Primal Estate: The Candidate Species

by Samuel Franklin

  Synster was incensed with his daughter. As soon as she’d come in, she’d released her sex pheromone. He caught it on the air as she sat on his desk. Why does she play games like this? They would have a talk later.

  Before she left, Nwella walked up next to him, bent down, and put her nose next to Rick’s mouth. He thought she was going to kiss him and Rick almost puckered his lips. She drew a deep breath as she smelled from his chin, up his face, and across his hair.

  Rick was glad he’d been washed. He thought about how he normally didn’t wear cologne, but noticed that whatever they’d washed him with smelled pretty good. He was careful not to exhale so she wouldn’t smell his breath.

  As she smelled him, he turned his head toward her and his eyes worked down her neck, breasts, stomach, and finally to her navel. He couldn’t help himself. He felt a shudder leap from the base of his spine up to the vicinity of his bladder, then dissipate everywhere from his thighs to his chest. He was afraid it had actually made him move. She stood up and ran her fingers through his hair. She smiled at him one last time. Rick smiled back like an idiot, and she walked toward the threshold.

  “Good evening, Father.”

  “Nwella,” Synster replied.

  “Nwella,” Rick said unconsciously under his breath, as if she’d said goodbye to him. He was still smiling.

  It was everything Rick could do to keep from turning around to watch her leave. He felt like he’d just made love to her, right there in front of her father, a mortal enemy. His mortal enemy! It never even occurred to him to reach out, grab her throat, and destroy her as quickly as possible. No doubt the “tag”, as Synster called it, would have stopped him. Rick took a deep breath and tried to focus.

  “So you mentioned this pain device on my wrist is called a tit-aaaa-tag? What does it do?”

  “That is merely a device designed to identify and control you. It takes your own impulses to initiate an activity that we have forbidden and turns them against you as pain. The more intense your desire to do the thing we have told you not to do, the more intense the pain. It has a variety of setting levels. We can also initiate the pain for punishment or training.”

  “Can you take it off me if I promise to be good?” Rick once again felt like a child but didn’t care. He was already playing that role to look stupid and once again, he was doing it well.

  “No, we don’t trust you.”

  Rick wished he could jump up quickly at that moment and lunge toward Synster without the intent to touch him, just to test the device, to see if it would activate even when he didn’t intend to do harm, but he didn’t. He was too close to its last demonstration of pain, and it had him scared.

  With this thought of pain, Rick began to feel tired and abandoned hope of trying to maintain some line of questioning that would provide him with a foundational knowledge of the Provenger. His impulses for self-preservation kicked in.

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Finally, Rick, a question that serves our interests. We as Provenger love adventure, but we carefully calculate those danger variables. Dealing with un-tagged humans can be unpredictable, so we are disinclined to make frequent contact ourselves. For this purpose, we have surrogates. I have chosen you. Because we are currently operating under the Natural Proliferation Program, we are required to maintain secrecy. If our presence were to become common knowledge, then we would be required to move to the Managed Collectivization Program. As part of your responsibilities, it is important that you understand the difference between these two.”

  Rick knew his history and if the Provenger were consistent in the accurate use of their English, he didn’t like the sound of the second program.

  “The Natural Proliferation Program started with our introduction of wheat and a few other agricultural products thousands of Earth years ago to obtain results distinctive to our goals. We wanted to dramatically increase the human population. Your development of agriculture would do that. With the surpluses it provided, you would then develop vocational specialization, which would lead to the development of technology. Without limiting this technological development, we had no way of controlling how far it could go, and we couldn’t come back to a population that was a technological threat to our harvesting project.

  “To stunt technological development, we needed to limit the abilities and the lifespan of those who, over the generations, would contribute. We found through our calculations that each decade of productive intellectual contributions beyond the reproductive years would exert considerable momentum toward such progress. We, therefore, needed to limit the cognitive ability and lifespan in these decades. For our scheduled return, we had a ten year window, but Earth necessitated at least twelve thousand five hundred years to reach the population levels we need. If technological development had continued unabated throughout this period, we could possibly have arrived to face a belligerent and equal foe. By introducing certain deleterious effects in wheat, we could retard the growth of your technology.

  “We engineered wheat to have long-term negative effects on the digestive and immune systems. These would slowly deplete the body’s ability to obtain the nutrition that powers everything else, from the immune system to the nervous system. With all the organs of the body, including the brain, being slowly deprived of nutrients or harassed by a confused immune system, a variety of dysfunctions would occur, all dependent on the individual human’s unique genetic makeup. Since these appear as very different problems, they work to hide the source of the problem. Even today most of your people, and certainly most of your traditional medical community, have no idea what causes your autoimmune diseases.

