The Last Dark Age of Man
by Michael Burnett
part 1
29th March, 2735
Seven hundred and three years after the cataclysm.
It’s taken us just over seven days to reach the survey zone and still I’m prone to staring at the sky, my mind and heart gripped by a kind of wondrous, frightened awe. The others are more jaded by now, but they understand; everyone was like this at first. I’ve been stuck in the lab ever since the doors of Bunker Nineteen were opened three years ago, so my experience of the initial anticipation that our colony felt, striking out into the unknown, was almost completely vicarious; there’s only so much excitement one can feel in analysing soil and water samples from a world you’ve never seen.
This is my first field expedition. Captain Taylor was on the first survey team when we first began to scour the Pacific Coast, both offshore and inland, searching for signs of life. But we found nothing but desolation. The other bunkers, so I hear, have fared no better.
As far as anyone can tell, the Earth is dead. If that’s the case, we’ve got around half a year of leftover atmospheric oxygen before we’re forced back underground; the only food we’ve got is what’s left in the stores. If Earth’s dead, we’ve got thirty years. Maximum. Knowing this, our curiosity has begun to give way to desperation.
The others on the modified trawler are topside veterans too, relative to me, of course. But I still catch them looking out at the endless sky, the boundless water, marvelling at the sheer scale of it all. The scorching sun is a marvel, too, and just as dangerous as the water. The ozone layer is gone; staying out in the glare uncovered for even five minutes could mean a trip to the ship’s medical bay.
Everything about this world seems alien. It strains the mind to think that, seven hundred years ago, there were billions of us — billions, a word now reserved for gut-bacteria counts, at least to my mind — and that the world was ours. How strange it must have been.
A voice sounds from the bow. “Up ahead! Up ahead, bearing north! I can see something!”
I shake my head as though waking from a dream, bringing my gaze back down from the vast blue dome that looms above us, its skin speckled with countless flecks of white cloud. I can see Walters running down the deck in the direction of the trawler’s bridge, and I start running too.
“What is it?” I call out, but he’s already disappearing inside the bulkhead door. I don’t follow him. I keep running until I’m where he was standing just a moment ago. I peer across the sparkling waves for a few moments, shielding my eyes, and then I see it. A flat, dark smudge on the horizon, brownish-black in a world of shining blue. Our destination is finally within reach.
The North Pacific Garbage Patch.
There’s a reason why we searched every square mile — from Anchorage, to Hawaii, to the Gulf of California, and inland as far as Montana — before coming here. The crew think this trip is a joke and aren’t afraid of saying so. This place, it’s fair to say, epitomises the wastefulness and decadence of pre-cataclysm culture: of things thrown away, out of sight and mind until the whole great mess of it came down on them in a way that they could no longer deny. So now it’s come to this: to our searching a pile of refuse the size of a continent. To sifting through the filth, hunting for the barest scrap of hope.
The crew think I’m crazy, but I believe we’ll find life there, if for no other reason than it’s the last place we thought to look. The world has changed, and we can no longer claim to understand it. If we ever could.
* * *
“My God,” Dr. Natasha Yeats breathes, her blue eyes widening to perfect circles behind square, black-rimmed glasses. “Just look at it!”
I am looking. I can’t tear my eyes away, in point of fact.
The creature scuttles from side to side like something mechanical, clicking its claws in an ominous fashion, its stalked eyes watching us with a primal distrust. Its broad, flat carapace is over two metres wide, by my estimation.
“Grafton’s Colossus,” I reply, my own voice coming out in a hoarse whisper. “Laurence always did have a penchant for melodrama. This time it’s justified.”
“No-one could argue with that.”
“I should think not,” a voice booms from behind my left shoulder, echoing off the steel-panelled walls of Laboratory Six. I jump involuntarily as Dr. Grafton advances towards the Perspex containment cell, rapping on its clear surface with latex-clad knuckles. The creature leaps back, clearing a whole metre in one uncanny movement. I hear Dr. Yeats mutter a startled curse under her breath.
“The Grapsus pictanaevatus is, by any measure, the find of the millennium.” Dr, Grafton glances down at me, a look of almost paternal affection shining out from his small, grey-green eyes. “And to think that the committee almost refused to commission the expedition that discovered it.”
