Immortality (2 page)

Her body stiffened. A disembodied voice was whispering into her left ear. The words were unintelligible… garbled, but unmistakably evil. This can’t be happening. She screamed out in frustration and grief at the seeds of budding madness.

COBIC-3.7

Mark kept up his pace hiking across the foothill terrain. The exertion had long ago passed from a conscious effort into machine-like automation. A trickle of sweat ran down one side of his face. His build was average, but his legs were nicely muscled and responded well to the exertion. He was wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a Sierra Club sweatshirt. His black hair had thin streaks of gray. A backpack pressed down on his shoulders. A pair of sunglasses hung from his neck by a nylon cord. The sun was extremely bright passing through the thinner air. He squinted but left the glasses off. He wanted to see this place the way it truly looked. He wanted no filters of polarized glass to alter the appearance of what nature had put here.

A breeze swept up the slope, pushing him from behind. The climb had been more difficult than he’d remembered from the trip half a year ago. In Wyoming, what the locals called
a hill
was a solid incline that went on for miles. These were the foothills of the Rockies. The ground was covered with boulders between which sprouted knee high grass and sage and small plants that carried burrs. Mark looked off into the distance. The rocky terrain ended a mile downhill where it blended into oceans of wild grass. He watched as the wind pushed huge waves through the grassy stalks. The sky was clear except at the horizon where a weather front was moving toward them. The storm was a bruised wall of clouds floating over the plains a hundred miles in the distance.

Six of them were on this expedition. They were doing
paleobiological research
. This was a new science and Mark Freedman was a founding member. At late middle age, he’d accomplished many of his early dreams. The only problem was that with each dream attained, three more had arisen in their place. He was a Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist, yet still worked as a professor at UCLA. He had been happily married but now lived with a female student less than half his age.

His five companions on the expedition were all graduate students from his classes. These expeditions were not games. The work was real. The goals were serious. He could have taken anyone on these outings, but these students were handpicked and brighter than many scientists he knew – and far more eager and easily led.

The destination of this outing was a site Mark had named A4, designating the fourth potential location in the region to be explored. A4 was a half-mile slope along the northeastern rim of the foothills. The terrain that had once been an inland sea was now a sea of grass. He hoped to find fossilized mats of bacteria deposited in the limestone croppings. The mats were remnants of a rare, still existing strain of
Chromatium Omri
bacteria named
Chromatium Omri BIC-3.7
. Mats previously unearthed by Mark had proven this strain was a throwback which had first lived 3.7 billion years ago. As the bacterium’s discoverer, Mark had been the one who had named the creature and given it the acronym of COBIC-3.7.

Mark’s COBIC was the oldest known form of motile life on Earth, the first cousin to protoanimals, the very nexus of the great kingdoms of plant and animal; it was literally the origin of an evolutionary branch which would eventually lead to all animals, including humans; and it was still swimming and living among us. Ten years ago, Mark had been able to link living specimens with the fossil mats. That link had proven his theories and earned him a Nobel Prize due to his solid research and a generous dose of luck. Winning this level of acknowledgement had changed his life and given him new reasons to dig even deeper into the questions surrounding this unusual microscopic creature.

Mark had recently developed a novel way of analyzing ground-penetrating radar images from satellites. The new technique revealed geological clues to where COBIC bacterial deposits might exist. The government had been happy to assist an eminent scientist in his work, especially if it might have defense implications. He had been given limited amounts of raw data from an older generation of military surveillance birds. His work with the satellite data had led him to over fifty possible sites, eight of which had already turned out golden, and heavy with mats of COBIC-3.7. That he had found any mats at all was remarkable. His bacterium was a free-swimming creature that resembled a capsule with a tail on it. Why had they ended up tightly packed into clumps of floating dead? In some cases, the mats were dozens of feet long with populations reaching into the countless trillions.

