“That’s Punk,” Lance motioned toward the screen. “That rod he’s holding is a sensor. The sensor maintains a ninety-eight-degree temperature and at random intervals gives a jiggle, like a shaking toy, so Punk stays interested,” Lance told the group. “Punk has held on tight to that sensor for seventy-one days, nonstop. The sensor is a dynamometer and a normal twenty-year-old human male in his prime has a rating of 45 kg. Punk here,” Lance motioned to the screen with his chin, “his grip is 102 kg. Very strong athletes range in the 60 kg range.”
With wide eyes, the six turned to the screen as Lance finally glanced at his outline. “We’ve found this is pretty consistent in all stinkers tested, with less than a ten percent variable,” he told them and looked up. “Punk’s grip has never faltered but has lessened at times, but only when he was distracted.”
“Yeah,” Ian chimed in. “His grip dropped to 90 kg for ten seconds when we opened his box and he could see us.”
All six gave a shiver as Lance flipped to a new page of his outline. “If one grabs, chop off the hand,” he told them. “Severing the forearm muscles only works if you take away their anchor to the bones, and punching where a nerve used to be doesn’t work. Theoretically, they shouldn’t be able to do this without rupturing a tendon but,” he paused, looking at each one, “changes have been made inside.”
“One would think,” Ian started and they turned to him. “That the tendons would be rotting and stinkers would be getting weaker, but we aren’t seeing that. Just the opposite in fact.”
Leaning back and tapping his keyboard again, Ian flipped pages as the six saw a split image of human thighs on the screen. Both showed the skin cut away to expose the muscle belly. “Notice how they’re both red but the one on the left isn’t as red?” Ian asked and everyone nodded. “Notice how the one on the right is bloodier?” he asked and again, they nodded. “On the right is a human. The one on the left is from a stinker. We know that stinker turned at the very beginning.”
“They’re staying… fresh?” Heath put out, not even caring who the boys had cut open to check against.
Liking that, “Yeah, that’s why when you shoot them, stinkers are still gooey inside,” Ian told him and tapped his keyboard again. This time, an image came up that they had seen on TV before the collapse, a black rod with tentacles extending out. “This is the parasite,” Ian told them, and they all stared at the image. “The only way to see it like this is in a vacuum or frozen. That’s how they got the image that showed up on TV. It was frozen, but we never saw it. We were a bit busy at the time.”
“Now, the maze,” Lance said, and they pried their eyes from the screen to him. “We’ve run over a hundred through that damn maze and not one stinker can memorize it. It’s only fifty feet by fifty feet. Anyone here could memorize it in less than a minute. It doesn’t matter what you use for bait at the other end, stinkers can’t remember which way to go by themselves,” Lance said breaking into a grin. “If you let one stinker go through and ten minutes later let another in and keep repeating that, after twenty stinkers they’ll take the correct path. They move like ants, and we’re certain of this, but don’t know what chemical scents they’re using. When we started that experiment we thought we were screwed, just seeing the stinkers getting smarter, but we started over and put water misting heads over the maze to clean it after each stinker, and they couldn’t navigate it. So we tested again by just making one go through four times a day and after two weeks, none had navigated the maze.”
“Navigate margin?” Percy asked.
“Six wrong turns was a fail, and there are thirty-two turns in the maze but only six turns to reach the end with the correct path,” Ian answered.
“Random variable?” Percy asked.
“Less than eight percent took the correct path without a fail, and not one that did ever repeated it,” Lance said, then looked at the others. “It was pure luck they took the correct turns.”
“Okay, so they’re stupid,” Rhonda stated.
“By themselves, yes. But in a mass, they can solve a problem like the maze,” Ian told her. “One ant is stupid, but a colony is smart because they work together, like moving across the land “en masse” looking for food.”
“Any retention of learned behavior?” Percy asked but kept scribbling lines, flipping to a new page when he’d filled one.
Furrowing his brow, “From past life?” Ian asked.
Shaking his head, “No, from what they’ve picked up. I know you said they couldn’t navigate the maze, but anything else?”
