The Descent into the Maelstrom (The Phantom of the Earth Book 4) (50 page)

Under pressure from the electorate, the ministry convinced Chancellor Marlour to allow the transhumans who lived beyond Livelle’s borders a one-time return to the city-state, primarily to aid as employees to the engineering consortiums tasked with establishing a new Livelle at a greater depth. The consortiums constructed a new, somewhat larger Livelle about 100 meters deep. At that depth, Livelle’s ground temperature was about 15 degrees C, but heat generated within the city-state would raise it closer to 30 degrees C. Transhumans could then survive for long periods of time at temperatures near 40 degrees C, but the chancellor required horizontal heat loops be constructed, as a precaution. The difference in temperature (ΔT) versus the surrounding earth was low, so Livelle required a relatively large system to remove the heat.

Beyond Livelle’s borders, a new Underground Realm formed, and for the next 80 years, humanity worked together to survive. Livellans used synisms to generate resources and sustenance and studied novel containment, burrowing, transhuman genome development, and research methodologies. Reassortment seepage seemed as extinct as Neanderthal Man, and Livelle’s population, though restrained by population controls, increased to 47,761, the ministry grew to 14 members, 9 more chancellors came and went, and the population beyond Livelle’s borders increased to 15,920.

During my own development from 135 AR to 152 AR in House Nexirenna, I formed a strong bond with my brother-in-development, Atticus Masimovian. Our parents were academics in the Education District. Their connections to the Central Government District and our hard work during the development program landed us in the prestigious Science District, where many of the high-level discussions regarding the Reassortment Strain with the central government occurred.

We formed the Selendia–Masimovian lab in 153 AR. Our team included Solstice Rupel, Carillon Decca, Charlotte Beam, Ahab Janzer, Erelah Thuddan, Turi Seaborne, Eulalie Lachaize, Nataya Mueriniti, Genevieve Sineine, and Rueben Variscan, among others. Our lab rose in prominence, particularly after Ahab Janzer developed biomat suits capable of shielding transhumans from the Reassortment Strain in 154 AR. Many brave volunteers perished at shallower depths and on the surface testing this technology, until Ahab determined it would protect a transhuman from long-term Reassortment exposure with probabilities as high as 70 percent. While three in ten with long-term exposure to the strain would die, the importance of this technological breakthrough could not be overstated: for the first time, we were able to study the deceased.

We conducted autopsies and found the Reassortment Strain exhibited traits common and uncommon to viruses. Of particular interest was its characteristic of chirality. In nature, near all biomolecules prefer one of two hands, with amino acids and proteins being designated as left-handed (or levo), and natural nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) designated right-handed (or dextro); the Reassortment Strain, with 8 nucleotides and 39 amino acids, combined the levo and dextro, something we’d never encountered before outside controlled laboratory conditions.

The strain’s mirror proteins were not performing any special action; they had the same functionality of their natural counterparts, but their slight difference rendered common protease or other treatments ineffective. Proteins do nearly 100 percent of the functional things cells do (i.e., enzymes, ribosomes, etc., are all protein), while DNA is just the code for proteins. So with proteins that were fundamentally different (mirrored) from the ones we understood well, and with the code used to make these proteins always changing, it was challenging to determine what protein was doing what. Thus, the strain’s chirality made learning or defeating it very difficult; it became clear to us how the strain confounded the sophisticated transhuman immune system, which at the time of the Death Wave provided protection from many cancers and 75 percent of the Earth’s natural pathogens.

Air samples taken from the surface suggested the strain traveled easily through the Earth’s atmosphere. It did, in fact, latch onto nitrogen gas, using it, carbon dioxide, and sunlight to synthesize energy. It reproduced at rates far faster than natural (and most synthetic) biological organisms. It’s unclear whether the strain could always reproduce outside its human host, or if this ability evolved after its release into the atmosphere. We believe the strain was designed to recognize humans as human before it moved into deadly action, entering the human body in a series of waves, penetrating through the skin, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It rapidly reproduced within the host’s neural and blood cells, killing the infected within seconds of exposure, pushing the limit on what we’d previously believed was possible biologically. Bloody discharges from the orifices and sometimes parts of the skin concluded the process. It didn’t seem to have any recognizable impact on other fauna or flora on or in the Earth.