His fieldwork had uncovered the additional surprise that COBIC-3.7 was not as rare as originally theorized. His evidence showed that at one time COBIC had been a dominant species which had almost died out during the same extinction event as the dinosaurs. Mark was certain this line of investigation would earn him his second Nobel Prize. He was convinced the bacteria held an important clue to the mass extinctions of the Cretaceous period. He had formulated a theory that the dying off of his bacteria could have been one of the triggers of the
extinction events
. The tiny bugs could have been a vital link in ancient food chains; and without them, the greatest beasts of all had perished. By comparing fossil samples from different periods, his investigation had shown the bacteria were going through long cycles of population growth and decay, cycles measured in hundreds of millions of years. Mark believed that during the final cycle, it was the combined environmental strain of huge animals and climatic shifts that pushed COBIC-3.7 and other bacteria over the edge and took the dinosaurs with them.

Up ahead of Mark, a student named Marie stopped walking to take a drink from her canteen. The weather was far too hot for October, but this had been an odd year of fires and floods and droughts. Global warming was catching up with them. Mark stared at her, imagining the flawless body he knew was hidden beneath her loose-fitting clothes. Marie was one of those blonde haired, blue eyed flowers that grew wild on the beaches of Southern California – in her case, Venice Beach. He had once seen her at the beach in a small bikini and roller-skates, and he’d never forgotten that heart stopping image.

A mild shove came from behind. Mark stumbled half a step forward. Another of the gals had pushed him. “Get going, you dirty old man,” she said.

Mark turned and stared at her. She had her hands on her hips and appeared stern, but there was a hint of a smile on her lips and in the corners of her eyes. The smile was contagious. Mark fought to keep a neutral expression.

“You made me into what I am,” he said.

“Don’t rub it in,” she said.

“Love to... Your place or mine?”

The girl puckered her lips into an air-kiss that said,
not a chance.
Her name was Gracy, and Mark was certain he was madly in love with her. They had shared his condo in Marina Del Rey for more than a year. Their relationship had been anything but simple. Gracy was strong-headed and wanted
her way
in everything. Mark was the same, except stronger and more stubborn.

In the beginning, their relationship had been overheated. He was wild about her looks, and she was in lust with his mind and his fame. A year later, she had moved into his place. Gracy had made it clear that she wanted their living arrangement kept a secret at UCLA as much as Mark did. The sneaking around had been fun and had lasted for several months. But inevitably the word had spread, and now everyone in the department knew their secret. Gracy had been embarrassed by her newfound whispered notoriety. She was the grad-student who had bagged the infamous Professor, the most desirable faculty member on campus. She had tried to blame Mark for the leak, but they both knew the gossip had been spread by her girlfriends whom she’d sworn to secrecy.

Some of the students were straggling behind. Mark slowed, giving them the opportunity to catch up. Gracy continued to walk at her own pace which was taking her out into the lead. Mark loved her most when she was displaying this kind of independence. She was twenty-three years old and had the looks everyone considered the
natural
California girl. She had a perfect body and long straw colored hair that was real and not from a bottle. She could have been one of those girls seen on a beer commercial, and might have been except for one thing: Gracy was determined to be recognized for her brains, not her looks. She had one of the highest grade point averages at UCLA and was on her way to earning a Ph.D. a year ahead of schedule.

Mark stared at her as she continued to put distance between them. Her clothing was a mix of Wyoming and
The Coast
. She had on jeans, an old silver studded belt, a t-shirt, an insulated vest, and a funky western hat. She was getting too far out in front of him. Mark called back to the stragglers. “Come on folks! When we get there, it’s Miller Time!” All he got in response were groans, but the pace did pick up.

The forced march ended at a rocky knoll. Mark laid a map out on the ground and pegged the corners with stones. Gracy sat opposite him and was busy with her field notes. The other students were resting and talking among themselves. Mark suspected the topic was mutiny and smiled. He switched on his GPS. The device was a military model the size of a cell phone and cost ten times as much as a commercial GPS. Most civilians were not allowed to own this kind of military hardware, but a Nobel Prize and called in favors got him altitude and map coordinates accurate to less than an inch.

“This is a good place to set up camp,” he said. “Site A4 is all around us.”

