AMABIT SAPIENS

by Craig DeLancey

Taking a long view is commendable, but easier in planning than in foreseeing or obtaining actual results....

A key turned in the heavy lock. The sound echoed in the concrete and steel of the hall. I lifted my head, listening, tense like some fragile, frightened animal. Which is exactly what I was.

A great steel door creaked open. A gust of warm air touched my chest. It felt, for a moment, almost pleasant. Footsteps clacked across the threshold. The door swung closed, the latch snapped into place with a clang that ricocheted tightly in my bare cell, and the freeze of the heat-thieving concrete bit into me again.

“Ms. Sumaran.” This was a new voice. I could see only a dim silhouette of the man through the course nylon weave of the black bag over my head. He seemed my height, or smaller, with broad shoulders. American, with a voice of middle age. Or maybe younger.

“Let me down,” I croaked. My chest and shoulders shifted as I spoke, and agonizing pain shot through my arms. I thought I had grown adjusted to the dull agony, but discovered now rather that my stillness had merely rendered me numb. A crushing, consuming ache overwhelmed each muscle with the slightest movement.

One, two days before—I could not judge how long—I had worked past sunset in the field office at the oil well test head. As I walked to my car in the sweltering Argentine night, someone came behind me and pulled a bag over my head. I screamed, tires screeched, and car doors clattered open, and I was packaged away in a van within seconds. The prick of a needle in the arm put me to sleep. I awoke here, shivering and naked but for my underwear and bra, surrounded by a cacophony of voices as two men dragged me through long halls.

They chained my hands behind me at my waist, then ratcheted them up to a hook on an icy steel pole. My bare feet just touched the coarse, cold cement floor. I don’t care how other people fight over definitions: anyone who has been hung up like that knows it is torture. That’s why they did it, after all. Your tendons and muscles first burn fiercely, and you become convinced they are being torn apart from the shoulders. Then that pain seems almost insignificant as all of your muscles start to twist into burning knots. Finally, after endless hours, this pain dulls—though it never ends—but the slightest movement, even a flinch, sends it roaring back with even greater force.

They weren’t criminals then. Kidnappers seeking ransom would not begin with torture. And rapists would not have waited.

“What do you want? Let me down.”

“No, Ms. Sumaran, not yet. Before we let you down, you’re going to answer all of my questions.”

“This hurts. It hurts!” He gave no response. I added, “I haven’t done anything. I have nothing to hide. I’ll answer any questions. Just let me down.”

“You’re lying.” Metal scraped along concrete as he pulled a chair out of the corner and to the center of the room. It creaked as he sat in it, too close, carrying a hint of cloying cologne. “You have done something. You did something to the oil well. You are working with other people.”

A shuffling of paper. He opened a folder, turned pages. “These other people include Allen Reed.”

I lifted my head. Had they snatched Allen? Were they torturing him too, now?

“I see that interests you, Ms. Sumaran. We know far more than you think we know. For that reason, I will know when you are lying. And I will punish you. So if you want things to get better, not worse, you will have to tell me the truth. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let’s start with your relationship with Allen Reed.”

“Our fathers knew each other,” I whispered. “We both became geologists. That’s all.”

“And you went to the same private school. The Marrion School.”

“Our fathers both supported it.”

“And then you went to the same graduate school. I know these are not coincidences.”

“Harvard is the best school for geology,” I whispered. I took a long pause to get my breath, slowly, evenly, with the minimum of motion. “No coincidence.”

“So how did you both end up geologists? Who told you to become a geologist?”

“I wanted to be a geologist.”

“I want to be a mathematician,” I told my father. He had come on my fourteenth birthday to the Marrion School, to bring me presents. He offered me a box and an envelope: from my “uncle” David a gold bracelet, and from my parents, two spring-break plane tickets to Barcelona for my mom and me.

I put on the gold bracelet and showed it to my father. It was a very heavy chain of irregular, organic kernels of gold. It sparkled but otherwise seemed like something you might discover lying on a forest floor.

“You like it?” my father asked.

“I love it. Thank uncle David for me!”

“He’ll be very pleased.”

We settled in one of the libraries, pulling two seats close to the crackling fireplace. We were alone among the long oak shelves stuffed with worn books.

I had come to Marrion, a private boarding school, when I turned eight. I cried when I went and Mom and Dad cried, but they said this was the best school in the world for people with my special talents. I didn’t know what my special talents were, but all the teachers at Marrion School acted as if I had one and they knew what it was, so I didn’t much worry about it.

My father now leaned back.

“Math, honey?”

“Yep.”

“I’m impressed. And proud. I still don’t know what I want to do.”

I laughed at him. I bet it was true.

“What about biology?” he asked. “You said biology last time I visited you.”

“Biology, too, but I like math more. Everything is math—I mean, you need math to describe anything, to do a science of it. Right? Well, I can do math and biology, right? Or be of use to biologists.”

He furrowed his brow in thought.

Allen came into the room then. Allen also studied and boarded at Marrion, same year as me. Allen’s father had named him after my father, as everyone knew. Our dads were really tight friends. Sometimes I teased Allen because his dad was gay, but mostly we were close even if we didn’t hang much. Allen was thin and kept his hair long enough to hide his eyes and seemed always a little embarrassed about something.

