Permian- Emissary of the Extinct

by Devyn Regueira

  “That end being ignoring protocol altogether until you’d convinced me to turn the whole scientific world’s attention to the sun, correct?”

  “This is valid.”

  “Why?”

  “I was aware of the quantum interference boundary in advance, and deduced, incorrectly, that a magnetic disruption incurred by a coronal mass ejection was responsible.”

  Reasonable. Emboldened by the progress, Alvin decided then to table that line of questioning with so considerable a network of lines left as of yet unexplored.

  “Why is your sail open?”

  “It is a physiological response to my body’s deprivation of warmth. As cold blooded quadrupeds, our sails would remain unfurled and exposed to sunlight until such a time that sufficient blood had passed through the high density of vessels to reestablish homeostasis. Where the function withered with evolution, the mechanism remains.”

  “So I’ve heard. But why are you cold? It’s hotter than hell, no different from yesterday or three months ago. Plus,” he squinted, “it looks to me like you’re sweating.”

  “An egg develops inside me, and thermoregulation is critical in embryonic development across all stages.”

  Professor Bonman was stunned to silence. Ma’am carried on; a radio bulletin calmly given as seawater filled the cabin of a drunk man’s car.

  “In my species, fertilization season occurs in the spring and nesting in the early summer. Substantial heat is requisite to our development, as low or middling temperatures facilitate errors in the production of testosterone inhibiting proteins. Testosterone inhibition ensures that all offspring are born female. After millions of years refining that mechanism for prenatal sexual determination, no male embryo can be reasonably expected to maintain viability to even the point of hatching. There exist modern reptilian parallels to this, namely in various species of sea turtle. This is easily verifiable. Later, activation of testosterone production glands occurs only in individual females who have amassed sufficiently disproportionate nutrient reserves to biologically indicate a competitive advantage. There exist modern piscine parallels to this, namely Lachnolaimus maximus or, in common parlance, the hogfish. This is easily verifiable. This addresses your earlier question regarding the sexual ubiquity discovered in the grave chasm. This is valid.”

  Alvin was able to wonder, briefly amidst his deafening astonishment, whether the organ that facilitated Ma’am’s ability to speak was independent of her respiratory system. The longer she carried on without pause, the more compelling the affirmative evidence.

  “Further, my abdominal secretions are not perspiration, although you may rest assured that yours was no amateurish deduction. Apocrine glands represent one of the two modern forms of sweat glands, first evolving along my ancestral lineage during the transition between cold and semi-cold bloodedness to accommodate the development of hair follicles. Where other lineages pursued that evolutionary branch to its fullest realization, be it fur covered bodies,” she cast a thumb over her shoulder where the plush panda bear politely eavesdropped, “or perspiration as an instrument of evaporative thermoregulation -” Alvin received the same treatment, “- ours diverged. Outside of our species’ sensory whiskers and the few body hairs left unliquidated after a forsaken evolutionary experiment, hair growth was secondary in its utility insofar as our apocrine glands were concerned.”

  “If not sweat, then what?”

  “Tell me, professor Alvin Bonman. In what geological period did your modern continent of Australia achieve full ecological isolation?”

  Alvin fidgeted.

  “The Jurassic. One-hundred-eighty-million years ago, give or take.”

  “What do you know of monotremes?”

  That word had burrowed into the tip of Alvin’s tongue the moment Ma’am referenced the divergence of Australian ecology, and he was physically relieved to have heard it. He was reminded of his very favorite scientific anecdote, an opening-lecture lesson he’d been given decades before on the importance of sobering one’s pessimistic fervor - on preserving an open mind while all the academic world prescribed skepticism in fatal doses.

  “The platypus.”

  “Excellent. So you understand?”

