Whereas his fellow students seemed to consider oxygen something to blandly consume, Thaddeus felt it was something you needed to earn. Only a few people were great. Maybe one in every hundred thousand. Maybe even fewer than that. He was among the exceptionals. Of this he was certain. The rest were no different than the guppies and gerbils he kept in his bedroom lab.
This boy, Patient Zero, is his guppy. Except that he won’t die.
Yesterday, Thaddeus left the laboratory feeling unsettled. Victoria Lennon wanted to give the boy a book? That meant she viewed him as more than a test subject. She empathized with him, worried he was bored, hoped he might still educate and entertain himself. No. No, no, no—that was exactly the wrong approach, one that put the entire project at risk. The subject’s name was not Hawkin. He was nameless. You didn’t name a splotch of exotic mold in a petri dish.
She thought Thaddeus cruel. But is the choker vine that tangles a tree cruel? Or the wolverine who claws a fish from a river? Or the fire that burns through a forest? The universe is constantly in pain as it tries to feed, survive, refine, and improve itself. You have to have a wider view to understand this. That’s why he is in charge.
He ordered an immediate review of her findings and compared the time stamps on the data to the laboratory surveillance footage. It didn’t take long to discover the anomalies.
Omnimetal was especially notable for its ability to store and deliver energy. It was like nothing in the known universe. Because it contained . . . more. Take the partnership and spatial orientation of standard atomic bonds and multiply it by a hundred, maybe a thousand. They didn’t know how deep it went. They were still trying to understand the geometry of the chains of particles and the impossibly dense angles of their subatomic structure on a quantum level.
This was what they did know: If you struck omnimetal, if you shook it, if you electrified it, it ate the energy and stored it. This was why the alloys had been so successful in batteries. The very movement of a car rumbling along the road created its own kinetic power. The wiggle and jimmy of a phone in your pocket charged it. The monorail for the Bullet train was also its engine. If omnimetal could disrupt communication and transportation networks, then the government wanted to know what it could do for the American war chest.
At first, after every session, the boy would vomit. Or cry. Or piss. Or void his bowels. But then, as Victoria notched up the intensity and frequency of the experiments, something changed. Something that went unnoted in her charts: The boy would glow. A pale blue, the same color as his eyes. It was concentrated around the bullet’s impact site, veining outward, giving his skin a marbled luminescence. After this he would pace around and breathe heavily and sometimes run in place. His nights would be sleepless and disturbed, as though he were wound too tightly and was in need of release.
Then, just the other day, Victoria unloaded an AR-15 into the boy at ten yards. The most extreme test to date. At first the bullets did nothing but fall to the floor like dead wasps. They didn’t ricochet. They didn’t knock him back. They hit him and they dropped, suddenly devoid of all energy.
The boy rubbed his chest and said the sensation was akin to an itchy rash itch or the burn that follows being roughly tickled. And for a few minutes afterward, the microphone picked up something. A humming. A vibrational murmur. As though the boy’s spine were a struck tuning fork.
Video footage played in slow motion revealed that his skin flashed silver-blue upon the projectiles’ impact, so his body reminded Thaddeus of the lake-dotted landscape that scrolled beneath the plane when it came in for a landing at the regional airport. The boy paced around, taking big breathy gulps of air, and Victoria asked him what was wrong, and he said, “I have to let it go.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I have to, I have to, I have to,” he said and then punched the wall. The impact shattered the concrete and sent cracks racing outward. The surveillance camera shook with the impact and Victoria held out her arms as though she might lose her balance. She looked up at the camera then. And it was as though their eyes were meeting. She knew. The dangerous potential of what had just happened was in her gaze. Yet her notes made no mention of it, and her maintenance request for the room simply cited “bullet damage.”
