This is part of the collection A Gaucho Throws the I Ching available on Amazon
You find a memory card on the shuttle bus to your employment. Curious, you bring it home and search through some old card readers to determine the contents. Several aerial images of regions in the Southern section of the Canadian states with heat maps, and a single text file labeled Pierre_Aoun_Bio. Here is a direct translation of that file:
I suppose this is like a time capsule of sorts. Science, or that is the state of Science as such is, until recently, similar to that of bedding infested with lice that has been sealed up. After a week the lice start eating each other until it’s over. It is this way with ideas in many cases. The young knew more about visa restrictions than Descartes, at least when I was coming up. I remember that struggle, when you needed advancement or applying for an award, you would often need letters, often three or more, from supervisors, colleagues. The more authoritative the figure, the more likely you will be asked to write your own letter. When I applied for such an award I found I had to write a letter of recommendation on my own behalf from the perspective of all my colleagues. Towers of self-praise from behind the nom de plume of more well-known figures in my field. At the end one of them simply emailed their signature in a separate photofile. This is common practice, and so in this way the successful among us built a complicated network of deception and co-conspirators. But these letters were always recognized as pedestrian paperwork, as long as the science was sound.
At a conference a Russian pharmacologist name Dmitry peeled another layer of the onion for me when he described his conflict with his superior over the action of a certain compound they were testing for the treatment of schizophrenia. After vehement rounds of disagreement between the Professor and Dmitry, Dmitry produced a manuscript to be reviewed by anonymous peers. The compound was an endocannabinoid and Dmitry had found key words that would flag the document and the editor would send it to Dmitry’s confederate in Amsterdam by the name of Alexei.
Alexei had communicated to Dmitry through back channels.
“These results do not line up with the conclusions at all Dmitry, what are you driving at”
“Thanks for reaching out Alexei. Yes I’m at odds with Herr Professor and he’s forcing his pet theory on me”
Alexei then asks Dmitry to write the peer review to his own manuscript. Dmitry, under the guise of the anonymous peer reviewer, provides a direct and authoritative rebuttal to his own supervisor, who relented and rewrote the manuscript to the specifications of Dmitry and the peer reviewer (who was also Dmitry). And so, through this wizardry of subterfuge you can force multiply your effort. And so, in this context, can another Louis Pasteur arise, a Gregor Mendel, or even a Fr. Georges LemaÎtre.
Well perhaps, but not in the way you might think. Once a young scientist, the descendent of guachos named Alessandro Benedetti from Montevideo was working in a renowned laboratory in Ann Arbor. He had lived on campus and would jog around the campus every night. On a winter evening, as Alessandro jogged through the quad he saw a light shining out of his laboratory. There he saw Xi Zhan, a shy and demure graduate student who shared the lab with Alessandro. In a long puffy coat and long ponytail, Xi used her phone light to peruse key articles Alessandro had printed out for his research project, a promising nootropic for enhancing memory. No doubt she would pitch his idea as her own at his expense.
This riled up the ancient gaucho within Alessandro. He chose not to confront the interloper directly, what good could it be at that point confronting a woman in private. Rather, he chose a method of complicated subterfuge. Alessandro preferred printing out articles but since this event he began forcing himself to read all his documents on the screen. He began printing out esoteric articles studying learning and memory in plants. Lumino-Tropisms, nitrogen seeking tropisms within the roots, even magnetotropisms in plant life. The reaction time of venus fly traps. Alessandro printed out volumes about the possibilities of learning in plants, highlighting random passages about prion-like activity of Abeta plaque formations. Over the course of the weekend he created an entirely incoherent line of inquiry. Insertion of NMDA receptors, recurrent circuitry and synapses, actin myosin pumps. Subtle formation of petals that can vibrate at high frequencies so that other sensitive petals could sense these vibrations. Simplistic nodes of information processing using gap junctions between walled cells to communicate with each other. Proposals of increasing the speed of tendril stretch, genetically programming recursive machine learning algorithms optimizing trophic responses. Social networks, hierarchy, and competition between plant species for sunlight and water. CRISPR-mediated formation of teeth, small projectiles with poisoned tipped barbs that latch onto mammals that quickly develop into roots. Fueled by multiple rounds of yerba mate and seething hatred, Alessandro confabulated an entire diabolical project, one he had no intention of pursuing, strictly as a red herring.