“Hey Uncle Allen,” he said. He pushed the door closed carefully, moving slowly, methodically. “Hey, Lyta.” My name is Hippolyta, but I insisted upon Lyta.

“I asked Allen to join us,” my father said softly. Then he called to Allen, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A paleontologist.”

“Consistency! You said that last time I asked.”

Allen nodded. He dragged one of the heavy armchairs over.

“How are things in New York?” Allen asked. He sat squarely down and crossed his hands formally on his lap as if unsure of where else to put them.

We talked about family and friends a while. Then my father said, “I want to ask the two of you for a favor.”

“Sure,” Allen said. I nodded. But I felt afraid. My father seemed worried, suddenly. He frowned, and his eyes took on a sad look. It was confusing.

“Last time I visited, you remember how you both told me you wanted to do something about ... some of the problems in the world?”

“Of course,” I said. I blushed a little. We must have sounded like such kids. Who didn’t want to make the world a better place? All people planned their life around that—that went without saying. Right?

“We—Allen’s parents and Lyta’s mother and I—we believe we know of a way that both of you can help. But you’ll need to do two things. You’ll need to study geology. We have found a tutor, a very good geologist willing to come here several times a week to tutor you two. And you would need to tell everyone that you are studying geology because you want to study geology. That it was your idea to have the tutor.”

We were silent a long time. The fire popped. I looked at Allen, but he stared at the flames. Always serious.

“Why, Dad?” I whispered finally. “That’s weird.”

He looked really pained. It shocked me to see that he even looked about to cry. “It will take a long time to explain. And I will explain, I promise. What I can tell you now is that if you are good at it, you would have a chance to do something extraordinary, something to really ... force changes that would make the world a better place. But it would be best if first you just try this for a while. If you don’t like it, if you are not good at it, we can stop the sessions. How would that be?”

The fire popped again. Allen nodded. “Of course. But for me it is not ... much to ask. Paleontology, geology. Mostly the same. Many of the great paleontologists were geologists.” He looked at me. The inference was obvious: of me more was being asked.

“This is weird,” I repeated. But I trusted my father. He had never lied to me. He had never spoken a word that he had not weighed. “But I’ll try it. Geology sounds fun.”

* * * *

“Geology is boring. It’s just hard, boring facts,” the American said. “Like rocks. Yet, explain this to me. What do Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, the North Pole and North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, Nigeria, Canada’s tar fields, Texas have in common?”

He poked me with a cold metal rod. I didn’t expect that, I didn’t know he had such a rod, and I gasped involuntarily in surprise, causing pain to shoot through my limbs as I jerked away.

“What do these places have in common?” he repeated.

“Accelerated biodegradation. Every geologist knows that.”

“Yes. And this is a suspiciously interesting fact. Why, why is there accelerated biodegradation?”

“The new strains of hydrogenes, of hydrogen-generating bacteria, have spread there. They are eating the oil quickly.”

“That is not my question.” He prodded me again. I gritted my teeth in anger. I suddenly wanted to scream at him, to tell him I would kill him or that my Uncle David would break his neck or that my father would turn the world upside down until he found me and then we would expose them all.

“That is not my question,” he repeated. “My question is, why? Why all of them, nearly simultaneously?”

“No one knows.”

This time he hit me. Hard, in the thigh. The whipping motion of the rod sent sharp, bitter pain through my legs.

“No one knows!” I shouted. “The oil fields must be connected!”

“Perhaps, perhaps.” He jabbed the chill end of the rod against my ribs. “But the oil-eating bugs could never travel that fast. Around the world nearly simultaneously? No. You will tell me. How?”

“Christ, I’m a geologist and even I don’t know.”

He hit me across the thigh again.

“Oh,” I cried pathetically, starting to weep.

The chair scraped. He rose and his steps circled behind me. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked. He pulled the hood off with a snap. I started in surprise, then blinked at the lights. Tears welled as the freezing, dry air hit my eyes. I saw my cell, finally. It was clean, perfectly cubic, with a green steel door. Glaring diode lights were arranged in a ring near the concrete ceiling and aimed at me. The air on my face was shockingly cold. It reeked of urine. My urine.

Before me stood not only a chair but also a small table on which a laptop sat, turned so that I could see the screen. A grainy, low-pixel movie of me played on it: I crouched in the field station, connecting a small ten-liter aluminum barrel to a high-pressure water line feeding the test drill.

I visualized the room, to picture where the camera had sat. On a shelf of equipment, I decided. I could have looked right at the camera there on the shelf and not have noticed it, or if I had noticed it I would have assumed it was some surplus hardware and surely not on, surely not transmitting.

“We have footage of you doing it.” He whispered. “Look at that. Look.”

* * * *

“Look at that,” my father said. “Look.”

It was my fifteenth birthday, and my father took me to a small bistro in Manhattan that served Tuscan food. I ordered tortellini and after the waiter left, menus in hand, my father pointed out the windows.

“There. Do you see that guy?”

Across the street a heavy man in a wrinkled pinstriped suit stood a little to the left of the entrance of a shining glass financial building, smoking a cigarette.

