Chimera, p.10
Chimera, page 10
Mira sighed and tugged her fingers through her damp hair.
“What could you possibly need it for anyway?” Amy asked.
“I was hoping I could attach a green lighting fixture to the bottom and use it to surveil the lake for the presence of our biofilm remotely.”
Amy looked sideways at her.
“I thought you retrieved your sample.”
“I did. Or at least I think I did. The drone would just help confirm as much and allow us to more carefully monitor its growth when we do formally release it.”
Amy nodded and spun a circle in her chair.
“While that’s a clever idea, I’m afraid I simply can’t risk flying the drone that low over the water, especially with the winds in that canyon. If it were to crash or become immersed, there would be no hope of repairing, let alone replacing it.” Amy must have seen the disappointment on Mira’s face. She rested her hand on Mira’s shoulder and directed her attention toward the computer setup. “Let me show you why this is so important to me.”
She brought up a map centered over Baffin Bay, the body of water separating northeastern Canada and Greenland. Clusters of jagged colored lines marred the coastal regions, occasionally stretching inland and out across the ice masses.
“Each of these lines represents an individual polar bear that researchers like me have been tracking via satellite,” Amy said. “There are fewer than twenty-five thousand left in the world, divided into nineteen distinct subpopulations, the majority of which reside in northern Canada. Their numbers continue to decline at the lower latitudes as rising temperatures force a continuous northward migration.” She turned around and looked Mira directly in the eyes. “You have to remember that polar bears are the largest terrestrial marine carnivores in the world. The primary component of their diet is seals, which don’t just swim to shore and serve themselves on platters. Polar bears have developed a system by which they use the sea ice to hunt their prey on the open ocean, but with the decline in sea ice and the resulting shift from multi-year to annual ice packs, many have been forced to seek alternative forms of sustenance.”
“By heading inland,” Mira said, recognizing where Amy was leading her.
“And up the coastlines, where they increasingly come into contact with human settlements.” Amy sighed and returned her attention to the screen. “These aren’t semi-domesticated animals content to rummage in garbage bins; they’re apex predators conditioned to hunt any available species in a harsh and unforgiving environment where weeks at a time might pass between meals. More than thirty have been killed in quote, unquote ‘self-defense’ by villagers along the eastern coast of Greenland over the past five years—a statistically significant number from a subpopulation that numbers fewer than two hundred—including the mother of the very individual you’re looking at now.”
The expression on Amy’s face was one of a proud parent showing off pictures of her child.
“Meet Miska,” she said. “I rescued her as a cub from a village called Ittoqqortoormiit—try saying that five times fast—where six adults were killed when they strayed too close to habitation. She alone survived the massacre, and only because she fetched a price I was able to pay from my personal bank account. I’ve watched her grow from an orphan who could barely feed herself to a ferocious mother who always ensures that her cubs eat first. I witnessed her birthing and weaning them on a remote camera installed inside her den. The first footage I recorded on this drone was of them emerging from the darkness and tentatively crawling away from their home, growing increasingly comfortable until they were playing in the snow without a care in the world.”
She smiled and traced her fingertip across the monitor, where the mother bear nudged her wrestling cubs to separate them.
“They’re adorable,” Mira said.
“We all make tremendous personal sacrifices in the name of science. Some of us more than others. This is not an easy life up here. It’s important to savor the simple joys whenever and wherever you can. As corny as it sounds, I think of these amazing animals as the children I’ll never have. My big white furbabies.”
“What a beautiful sentiment.”
“That drone’s my only real connection to them,” Amy said. She wiped a tear from her eye and laughed at herself. “Someone has to look after them and make sure they’re all taken care of.”
“And no one could ever do it better than you do, mama bear,” Elroy said from the entryway. He walked up behind her, squeezed her shoulders, and winked at Mira. “As you can probably tell, we old-timers won’t ever be accused of being the sanest people in any room and likely wouldn’t be welcomed back into civilized society with open arms—”
“Speak for yourself, you old goat.”
“—but we do have a pretty good thing going, don’t we?”
Amy placed her hand on top of his, and Mira suddenly realized that she’d overstayed her welcome. She excused herself and was nearly to the door when something Amy had said hit her.
“You said you had to log five hundred flight hours before the NSF would approve your requisition for a new drone,” she said. “Did you do that up here?”
“Of course,” Amy said. “It’s not like they could make me return to the States to do it.”
“Do you still have your old drone?”
“I think so, but it’s crashed so many times that I’d be surprised if it flies anymore.”
Mira smirked.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to.”
19
“I’d forgotten this thing was even back here,” Dougherty said. The massive facilities engineer lifted a dusty crate from the top shelf, set it on his workbench, and carefully extricated the old drone from the polyethylene foam insert. “Ah, yes. The Phantom Two Vision-plus. While this model was the top of the line in its day, it simply wasn’t designed with arctic conditions in mind. I can’t tell you how many times Amy brought it down here—rotors busted and guts hanging out—begging me to put it back together again. It’s almost a shame we had to put it out to pasture.”
