Aeota Read online

  “Well, thanks. I gotta go now.”

  “Take a dozen eggs,” offered the woman pleasantly. “We’ve got more than we can sell.”

  Behind the wheel again, I cast frequent sidelong glances at the carton of Aeota Farm eggs on the passenger seat. The hipsters had shopped the image of the vestal virgin out of context and replaced the tobacco leaf in her hands with an uplofted, much-larger-than-life egg.

  5. JUDGE DREAD

  The opalescent murk outside my windshield had gotten pretty bad by the time I hit the outskirts of the city where AEOTA had its corporate HQ, and I was grateful I didn’t have to head any further north. Just breathing this stuff was becoming problematical.

  Past an elementary school, a mall, a junkyard, a milk-bottling plant—

  find aeota yesterday everywhere.

  The building that housed AEOTA bore discreet signage in a modest font attesting to the company’s humble presence. An elegant single-story block of offices, more viridian-tinted glass than steel, was dwarfed by a tall windowless monolithic manufactory wing longer than a couple of football fields, all utilitarian coppery metal.

  I took a visitor’s parking space and entered a pleasant atrium. A receptionist ensconced as eye-candy behind a circular desk might have wandered in off the pages of Vanity Fair magazine.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Thaumas, please.”

  “You’re expected?”

  “No. But if you tell him I want to talk about Holger Holtzclaw and Eurybia Enterprises, he might get all puppy-dog eager.”

  Three minutes later, I had a temporary badge and a guide—a young intern who looked as if he could shave the down from his cheeks with a lettuce leaf—and was heading toward what I hoped were, if not some definitive answers, at least some further milestones along this crazy road. I felt a little as if I were Nick Fury walking through the dangerous corridors of AIM, but since I didn’t see any guys in yellow bee-keeper suits, I tried to shrug off the feeling. Besides, I wasn’t right for the role of Nick: I looked awful with an eyepatch.

  The wooden door bore the title of CEO and my man’s full name: Thomas T. Thaumas.

  I don’t know who I expected to see behind that door. The Devil, Gordon Gekko, Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Evil. But whatever menacing figure my imagination might have supplied, it wasn’t that of Judge Hardy.

  Old cultural touchstones evaporate, exhibiting a half-life determined by a complex formula involving nursing-home mortality stats and the ratings of certain nostalgia-driven cable channels. Once upon a time, everyone knew the Andy Hardy movies. Mickey Rooney as the boy who defined the then-newly minted modern teenager. Familiar enough to inspire a thousand imitations and parodies. And Andy’s dad, played by actor Lewis Stone, almost as familiar. Wispy white hair receding from a high, intelligent dome of a forehead. Strong, elderly-handsome craggy face, more long than square. Clear, dispassionate, ironic gaze—stern but fair. Always dressed in plain dark tasteful suits and vest, with one of those floppy ties seen mostly on Golden Age comic book senators of yore.

  That proved to be Thomas T. Thaumas to a T. Except for the Bluetooth headset that Judge Hardy had never envisioned.

  The door shut of its own volition behind me as I crossed the oxblood-colored carpet. I had just enough time to quickly take in burl-wood walls adorned with soothing abstract paintings and a large window looking out over a grassy courtyard where AEOTANS strolled and lunched, before I confronted the CEO of AEOTA.

  Thaumas wheeled out from behind his desk, a sculpted, bare-topped mass all stainless steel, birch, and walnut in aerodynamic lines. He compensated for his stick-like legs, which barely bulked out his trousers, with one of those hi-tech wheelchairs that could climb stairs and elevate the sitter to eye-level in cherry-picker fashion. Simultaneously heightening himself as he moved forward, he produced a disorienting sensation in my brain, as if several dimensions of the universe were involuting.

  Neither smiling nor frowning, utterly neutral and businesslike, Thaumas extended a hand and we shook. I wasn’t invited to sit, and indeed there were no spare chairs.

  “Mr. Ruggles, your inquiry, conveyed to our receptionist, concerned a potential past client of ours, one Holger Holtzclaw. What is it you wish to know about our dealings?”

