14. The Foundry

Engines of Change

Previously — In episode 13, we learn the backstory of John Spillers, as told by Sergeant Zayas during his final moments immediately following the attack on the Grass Cutting Area. Spillers was an immigrant from Holland who joined the crew of the Santa Maria as a cooper, and was later left behind in Haiti with 39 other men in 1492. He’s not only managed to survive four hundred and fifty years, he’s doing whatever he wants. With impunity. First, there’s JTF Alpha—soldiers he’s hand-selected and modified with super-human capabilities. They can travel undetected, somehow under the concealment of a strange blue light. They also have astounding durability—one man took a face full of 30 caliber rounds from a Browning machine gun shortly before throwing a man into a wall from across a room like a lawn dart. We also learn that Spillers likely had cagey motives from the get-go with respect to the construction of the Grass Cutting Area—the top secret detention facility nestled in the jungles of Ramey Air Force base. After JTF parachutes in and kills everyone there, it starts looking more and more like the whole place was intended to serve a single-purpose in a larger scheme involving the jibaro Jesus Santiago. And though it’s not clear why, Spillers still needs Santiago—alive.

Part 1: Arrival

Vandyck is seated at the banquette of the galley kitchen when she feels a searing sharp pain high up in her nasal passages. She dabs at her tear ducts with the heel of her hand, eyelids still fluttering when she looks up again toward the spot at the middle of the room. She makes out several faint blue dots, just barely there, floating four feet above the floor as though composited on a semi-translucent overlay. When the burning subsides, she watches as the dots get bigger and brighter, until they become sparks, whirling around like dozens of individual pinwheels. Eventually, a pair of silhouettes take shape and soon, an old man is standing in the center of the room.

From the FOJIP presentation—the human, she thinks to herself, doing her best not to look stunned. “You have some explaining to do.”

He doesn’t reply—just darts his eyes around the nooks and crannies of the room for several seconds, not lingering anywhere too long. After a while, his face softens into a smile. “Vandyck—I’d be lying if I said I knew you could do it.”

She stands up from the banquette, her eyes wide. “What in the exact FUCK is going on?”

“I’ll tell you everything I know,” he says, holding up one hand. “But I have questions too. For you and for my friend here.”

“Who is that?” Vandyck says, shaking her head. “Is he injured?”

Santiago frowns. “The journey was hard for him. We’ll need to go somewhere quiet while he acclimates.”

Vandyck is still staring. The soldier is barely able to stand, but there’s no blood, no bruising anywhere on him. “Sensory dilation,” she says flatly. “Hold on to him and follow me.”

Part 2: Engines of Change

“Genes are the replicators. Humans are their survival machines. When an individual human has served its purpose, it is cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.”

— Area J Operator’s Field Manual 5137 (Tenet #2)

On Earth, long before Spanish caravels set sail for the new world—before their Iberian ancestors forged the falcata as a weapon against the Roman legion—before nations and tools and trees and even atmospheric oxygen, in an impossibly distant era, locked away in the crenellated and cauterized fissures of the late heavy bombardment, the Earth was quite simply a violent unsupervised foundry. Countless prokaryotic organisms swam in a warm brine of combinatorial complexity, reacting with whatever they could—water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonium, nitrogen—and the occasional infusion of minerals and compounds from planetesimals flung inward from Jupiter.

Over hundreds of millions of years, these prokaryotes produced an unfathomably large number of permutational configurations. Like blindfolded craftsmen stumbling through a vast factory floor, they stupidly kicked at buckets of parts. They wandered and kicked and they died. Over and over and over. Until one day, a single bucket of parts was kicked in just such a way to produce something unique—a particular arrangement of nucleotides that could replicate its own genetic material. And so it was that a single blindfolded craftsman became a cellular machine capable of producing descendants—an engine of change that could persist and improve over time. The only adjudicator of success was whether or not the result of the replication could survive long enough to propagate genetic information forward—a sort of built-in quality control woven into the fabric of a never-ending ancestor’s tale.

Sepulveda is somewhere in that foundry now, so disoriented and scrambled up, he’s unsure of what he is—adrift in the dark brine of complexity. For him, there are no shapes, sounds, words, memories, desires, fears. No awareness of self or physical bodies—just undifferentiated silent blackness of unknowable size. He dimly senses he is simultaneously somewhere else, but then a vague nagging itch rises up in him from some place out at the tips of the blackness, and a switch toggles from totally off to somewhat on, bringing into focus a dark and boundaryless expanse. And then a thousand million years go by. Something is happening, he thinks. And though he can’t make sense of the what or the how, he suspects it’s happening for a reason. He tries to arrange his thoughts into something more actionable, more decisive—but the effort makes him tired and he sinks back into a deep dreamless sleep. When he returns, he marshals his focus once again into the impenetrable blackness—to try and understand it once more. It’s less tiring than the last time, and though he doesn’t yet have the word to describe the cause of his fatigue, he’s experiencing the passage of time. After a long while, he begins to imagine time as a thing that can be small or big, perhaps even be made small or big. So he scoops out of the darkness, pieces of time—forms them into units he comes to think of as moments. He feels there could be something like a before and an after and something he senses as in between. He needs names for the different kinds and quantities of things, so he summons them from some other place in him until he feels that mysterious itch again—feels it as a physical force pushing into him, leading toward a thought—that HE is a thing inside this blackness—a special kind of thing that feels and perceives and hurtles through time, if for no other reason than to give the darkness specificity and shape. Another switch is toggled and the thing that is HE speaks to him.

