The Last Silver Bullet Read online

  ‘Oh yea, that software would be eggplantastic for capturing that view of the entire valley,’ Milli Ann agreed with an extra zing in her steps. ‘It would make a sick selfie background.’

  Buddy let out a sigh of relief. Had Milli Ann started engaging with those kids, it would get impossible for him to reboot her good mood. Just like Buddy, she absolutely hated bullying too but didn’t know how to not get involved like him. When she was younger, she ignored it but now she just couldn’t. She even tried moulstoning, where you join in a joke on you to make it not funny anymore, but she didn’t have the patience for it.

  The ascent to the Sentinel Dome was easy and went without anyone dishing out more dirt about the two. Surrounded by an assortment of High Sierra peaks, Buddy felt so insignificant and even more lost in life – the magnificence of Nature did overawe most people. When the tour guide told the kids about the Jeffrey Pine that grew on top of the Dome, Buddy wondered how it would have been for him to live there.

  What really intrigued Buddy was the tree’s holographic image that showed its intricate jigsaw puzzle-like cracked bark. It was as if he could sense the presence of some hidden secrets in the tree that would surface if he could put the jigsaw puzzle together.

  His line of thought was interrupted when a strong gust of wind almost knocked him off-balance – Milli Ann had already taken a knee. Their noodle-like roots trembled as they tried to withstand the airstream’s sweeping surge.

  After recovering, Buddy was quick to determine whether anyone was looking. To his horror, everyone had seen it.

  ‘That’s exactly what leading a privileged life does to you,’ a Blahbarian Bimbo drew her inference about the reason behind the Smalls family’s delicate roots. She had been commenting on everything Buddy and Milli Ann did, but this time it was loud enough for Buddy to hear.

  Wish she had the big red switch on her for shutting her off, Buddy thought of her.

  The fact that the Smalls family was babied around by the human couple of Rosa and Victor Alset, was the reason for all the roasting Buddy and Milli Ann got. Being the Chief Botanical Researcher slash Park Ranger of the Yosemite National Park, Ranger Rosa took her job pretty seriously. She and her team would spend days collecting data from various parts of the park, and spend even more time in order to analyze it. Despite having the whole National Park to take care of, she never gave up on her green fingers and diligently maintained a personal garden. The Smalls family was one of the few extremely privileged ones who were part of that garden that mostly had potted plants.

  They had been gifted to Rosa by Victor during the time they were just seeing each other. Initially there was only the married couple of Gia and Joseph Smalls in the pot, but then Gia chose to germinate a couple of seeds from unknown parents. Buddy was brought to life first, and later came Milli Ann. Ranger Rosa took it as a blessing and didn’t pull them out. Buddy was a Roseum Succulent – one whose chunky leaves were arranged like a Rose flower. Rosa marveled at the odds of having a namesake specie growing in the pot, that too, without her having to play any part in Buddy’s germination.

  As for Milli Ann, she was from the Lithops tribe of Succulents. Rosa couldn’t really detect Milli Ann’s germination because Lithops resembled little pebbles. Commonly known as Pebble plants or Living Stones, the plants of the tribe had evolved to resemble rocks so as to avoid being eaten. When Rosa finally discovered Milli Ann in the pot, she let her be because her pebble-like appearance added an exotic new dimension to the Smalls family pot. Moreover, Buddy and Milli Ann had entangled their roots with Gia and Joseph, making it next to impossible to uproot them without harming the couple. The Smalls couple and the adopted kids made a great treat to watch – all of them tiny; all of them like pieces of art.

  The final leg of the school trip took them to the Tuolumne River which originated from the majestic Mount Lyell. The mountain cradled the rapidly-melting Lyell Glacier – the last remaining glacier of Yosemite that had retreated so much because of global warming that some considered it an ice field now.