“Yes.”

“Why do you think he smokes? Why doesn’t he quit?”

I shrugged. “He doesn’t really believe that it’ll kill him.”

“Oh, come now. That building houses derivative traders. That man’s probably a quant jock there. A mathematician. No, he understands statistics.”

“But he doesn’t keep it in mind. He doesn’t worry about it.”

“Good.” My father rapped the marble-topped table with his knuckles, punctuating his approval. “Now we’re getting closer to the truth of the matter. But why? Why doesn’t he worry about it?”

“It’s inconvenient to do so?”

My father shook his head. “Okay. Try this. A thought experiment. Imagine I walked over there and handed him a revolver, and convinced him that Russian roulette was as pleasurable as smoking. Would he play?”

I looked back at the man. He eyed the traffic and scuffed his feet self-consciously as he dragged hard on his cigarette.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“He would fear the roulette?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the difference? The odds are the same. Or we could make them the same.”

“The time.”

“The time. To that man, the future is an abstraction. He can’t bring himself to care about it because deep down, in his gut, in the limbic core of his brain, it’s not real to him. What happens in the future is too far away to matter. Economists even have a name for this phenomenon: exponential discounting.”

I looked back at my father. He was staring at me intensely. He leaned forward slightly, and his voice dropped.

“That’s the difference between us and them.” He waved his hand at all the passing traffic, at all of Manhattan, to make it clear that ‘them’ referred to everyone out there. “To us the future is a real place. A real world. We care about it.”

I took these words to refer to our family—to mean, you and I are especially thoughtful folks. I cultivated a bit of ignorance in this. For a while.

“You think we’re better people?” I asked, with teenage pique.

“Oh, no. Not better. Not kinder, not smarter, not more selfless, not more empathetic. Nothing like that. Nothing so noble. Just this: we care about the future—what they would call the distant future. And they don’t care about it. They can’t.” He leaned back. “And so, what we see as a clear and immediate danger, like playing Russian roulette, they see as a gossamer shadow of a threat, like smoke.”

Across the street, the man threw his butt on the ground, stepped on it, and went back through the glass doors. My father snorted, “Of course he’s a polluter, too. The future is also a place where his garbage will disappear.”

* * * *

“What is that garbage you’re putting in there?”

The video played of me attaching the cables, again and again. With my arms hoisted behind me, I could not turn to look at my tormenter. My own shoulders were in the way. I turned my head the little I could.

“What?”

The stick slammed across my lower back. Crystal sheets of sharp pain broke through me.

“Oh, god, don’t do that,” I wept. “Please. Please.”

He came up close behind me. I smelled his heavy cologne and felt his body heat and the warmth of his breath on my shoulder as he said, “You instructed your crew to pump cool water into the test well for two days. Then this.”

“I was testing for potential infection. Everyone is testing now. Before this, we were pumping down boiling water.” I swallowed. “The water we use to drive the tarry oil out—that would kill any bacteria in the area.... You have to inject cold water. That—” I pushed my face toward the screen, trying to point with my chin. “That’s a formula meant to feed hydrogen-generating bacteria. To increase the local population, so we can test it.”

There was a long pause in which I waited for the stick to hit me. Nothing happened. I heard a faint, distant buzzing. I realized, suddenly, that the man was listening to another voice. Over an earpiece or headset.

Finally, he said, “No one else uses such a procedure.”

“It’s my own,” I said in a rush. “My own. No one has been able to test for the bacteria before. As you said, it seemed to come out of nowhere. I had a theory that maybe the usual test procedures killed the bacteria in the area of the drill. So when we tested we missed the infection—the samples came up sterile because we sterilized them. Maybe the bacteria wasn’t new—we had just failed to test correctly before.”

Another long pause. I watched the looping video of me: I attach the line. I check it. Attach the line. Check it. Attach the line. Check it....

Two hands came forward quickly, into my view. Tan skin, rough-edged nails, short fingers. And, in a flash: the small finger on the right hand ended at the second joint. The tip of it was missing. But I saw this only for a moment, fast enough that I could not be certain, as the hands pulled the black bag over my head.

“You’re lying again,” he said.

And then he shouted out, “Bring the board!”

* * * *

“Should I bring my board?”

My uncle hesitated. “If you like.”

I pulled my surfboard out of the sand and started down the beach. Tall waves broke on the Baja coast, and a sharp, warm wind pelted us with fine golden sand. My uncle took off his shoes, stuffed his socks in them, and tossed them back toward the beach house. Then he jogged to catch up.

Uncle David was tall and had hard arms and moved like a cat. When he used to visit me at the Marrion home, I had loved it that other students looked at him sideways, slightly frightened. But I wasn’t scared of him: he was Uncle David.

But that was then. Now I was a college student, out on my own, trying to enjoy a break. I had split the weeklong rental of the beach house with Steve, a nice boy from the math department. Steve stood where the surf just touched his feet. He watched us walk away, holding his own surfboard but frowning thoughtfully.

“He doesn’t understand,” I said petulantly, making it clear to my uncle that I blamed him for the discord. “You know, other college kids don’t have their uncles arrive for a private meeting during their spring break.”

