Permian- Emissary of the Extinct

by Devyn Regueira

  “Have you fallen so far? To think, only three months ago - less, even - less than three months ago you were, by the visit, astounding the greatest minds of our species with your knowledge and with your intuition. One bad guess in March this year and it crumbles, one bad guess and you are acting your age. Seems… such a shameful thing to waste. Well, at least we can rest peacefully knowing AI is on the horizon. I suppose they mean it when they say that no job is safe. Do you know -”

  “NO!”

  Ma’am’s plastic chair was flung backwards into the cushioned arms of a one-to-one scale panda bear, and her clubbed fists served her well in crushing depressions into the table. Bo did not flinch, or retreat, or retaliate. He had expected the outrage. He had instigated it.

  A quantity of locks that grew by the month rattled their progression behind him, and Dr. Nilsson put his fledgling moments to good use. Ma’am stood upright before him, short but broad, clawed and seething. Frontally exposed to him now, he examined her physiology for evidence to support a newborn hypothesis; a hypothesis constrained only to the least skeptical pockets of a mind that had been conditioned to embrace the absurd in whatever form.

  “The hairs, if they are genuine hairs, on your arms, if I may call them arms - they are standing, Ma’am. That has not occurred before, not even in these such moments of extreme belligerence. And look,” he pointed, “you are perspiring from your abdomen.”

  Ma’am adjusted the pitch and roll of her head for visual confirmation, and Bo pounced in pursuit of his own. She watched a single human finger approach her torso, sample the moisture that had truthfully sprouted from the flesh, and retreat. It was a fortunate thing, perhaps, for them both that it was then the final lock yielded, and then that the divider door swung open with a squelch of atmosphere.

  Two men engulfed Ma’am’s doctor about the shoulders. They plucked him from his chair, even as he plucked his finger from the depths of his mouth, and they tore him from the room, even as he tore the mask from his face so that she might know he was smiling as he went.

  “What in the fuck is the matter with you, Nilsson? Seriously - what the fuck kind of doctor are you?”

  “The kind of doctor the First Lady calls when her husband spots blood in his urine, my friend. Principally, however, I consider myself a scientist.”

  The same two men chauffeured Bo down a drab hallway, headed briskly toward the decontamination chamber that demanded their presence before any punitive action could begin to be considered outside.

  “I don’t know what they teach you in Switzerland -”

  “Sweden.”

  “I don’t know what they teach you in Switzerland, Dr. Nilsson, but the first five minutes of the first day of every science class I ever took was dedicated to reminding kids not to taste the fucking chemicals.”

  “And how many scientific studies, may I ask, are accredited to you, Dr. anonymous gun toting pawn?”

  That man and the other held their tongues as they approached the vacuum sealed door to the chamber. A small rectangular window revealed the end stages of an inbound decontamination endured by a pair of Americans familiar to Dr. Nilsson.

  “Would you look at that! Nobody told me there was a consultation scheduled for today.”

  “Just keep your eyes down and your lips together until we can put you in front of the folks that are going to decide your future.”

  Bo’s eyes did as they pleased - foremost performing a thorough survey of the middle aged black man and the younger gentleman frantically taming his hair after a shower of pressurized oxygen. He stared blatantly as they approached the window and afterward.

  “Hello, professor Bonman. Hello Brady.”

  “Bo.”

  Alvin nodded, not at all perturbed by the configuration of armed men swaddling the Swedish doctor he knew in passing. Alvin had been there himself not three months before. Brady had not, and his confusion was a thing made tangible in the arches of his eyebrows and the deepening of the dimple in his chin.

  “Dr. Nilsson? What the hell is going on here?”

  Brady, outranking the masked men in little more than a semantic capacity, nonetheless accused them with a firmness of expression and detained them with the staying power of his gaze. Dr. Nilsson took it upon himself to intervene on their behalves.

  “My methodology this afternoon was admittedly… something of an eccentricity. Rest assured, friends, it will all be cleared up on the other end of this decontamination chamber.”

