Mr. Chen. We will have access to the individual text files as they are generated, accessible to you in the order that the images are fed into the application. In mere minutes we’ll have entire genes available to test against existing databases. If all goes well, the algorithms will match, according to thresholds of similarity, the genetic sequences we’ve transcribed to the predefined genes of known species. Gather up enough matches, dearest Guo, and I shan't have to explain to you that a bigger picture is liable to come together.”
“Perhaps you’ll recall, Ms. O’Lear, that I was in charge of the team commissioned to establish those thresholds of similarity.”
“Ah, yes! My memory tends to resemble ashes to the wind of late. Scattered, as it were. You worked parallel to the ‘Ice Sheet Moth Team’ earlier in the project, is that right?”
“We did, although that name was kept secret from us in deference to the integrity of the experiment. While the Ice Sheet Moth Team worked directly with the specimen - little more than a wing fragment well preserved for nearly twenty millennia i
n the upper strata of a glacial ice core - we were given access only to the species’ genome, once available. Our task was to create a full biological profile of the organism based exclusively on genetic comparisons as you’ve described them.
“By the time a living individual of that species was successfully produced, our profile correctly predicted the species to be a flying insect well adapted to frigid climes - but little else. Adjustments to the algorithm and similarity thresholds were made in the succeeding weeks. As of last month, a third team, beholden to the same restrictions, was tasked with creating their own profile of the organism derived from our updated processes.”
“And?”
“And they were accurate.”
“Accurate? How accurate?”
“To the shape of the spots on its abdomen and the rate of its beating wings.”
“That’s remarkable, Mr. Chen. I do say that I am giddy to see it in action. Now more than ever, perhaps, with more than a moth at stake.”
“As am I. Although - I would caution against any pretense of infallibility now, in the wake of a single experiment. Every element of this project is moving at a faster pace than the scientific community at large would otherwise endorse, given the nature of our objective. I expect that to establish a mechanistic understanding of any significant proportion of the transcribed genes will take vastly longer than two weeks. If so, and only if fortune favors us, perhaps, by then, the point will be moot.”
“In that, I wish you the very best of luck.”
Melissa rose from her seat and attempted a bow, the gesture sabotaged in equal parts by a lack of balance and the most cursory understanding of Chinese etiquette.
“If fortune favors me during the next two weeks, my dearest Guo, I can only aspire to have slept for the duration.”
Installment Four
“Do you really think you still have that kind of sway around here? I mean, for fuck’s sake Brady, you were the one that got him thrown in there in the first place.”
“It’s not about sway anymore. It’s about attainability. It’s about protocol, which, I’ll remind you, I was following.”
“Wouldn’t have had to resort to that protocol if you’d handled yourself like you were trained to from the get-go.”
“Christ, Bill! There’s a reason Daniels recommended the guy so highly. Bonman’s sharp. He would’ve put some pieces together regardless of who was assigned as his contact. Especially, uhh, in case you forgot, given the uncomfortable fact that his friend spattered brain shrapnel all over the whiteboard a day back from site. You don’t think fireworks started going off in Bonman's head the moment he realized the news wasn’t going to be reporting on that? That all the students were ‘mysteriously transferred’ before their FAFSA checks cleared?”
“Find your point, Brady, and get to it as quick as you can without forgetting who the hell you’re speaking to.”
“Do you know why I clicked that button, sir? Why he’s eating stale bread in confinement right now? For exactly the reason we invited him in the first place. He’s wasting away in there, and our sector has bullshit to show for the last five months.”
Brady’s direct superior sighed and rubbed the greyest parts of what hair he’d managed to preserve into his early sixties.
“Fine, let’s say he’s got the brain and experience to outclass every other geologist we have on site. Fuck it, may as well assume he’s worth more consulting-chips than all forty-five world-class pebble jugglers combined. Because, by the way, that would be the only actual justification for this conversation. If we can make those assumptions - can you honestly tell me you believe it would make a difference now, Brady?”
“It’s - sorry, bad habit - she’s mastered every other subject. We’re talking savant level expertise in most fields after five months. Geology is the last frontier, so to speak. She can learn, Bill, probably anything. We’re the ones falling short. We need our best consultant.”
“Fuck it. Let him out.”
The senior Pentagon alumni of twenty-two years struck a match and breathed a cigar to life; a fresh replacement for the one he’d nibbled to the marrow that morning.
“Sit Bonman down to a nice steak dinner, apologize for the last few months of his life, and, before dessert, preferably, make god damn certain he understands that you’ve just bet the world on him.”
A knock. Odd.
Alvin stared begrudgingly at his steel toilet and matching shower stall. What had been two bastions of privacy during his former life were now flagrantly exposed; his daily routine on full display for any visitor at any time. Visitors never knocked.
“I’m busy!”
“No you’re not, Alvin.”