Strike Team Commander Vastar Alalia requested the new biomat, combined with existing synsuit technology, be deployed to his teams. (Previously, the strike teams wore synsuits that protected from high temperature and pressure, but not from Reassortment.) The timing was fortuitous, for the next year, during what the media called the Great Reassortment Panic of 155 AR, an entire government housing sector (holding some 10,000 Livellans including Atticus’s and my parents) perished before the strike teams (who sustained massive losses) could contain the outbreak. They sealed off that part of Livelle with fortified carbyne walls, then flooded it with liquid ethanol and radiation.

Chancellor Hardington ordered an evacuation of Livelle to a newly hollowed city-state positioned 300 meters deep. The engineers recycled much of the composite materials from the legacy city-state to build the new one. At the new depth, Livelle’s temperature was expected to rise to nearly 35 degrees C (which included the net impact of heat generated by the laboratory and population, offset by a new system of horizontal heat loops). With an underground ground temperature near 21 degrees C in the caverns surrounding Livelle, new villages formed along the rivers and streams outside the city-state.

Secretly, prominent scientists of the time had wished the strain would’ve killed more Livellans in 155 AR. They doubted the synism vats we then used could produce enough raw materials for the ever-expanding population. (Chancellor Hardington had refused to enforce the preexisting laws on population controls and instead pressured the Science District’s synbio labs to produce more raw materials and sustenance.)

To our dismay, he was reelected twice. His popularity stemmed from his devout belief in the Twin Gods of the Cosmos and his tight control over the media. Over time, it seemed as if the people came to think of Chancellor Hardington as one of the gods, even as starvation surpassed old age as the greatest killer of transhumans in Livelle. (A positive, if morbid, side effect of Hardington’s incompetence was an increased supply of carbon for composite materials supplied by dead transhumans.)

Reassortment still loomed as a threat to humanity. Tests of the bedrock above Livelle suggested the Reassortment Strain continued seeping underground, below 150 meters. My lab drew up new plans, outlining further descent, but I had this terrible feeling all we were doing was hollowing out a tomb for 90,000 transhumans. Then the disaster many scientists foresaw, happened.

The Great Reassortment Panic of 165 AR struck on the 137th day of the year and for the third time since the Death Wave at the end of the Quaternary Period, Livellans faced the real possibility of extinction. Chancellor Hardington, who grew madder by the day, declared a state of emergency in Livelle after the Reassortment Strain breached the borders of the Information District, killing 5,000 transhumans before the strike teams achieved containment. I feared for Atticus, who’d left our lab in favor of political office, and was elected Minister of the Information District the prior year. Luckily he survived the containment breach.

The chancellor and the ministry evacuated the Central Government District to the Science District, to which I’d been elected the minister of in 164 AR, located at the lowermost level of the city-state. In the meetings that followed, a boisterous Atticus Masimovian demanded the chancellor take a drastic step and move Livelle to a depth of 2,000 to 2,500 meters. He suggested that the high heat and pressure deeper inside the Earth would ensure natural safety from the Reassortment Strain. (While I agreed with my brother-in-development publicly, privately I told him that depth would also prove untenable for transhuman existence without full containment!)

Atticus knew that my team had synthesized a variant of
C. perfringens
capable of rapidly ingesting limestone and granite, among other minerals, which we called mineral crushers; they were a programmable form of lithotroph or “rock eater,” far more advanced than any that existed Before Reassortment.