“You are not other college kids.”

I hissed disapproval through my teeth.

“When I was your age,” he said, pointing down the beach, “there was a lot more sand. The seawater rise has stolen much of the beach. Looks like Florida now.”

“It’ll get worse,” I told him.

He nodded. We trudged through the hot sand a while longer before he said, “You will graduate cum laude, I understand. That’s an accomplishment for Stanford, and for a double major.”

“Everybody gets an A at Stanford.”

“Not in math and geology.”

“Even in math and geology.”

He smiled. “You’re self-deprecating like your father. He could never take a compliment.”

“I’m more like my mother.”

“You have Janet’s painfully acute sense of fair play. That I grant.” He looked over his shoulder with a smirk. “And she would approve of a sensitive-looking kid like that Steve there.... But someday you’ll agree with me that you’re more like your father.”

He looked around. We were alone. “Let’s sit.”

I planted my board and we sat side by side, staring at the waves breaking on the sand. The salt sea air smell was still new and fresh to me. I twisted my heavy gold bracelet around my wrist, waiting.

“You still have that.” He smiled.

I nodded. “Why are you here, Uncle?”

“I wish I could say it was only to see you.”

“But your virtue is honesty.”

He laughed.

“I’m heading to the Valley for some business.”

“Business for my father?”

“I don’t do any other kind. But I came here because I wanted to see you alone, without others knowing. I can be seen at Stanford.”

“Why?”

“Let’s say, I want you to tell me about the oil ecosystem.”

“What?”

He brushed sand off his pants. “Humor me a moment.”

I stared into his eyes, trying to understand why he would ask me something so odd, trying to judge if he was joking in some way.

I had come to realize, after I left the strangely sheltered world of the Marrion School and was studying at Stanford, that this uncle of mine was an enigma. I had Googled him many times and found that he had long ago been a famous activist and even once a poet. But in the last twenty years, he had evaporated: there was not a reference to him that didn’t reach back in time. There were dead stay-at-home moms with a more dynamic web presence. I had no idea what he did, no idea why he flew about in suits looking ominous, no idea why I called him uncle.

“Humor me,” he repeated. “Tell me about these methosomething bacteria and the hydrowhatevers.”

I grabbed a handful of sand and threw it on my feet. “There is a whole ecosystem of microorganisms deep underground. In the oil deposits. Many different kinds of bacteria, which live on oil or on other organisms that live on oil.”

“And they ruin it?”

I shrugged. “That’s how an oil company would put it. The bacteria tend to make the oil more dense and viscous, less suitable for extracting and refining.”

“And there are two kinds of bacteria.”

“Many kinds. But two important groups. The methanogenics eat oil and excrete methane. The most successful of these are hydrogenotrophics. They eat oil but they also use hydrogen to make methane. This hydrogen comes from bacteria that eat the oil and excrete hydrogen—hydrogenes or hydrogen-generating bacteria.”

Uncle David reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a long aluminum cylinder. It shined in the sunlight, announcing clearly a very high-tech manufacturing. Only the thinnest line near one end revealed the presence of a kind of cap.

“Suppose,” my uncle said, “that this cylinder contained several strains of bacteriophages, of viruses that attack specific bacteria—extremely virulent—that would kill the methanogenic bacteria, including the hydrogenotrophic methanogenes. Suppose someone injected it into an oil well. What would happen?”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure. If it really worked, and if it could survive down there, then you would significantly reduce the methane generation. Slow the biodegradation of the oil. But the oil companies are trying that. No one has succeeded.”

“They have not succeeded.” He pulled another cylinder out of his jacket. “Suppose instead that this cylinder contained a new strain of hydrogen-generating bacteria. Very aggressive, very successful at eating all different qualities of oil. What would happen if you inserted this into the same well after?”

The cylinder flashed, blinding, as he turned it over. I reached out and took both cylinders, one in each fist. They were warm from resting by his heart. They felt almost like something alive. And they were light: empty. Only here for illustrative purposes. Or here because he came to see me before, not after, he made his more important stops on the West coast.

“If you injected this after you killed the methanogens? Wiped out the competition?”

He nodded.

“And if this stuff were resistant to the bacteriophages you put in earlier?”

“Assuming it were completely resistant to those bacteriophages.”

“They’d eat the oil. Quickly. Turn it to sludge.”

“And?”

“And excrete hydrogren. A lot of hydrogen.”

“Which could be tapped.”

“Yes. But this has been discussed, and the oil companies and the governments of the world have made it clear they consider the approach impractical, and they would never allow such a thing. It’s too dangerous.”

“More dangerous than burning the oil?”

I shook my head. “No. Probably not.”

“The problem,” my uncle said, “is that they don’t see how to make as much money off it. They are invested in their gasoline infrastructure. Their profits—I mean, their short-term profits—are larger if they don’t have to build a new hydrogen infrastructure.”

I nodded. “Sure. That’s probably the real reason they’ve resisted experimenting with such approaches. It just doesn’t make good sense for next quarter’s profits. Never will.”

“What, then, if someone else put both of these strains into the wells?”