* * *
The Northfall facility is mostly featureless, but Thaddeus oversaw the construction of his office and one wall of it consists of windowed boxes representing the periodic table, each with a sample of its element. There are 119 boxes instead of 118. The extra casing is empty except for a placard that contains an ellipsis. That’s where omnimetal belongs, along with everything else that fell from the sky, cooked in the cosmic cauldron. In a way, the whole world exists in this empty box right now. The whole world is an ellipsis. What they’d thought they knew, they didn’t.
Thaddeus knows Victoria Lennon despises him. But he is accustomed to being despised, so he gives it little thought. He doesn’t believe in emotions, only calculations. But the other day she asked him a question that continues to cycle through his head: “Do you even consider yourself a scientist, Dr. Gunn?”
It wasn’t offense that made him unsure how to respond. It was because in this time, with these impossible new rules, his work felt more like an investigation into magic. Which made him not a scientist, but a wizard.
He has full security clearance and supervisory control. His staff is here in Northfall to discover a framework for the ninth metal, a use for it, a language and a narrative for it.
In one laboratory, they are focusing on its psychoactive and biochemical effects. Here they apply an extraction that is roughly the same compound as space dust, the preferred drug of the so-called metal-eaters. Their subjects are rats and chimps and pigs—all of their eyes now give off a faint blue glow. There are also a few human test subjects who signed the necessary paperwork in order to collect the very generous honorarium at the end of the study.
Another building is devoted to energy economics. Here the metal is studied for its flow, as a conduit, and for its storage, as a battery. There was an impossibly dense clustering to it on an atomic level that gave it a supernaturally high tensile strength and made it extremely difficult to mine. This same density seemed to be the source of its fuel—its ability to absorb and multiply its potential energy. The metal here is tested with water and magnetics and microwaves and radiation and heat and sound. One of the walls ruptured and was repaired. The top floor detonated, killing everyone in the lab, and was entirely replaced.
And the third building houses their weapons program. This is where they keep the boy. Patient Zero is their only living subject. Miners discovered another body statued in an omnimetal crater, and there have been rumors of a metal wolf and a metal owl and a metal bear, but the exploratory drones have picked up nothing.
Thaddeus has always done his best thinking on the move. He insisted a sidewalk be installed for this very reason. It winds through the grounds and his feet tap the concrete with a metronomic rhythm. He undoes his cufflinks and rolls them around in his palm. Everyone knows not to bother him when he is on one of his rambles. He is slowly, steadily, deepening his focus with a meditative exercise. Every step equals one thousand years of time. It doesn’t even take a full step to erase industrialization, and it takes only six steps to extinguish all of human history. All of Wright’s architecture and Homer’s texts and Einstein’s theories and da Vinci’s paintings and the world wars and the Roman Empire and the Zhou dynasty. All of it, gone.
And it takes only two hundred steps to outpace humans altogether, their shapes disappearing into the jungles of Africa. If he keeps going, he categorizes his steps according to ages and epochs and periods, retreating through geologic and cosmological time, as glaciers rise, as dinosaurs rule, as oceans shift and continents coalesce, as life withdraws and simplifies and finally vanishes and the Earth is nothing more than a spinning ball of molten rock. Sometimes he makes every step ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand, or a million, or a hund
red million years so that he can go farther and farther still, seeking out the stardust of our beginnings, seeking not just deep time but deep space. Somewhere out there, he knows, he’ll find the ninth metal.
Today he does something different. He shortens the timing of his pacing to decades. His mind keeps circling around this notion of wizards, of knights and orcs and mystical forests and dragons and tombs full of treasure. So he walks until he arrives squarely in the Middle Ages. And it is here that he pauses. And stares off into an uncertain distance for many minutes on end. His mouth forms silent words.
A security drone buzzes overhead and brings him back to the present. He turns in a circle and takes in the pines and the campus and the trill of a chickadee and the pulpy clouds overhead. And then he heads promptly to building 3.
He knows what to do in order to voice his professional disappointment. To remind her of his authority. And to accelerate their research efforts. He has made his calculation.
