Aster Olsen

Experiments In Restoration Failure

The sunsets were my favorite part of the day at the lake, because that meant time had passed, and I was closer to being done with this assignment and reintegrated. It was a noble project of course, and I believed in the mission of the Restoration Corps, but I’d been stationed alone for months, stuck on the edge of a blue lake wedged between rocky mountains. I had little else to do but think too much, the very thing I’d joined the Corps to avoid.

I’d joined with the Corps not because I needed the money or couldn’t get work in a respectable profession like most of the men in my company, but because the thoughts in my head were a burden. Even as I’d taken extra classes and graduated from the academy a year early, there was little escape from the doubt that creeped in alongside the longing and the despair. My parents thought me a high achiever, and the Corps sent me to the capital along with nine others for a day of pageantry.

“These men before you are the best of the best from our Restoration Corps,” the speaker had said before pinning us. “They will bring us a world once again of green and blue. They will restore what has been broken. They will rebalance all. They will make the world safe for us. Through their efforts and sacrifice, the Corps mission will be realized.”

The applause was deafening. I tried to smile and act the part. I wanted to be what they needed. A month later I was deployed to Lake 24051-C, alone. 

In total, eight of us were in the sector, reachable by one another via a strenuous overnight trek during the warm season, though orders were to remain at our lake at all times. Brim, who I’d fallen in with during training, was assigned to a nearby lake, which reassured me even though I knew I wouldn’t see him for the deployment. I’d found most of the men I’d trained with indecipherable, but Brim shared my curiosity. The two of us had been reprimanded for deviations from experimental protocol early on and bonded over it. 

The rest of the company was spread across Sectors A and B. There was a desire for coverage, not depth. It’s like when you learn in school that ducks have fifty ducklings because some will be born with two heads, others without feet, and more will die from disease. The Restoration Corps figured at least one or two of us could pull this mission off and return a hero.

The experiment was straightforward: I was to add a bag of amendment mixture every other day. I would collect water samples each morning two hours after first light, monitor the continuous data sonde, recharging and repairing as needed. Personal protective equipment was to be worn at all times, and in the case of unprotected contact with water, I was to immediately radio Corps headquarters before attempting disinfection procedures to the best of my ability. 

To my relief, the Captain told us the air was okay to breathe in the area, so we could go without respirators and masks. Airborne pathogens didn’t last long in the environment without hosts, and still required close contact. Another reason for our isolated deployment, I deduced. Outside the perimeter, each of us was considered a potential vector, a risk to be minimized and, if necessary, destroyed.

Outside the perimeter, each of us was considered a potential vector, a risk to be minimized and, if necessary, destroyed.

The Corps, I knew, would not hesitate to sacrifice me in order to protect the air and water supply from anything I might introduce after contact. Even without a suit breach—or worse, a submerged cut or abrasion—the reintegration procedures would be difficult. Reintegration, the Captain had said before deployment, was not for everyone.

Despite the dire warnings, the first few weeks of the restoration mission were uneventful. I gathered dried grey wood from the sparsely vegetated shoreline and used my hatchet to fashion a foundation for the standard issue red and grey nylon Corps tent I’d been provided. I made chairs and pathways and a shed for my freeze dried food and worked to improve the reverse osmosis pocket system I’d been issued to be more efficient, but as days slid into weeks and then stretched into more, no amount of effort managed to occupy my mind enough to quiet my thoughts.

I suppose anyone can get to thinking too much, if the circumstances are right. I got to thinking: why am I out here? The answer was obvious: orders. I could regurgitate the story my parents believed, the one the speaker at the capital during graduation had wanted me to believe: I was a hero returning the planet to livable. An elite member of the Restoration Corps, strong and smart and capable and willing to take whatever risks the job demanded. And I did believe that. I did. I do. 

I do. When I told my parents I dreamed of my kids swimming in any lake they wanted without a second of hesitation or an ounce of worry, I was not lying. I want my children to cup their hands into a flowing stream and sip eagerly and without care, sip without certain death following. Which hints at the actual question I couldn’t stop asking: what do I want?