“And you were an engineering major?!” Ian cried out.
Pausing his notes, “Yeah, you have to take statistics and sociology for just about every major,” Percy told him.
Popping Lilly’s leg jokingly, “That’s why you were so good at this stuff,” Jennifer whispered.
“Yes, but Jennifer, Lance and Ian are only taking college courses and not majoring yet. I want to know why they already took statistics,” Lilly whispered back.
Rolling her eyes up, “They fucking love math,” Jennifer moaned as Lance spoke.
“Yes, we have found some learned behavior is retained,” Lance said, and everyone became attentive. “But only minor things and nothing complex. They can learn how to open a door but not unlock one. If they do a simple action like that, and it doesn’t require a long-term thought process, they can retain it,” Lance said. “For a short time,” he added.
All six just looked at him, bewildered. “If a stinker doesn’t open a door every so often, they forget. Sorry, we don’t know a timeline because we were and still are concentrating on them hiding,” Lance told them. “That one seems to stay with them because they can do it anywhere. Once one learns to move till he can’t see the prey, we think it reasons the prey can’t see it. Since all it takes to reinforce the idea is to hide, they can do that anywhere.”
“We’re still testing,” Ian chimed in. “But we’ve made a stinker forget how to hide. We kept it secluded in a box for a month. Does it take that long? We don’t know.”
“So only short-term minimal tasks can be retained?” Percy asked scribbling away.
“That we’ve tested, and we still haven’t heard of any complex tasks,” Lance told him.
Raising his hand, “So, nothing is retained… from before?” Heath asked.
“Nope,” Ian and Lance said together. Hearing the certainty, Heath gave a relieved sigh as Ian tapped his keyboard again. When the image came up, they all got a little queasy.
“This is what’s inside the skull of a stinker a month after turning,” Lance told them. The screen showed where the top of a skull had been removed and inside was just a gooey mess. “The higher brain is the only part that the parasite doesn’t preserve and actively digests. It doesn’t use the digestive, respiratory, or circulatory systems but it preserves those to a degree.”
“Preserves?” Percy asked.
“The organism secretes something that somehow stops decay,” Lance said. “But it doesn’t do that to the higher brain, the part using so much energy.” Slowly cutting his eyes to Lilly, “We wanted to get a mass spectrometer to get a better grasp on what the secretion is, but we’ve been overruled,” Lance admitted.
“Oh, motherfucker!” Lilly snapped. “You even think of heading off to look for a mass spectrometer and I’ll monkey stomp your ass!” When Lance gave a depressed sigh, Sandy perked up in her chair after realizing Lance wouldn’t do shit to make Lilly mad, and she really loved that. Someone who could reign in some of the boys’ tendencies. For the first time, Sandy came to the conclusion Lilly wasn’t allowed to leave or be far from Lance, ever.
“Ahh,” Percy gasped in understanding. “That’s why you believe this is a weapon.”
“Oh, it is a weapon,” Lance huffed.
Lifting her hand up, “I’m lost,” Rhonda said, and Mary wanted to hug her because she was as well.
“As advanced as this parasite is, it should’ve evolved just in the six months it’s b
een active here, but it hasn’t,” Lance told her, very impressed that Percy had come to the conclusion so quickly, even without the rest of the data. “This parasite uses the body and communicates with each other in the body, but it destroys the higher brain; the part that makes us smart. The parasite is clearly designed to not progress past a certain point.”
“But I heard chimps could catch it,” Rhonda said.
Nodding, “Yes, some can,” Lance told her. “But not all. From my dad’s notes before the collapse, they found out only one in twenty chimps could be infected and turn. And that was only the common chimpanzee. More orangutans turned than chimps, but it was still only one to six. It all comes down to how much energy their brain used. If they were a smart monkey, the parasite got turned on when they got sick. If they weren’t a smart monkey, they could die and not come back. Something out in space didn’t want life that could threaten it to survive, but it didn’t want to wipe out all life.”
Flinching, “Seems far-fetched, don’t ya think?” Percy cringed.
“Nope,” Lance said, then Ian spoke.
