Oratio Brevis

The sun has gone down and all is quiet. The heat has not only dissipated in the evenings but the days are cool and life is springing up from the ground inside the Messocosoms. There’s a bustling outside my window because the younglings have started migrating back into the valley. They seem to change shape slightly every year, or perhaps it’s that my memory is warping with every passing season. Sometimes one of them will pass me and I’ll feel a painful hunger to devour a few of them. I move on. I remember that I’m a vegetarian … a bear killing vegetarian that eats fish. A pescatarian avenger!

A demented stranger who hobbles on, hunches over, and reflects. There’s no victory to be had here.

Things have been moving along fairly smoothly with the experiment. The mesocosoms are performing beautifully again and the smell of green air is on the horizon. We’re having to tamper with our systems outside less because of the Troll Traps we set. I’m not sure how many we’ve killed. The Dwarfs take care of that mess. I don’t like to look at them. No doubt there will be blow back, but when they took our central chiller unit down without us knowing we couldn’t let these things slide any longer. Breaking systems of that nature demands blood. Once they figure out the traps they’ll recuperate and that will be the end of this slow period. Then it will be back to twisting through plants, wires, computer chips, and scraping flesh exposing burns from my left hand again. Trolls.

There’s hope on the horizon. News from the east has come in about many exciting projects. Will write more about that later.

What once constituted hot is now a northern vacation. A 13 percent increase in the temperature curve and a 26 percent drop in humidity has nearly turned the plants into smoldering piles of carbon. The ambient treatments are still reaching for the sky, but the symmetrically elevated chambers are crushed flat. During the day all the chambers are releasing carbon dioxide at a rate higher than we can flush with the dump valves. CO2 injection is all but non-existent.

As far as I can tell the trolls and gnomes were unaware of my return from the North until today. They took out two primary systems but I had them back up and running in minutes. I bet they thought they were pretty tricky. There was some annoying fallout as a result but nothing as bad as tumbling through the bureaucratic hell that is infrastructure change.

There was an unfortunate mishap while I was gone. The gnomes cut my communication lines to the Terracosoms while I was gone. That little trick of theirs caused some bureaucratic shuffling. I wasn’t around to do any rule breaking. Evidently the requests sent out to the Titans were heard right away. I think the trolls have been meddling with my requests.

The salmon run was impressive but didn’t start until the morning I left. I gave a brief thought to jumping in and swimming with them, but then imagined them nibbling on my toes and thought better. Onward and upward, I was out of there. At one point I managed to kill a bear with a spear and a stray eagle followed me through the mountains for several miles. Those birds are like pigeons with significantly larger excrement. I saw one fly through a man’s window and leave a whole salmon on the table for dinner. The beasts are practically griffins up north this time of year. They terrify me and their hunger has no limits.

The days are hot, humidity is low, and the plants are nearly dead. It’s summer and the soil is almost as quenched in the mesocosms as it is on Terra Firma. This is the time of year when electronics will start failing randomly. At four in the morning a strip heater will go out or the chiller unit will fail and I’ll have to come in to lord over this place for a few extra hours that day. The routine is simple: play unsuspecting victim to the trolls that roam the field whom plot with the gnomes that rule the polyhouse. Their objective is clear, simple, and imprisoning. They deliver bad gadget-fate on the physical systems of our little experiment.

In a few weeks I’ll be amidst the salmon run. I’m going there as best man, for a spell, and then it’s back to reality. Then it’s back to the project, the gnomes, the trolls, and all that equipment. I’ll be back home with the wires, steam, gears, solenoids and computer integrated ecosystems. It will be nice to be back in this place where boxes smell like boats and the buildings open into buildings that open into automated offices filled with tubes, flow meters, and a few scarce crazies. I know I’ll miss this place where the gnomes have control; this place where the trolls dare not go; this place where I work.