There were better options than joining the Restoration Corps. I could have joined one of the well-funded research labs, or done any number of “necessary jobs that keep the decontaminated zone running,” as the advertisements proclaimed. I’d had offers, recruiters who would laugh when I told them I was thinking of joining the Corps instead of taking their generous contracts. But I thought I might find myself in the Corps in a way not possible with a lab job safely behind the perimeter. The Corps offered a real change, didn’t it? It offered something no other job did: escape.

On the third week, I let curiosity corrupt me. Out of boredom I had decided to take two samples on the same day. I had plenty of supplies to spare, and it struck me as an odd blind spot in the Restoration Corps sampling scheme to never collect duplicates or blanks. In the first sample, everything was as it should be: the trend I’d noticed after the first week continued—a slight decrease of pathogen indicators along with a decrease in excess nitrogen and phosphorus—presumably caused by the billions of designer microbes I threw into the lake every other day, a concoction that would displace the pathogenic cells through direct violence of antibiotics and bacteriophages and by more sophisticated means of broader spectrum enzymatic activity. Together they would destroy the horrible pathogens that had made most of the lakes in the northern hemisphere nonfishable and unswimmable, and all wilderness beyond the perimeter a death sentence. It was total war beyond my eyesight, and so it did not feel very real after a few days despite the terrifying training materials and serious instructions from the Captain to never deviate from protocol. 

It was total war beyond my eyesight, and so it did not feel very real after a few days despite the terrifying training materials and serious instructions from the Captain to never deviate from protocol.

The other duplicate’s readings were the same. Not similar, but a literal duplicate. It is an inconvenient truth that there is noise and mess to everything, particularly the systems the Corps seeks to control and influence. I should have let it go. Instead, I tested the filtered water from the bottle next to my bed, and found the same exact result.

This was slightly concerning. I had been drinking that water every day, and it should have had low nutrients on the edge of the machine’s detection limit and completely undetectable indicators of pathogens. What lack of variation is allowable before it ceases to be interesting and becomes a problem?  

The next day I took the lake water sample as usual but split it into three subsamples. One at a time I ran them through my standard issue Corps mobile spectrometer. All three were exactly the same, though slightly lower from the day prior 

It was a pattern without logical explanation. Or rather, the explanation was logical, but one I did not want to acknowledge. I took the device apart, breaking the tamper tape in the process. A simple disconnection of the power, a restart, and a quick scoop of lake water later, I had my answer. The readings at first were similar to anything safe within the decontamination zone. And then, from within the machine there was a distant low beep, and the numbers scrambled for a moment before settling into the familiar high values.  

The Corps had not anticipated a grunt with initiative, which, given what I knew of the others in my platoon, was understandable. I had violated several direct orders by deviating from the sampling protocol and tampering with the device, and if I were to bring up my findings to my CO I could kiss reintegration goodbye. I’d be stuck in the wilderness, and I’d die of some horrible bioengineered disease the first time my filter failed and I drank contaminated water. Everyone in the Corps had seen the photos and videos of those who could not be reintegrated. They died painfully, skin leaking blood from a desiccated landscape of fissures and cracks, their breath becoming shallower as their lungs filled with fluid. After a few days, all they could do was utter a last painful moan before falling silent.

But despite the death sentence that awaited any Corpsman who failed to follow orders, I saw life outside the perimeter. I had expected it to be quiet, but in many ways it was louder than the typical drone of air filters and the crackle of the sterility field generators. Insects scratched and buzzed and birds chirped and tree branches scraped against one another. While the Corps’ training had stressed how many species were extinct from exposure to anthroponotic diseases, to my pleasant surprise there were many survivors. 

In all of our training in the Restoration Corps, our own safety and survival were emphasized. Here was how to avoid exposure through water, soil, and air. Here was how to quarantine to prevent spreading illness. Here was how your service pistol works in case none of your preventative measures succeeded and you needed a final honorable solution. I had learned very little about the fate of others beyond the perimeter. But the corvid who watched me scoop morning water was wary. The flies emerging from the lake scattered before me desperately wherever I went. The species here did not have respirators and gloves to protect themselves from me. I thought about a grasshopper wearing latex gloves and a tiny respirator gesticulating wildly for me to go away, and I laughed out loud for the first time since I’d set up camp.