  Bo smiled broadly and ushered Alvin and his contact along with a gesture of his head.

  “Good luck with your consultation, gentlemen.”

  Brady squared his shoulders and took the lead. Alvin’s shoulders were square by nature, and he made a conscious effort to soften them as he passed.

  “Right back atcha.”

  “That is kind of you to say. Oh - if you have the moment, professor Bonman, just one more thing.”

  The doctor’s attachés glanced suspiciously at one another, and then as one at Brady. Emboldened by the polyp of authority and a good breakfast, he nodded his approval.

  Bo wasted no time and respected no conventions of personal space. His lips brushed Alvin’s ears as he whispered, and the wind of every syllable tickled more than the last.

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “Hello, professor Alvin Bonman.”

  “Hello, Ma’am. I like the new voice. How are you feeling today?”

  “Acceptable. May I ask you something?”

  “Only if I can’t say no.”

  Alvin flashed a smile kept modest by his mask and settled into what he’d begun to unconsciously regard as his personal office chair.

  “I would like you to invite Brady Elway Thomas to participate in our consultation.”

  A glance over his shoulder revealed Brady’s vague outline chatting with an equally vague outline across the divider. Alvin wondered briefly whether Ma’am had assumed one of them belonged to Brady, or knew it.

  “Decisions like that are ten floors above my pay grade, Ma’am.”

  “If that is the case, professor Alvin Bonman, then you would be accurate in regarding any future consultations on equal terms.”

  “Holding my balls to the furnace after all we’ve been through? That’s how it’s going to be?”

  “Valid.”

  “Shit, fine, give me a minute.”

  Three knocks on the divider, seven locks undone, and Alvin was standing mask to surgical mask with Brady not two minutes after that scene had played itself out in reverse.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  “Not me,” Alvin cast a thumb backwards across the plexiglass, “our little lady has a crush on you or something.”

  “On me? Why?”

  Alvin was sure any standard issue middle school microscope would have revealed a tinge of blush in Brady’s cheeks.

  “No fuckin’ clue. Far be it from me to put words in her mouth.”

  “Do you think it has something to do with Bo? Normally people aren’t just dragged out of here mob style like that… all due respect.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah? What’s yeah?”

  Brady cocked a glance, and an eye, indifferent to how the blatant display of suspicion might be received. Three months of shared meals and simultaneous, close-quarter decontaminations had effectively mutated his relationship with Alvin Bonman. Their association, it seemed, had transitioned from authority figure and mischievous ward to something more reminiscent of young brothers quarreling over the Xbox controller minutes after gleefully sharing toys in a bath.

  “What did Nilsson say to you?”

  “It was nothing. Speculation. I think the oxygen in there has been carving that guy’s brain into Swiss cheese.”

  “Swedish.”

  “Swedish cheese, whatever. Are you going to come in with me or not? Because, otherwise, she made it pretty clear she’ll be dropping our class for good, and I’m not convinced she’s got the cheek bones for
a poker face. Maybe she is bluffing about that. But if there’s one thing Ma’am can still do since her wires got all crossed, it’s hold a grudge until she’s squeezed the intestines out. It’s our responsibility to follow this thing through to the end.”

  He shrugged.

  “And I can’t speak for you or your situation Brady, but that end is looking like my only way out of this God forsaken forest. You can only spend so long in Siberia before you really understand why it was the Beverly Hills of prison camp real-estate for the last century.”

  “You don’t have to tell me what our responsibility is, Bonman. But I’ll remind you that I’d be shitting all over mine if I broke protocol on the threats of some hormonal proto-mammal.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  “Say what?”

  “Why did you say that she’s hormonal?”

  Brady shrugged.

  “Listen, I have two kids. I’ve had two deployments. I wouldn’t admit it on my deathbed,” Brady chuckled, “but I enlisted the day I found out my wife was pregnant. Flew my ass so far away that the second and third trimesters became her mother’s problems. Knocked her up again on R&R in Italy, volunteered for another tour right then and there.”