Look closely, it says.

In place of the blackness, he sees the entire Earth from up high. He is a disembodied eye with wings now, able to speed up and slow down the movement of time as he passes over continents and oceans. And though he doesn’t understand why the foundry exists, he observes the work of its blind craftsmen—the engines of change—from multiple vantage points, against the backdrop of volcanic plumes and asteroid impacts and tsunamis and lightning storms. He witnesses the formation of eukaryotic super organisms the size of islands, the gradual accumulation of atmospheric oxygen, the bluing of the sky and cooling of the oceans. Millions of years elapse and the water teems with life. At the microscopic level, he sees that foundry designs have become more ambitious—more modular with a greater separation of concerns. There’s segmentation and specialization, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, adversarial network effects, and the need for upgrades—hard parts so to speak—to support energy metabolism, motility, defense, and waste removal. During a stretch of nice weather lasting twenty million years, the foundry produces cartilage and bone and spines and shells and horns and locomotive appendages and venom. There’s an explosion of quantity and complexity in the oceans which spills out on to the land—just at the coastlines at first—fungi and plants—then arthropods and insects and spiders. Within a hundred million years, the foundry pushes deep into the land, couriered within the guts and brains of four legged containers outfitted with lungs. He waits out an ice age or two, until the Earth becomes warm and wet again, and watches a million generations of dinosaurs come and go.

Somewhere else, he feels a pair of hands holding him up as he moves along a sleek marble floor. Someone mumbles words as though speaking through a wall of cotton. He looks, and sees the face of an old man. It’s familiar.

But then a mountain-sized object from space slams into the southern peninsula at 50,000 miles an hour. The impact makes a hole nineteen miles deep, and displaces twenty five trillion metric tons of molten debris at velocities so great, some is ejected into space. The material that rains back down is super-heated upon atmospheric re-entry, and triggers wildfires across seventy percent of the forests on the planet. Radiating outward from the impact’s epicenter in all directions is eight-hundred-degree wind that incinerates plant and animal life within a thousand miles. Ten minutes later, a column of water one point five kilometers high screams across the ocean at mach one. When it hits land, it keeps going for a thousand miles, and for the next ten years, every living thing that survived the initial volley of disasters is forced to live on a knife’s edge. Sepulveda thinks it’s the end of everything. But it’s not. The fires eventually die out, the tsunamis dissipate and soon, the whole planet is crawling with a new crop of bipeds and quadrupeds—most of them small mammals, fresh off the assembly line. Foundry operations, it turns out, simply regrouped and turned out a better product. Quality control.

And then the itch returns and the thing that is HE speaks again.

Come with me, it says.

Sixty five and a half million years later, during a time of relative stability, there are grasslands and forests and great barrier reefs and birds and tree-dwelling primates and pachyderms and beavers and large cats and half a dozen types of humans—each a specialized kind of macro-molecular shipping container providing safe passage for billion-years old passengers as they wend through the ages, propagating forward in time.

Sepulveda is somewhere else again, his feet dragging against marble. He becomes aware that he’s looking out of two holes, and wonders—are these his eyes? He sees someone a few feet up ahead—a woman dressed in a silver tunic with skin the color of burnt mahogany, just a shade lighter than his own. She’s walking briskly and looking over her shoulder with worried glances. He looks left and sees the old man’s face again, then feels a vibration. No, a string of words. The old man is speaking. Sepulveda tries to make his own words, but there are no sounds—just more cotton. He feels more vibrations, this time from the right. It’s the woman in the tunic. She’s walking beside him now, moving her mouth while looking directly into the two holes he’s staring out of. She’s beautiful, he thinks.