  “I understand. You’re lactating. Monotremes diverged from Australian marsupials after the continent split from Gondwana, preserving various non-mammalian features that marsupials in Australia and placentals elsewhere gradually shed. The platypus was such a hodgepodge of features - ” Alvin leaned back to the very fringes of his chair’s contract with gravity and cracked a reminiscent smile, “ - that the first specimens sent back to Europe were considered a hoax for decades. Duck billed, egg laying, venom producing, lactating, impossible abominations. No offense.”

  Ma’am continued to listen politely; engaging in her restraint, inviting by her attention.

  “They do produce milk for the hatchlings, but not from highly localized glands. Not from nipples - those hadn’t evolved by the time they diverged. The milk is secreted from clusters of glands throughout the abdomen, like cloudy, viscous, syrupy sweat. Like yours, I suppose, except thicker, more nutritionally refined, presumably, and they aren’t tucked away beneath that armor plating.”

  “This is valid. And to your point, you may learn, Dr. Bo Nilsson has ample reason to agree.”

  “It seems he does. May I ask how it happened?”

  “Only in the proper company.”

  Enveloped in thought, Alvin returned the legs of his chair to the ground with the unconscious, subtle autonomy of reusable rocket boosters to a seaborne platform.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Ma’am.”

  He stood.

  “Professor Alvin Bonman?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If your present intentions are to escalate the content of our conversation above your pay grade and the pay grade of Brady Elway Thomas, you will know nothing more of my condition and your presence will no longer be welcome in this room.”

  “God forbid.”

  Eight minutes and two juice pouches came and went before Brady’s defensive humor eroded and his weaker constitution exposed. Sullen and apprehensive he entered the room, forced to abandon the protection of Alvin’s shadow long enough to fill a toy chest, drag it to the table, and test his weight.

  “Hello, Brady Elway Thomas.”

  Brady, drenched to the soles of his feet in sweat, looked to his ward for guidance. Alvin nodded.

  “Hello, Ma’am. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  “A sentiment we share. May I proceed to the point?”

  Ma’am’s question was a courtesy addressed to them both. Each answered in the silent affirmative, two nods that speckled the table with half a dozen saline pools of disparate depth.

  “Thank you. Brady Elway Thomas, I will now speak three names. Please format your response in the following way: first describe the nature of your association with each person; next provide your most current knowledge of their whereabouts. Is this acceptable?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Guo Chen. Melissa O’Lear. Dr. Bo Nilsson.”

  Alvin intervened in advance of what he didn’t need a disproportionately large olfactory bulb to expect from his meddling chaperone turned anxiety ridden friend.

  “There’s no room for protocol, Brady, hasn’t been for a long time. Tell her what you know or it’s radio silence from here on out; my office at Berkley will be refurbished into a micro-aggression reeducation center and your ‘objective attainability’ becomes the oxymoron of the century.”

  “Alright - okay. I met Guo and Melissa several times on the southeastern edge of the nest crater. They asked me to see what I could do about scraping the budget for enough cash to add drones to the fleet we were using to image the genome. They’re both still here, last I checked, across camp with the geneticists running…” his eyes were thick with sweat and apprehension and appeals for approval as they travelled and twitched and dilated, “… genetic comparisons.”

 
“And Dr. Bo Nilsson?”

  “I’m not his contact, per se, but we’ve spoken between spells in decon. He’s still in there, probably, but not for long. By the looks of it, he’ll be fast tracked to a cell for whatever fucked up thing it was he did in here today.”

  “Can you recall whether Dr. Bo Nilsson or either of his armed escorts were, at the time of your interaction, in possession of a red cooler?”

  “No, Ma’am. It’s still here. Just across the divider, I mean. That’s where your blood sample is stored for delivery to the lab, isn’t it?”

  “This is valid. To the best of your knowledge, do any means presently exist to prevent the passage of Dr. Bo Nilsson and his escorts from the decontamination unit to the larger project site?”

  “None that don’t involve a fire alarm, an expensive evacuation, and a bonafide inquisition. Protocol is such that, in any situation falling short of a full blown threat to objective attainability, decon is a one way street.”

