B. Fisk

Not even plankton live forever!

Here’s what a microplastic tastes like: chewy at first, and then it unzips, to pierce your unwitting membranes. If you’re the kind of thing that eats microplastics, you’re never hungry, just usually uncomfortable. You’re alone, too, but then you fix that. There’s only so much one body can eat.

. . .

I prefer technical truths to other kinds. Although I do breathe air, I lived my entire life underwater. Everybody on planet Venus lived in an airtight bubble, covered by a saltwater barrier, covered by a lot of concrete. Our roads were superplastic tunnels filled mostly with water, and a little hole for people to come through. My job at the VTC was road maintenance, so I did pH neutralisation, trace element precipitation, and sterilisation, when those naughty extremophiles wriggled their way through the water filter.

My office was pushed right up to the membrane of the bubble Venusoid, because I wanted a window. There was a kilometre or so of water between me and the atmosphere so my eyes didn’t boil out of my skull, and through it I could sometimes see a pale blue dot, which I thought was the sun. Really, from in there, you’d think all of Venus was blue. 

It was the day of my wedding, and my husband(s) were waiting for me to get off work. I sneaked back into my office while it was being gardened. On planet Venus we did air recycling, just like on planet Earth, except we kept it controlled. Each bubble had a set of designated photosynthesisers, and we didn’t waste drinking water on them. We plugged their roots into the walls to feed off the interstitial flow. I liked to listen to the ocean, thundering its congested way through our membranes.

I found the leukonoid Dodo plugging kelp into my office, bare-handed. Excuse me. In a strict anatomical sense, Dodo didn’t have hands. It’s more like Dodo saw the human hand, and liked it, and made it better; one of Dodo’s hands does the work of two of mine. Personally, I’ve always taken it as a compliment. 

I was lucky, because while Dodo was touching the kelp, its hands were crisp and green. I saw it grasp the leaf blades, and as it spread out its six digits (four fingers on top, two thumbs on bottom), it retracted the webbing between finger and thumb, like an octopus revealing its tentacles; but unlike the octopus with its hidden beak, Dodo was soft all over, and full of holes. When Dodo drew back from the kelp, its silhouette returned to the air. 

“This is a designated breathing room. I’ll ask you to leave, Dr. Princess,” it said. 

Dr. Princess isn’t my real name. I was a new kind of woman—a Venus kind of woman!—so they had to come up with a new insult for me. “Princess” is because I was the only baby ever born on this planet. I technically began on Earth, but my perfect undetectable fetus was carried through space isolation, the whole way here, so whatever it was that killed all the other babies didn’t get me. Can you imagine growing up a little girl idiot among scientists and engineers? It’s enough to drive a girl crazy, but luckily I’m not crazy.

If you’re the kind of thing that eats microplastics, you’re never hungry, just usually uncomfortable. You’re alone, too, but then you fix that.

When I earned my doctorate, I let everyone know it was Dr. Princess. I didn’t know where Dodo caught wind of the nickname. Bengt 1 told everyone to stop calling me that after I resigned from the VTC for bubbly matrimony. I really should’ve asked Bengt 1 where he heard it from, but I assumed it was from Bengt 2, who heard it from Bengt 3, who heard it from Bengt 5… And yet, if only I’d followed the line, I would’ve come back to Dodo, the cultivator of my husband(s).

“My name’s PBD,” I said. I thought I should warn Dodo about that kelp it was plugging into the wall. It wasn’t safe to touch it without protection. “That thing’s been grown on Earth water, you know.”

“I know,” it said. 

“Will you be offered worker’s compensation for future cancers?”

All Venus water was originally Earth water, a known carcinogen. We’d lifted ours from the Antarctic Ocean, so it had the same constituents: salts, dissolved gases, microbes, and microplastics. All land organisms carry inside our cells the chemistry of our old seawater, us on bubble Venusoid more than everybody on the Antarctic because they were chock-full of plastic, and we didn’t touch the saltwater or the things that grew inside it. We neutralised, we precipitated, we sterilised. Venus life was a pure life. I had many allergies, but no cancers. 

I thought Dodo was a new arrival, because it wasted syllables on the VTC. It replied, “Only supposing that it wasn’t my own goddamn fault, said the Venusoid Transportation Commission. So probably not.” 

“You can grow recreational plants, with filtered water,” I said, “though I don’t personally commend it.”

“That stuff’s sterilised of anything interesting. Super dead. No action.” A part of Dodo came loose, upward and around, in a flowering motion. Clockwise, the same direction the waters flowed in Venus’ southern hemisphere. We were big enough to feel the Coriolis effect, to have our currents twisted by planetary motion.

“What?” I said. I really got off the wrong trail of thought. 

“It’s chock-full of dead bodies. Dead plankton,” it said. 

