jamieproctor.ca

It was hard to say when it started, because when the first person caught it on video it was subtle – and who knows when the first person just SAW it and had nobody believe them? First, second, seven millionth, it was what it was and it was undeniable: someone was taking a slow-pan of their garden when a middle-aged woman with a tired face walked up to it and put it in a box.

She put her hands under the ages and scooped it up – schoomp, like that, like a human scooping up a jellified cat by the armpits and butt – and slid it into a big cardboard box.

“Hey,” said the recorder. And that – even after a few days and a few billion gallons of digital ink – was all that there was to be said.

***

Then the same thing happened to a grove of trees by a convenience store in Georgia. The box was of normal size; a couple feet on a side. The pines were of normal height; a couple dozen meters. The two combined as smoothly and logically and cleanly as a cat scruffing her kittens, with only a few shed needles.

She reappeared ten minutes after that at a municipal park in Kyoto. It went into a box that looked like it had once held wine, from the plants to the stones to the pond.

And six seconds after that, the entirety of Algonquin Provincial Park was rolled up like a scroll and placed in a hollow tube that looked like it had once held wrapping paper. This was when someone managed to reach her and ask her a question, which was as follows:
“What the hell?”

The woman politely considered this, then reached out with a sigh, picked up the (slightly scuffed and alarmed) park ranger, folded them into a little piece of paper, then put them in her pocket.

Then she did the same with everyone else present, one at a time. She did not rush and did not lunge and it took about half a second, if half a second were ten minutes were half a second. Her movements were tired, but careful; firm, but kind. No blood was shed and no spines were snapped.

The little pieces of paper were tissue, and brightly coloured. The sort of thing you might pack a birthday surprise inside if you bought something at the last minute and left it in the bag. Every single folded scrap of paper went into the same pocket, which was on the front of her jacket, which was made of something that wasn’t leather, or was, or maybe, but was definitely old. It was not a very big pocket.

A few hours after that someone saw her piling the Great Barrier Reef into a Tupperware, rock by rock, coral by coral, fish by fish. Each delicate little half-bleached organism was placed in with her right hand, and with her left, a tiny splash of thousands of gallons of water to keep it moist. Sharks spilled in and out of her hands like minnows, and her brow furrowed just a little deeper with every deathly-white scrap of reef that left her hands.

***

After that she was everywhere, all at once, one after another.

In Central Kalimantan at midnight placing orangutans into a small cloth bag one after another, along with the trees they slept in.

In Manhattan during lunch, bottling the falcons, back slouched and legs dangling from the rims of skyscrapers.

In the Virunga Mountains that afternoon, scrubbing the forests for mountain gorillas with a loupe and a jewelry box and a long-suffering expression that no amount of squinting could hide.

In the Antarctic Peninsula amidst the endless winter twilight, piling glaciers and icebergs and penguins into an ice cube tray, and shaking an unfathomable amount of krill into a worn zip lock bag.

In Madagascar she spent over two minutes under the sunset with a pair of tweezers systemically plucking every lemur from the island into an old egg carton filled with cotton swabs.

And across the entirety of the globe, over the course of half an hour of deeply mixed feelings, she picked up every single mosquito using a petri dish and a drop of blood on a dusty shop knife. She made the cut without apparent flinching and wiped the blood off on her shirt when she was done.

New Zealand became fernless. The redwoods of California were plucked like carrots and put in potting trays. Every bed of moss was stripped and placed in a laundry basket. The mushrooms were taken out of the dark and fed into a bag of noxious smells. Every lichen was transferred to a pet rock named (by the stencil on his side) ‘Greg.’

If anyone got too close they were taken too, but too close was really very close, and she still kept vanishing so often that few had the opportunity. Much of the time when nobody had eyes on her it was assumed she was in the ocean. At least, that’s what everyone decided when a spy satellite caught her filling a portable fish tank with blue whales. The air filtration unit was wheezy and the glass was smeared and the moment she was done she sprinkled them with a little kelp from her zip lock, pulled out a second tank and her scoop, and left.

Two minutes after that was the last time anyone saw a grey whale. The tour boat was very surprised.