  “Even so, we calculated through our Algorithm that by the time we arrived, your people would have discovered these causes and would be living relatively healthy lives, using the grains more as animal feed to produce the fat and protein in your own livestock that was the foundation of your natural diet. Instead, you have made the mistake of avoiding fats in your diet because they have a higher caloric density, and you believe they make you fat when they do not.

  “We know that you personally have adopted this traditional diet and saved yourself from a chronic autoimmune disorder you call by the names dysautonomia, Gulf War syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and a few others. Have you not?”

  “I thought it was multiple sclerosis,” Rick replied, interested at how this had taken a personal turn.”

  “Yes, it could have become that if you had one slightly different genetic expression and hadn’t changed your diet. Our scans have confirmed that. But back to my main point; humans have certainly populated Earth, per our plan. But, contrary to our expectations, your technological development has fallen far behind where we thought it would be. Perhaps we have only ourselves to blame. One of the effects of nutrient deficiency, of course, is reduced intellectual capacity. Right about the time when many conclusions were being reached regarding the whole fat versus carbohydrate issue in the 1950’s through 70’s, we intervened to change wheat again. At around that time, we enhanced both the yield, to reach more cultures, and the deleterious effects of wheat, to reach certain body mass index quotas. We value human fat.”

  “Norman Borlaug?” asked Rick, taking a chance, suspecting Provenger involvement.

  “He may have been a miscalculation on our part. His work to enhance the yield of wheat crops certainly enhanced some of the deleterious effects we had already carefully calibrated. While this aided our goals to fatten your population prior to our arrival, there is now a problem.

  “Various decisions your healthcare researchers made during the last fifty years contributed to the health mess you find yourselves in and, therefore, the mess we find ourselves in. You see, Natural Proliferation would work just fine if you humans weren’t all poisoning yourselves with drugs. Since you are, it is looking more likely that Managed Collectivization might be necessary for us to harvest our required quota. We require an organic prod
uct.”

  Rick squirmed in his seat. He knew exactly what Synster was talking about, and this just happened to be one of the main topics on his web site. One in every three adult Americans was on some kind of statin drug, one in nine were on antidepressants, and the statistics for blood pressure medications were even worse. Almost all Americans ingested artificial sweeteners in everything from chewing gum to diet sodas. There existed a virtual cornucopia of drugs that, when tallied together, amounted to a very small percentage of the population that was unaffected. Rick and, recently, Carson happened to be two of the unaffected.

  “I’ve been arguing against these drugs for years, so have many doctors and researchers. What more could I possibly do?”

  “All of the research already exists,” Synster related with obvious annoyance, “that shows these drugs are unnecessary if only people would conduct themselves properly. The only improvement that can be made is for your government to change its policy on the use of these drugs through its control of your mandatory healthcare system.”

  Rick knew this meant the heavy involvement of his brother.

  “I’ve reviewed the history of your species’ health care initiatives. It is so unfortunate that it’s taken the course it has. Up until the 1960’s, you had it right. Improvements in nutrition were seen as the first line of defense against disease. Then the industrialization of agriculture, the hybridization of grain and legume crops, and creative food scientists in flavor labs all conspired, resulting in the massive consumption of carbohydrates by your species. Instead of realizing this as the cause and reversing it, your healers decided to medicate. The alchemists you call doctors believed they could use their single compounds to improve a complex system degenerating due to an inappropriate internal environment. Their successes resolving infectious disease with vaccines and medications, a completely different health issue, made them feel comfortable with applying single medication strategies to chronic physiologic malfunctions. Your people moved away from the gene therapy that good nutrition is, and instead pursued a path of medications. You abandoned the source of the problem and toyed with the symptoms.”

  Rick seemed to feel that Synster was on a rant. He seemed very disturbed by all this. Was he desperate?

  “Now they are finally getting back to gene therapy again but trying to change the actual genes instead of allowing them the environment in which they’ve evolved to work. How a people with the prowess you have in physics can let this happen is beyond my understanding. If I seem frustrated, you are correct. What simpletons would think they can correctly mediate something as complex as inflammation and lipid metabolism with single or multiple drugs?”

  Synster seemed more than professionally involved in this, Rick thought. The level of intensity seemed personal. Rick wondered if Synster had pressure on him from his own kind. Maybe Synster was on the ropes regarding this project.

  “I’ll need you and your contacts to exert certain influences to change things. With my guidance, the population of Earth will eliminate medications and become healthier. We need to harvest an organic product to maintain Natural Proliferation.”

  Looks like you’re in this for the long term, Rick joked with himself. This yahoo doesn’t know his humans very well. They need you for something. In the meantime, you’ll figure out how to fight them.