Dodo didn’t like the word extremophile, but plankton’s hardly better. It’s not a family but a lifestyle, one word for all the floating things in the ocean that can’t move of their own will, only with the water. It’s cruel to define a body by all it cannot do, but I wasn’t a biologist; I never had the stomach for dissection. I was a road worker. I kept them salty and clean. I didn’t feel guilt, but I had professional pride. 

“I kill millions of microbes all the time.” I said microbes because I was being exact: plankton is a lifestyle, not a size. “I inject a poison syringe into the water, and they not only eat it, but send it to their friends in little packets of DNA. I do it happily. There are pathogens that eat our breather plants, that would like to eat us, or even bubble Venusoid itself. Without my maintenance, we’d implode. Boil dead.”

“I’m messing with you,” said Dodo. “I obviously don’t want to die by plankton.”

And then Dodo did something disgusting. I suspect it was to provoke me, or to amuse itself, or to amuse itself by my provocation. It was the first time I saw it eat. 

. . .

You don’t know it yet, but you could survive the most terrible cold anybody’s ever died of. You could survive the turbulence of a newborn ocean. You eat uncomfortable things, and you get mitosis, and now two of you are eating uncomfortable things. Cycle through.

Your scintillating tendrils can sense light, and do something like smell. There’s something you can eat very close by, a bigger plastic than you’ve ever known. Only it’s so very hot, and by this point you’ve forgotten how to handle the heat. But that’s OK. There’s lots of genes around.

You don’t know it yet, but you could survive the most terrible cold anybody’s ever died of. You could survive the turbulence of a newborn ocean.

. . .

I began to feed Dodo. It wasn’t so bad, just a few hairs here and there. Dodo called it volunteering for decomposition, which put people off, but I have never held illusions about my current and continuing state of managed decomposition. Time’s arrow points in one unflattering direction. Personally, I believe only in irreversible change — same as every other layabout with a circadian rhythm. Legs aren’t very original either, but they’re a good way to get around.

It was the death knell for my marriage, only a few unimpressive days old. Bengt 5 said I shouldn’t be giving parts of my body to an alien. I asked who I should give them to instead, and Bengt 3 replied our future baby, which must’ve made him feel very smart. Of course, I’d already sterilised myself by then. Bengt 2 said that our population can’t sustain itself, Earth’s done for, they’re all sick and poisoned except for us, and all I’d had to do was get pregnant. I said it was only a few hundred thousand eggs, around which point Bengt 1 began to cry. I suppose Bengt 1 felt betrayed because Dodo cultivated his embryo, and he thought that meant it programmed humanity’s purpose into him, or even believed in it. But Dodo isn’t that cruel.

There’s something you can eat very close by, a bigger plastic than you’ve ever known. Only it’s so very hot, and by this point you’ve forgotten how to handle the heat.

A hundred thousand popped eggs adds up to, approximately, nothing. There’s more microbes than stars in the observable universe. Did you know that? It’s a 13.8 billion lightyear bubble, and after all those stars die, there will still be a microbe chewing its way through some small, stupid, lonely rock. The little friends of that little microbe are the ones who’ll eat Bengts’ children and children’s children, no matter what I do. The fate of humanity has got nothing to do with me!

So I left my husband(s), for an inner sac of Venusoid. The further I went into the bubble, the more it dripped, like a wet sponge. The inner sacs were unpopular, and difficult to find, although Dodo, also built like a sponge, had no trouble sniffing me out. 

“The road between bubble Venusoid and bubble Coely sprung a leak,” Dodo told me, on behalf of the VTC. 

“I thought we already handled the extremophiles,” I said. 

“What a mean name,” Dodo said. 

“50°C and above makes it definitionally extreme,” I said, although I didn’t actually know the definition. “I salted that road so much it was practically brine and still boiling.”

“I told you not to season it. Everybody loves salt,” Dodo said. 

“Technically, plankton don’t have bodies,” I said. “Bodies must take action. They must affect other bodies.”

“They’re taking bites out of the walls,” said Dodo. “Is that good enough for you?”

I returned to work. The roads were corroding at an exponential rate, and the only way to fend it off was to flush the water out – but there was only so much water we had. Our pygmy ocean would never touch again the Earth; flowing through pores and over membranes, it had not a single current in common with the Antarctic. Therefore, it had to be an efficient organism. The ocean eliminated redundancies, billions worth of redundancies, arms and fins and lungs and brains, if they were redundancies. I was a cleaner. Digestion aid. 

. . .

It isn’t safe near the big plastic, but the taste is worth it. The things around you eat and die, salts and poisons supersaturating the water. You’ll die too, but there’s always somebody who sticks around. Cell colonies work like teeth, they fall out and come back. Eat the walls. Go on. Eat!