By the time forty-eight hours had passed, there wasn’t a single animal or plant or fungus or anything left that wasn’t a human. Astronauts looked down from space stations where someone had floated in and rudely taken their experimental crops and insects and saw no more green on the big blue marble under its white swirls. Even microorganism tests came back clean on every surface; some said they’d seen her wandering with a hand vac and changing the bag every so often, running it over anything and everything.

And still she hadn’t said a word.

***

On the third day, she started seriously working on the last remaining species.

The tissue paper came out again, and then back into her pocket, burgeoning with humanity. They were filed without sorting; packed without prejudice; tucked away for the sake of expedience and nothing more. The ones who fought and the ones who ran and the ones who asked ‘why’ and the ones who never knew anything was going on at all were placed side by side and one after another based on proximity, or something even more purely chance.

Violence did not work in any form. Someone got excited and launched a lot of it at one point; the offending missiles were removed from the sky like splinters and placed in a black heavy duty-garbage bag with red pull ties.

The very last human being on the planet to be collected was a sleeping premature baby in an incubator in a hospital in a country that – like every other one – no longer existed by any meaningful definition of the term.

She patted their head in a vague yet friendly way as she tucked them into the tissue paper. And then, seeing as her task was now complete, she gave them a triple-thick wrapping to use up the leftovers.

***

The geography and geology, she left with only a few souvenirs to remind herself of.

An old chip of rock from a river near a bay. A shell that had turned to stone. A bit of muck from a very, very deep place.

The soil she kept, and the water. They went into large clear plastic bags, for easy identification.

All of it went into her locker, but for the tissue-papered contents of her one large pocket. THAT went into a small, plain cardboard box, and that box was covered with bright wrapping paper.

Then she held it in one hand and a black marker in the other, propped it against her forearm, and wrote ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ on it in large, unseriously celebratory font.

***

She did not leave a forwarding address.

“The defendant will now speak before the tribunal.”
“This all seems highly irregular. Legally speaking, I mean.”
“The defendant has created highly irregular times. Explain your motives and actions in your own words.”
“Oh fine, oh fine, well, it was mostly about the pigs.”
“The pigs?”
“Feral pigs specifically, yes. Crossbred with wild boar. Country’s FULL of them – it’s a global problem, really, we’re just one of many –”

“The defendant will keep track of her point.”

“Oh right yes. Well, we had something of an advantage here: thanks to conservation efforts, Australia has a healthy population of predators big enough to tackle a full-grown feral boar as a meal. Saltwater crocodiles. Largest living reptile on the planet, wonderful creatures. And they’ve been eating feral pigs like candy since the ‘70s rebound at least. They turn rivers into absolute barriers to hog territorial expansion, it’s quite amazing –”

“The defendant will keep track of-”

“-BUT they can’t actually meaningfully reduce the total hog population, just curb its growth slightly. And so we figured-”

“Define ‘we’.”
“Me, Doctor Ludwig, and Pamela Hicks. You’ve got all of us here, I believe?”
“Continue.”
“Okay, fine. So we figured that we could use what was already a proven ecological asset as the foundation for a genuine panacea for an unsolved and long-ongoing environmental issue. We just had to motivate the salties to eat more pigs.”
“Which you didn’t do.”
“No, no, we did! We really managed it! Basically, the problem we were dealing with wasn’t that they COULDN’T eat pigs, it’s they couldn’t eat ENOUGH pigs. So we developed this sort of heavily-modified symbiotic variant of a tapeworm, and after careful and sufficient testing we poured a few billion of their eggs into rivers and lakes across the continent.”
“Describe this tapeworm.”
“Well, we wanted the crocodiles to be hungry, so we tweaked an organism that would normally leech nutrients from their host’s meals to absolutely gorge itself on them, then dissolve itself on reaching full capacity in a slick, high-energy slurry that would act like a crocodilian energy drink. End result was an exothermic organism with an endotherm’s digestive speed and appetite, and a hell of a lot of energy to pursue that appetite.”
“The tribunal would like to ask the defendant a question with a yes or no answer: did the defendant wilfully create and widely disseminate a biological contaminant intended to transform the bulk of Australia’s saltwater crocodiles into perpetually-starved high-speed eating machines?”
“Well, that’s-”