“Groovy... Why don’t I break out the beers?” said Gracy.

“You know I never drink on duty.”

“Sure,” said Gracy. “And you never swear and always hold the door for ladies.”

“Duddly Do-Right at your service.”

Gracy opened the lid of what Mark called his specimen container. The Coleman ice chest would be filled with fossil specimens on the return trip; but right now inside were several blocks of dry ice, four six packs of Miller, and fifteen pounds of frozen ground meat.

The iced beer flowed down Mark’s throat, taking with it any remnant of fatigue. Marie and Tony had gone off in search of wood and, Mark suspected, each other. He gazed around at the vast surroundings. On the west side of his hill were the beginnings of the Rocky Mountains. On the east side was the ocean-sized basin of grass. Gracy had the beer raised to her mouth. Mark reached over and tickled her sides. She spit beer all over him and the map.

“You bastard!” she yelled.

She grabbed him and they wrestled on the ground until he had her pinned. Her cheeks were flushed.

“Give up,” said Mark.

“No!”

Some leaves were tangled in her hair. She squirmed under his weight, but he had her solidly pinned. He felt her muscles relax as she stopped fighting him. He knew she was trying to catch him off guard and didn’t give her a break when she suddenly tried to roll him off.

“All right,” she said. “What’ll it take for you to let me up?”

“A kiss.”

“Never!”

Mark kissed her on the lips then got off her cautiously as if she were a cat about to strike. Gracy sat up. She removed a leaf that was dangling over her face. Her hair was a mess of blonde tangles. Mark could tell by the look in her eyes she was plotting revenge.

~

The sun was creeping down toward the western rim of mountains. The storm clouds were half again as close as they had been in the afternoon. The team had been working the site for hours.

Mark looked over another piece of limestone. There had been several fossils of large marine animals but no mats of
Chromatium Omri
. This piece of rock was no different. Gracy had taken charge of the two students responsible for chipping off vertical slabs of limestone. The other three were off scouting.

The bacteria should have been here. Mark turned around and pitched a small piece of limestone down into the valley toward a pair of hawks that were circling in the distance. The hawks were in no danger. The rock sailed far enough out that it landed silently hundreds of yards down the slope.

“Forget it,” he mumbled.

Gracy turned around and stared. Mark said it again, only louder. “Forget it.” The day was shot. They had enough provisions to stay for two nights. If tomorrow was a bust, they would have to hike back into town to re-supply and then out again to a different site. He hated being wrong.

The sun was gone. The base camp was a collection of dome tents scattered across a hillside clearing. The arrangement of tents had been completely random. Several campfires illuminated the surrounding boulders and tents with flickering orange glows.

Mark wore his reading glasses. He was sitting on a folding stool outside his tent. A Coleman lantern hanging from a pole cast a white hot light onto the ground. Arrayed in front of him were poster sized satellite photographs. The photographs had a slight curl from being stored in a tube. The sensors that had collected these images worked in the infrared region of the spectrum. Plants and trees were a bright red. Ground formations were paler colors of blue.

The sounds of discussions and the sizzle of grilling burgers were drifting from the other side of the camp. The smell of food was working on Mark but he ignored it. Minutes ago he had stopped examining the COBIC sites and was instead looking at a satellite image of the American Northwest forests or, more accurately he thought,
what was left of the northwest forests
. The lumber industry had succeeded in harvesting far too much of that ancient place. Trees hundreds of feet tall and older than western civilization were gone. There were single trees that had been growing for thousands of years. He grew crazed seeing this evidence of mankind’s idiocy. Humans were one of the few animals that went merrily along consuming its environment until it no longer supported life, then moved on; locusts were another. Someday there would be no place to move on to. It might take generations, but sooner or later we would run out of something critical, and then what? Look at our oil supply. Fossil fuel would be gone soon, and were we creating a replacement energy source? Not likely. What did we have to show for our concern? Not much except some rich politicians, a bankrupt Middle East policy based on our addiction to oil, and terrorists indirectly funded by our addiction who wanted to annihilate us.