“The oil economy would crash and we’d have to make a blitz switch to a hydrogen economy. It would cause terrible immediate economic turmoil.”

“And what will waiting do? What will inaction cause?”

I had to grant the point. “Worse turmoil—the same eventual collapse of the oil economy but with greatly worse global warming. But farther in the future. Twenty, thirty years out.”

He nodded. “So, if we don’t discount future costs radically, then this,” he pointed at the cylinders, “would be the best course of action.”

“No, a peaceful, gradual switch to alternatives would be the best course of action.”

He sighed impatiently. “Don’t waste our time. That is not going to happen.”

“You talk as if this was something other than academic.” I’d done an internship with an oil conglomerate, at my father’s request. I knew how these things worked. “But it can’t happen. How would this someone ever get close? And maybe you could get it in one well, but you’d never get it into all the major reserves.”

“Agreed. One person could not. You’d need someone inside of each major oil project in the world. And these people would have to put the bacteria and viruses into many different wells simultaneously.”

I looked at him, unwilling to follow the steps to their conclusion. “Enough riddles. What are you saying?”

“I’m asking you to go to Harvard for the geology Ph.D. I’m asking you to get a field research position in South America with a major oil company.”

The wind gusted and I squinted against the sand that blew against my face. And then it dawned on me.

“Even the Spanish,” I whispered. “Even the Spanish classes—the paid trips to Argentina, my time as an exchange student, even that was planned.”

He pressed his lips together. After a long moment, he said, “I ... I hope you still believe those were valuable things for you to have done. The summers in Argentina. You wouldn’t change that, would you?”

The truth was those summers had been the most painful part of my youth. I had never seen real poverty before, never hidden from crime, never eaten a meal with a family while in the distance police sirens screamed the constant death cry of a shantytown. The sun had been shrouded for months as thousands of squatting arsonists burned the last of the rainforest away, its cremation smoke rising up to clot the sky; and below those black clouds, fumes choked the long boulevards as a flood of cars and motorcycles belched oily blue smog. The hopelessness of it had overwhelmed me. There was no order, no planning, no vision for the future. And I alone seemed to recognize that we were trapped in a nakedly desperate, all-consuming now—in which everything was burned, devoured as quickly and as violently as possible—and after which we were obviously going to choke and starve.

“This isn’t normal,” I whispered. “Everything planned like this. It’s not normal.”

“I admit that we are planners, your father and I. But so are you.” He reached over and took the cylinders from me and slipped them into his coat, their brilliance disappearing within his dark pocket.

I stood. “This is crazy. Look at other people, they’d never put up with this, they’d get on with their lives and say the hell with this. I see how other people live. We’re like a—a cult or something. You, my dad and mom, your friends—asking people to keep secrets, to plan, to change their whole lives. Half our kids going to that secretive little school together, the other half spirited away to other private schools. That’s not normal. I know that now, I’ve seen how other people live. How can you ask this of me? How, after I’ve seen how other people live?”

“Because you see how other people live.”

That was part of the air of danger, part of the fierceness of Uncle David. His threat was not just that, at an age near fifty, he still looked like a lithe killer and cast a cold eye on everyone who passed him. It was also that his words could surprise like a blow. They were often painful, sharp, too correct, too true.

I ran my hands through my hair.

“But why?”

“You know why. To save the world.”

“That’s not enough. Forcing a hydrogen economy.”

“No, it’d take a lot more than that. Hundreds of people, doing hundreds of different things, for hundreds of years.”

“If there were such a conspiracy, you wouldn’t tell me.”

“If I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t help. You’ll keep the secret because you’ll see that you should.”

“This is crazy,” I repeated. “How can you ask this of me? Other people would tell me I’m crazy if they knew the things I did just because you ask.”

“Lyta, you’re not like other people.”

“Why do you always say that?”

He stood. “Because it’s true.”

“All my life you’ve said that. My dad too. That’s why I went to the Marrion School, they told me. But I’m not special. I’m not smarter than other kids. Not faster. Not more creative. There’s nothing special about me. You think I’m being humble about Stanford, but I’m not. Everyone gets an A, but you can tell who the smart ones are, and I’m not one of them. Why say I’m different?”

I stood too. He took my hands in his. My fingers disappeared in the folds of his rough palms. “Hippolyta.” It was one of the rare times he called me by my full name. “Do you really want to know? Right now?”

I didn’t answer. I told myself the question was rhetorical. I knew it wasn’t.

I pulled away, grabbed my surfboard, and stormed off down the beach, to the thin comfort of following Steve from the math department as the waves swept him out into the surf.

* * * *

The door swept open again. Two other men came in, then a third. I could hear something big but light banging awkwardly first on the doorframe, then against the door and the floor. They spoke in hushed voices.

“Over there.”

“Like this?”

“Right. But grab that.”

“Where should I put this?” someone asked in a voice that revealed obvious strain. I heard water sloshing in some kind of barrel.

“There.”

Footsteps circled behind me. Someone jerked my arms up and I screamed. The pain was impossible. I was certain my shoulders both dislocated. But then my hands fell to my waist. They had lifted my chain off the spike.

“What’s happening?” I asked, as the white blaze of pain subsided. Self-loathing coursed through me when I heard the fearful pleading of my tone. No one answered.