“Yes or no only.”
“Yes. A bit. But-”

“The defendant will now explain the further modifications that occurred after the initial crime.”
“-oh good yes, I was getting to that. Which ones?”
“The bulletproofing.”
“Well, people were shooting them.”
“The crocodiles had begun roaming the land.”
“Lots of energy to keep those little legs walking and a big appetite to feed, so yes, we expected them to get a little more prone to terrestrial hunting. That was why we first started working on the algae –”

“The defendant will return to the topic at hand.”
“-yes, that was the algae! We originally started developing a keratin-friendly algae that could evaporate heat quickly and tolerate dry air so they wouldn’t cook themselves to death when they were on land for long periods of time, and then after people kept shooting at them for no reason –”

“When did these modifications take place?”
“Last July, I think.”
“At that time the death toll was over six thousand.”
“Look, they were expected to hunt pigs. We assumed that the average human being was less of an easy meal than aa pig, and clearly we were wrong. I’m sorry for assuming the best of our species?”
“The topic at hand, defendant.”
“So anyways since people were shooting at them we decided we could take advantage of the rugged, tough coating the algae developed when it dried out and sort of encourage it to layer itself densely like Kevlar. A big crocodile already has a pretty good suit of armour, but the algal encasement really helped protect them.”
“Which is why the death toll quadrupled over the next two months.”
“Statistically, it seems a bit likely, yes. That’s when Doctor Ludwig suggested the eye implants.”
“Explain the eye implants.”
“So, the idea was that they would alert humans that a crocodile was near through a simple co-opting of the natural function of the tapetum lucidum. The salties can already see in the dark by reflecting light back through their eyes as eyeshine, right? So we just add extra light sources to that to make their eyes REALLY ‘pop’ no matter what, and humans will receive tons of advance warning of their presence. Easy peasy! We spent the next four months catching every croc we could and fitting them with ocular implants that turned their gaze into flashlights.”
“At what point did you become aware that these devices were deadly weapons?”
“Well, I don’t know when we became ‘aware.’ I mean, we heard rumours, but we figured people were exaggerating until we saw one of our fresh surgeries use his eyes to saw a tree in half.”
“This was?”
“In December, I think?”
“Were you aware that global news first received credible video of a crocodile with ‘laser eyes’ using them to cut through a car door in mid-October?”

“No. We were very busy installing new ocular implants in the crocodiles; we were basically working twenty-four-seven. And none of us were big on the news in general. We live in our heads, you know?”

“That leads us to the final line of questioning for this session: would the defendant explain the purpose behind the cranial alterations to the seven test crocodiles recovered from her lab?”
“Oh, we were making them smarter – or well, trying to. Intelligence is such a hard thing to describe, let alone qualify or quantify, you know? But it seemed like a lot of the problems we were dealing with would go away if the crocodiles were clever enough to understand that killing humans with the concentrated light from their eyes was wrong, even if they were firing harmless weaponry at them. Also Pam thought after that we could teach them how to do their own ocular implants. We were REALLY sick and tired of doing those surgeries by then, which is why we got a little sloppy on the particulars of neurological booster we developed – ‘more neurons in the brain with more connections faster’ was the closest we bothered aiming – and why it was a brute-force genome edit delivered through a retrovirus injection. Way less cutting and stitching involved, I tell you. My fingers were practically fused together by the time we got around to finishing up, which is probably why I was asleep in the lab when you fellas got me. I passed out trying to spellcheck myself!”

“That is more than enough for now. Return the defendant to-”

“Hang on a second, I just-”

“The defendant will-”

“thought of-”

“-be SILENT-”

“-something-”

“-AT ONCE.”
“-did you say seven? Seven crocodiles? In my lab? Because we were working on about fifteen.”

***

In retrospect, it was agreed the sentencing would likely have been lighter had the primary defense not been ‘Australia’s received enough invasive animal species; it’s time to give one back to the world, isn’t it?’

They sat by the edge of the water and they breathed and they waited for their lungs to overflow.