“Did you know scientists infected a dolphin?” Ian asked and everyone jumped. “They pulled it out of the tank, kept it wet, and infected it. It died and then came back flopping around but when they put it back in the water, it died. We don’t know how long it took and we aren’t going to find a dolphin to find out.”
“Stinkers die in water,” Percy declared proudly.
“We know,” Ian said and Percy slumped down dejected, but was still writing away. “If a stinker stays saturated in water for more than five hours, they die. If they’re in water for more than an hour, motor functions start to slow. It takes a week to regain them. But after five hours in the water, they may not die right away but they do die. So what does that tell you?” he asked Percy.
“Um, the organism doesn’t like water?” he guessed, but he didn’t sound convincing.
“Oh, the organism loves water and we’ll get to that later,” Lance told him. “Whatever created this, didn’t want it spreading to aquatic life.”
The other five turned from the boys to Percy because they were lost. “I’m no expert, but there are marine animals that rank high in intelligence,” Percy said. “If this was a weapon to go after intelligent life, it would go after all.”
“True, but no aquatic life has technology. The ET that created this shit doesn’t give a rat’s ass about smart fish, and I know dolphins aren’t fish,” Lance moaned the last part. “It’s after terrestrial life that could or currently does pose a threat.”
Finally pausing his writing, “Okay, just how did you come to that?” Percy asked.
“Fire,” Ian and Lance answered together, and Percy just cocked his head.
“Dude. Without fire, no species is moving ahead technologically. And it’s real fucking hard to discover or maintain fire underwater,” Lance told him, and Percy’s head bobbed slightly as he followed.
“Sure, they can be smart underwater, but they aren’t going to build spaceships and travel far and wide. Water is a thousand times denser than air. You know how much power you would need to have to get a water-breathing payload of aquanauts off the surface?” Ian asked.
Percy’s eyes suddenly brightened up on a problem he could work out. “Yes, I can figure it out real quick!” he blurted out.
“Percy!” Ian snapped before Percy flipped a page to start working. “It could be done but without discovering fire, it’s impossible.”
“But that means every world that has life would have oxygen,” Sandy said.
“You don’t need to have oxygen to have fire, Mom,” Lance told her. “Yes, on Earth oxygen is one of the components, but you can have combustion without it. We use the term oxidizers here because oxygen is so important to us, but there are other oxidizers besides oxygen.”
Leaning to Lilly, Jennifer whispered, “They make me feel so stupid. Without even thinking about it, Ian made a fluorine atmosphere in a box without oxygen and sure enough, started a fire. Then Lance came over and made another atmosphere with chlorine in the box and started another fire. Then when we left, they told me you just need an oxidizer but it doesn’t have to be oxygen.”
Waving a hand out, “Well, Ms. Sandy showed me a copy of Lance’s birth certificate so I know he’s only thirteen, but I’m still having a hard time believing it,” Lilly scoffed.
Jumping to his feet, “All right!” Heath cried out. “You’re going in a direction I can’t even follow. Can you continue on and pick this up another time with Percy? Shit, this is way over my head.”
“I’m good with that,” Percy said and jotted down squiggly lines. “So, you were saying the organism loves water but dies if the body is saturated for five hours?”
Nodding, the boys both looked at the six with huge grins. “It loves water, but only in the proper ratio,” Lance said, and the six gave him confused looks.
“The parasite generates electricity like you could never imagine,” Ian said in awe.
Chapter Nine.
“We generate electricity,” Percy pointed out.
“Yeah, a hundred watts at rest is what a normal person puts out, but stinkers put out fifty times that,” Ian said grinning. “And the kicker is, they can increase it if they need to. All they have to do is for the parasite to increase in number.”
“There’s no way! They would show up hot in the thermals if that was the case!” Percy cried out.
Holding up a hand, “Listen,” Lance told him. “We’ve found out there’s one hundred grams of parasite for every kilogram a stinker weighs. So, roughly a pound of parasite for a hundred and twenty pound person,” Lance said.
“I don’t need you to convert,” Percy sighed rolling his eyes.