I remembered why: my laugh bothered me. A deep retching sound that made me wince in sympathy for the marmots within earshot. I thought by being in the woods, alone, with no mirrors, no one to observe me other than the ravens and salmon, that I would not mind how I was. My appearance required someone’s perception, their judgement and categorization and opinion, and without that I should be relaxed. But I wasn’t. If anything, I became increasingly bothered over the weeks by my lack of grounding. And so when I began to notice the inconsistencies in the data I was gathering, I was already in a heightened state. Despite what I observed, I worried that my perception itself was the problem. The way I viewed myself was different than everyone else—so logic dictated that I must be unreliable. Had I created these observed data inconsistencies through my own lack of correct perception then? 

I thought by being in the woods, alone, with no mirrors, no one to observe me other than the ravens and salmon, that I would not mind how I was. My appearance required someone’s perception, their judgement and categorization and opinion, and without that I should be relaxed. But I wasn’t.

My only companion at night—when the sun finally dipped behind the mountains for a few hours and the raven that followed me from branch to branch as I gathered my samples and checked the sonde grew bored and left—was doubt. It ate at me, a voracious appetite I could not satisfy no matter what I tried to feed it. Each night I fell asleep to its rumbling ache inside of me.

Nine weeks into deployment, I could no longer take the hunger of my doubt. I packed as lightly as I could, then set off at first light after collecting a water sample. Another violation of an order stacked on top of other violations, but I couldn’t bring myself to miss a collection entirely for that day. Private Brim Petrarch was monitoring lake 24052-C, located approximately eighteen miles northeast of my own lake. Without a trail, and with a scramble over a scree-filled pass, I needed as much time as possible. I subdivided the sample and placed part of it into the spectrometer, recorded the lie, hoisted my pack, and left. 

I found Brim swimming in his lake. His naked skin glistened gold and orange in the evening light, and for a moment I became caught up in the sight, in his unconcerned vulnerability, in how many layers covered me in comparison, in how dry my skin was, before my training finally kicked in and I threw my pack down, grabbed my emergency kit, and ran towards shore. He must have seen me, for he waved and yelled something, then swam lazily towards me. By the time Brim was close enough for me to hear him, I’d donned my protective equipment.

“What are you doing here, Flounder?” Brim said exiting the water, gingerly stepping naked feet onto the smooth pebbles coating the shoreline. He did not cover up his nakedness and I could not look away, for his skin, perhaps because of a trick of the gentle evening sun, appeared almost poreless. He was definitely hairless, and as the light caught his enviable smooth torso and muscular legs, I swear it formed a fish scale pattern. He had become something more than the Brim I knew before. Something I found myself strangely jealous of.

“You’re going to die,” I told him. I sprayed him with disinfectant and he screamed as it burned his inhuman skin. I clasped my hands over my ears to dull his sounds to little effect. He sprinted towards the water and I tackled him, the smell of burning fish, my screams mixing with his, until we lost consciousness. 

When I awoke, I apologized, even though he wasn’t awake, the disinfectant still coursing throughout his lymphatic system. I dragged him to his tent after cleaning him with filtered lake water and tucked him into his sleeping bag, then sat watching him twitch and moan. His skin, while smooth and slightly iridescent, now appeared otherwise normal. I doubted what I’d seen. Why had I done that? Surely he would know better than to strip naked and swim in the water. That was a death sentence. Brim was smart—likely to advance through the ranks quickly—he wouldn’t endanger himself or his career. Yet when he finally did stir he did not deny his actions, interrupting me as I tried to spin an exonerating story for him. He was so calm, not even worried that I might report his behavior, not terrified that he wouldn’t be allowed to reintegrate.

“You always were a stickler for rules,” Brim said.

Brim told me he had taken to swimming after five weeks of growing increasingly frustrated with the contradiction he observed between the Corps instructions and his lake’s reality. His lake was full of fish, and he saw birds catch and gulp them down. 

“I grew jealous of their freedom, I suppose,” he said to me, as if it made perfect sense. As if we didn’t have orders, as if we hadn’t signed away freedom to the Corps, as if personal freedom came before what was best for society. As if the too smooth fishskin I’d scrubbed with chemicals and tried to restore to no avail was not horrifying. As if I didn’t also desire things which were off limits.

As if we didn’t have orders, as if we hadn’t signed away freedom to the Corps, as if personal freedom came before what was best for society.