  “He received a letter from your firm just a day or two before he disappeared, suggesting that he should visit you. Did he ever keep that appointment? If he did, then your firm was one of his last known contacts. His wife and creditors are eager to track him down, and they have hired me for the job.”

  “Mr. Holtzclaw did indeed visit us recently. I can get you the exact date and time if you need it. But after a tour of our facilities, he learned that our technology was unsuitable for his needs, and we parted ways permanently, with no subsequent contact or open channels. I’m afraid I have no idea of his current whereabouts.”

  “What was he after? What made your tech not useful to him?”

  “Mr. Holtzclaw was interested in capturing and sequestering methane from landfills. Our own processes actually generate methane, the exact opposite of what he needed. I am afraid he learned of us through secondhand information, and misunderstood the nature of our work.”

  “What exactly is the nature of AEOTA’s mission, Mr. Thaumas? I haven’t been able to figure that out yet myself.”

  Thaumas pinned me with a glacial granitic gaze, and I felt like young Andy summoned onto the carpet for playing hooky, or knocking up Judy Garland.

  “Our firm pursues many disciplines, Mr. Ruggles, some with obvious synergies and others that might seem, to the uninitiated, to be utterly divergent. We sponsor R&D programs in a variety of areas. But our overriding ethos and raison d’être is plainly on display in our name. We believe that reality can be shaped by skilled intentions. That’s ontological engineering. The noosphere or realm of human thought governs all that is. We apply the shaping precepts we have deduced and mastered, and reality changes to match our dictates.”

  “Are you talking about introducing new ideas and products and technologies into the world, and then hoping they are used as you intend? Shaping the culture that way, like Microsoft or Google or Monsanto? Or are you pumping me full of New Age woo-woo?”

  Thaumas allowed himself the smallest of smiles. “Perhaps both, Mr. Ruggles.”

  “And what the hell is ‘totalizing affinities?’”

  “It’s as the poet famously ordained, Mr. Ruggles: ‘Only connect.’ We identify affinities, both overt and covert, explicit and implicit, then work to totalize them, to both utterly comprehend these secret connections and to foster their interlocking syzygy.”

  “Well, to be perfectly frank, Mr. Thaumas, all this sounds like a truckload of mystical, investor-befuddling bullshit to me. But so long as your stockholders are happy, who am I to quibble?”

  “You are entitled to your opinion of course, Mr. Ruggles.”

  “Do you think I can see whatever it was you showed Holtzclaw?”

  “But of course, Mr. Ruggles. You need only sign a simple non-disclosure agreement consisting of a single paragraph.” Thaumas activated his headset mic. “Ms. Bagasse, would you please bring in a copy of the standard visitor’s NDA? And please summon Dr. Pontoto conduct a tour.”

  A pretty young assistant whose perfume alone had to count as some kind of perk for the executives she worked with came swiftly. I read and signed the form. While we waited for my guide, I said, “What’s the T stand for?”

  It seemed to me that Thaumas only pretended not to comprehend. “What T would that be, Mr. Ruggles?”

  “Your middle initial.”

  “It stands for Totenwelt. It’s an old family name. It refers to the land of the spirits, the dead, the fey. My female ancestors were all witches, you see.”

  6. A VISIT WITH MICROBIAL MATT

  Before I could reply to Thaumas’s somewhat unsettling familial disclosure, Dr. Matt Ponto arrived.

  To say I was kinda taken aback by his appearance would be akin to claiming that the fussy o
ld maid had been nonplussed by the nextdoor backyard orgy.

  For a moment, I thought I had fallen into Middle-earth, or at least the Peter Jackson stage set thereof. Ponto was a bandy-legged dwarf, heavily muscled, a fact easy to discern from his arm-and-leg-revealing outfit of green cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt printed with a photorealistic nebula. He wore thick-soled hiking sandals. A shaggy mane of blond hair crested above his eyes and a thick golden beard began more or less just under them, leaving him peering out as if from a military bunker’s slit.

  He grabbed my hand and squeezed it like a garlic press deals with a ripe clove. A kind of bumbling bonhomie radiated off him. His voice was surprisingly high, at odds with the rest of him. “You’re Vern, right? Bagasse told me on the way in. Call me Microbial Matt. Everyone does. My specialty. Bugs of all sorts. But it’s a pun too on my big project. I don’t know if pun is the right word, exactly. You’ll see. C’mon, let’s go, the day’s not getting any younger.”