“A happy accident,” I venture, then hastily correct myself, seeing disapproval darken Dr. Grafton’s heavy features. “I mean... good fortune, that’s to say. Serendipity.” I pause, reflecting on the heavy price of that good fortune. “Despite the sacrifices.”
“And we surely haven’t had much good fortune until now,” Dr. Grafton rumbles. “Just sacrifice, with no reward.”
He’s right up against the Perspex, and the creature is inching warily towards him, its deadly-looking pincers held out in a defensive attitude. Dr. Yeats is on her feet, too, but is keeping her distance, as am I.
“Where shall we start?” she asks, addressing Dr. Grafton without taking her eyes off the Colossus.
“The Board of Directors are anxious to see some tangible benefits to our colony,” Dr. Grafton says. “But I say that this is my lab. We will study every aspect of it: not just those considered expedient. The Colossus is surely more than just a source of protein.”
“The shell material is quite mesmerising,” I say. “The colours. It hardly looks real.”
“In a way, it’s not,” replies Dr. Grafton. “That’s human-made plastic you’re seeing. If we can work out how it’s rendered them harmless to its own vital systems, perhaps there is hope for us after all.”
* * *
If the North Pacific Garbage Patch looked like an eyesore on the horizon, up close it’s a monstrosity. In my daydreams I’d imagined piles of pre-cataclysm artefacts jutting every which way: automobile tyres, plastic tubs and toilet seats; plains full of shampoo bottles, stretching for as far as the eye could see. I thought it would be almost like a museum of the old times, something through which the distant past could be observed and learned from.
The reality could not be more different.
The first thing that hit me was the stench. In the centuries since the cataclysm, the plastic has begun to photo-degrade, and there are no longer any discernible objects. Just mountains of sun-bleached, bloated conglomerations of decayed refuse stretching into the distance.
But there is life. The Garbage Patch is teeming with it!
Almost every available surface is crammed full of millions of barnacles, packed so tightly that some of them have even attached themselves to each other instead of the plastic mass below. The water is bright green instead of blue: evidence of a healthy colony of phytoplankton. The Garbage Patch is a miracle: an oasis on a barren planet.
The sea breeze brings little respite from the smell. Before long we return to the trawler, setting out again with a smaller crew, limited by the number of available gas masks to four teams of two. As the rookie, I’m partnered with George Callow, one of the most experienced of the field personnel.
Callow holds out a slim but wiry arm, his shoulder-length blond hair escaping from underneath his gas mask, moving slightly with the breeze. I grab onto his hand then pull myself onto the ridge with a grunt of effort, feeling my boots sink into the glutinous mass beneath them.
Callow turns and looks out to the west, where the afternoon sun is beginning to make its descent. The yellow light glistens off the grey surface of the Garbage Patch, reminding me of wet toilet paper on a bathroom floor. I feel my stomach churn. “This place is disgusting!”
“True enough, Blake,” Callow replies. “But it has life. We’re witnessing something extraordinary here. Hold your nerve; it’ll all be worth it.”
I nod silently, and we begin to head down a shallow decline towards a barnacle-encrusted pool of salt water that has collected in a small depression.
“Take water and solid mass samples. Oh... and see if you can work a few of those barnacles loose,” Callow says. “I think I see something over there. I’m going to check it out.”
Callow points to a bulbous shape near the base of another of the piles of decaying plastic. I follow his finger with my eyes. “Just more plastic, seems to me.”
“I don’t know,” Callow replies, an enigmatic quality tingeing the edges of his words. “We won’t know if it’s important until we take a look.”
* * *
I was the obvious choice of assistant for Dr. Grafton’s lecture, Dr. Yeats now being fully engrossed in reverse-engineering the Colossus’ method of phthalate binding, a project we’re hopeful will lead to a way to cleanse our own microplastic-polluted bodies. This is the largest turnout I’ve ever seen: not that that’s surprising in the least. It seems almost as though the entire three-thousand-strong population of Bunker Nineteen has packed themselves into the dimly-lit lecture theatre, bodies spilling out into stairwells and crowding the doors.
Dr. Grafton is holding forth, arms sweeping in wide arcs as he addresses his electrified audience. In a Perspex tank to his right, the Colossus cowers, cringing from the sound of applause and the powerful baritone of Dr. Grafton’s voice, blaring through the PA system.
“After nine months of hard study, my team and I have made great steps in our understanding of Grapsus pictanaevatus or, as my research team like to call it, Grafton’s Colossus.”
