Opalescence Read online

  “Allow me.” Edwards walked over, and, holding her right arm, led her to a darkened window. Handing her a small remote, he said, “Would you care to do the honors?” She stared at him now, apprehension rising, and feeling her legs beginning to wobble a bit. Slowly she nodded her head. “Steady,” Edwards cautioned. Julie looked down at the small control, then tentatively took it and looked back at Edwards. There were two buttons on it, “Trans” and “Op.” Transparent and Opaque, she guessed. Placing her thumb on the Trans button, she looked at the window and pushed. Instantly the view cleared. Julie hit the floor.

  When she came to twenty minutes later, her head was throbbing. She reached up and felt a sizable lump on the brow over her right eye. “Ow!” she yelled. Immediately someone appeared at her side wearing a white smock, hair tied back in a rather severe bun. A small tag said her name was “Peloste.”

  “Well, hello there, Professor!” Peloste said with a smile. “You gave us a bit of a scare there.”

  “Uh, what happened?” Julie asked.

  “You don’t remember?” Peloste queried, concerned.

  Julie thought. “I was talking to Dr. Edwards ... and ... then, I was about to, I saw something...” she trailed off.

  “Right. Then you fainted and knocked yourself out. Apparently the shock -” Julie lifted a finger silencing the nurse, thinking, then remembering. She let out her breath.

  “Oh. Oh yeah ... oh … SHIT!” She began to rise.

  “Hold on there, Doctor,” Peloste said, putting a hand on Julie’s shoulder and gently pushing her back down. “We need to take a film of your head.” Julie lay back down, but her mind raced.

  Peloste walked to a small panel on the wall. “Dr. Karstens said to notify him the moment you come to.”

  “Karstens?” Julie asked.

  “He’s the Director of the Institute.” She clicked a button and punched some numbers, paused, then spoke in a voice too low for Julie to hear. When she was done, she turned again to Julie. Chuckling a little, she said, “Edwards felt so bad. Said you slipped right out of his grasp.”

  She adjusted the magnifier attached to her glasses and looked closely at the bump, then touched it lightly, causing Julie to yelp.

  “Sorry, Doctor. It looks like just a surface injury, but after Karstens sees you we’ll take a closer look.”

  “Mmm, okay,” Julie mumbled, again touching the lump. It was tender and felt like a small knot. Trying not to think about what she thought she saw in that room, she looked about the one she was in. The walls were painted a cool blue; strangely reassuring. On the wall directly in front of her hung a large videograph, a scene from nature, snippet of a view, a minute in length. It was of trees and grass waving in the breeze, making a gentle rustling sound. Occasionally, she also heard birdsong. It was a lowland. In the background was a mountain of medium height, round on the backside, flat on the front. Its face had clearly been shorn off due to some past geological episode. Down below, wound a small river. The scene looped almost imperceptibly every sixty seconds, which became noticeable when the same pattern of sounds occurred over and again.

  “Half Dome,” Julie said. Well, Half Dome as it appeared some fifty years earlier. Yosemite Valley had since been sold to a private developer for several billion dollars. He’d promptly cut down and sold off most of the trees, then built a large town and amusement park geared toward the very rich. It was now called Arnoldland, as the buyer’s name was Ross Arnold. He carved a large, golden “A” on the flat face of Half Dome.

  Within a year, most all of the larger wildlife had been shot and mounted on walls or erected free-standing. Bears, mountain lions and elk, caught off guard nibbling or grazing peacefully, now stood immobile, collecting dust, cast in their perennial roles as vicious and terrifying beasts, ready to rip out a man’s throat at a moment’s notice. With each elimination, the people sighed to think that there was one less horror in the world.

  “Very good,” came a voice behind her. Julie looked around to see a mid-sized, suited man walking toward her, distinguished looking with glasses, beard and gray hair at the temples. With him was Edwards. “You recognize it. It’s changed a bit since, hasn’t it?”