  They were visiting a Water Hyacinth settlement of the Tuolumne River. The teachers wished to make the kids understand how tough life could be for some folks. The settlement was under a constant threat from the Forest Department which considered the Water Hyacinths invasive. Ranger Rosa and the others would regularly remove them from the River, but the diehardcore water-dwelling Bloomans would reclaim the territory just as quickly.

  At the settlement, Buddy’s worst fear came true – Gia was there. Obliteratin’ locusts! Why is mom here? thought Buddy. He was so discolored at her for being there that he didn’t even respond to her excited greeting.

  Gia was there because she ran an e-commerce business of memorabilia fished-out of the Tuolumne River by the Water Hyacinths. It was from the adoption center run by the Water Hyacinths that the Smalls couple had found Buddy and Milli Ann as seeds. While Buddy the Seed had been found inside an acorn floating in the River, the seed that Milli Ann sprouted from had been rescued out of the River’s depths from an airtight box.

  ‘Wow, look at them,’ marveled the Water Hyacinths who had fished out Buddy and Milli Ann, ‘they’re all grown up now.’

  ‘Yes,’ acknowledged Gia, ‘you don’t know how grateful Joseph and I are that you got these wonderful kids in our life.’

  At the end of the school trip, Gia gave a small presentation on the tough life at the settlement and urged the kids to contribute to the Water Hyacinths’ welfare by getting involved. The jealousy-thrives rolled their eyes at that. They considered Gia to be a fortunate snob who only talked about the welfare of the underprivileged because it was a fashionable thing to do.

  But their assumptions on the Small family’s wealth were wrong on so many counts. Gia and Joseph did make a lot of money all right, but would never get rich because they kept donating huge sums of money to ensure the wellbeing of the perpetually-struggling river-dwelling plants. On top of that, Gia also funded certain environmental causes she was actively involved with. Activism was a tireless endeavor.

  The dislike the family garnered was also because Joseph Smalls ran a successful lotto business. The only thing he had to do in a day was go back and forth on the next day’s lottery combinations with Jack Potter, a Daffodil plant he had hired as a consultant. Joseph was seen as someone who ran Lost Wages; someone who corrupted folks into gambling their money away.

  While Gia and Milli Ann spent their time going to seminars, conventions and protests organized for action on climate change, Buddy was not sure if that was having any positive effect on the crisis. The climate change deniers just didn’t care for a dialogue with the activists anyway. For them it was always like, I’m rubber you’re glue, your words bounce off me and stick to you. In fact, the deniers would go out of their way to counter the realists with their whacktivism.

  Moreover, Buddy thought that his family’s involvement in activism was only providing more fodder to the gossipers around. He hated the way people talked about his family; he wanted to prove them wrong but didn’t know how to go about it.

  12

  Off the Blocks

  Things got a move-on when Buddy had to team up with Chris Hempsworth – Hempsy – and another kid named Brews Lee for a class project on humans. They had only gotten together because no one else wanted to have them in their group. Fashionable kids were working on human fashion, the sports freaks were smacking their lips about getting an opportunity to work on their favorite human games, while the meme-junkies wanted to present the world of human memes. The three just didn’t have the bandwidth for things like these.

  Hempsy was an aspiring radio-astronomer. Ranger Rosa kept him so she could study the effects of pollutants on him – the Hemp plants showed great potential of getting rid of toxic substances; they could even do away with radioactive waste.

  But Hempsy was basically someone more interested in what was happening up there rather than down around. He tried being part of the Crop Circles
Society looking for the extraterrestrials. They would beam deep-space messages by arranging themselves in weird patterns over agricultural fields, believing the aliens would receive the transmissions and relay back a reply. Though he had no problem with the assumption that aliens existed, he just couldn’t wrap his head around the mode of transmission the Society had chosen – he would rather have them beam up mathematical formulas instead of those absurd diagrams.

  Brews – the other kid who had to team up with Hempsy and Buddy – was a bonsai of a Chinese Coffea bush. More than two billion cups of coffee were savored around the world every day, but the species was under the threat of extinction, with some projections claiming it would die off by 2050. The sensitive kid was already having a genuine extinction meltdown because of the awareness.