The audience murmurs. The Colossus extends a single eye from within its shell, scanning its surroundings and then withdrawing it again, hunkering down in terror at the back of its tiny prison.
“One of the biggest killers during the cataclysm, as we know, was plastic. Twentieth and twenty-first century humans produced a total of ten billion tonnes of plastic, with a great deal of it ultimately ending up in the stomachs and cells of marine creatures. Directly, this caused starvation; indirectly, phthalate poisoning of species at the lower end of oceanic food chains caused devastating and ultimately fatal trophic cascades. Until recently, we believed that nature had produced no antidote to this horror. But we were wrong.”
Grafton turns to me. “Dr. Isett, if you would.”
I press the clicker, and a large diagram of the Colossus’ innards appears on the high wall behind us. Grafton glances briefly at the image, then continues.
“What you’re looking at here is the liver of the beast you see in front of you; the ellipsoid structure on the right is an adaptation we’re calling Yeats’ Addendum. We estimate that, around three hundred years ago, a member of the coral-dwelling crab species Grapsus albolineatus developed an enlarged liver. This extended organ had the ability to process micro-plastics, reconstituting the highly toxic phthalates as part of the process of chitin production for shell growth.”
A few gasps rise from the darkness of the lecture theatre. I glance over at the Perspex case and see the Colossus pacing its enclosure, sidestepping back and forth and raking its claws over the Perspex. Grafton continues.
“This new ability was essentially two evolutionary advantages wrapped up in one: the mutated Grapsus crab was now able to grow its shell without the need for moulting as well as safely consume the nutritious but highly toxic barnacles found on the Garbage Patch.
“The compressional strength of the shell, meanwhile, was increased to almost two-thousand PSI; well beyond the abilities of its predators from the ray and turtle families to crush it with their beaks. The high latent toxicity of the Yeats’ Addendum organ, meanwhile, proved fatal to its octopus predators.
“The Grapsus pictanaevatus has, in all probability, never had any natural predators, and has thus flourished whilst contributing to the extinction of its former predators via the removal of a vital source of their food and by causing fatalities directly.”
Dr. Grafton surveys the audience, his large face placid but energised. A hand shoots up near the front. “It’s my understanding that the Colossus’ ancestors were only a few centimetres wide. Why is this one so large?”
“Good question,” Dr. Grafton replies. “The inherent danger in the moulting phase of a crab’s life tended to select out larger individuals from crab populations — with each moulting, the chances of being predated increased, with larger crabs finding it more difficult to find suitable hiding spots. The Colossus has no predators to fear and does not need to moult.
“As the crab grows older, the proportion of plastic to chitin within its shell merely increases. A larger specimen such as Queequeg here” — Dr. Grafton indicates the Colossus with another wide sweep of his arms — “is still vigorous at one-hundred-and-fifty years old, and its shell is over 90% reconstituted micro-plastic. Our working theory is that the only limiting factor on their size is gravity.”
I press the clicker again. An image of the North Pacific Garbage Patch flicks into view: one of my own photos. In another instant an image of Callow’s slumped body, right arm sliced off at the shoulder and his stomach torn open, flashes into my mind’s eye. I squeeze my eyes shut, banishing the image with an effort of will.
“Focus,” I mutter under my breath. “Not now. Not now.”
“In this image, you can see the aforementioned barnacles. There is only one species — a genetic offshoot of the Coronula diadema that colonised the plastic, possibly after their nauplii drifted onto it from passing humpback whales. This new species feeds off the single species of phytoplankton that survived the cataclysm. As these plankton are autotrophs — living directly off the sun’s energy — what we have here is an entirely self-sufficient ecosystem, consisting of a single linear food chain of only four levels.”
Dr. Grafton pauses for effect.
“The Earth is not hostile to life, as we had so recently begun to believe.”
* * *
“Help!” I call out to the others, my voice raw with terror. “Over here — help us!”
I search the mounds of rotten plastic in every direction but see no-one. The creature has scuttled away, frightened off by my flare, but I can see others nearby. Callow needs medical attention, and he needs it fast. I can’t move him by myself, especially not with the injuries he’s sustained.
I look down at Callow. His skin is as pale as freshly glazed porcelain, and he’s not moving.
“Callow,” I whisper, my voice sounding alien to my ears. “Hold on, George. Please, hold on! Someone will be here soon.”