“Brady?”
“Can I come in?”
“… Just make sure you take your shoes off at the door. Don’t need you tracking your mud inside. I like to keep my personal hell tidy.”
A series of locks, so many that Alvin had taken to teasing the guards on shift for their paranoia, were undone from the far side of a cushioned door. That door, its locks, the voyeur’s dream of a bathroom, and a twin sized bed had been Alvin’s home for twenty-two unbroken weeks. Now the man responsible paid his first visit, and, in what he could only interpret to be the delayed onset of Stockholm’s Syndrome, Alvin was glad to hear his voice.
Brady opened the door. Professor Bonman noted with interest that he was the first person not to enter the cell behind the barrel of a rifle, and with laughter that Brady had removed his boots.
“Nobody’s fallen for that one before, Brady. Sometimes I can’t help but ask myself whether you got recruited for this gig straight out of high school.”
Brady smirked, his meticulously styled head of scalp-clinging, off blonde hair unchanged by the months; his chin dented like the quarterback that Alvin could not be convinced hadn’t inspired the first third of his pseudonym.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Bonman. I’m just trying to keep the cell nice for its next resident.”
Alvin, never beaten, spared physical torture and starvation, was nonetheless exhibiting the early stages of what his captors had coined “institutionalized complacency”. Threats of long term isolation, removal of book privileges, permanent confinement, and food he’d regarded as a Geneva Convention grey area had driven him toward the sort of skepticism that prevented him from jumping with joy at this first glimpse of hope.
“You’re getting me out of here?”
“You got yourself out of here, Alvin. You played nice.”
“Don’t fu - please don’t fuck with me, Brady.”
“Are you going to keep playing nice?”
“Does a geologist shit in his cell?”
“Not anymore.”
Alvin’s pace was tentative and his posture guarded as he rose with a creak from his bed. Built like a refurbished 1980’s exercise trampoline, responsible for more stress in his shoulders than a satchel stuffed with quartzite and divorce papers, Alvin didn’t imagine he’d miss it much.
“So where will this geologist be shitting now, Brady? Someplace with walls, I hope?”
“As far as the eye can see. If you’ve got anything you want to bring along, be quick about it, Alvin. It’s a short drive across site, but decontamination takes a couple hours and her sleep cycle starts at about seven tonight.”
“May I ask what you’re talking about, or is that need to know?”
“Can’t talk about it here. I’ll fill you in once we’re through the decon unit. Almost forgot - I’ve been told there’s a steak with your name on it in the plow. Just in case you needed any more convincing.”
“Say no more, Brady. Lead the way.”
Brady led the way and Alvin was free from his purgatory. Correcting a twenty-two-week-old mistake, he made sure to inspect the series of locks that had so long represented his confinement.
All he’d taken from the room was a sketch of his cell from the outside looking in. Reverse engineered with only sound for a diagram, professor Bonma
n compared his interpretation of locks he’d never seen with the real thing.
Forty seconds later, his contact and guardian angel opened another door. Alvin waded through Brady’s shadow, revived in the frigid glow of his return to daylight, invigorated by a pioneering step onto snow caked gravel that crunched just as he’d remembered it. A happy man, Alvin smiled and stuffed the page of crinkled validation into his pocket.
“Right this way, professor Bonman.”
“Aye aye.”
Feeling more or less like Neil Armstrong must have three weeks after returning to the world he’d changed forever, Alvin exited the quarantine. There were no presidents or dignitaries or media moguls to greet him, only a pair of stern looking armed men in surgeon’s masks, and, unlike our first lunar emissaries, he would learn that his sodium-hypochlorite sponging was well worth the embarrassment.
“I feel like I just took a ten hour steam bath at Yellowstone.”
One of Alvin’s chaperones dangled a mask in his face. Brady emerged next and was given the same treatment, covering his mouth before gesturing for his adopted geologist to adorn his own.
“There is no talking without a mask on this side of quarantine. Every dirty joke you’ve ever told polluted the air with a little bit of spittle, a little bit of what you had for lunch that day, and a bacterial cocktail more diverse than the Miss Universe pageant. We can’t risk exposing her to that.”
Alvin slipped his mask on, the skin he’d finally shaved in quarantine after months of neglect already disagreeing with the pulpy material.
“How do I look?”
“Like a geologist on a mission.”
“Speaking of which, isn’t this the spot you imagined yourself filling me in on the details of that mission? I believe it was just before you coaxed me out of my den with your cold steak. And now that I’ve transitioned from confinement to confidant, I wouldn’t be opposed to knowing who this ‘her’ is that I’ll be consulting.”
“We’ll get to her identity shortly. First we need to shore you up on some protocol. Everyone else had a three day course on this stuff, so I won’t have time to repeat myself.”
Permian- Emissary of the Extinct Page 5