“Sorry, but others do,” Lance said, and Percy turned to the others.
“I’m sorry, guys,” he said, but they were just staring at the boys.
“Now,” Lance said and Percy turned back to him. “Before that person became a stinker, it took that sixty kilo person’s entire body to generate that kind of power, which we give off as heat. Now the parasite makes more heat but it’s smaller, and that one pound is spread out over the entire body. In case you’re wondering, the normal temp for a stinker is seventy-eight degrees.”
Following what Lance was saying, it suddenly hit Percy where all the power around here was coming from. “Holy mother,” he mumbled.
“What?” Rhonda gasped, looking around for a death machine coming to kill them.
With wide eyes, “The power here…,” Percy mumbled.
Realizing what he was saying, “You’re getting power from stinkers?!” Rhonda cried out.
Nodding with a shrug, “Kind of, but you figured it out so stop selling yourself short, chick,” Ian popped off.
“Now, let me take you on the journey of how we discovered this,” Lance said. “It actually started right before we paid the Nazis a visit. I wanted to know how much hydrogen sulfide a stinker put off after it died. I wanted to use it for fuel and covert over some of the ATVs and UTVs. We built an airtight steel box and put in some relief valves so we didn’t have a bomb lying in the field below the cabin, and then I threw in a dead stinker and some packets to absorb oxygen. Then I sealed the box,” Lance stopped as Jennifer chimed in.
“It was a steel coffin, not a box.”
Lance just nodded, “Okay. After I sealed it, I put a vacuum on the box at -1 Millibar.”
“Ssssshhhhit!” Percy exclaimed.
Leaning over to Percy, “I take it, that’s a lot?” Dwain asked in a whisper.
“Yeah,” Percy nodded. “The stinker didn’t like explode?” he asked Lance.
“No, that was the first weird thing we noticed. It just expanded like a balloon. Hell, the eyes were extended out of the sockets like two inches,” Lance chuckled, and the others felt squeamish. “I got pictures,” he offered, and they all shook their heads.
“Well, we were just continuing on at the cabin and went back to check
on the coffin,” he said grinning at Jennifer, “two days later, just to see if we needed to change out bottles.” He paused, shaking his head. “When we got there, we walked up carefully and saw the vacuum was lost but both bottles were filled with hydrogen sulfide, sixty-four cubic feet of it, and the blow-off valve had gone off. We still don’t know exactly how much hydrogen sulfide a stinker will put off after the brain is destroyed, but we will one day.”
“Needless to say, we were pissed,” Lance said as Lilly and Jennifer snickered. “Okay, we threw a tantrum because that was a lot of work we’d put in to this. So, we opened the box and there wasn’t a stinker. There weren’t even clothes, bones, or teeth, just a gray, cloudy goo at the bottom. Getting very worried, we tilted the box over and found the goo was viscus and moved like honey. But at the bottom of the coffin, we found a hole had been eaten through a half inch of solid steel.”
The six were leaning forward in their chairs with bated breath for Lance to continue as he nodded to Ian and then turned back to them. “Knowing acid was involved, I turned it over to Ian. He went and got his stuff and came back to test the goo and found out it wasn’t acidic. It had a pH of 7.3, almost like the human body. But in the goo, Ian found a pacemaker. Well, we didn’t know what the fuck it was, but Lilly knew it was a pacemaker. Thing was, it was only the circuit board and nothing else. A silicon circuit board,” Lance stressed, “like you would see in any electronic.”
“Since we needed acid for batteries, Ian wanted to repeat the experiment and see just what acid was made and how strong it was,” Lance told them. “So we set it back up and repeated the experiment, but kept a much closer watch this time. In a day we watched the body seem to melt, and when we saw the goo collecting at the bottom, we shut down the vacuum and opened the lid,” he said with irritation. “Right before our eyes, we watched the goo go from clear to gray and increase in viscosity.”
“Knowing we were on to something, we repeated the experiment but this time, put a drain in. It took us two more times until we got a working sample, but it had to stay under vacuum and only be stored in glass or silicon.”
Forsaken World | Book 6 | Redemption Page 14