Each of my arms was seized. Keys jangled, and my chains were unlocked and fell away. They put their hands under my armpits and hauled me across the room, too quickly for me to try to walk, so that the soft tops of my feet dragged along the cold concrete. They turned me over, pushed me down onto something hard—a wood board. Velcro hissed. My arms were pressed down and wide straps were Velcroed closed over my wrists, then my ankles.

“What are you doing?”

My feet tilted up in the air. They had strapped me to a board, I realized.

“What are you—”

Water poured onto my face. For a second I thought the spray was meant to shock me. But it continued. Water filled my open mouth. I bit down, but the black bag over my head caught in my teeth. Water ran into my nose and filled my sinuses, burning. I choked, gasped, but could not find a way to breath. A horrible, wracking gag clawed at the tops of my lungs and bruised my throat. I was drowning, I was being destroyed by the water. I would have to breathe, I had to breathe, I had to breathe, I had to—

The water stopped. I coughed bitterly. Then my harsh, explosive inhale scraped at my throat and lungs.

“You will tell me now everything.” The man again.

“What—” I choked. “What do you—” The water fell into the sentence, into my open mouth, into my gasping for breath.

It was impossible. I was going to die now. Not even die. I was dead already: there was nothing left of me but the burning, the pain in my throat and lungs and stomach and nose. I was lost—all of me that was human was lost—and only a spinal, mindless, uncontrollable terror remained, a will without future that gasped for air, grasped to escape drowning.

The water stopped again.

I coughed and vomited water. It fell back into my nose, tasting of hot bile, and I had to vomit it again.

“Everything,” I managed to croak, to cling to the life my body demanded that I seize. “I’ll do anything you tell me to.”

* * * *

“I did everything Uncle David told me to do. I followed the protocols perfectly.”

I sat on the edge of the bed in my father’s hotel room, a generic suite in a mid-list hotel in Buenos Aires. It reeked of smoke; people still smoked in hotels here. He stood by the window, shoulder pushing aside dingy yellow drapes, and looked out at the night lights of the city.

“I took the starter cultures,” I continued. “And tried to breed a viable vector population, but neither would take.”

He nodded. “We knew you would do everything perfectly. That’s why you were scheduled to perform the last injection. The seeds must have been contaminated.”

“But why did you start the other injections? And weeks early! Now there’s panic at the office. Everyone knows something is happening. The whole world knows. Hydrogen blooming through desert sands!”

“There were difficulties at the other sites. We had to act or it would have been too late.” He turned away from the window. “I’m sorry, Lyta. We’ll pull you out now. Tonight.”

“No way in hell,” I told him. I stood up. “No way in hell.”

He looked exhausted. He was jet-lagged, but also clearly overwhelmed with worry. His red eyes made me suspect that he had been weeping before I arrived. He locked his bloodshot gaze on me now.

“It’s not safe. Even David agrees. We need to—”

“Fourteen years.”

“I...” But he could not finish his sentence. His hands fell at his sides, hopelessly. His gaze turned to recognition, his expression to sorrow.

“Fourteen years,” I repeated. “Since you asked me to start this mad project. College, graduate school, summers here, a worthless job with men I hate, years climbing the ladder to become lead research scientist. No lovers, no friends. I was here, working, the night my mother died. Fourteen years. For this.”

“I know, Lyta,” he whispered, barely audible. “I know. I’m sorry.” He hesitated. “Your mother never doubted—I mean, she always knew how much you loved her.”

“Why did I do it?” I asked him.

I knew what he would say. Tonight I wanted him to say it.

“Because you’re special.”

“Why am I special?”

He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. Our situations were reversed now. I went to the window and waited, holding my purse as if about to leave, while he kneaded his hands together between his knees, twisting them into fists.

“Why am I special?” I asked again.

“I ... your uncle and I ... we ... we were—we are...” He looked up at me. “GMOs.”

I thought about that a minute. “You mean gene-manipulated? Like those kids whose parents paid to make them blue-eyed and blond?”

He grunted. “I never thought of it as something so ... mundane. I should have realized that it would be less of a shock—maybe no shock—to you. But yes. Like those kids.”

“But you’re—that was years ago. They didn’t have reliable technology before your birth, did they?”

“It was done secretly. By William Marrion.”

“Oh my god. The founder of the orphanage. The man who raised you all.”

He nodded.

“All of you are...? All the kids of the orphanage?”

He nodded again.

“And what...?”

He smiled at me sadly. “Yes, ‘what’? That’s the question. We’re not all blue-eyed. We’re not all blond. What was done? Just this: we were made to care more. About the future.”

“To care more? That’s absurd.”

“No. No, it’s not. It’s basic neuropsychology. Jack has explained it to me many times. You can teach a dog to see the consequences of its actions a few minutes out, perhaps an hour out. Chew the chair and if the master sees you, you’ll be punished. But you can’t teach a dog to care about a day away. You can’t teach a dog to plan for next week. Why? Because the advanced portion of a dog’s frontal lobe is a thin wafer compared to ours.”

