Skeleton Coast

Of theRove and all those aboard her, the official report listed her as lost at sea. And that wasn’t far from the truth, though she lay not under hundreds of feet of water, but under an equal amount of pure white sand, nearly eight miles inland from where the icy waves of the Benguela Current pounded against Africa’s Skeleton Coast.
2
THE LABORATORIES OF MERRICK/SINGER
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
PRESENT DAY
SUSANDonleavy sat hunched like a vulture over the eyepiece of her microscope and watched the action unfold on the slide as though she were a god of Greek mythology being entertained by mortals.
And in a sense she was, for what lay on the slide was her own creation, an engineered organism that she had breathed life into as surely as the gods had molded man out of clay.
She remained motionless for nearly an hour, enraptured by what she was seeing, amazed that the results were so positive this early in her work. Against all scientific principles, but trusting her gut, Susan Donleavy removed the slide from the scope and set it on the workbench next to her. She crossed the room to where an industrial cooler hulked against one wall and removed one of several gallon jugs of water kept at precisely sixty-eight degrees.
The water had been in storage for less than a day, having been flown to the lab as soon as it had been collected. The need to keep fresh water samples was one of the principle expenses of her experiments—nearly as costly as the detailed gene sequencing of her subjects.
She opened the jug and smelled the salty tang of ocean water. She dipped a dropper into its surface and siphoned up a small amount, which she then transferred to a slide. Once she had it centered under the microscope, she peered into the realm of the infinitely tiny. The sample teemed with life. In just a few milliliters of water there were hundreds of zooplankton and diatoms, single-celled creatures that formed the first link of the food chain for the entire ocean.
The microscopic animals and plants were similar to the ones she’d been studying earlier, only these had not been genetically modified.
Satisfied that the water sample hadn’t degraded in transport, she poured some into a glass beaker.
Holding it over her head, she could see some of the larger diatoms in the glare cast by the banks of fluorescent lights. Susan was so focused on her work she didn’t hear the door to the lab open, and since it was so late she didn’t expect anyone to be disturbing her.
“What have you got there?” The voice startled her and she nearly dropped the beaker.
“Oh, Dr. Merrick. I didn’t know you were here.”
“I’ve told you, like I tell everyone in the company, to please call me Geoff.”
Susan frowned slightly. Geoffrey Merrick wasn’t a bad sort, really, but she disliked his affability, as if his billions shouldn’t affect the way people treated him, especially staffers at Merrick/Singer who were still working toward their doctorates. He was a year over fifty, but kept himself in shape by skiing nearly year-round, chasing the snows to South America when summer came to the Swiss Alps. He was also a bit vain about his appearance, and his skin remained too tight following a face-lift. Though a doctor in chemistry himself, Merrick had long since given up lab work and instead spent his time overseeing the research company that bore his and his ex-partner’s names.
“Is this that flocculent project your supervisor ran past me a few months ago?” Merrick asked, taking the beaker from Susan and studying it himself.
Unable to lie to get him out of her lab Susan said, “Yes, Doctor, I mean, Geoff.”
“It was an interesting idea when it was presented, though I have absolutely no idea what it could be used for,” Merrick commented, handing back the beaker. “But I guess that’s what we do here. We chase down our whims and see where they take us. How’s the project coming?”
“I think okay,” Susan said, anxious because no matter how nice he was, Merrick intimidated her.
Though, if she were truthful with herself, most people intimidated her, from her boss down to the older women she rented her apartment from and the counterman at the cafe where she bought her morning coffee. “I was about to try an unscientific experiment.”
“Good, we’ll watch it together. Please proceed.”
Susan’s hands were beginning to tremble so she placed the beaker on a stand. She retrieved the first slide, the one containing her engineered phytoplankton, and sucked up the sample with a fresh dropper.
She then carefully injected its contents into the beaker.
“I forget the particulars of what you’re doing,” Merrick said, standing over her shoulder. “What should we be seeing here?”
Susan shifted to hide the fact his proximity made her uncomfortable. “As you know, diatoms like this phytoplankton have a cell wall made of silica. What I’ve done is, well, what I’m trying to do, is find a way to melt that wall and ramp up the density of the cell sap within the vacuole. My engineered specimens should attack the unaltered diatoms in the water and go into a frenzy of replication and if things work out right…” Her voice trailed off as she reached for the beaker once again. She slid a hand into an insulated glove so she could touch the glass container. She tilted it onto its side but rather than spilling quickly, the water sloshed up the side with the viscosity of cooking oil. She righted the beaker before any dripped onto the lab table.
Merrick clapped, delighted as a child for whom she’d just performed a magic trick. “You’ve turned the water sort of gooey.”
“Kind of, I guess. The diatoms have actually bound themselves in such a way that they capture the water within a matrix of their sap. The water’s still there, it’s just held in suspension.”
“I’ll be damned. Well done, Susan, well done.”
“It’s not a total success,” Donleavy admitted. “The reaction is exothermic. It generates heat. Around a hundred and forty degrees in the right conditions. That’s why I need this thick glove. The gel breaks down after only twenty-four hours as the engineered diatoms die off. I can’t figure out the process behind the reaction. I know it’s chemical, obviously, but I don’t know how to stop it.”
“I still think you’re off to a tremendous start. Tell me, you must have some idea what we could do with such an invention. The idea of wanting to turn water into goop isn’t something that struck you out of the blue. When Dan Singer and I started working on organic ways to trap sulfur we thought it might have applications in power plants to reduce emissions. There must be something behind your project.”
Susan blinked, but should have known Geoffrey Merrick didn’t get where he was without a keen sense of perception. “You’re right,” she admitted. “I thought maybe it could be used for settling ponds at mines and water-treatment plants and maybe even a way to stop oil spills from spreading.”
“That’s right. I remember from your personnel file, you’re from Alaska.”
“Seward, Alaska, yes.”
“You must have been in your early teens when theExxon Valdez hit that reef and dumped all that oil in Prince William Sound. That must have had quite an impact on you and your family. It must have been rough.”
Susan shrugged. “Not really. My parents ran a small hotel and with all the people on the cleanup crews they did okay. But I had a lot of friends whose parents lost everything. My best friend’s parents even divorced as a result of the spill because her dad lost his job at a cannery.”
“Then this research is personal for you.”
Susan bristled at his slightly condescending tone. “I think it’s personal for anyone who cares about the environment.”
He smiled. “You know what I mean. You’re like the cancer researcher who lost a parent to leukemia, or the guy who becomes a fireman because his house burned down when he was a kid. You’re fighting a demon out of your childhood.” When she didn’t reply Merrick took it to mean he was right. “There’s nothing wrong with revenge as a motivation, Susan. Revenge against cancer, or a fire, or an ecological nightmare. It keeps you far more focused on your work than doing it just to get a paycheck. I applaud you and by the looks of what I’ve seen tonight, I think that you’re on the right path.”