Humid, p.4
Humid, page 4
The government set up refugee camps out west, where there was more power and slightly less humidity. This allowed them to grow more food as well as raise some animals. Wendy knew that the sand was absorbing some of the moisture, but she wondered how long it would continue, and worried about her asthmatic husband. Most people with asthma simply died after prolonged exposure to these conditions, and she knew the climate in the deserts would eventually get worse. The atmosphere was still sucking up water, after all.
She had finally been given access to semi-real-time satellite photos that showed both poles of the planet shrouded in dense fog. Nothing could be seen in the images except what appeared to be a single super-massive cloud over both Antarctica and the Arctic.
The only explanation that Wendy or anyone else could come up with was sublimation. The very ice itself was undergoing a phase shift from a solid into a gas, skipping the whole liquid phase entirely. So much for the ice caps melting.
All that extra water vapor was going to add to the total amount in the atmosphere and spread out over the planet, making those desert areas less and less appealing. Wendy, along with meteorologists all over the world, was trying to figure out a timeline, but was so far unsuccessful.
She had all the advanced instrumentation and equipment to monitor every aspect of the weather all over the world, but couldn’t define a pattern. The entire event didn’t make sense and Wendy knew it.
If the atmosphere was super-saturated with moisture, liquid didn’t evaporate. So how had the surface water evaporated? Why could they not gather water without it disappearing? The atmosphere was acting like it was incredibly dry, but clearly it wasn’t.
After a year, the only explanation that Wendy could imagine was that this entire event wasn’t natural at all. Someone had triggered this. Someone was to blame.
Wendy had tried digging through the scant files that she had access to but hadn’t found anything to support her theory. Instead, she pored over the satellite images, looking for anything that appeared out of place that might cause this. Early on, she had expected to see some giant metal contraption sticking out of a tropical jungle. Eventually she had been forced to realize that this was not some old James Bond movie.
Still, she always looked. Her duties at the station were primarily to keep the place fully operational while manually recording certain data points, in case of data corruption. Some of the machines had been hit harder than others by the humidity, so it was not unheard of to lose vast stores of data. Her second job was to access these pools of data and look for clues to try and solve this mess. The government still hoped to fix it and have everything go back to normal.
On the radio she had heard generals demanding to know where they needed to aim the nuclear missiles. Apparently, the generals were not yet convinced that this wasn’t an old movie.
7
Since running water was fairly hard to come by, Wendy rarely took a real shower. Instead, she had to go more institutional in her bathing habits by employing the age-old sponge bath technique.
The thing about the high humidity was that it led to mold and algae growth on and in pretty much everything. Wendy caught on to this very quickly after having to throw away several large sponges in quick succession. One had turned green in a little less than a day, and two others became so inundated with mold that she could smell them from across the room.
Normal, everyday items didn’t have this problem, but the purpose of sponges was to trap and hold water, so they quickly became foul.
To try to fight this effect, Wendy stored her sponge in the microwave. This protected it from the humidity and it also allowed her to easily zap it for ten seconds or so whenever she thought of it. Using this trick, her sponges usually lasted for nearly a month before she could no longer bring herself to use them.
Thankfully, the station was fully stocked with plenty of supplies, including more sponges, all protected in airtight boxes with plenty of desiccant, just in case a small amount of moist air was able to penetrate.
The government had plenty of faults, Wendy was acutely aware of that, but they certainly knew how to stock and re-supply all their outposts, which is exactly what they considered her weather station out in the boonies to be.
Wendy tapped the buttons to sanitize the sponge quickly before use. The microwave was her main method of cooking. The solar array meant that she needed to be thrifty with her power and the microwave, while not creating the most delicious of entrees, was at least very efficient in its energy usage. Compared to an electric oven, a microwave hardly used any energy at all.
In her first month at the station, Wendy had tried to get a fire lit outside in order to cook some previously frozen meat over it. She had known the humidity would have an effect on the fire, but she had severely underestimated its effects.
She had tried for nearly an hour to get the small bundle of paper to light, but she may as well have trying to get flame to take to wet leaves. In an act of desperation, she had pulled out the small propane hand torch and laughed quietly when the paper burst into orange yellow flame. She thought she had won and had finally found a way to beat the water-dense air. Her joy was short lived as she removed the torch and watched the flames die out long before igniting the small twigs and other secondary material.
She had not tried to light another fire.
The microwave sounded its pleasant ding and Wendy reached in to grab the steamy sponge. The faint aroma of mildew crept out of the microwave once the door was opened and she noticed that the light-colored sponge had taken on a green tint. The days were numbered for this one, but she knew it still had a more few baths in it.
She reached up to pull the elastic tie from her hair and realized how grimy her light-colored hair had become. She wondered how long it would be before the algae began growing on her hair, like it had on Curly. Thankfully, even compared to other people, her hair was thin. Comparing her hair to the thickness of the dog’s coat, she imagined she had plenty of time before she would need to start shaving her white-blonde locks.
