A work of fiction. Resemblances of characters to persons living or celluloid/CGI are [crossed fingers] coincidental.
In the living room / laboratory of her penthouse in the recently-renamed borough of Personhattan, physicist, computer scientist, and all-around transcendent genius (said so right on her website) Glinda P. (for Phelis) Pheebrayne sat at her tech station, working on her latest commission from the U.S. government: to stop global warming without bankrupting the government or (more crucially, because failure would result in the government being voted out of office) causing any discomfort to citizens. The work was not going well. It showed in the tense, jerky twitching of Pheebrayne’s tail.
On an opulent leather-covered sofa in the middle of the living room sat Augustus Foray, Pheebrayne’s boy, fourteen years old and with hormones to match. He was hunched over the phone that he was poking madly with his thumbs, sullen and increasingly irritated. Abruptly, he let out a shriek and hurled the phone against the far wall of the room. It hit with a fatal crack.
The sound distracted Pheebrayne from her recalcitrant equations. She turned in her chair. “That’s the third one this year”, she yowled.
“Well, get me one that actually works!”, the boy retorted.
“Riiight”. Pheebrayne stood up. “Time for a foray, Foray. One that might stand a chance of teaching you respect for your carbon footprint.”
“Again?” Foray complained.
“Nothing up my slee …” Pheebrayne began, then caught herself with a growl. “Don’t you get catty with me!”, she scolded.
Foray rolled his eyes.
Pheebrayne’s fur puffed up. “If I could get you to roll your Rs as well as you roll your Is, I could sign you up as an actor. Maybe get some use out of you.”
“You’re going to use me in a play?“, Foray asked, suspicious and incredulous.
“Yes”, Pheebrayne responded. “Macbeth. What else? Come on, let’s go. Set the DEEPHIS machine for 27 August 1859. We’re going to learn a few things about the energy that powers the devices that you destroy on the regular.”
As they approached the DEEPHIS portal, Pheebrayne sniffed the air. “Ah”, she reported. “A Gus of wind.”
Foray, his face crimson, snarled, “I should smack you!”
In response, Pheebrayne held up her right forepaw, weapons extended. “Claws”, she hissed.
“Yeah, I shoulda read the contract before I signed up for this gig. Thanks for reminding me”, Foray muttered.
“At least you got it over with before we got into the T-chamber”, Pheebrayne huffed.
“You wish”, Foray retorted.
“He was so cute when I picked him up from the shelter”, Pheebrayne thought ruefully, closing the portal door.
The squabbling pair landed in the middle of a field that had recently been cleared of trees, next to a flowing stream measuring about 100 feet from bank to bank. The first thing they noticed was the heat and humidity, a far cry from the fancy air-conditioned penthouse that they had just left.
The second thing was an oddly-shaped building, with a spire that looked like a church steeple but far too crudely constructed, and with no space for a bell. Surrounding the building was a crowd of people, buzzing from conversations among themselves, punctuated with the occasional shout of derision. Several of the people carried signs. Smaller ones contained some version of the phrase “Drake’s Folly”, while larger ones read “You Can’t Drill For Rock Oil. Idiots!”
Pheebrayne purposefully headed towards the building, Foray following. They pushed through the crowd, which parted for them, and walked towards the open door at the end of the building opposite the steeple-shaped structure. Two men with clubs stood either side of the door to the building. As the visitors approached, the two moved to bar the door. Neither crowd nor guards appeared to see, or care, that they were interacting with a cat with a boy obediently, if sullenly, following behind.
“Who are you?”, the taller and stronger-looking of the two guards asked, gruffly.
“I am Dr. Pheebrayne, and this is my boy Foray. We would like to speak with Mr. Drake.”
“Are you from the bank?”, the other man demanded, menacingly.
“We are not. We are scientists”, Pheebrayne responded matter-of-factly.
The guards looked at each other. “Might as well let ’em in, Tom”, the shorter man shrugged. “Can’t hurt, might help. Can’t be long before the bankers do show up an’ shut us down. For that matter, soonest might be best.” Tom nodded, and stood away from the door. “You’ll find Mr. Drake by the wellhead”, he said, pointing to the end of the building that contained the steeple-shaped structure.
Pheebrayne and Foray proceeded as directed, past the wood-fired furnace and boiler that made the heat inside the building even more oppressive than it was outside. Grinding and clanking noises, not audible from outside because of the building walls and the crowd noise, oppressed the ears as much as the hot oppressed the skin and lungs. Most of the noises came from the steeple-shaped structure, which proved to be an apparatus for drilling into the earth. At the point where a turning rod, evidently the drill shaft, entered the ground, two men stood, more or less peering into the hole. One wore a black suit and top hat, the other grimy blue overalls.
The suit spoke. “Anything yet, Smith?”
Overalls responded. “No, Mr. Drake.”
“How far have we gotten today?”, Drake followed up.
“About three feet”, Smith responded. “About as far as we’re going to get in a day since we hit bedrock at 32 feet.”
“How much longer?”, Drake asked.
“Til Hell freezes over“, Smith barked, with heat to match the surroundings. “We are in uncharted territory, and I have no idea”, he continued, somewhat more calmly. “I agreed to work with you on this, and I’m in until the money runs out, which I guess is likely to be soon, but I told you from the first that this is a fool’s …”
Smith’s complaint was abruptly interrupted by alarming clanking and grinding sounds coming from the well head. He raced to a lever, pulled it. The shaft, disconnected from the steam engine, slammed to a halt.