Lithotrophs are organisms that naturally occur in the environment, and are diverse enough to include bacteria, archaea, and fungi. Their metabolism is based on the ability of certain enzymes to catalyze reactions where electrons are stripped from metals and inorganic ions. This energy is transferred to cofactors with reductive potential, such as NAD(P)H, which are in turn used to reduce carbon-containing molecules into useful biomolecules. The carbon dioxide may come from biological sources (heterotrophy) or from carbon dioxide in air or dissolved in water. This combination of energy and carbon allows the organism to make new cells. Moreover, lithotrophs commonly use inorganic sulphur-containing compounds for the source of electrons, then excrete the oxidized remains as sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid readily dissolves minerals such as carbonates and can even break down other types of rock at a slower rate. This activity reveals more metal ions for sources of more electrons, as well as more carbon dioxide for cellular proliferation, and the process repeats. This process can hollow out vast sections of the Earth.

The mineral crushers my team synthesized required large-scale shifting of material (mass transfer) to be successful. Mass transfer was increased by engineering the crushers to be more mobile through an amoeboid locomotion system. They entered into miniscule cracks in rock and worked quickly; by liberating tiny sections of entrapped air in semi-permeable rock, gasses were released; by engineering these synisms to split water (using an enzyme similar to what is known as Photosystem II in photosynthetic organisms), some water from the surroundings was broken down and oxygen was released. The important part was that the crushers didn’t violate conservation of mass or energy; they received the energy from their “food,” in this case slightly reduced metals or other compounds, and they used it to grow, as well as cause change in their surroundings, (i.e. move the compounds in the limestone and granite to slightly different states). Put simply, the crushers, with far faster metabolisms than natural lithotrophs, enabled a rapid, controlled clearance of bedrock inside the Earth.

The descent was less the issue than the temperature and pressure measurements, which I’d assured Atticus would be ominous. My lab calculated that 2.0 km deep, the ground temperature would be about 65 degrees C, while 4.0 km deep, the temperature increased to nearly 130 degrees C. Tests of natural life indicated the highest temperature for any functional living creature was 122 degrees C, and that required at least 2.2 atmospheres (atm) of pressure to prevent boiling. (The air pressure of a shaft at 4.0 km would be about 1.6 atm.) The highest temperature for a functioning animal (not mere survival) was 80 degrees C for the deep ocean floor Pompeii worm (pressure of 400 atm).

We worked tirelessly to adapt the genetic characteristics of the Pompeii worm to the transhuman genome, while the engineering consortiums designed a closed thermosiphon loop that would reach into the nearby lake (170 meters deep), then back down into the new Livelle at 2,500 meters deep. The difference in temperatures would naturally drive fluid flow without pumps, so no energy would be required, while several loops would provide redundancy. Large-diameter loops would actually be used for transport of people and material to “stations” near the surface in sealed “pigs” similar to those used to inspect pipelines from the inside. The problem, as ever, was that in addition to liquids and gases, the Reassortment Strain could pass through solids: it would contaminate the water inside the piping, killing all the transhumans in Livelle. To avoid this scenario, we pumped liquid ethanol and radiation into the piping at shallower depths.

The descent didn’t go as planned. Construction on the deeper city-state experienced delays, primarily owing to a lack of leadership. Several less severe Reassortment scares put more pressure on Hardington, who’d narrowly won reelection in 167 AR based on the assurance he was best qualified to rule Livelle during its existential crisis. But where his approval had hovered near 50 percent at the time of his reelection, by the following year it had dropped to just 20 percent, the lowest for a chancellor in Livelle’s history.

He imposed Martial Law following another Reassortment scare, ceding control of the city-state to General Palomar, the leader of Livelle Guard. When demonstrators against the Hardington Administration organized in Centaurus Square, Palomar ordered the Guard to arrest anyone who gathered there and on the city’s pathways. Peace returned to Livelle, for a time. The ministry urged the chancellor to address the people. On the 245th day of the year 168 AR, he gave a speech in Centaurus Square before a crowd that turned violent.