  “My father took me once when I was a girl,” Julie responded. She didn’t offer more. “Not your typical hospital room,” she noted.

  “Mm, no,” the man replied, a look of distaste darkening his features. He extended his hand and said, “Bob Karstens. Glad to meet you.”

  Edwards, who had been behind the director, took her hands and cupped them in his. “Dr. Pine,” he began, “how are you feeling?”

  “Well, except for a headache and sore neck, I feel fine.”

  “Yes, Dr. Peloste will be looking at that. However, her initial diagnosis is encouraging. I am so sorry, Doctor. You fell so suddenly, and my vintage reflexes aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Please, call me Julie. Formalities have never meant much to me. And I’m sorry about fainting like that, but...”

  “Of course, perfectly understandable. And you can call me Joe. A regrettable situation, your fainting and my dropping you.” Edwards shook his head in self-reproach.

  “Um,” Julie started, “about that room, what I saw, or, thought I saw...”

  “Julie, my dear,” Karstens answered, “let’s talk about that later. First thing we need to do is make sure you are okay.” He touched her shoulder, then, with Edwards, began to walk off.

  “But,” Julie called.

  As he was about to round the corner, Karstens turned back, and with a gleam in his eye said, “Yes, it was real.” And then he was gone.

  Chapter 2

  True, for a time we tolerated them in our graciousness, those unthinking, unfeeling beasts of the earth. All the crawling, squirming, slavering creatures that we shared this small planet with. Nature, red in tooth and claw. Monsters, really. For millions of years they had inhabited our nightmares, and generations of children shook in the dark for fear.

  But we grew up, broke the chains that bound us, and now were free. Free of the guilt we’d felt at their slow, systematic extinction. For now we knew that their existence had been mere chance; they were never actually meant to be here permanently, not the way we were. Their continued survival had been incidental to ours. They’d been, in actuality, parasites that had taken, yet given back nothing in return for their miserable lives.

  Still, there were voices “crying out in the wilderness,” which tried to raise the alarm. But not for long. It was apparent that an unstoppable force, in inexorable time had come to the human sphere, the Anthropocene, and it was no use trying to fight it. It was like expecting a speeding train to stop for one man on the tracks. It simply wasn’t safe to be at odds with destiny. Posters randomly appeared at the time with a wise old Japanese saying, “The nail that stands up gets hammered down.” People weren’t sure who put them up, the government, or the opposition.

  It became a crime then, an unforgivable sin, to speak of protecting the environment, and of what once was. For those with such delusions had a sickness, a disease, and most of the time it was incurable. Even so, some tried to rehabilitate them, and in a few notable cases were able to help these people to see the wrong in their thinking, the harm such fantasies could cause the Great Vision. It was a war of ideas, of values, but the outcome was never in doubt, for the government, in essence an amalgamation of corporations — really a cabal of the very rich — had already made its decision.

  As might be expected, there arose a Resistance, which, at last, giving up on verbal protests, opted for monkey wrenching and vandalism. Hackers attacked government surveillance systems, offices of The Enlightened, and just about anybody else they perceived as part of the “suicidal order.” At the same time, construction equipment was torched, engines wrecked, headquarters burned down. It was a last desperate act, the final, inevitable card to be played before the end, and was, of course, anticipated by the government. In fact, elements therein, with official approval, even too
k surreptitious part. It all made for horrendous public relations for the troublemakers, terrorists and traitors, serving to verify and harden popular opinion against them.

  Thus, when every avenue had been tried, and still people insisted on looking back to a past that was dead and gone, all that remained was to excise the cancer of earth worship. That’s when the purges began. It was a sad, but necessary evil, and when it was over, fully ten percent of humanity had disappeared. No one knew what happened to them, although everyone did. Dumped at sea, it was rumored. They had gone the way of prehistory, as everything pre-Awakening was dubbed, just another stepping stone, another footnote in the Grand Story of Life.