  Since he didn’t know how to deal with this apparent eventuality, the nerdcore bonsai vowed to solve it by studying botany. For passing his spare time, he got it going with a whole lot of procastigaming activities.

  It was only recently that Brews had been chucked out of a SHRUBG gang for going easy on the enemies. It was considered a strategy blunder to have a team member like Brews parachuting down with you over the drop zone. You were required to take roots – preferably inside the ever-shrinking safe zone – kill the other teams, rob their resources and create passages for yourself and your teammates to propagate branches and roots for staying inside the safe zone and blocking the way for others. SHRUBG was an obsession with Bloomans of Chinese origin because if you were in China, the PC version would have been banned for you.

  ‘What should we do the project on, guys?’ Hempsy asked the group after school.

  ‘It should be something on what the three of us are interested in,’ suggested Brews, ‘but the problem is, we all come from different universes.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Hempsy.

  Buddy wasn’t even sure what he was really interested in; fighting climate change was still only an abstract idea in his head; though he was some sort of a hacking enthusiast with good skills to hold his own in the geekosystem.

  Having a younger sister who worships you and follows you around like a puppy always helps. ‘You know what, you guys should work on Project Human; find out what’s making them lose their marbles,’ proposed Milli Ann.

  They liked her suggestion but were a little unsure about it. Nobody would be interested in seeing boring Anthropology presentations. But, Milli Ann was not your average little girl – she was way smarter than kids her age. She also knew how to manipulate you to suit her purpose, and right now, she really wanted them to work on Project Human.

  ‘You’re interested in Botany, right?’ She asked Brews. ‘Wouldn’t you be interested to know why these apes keep making stuff like Agent Orange and all those ridiculous perfumes made of whale puke? We didn’t plan them out to be this way, right?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ agreed Brews.

  ‘And, Hempsy, how’s your astral-eavesdropping going on with all the Radio Frequency Interference from satellites and cell phones?’ That was enough for curing Hempsy’s indecisivitis.

  After having her pitches accepted, she moved to Buddy, ‘Well?’

  Milli Ann’s ‘well’ was actually a verbalized nudge since she totally expected nothing but an affirmative response from Buddy. He had to nod up to her. Last time he backed out, Milli Ann had pulled the if-only-I-had-a-real-brother card and had howled away to glory. He loved her too much to be going through her emotional blackmail.

  ‘I mean, just look at them,’ she went on. If someone was ready to listen, she loved to go on with her human-bashing. ‘They are calling themselves a disease now and rightly so, but some of them have the audacity to get offended by it. How dare they?’

  Sensing that Milli Ann would have gone the whole nine yards otherwise, Buddy asked, ‘Yeah, but how do we go about it?’

  ‘Well, I can handle the science bit,’ offered Brews.

  ‘I guess you guys can count me in for researching the web. I can easily get us cool and rare information for the presentation,’ Buddy announced.

  Hempsy was feeling left out. ‘What’ll I do, ay?’

  ‘You could do the presenting,’ suggested Milli Ann, ‘after all, who’d be better than an aspiring radio astronomer at presenting facts and data.’ Milli Ann was sweet talking him into going for the role.

  ‘Sounds like a deal.’ Hempsy gave her the nod.

  13

  Trojan Horse

  The group began researching. Buddy had learnt one thing about researching the web – there was a lot of fake content going around. To check the authenticity, one had to check on multiple sites, forums, even go through fact-checking of the rumors. With Project Human, he could see a pattern. Websites did have information on the origins of Project Human, but all of them were somehow or the other linked with the government. It was basically the same information going around with changes in the style of expression. Everything sounded like a fairytale, just that the mandatory monsters were missing altogether.

  Buddy had to check other sources since there had to be stuff on other lines too. He checked the dark web where Bloomans generally logged on for indulging in nefarious activities. He had heard of some secret forums where no bots monitored or censored the conversations. There was a lot of mention of the Brotherhood which the government had cleverly toned down. A lot of Blooman researchers had put up their work too – mostly ones with controversial papers that the government had blotted out.