Before coming inside, Wendy had squeegeed several gallons of water off of the large windows of her facility. She did this daily so she could use the water for bathing. Since it was removed so quickly, it rarely ever grew any noticeable amount of algae. As she peered into her bucket now, it appeared that she had already lost some of it to the air.
While washing all the sweat off herself, as well as the little bits of algae, she tried once again to understand how the water was behaving. She could leave a cup of water out on the counter and it wouldn’t noticeably change in volume, but if she had a bucket with several gallons in it, as she had done to wash up, she could very nearly watch the water level drop. It was one of the many things that simply made no sense at all.
After she was done cleaning herself, Wendy squeezed as much water as she possibly could from her long hair. It had always amazed her husband when, after washing her hair, she would twist the long tail up like a wash cloth and water would pour out of it. Back then, she did it just to save time with the blow dryer. Now it was her only real method of “drying” her hair.
Leaving the bathroom, Wendy strolled around the facility naked. Toweling dry was pretty pointless and she had never figured out any practical way to keep her towel from turning mold-laden after a single use. She had thought about trying to microwave it as well, but it didn’t really fit inside the small microwave, and it truly didn’t matter. She had grown accustomed to always being slightly wet.
Feeling as drip-dried as she was going to get, Wendy grabbed for her clothes and slid them on. Rayon had gotten a bad rap when it had first become available. It was thought to be a synthetic fabric, but it was actually made out of natural fibers, unlike fleece, and was one of the best fabrics for both durability and breathability. Plus, she had always thought it felt nice against her skin. The clothes that the government dropped off all had some type of silver woven into the fibers to keep mold at bay, so her clothes actually stayed reasonably clean, or at least free of the scent of mildew, for quite a long time.
Freshly washed, Wendy let her eyes lose focus and relax as she stared out the newly squeegeed main windows. It almost appeared that the air had taken on a faint green cast. She knew it couldn’t be time to clean the windows again. She swiped her fingertip across the inside of the window panel with her finger, wondering if there were now algae growing on the inside. Her eyebrows went up in confusion as she only saw her pink calloused fingertip, with no green anywhere.
Bending over slightly, Wendy peered through her freshly-made slash mark to look out through the clear area of the window. It appeared that the air itself was green. Could the algae actually be growing while suspended in the air? She felt her heart stutter as she realized that in the current situation, anything was possible. The only thing she knew for certain was that if algae were growing in the air, then she was inhaling the particles in large quantities, straight into her lungs, and that was all kinds of bad.
00000
With her station chores done for the day and the morning’s data already processed, Wendy decided to try to find out what was going on outside. She knew that regular algae should not be able to grow to any kind of visible size while suspended in the air.
Wendy had taken several classes in phycology, the study of algae, while she was working on her master’s degree in atmospheric science. Those classes functioned more as electives for her, but she enjoyed them far more than the standard electives of public speaking or art. Despite her first teacher in the subject being one of the most miserable humans she had ever run across, the subject of algae had still held her interest.
Her skills at identifying algae were not the best, but she was functional with an image-based identification key. She had identified most of the algae growing on things outside as filamentous green algae, the common stuff everyone sees growing in large clumps at the edges of ponds or shallow pools. It had, in her not so professional opinion, rightly earned the nickname pond scum.
Filamentous green algae were much too large to be suspended in the air. Even in the extreme conditions they now faced, she couldn’t see that as being even remotely possible. Therefore, whatever was growing in the air had to be something else entirely.
She wondered about how to capture a sample to identify. Then she remembered that the supply closet had nets that a previous researcher had used several years ago, to capture and collect zooplankton for a study involving global climate change. She smirked as she realized just how wrong all their computer models had been on that topic.
Soon enough, Wendy found herself outside waving the net around in the air like she was surrendering on a battlefield. She knew it must be a rather odd sight, but thankfully no one was around to witness it.
She pulled the cup at the end of the net closer to her face and had no difficulty seeing a green residue on the inside of it. The cup had been clean when she first started waving it around madly, so whatever that was had come from the very air itself.
A smile crept across her face. Life at the station had grown mundane in the previous months. It didn’t seem like the government was making any headway in the effort to solve this puzzle. They were more accustomed to sticking their heads in the proverbial sand and waiting for someone else to solve it for them. Wendy was pleased to at least be doing something that she felt was novel. She had certainly never heard of algae growing in the air.
8
Wendy was concentrating as she scraped a very small portion of the contents of the cup onto a glass slide. The amount was miniscule, but when she put the glass coverslip on top of the sample, it spread out to thinly but fully inhabit the four-sided space it was given.