  With the guilt-makers gone, suddenly it was as if the whole world opened up for us. Those mental shackles broken, we’d been set free, and it was liberating. Land previously wasted by being set aside for “wildlife” was rightly reclaimed for human use. Finally. And with it, a new era of wealth and consumerism took off. We had not realized how much had been withheld from us. But now, all had a surfeit, and it became a time of luxury and laughter. New transit soon crisscrossed through previous forestland, while their trees were felled and harvested for more housing on the very same land. Vast new acreages were opened up for farming crops to feed our rapidly increasing population. Free of the curse of environmentalism, nothing was held back, nothing untried. People were happy, and everything was “clear.” A new era began, the “New Man” (NM) era. Everything “prehistoric”, pre-Awakening, was OM, or Old Man. All calendars were changed accordingly.

  Indeed, our numbers exploded; it became a virtue to have many children. At the same time, genetic advances translated into longer life spans for all. Where once “overpopulation” would have been a concern, now no one worried. “The World Is Our Oyster” was a catchphrase seen everywhere. When children asked their mothers what an oyster was, mom would shrug, pat the child’s head and answer, “Some fish thing that lived in the ocean.” It made the children shudder.

  And like the dumping of toxins on land, synonymous with the time of the Great Awakening, the world began to openly dump all manner of waste into the seas. Effort was no longer spent on attempts to keep them clean. It was reasoned that these waters were so immense, so dynamic, that they could absorb anything we discarded.

  The new agricultural lands, rich in nutrients, easily fed the masses, food from them aggressively grown and harvested, forced from the ground with poisons. On them we grew genetically engineered Pomatos (a potato/tomato combination), Whorn (a wheat/corn combo), and even Peef (beef and potatoes) along with various fusions of all of them together. Then every combination was tried, every possibility tested, and entirely new foods invented from molecular scratch in laboratories. It seemed that every day an all new kind of fare was making news, and the people, unwitting subjects in the mass experimentation, clapped their hands in delight.

  It was a golden age. And it lasted about 40 years. Then certain things began to go awry. Actually, they had already been doing that for a while, it was just that, in their revelry, no one really noticed.

  Songbirds were one of the first to go during the Golden Age. Somewhere in that initial decade, the last lonely melody was heard. A warbler it was, calling futilely for another, until, finally giving up, it fell to the ground, dead, and was crushed underfoot. Nobody really missed them, but for a year or two one could buy a sound recording, made decades earlier, on the black market. It was highly frowned on.

  It was more of a worry when major insect pollinators stopped coming around to visit the flowers and make our food grow. Scientists weren’t sure why, but some secretly believed that bees had no taste for Peef, or any of our other laboratory concoctions.

  This potential calamity, however, turned out to be a boon for the government when it quickly unveiled a new technological breakthrough in crop pollination. Synth-o-Life pollen, each type tailor-made for the particular plant that it was to be sprayed upon, produced bumper harvests. It was another milestone in the new system, and it was exclaimed upon by enthusiastic school teachers and corporate spinmeisters alike as evidence of man’s natural superiority over nature.

  And when we thought about it, it suddenly seemed absurd that we had so long depended upon the unpredictable vagaries of such a fickle and primitive mistress as nature. How could we? It was utterly preposterous! Of course we had to wrest our fate from the hands of “mother nature” and claim it for ourselves. Hadn’t we, in fact, been doing just that all these years, anyway? Housing, water supply, energy, agriculture, etc., all were evidence of our unwillingness to be tossed about like reeds in the wind, or like flotsam thrown upon the rocky shores of fate.

  From this triumph, we turned our attention much more to controlling the climate and attempting to defuse earth’s chaotic weather bombs. That, though, turned out to be a much harder proposition. It seemed that every piece of modification here was accompanied by a random act of violence there. When the poles and Greenland were finally ice-free, the thermohaline current, which had previously circulated the ocean’s waters north and south, began to slow and the waters to stagnate. On land, drought was spreading, ravaging cropland.