  Ponto grabbed my left arm just above the elbow in a nerve-damaging pinch that brooked no resistance and steered me out the door. What was it with strangers today feeling free to make use of my bod? I looked over my shoulder to say goodbye to Thaumas, but he had already swiveled his chair and was motoring back behind his desk, lowering his seat at the same time. The combined movements provided the sensation that he was shrinking, disappearing down some converging set of lines that led to a vanishing point in a surrealist canvas.

  Ponto led me through a cube farm where no one bothered to look up to the rear of the office wing, then carded us through a locked door and into the huge windowless structure behind the façade. I expected to immediately enter a facility like NASA’s famed Vehicle Assembly Building. But just beyond the entrance was only a many-doored corridor of modest dimensions, not the cavernous warehouse I had half-expected.

  “Labs and stuff here, but you don’t want to see that. Boring, innocuous. No, you want to see Vaalbara. That’s what I showed Holtzclaw. He found it fascinating. Didn’t want to leave! But first we have to get you kitted out. Otherwise you wouldn’t last too long. No, you definitely need to be able to breathe to enjoy Vaalbara.”

  I don’t think I had even said so much as hello since Ponto had taken charge. Trying to shift the conversation or slow down our pace was the same frustrating and impossible task that Bugs Bunny faced every time Taz came on the scene.

  Ponto brought us to a kind of locker room. I did a double-take. Hanging on pegs were several lime-green suits with boots and hoods attached that did indeed resemble the outfits of AIM.

  “Powered Respirator Protective Suit,” Ponto explained. “PRPS. We call them perps. Get dressed. Oh, ditch any metal, too.”

  7. “A TITLE ON THE DOOR DESERVES A VAALBARA ON THE FLOOR”

  I expected something out of the ordinary when, after discarding my phone and keys and other metallic objects on a shelf, including that mysterious charm bracelet, Ponto and I had to cycle through an airlock to see what he wanted to show me. Gasketed outer door dogged tight. The hiss, muffled by my beekeeper headgear, of pumped-out air, leaving us in partial vacuum. I sent out silent thanks to the quality-control staff at the PRPS factory. Then an equivalent hiss of new atmosphere arriving. Finally, the rubber-buffered inner door unlatched. And on the far side—

  We had stepped out onto a small railless lanai or platform that projected out, midway up a wall, over a high-roofed expanse of seemingly empty “factory” floor that must’ve been equivalent to about a dozen football fields in dimensions of six by two. The illumination inside this vast space was weird—like outdoor sunlight, but considerably less bright than noon of a cloudless day, and also with uncanny spectral differences I couldn’t quite pin down.

  Sudden slow and weighty ripplings twelve feet below the platform forced a realization upon me. What I had taken for a flat featureless floor was really the top layer of an enormous tank full of—something. From the nature of its movements, I surmised that the slinkily undulant material, a glabrous blue-green shot through with streaks of gray and opal, formed a seamless blanket atop millions of gallons of unknown fluid.

  I turned to Ponto, and his voice reached me via speakers built into the hood of my perps.

  “The light mimics what we understand to have been the unprocessed sunlight of the Archean Eon, some four billion years ago. Seventy percent of our current luminosity, with more UV. Our young sun was lazy and liked to spit. Vaalbara was a supercontinent of that era, hence the code name.”

  “And the floating carpet is—?”

  Ponto grinned big behind his plastic faceplate. “That’s LUCA.”

  “You named this stuff after a Suzanne Vega song?”

  Ponto promptly pish-poshed my ignorance. “Last universal common ancestor. The rudimentary firstborn Terran, and mother of all subsequent life on the planet.”

  “And you found this living fossil where?”

  “We didn’t find it. We reverse engineered it from many different extant organisms, including the methanogens in your gut. Methano-brevibacter smithii and its cousins.”

  “So it’s just a simulation of the original.”

  “If you insist. But we think it’s pretty darn close to identical. That makes it an emulation, which is qualitatively superior to a mere simulation.”