Elsewhere, he is again an eye with wings—this time floating by a patch of shrubs and grass, watching a dozen humans enter the mouth of a cave, past small heaps of stony rubbish. The entrance is enormous, like the maw of some wilderness cathedral. When the last person is swallowed up, he follows them in from above and behind. The one at the front of the column carries the lifeless body of a child toward a narrowing passageway—a six-foot tall cave within a cave with a gentle downward grade. Sepulveda flies through it and discovers that this secondary cave eventually leads to a larger interior pocket chamber. From there, the shaft of light from the main opening has only enough lumens to render shapes in muted hues of black and grey. But an eye with wings sees everything. Above, there are massive stalactites twenty feet long drooping down from the vaulted ceiling, and hidden among the folds of rock are translucent scorpions and salamanders and brown spiders. He waits in this room, next to a snail, until he hears hushed breathing and cautious footfalls announce the arrival of the humans. One by one, they spill into the chamber, regrouping into a circular cluster. A few glance up at the ceiling. The one carrying the dead child sniffs a few times, and resumes walking. The others quiet down and follow, again forming into a single-file column. A minute later, the chamber has narrowed to six feet across side-to-side. The darkness is so enveloping, everyone must rely on smell and feel and memory to make their way. The younger ones who have never made the journey become afraid. Around them, uneven bumpy walls go high up, mostly straight, before vanishing into the darkness. Though he can’t feel the ground they walk along, Sepulveda knows it must be hard and wet from the sound it makes as twelve pairs of feet slowly advance. Suddenly, they stop. From his slightly elevated position, he hears the sound of objects being passed hand-over-hand from the rear of the column to the front. An older member of the group opens a pouch containing three small implements. After several minutes of blowing on kindling, he’s made a glowing fire. He pulls a stick from it and holds it like a torch high above his head. The cave walls reflect back a soft orange light, permitting the funeral cortège to catch momentary glimpses of each other—eyebrow ridges, cheeks, and jowls, all flickering somberly in a manner befitting the moment. Then the man waves the torch left and right, as though looking for something in particular. On one pass, Sepulveda notices a series of crosshatch patterns deeply notched into the wall—geometric shapes of some sort. As he zooms in closer to examine them, everything disappears.

He’s back in the marble hallway, passing by a wainscoted alcove. The woman in the tunic is an arm’s length ahead looking from side to side as though expecting at any moment to run into someone. Suddenly, she points to the right, and hustles them into a wide hallway toward a handsome black and gold cast iron door. He’s seen doors like this before, he just doesn’t remember where. The woman grabs at a small gold ring at waist level and slides it open. The moment they’re in and the door is closed, she presses a round button on the panel, then turns to face Sepulveda, looking concerned. “Captain, can you hear me? You’re at Area J. Your brain is re-acclimating—which could take a while. We’re almost at my office. It’ll be quiet there.”

Sepulveda’s head lolls to the left. He looks past the bird cage mesh at the floors as they scroll past, one-by-one, and thinks back to the explosions and gunfire at the Grass Cutting Area and wonders if the woman is somehow mixed up with the gringos. “Who—”

“I’m Dr. Vandyck.” she says quickly. “And there’s no easy way to say this except—you’re no longer on Earth. Not even close. Your head’s all jumbled up because you’re acclimating to sensory dilation.”

Just then, Santiago interrupts. “Look, he’s nodding.”

Vandyck turns from the old man back to Sepulveda and explains that the flow of time is different at Area J, which is why, if a human were to suddenly show up—actually survive crossing over into the control plane—it would feel like coming out of a coma. Then she points a thumb in Santiago’s direction and adds, “I have no idea why this one here isn’t all scrambled up.”

Sepulveda’s blinking rapidly now, moving his lips. “I’ve…seen…it.” His words are fully enunciated, but arrive so slowly, it’s as if they’re traveling along transatlantic copper cables from London to New York.

Vandyck is nearly on her tip toes, eyes wide, face turned up like some neodymium word-magnet. She crosses her arms, and brings a hand up to clutch and twirl the pendant that dangles down by her neck. “What are you talking about?” She asks.

Sepulveda ticks his eyes right to Vandyck without moving his head. “We’re… not… just… containers… engines… also.”

Santiago and Vandyck glance at each other, not knowing what to make of that word—engines—half expecting the other to jump in with a clarification to tidy everything up. After an uncomfortably long silence, the elevator begins to decelerate and Santiago licks his lips. “Spillers?”

Sepulveda shakes his head up and down and stands up taller. “Yes.”

Vandyck brings her hand down from her pendant. “Fuck. This is a YP that’s about to turn into a major MP.”

Sepulveda snaps his head toward Vandyck and presses his lips together, suddenly pointing. “I… know… you…”

Vandyck scrunches up her eyes, but says nothing.

Sepulveda is bobbing his head up and down slowly. “Condado… Vanderbilt… hotel… vestibule.”

The elevator has stopped. Vandyck looks at Santiago, then back at Sepulveda. For the first time today, she’s frightened. Santiago reaches for the latch and retracts the birdcage mesh door.

“Let’s go,” he says softly. “I think we all have questions for each other.”