. . .

“The humans on Venus call you aliens,” I told Dodo, half out of shame, and half curiosity.

Dodo said, “You’re so precise with language, that must have driven you crazy.”

“I’m not crazy,” I said, “and I think you’re lying again.”

“I’ll admit to a lie of omission. I didn’t begin as an alien,” Dodo said. “I was once a set of undulating mineral patterns on the underside of a carbo-ice sheet, on Europa. More precisely, I was a result of those undulating mineral patterns, and they were a result of me.”

“Humans are still mostly saltwater,” I said, trying not to act surprised. Dodo had never before told me where it came from. “We’re supposed to have evolved from deep-sea vents, or tidal pools. Interfaces between water and minerals. You can do very exciting things with a membrane or two. It makes a good environment for a pre-microbe microbe. Livable, maybe.” 

“Not at all,” Dodo said. “I only became alive when I came into contact with human DNA.”

“Is that where you got your sense of humour, too?”

“Everything I have is stolen. I am leukonoid,” Dodo replied, proud and mischievous. “We may have been cultivated in your image, but our natures are elementally different. Cut out any of my organs, and it will grow into a new leukonoid. Cut out your organs, and I’ll absorb them. I could pick up your electrochemical habits by eating your nervous system, and I’d be conscious of it too. Your intelligence is an emergent trait of your interlocking parts, you come from between your body and itself. Dodo comes from between inside and outside, I am my surface area. A human fetus is not a person, but the difference between me and a petri dish is only a matter of scale.”

I understood why Dodo was always so sympathetic to my plankton. They inhabit the invisible world, but there’s not a way to live as a human without killing or feeding or providing a nice place to have sex for tiny little things we’ll never see. We are their bodies of residence before we are anything else. Even more incriminating, we invent things for them. We invented a new kind of chlorophyll for Venus’ sunlight, we invented DNA for leukonoids to copy, and we invented plastic for you to eat. The aliens are here because we made them. 

Cell colonies work like teeth, they fall out and come back. Eat the walls. Go on. Eat!

. . .

If I kill 99.9% of the bodies in a cubic metre of water, I am basically a miracle for the 0.1% who stick around. I mean, sterilisation is a miracle for those little freaks, and they like to conjugate around, if you know what I mean. Yes, it’s called a plasmid, it’s this little piece of DNA cells use to have sex — sorry, I’m being reductive. They don’t have our reproductive baggage. They can split themselves, or form a colony, or eat one another and decide not to digest, or inject their genome into their predator while they’re being digested. We’re so possessive of our genes, but DNA is their commons.

I’ll try to be direct. Imagine your body. 315 °C, 200 atmospheres of pressure, and salty as hell. Half the time I was trying to keep the roadwater from going supercritical. Who lived here, with me on the job? You are the most extremophilic of extremophiles, and you love to eat. Sorry if that’s an offensive term, it’s just that we’re not sure yet if you’re bacteria, or fungi, or Venus aliens. All I know is what you eat (plastic) and what you don’t eat (steriliser injections). It’s the most exciting thing on Earth since they realised the water was giving them cancer.

. . .

They sent me up to Earth with a sample of the plastiphiles, packed into this terrible little rocket thing. Rocket’s a misnomer, it didn’t even have an engine, only fins to ride the solar wind. We followed Venus’ orbit for the initial boost, then drifted along, until we got caught by the pale blue dot. That’s what the space jockeys call their planet. It’s even on the computer navigation. Astral body: Pale Blue Dot, P.B.D. for short.

You are the most extremophilic of extremophiles, and you love to eat. Sorry if that’s an offensive term, it’s just that we’re not sure yet if you’re bacteria, or fungi, or Venus aliens. All I know is what you eat (plastic) and what you don’t eat (steriliser injections).

Hearing that made Dodo laugh. The jockey let me take it along, since leukonoids are mostly air, and eat detritus. “It’s funny, what’s in a name. I’m in your orbit, after all.”

“I’m not big enough to be gravitationally attractive,” I said. 

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Dodo said. “I’ve shared a petri dish with much worse roommates.”

“When were you in a petri dish?”

“During my polyp stage, while I was at the mercy of Dr. Bengt Lukasson,” Dodo said. “The first human DNA I reproduced. You could call him my gene donor, but he liked to call himself a gene victim. It was pretty funny, actually.”

“So you stole his joke, too?”

“Maybe if I had a more exciting diet, I’d find new jokes to steal.”

“I’ll try and donate my most exciting cells,” I said, fondly, “freak.”

Even the best of friends come up short when confronted with the alien between them. In the little rocket like an aquarium tank, I believed, at that time more than any other, that Dodo and I could understand one another. I was lucky Dodo had a shortcut. Two, in fact, with six fingers each.