  Hands on his hips, Brady squinted to filter a clearer picture of the inhuman figure sat patiently at the table. Ma’am’s face was perfectly still, affixed, as if by tether, to a spot just between his eyes.

  “Point is, I hand picked chasing terrorists through the desert over dealing with the same kind of unsolicited psychopathy our Permian friend has been prone to of late. Twice. That, father-of-none professor Bonman, is why I say she’s acting hormonal.”

  “Fuck.”

  Brady turned from Alvin and the divider to hunt down a juice pouch he’d stowed away the day before. His voice careened from the well insulated walls, congesting the room with sentences that a foot of plexiglass and aerogel assured him Ma’am would go deprived of.

  “Yeah, I know, I’m a dick. I’m not saying all pregnant women are that way, but this one, God bless her, she is an outlier. Among the expecting, my beloved raises the mean value of mean, if you get what I mean. Anyway, yeah, you know, the hormones fuck with their heads. Can you pi-”

  “Fuck the protocols, Brady, fuck your juice. Put it down, get your head straight, follow me through that door and don’t cough unless she sticks a claw in your ass and insists. Ma’am is pregnant.”

  Brady dropped his juice and froze in place like a gazelle with an inkling. It took the briefest exertion of logical thought to free him from that purgatory.

  “Listen, Bonman, I’m just bitching here. Don’t start coming up with crazy theories and plastering my name all over the bibliography.”

  “That’s what Bo told me, before they stuck him in decon.”

  “He told you that? Just that? Well shit.”

  Brady retrieved his juice, punched a hole, and, for the time it took to quench his thirst, held his finger up with the empathetic vigor of a DMV clerk ninety seconds to lunchtime.

  “Honestly professor BonBon, Lieutenant Dan has more of a leg to stand on. You said it yourself, the doctor’s older than batshit and probably as crazy. And uh, by the way, I don’t know how they do it in West Virginia, and I certainly can’t speak for the Nordic, but pregnancy is like the tango -”, Brady suctioned the juice pouch into a wrinkle of its former self, “- ahhh.”

  A substantial burp, three minor aftershocks for good measure.

  “It takes two.”

  “You are alone.”

  “I know that.”

  Alvin frowned and sank into the seat he’d begun to consciously regard as his personal hell.

  “My terms were adequately clear, professor Alvin Bonman. Perhaps you will recall them for me.”

  “Per-haps? I could have sworn you glued those two syllables together at the tippy top of your list of naughty words.”

  “It is obvious enough to recognize that some things are predisposed to change, professor Alvin Bonman, however disinclined they may be to grace us with any forewarning. To pretend they are not is to prolong the unpleasantness.”

  “So which things have changed, exactly?”

  Ma’am had developed, presumably without her knowledge or consent, a habit of perusing the surrounding area with her nostrils. On occasion they widened without cause, on others they narrowed, and, increasingly, they moved and constricted and relaxed entirely independent of one another. Alvin believed it was her species’ equivalent of a wandering mind. He had not had the inclination to ask.

  “I will speak frankly with you now, but not of geology in a consultative format, and only with assurances of your commitment to involving Brady Elway Thomas upon request. Is this acceptable?

  “Sure is. Now that my part is all shored up - go on, what changed?”

  “Everything. Tell me, professor Alvin Bonman, is there a reason you have not mentioned my sail? Surely you have noticed it.”

  “Seemed rude.”

  “You haven’t the time for menial courtesies, and I haven’t the patience.”

  “Why is your sail… showing, Ma’am?”

  “Do you care to venture a guess?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Based on the time of Dr. Bo Nilsson’s removal,” Ma’am tilted her head for a look at a clock designed for the elderly and otherwise visually impaired, “and the time of your arrival, your intersection can be expected to have occurred at the door of the decontamination unit. Although,” another look, “he was probably made to wait while you dressed yourself, and for a period of approximately two minutes. Is that valid?”