Big, deep, shuddering breaths that made their bones rattle and the skin of their cheeks flap like sails.  Over and over and over until their blood was so oxygenated it could glow in the dark and then:

“One, two, three, go.”

“Rock,” said the first diver, who was the tallest and longest and leanest.

“Rock,” said the second diver, who was the shortest and roundest and hairiest.

“Paper,” said the third diver, who was the baldest and burliest and loudest.

“How do you always do that?” asked the first diver (whose name was Cloe) in a voice that was carefully NOT whining and therefore was extremely whining.

“Simple,” said the third diver (whose name was Bert).  “You two are too much siblings: you always pick the same thing.”
“But how did you know it was going to be rock?”

“You looked like you were going to pick rock.”
“But how-”

“There’s a rock-shapedness about you,” said Bert.  He wrenched his arms in a brief windmill stretch, cracked his neck, shook himself, took one more deep, deep, rattling breath and dove into the water.  The ripples slid out like rings in a tree trunk; perfectly two-dimensional.

“I hope he gets stuck and drowns,” said Cloe.

“No you don’t,” said the third diver (whose name was Marci).

“Fine.  But I hope he doesn’t find anything.”

“He won’t.”
“Why?”
“Because he spent too much time gloating at you and not enough time getting ready.”

Cloe grabbed Marci’s hair with the casually gentle malice of a sibling and messed it up.  She reciprocated, and together they watched the water.

***

In the water, Bert

swam

down

all

the

way

through the bright light

into the murky weeds

past the long long roots and tendrils

along the muck and into the sheets of silt

where there was no light and you felt with your hands and the sensation of the water on your skin and the instincts at the nape of your neck

which was where he began to feel the burn inside and as he did that his hands closed on something

something new

and he turned and grabbed and wrenched and pulled it free

and rose and kicked

all

the

way

up

***

When Bert came out of the water he breached like a dolphin and spouted like a whale and wheezed like a walrus all at once, which made a much more interesting sight than he had going in.  Cloe applauded; Marci waded in to help him stand up. 

“I got it,” he said, or gargled, or something.  He put his hands on his knees and his knees on the sand and the sand on his palms one after another.  “I got it.”
“You got it?” asked Cloe.

“I got it.”
“He got it?”

Marci gently removed the contents of Bert’s palm, knuckle by whitened knuckle.  “He got it.”
“What’d he get?”
“I got it!” coughed Bert.  “Didn’t you hear me, I got –”

“A dead root,” said Marci.  “A really big one.”

“-it,” finished Bert at a lower volume and a lot more mumble.

Cloe began to cackle.

“Knock it off,” said Bert.

“It’s nice,” Marci told him.  “Waterlogged, not rotten.  You could carve something out of this.”

Cloe continued to cackle
“It won’t do,” said Bert.  “It’s no dinner.”

“It’ll do.  Just not what you thought it was, that’s all.”

Cloe was still cackling. 

“Fine,” he said.  “Fine, fine.  Found it under the silt.  Who’s next?”
Cloe’s cackling reached a peak and trailed off into a happy sigh.  “I’ll do it,” she snorted, wiping away a tear.  “Just let me – hoo boy – take a second to – ahah, holy shit – get a breath back in.  Hweeeee.  You just about drowned me on land here.”
Bert stood up straight, walked out of the shallows, bopped Cloe on the head as she began to fill her lungs again (he had to reach a long way up) and laid down in the sunshine with his eyes closed. 

“Do you want this?” Marci asked, one hand full of root.

“Put it down over there,” he said, muffled under both his arms.  “Let it dry out before we make any big decisions.”

“Too late,” said Cloe.  “Big Decisions is heading down now.  See you in a minute.”

She stepped back, rocked on her heels, thumped a foot like a rabbit and took one, two, three long, lunging, leaning strides before she launched like a frog, arched like a salmon, and shot down through the surface.