“Does it still work?” Mira asked.
Dougherty removed the quadcopter’s casing and set it aside, exposing the inner workings. He seated a pair of magnifying lenses on the tip of his nose, leaned his head back, and studied the components.
“If I remember correctly, the power distribution board is fried, which means there’s no way of sending equal amounts of juice to each of the rotors. The infernal thing just spins like a top.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Well, sure . . . but without a new board, I’d have to rewire the whole thing so that the battery distributes power to each rotor individually, which would increase its weight and decrease its responsiveness to such an extent that it wouldn’t stay aloft for more than a few minutes in this wind, let alone with the precision you’d require for it to hover just a few feet above the water.”
“What if it didn’t have to fly at all?” Mira asked, offering a crooked half-smile.
Dougherty stared at her for several seconds, his bushy brows furrowed, until he finally realized what she was suggesting. He beamed and looked at the Phantom in a new light.
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place? That changes everything.”
“Can you do it?”
“Is it safe to assume there will be more chocolate in my immediate future?”
“I have a hunch that can be arranged.”
“Then I relish the challenge.”
“I that a ‘yes’?”
“Has anyone ever been able to tell you ‘no’?”
Mira hopped up on her toes, wrapped her arms around his neck, and gave him a flurry of pecks on the fuzzy cheek, each punctuated with a “Thank you.”
“Go on now,” he said. “You’re making me blush.”
Mira exited the workroom in the rear of the climate control center and headed for her lab. She could hardly contain her excitement and couldn’t wait to tell Sammie about her idea for the drone. If Dougherty could really retrofit the old drone for their purposes, then they would have a way of confirming that the biofilm wasn’t colonizing the lake and a means by which they could monitor its growth once they did officially release it.
She skipped down the stairs toward the giant aquarium and was just about to share the good news when Sammie looked up from her microscope, stopping Mira dead in her tracks. Sammie looked like she hadn’t eaten or slept in days. Her face was ashen and the rings around her bloodshot eyes were as dark as a raccoon’s.
“It’s about time you got here,” she said, rising from her desk. “There’s something I need to show you.”
She grabbed a box from the counter behind her and carried it over to the aquarium in hands that positively shook from caffeine overload.
“Are you okay?” Mira asked.
“Kill the lights, would you?” Sammie said, dodging the question.
Mira hit the switch just as Sammie reached the top of the ladder and turned on the green lighting array. The biofilm materialized from the open water, clinging to the glass walls above the wavering kelp, beneath which crabs scuttled across the sandy substrate and tube worms tentatively extended their feathery appendages from the rocks.
“It’s grown even since this morning,” Mira said.
“That’s not all, though. What else do you notice about it?”
Mira leaned right up against the tank. It was readily apparent that the bacteria were producing dragline silk at an unprecedented rate. Countless individual strands connected the biofilm to the glass and formed overlapping layers reminiscent of pictures she’d seen of spider webs that carpeted entire meadows or filled the rafters of abandoned barns. She was just about to ask Sammie what she’d noticed when she made the connection for herself.
“It has to be nearly a quarter of an inch thick,” she whispered, looking up and finding Sammie staring back down at her with an unreadable expression on her face. “It should be visible to the naked eye.”
“Exactly. The microorganisms themselves would only be identifiable by their communal iridescence, but the sheer amount of webbing binding them together should be impossible to miss.”
“So why can’t we see it?”
“I have a theory,” Sammie said, glancing over her shoulder at the box she’d brought with her. “Mind handing me the flashlights labeled ‘green’ and ‘white’?”
Mira passed them up to Sammie, who switched off the lighting fixture, darkening the room. A green glow blossomed from the first flashlight as she shone it down into the water. The beam created a circle of emerald iridescence that diffused outward through the biofilm, fading near the periphery. She moved it back and forth, illuminating different sections.
“Look at it from underneath,” Sammie said.
Mira crouched and peered upward, but the light on the biofilm looked just as it had from above.
“It’s the same,” she said.
“But it shouldn’t be. Sure, some amount of light should pass through the webbing and refract from the organisms at tangential angles, but the superficial bacteria should act like mirrors and reflect the light. They shouldn’t be transmitting that iridescence to the inferior surface. Now, watch what happens when I turn on the ordinary flashlight with its full-color spectrum of white light . . . ”
Sammie shone the second beam onto the exact same spot as the first. The white light seemed to erase the green, turning the biofilm invisible once more. She drew the two flashlights apart and the organisms underneath the green light appeared on one side of the tank again.
“Now, hand me the blacklight.”
Mira retrieved a third flashlight, labeled ‘Black UV,’ from the box and exchanged it for the other two. The blacklight blossomed a heartbeat later, casting a purplish-blue glare over the lab. The biofilm appeared once more, only it looked like a particulate mist trapped in a chaos of translucent spiderwebs.