Having set the bait Alessandro played his cards close to his vest and kept his distance from Xi, but not cold to the point he tipped off he knew about her espionage. His efforts at countersurveillance, a quick glance at her search history on her laptop, revealed she spent considerable time reading Arthur Machen short stories and perusing Salvatore Ferragamo. She dreamed big despite the fact her salary was roughly half of his, her polka dot skirt was threadbare on close inspection. Born of a millenia of test-takers and a card carrying communist (you needed to be to get into Ann Arbor), she still succumbed to the land of the perpetually embarrassed millionaires. But, mostly Alessandro remained busy in his attempts at developing the next modafinil. He did however, maintain his nightly jog, and on that Monday noted Xi, but not only Xi but with a second senior scientist from a neighboring lab, a jaunty and gangly character who was highly skilled and paranoid. What projection! Alessandro was at once amuse, ‘even my table scraps they devour’. A slow dread rose up in him however, and Alessandro calculated that his precautions to prevent theft of his design of novel nootropics weren’t enough. He began password protecting his folders, uploading crystal structures onto secured hard drives disconnected from the internet.
Within a month Xi and her colleague left the lab and the school, rather abruptly. Alessandro was relieved, he considered them similar to ants, easily replaced by more worker ants from any ant pile. This is how he viewed most of humanity to be honest. It was then that Alessandro regaled me with his film noir plot of espionage and paranoia. When I would see a “news of the weird” article about mutant sunflowers developing deformed venus flytrap shapes or extra large pitcher plants we would laugh heartily at the absurdity of the possibility of Alessandro’s plan coming to fruition.
It was the following spring that my laughter turned to concern. The pollen that year was dense, students would trace out aphorisms on the hoods of their car. “Love has reasons which reason cannot understand” I remember reading fondly. It was my allergies that spared me, every spring my sinuses were assaulted. Consider what pollen is, is it not just semen from a tree? At the first thaw we walk about in a urine haze of tree jizz. It is a full frontal attack on humanity, an assault of the senses. Over the years of fighting this pollen I prepared for March as my ancestors may have prepared for war, armed with antihistamines, quercetin, eye drops with mast cell destabilizers, N95 masks and goggles. A keen observer of this season, this particular year, something was, off. The pollen itself seemed thicker, grittier than before. Every four years it coincides with the political square dance of America, and now the decrepit corpses were decaying in high definition, their skin sloughing off their ragged mandibles. It was watching this parade of cadavers that a news item came across my feed, about a small southern town receiving an overwhelming influx of senior citizens, even as young as 65, showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
Now, by trade I am a natural product chemist, and have developed quite a network of fellow chemists. Some dive off the coast of Hida-Takayama for esoteric jellyfish, and others hunt caterpillars in the Alps in search of the next “lizard spit” or unicorn product for treating erectile dysfunction or sickle cell anemia. In this particular moment I followed a hunch and wrote to several of my colleagues around the world. I did not reveal my intuition but rather asked a favor, would they send me a few samples of pollen from different flora…birch, ragweed, grass. Within a week I had samples from Sao Paulo, Beirut, Paris, Beijing, all confirming my suspicion.
I invited Dmitry and Alessandro to my flat for espresso, and handed them a box of contraband N95 masks. “You will be needing this”. After pleasantries are exchanged, I cut to the chase.
“Alessandro I suspect they’ve weaponized the pollen. It’s loaded with Alzheimer’s plaques.”
He gave his wry smile. The smile of a gaucho who killed a calf with a stray bullet. “Who knew my table scraps would come back to haunt us all Pierre. But really how do you know?”
“I checked under the microscope, followed up with Mass spec, PCR. Under the microscope the pollen had attached to it folded abeta sheets, the very same misfolded proteins that degenerate the brain. Enough of this gets in the bloodstream and it acts like a prion to recruit other proteins, it goofs up everything.” I needn’t say more.
“But how did it get into the trees, was it an attack on America?” asked Dmitry.
“I did some further analysis it seemed that a CRIPR-Cas9 vector introduced the mutation into multiple sites throughout the world.”
“Some kind of weaponized bee fertilizing and mutating trees to release the pollen?” Interjected Alessandro.
“I assume so” I said. “But it wasn’t only in America, every continent showed the same pattern, “
“Only Tree pollen?” Alessandro asked.
“Ragweed, Tree pollen, the major players….”
Alessandro turned to Dmitry “What are the chances this crosses the blood brain barrier”
Dmitry replied “If it is in the soluble state it has a reasonable chance.”
“It is soluble…my friends I have checked, here check the slides for yourself.” I showed the photo of the pollen under the electron microscope, it was clear as a talking dog.
There was a long silence. I was confident in my findings, I did not need their opinions on the data, but as friends, I wondered, what to do next.
“Can we ride it out?” Alessandro offered, always the gaucho.
“People will start to catch on, and the pollen count will catch up to us, every spring will get worse and worse. After a year or two we will have trouble navigating to work” I replied.
In Florida and Brazil they burn the crops, if we can follow a burn zone and stay there the pollen count will be low, we can reseed the crops.
“Ok Don Quixote”, said Dmitry. “Listen this solution is too fantastical. “
“What about Phoenix?” I ventured.