“How are you still alive?” I asked him.

“I think you know why,” Brim replied. 

I showed him my measurements. He showed me his.

“Then why are we here?”

“I have decided I am here,” Brim said, “to take a swim.”

I spent the night at Brim’s lake. The next morning, before I left, he scooped a water sample into a flask, sealed it, and handed it to me.

“Add it,” he said. “When you’re ready.”

For weeks after I stared at the water Brim had given me and thought about the data I’d shown him, and the data he’d shown me. I thought about him emerging from his lake, how beautiful he had been before I’d tried to cure him. I had been worried about showing him all my findings. I’d first shown him something safe, something deniable, but he’d called my bluff and handed me his entire notebook. He’d changed sampling protocols from week one almost immediately. I felt foolish that I’d waited, that I’d tried to conform to the Corps protocol for months despite the doubts festering within me. By comparing our observations, it was obvious that the machines we had been given—our portable spectrometers and sondes—were preprogrammed to return a decreasing number every other day, an elaborate way to generate data to demonstrate that the Corps’ additives were successful, but that the problem was not solved, that their protective mandate must be renewed. 

Brim had swum in the lake without protective gear. He’d done it daily, for months, and he was fine. In fact, he looked more than fine. He was tan and the swimming had begun to develop his lats and shoulders, and there was a litheness to his movements I hadn’t seen during training before our deployment. Perhaps the water did not kill, as we had been told by the Corps, but transformed. A transformation, or a corruption? I was no longer sure of the difference. Disease was, after all, the ultimate corruption of the body, and the ultimate transformation of cells into incubators and nutrition for billions of microbes.

I attended to my sampling haphazardly upon my return to Lake 24051-C. Not on purpose, at least I don’t believe so, but because I could not stop thinking of Brim. I began to become lost in the lazy ripples of the windblown lake when I stared at it for too long. Occasionally I’d hear a splash, and swear that I saw Brim on the other shore, his smooth crawl dragging him towards me, pulling me towards him, urging me to join him. I’d find I’d taken a few steps towards the water. 

After a week of going through the motions, I entirely abandoned collecting new water samples. The machine would make up a number regardless of what I did, so it was easier to reuse the same sample of water and avoid the hassle of collection altogether. I thought about using the water in the bottle Brim had given me, but it didn’t seem right. I had taken to sleeping with it next to me. When I drifted off each night I imagined I heard a gentle playful sloshing.

As the end of the seven months deployment approached, I realized that whatever had happened with Brim had altered me in an irreparable way. The mission of the Corps seemed so distant and insignificant. What we were doing was a performance, a show for… for who? Did it matter? 

When reintegration happened, would I be evaluated on this performance? I began to suspect this had been some sort of elaborate test by the Corps, and I had clearly failed. I was supposed to follow orders, and yet I had let curiosity corrupt me. I had thought myself disciplined, capable of controlling impure impulses and impossible desires, and yet I had been wrong. In only a few months on my own, I had failed to live up to what a Corpsman should be. Something had gotten into me and grown.

The lake was not as cold as I thought it would be. I had assumed that the protective equipment I wore had insulated me, that the water must be much too cold to submerge in naked. I’m sure they’d said that in training. That the water was freezing in addition to being full of dangerous diseases. Exposure was not only deadly, but painful. They’d emphasized the pain.

The water was not warm, but it was not too cold. It was refreshing. 

When I dunked my head under, I wondered at my insanity, the way I was certainly ingesting tiny gulps of microbe laden water. As I surfaced and stood in the chest deep water a few body lengths from shore and watched the sparse trees sway and golden afternoon sun blanket the rock cliffs, I wondered if disease grew in my lymph nodes, if it pulsed through my blood stream. I’d run a sample through the Corps mass spec twelve times before sticking my bare foot in, then another dozen before submerging, although I’m not sure why. The same pattern as always held, and the answer was obvious: I did not know what was in the water. The only way to find out was to submerge. So I did, and after minutes of nothing, my panicked thoughts finally began to subside. 

The same pattern as always held, and the answer was obvious: I did not know what was in the water. The only way to find out was to submerge.