  In a way that Alvin recognized and Brady simply hadn’t had the exposure to, Ma’am appeared to become disconcerted by the response.

  “I wouldn’t take it too hard, Ma’am.” Alvin spoke frankly from a place of incontestable experience. “He’ll be put in front of an international panel of authority folks that will do everything they can to enlighten him as to how seriously he’d taken due process for granted all his life. Where he’s going, he’s more likely to become a schizophrenic than any sort of threat to your wellbeing.”

  “His access to the authority represents the most fundamental threat to my wellbeing, professor Alvin Bonman.”

  “How is that?”

  “For precisely the reason professor Every Daniels insisted to the point of mental collapse that my wellbeing should never have amounted to a matter of contention in the first place.”

  To Brady, the spike in tension incurred by her allusion to professor Daniels was a tangible thing - manifest in Alvin’s posture, in Ma’am’s disposition, in the collective expectation of a change in the discourse to come. Credibility toward that end came from his periphery; a twitch in Alvin’s cheek familiar to him by the profile he’d been forced to memorize in advance of the geologist’s arrival. Surprisingly, no doubt attributable to the experience of punitive isolation and so never articulated in any such document, professor Bonman found a way to maintain his composure.

  “You’re saying that he wants you dead - is that right?”

  “Indisposed. Be it in that form or any other.”

  “Well, Ma’am, to that I’d say - grab a whisky and cigar, welcome to the club. Two women in America would gladly forfeit their alimony checks for the chance to visit my tombstone, no questions asked. Shit, even Brady took a shot at me, sort of. Point is, if Every couldn’t prevent anyone in the authority from playing Dr. Frankenstein on your behalf, why would the testimony of one eccentric Swede with his back to the wall convince them to up-and-sink all the costs they’ve already put in?”

  “Evidence, professor Alvin Bonman.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Evidence of exactly those contentions professor Every Daniels earnestly made, contentions discredited then only for a lack of substantive evidence.”

  Brady noticed for the first time the secretions from her abdomen - subtle in some places, constant and voluminous in others, the worst offenders carving ravines into crusted layers that had hardened with the passage of hours. It seemed a prerogative of basic courtesy to divert his eyes when again she spoke.

  “I presume our collective agreement in stating that effort toward ensuring my ethical treatment has waned since my expectation of a solar calamity proved wholly unsubstantiated in March of this year. Beyond irreparable damage to perceptions of my utility toward human survival, one peripheral outcome became a general mistrust for myself, for my species, and for our original intentions. To appreciate the resultant danger, we must recall professor Every Daniels’ contentions, and then the nature of the evidence that would have, if presented, validated his cautions to an extent that merited full scale objective reassessment on the part of the authority.

  “Professor Every Daniels first disputed the feasibility of those implications that are inherent to our predictive timeline inscription, himself insistent beyond discussion that the temporal simultaneity of your technological maturation and a mass extinction was less statistically compelling than the probability of our having premeditated a grand manipulation of your species. That argument has since been supported by my aforementioned failure to corroborate those implications in March, and the abject lack of cause to expect any other extinction level event to occur in the near future.

  “The second contention posed by professor Every Daniels, a contention better regarded, in my view, as a corollary to the first, pertained to my species’ intentions upon our revival. Professor Every Daniels claimed, fervently and with no apparent ulterior motive as his life approached its scheduled end, that the aim of and upon our revival would be a concerted effort to reconquer the planet that had smothered us. A mechanism for asexual reproduction kept hitherto overtly secret will cast precisely that motivational shadow upon me; an indication of calculated, clandestine endeavors toward propagating my species until such a time that yours is euphemistically displaced. I will state now, with all possible emphasis, that this is not the case. Bo Nilsson, however, will insist upon it.