  Then, throwing all previous caution to the wind, we tried everything to mitigate the heat; well, everything short of actually cutting our emissions of greenhouse gases: every geoengineering trick without regard to possible negative side effects. Iron was dumped wholesale into the seas with the expectation that the growing masses of algae would absorb the increasing CO2. That appeared to work for a short while, until it was noticed that enormous algae blooms were robbing the oceans of oxygen and contributing to their demise. We dropped millions of tons of nano-sized aluminum from the skies, many a flight cutting grid-like paths back and forth. The hope was that the particulates would reflect sunlight back into space. Then people began to complain of serious lung issues.

  For a long time, scant attention had been paid, except by a nervous few, to the implications of receding forests and expanding deserts. In the oceans, plankton and coral reefs, victims of global warming and pollution, began to die out wholesale. Fish too, ruthlessly depleted, were now to be found only in pockets, surrounded by extensive, dark “dead zones.”

  In time, the very air one breathed, no matter where he or she was in the world, carried a foul, oily, chemical stench about it, which never seemed to go away. Grass that had been growing in the few spaces where concrete and asphalt met began to brown, even without treatment. Rain, which used to fall freely on agricultural fields, now increasingly had to be coerced from the sky. When that failed, reclaimed and desalinated water was quietly substituted.

  With the lax regulatory atmosphere came increasing environmental disasters, including massive leaks from many of the thousands of offshore oil rigs. The infamous 2010 Deep Water Horizon disaster was repeated again and again. Similarly, one by one, nuclear power plants also failed and melted down when people tired of the vigilance required to prevent accidents; of fighting an industry behemoth intent on deregulation. Or when loss of power for any reason, from solar flares to warfare, for more than a few hours, meant loss of reactor cooling. Vast no-man’s-lands, contaminated with radiation, were nonetheless inhabited by those with nowhere else to go.

  And thus, silently, one by one, links in the chain, strands in the great web of life, were snapping. Nature was, at last, buckling beneath the strain, had hit its final tipping point - the point of no return. And, like the earth itself, it seemed the whole of man was ailing, sick with respiratory disease and cancer.

  When it became obvious that things weren’t going well for us here on our home planet, it was announced that the time had come to set our sights on bigger and better horizons: the colonization of space and the terraforming of other planets, no matter the cost. On moving out among the stars and populating their worlds with more of us.

  For it had been decided that man was, indeed, the highest form of life by far to have ever existed, the very pinnacle of galactic evolution. Must have been, else w
e would have heard from others by now. But no, the radar dishes still rang silent, even after all these years. Flatline. It could only mean that no one else was out there. Perhaps there were places with lowly forms of biology as had once existed here, but when found, they too would be transformed, made to our likeness, their vermin exterminated as well. If we so chose, we might bring some promising specimens along via genetic modification. They could turn out to be useful.

  That was the vision, our new mission. That’s why we are here, we realized, to fan out into the galaxy, and from there to the larger universe. It is a holy crusade, and one we’ve held, unconsciously, within our breasts for lo these many, many years. It’s why we have always cleared the way before us, purging our path with fire, cleansing the earth, this noble which gave us life and nurtured our youth. Surely, if she could, she would understand, understand that we had finally come of age and had outgrown her; that the time had come for us to leave home. And, like young men and women who have their whole lives ahead of them, that’s exactly what we would do. The time had come to put childish sentimentality aside and move forward; time to be free of the prison of this planet. A glorious future awaited.

  Once the earth was written off, huge resources and brainpower were put to work. A new era of spaceflight ensued, and rumor had it that great Dyson Spheres were being constructed that would be capable of taking people away from their ruined world and onto a happy journey to the stars. There were videos! People were told there would be sacrifices and everyone was expected to contribute. Unknown to all but a relative few, however, was the fact that, even though the mission had consumed much of the available resources left, there was not nearly enough to complete it. At least not for everyone, nor even a tiny fraction thereof, since most of the raw materials were already gone, expended during the heady building boom.