Setting the prepared slide aside, Wendy had to try to remember where she had put the small dissecting microscope. The station itself wasn’t a large space. It measured around two thousand square feet, containing the large main room with the computer controls and instrument displays, a nicely sized bathroom, a small supply closet, and one other room that had previously been full of workstations. Wendy had cleared most of them out to create her sleeping quarters. Naturally, she checked the supply closet first but it was not in there; she knew it would probably take up too much room to be in the small area.
The only rooms with windows were the main room and her converted sleeping quarters. The dissecting scope doesn’t need power to function as it’s basically just a large magnifying glass. The only thing it needs is a light source. Because of this, Wendy soon remembered that she had previously used the scope in her sleeping quarters, and found it tucked under the only remaining desk in the room. Resting on the slide area was the small mirror she had used to bounce light where it was needed most on her sample.
While these hazy days were never filled with the bright sunshine she was accustomed to in Missouri during May, the weaker diffused light was more than suitable to see what she needed to see through the scope. She set the mirror against the corner of the desk and adjusted it until the light was concentrated on the slide area. Then she carefully slid the glass slide under the metal holders until she heard the satisfying click that told her everything was secure.
As Wendy peered through the eyepiece of the scope, the first thing that struck her was the homogeneity. Everything on the slide looked exactly the same. Typically, if you go outside and wave something around in the air, you collect a vast assortment of all kinds of dust particles, pollen grains, maybe a few gnats and whatever, but the sample on this slide was all the same kind of particles.
She twisted the zoom knob on the side and put the cross hairs on one of the finest specimens. As she adjusted the focus she could clearly see it was some kind of diatom. This didn’t surprise her because diatoms were a type of algae that were frequently found blowing around in the air. They were mostly single-celled organisms that had a type of hard shell and were picked up and blown all over the planet.
She even remembered hearing about diatoms being very important nucleation points for the formation of hail stones because they provided that initial bit of mass to begin collecting ice. Scientists had found diatoms at the very center of hail stones nearly as often as they found grains of sand. No, the fact that it was a diatom didn’t surprise her. That it was all the same type of diatom within the sample is what left her scratching her head.
Flipping through one of her books about algae, she turned to the section on diatoms and saw, right there at the beginning, that it was a group of two hundred genera and possibly as many as 10,000 extant species.
Wendy set the book aside and took out the slide she had been looking at. Using the black grease pencil taped to the side of the scope, she wrote a fat number one on the edge of the glass slide. Then she slid that slide to the far corner of the desk. Wendy then prepared four more slides, numbering them accordingly. Shockingly, they all had exactly the same diatom on them. She couldn’t even find the shadow of a different kind of cell.
Now her heart started racing. She knew this had to be important. This had to mean something. The air was being infested by a certain kind of diatom. She jumped up from the desk and ran into the main room. She sent a quick alert via email to the military group that she reported to. Most of her communications went to a man named General Neels, but she knew it was probably routed through individuals of far lower rank.
Wendy wrote to him about the green tint in the air and the results of her sampling. She included a detailed drawing of the diatom that she had seen. It was shaped roughly like a football, with two parallel series of dots running down the center of its length and dozens of small ridges or ribs spanning the width. As far as diatoms went, it wasn’t super unique, but she thought the picture should be detailed enough to find out if others were seeing the same thing.
Within minutes, Wendy received a message stating that they had not witnessed any change in the air out west, but they would take samples nevertheless. They would also instruct the handful of other weather stations to do the same, although they weren’t positive that all the stations were outfitted with a dissecting microscope.
Wendy was pleased to have made some headway, but wouldn’t be resting on her laurels while others gathered samples.
She went back to her textbook on phycology and turned to the key in the back. Keying out diatoms to find their species was not something she was really qualified for, but she hoped to get an idea of who her new friend was.
Sadly, after spending nearly an hour with the key, she couldn’t narrow it down to even a basic genus. The questions asked were too specific for both her equipment and her skill.
Wendy slumped in her chair, feeling defeated. She hated few things more than running up against a lack of knowledge, and one of those things was running up against a lack of equipment. This situation smacked two of her buttons right in the middle. It was frustrating work, but she was still glad to have more to do.
She knew that the other stations were sampling their air, and the chances were high that the General could find someone who could identify the diatom. Not that it mattered all that much which particular diatom it was; the big question was if it was the same one all over the country, or even all over the world.
Wendy absent-mindedly flipped through the textbook, feeling the flimsy, moist pages slide between her slightly pruned fingers. As the books pages fell one upon the other, she neared the end and discovered an appendix titled “Fun Facts About Algae.” She glanced at the mostly remedial facts, meant to try to get people interested in what many viewed as a soul-crushingly boring pursuit. Algae make up as much as fifty percent of the oxygen we breathe. Algae are fifty times more productive as a biofuel than traditional crops. Etcetera, etcetera.
Truly, she was more bored by the Fun Facts than by the actual textbook. Then she flipped the page and gasped. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