I developed a routine: In the morning I’d document my observations and thoughts, and in the afternoon I’d swim. The shimmer of my skin lasted longer each day, until after some number of weeks it stayed and did not fade, even if I missed a day in the water. With the shimmer came a new smoothness, as if every wrinkle and pore had been sandblasted, hair sloughing off in mats. A looseness developed within me each time I submerged myself, not euphoria, for I’m not sure such a feeling was possible, but a lessening of tension in both body and mind. While my body’s transformation was obvious when I stood in front of the mirror-smooth morning water, it soon became mundane. Of course my body changed, for I had made the decision to change when I’d first stepped foot into the lake. I’d been thinking of Brim, of his inhumanly human body emerging from his own lake, his corps uniform discarded, his instruments in disarray. He had embraced the unknown bravely and become something more than the boy I’d gone through the academy with. 

Still, though in many ways my anxiety had subsided, there was a discomfort I couldn’t shake. There was the prospect of the rescue helicopter landing, of my upcoming evaluation. The question of my reintegration hung over me at all times. A different life waited for me inside the perimeter, and I was no Brim. I found myself checking my tables of falsified data, carefully squirreling away the evidence of the machine’s fraud and my incriminating knowledge of the ruse. To shed the Corps uniform and jump into a lake in the middle of the wilderness was easy; to do it in front of another person—in front of my captain, or the other men in the company, in front of my parents and friends and—there were plenty of reasons to hide my indiscretions. As the trees changed to a yellow-orange and the days grew shorter and colder, I found it again easy to avoid exposing myself in the lake. I had experimented. I’d had my youthful fun.  

The more I wore my protective clothing and conducted the Corps business, the more I found my anxiety of getting caught had left me, for this was a simple and straightforward way to live, one with a future inside the perimeter—and besides, I reasoned, the lake would most likely freeze during winter, and I’d rather stop subjecting myself to its seductive properties before I became trapped in it like a fish under ice and drowned. 

When the helicopter team picked me up, they made no remarks about my appearance. I frowned at my dull reflection in the curved metal and glass of the thumping machine and I wondered how Brim was doing. Did he still have that smooth sparkle?

During the debrief, I caught snippets of conversations as I was evaluated by the Corp’s reintegration handlers: I learned what the other members of my platoon thought of their findings, what the higher ups told us they thought they would discover by combing through the data we had risked our lives to collect, and how it had all been worth the sacrifice and loss. More than half of us had not returned. I said little about my time at the lake. It seemed like a dream, like someone else’s life that I had lived. I felt a profound sense of sadness, of loss. I slathered lotion on my skin several times each day but I still felt cracked and dried out. I drank liters of water and remained parched. When I slept, I cradled the bottle Brim had given me and dreamed of slipping past the sterility field perimeter and gliding under twinkling sky towards still clear water, of throwing myself into its embrace, sighing out my air and sinking into its depths, breathing the water as easily as I breathed air, wrapped in the supportive embrace I’d known for those few months.

Brim had not reintegrated. I wasn’t sure if he had even been picked up by the helicopter. What had the pilot found when he’d circled Brim’s lake? 

The Special Services Grief Team held a ceremony of remembrance for those who had not reintegrated alongside us. We assembled in a cavernous building, walls lined with glistening steel vats of chemicals and filters connected to snaking tubes. In the center of the concrete floor, a polished hatch was opened directly to the immense central water cistern. One by one, a grief counselor led us to stand in front of the hatch and peer down into the vast inky black cleanness, and we said whatever words came to us, then made the traditional purifying offering of bleach. I was the last to go. 

“I wish I had stayed with you,” I whispered low so I wouldn’t be overheard. “I wish I would have done more, that I could have been stronger. I wish I could see you swim one last time.” I looked at the bottle of bleach the grief counselor had handed me and found myself recapping it. “I wish you weren’t everywhere in my thoughts,” I whispered, and withdrew the bottle Brim had given me. “I wish there was a way I could have saved you.” I thought of the weight of the sterility field, how it seemed to press down on my mind until even my memories of the lake and Brim were squeezed out. In the overhead fluorescent light, my skin was sallow and shimmerless. The counselor noticed I’d recapped the bleach and placed it on the floor and hurried towards me with a scowl forming on his face. I thought about restoration, and what was truly needed. I thought about how I had done plenty of thinking. I poured in the water from Brim’s lake until his gift was empty and took a step.