I grab the radio from his belt and, as I do, I see his lips moving. He’s still alive.
“This is Blake; Blake Isett,” I start to say. “Callow’s badly injured. We’re not safe here. There’s a... some kind of...”
I’m hyperventilating, and have to force the words from my throat: “creature... here. It’s huge. Ripped Callow’s arm right from his body.”
I release the push-to-talk button but keep the radio gripped tightly in my hand. I feel suddenly dizzy; a moment later I’m on my knees. Callow is covered in blood. His eyes are half-open and glazed over. I hope to God he’s not still conscious. Frantic, I lift the radio again to my mouth, not knowing if I’ve waited minutes or only seconds for someone to respond.
“Does anyone read? I repeat, we have a serious situation—”
“Copy, Isett. We read you. We’re locking onto your beacon. Hang tight.”
* * *
“How can you not see what you’re doing?” Dr. Grafton says in voice that’s half-snarl, half-shout. He’s trying desperately to control his anger, but I fear he’s losing the battle. “How can you be so wilfully blind?”
“All I’m saying” — Director Barrett looks to the other three members of the committee, evidently confident that she holds the high ground — “is that the rules have changed. We must be prepared to meet this new challenge head-on. We must be prepared to protect and preserve our colony. Our highest priority is to ensure the survival of Bunker Nineteen.”
Grafton erupts in anger. “Protect and preserve us? By doing what? Betraying the other colonies? By making enemies of our allies? Have you forgotten why we needed the Bunkers in the first place?”
Director Kaye, a man who’s neither balding nor going grey despite being almost seventy, interrupts with a voice like tyres on gravel. “The Bunkers have allowed our species to survive the interim period. We had hoped to find Earth reborn, with enough to go around. But the extreme localisation of the planet’s life systems forces us to view our position through a more... strategic... lens. Surely you understand that.”
I’ve stayed quiet until now, but it’s clear to me that Dr. Grafton could do with some support. Time for me to weigh in. “Look,” I begin. I gulp as the four committee members turn their heads towards me.
“What Dr. Grafton is trying to say is that a refusal to co-operate, once the reality of the crisis was upon us, was the reason why the cataclysm occurred all those centuries ago. To invite rivalries would be to return us to the state we were in when civilisation lost its way.”
“It would be a death sentence. Not just for humanity, but for the life that the Earth has managed to sustain. We must nurture the site. We must pool the expert knowledge of all the colonies, to help it to grow and flourish. We must co-operate. We must not repeat our ancestors’ mistakes.”
Dr. Grafton has made full use of my intervention, apparently having regained his composure in a matter of seconds. But the committee seem unmoved by our remonstrations.
“Ridiculous!” Director McRae guffaws, clutching his dark beard in mock exasperation. “Are you saying what we think you’re saying, that the Garbage Patch could sustain the entire population of fifty bunkers, but that it’s somehow not enough to sustain one?”
“You’re not understanding me—”
“I think we’ve heard enough!” Barrett exclaims with finality, cutting Dr. Grafton off with a downward swipe of a palm. “Dr. Grafton. Dr. Isett. You are excellent scientists; the work you have done has been exemplary. But you must leave the strategic decision-making to those qualified to do it. This session is over.”
* * *
It’s one-thirty in the morning when I hear a knock on the main door of my quarters. I sit up and rub my eyes, trying to drag myself from the depths of sleep. The knock sounds again, a little louder this time. I swing my feet over the side of my bunk and plant them on the floor, gasping as the cold metal steals the warmth from me. Either it’s him, or Security screened my intramail and are here to arrest me. Either way, it’s too late now.
I swing the heavy steel door open on its hinges, squinting out into the bright hallway. “Callow.” I exhale, feeling profound relief. George Callow nods and smiles grimly. “I got your message.”
“Come in.” I step back, indicating a smaller two-seat sofa with a wave of my hand. “I’ll go and get us some water.”
As I pass him his glass of water, I can’t help but look at the space where his right arm used to be.
Callow sees me wince but does not seem offended. “Could have been a lot worse. I owe you a great deal, Blake.”
“No,” I correct him. “You don’t. You would have done the same thing for me. But if you really feel the need to repay me, now is a better time than any.”
Callow’s thin, fair eyebrows draw together. He places his glass down on the table and pushes a stray lock of hair behind his left ear.
“I’m listening.”
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Michael Burnett