  “Upon receiving Dr. Bo Nilsson’s testimony - itself no less than the demonstrable sum of evidence which doubtless would once have endowed professor Every Daniels and his espousals with legitimacy - there may be for the authority only two courses of action. One: discontinuation of the project for purposes of fundamental reassessment. Two: immediate and irreversible mitigation of the threat.”

  “Who’s to say that neither of those are the course best taken, Ma’am?”

  Alvin leaned back in his seat, pressed either boot to the table for support, and began to rock; his body a ship on a buffeting sea, his eyes twin billiard balls - steadfast and level, unperturbed whatsoever by the outside tumult with credit to the gyroscope upon which the table had been built.

  “Professor Alvin Bonman, your sentiment surprises me. Will you do me the courtesy, at least, of hearing my question and responding with absolute sincerity?”

  “That’s the only way I know how to do it, Ma’am.”

  “Thank you. I ask you, then, whether your disdain should be taken to mean that you have you come to embrace professor Every Daniels’ suspicions as fact? Or is it that you have reached a conclusion that the mitigation of my existence begets an outcome which will best serve your own personal interests?”

  Brady was not so willing to rock the boat as Alvin. He observed in helpless anticipation, convinced more by the breath that he’d forsaken one protocol too far, effectively comatose in his willingness to wake the irritable captain as a ship he shared approached a bump in the frigid night.

  “I suppose it’s a little of both, Ma’am. You’ve just laid out the prosecution’s case against you. If there were a jury and a camera crew in this room, I don’t think deliberation would last long enough to justify a commercial break. To be honest, even if I did have the balls to doubt Every all over again by embracing your version of some grand misunderstanding - even if you’ve got a big, beautiful bleeding heart underneath that suit of armor - what reason could I possibly have to give half a shit about what happens to you? I want to go home. Every time that heart beats, whatever it looks like, is just another delay.”

  “Have I the opportunity to contest those claims before the weight of their endorsement are applied toward hastening my probable execution?”

  Coming as a surprise to both humans present, that question was for Brady to answer.

  “Uh, yes - of course. Due process and all that.”

  From Alvin’s perspective, an apprehensive sideways glance and a essay’s worth of body language justified Brady’s acquiescence in no uncertain terms - something to the effect of shit happens, and we both know I�
�m not great under pressure.

  “Thank you, Brady Elway Thomas. Professor Alvin Bonman, please know the following. As all of my hopes for a positive outcome were contingent upon your solidarity, I previously chose, in careful consideration of your existential wellbeing, to avoid disclosing certain details. Given the belligerence displayed against my own wellbeing, anticipated or sudden, I must express the full truth; uncurtailed in the slightest for purposes of preserving your delusion of security.”

  “Heartbreaking.”

  “Let her talk, Al.”

  “My death or any parallel form of the permanent discontinuation of this project can be expected, beyond any shadow of probability, to necessitate your own mitigation, professor Alvin Bonman, up to and including your death.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I asked you, once, whether you would wager the world on precisely that. Will your answer change?”

  “You asked, yeah. I relented. And you were wrong. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. If I hadn’t believed your bullshit we’d be in the exact same spot, probably, agonizing over the same riddles, talking in the same god damn circles.”

  “This is valid, professor Alvin Bonman. It sounds as though your cooperation cost you precisely nothing. Why not humor me now?”

  “She’s got you there.”

  “Fuck off, Brady. Feel free to keep talking, Ma’am, but be damn sure that kindness doesn’t imply that I’ll keep listening.”

  “Your academic credibility, your tainted record of conduct on site, and your association with professor Every Daniels - a man who made egregious public declarations on the existence and aims of this program before committing suicide in obvious expectation of retribution - will jointly result in a distrust too pervasive to permit your return to public life. Those very same characteristics that qualified you, in the authority’s view, will come to represent an unpalatable potentiality. Without the existence of a program regarded as securely indefinite, your existence provides no latent value to the authority that, as a proportion of its risks, is worth preserving. If the program is to be discontinued, you are to be handled thusly. Logic demands it.”