  “And here I thought you’d lost your mojo. Yeah, that’s about right, but you missed the part where I put strawberry jam on burnt toast at 7:41 this morning. It was snowing outside. What’s your point?”

  “My point, professor Alvin Bonman, is that whether or not you care to venture it, you do have a guess.”

  “I’d prefer to discuss how you can draw such conclusions when you have given us every reason to believe that your “quantum nuance” gauge has been out of whack since the solar probe incident. Or, better put, the solar probe lack-there-of. Is that what changed, Ma’am? Are you finally back on the saddle, or have you just been playing us for fools the last few months?”

  “The two are not mutually exclusive, professor Alvin Bonman.”

  “I can threaten to withdraw from our little chats too, you know. You’re losing leverage more quickly than you can horde it.”

  “Perhaps not. I take no pleasure in admitting that my primary sense has not returned. To quantum nuance, I remain blind; wedged behind an impassible informational boundary which formed the moment you departed to contact the Parker Solar Probe team at Johns Hopkins University. In reading clocks and conducting basic arithmetic, however, my faculties are fully intact.”

  Ma’am’s new voice made every insult to Alvin’s intelligence seem all the more scathing. He resolved then that if ever he had the occasion to shake the hand of the veterinarian’s wife who’d donated it, he would refuse. That vendetta extended equally to whichever authority bureaucrat championed a reversal of the ‘Unwed-Faculty from Academia Protocol’; a policy Brady took great merriment in acronymizing.

  “So you never actually precalled any future conversations between us at all, did you? You couldn’t have. It was all before that first consultation, or during, maybe. You knew what I’d say in advance and you played me like a fiddle.”

  Alvin shook his head in disbelief. The fifty-three year old leaned back in his chair, indifferent to the danger it posed to the back of his head. Every teacher from Kindergarten to calculus had cautioned him passionately against the habit, but Alvin’s skull was unscathed and now it hardly seemed a danger at all.

  “That is invalid.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Thoughts are material phenomena, and only in scale are they distinct from the motion of your hand or the blink of your eye. It is valid to say that I did not and
could not endeavor to precall your words or actions. Rather, I assembled, categorized, measured, and compared the incidence of specific thoughts in the very course of your thinking them. The process was no different than software compiling data with which to populate charts and graphs. To preemptively ascertain your questions, your concerns, or your intentions was a matter of comparing the lines, the bars, the points, and the slices.

  “Prediction, you should be aware, is not precollection. Those phenomena and their use are governed by separate indivisible rules. You would not have perceived any meaningful difference, of course. With the understanding that every conclusion I reached was genuinely derived from your conscious thought, whether or not my expectation of your ensuing statement or action was exact became immaterial. The impression, insofar as you were concerned, remained the same.”

  “Why tell me this now?”

  “You asked.”

  “Okay. Well, since you’re feeling like an open book today, may I ask why I am to believe that you aren’t still capable of doing the very same thing as I speak - as I think? I can’t trust you as far as I can throw you. Although, lately I’m considering whether that isn’t a theory worth testing.”

  “I am making a concerted effort to be honest with you, professor Alvin Bonman. Trust, it seems, is a commodity above all others among your kind. You are involved without your conscious knowledge in an eternal experiment in social economics, and only now do I myself see the propriety in adhering to its bylaws.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “And I cannot expect you to. Such an expectation comes at an inherent price. Trust, as it stands in this room, is a sellers’ market.”

  Alvin did not believe a word she synthesized, but could see no danger in taking Ma’am up on her offer.

  “Why did you pretend to struggle with geology during your consultations in the months before our first? To the point that the powers that be felt bullied into commuting my sentence and dropping me onto the front line? Better put… why me?”

  “Personality assessments of every immediately accessible individual were conducted before the disruption to my access to quantum nuance. Your intellectual competence, your academic esteem, and your contextually unique disposition collectively graded as most agreeable toward achieving the end I sought at that time.”