  “The alternate method of harvest produces for us unpleasant inconveniences. For you and your people, it would mean the end of everything as you know it. Under the Natural Proliferation Program, we would slowly harvest from various segments of the population based on our needs, leaving the rest to continue with their lives, continuing to produce food and offspring in what we call a Perpetuant Cycle.

  “Since you collectively decided to poison yourselves, destroying our meat and organ harvest, our reluctant alternative may be to initiate the Managed Collectivization Program. This would necessitate an overt approach. We would have to take control of large portions of the population to manage their diets and recreational activities. To merely take control of part of your planet, or parts of various populations, would guarantee that the rest would make war on us. We would need significant earthbound resources to manage our human ranches to turn out a nutritionally sound, un-medicated, antibiotic-free, un-poisoned product. I’m sure you can imagine the implications to your way of life, not to mention the significantly increased resources we would need to employ in security and management. We would literally need to become ranchers of animals to feed to our collectives of humans. We find this prospect to be incredibly wasteful of our time and resources. You have some land, Rick?”

  “Yes, I do.” Rick was jolted out of his visualization of the world as a gulag.

  “You plant grasses there to encourage the success of animals so that you may return to hunt them?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “We are no different. These deer and elk on your land are your food. Suppose someone was to feed them sugar cubes and lettuce all day long because they like it and, therefore, figured they were doing them some good. Then, when their health suffered, they were pumped full of drugs to “cure” all the problems. If you couldn’t stop these people and allow the animals to eat the way they were meant to, wouldn’t you fence them in or fence the people out?”

  “Yes, I would,” Rick replied. “Or I’d have to go the grocery and buy my meat there, supporting someone else’s managed collectivization,” he continued in complete agreement. They have every right to do what they’re doing, Rick thought.

  “We were really expecting you humans to take care of these issues on your own.” Synster didn’t add that Natural Proliferation was his project, and if it didn’t work, he would lose everything and Ryvil would be promoted to Project Director. Just in case Rick was pettier than he thought, he didn’t want him to get any crazy ideas about methods of revenge.

  “So if we get our act together, it’s Natural Proliferation and you get your organic harvest. If we don’t, it’s Managed Collectivization, and you put us all in collective meat factories to manage our health for us?” Rick felt like he was negotiating a deal on The Price Is Right, except the total destruction of humanity was behind the next curtain.

  “Oversimplified again, but yes.”

  “May I have a glass of water?” Rick inquired, and with his wry sense of humor continued, “Or whatever it is you think I should be drinking.” Rick felt like he might throw up.

  Synster appreciated this last comment and took it to be Rick’s submission of will. It was not. Synster touched a panel on his desk and ordered the water.

  This will be impossible, Rick thought. People treat food like a religion. They won’t change for their own good. They’ll resist, they’ve already been resisting the science for decades.

  “This, of course,” Synster continued, “is all background information and only necessary in that you understand the motives for your actions. You need to know that your activities will truly be contributing to the salvation of man as a somewhat independent animal, rather than a factory raised product.”

  A Provenger entered, placed water on the table, and exited.

  “What you need to do will be coordinated, over time, by me. You will use your influence through your internet site, and you will need to use your contacts; your brother. I may contact others, and you will represent me when I choose not to engage them. Any duties that I require must be executed precisely as I’ve ordered. You will answer only to me unless I appoint an agent to act for me. Although we appear to have complete knowledge about your culture and your history, we’ve only had time to assimilate what initially interests us, leaving the depth of our knowledge lacking. I will need you to fill in the gaps. We will also need you to use your position with the NSA to inform us if your government discovers any of our technology.”

  “So exactly what do I need to do on my website? I’ve already been trying to get people to eat real food and get off meds.”

  “I’m glad you asked. When your government proposes our policies,
many will seem questionable. You will express support, as opposed to your regular disagreement with the government. For example, currently around seven hundred thousand people every year have their gallbladders removed due to damage from their current high carbohydrate diet. Its function is to aid in the digestion of fats. With your government’s advocacy of high carbohydrate, low fat eating, this organ is simultaneously inflamed and atrophied. Its removal is the only option once it becomes clogged and inoperative. The government will require these to be preserved and submitted for testing.

  “In addition, the government will begin advocating and encouraging through insurance policy benefits the proactive removal of gallbladders for people with certain health issues. Since gallbladders help people to digest fats and dietary fats are thought by your ill-informed doctors to increase cholesterol and make people fat, we believe it will be easy to get gallbladders removed from people who are obese. We value the gallbladder for elixirs and may still be able to use them.