Phytosphere

“Don’t worry about samples. I’ll bring those. You just bring your mind, Gerry. We’re nothing but a bunch of engineers. We need someone telling us what to do.”

The next day, in Copernicus, Gerry stood with Stephanie in the control booth behind Mitch and two other technicians. Out in the control area—a pressurized warehouse space about a thousand yards square—two platforms stood ready, each capable of generating its own singularity and gravitational field, a speck of laboratory-created black hole, as Mitch called it.

The first and bigger generating platform stood anchored in the center of the control area, while the second had wheels and was set to travel around the main platform, much the way the Moon revolved around the Earth. Infrared cameras—dismantled and reconfigured from the Alleyne-Parma cameras—hung from overhead scaffolding, ready to record the results. The wheeled platform—Platform 2, as the engineers called it—ran on rails.

Gerry tapped his chin a few times. “Is there any way we can take Platform 2 off its rails?” he asked Mitch.

A knit came to Mitch’s brow. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Because I want the option of increasing its gravitational pull. The closer it gets to Platform 1, the stronger its gravitational pull against Platform 1 will be.”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” said Mitch. “We can control the g-force artificially from here.

But why would you want to increase gravitational pull?”

Gerry didn’t immediately answer. “You’ve got both platforms geared to their scale strengths?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s give it a shot.”

Mitch spoke into a microphone. “Sal? Kev? You can take the xenophyta into the control area.”

Two junior technicians emerged from doorways leading into the warehouse, pushing big carts loaded with lab coolers. They maneuvered these carts as far as Platform 2’s rails, then lifted a total of eight coolers over, placed them equidistant in a circle around Platform 1, and bolted them into place. They unclasped the lids from each.

Gerry glanced up at the regular camera monitors and got a top view of the nearest cooler. How harmless the living xenophyta looked. Nothing but a box of green sludge. And yet this sludge was killing millions on Earth.

Sal and Kev left the control area.

Mitch and the other engineers charged up the first singularity.

At first nothing happened, and Gerry thought his gravity theory was a bust. But, after a minute, an emerald mist rose from each cooler, and this emerald mist stitched itself in a perfect sphere around Platform 1’s singularity. As the minutes ticked by, the emerald mist thickened, until finally it was so dark it was almost black. The infrared cameras showed a warming of the entire sphere, with parts of it edging into yellow. The xenophyta maintained the same scale distance from the singularity that the phytosphere did from Earth.

At this point, technicians engaged Platform 2. It circled around Platform 1, simulating the movement of the Moon around the Earth. As the final xenophyta in the coolers drifted up and joined the rest of the miniphytosphere, the technicians keyed in the necessary sequence and soon the secondary singularity exerted a gravitational pull in scale relation to the Moon’s.

According to the infrared cameras, a stress band developed immediately, an amorphous bar of heat that traveled from the north to the south pole, and went around and around with the revolutions of the Moon.

Tides proven. The phytosphere began to slowly counterrotate. This counterrotation was centrifugally strong enough to keep the model phytosphere in place, while the pull of Platform 1’s gravity kept the whole thing tethered. Gerry realized that the phytosphere was a delicate thing, as nuanced as an egg.

“Could we send in the probe?” he said.

Mitch leaned into the microphone. “Kev, do you want to introduce the probe?”

Kev emerged from one of the doors. This time he was safety-belted to a long nylon strap. As he got closer to the singularity, he had to dig his heels in against the artificial gravitational pull. Even inside the control booth, Gerry felt a slight tug toward the observation window.

Kev carried a Styrofoam ball the size of a softball. He waited for the Moon to pass, stepped over the rails, and approached the Earth. The whole primitive setup reminded Gerry of all the cheap, underfunded research projects he had ever been involved in. Kev unlatched his tether so the Moon wouldn’t crash into it, crawled to a ring anchored into the concrete floor, attached himself with a smaller tether, and stood up, a man in a white hazmat suit standing before a large green sphere that was like a boiling and shifting ball of algae.

Kev tossed the Styrofoam ball into the phytosphere and the gravity pulled it in. A string was attached to the ball, as they didn’t want the ball crashing directly into the singularity, but rather for it to hover inside the phytosphere. Various instruments were embedded in the Styrofoam ball, including a microscopy camera. Here was Smallmouth 2, thought Gerry, not without some chagrin: a Styrofoam ball and a piece of string. Yet he was used to this kind of thing, working with everyday household objects and coming up with at least some kind of scientific result. In the cash-strapped Department of Ocean Sciences at NCSU, that’s the way he had done things.

Kev now looked like he was flying a kite, only the kite was a giant green sphere about twelve yards in diameter.

Gerry went over to the microscopy screen. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Stephanie and Mitch crowded behind him as he took a seat.

Gerry pointed. “Just as I suspected. The flagella have grown active, like they do in the real phytosphere.” He double-checked a readout screen, which had graphs to measure and tabulate a

number of phenomena. “You can see that the cellular electrical activity within the flagella has increased tenfold. In other words, they’re flexing their muscles and joining up with each other. And look at this.

They’re actually producing the scaling material for the carapace. Probably not at the same rate they actually do in the phytosphere, because we haven’t provided this sample with any water or light, but I think we can safely conclude that gravity is definitely the trigger. Without gravity the xenophyta more or less remain in a state of stasis. Add gravity, and it’s like rain has come to the desert. Everything starts to grow.”

“So how’s this solve our problem?” said Mitch. “How can we possibly take the gravity away and put the phytosphere in stasis mode? We would have to take the whole Earth away in order to stop the gravity trigger.”

Stephanie put her hand on Gerry’s shoulder, as if preparing him for the blow of what was looking like another impasse.

“We don’t have to take it away,” he said. “We don’t even have to worry about the Earth. It’s the Moon we have to concern ourselves with. The Moon creates the stress band, and that’s the key to solving this whole problem. We just have to fool around with it. What happens when the stress band passes over the flagella? I always knew there had to be a connection between the two. You see how there’s an excess of electrical activity in the flagella? And look at this statistic. About two percent of the flagella are shorting out completely and not coming back online after the stress band passes. The other ninety-eight percent all seem to experience some kind of seizure activity before going back to their usual profile. Because the stress band isn’t strong or constant enough, it gives the small percentage of destroyed flagella a chance to regenerate. If it were strong enough…”

Mitch looked more closely at the readouts. “Gerry, I think you’re onto something.”

“Let’s increase the Moon’s gravitational field. I want to see if we can increase the short-out rate by upping the pressure of the stress band. In fact, I want to increase the gravity until we get a hundred percent short-out rate. Let’s kill all those damn things if we can.”

“Gerry… are we working toward a model here? Because how the hell do you expect to increase the Moon’s gravity in real life?”

“I expect to do it on a shoestring budget, like I do everything else.”

Mitch hesitated, but finally gave his technicians a nod.

The technicians keyed in the necessary commands to increase Platform 2’s gravitational field.

As the strength of the gravity increased, Gerry watched the readouts carefully, making sure all of them were recorded, particularly the short-out rate. The short-out rate in the flagella increased from two percent to five, and then ten percent, even as the temperature of the stress band rose dramatically. As the short-out rate reached fifteen, then twenty percent, the color of the small phytosphere changed, becoming a light green. Its entire surface quivered. The short-out rate jumped exponentially to forty percent, then to eighty percent, as the mock-up Moon exerted an ever stronger pull on the scale-model Earth.