“That’s the Ymirarchaea,” Sammie said. “It’s resistant to light in the ultraviolet range, which causes damage to the DNA of most microorganisms, hence the reason that marine bacteria iridesce and diatoms die when they’re too near the surface.” She climbed down the ladder, picked up her box, and returned to her microscope. A quick glance through the eyepiece confirmed that she could still see what she expected, even under only the blacklight bulb. “Now, look at the slide and watch how it reacts.”
Mira looked through the lens and saw an archaeon that had engulfed both a bacterium and a diatom, forming a single pentagonal organism reminiscent of a human cell. Fibrous strands of webbing surrounded it, adhering it to the slide. The linear grooves on the surface of the archaeon glowed faintly blue in the ultraviolet wavelengths. Sammie moved the flashlight to the other side of the lens, and the lines appeared to shift.
“It’s like the light reflected from one set of lines when you were on my right,” Mira said, “and then from the lines in between them when you stepped to my left.”
“Keep your eye on that archaeon.”
Sammie turned off the blacklight, momentarily allowing the lab to fall into complete darkness. She switched on the green flashlight and the archaeon vanished as though it had never been there at all, leaving behind a single iridescing bacterium within its body mass.
“And now the white,” Sammie said.
Something in her voice made the hairs rise on the backs of Mira’s arms.
The ordinary white light filled the view through the microscope. Sammie pressed the flashlight against the side of the aperture and shone it directly onto the slide, producing a reflection from the thin glass. When it resolved, only a vague shape of roughly the same dimensions remained, as though the communal organism—archaeon, bacterium, and diatom—had been replaced by a fluid of slightly different density than the fixation solution.
“It disappeared,” Mira whispered.
Sammie moved the light and the organism reappeared.
“What in God’s name have we done?”
20
Dougherty eased out onto the floating dock, the resin-coated aluminum slick underfoot. Waves thumped against the underside and vanished beneath the ice rimming the shallows. The wind blew straight into the open boathouse from across the lake, the far side of which was invisible through the sheeting sleet. Arendelle Island materialized from the storm, marking their initial target.
“How’s the video?” he called back over his shoulder.
“Perfect,” Mira said. She stood at the foot of the dock, her back to the lake to shield her laptop from the elements. Her screen displayed the live feed from the drone’s camera, which jostled wildly in Dougherty’s grip. The clear plastic housing caused a fisheye distortion and there were numerous dead pixels, but she couldn’t have been more pleased. “I can’t believe you were able to modify the drone so quickly.”
Dougherty knelt at the end of the dock and glanced back at her. His cheeks were red and chafed, his beard frosted with ice, and yet the expression of pride on his face was unmistakable.
“Oh, how I relish a challenge,” he said. “Not that I don’t enjoy my role at the station. It’s just that I’m rarely afforded the opportunity to dig into my bag of tricks.”
He’d looked like a little kid with a new toy when he tracked her down on her way to the lab this morning, holding his monstrous contraption in his arms. Mira hadn’t even recognized the drone at first, as it had almost looked like a gyroscope mounted inside a motorcycle tire, at least until she’d seen the tiny propellers protruding from the top. He’d rewired the current from the batteries directly to each of the rotors, encased the wiring in spare PVC pipes, and built a clear waterproof housing that he’d fitted into a ring of the same closed-cell polyethylene foam insulation that lined the inside of the station’s walls. He’d even upgraded the drone’s antenna array and the remote control so that it would be able to cover the entirety of the lake from the comfort of her lab, even the far southwestern shore, where the runoff from the melting glacier eroded the granite hillside.
A crackling sound burst from the transceiver in the pocket of Mira’s parka.
“How’s it going down there?” Sammie asked.
Mira set down her laptop on a nearby crate and brought the two-way to her lips.
“We’re just about to find out,” she said through a cloud of breath.
Dougherty took that as his cue and set the drone in the water. The image on the screen blurred before, then resolved into crystal-clear footage of smooth gray sediment spotted with the occasional rock or seashell from which brown macroalgae grew in hair-like clumps, shifting gently on the current.
“So far, so good,” Mira said. “What about the green light?”
Dougherty scuttled back down the icy dock and retrieved the remote control from where he’d left it on top of the crate. A flick of a switch and the color darkened to a deep green. The domed casing produced refractions of light that wavered near the edges of the screen.
“Now, let’s take her out and see what she can do,” he said, toggling the twin sticks with his gloved thumbs. The rotors buzzed and the drone streaked away from them, riding the waves. On the monitor, the seafloor passed in a blur until it dropped out of sight. “The controls will take some getting used to, but once you’ve got it down, it’s a piece of cake. Just be careful not to push too hard or”—the drone screamed and rose several feet from the water in the distance—“it will actually take flight.”
Mira caught a glimpse of open air and plastic spotted with water on the monitor. And then she saw only green-tinted darkness once more.
“Amazing,” she whispered.
Dougherty blushed and offered her the controls.
“It’s all yours,” he said.
“You built it,” Mira said. “Play with it for as long as you like.”