Dmitry shook his head, “In the spring the desert plants are still a nightmare for pollen. You know in Russia we have a saying, when you are attacked, embrace the winter. In Russia the spring season is very short and we can always retreat to Siberia for the heavy pollen season. In fact many of my countrymen would be well prepared for such a venture.
As a natural Mediterranean, I winced at such a prospect. Dmitry smiled like a Cheshire cat and a long pause ensued…
“For me there is always Patagonia,” said Alessandro. “Very arid, dry, rather isolated but I imagine that will change with this news.”
“Yes but for me, I have no home…Paris, Beirut, this will be devastating for them. Maybe I will go to Juneau.”
After long discussion of the arrangements we all discussed that it would be best for us to branch out cold and arid conditions to our best ability. I excused myself to the restroom and took a long look at a picture I had bought as a part of my “vision board” exercises. It was a picture I had chosen, really without much forethought, of Hegel and Napoleon in Jena. Underneath was the caption:
I saw the Emperor—this world-soul [Weltseele]—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.
At this point I decided it was time to do more than survive this storm…
Gentlemen, a wise man once said never let a serious crisis go to waste....why not the same here. As we can tell this will leave most of America, China, Europe, everything near the equator, addled and neurodegenerative. If the pollen is bad who is to say the food we will soon be eating be any different.
"Agriculture" says Alessandro.
"Seeds, specifically" I reply. "We will need to bring source seeds to start greenhouses, we can all become oligarchs if we have the untainted varieties staple crops."
"If bugs are the vector we will have to pollinate them ourselves." said Dmitry.
"They have fully automated Greenhouses now."
And thus we hatched a plan to gain enough virgin, unmutated seed to start our global enterprise. Here you may have been expecting that we ventured on a heist to rob a seed bank, but for three chemists with our track record it was actually very straightforward. We simply asked the government for the seeds. We put together a proposal to study natural products, and chemically synthesize nootropics that delayed neurodegeneration (here was an ironic truth), and once the proposal was accepted we requisitioned several cases of seed, staple crops, mosses, algae, everything we would need to build out our own greenhouses. During this time the three of us stayed inside as much as possible and made our plans to build out our bolt holes. Dmitry was writing for a position in Vladivostok and Alessandro was traveling back and forth to Tierra del fuego. I told him to be careful as I noticed even at that time a slight uptick in plane crashes, car crashes. The idea of warning the authorities never really crossed out minds, except to warn our friends and family and sending out masks.
I packed my portion of the seeds in coffee bags, drove to Juneau and rented a small. Another of my hunches panned out, the beta plaques were in the starches as well, potatoes and corn laden with the plaques. By the end of the year much of the global south was completely addled, there were riots and mass extermination squads. A brigade of diabetic Americans on disability scooters, affixed with "Don't Tread on Me" bumper stickers attempted to invade Canada, held off by the Mounties. But, for the most part, people's minds already worn down by the abeta millstones, largely accepted their lot. The Great American experiment ended in a whimper and the great Chinese century cut short in it's prime.
Many of my family reconnected with me in Juneau and we have created a little Phoenicia here, still by the sea but in the absence of dangerous pollen clouds our infamous cedars produce. In the two weeks of summer we stay in our hermetically sealed greenhouses. Certain outpost were spared. Reykjavik, Oslo, Montreal, Christchurch, Alaska. Canada was renamed Greater Monreal and soon acquired Alaska from America in order to pay off outstanding debts. As a Francophone this transition was welcomed. My seed business thrived off of trade with other outposts and Dmitry and Alessandro and I kept in touch on logistical issues. In the dead of winter when the pollen count is lowest I would venture down to the US and sell my wares, non-GMO seed to some of the remaining high IQ , hazmat suited farmers to replenish their depleted stock. Big box stores and entire neighborhoods were decomposing, an entire country teeming with huddled masses. Rhododendrons towering over decaying houses, Cedars exploding clouds of pollen. Most of the feral humans have a catatonic glaze now, I do my best not to garner attention from them. Some pockets of hyperboreal internet service persist, but the database that began this entire crusade has long fell into disrepair.
We now have three dozen greenhouses and several cargo ships retooled for carrying seed crops. I mostly barter. In exchange for factory equipment for making masks, I deliver non-GMO rice via drones to Beijing. At least I did before it went completely dark there. In Russia, Dmitry has been appointed director of Svalbard seed vault. Small periodic journals write of the "flowering of the new Russian century". In Patagonia, Alessandro and I have an arrangement where he supplies nootropics to North America under my distribution and I supply raw materials grown in the Pacific Northwest. I travel with security and troves of cubic zirconium which has become the new currency, for a few necklaces I can get a metric ton of GMO-free potatoes from Idaho. For my last visit to Hong Kong I picked up a three centuries old copy of the I Ching in exchange for some orchids. I shipped the I Ching to Alessandro with the inscription , "Aquí hay otro lío en el que me meterás" or roughly, "Here's to another fine mess you will be getting me into.
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