***

In the water, Cloe

slid

down

all

the

way

away from the sun

and beneath the weeds

and through their stems that were their roots that were themselves

and into the soft scum and mud of the shallow bottoms

down beyond that she eeled

turned so thin edge-on that the water couldn’t stop her

and turned so wide flat-out with her feet and hands to beat for power

down

farther

yet

in

the

dark

where the shapes grew regular and veiled and rotten and everything was hard and crusted

her heel kicked and caught in something long and thin and unbreaking

and she had to coil in on herself and feel blindly with fumbly fingers that weren’t paddles anymore

she was free

but she was running low

and she took the thin thing in one hand

and she took the first thing she could reach in the other

and she kicked

all

the

way

up

***

Cloe bubbled up to the surface and inhaled and yelled “holy SHIT’ and waved her finds in the air all at once which meant instead she swallowed water and coughed and sank.  Marci ran in and dragged her out by the arms and the scruff of her neck, dripping and wheezing and whistling like a jay with a tin-plated windpipe. 

“Did you get it?” asked Bert, who hadn’t moved a single centimeter in the most ostentatious way.

“Fuck, you, I, got, two,” gasped Cloe, expelling unwanted liquids from her mouth in several ways.  She threw her possessions overhand at Bert an astounding six inches, then rolled over onto her face, which Marci adjusted to prevent her choking on her own vomit.

“Two what.”
“Chicken BUTT.”

“Chicken what?”
“YOU’RE the, chicken.  Butt.”

“It’s a dead gar,” said Marci.  She held the partially-fleshed remains with a critical eye and a blind nose.  “Big one.  Too bad it’s so far gone.  Nice bones.  And this over here is… a turtleshell.”
“Awhuhh.”
“With gar teeth in it.  I think one of them choked on the other.  Very pretty.”
“But not dinner,” said Bert.

“Very pretty,” said Marci.

“Beats a root,” said Cloe.

“The root smells better,” said Bert.

“Bug off,” said Cloe.

“Make me,” said Bert.

“I will,” said Cloe.

“I’ll go in a minute,” said Marci.

She breathed and she breathed and she breathed, then she took two heavy stones, one in each hand, and she went to the highest of the very little cliffs above the water, which weren’t very high, and she jumped.

***

In the water, Marci sank

all

the

way

down

through the light

under the weeds

under their underpinnings

through the murk

and into the dark

to the very bottom

where she let loose her stones and began to kick

swimming fast just above the jagged remnants

feeling them barely-not-brush against her with her hair

seeing them almost-just-not snag at her with her mind

until she plunged over the edge

of the shelf

of the rim

of the basin

and into the cleft

where the bottom was besides her everywhere

and everything was a claw waiting to grasp her and ask

stay

stay

stay

but she was quick and sure and clean and lucky

so she didn’t stay

but she stopped for a moment

and felt

with all of herself

and felt

with all of her care

something new

and she grabbed it

and bent

double

and heaved with her spine and arms and legs like a jack-knife

and it broke free and had no choice but to come with her as she tore it free

all

the

way

up

up

UP

***

Marci hadn’t broken surface before Cloe’s hands were on her arm, her shoulder, turning her up to her first inhalation in minutes and minutes.  Bert held her back flat while she floated and breathed and remembered what air was, and together they waited until she was ready and they carried her up and out to the shallows where she planted her feet and swayed in gravity and took herself ashore. 

“What’d you get?” asked Cloe.  For formality’s sake, since it was taking up both of Marci’s arms and was taller than she was. 

Marci held it up for inspection anyways.  It was long, and sleek, and curved, and it shone in the sun despite the intrusion of corrosion and time and muck on its person.  The grace was only slightly marred by a mangled rectangular placard placed squarely in its middle, announcing in antique glyphs

MYFLOR  A.C M

E N – D 8

  UNSHI  STAT

“Now THAT’S dinner,” said Cloe.
“Dinner and more if you let me do the talking,” said Bert.  “They’re crying for anything big at the junkers right now.”

So they left, Bert carrying the treasures in his arms, Cloe carrying Marci on her back.  And they didn’t turn to look at where they’d been or say farewell, because this was just one dinner (and more) and they’d be back, and the water would be there, and so would what waited inside it, beneath it, taken back by it.

Them too, one day, a maybe day.  But there was no rushing to any of that, so they walked slow.