  Then he hit the jackpot – he found Bloomian Assange’s leaked files on Project Human. There were detailed timelines and observational charts that should have been declassified a long time ago. While the government had been quick about dealing with Assange, getting his website’s servers to deny him hosting, a substantial number of the leaked files did make it to the dark web. The firebrand journo was made to pay dearly by the government. He has been rotting in Cyberia’s solitary mode ever since – a price he paid for revealing their tricks of the trade to the world.

  When the SFLA got to know about what Assange was up to, putting him away became a big priority – they wanted to ensure that they could continue maintaining their cloak of secrecy. The hardy indoor Spiderwort plant was put in their idea of an Alcatraz prison for Bloomans, a sealed glass jar.

  It was pretty easy for them to have Assange put away. Humans had been known to seal Spiderwort plants inside big, globular bottles, with one of the plants famously surviving – rather thriving – inside for more than 50 years, entirely on recycled air, nutrients and water. Even when the humans marveled to see a living organism so easily adjust to a life inside a closed jar, it was still the worst sort of solitary confinement for any Blooman being.

  Buddy shared the Assange files with Brews and the group. Going through the contents gave the group a real sense of thrill. They knew they were on to something big, unearthing some sort of a conspiracy. Along with entries on the Creation of Man, the Theft of Fire, the tragic fate of the Neanderthals and Denisovans, along with the Garden of Eden experiment, there were details of every retrovirus that had found its way into the human genome – something that really caught Brews’ eye.

  There wasn’t a single organism on Earth that didn’t have a brush with a virus ever. While they weren’t really considered living organisms, the adventurous squatters lurked somewhere between chemistry and biology. Viruses carry genetic material, but they don’t have the necessary cellular machinery to perform biochemical activities for multiplying and spreading.

  To solve this problem, they simply use the superkingdoms of life by hijacking living cells of animals, fungi, plants and bacteria for transferring their genetic material across time and eventually killing the host cells.

  While most viruses followed this modus operandi, there were retroviruses that spliced in to the host’s cells and copy-pasted their own DNA into the host’s DNA sequence, creating a hybrid DNA. Their invasion is so effective that currently about eight percent of the human
genome consists of HERVs or Human Endogenous Retroviruses, making every human being part-virus. Brews could understand the contents of the Assange files because along with Botany, he had an interest in Genomics too. The deeper he went the more weirded-out he got.

  ‘I think we have our culprit,’ he announced to the gang.

  ‘What do you mean?’ quizzed Buddy.

  ‘I mean, there could be a retrovirus that re-jigged the human genome and caused all the weirdness in them.’

  Milli Ann’s eyes lit up. Brews went on, ‘There is one they called HERV-K that had affected them when the three human subspecies hadn’t branched out. It played a big role in separating the early humans from their primate ancestors by switching on or off certain genes present in the human DNA.

  ‘While the retrovirus could only make minor adjustments to the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, the genome of Homo sapiens was affected quite intensively – it made the runt of the litter the top dog.

  ‘HERV-K managed to mutate around 20 times in the Homo sapiens genome. One of the mutations happened right before the Theft of Fire, while yet another happened 200,000 years ago that made Homo sapiens branch out from the human family tree.’

  ‘This is so spooky,’ Milli Ann blurted. ‘What does this HERV-K do to the humans, by the way?’

  Buddy was already Moogling on the go. He interjected with his findings, ‘It gives them autoimmune disease, schizophrenia, difficulties with thinking and behavior, indifference and loss of inhibitions.’

  ‘Basically, all the things we didn’t want them to have,’ concluded Milli Ann.

  ‘Things were never really in their control after that,’ marked Brews. ‘One of the reports in here also suggests that the Brotherhood suspected that HERV-K was genetically engineered by someone.’