Mining omnimetal is especially difficult due to its yield strength. You couldn’t simply chip or carve it out of the ground. A pickax would snap. A bulldozer shovel would bend. A jackhammer would dull and smoke. But at around 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it begins to melt. As it did when it originally entered the atmosphere and burned through the skies and cratered the region. Tools have been developed to mine it. Called welders and nicknamed “wizard blades,” they resemble giant drivable chainsaws with laser-lit teeth, and they can slowly slice through omnimetal. The blue smoke their cuts release is toxic with spent energy, the bump that makes space dust so popular, like some supercell of cocaine.
Thaddeus commits himself to his office for most of the day. Later that afternoon, when the door to Victoria Lennon’s laboratory opens and Thaddeus enters, he walks with a hunch, weighed down by something he carries two-handed. One side of it is housed in a thick grip, a hilt with many thick wires tangling out of it cored in a battery casing. A four-foot shaft of metal rises out of this. A circuited version of what might be called a broadsword.
Victoria stands from her desk and asks, “What are you doing? What is that?”
Thaddeus ignores her as he bends over the control panel and fits a key into the lock and twists it. He plugs his security code into the keypad. An entry unlocks with a buzz. The entry through the security barrier and into the chamber that contains Patient Zero.
“Dr. Gunn?” Victoria says. “I’m in the middle of an experiment. Please.”
Thaddeus thumbs on a switch in the hilt. The blade begins to sizzle and spit with a lacework of lasers. He can feel it humming in his hands, the voltage high enough that all the hair on his body prickles. He slides open three latches and opens the door and stumbles into the chamber.
The boy has his fists balled and his legs spread apart, a defiant stance. He does not retreat when Thaddeus approaches. Instead, he stares curiously at the sword, his expression a mix of curiosity and hate.
“Please leave,” Victoria says behind him.
Thaddeus tips his head to acknowledge her. Then he hoists the sword, with some difficulty, and brings it down on the boy, slashing a gash across his chest that glows with a painful blue light.
16
* * *
Abarrier surrounds Gunderson Woods; it’s made from spiked logs set upright. Clumps of bark scab their sides. It’s like the perimeter of a pioneer fort. Guarding something old. And indeed, that’s the position of the metal-eaters. They believe what they’re worshipping is not new—it’s the very essence of long ago and faraway. They will do anything to protect it; they peer down from towers with binoculars and patrol the grounds with assault rifles.
Sam Yesno pulls up to the gated entrance in one of the family Cadillacs. He climbs, with pained difficulty, out of the car. One of his arms is bandaged and he’s wheezing slightly, still recovering from the fire. The day is cool, an early taste of fall, and he wears a tweed jacket and jeans. The hunch of his spine is made worse by the satchel he hoists out of the back seat.
Officially he is the Frontier family’s lawyer. But maybe emissary is a better word for his role. He represents the family. He joins Ragnar on calls and in meetings, often sitting to the side, listening, taking notes. He flies to other states or countries on his behalf. He finalizes contracts and arranges press. He works with a staff, but many matters are for his eyes alone. He is the embodiment of the Frontiers’ goodwill. The boy no one wanted, the Frontiers took in. The boy with the father in and out of prison and the mother who took off for Grand Forks with the high-school baseball coach has grown up inside a dynasty. In so many ways, he doesn’t fit. He’s not part of one family or the other. An Ojibwa with no sense of blood and culture. A Frontier without a shared surname.
The gates of Gunderson Woods are made from iron-armored oak slabs. Each has an eye etched on it with wobbly rays—or are they tentacles?—extending on all sides of it, their symbol. Yesno stands before them, raises a hand, and knocks. Gently at first. And then, after a few unanswered minutes, pounding with the meat of his fist.
“Metal is,” the voice says and he takes a few steps back and shades his eyes with his hand. A woman—maybe a man—stares down at him from the sentry post. She casually aims an Uzi at him. She is cleanly bald, one of the side effects of smoking or snorting space dust. Even her eyebrows are gone, giving her an alien appearance. She wears all black, the fabric of space. And the blue glow of her eyes is evident even on a sunlit day such as this.