He pressed a rigid index finger against his forehead. “This is where the mammal brain represents the future, and also where it enables us to care about the future. And this ability is a matter of degree, not of kind. And we were ... designed to care far more about the future.”

I shook my head in wonder. “Who else?”

“All the orphans of the former Marrion Home, the people you know as your aunts and uncles. And their children.”

“Uncle Reed and Aunt Trend and Aunt Joy and Aunt Marr and...?”

“Yes. All of them. Eighty-eight in the first generation.”

“And mom?”

“Including your mother.”

“And me?”

“The genetic traits are dominant.”

I turned and looked out the window again. “So everyone out there...?”

“To them, tomorrow is real. Next year is a vague image. And five years away is as unreal, as unmoving as a fairy tale.”

He watched me for a moment, as I gazed at the city buildings and wondered about the futures behind each lit window.

“You know it’s true,” he said. “I have stood where you stand now, while Marrion told me this by recording. It seemed incredible, but I knew it was true, and I realized then that I’d always known it was true. That becomes clear now, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I admitted. My hands were shaking. I felt distant, as if I were watching myself from another time and place. These revelations weighed too much, stood too tall, for me to grasp them. My voice seemed to come of its own will.

“And so,” I asked softly, “you think you’re supermen? And you can just try to run the world, take things over, in order to make it as you see fit?”

“Oh, no, Lyta. No. We are just the only people who care enough about the future to try to save it. That’s all. We’re the only people who care.”

We were silent a long time. Then I said, “It may make things much worse, you know. All the cities might go dark, the planes grounded, the cars heaped up in junkyards. Chaos could follow.”

“Chaos is guaranteed, now or later. The question is which will be worse. It’s a matter of comparing calculated risks.”

“Calculated risks,” I hissed bitterly. He shrugged. I stared at him a long time before I said, “I’m going to finish it.”

My father shook his head. “Please, hon. They’ll watch the well heads now. They’ll watch you. A gringa.”

“No. They’ll turn to me to help protect them. They have no one else. They’ll ask me to test the wells. It’ll be even better cover than before.” I held out my hand. “I’m going to finish it. I can inject during the tests. Give them to me.”

He looked at my outstretched palm.

“Dad, you would not have come without them. I know this. Give them to me.”

He did not move for such a long time that I started to feel sure he would say no—that he would take my arm then and direct me out the door, to a car, to the airport, almost carry me like he did when I was a little girl. But then he reached very slowly into his breast pocket, and pulled out two shining cylinders. He laid them on my hand, one at a time. They clinked softly against my bracelet. I closed my fingers around the warm metal.

“I wish I was like them,” he whispered. “Like all the others. I wish I didn’t care about the future. I wish I didn’t care about the world. I wish I only cared about you.”

I put the cylinders in my purse. “So do I.”

* * * *

“I don’t care!” This was a new voice. Out in the hall. Not loud but penetrating. Also American, and older, perhaps sixties. “You’ve broken all the rules here.”

The key turned in the lock. I listened to the footsteps of two men enter the room.

After the confessions I was given a wet towel and a dry towel, and allowed to clean myself alone in the room, a silly pretense of privacy since I knew they watched me. An orange jumpsuit lay limp by the door and I dressed in that. I had to roll the sleeves and legs of it, but was glad for the thin addition of warmth it yielded.

A lot of time passed. Three meals were slipped through a panel at the bottom of the door, and then later taken away.

Finally, two men in masks came with two additional chairs and another table. They chained me to the metal chair with my back to the door, hooded me again, and left me to wait. Until now.

Two chairs scraped, they sat, and the chairs scraped again as they scooted up to the table.

“Ms. Hippolyta Sumaran,” the one I knew, the torturer, the younger man, started. Though I did not believe he would strike me again, I felt the shiver of fear to have them behind me, addressing me, while I sat there helpless. “With me is an important colleague. You will tell him what you told me.”

“Yes,” I said. My voice was a whisper.

“How did the oil plague get into the Argentine reserves?”

“I put it there.” I was ruined. Not because of fear of the waterboarding. The waterboard did not even seem so fearful now. But because I knew, clearly and without doubt, that I would break again if they put me on it. That knowledge, not the torture itself, crushed me into docility.

“How?”

“Through the test well. Where we do experiments.”

“And how did it get into the other reserves? In other countries?”

“Other people. Like me.”

“A conspiracy?” the other voice, the older man asked.

“Yes.”

“Including Allen Reed,” the younger interjected.

“Yes.”

Papers shuffled. The older man said, “you went to school with Allen Reed.”

“Yes. At the Marrion School.”

“The elite private school?”

“Yes.”

“And when were you recruited into this conspiracy?”

“At the Marrion School.”

“At the school? Together?” A tone of incredulity seeped into the older man’s voice.

“Yes.”

“You both were told to become geologists?”

“Yes.”

More shuffling of papers. “How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

This much I had confessed, but no more. I had not told him what we were.

There was a long pause. Finally the older one sighed heavily.

“Do you realize, Ms. Sumaran—do you realize how absurd that is?”

“Sir...” the younger man started.

“Shut up,” the older one demanded. “Shut up.” Then, in a softer tone, to me he said again, “do you realize how absurd that is?”