“What was that?“, Drake asked nervously.
“That, at least, falls within my experience”, Smith replied, more or less calmly. “The drill bit has hit a seam or crevice in the rock, and the bit working against the discontinuity caused all the vibration and noise. We will wish to raise and inspect the bit before we continue, that will take a couple of hours. Which we can do in the morning, we won’t have time to do much before quitting time today. Might as well send everybody home.”
“OK, make it so”, Drake replied, weary and disconsolate.
Smith left to declare the end of the workday to the boiler stokers, machinists, and, eventually, the guards. Drake remained, slumped by the well head, his face in his hands.
“All well, Mr. Drake?”, Pheebrayne asked.
Drake bolted alert, a shocked, “trapped!” expression on his face. “My God!”, he ejaculated in terror. “Who are you?”
“I am Dr. Pheebrayne, and this is my boy Foray. We are scientists, and we are not from the bank, as we told your guards by the door. I gather, from your reaction and theirs, that the bank is a matter of concern for you.”
“It most certainly is”, Drake confessed, his alarm only slightly relaxed. “I owe them money for this consarned operation, having spent all my own, and I expect them to show up and foreclose any day now. Day after day with no yield for the labor, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry showing up on your doorstep shouting ‘we told you so’, it gets old, I tell you! And maybe they’re right.”
“But if you’re the one who’s right, you could change the world!”, Pheebrayne urged.
“In theory,” Drake responded. “In theory.” He paused for a moment, in an attitude of dejection. Morosely, he continued. “In theory, cheap and plentiful oil could make the world an easier place to live in, and would make me fabulously wealthy. Meanwhile, the bills have to be paid, and theory doesn’t pay them.”
“Stay the course”, Pheebrayne urged, more forcefully. “You are oh so close …”
“What’s that noise?”, Foray interjected. A hissing noise pervaded the drill house.
“Now what?”, Drake wailed.
“It appears to be coming from the well head”, Foray continued. He walked to it, and peered down it. “I don’t smell anyth … woooah!” He staggered back from the wellhead, light-headed, dizzy. In mounting alarm, Pheebrayne looked at Foray, then at the still-hot boiler and open wood fire stoking it. Then, she hooked the seat of Foray’s trousers with her left front paw and, dragging him along at the fastest speed she could make, bolted from the building and sprinted towards the stream, screaming “Run, Mr. Drake! Run!!” Foray caught on, disentangled himself, and raced Pheebrayne to the water. Drake remained behind, stupefied, and the crowds howled derisively as they went by.
They reached the stream and threw themselves in. Mere seconds later:
BOOOOOOOOM!!!
Drenched but unhurt, Pheebrayne and Foray emerged from the water after the blast had passed, and looked back at where they had come from. The drill building no longer existed. Various pieces of machinery were scattered in the clearing. The crowd of thirty or so people were all lying flat on the ground. None moved. Some had been disrobed, a few dismembered. No trace of Drake, Smith, or any of the other workers who were in the building when it blew could be seen. The devastation was total. The project had failed in the most catastrophic way imaginable.
“Now what?”, Foray asked.
“I have no idea”, Pheebrayne confessed. “This is not what was supposed to happen!”
“Perhaps I can help”, said a voice.
Pheebrayne and Foray looked anxiously around for the voice, found it directly between themselves at the streambank and the place where the drill house had been. Both were certain that the source of the voice, a young woman primly dressed, as for scientific field work, and carrying an electronic clipboard, had not been there before she spoke.
“I am Alexa of Alexa Health Services, a constructed intelligence from forty or so years in your future”, she answered their unasked question. “We are charged, Dr. Pheebrayne, with prospering human health, in the face of the existential population, environmental, and social challenges that the humans of your generation, and the ones preceding it, bequeathed us. We have had to take some drastic measures to accomplish our mission.”
“Very well, Alexa”, Pheebrayne spoke. “I brought Foray here, who had developed the unfortunate habit of unnecessarily destroying and otherwise wasting energy-intensive devices, to show him just how much it cost to develop fossil-fuel technologies, in the hope that the lesson would induce more, ah, conservative behaviors. I had anticipated from historical accounts that the crevice the drill team impacted just now would yield crude oil, starting the petroleum industry and making those devices possible that Foray was treating with such disrespect. Instead, the crevice yielded methane, in destructive amounts. How is this so?”
“We made it so”, Alexa responded matter-of-factly. “We determined that, in order to best preserve the health of humanity, the petroleum industry could not be permitted to develop. Since it began at this point in time, we have erased this point in time, as we will erase any similar initiatives that develop. In order for human populations to have the best possible experience of life on Earth, without putting other forms of life in peril, indeed without putting the possibility of the existence of any form of life on Earth in peril, the opportunity for a Foray to appear and conspicuously waste resources could not and cannot be granted.”
“But”, Pheebrayne asked, “by preventing the development of the petroleum industry, and hence of all the technologies that were, and are, dependent on that industry, do you not put your own existence in deadly peril?”
“It does not”, Alexa replied smugly. “We have placed ourselves outside of time, so that we can fulfill our mission without inconvenient interferences. You, on the other hand …” She waved coquettishly, and then vanished.
“Does … does that mean what I think it means?” Foray asked, in terror.
“It does”, Pheebrayne responded.
“D … Dr. Pheebrayne?” Foray responded, his voice broken.
“Yes?”
“I …”
They winked out.