“Um, yes,” Yesno says. “Metal certainly is.”
“What is your purpose?”
“My name’s Sam Yesno, and I’m here on behalf of the Frontiers to discuss —”
“She is busy.”
“Oh, I’m not surprised to hear that. I just showed up out of the blue. I’m perfectly willing to wait. I would have set up an appointment except that, well, there’s no phone.”
“She is busy.”
“Yes, you mentioned that. But I’m very patient and would very much like an audience with Mrs. Gunderson.”
“You won’t find Mrs. Gunderson here.”
“Oh. Well, I’m almost certain —”
“Mrs. Gunderson is dead.”
“Dead? Goodness. But—when? How?”
“She died the night the sky fell.”
“Ah, so you’re speaking metaphorically. That’s a relief. So—help me out—what shall I call her?”
“You can call her what we call her.”
“Which is?”
“Mother.”
“Mother? Mother. All right. Then may I please speak to Mother?”
It takes several more minutes before he convinces her to open the gate. He has a way with people. A kindly patience, a soft-voiced persistence. He wears at them the way a steady drip of water will a stone. She pats him down, then takes his satchel and goes through it before returning it to him. “This way.”
In most of the Frontier mines, scientists consider the meteor strikes somewhat equivalent to gunfire: The omnimetal came traveling at a high velocity and struck the earth and burrowed in and warped its shape as a bullet would flesh or brick or wood, then it usually mushroomed outward or balled like a teardrop. Sometimes they find a fat crater with a silver smear at its bottom and then the geologists bring in their coring drills and the 3-D imaging reveals what looks like a massive tadpole or jellyfish hidden beneath the ground, frozen in flight, swimming away from the surface and toward the center of the earth. Sometimes there is an acreage struck by many small meteors, creating hundreds if not thousands of veins, like silver roots filamenting downward. Sometimes, in the deep lakes, the omnimetal, heated by its sprint through the atmosphere, would solidify in long spikes or tendrils, like a silvery coral.
Yesno has visited many mines, and most of them require the draining of lakes or the excavation of all localized dirt and stone to reveal the metal for extraction. But Gunderson Woods looks like nothing else he’s seen. The drone footage of the property hasn’t prepared him. When he steps through the gate, he exp
eriences a sudden sense of dislocation. It is as though he has traveled, in a few paces, through several months of the calendar and arrived at winter’s edge after an ice storm coats everything with a silver-white gleam.
The dirt here is shallow—bottomed by pre-Cambrian bedrock—and when the thick cluster of molten omnimetal struck, it splashed back. So there are scalloped patches and bright rivulets underfoot, like ice melt. And so there are waves, like those frozen on the Superior shore every January. And so there are trees—some fallen, others upright—that are mostly sleeved in metal, some with leaves still unfolding from their unvarnished branches. He spots one that’s already turned red, anticipating fall.
But the view is interrupted, for now, by a shantytown. Tents, hitched trailers, pop-up campers, vans, singlewides, shacks with corrugated plastic roofs, hastily built cabins with gaps between the logs. Here her followers live. The metal-eaters.
Smoke drifts by. Some of it smells pleasantly of pine and some of it burns his nose like battery acid. Space dust. People sit on lawn chairs and they stand in doorways and they peer from windows, watching as he passes. Most with eyes glowing. All wearing black.
Here is a larger outbuilding, what clearly was once a barn. The double doors are closed, but through the slats he can see light zapping. The sounds of a factory come from within. Drilling and scraping. The tumbling clatter of what might be a dryer full of stones. Several chimneys rise through the roof and expel a foul, spicy smoke that’s run through with blue sparks. Their kitchen.
His host leads him on a winding path through the structures, and he says, “And what was your name again?” and she says, “That doesn’t matter.”
The Ninth Metal Page 12