Yes. Of course it was absurd. No fourteen-year-old girl could commit to a goal more than a dozen years in the future, not a goal that required her to push aside her dreams and to bend all her life to such a purpose. She might say yes, but she couldn’t keep a secret for years, she couldn’t follow through with the education, the long toil of climbing the corporate ranks. And if she could, if there were such a girl, there could not be a dozen other such boys and girls, also raised to this purpose. Such a conspiracy was impossible. Human beings simply did not have that kind of foresight and focus. They did not have that kind of commitment to the future. Especially not upper-class American kids, with a world of instant indulgences and possibilities laid before them, tempting them every second of every day with immediate pleasures.

As if an open door stood before me, I saw clearly my way out of this cell: I had only to confess part of the truth and to yield to some of my fears.

“Don’t put me back on the waterboard,” I whispered. I started crying as I pleaded. “I did my best to say what he wanted me to say.... I could tell he wanted me to say something. Just tell me what you want me to say.”

“You bitch,” the younger man hissed.

“Out,” the older man commanded. “Now.”

“Sir, can’t you see she’s playing games with—”

“Stop. Shut up. Go to your office and wait for me.”

A chair scraped backwards. Footsteps retreated. The door opened and closed.

The older man sighed.

“Your father has influential friends,” he said. “He has made a lot of noise. He has convinced many people—including some people to whom I must answer—that a mistake has been made. I am now inclined to agree with him.”

“Please let me go,” I whispered.

“Of course, Ms. Sumaran. Of course.” There was a long pause. His chair slid back. “May I just say something?”

I did not answer.

“Yes? Well. You will never find us, Ms. Sumaran. We don’t exist. It would be best if you went home and forgot all about this. Raising trouble, making complaints, looking for revenge—dare I say, looking for justice—well, that will only make it harder to forget this mistake. It will be better for you if you just forget and move on.”

“I would like to move on,” I replied meekly.

“I’m glad to hear that. We will bring your clothes. You may dress and then we will put the hood back on you. We will take you to your embassy and drop you there.”

“Now?”

“Soon, yes.”

He shuffled papers. A pen scraped briskly across paper, signing. Then there was a pause, followed by the sound of a piece of paper—or perhaps a large photograph—being lifted and then snapped into standing.

“What is this that it says over the doors, over the doors of the Marrion School? Ambit sap—”

“Amabit sapiens cupient caeteri.”

“Meaning?”

“The wise love, others merely covet.”

“Ah. A nice sentiment. I would like to think that some of the wise do love.”

“It is love,” I told him, “that makes them wise.”

* * * *

They pulled a hood over my head, banded my hands together behind my back, and then put me into the back of a car. We drove around for a while, making lots of turns, and then they stopped, pulled me out, and shoved me stumbling forward.

“Go straight ahead,” someone grunted. Doors thumped closed, and the car’s engine gunned and retreated.

I walked a short distance, until I bumped into a wall. I heard footsteps approach, hard soles slapping on pavement. The hood was pulled off.

“Señora,” a Marine asked, looking around, one hand on his belted pistol. “Señora, estas bien? Estas herida?”

“I’m an American citizen,” I said. “Take me inside.”

After hours of questions and phone calls and stale cups of coffee, and after the ambassador allowed me to wash up in his private bathroom in his top floor office, they let me go. I walked, wobbly and shaking, to the elevator and rode it down. The steel doors opened silently on a small lobby. A man sat against one wall, reading a newspaper. Beyond him, two sets of glass doors, with a little armored Marine station between them, let out onto stone steps and then a walkway to an iron gate by the road. A black car waited by the curb, sunlight gleaming off the long hood. Its windows were opaque. Uncle David paced, like a furious lion, back and forth beside it.

When I had taken two steps toward the door, I glanced at the man reading the paper. His face was hidden behind the opened pages, his hands holding them out between us. Then I saw it: the pinky of his right hand lacked one joint.

I froze, staring. I began to tremble. I wanted to flee, but fear paralyzed me. The paper came down. A bland, small man looked at me with bloodshot eyes. He had short brown hair and a thick neck. I smelled it then: his familiar cologne.

We stared. Finally, he said softly, “I’ll be watching you.”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I wanted to say, “You’re going to be disappointed.” I meant to go back home to New York, start school again, finish my studies in math. Nothing there worth watching.

I moved toward him, half a step. It took me a long moment to find my voice. But finally I said, “I forgive you.” My words were barely audible. My hands shook. I said it again, louder. “I forgive you.”

“I don’t need—”

I cut him off. “Maybe you’re just a bad man. But maybe instead you thought something had to be done to help the world. Something that might not work, something that might be bad, something that might even make things worse—that would, in the near term, surely make things much worse. But you couldn’t think of anything else to do, and you hoped it might, just might, force an answer.” I nodded. “I understand that. I understand desperation. I understand the terrible things we sometimes do on the thin hope of a calculated risk.”

I moved on before he could respond, pushed through the heavy doors, and walked out into the blinding sunlight of a new and uncertain day.

Copyright © 2009 Craig DeLancey

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Marrion’s kids appeared earlier in “Amor Vincit Omnia [April 2008].)