  “You say ‘Franken-STEIN’ and I say ‘Franken-STEEN.’ How come the airlock?”

  “LUCA is an anoxic methanogen. Oxygen would kill it, and it pumps out methane as a byproduct of its metabolism. That’s why you couldn’t bring in any metal that could strike a spark and set the whole atmosphere off. Can you imagine the results? Even the electric lighting units are behind transparent barriers.”

  “What’s in the tank?”

  “An emulation of the Archean ocean. Different pH, higher salinity, different dissolved mineral mix. We had to measure analogous existing African alkaline lakes with Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry to learn—”

  “T.M.I., Matt. T.M.I. Just answer one last question, though. What’s it for?”

  “What is life for, Vern? LUCA is its own reason for existing.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, kid. Nobody invests hundreds of millions in research and infrastructure and daily maintenance on something that has no payout. What’s AEOTA’s stake in this? What’s their intent?”

  Ponto’s face registered genuine dismay and sadness. “Can’t you believe in discovering knowledge just for its own sake, Vern? We do, here at AEOTA.”

  I gazed out over the Sargasso of purposeless flatulent crud. The odd light and the unvarying expanse, as well as the hypnotic small oscillating and spreading quivers of LUCA’s bulk, began to have a disorienting effect on me. The walls of the space seemed to swell and bulge and pulse before they receded, eventually disappearing entirely, while the carpet of LUCA spread to fill the new vacancy. The roof evaporated, revealing the low-intensity Archean sun. The limit of my new vision was the far horizon of the planet, a globe entirely covered in this slime. And I—I was standing on the prow of a ship I couldn’t see, moving slowly on an endless voyage across the unchanging monoculture.

  I felt myself getting dizzy. I began to sway a little.

  Ponto’s gloved hand on my shrouded shoulder brought me back to the present reality.

  “You feeling okay, Vern? Maybe you should put your head between your knees.”

  “That’s for nosebleeds…” I started to say.

  And then Ponto’s reassuring hand slipped down my back, was joined by its sturdy gloved mate, and despite my assailant’s dwarfish stature, those two traitorous mitts managed to shove me off my feet and over the edge of the slab.

  8. ROLL OUT THE WELCOME MAT

  The fall took an eternity. I seemed to plummet for days. I had time to anticipate my landing, plan my escape from the Vaalbara room, and plot and carry out my elaborate revenge on Microbial Matt, Thomas T. Thaumas, and the entire human resources flowchart of AEOTA, including that pretty administrative assistant who smelled
so classy. But all my rational forecasts were to prove useless.

  I hit the surface of LUCA like a Hollywood stunt man hitting an air mattress, nice and cushioned. I bounced twice in a low arc, then thrice, finally coming to a rest totally unharmed, so far as I could tell. That I did not pierce the surface and fall through to the Archean sea was likewise welcome.

  But something was still wrong. It took me a few seconds before I realized what.

  I could smell an odor other than my own fear-sweat and booze-breath.

  I could smell the sea, this particular ancient sea and whatever vegetal musk its lone citizen contributed. I expected also some kind of rotten-egg smell from LUCA’s farts. But then I remembered that methane was scentless, and the typical sewer-gas smells we all recognized came from other chemical components that must have been absent here. It dawned on me that the pong was identical to the odor that had wafted from the box of sludge that Brevis Baxter had given me in the bar earlier today.

  The fall must have split a seam in my perps.

  Whatever the original capacity and duration of my air supply, it was now compromised by the invading methane atmosphere. Suddenly I felt—or imagined I felt—a scratchiness in my throat.

  I had to move fast.

  I flipped off my back and got into a hands-and-knees posture. From that position, I tried to stand. But the wavering, flexible membrane that was LUCA kept knocking me off my pins. It was worse than trying to remain upright in a bounce house full of birthday-cake-sugared-up kids.

  In the few seconds of verticality I achieved on each attempt before toppling over, I managed to discern that the viewing platform was now empty of anyone, and the door back into the AEOTA HQ was shut. I also noted with relief that there was a ladder bolted to the wall, leading up from LUCA—actually, presumably, from the level of the underwater floor—and to the lanai.