Balance of Power Shifted (9 page)

There were definite living organisms present on the slide and they seemed separate yet conjoined since they took up every available
micrometer of space.  The organisms were rounded in shape and the overall appearance was of a hazy greenish color.  The thing that mesmerized me was the way all the organisms seemed to pulse at the exact same time, almost like the rhythm of a fast heartbeat.  It was hard to discern at this lens power, but each organism seemed to be made of two chambers.  We both uttered ‘wow’ in unison, and Bill proceeded to take pictures at different power levels.  At the higher magnification, it showed that they were in fact a two-chambered organism.

When Bill was done with the photography he looked over and said
, “Rico, got any ideas while I have this sample teed up on the scope?”  Funny you should ask Bill, but I have a theory that I want to play out now that I saw what the specimen actually looked like on the slide.  Put the scope on the first magnification level that you did.  Bill changed the scope level and brought up the same image that had so mesmerized me to begin with.  Staring at the screen and back at my watch, I started counting how many times the organisms pulsed for the next 60 seconds.  At the end of the minute, I stated that there were 106 pulses in 60 seconds.  Bill looked at me and said yeah…so what?  Without saying anything, I walked over to the wall and killed all the ceiling lights in the room.  The only lights in the room now were two work lights near our improvised lab and the screen monitor.  Walking back to the PC monitor, I again started to count how many pulses the specimen performed over another a 60-second period.  I could see Bill catching on to me now and he asked how many pulses I counted.  Sixty-seven I responded.  Getting into it fully now, Bill jumped up and turned off the two work lights leaving only the PC monitor and a glow from the microscope.  Try it again, he eagerly urged.  Once again, I counted pulses for 60 seconds and responded by saying forty-four.

I sat down next to Bill and
patiently let my mind process the information for a minute, which was the same as my partner was doing.  Bill was the first to speak up and echoed what I was thinking by saying, “It appears that light is the stimulus for these organisms and in some way or fashion they are synchronized to one another, how else would they pulse in unison.  The more light they receive the more green color is observed.   Based on what we know from depriving it of light while in the ship’s locker and my bag it becomes browner in color without light.  The greener the color, the greater the electrical charge as witnessed when both of us got shocked.”  “Sounds like what I was thinking and I would add that the organism seems to be hardy and resilient. 

I think our next step is to see if we can reproduce more of the specimen because if we screw this up and it dies, who knows if we will ever be able to get access to it again.
”  “I actually have a couple of scenarios in mind that I want to try tomorrow,” Bill said.  “Using small amounts of the specimen liquid I want to dilute it by up to fifty percent with sea water and see what happens.  I also want to perform the same test, but add just plain filtered tap water to see if it is dependent on salt water.  I will need to monitor by using the microscope to see if we can determine what the effects of the tests are.”  “Why don’t we set it up tonight,” I asked.  I don’t have enough seawater left to accomplish what I want.  Why don’t you run down to the beach first thing in the morning and bring back a gallon in a clean container,” Bill said.  It seemed to be more of an order than a request I thought to myself, and grinned thinking how this whole situation has brought out a side of Bill I had never seen.  “How come I can’t just go down to the bay for the sample,” I said.  “Too many contaminants that may muck up our test and the results” was Professor Bill’s haughty response.

“
Hey Billy boy, let’s head upstairs and play a little Call of Duty. I feel need to shoot something and it might as well be you.”  “You are on Boy Scout” was his quick reply as he jumped up from his chair with some bravado.  We headed up to my gaming area which can support four different people playing on their own system at the same time.  With a quick detour for a couple of beers, we sat down in the specially designed gaming chairs.  We sat in chairs opposite of each other, separated by our own 50-inch LED video screens.  We communicated with each other and a slew of other players around the globe over high-quality headsets for the next two hours.  I must say I had the most kills, but I had to give Bill some credit for getting a few.

The sun was just coming up the next morning as I dressed in my workout clothes.  Heading downstairs barefooted
, I stepped onto my workout mats and stretched out for 10 minutes.  For the next 10 minutes, I used the same wrestling warm up drills I used to do back in high school with a number of simulated single leg takedowns, shoulder rolls and body sprawls.  When that was completed, I put on a pair light gloves used in MMA and shadowed boxed for another 10 minutes.  Once I was nice and loose, I started punching the heavy bag while continuing to move my feet back and forth around the bag.  Alternating combinations and jabs as well as few power punches, I worked up a nice sweat.  Once my arms got tired and heavy from the lactic acid buildup, I moved over to the kickboxing dummies and practiced side and front leg kicks with both legs.  I always enjoyed the loud thwwack sounds that resonated with these kicks.  In real bouts, I always used them to take the steam out of my opponents as I set them up for a knockout or submission.  I then moved into straight kicks and ended with a flurry of roundhouse head kicks using both legs as fast as I could change direction.  Taking off the gloves, I finished with 15 minutes on the treadmill running barefoot as fast as the track would turn.  Feeling nice and relaxed after my workout I headed upstairs for a quick shower and a trip to the beach.

Bill was still sleeping as I headed out to the beach in the pickup. 
I decided to head South on Highway 5 and drive to Imperial Beach. I had not been there in a while but thought it was a beautiful location.  My favorite spot was near a well-known pier and tourist spot.  While driving the 45 to 60 minutes to the beach, my thoughts led me to Bill, and how glad I was that he had decided to hang out in California with me.  In truth, I was a bit homesick and had not been back east for a while.  New Jersey and the east coast was still where I considered home to be.  I started to get a little melancholy about my situation and my thoughts soon turned to Fiona.  I felt bad that I had become one of those friends that thought posting a few things on Facebook kept me classified as a friend.  In reality, I had isolated myself out here since I felt that life had cheated me and left me without one of the best support organizations a person could have in this world, which was family.  By the time I got to Imperial Beach, I had decided that Facebook was not going to cut it anymore and I wanted to reconnect with all my friends in a more personal way starting with Fiona.

The beach was beautiful this time of morning. 
The gulls were noisy as ever as they fought over scraps of food among the flotsam and except for a couple of joggers and a dog walker; I had the beach to myself.  Taking off my sneakers leaving me barefoot since I did not wear any socks, I walked down to the pier with the smooth sand cool on my feet and toes.  Wading out to where the water was about a foot deep, I submerged the plastic gallon container that previously held spring water.  As the water gurgled and whirl pooled around the opening, I watched the dog walker throw a tennis ball about 25 yards out in the water with some kind of sling shot contraption.  The Black Labrador took off like a shot and bounded through the morning rippling of waves until his paws no longer touched bottom.  With quick dog paddle strokes and his snout sticking out of the water, the dog closed in on the small green fluorescent ball and snatched it in full stride.  Immediately the dog reversed course back to his owner.  By now the jug was full so I capped it and started to walk back to the beach.  By the time I was a few yards onto the beach, the dog’s owner was already launching the ball back into the waves to the obvious joy of the dog.  With a silent acknowledgement to myself, I knew that somewhere in the future that a Labrador would be panting beside me.

Driving back home,
I stopped for gas at a local station and convenience mart, car wash and whatever else they did there.  I pulled up to pumps and with an emphatic, “you’re shittin me” saw that the price of gas had gone up 12 cents since my last fill up.  I recalled some headline a few days ago about some middle-eastern mucky muck had farted to loudly and the US analysts interpreting this as a sign that there would be fuel shortages hence driving the cost of a barrel of oil upwards. It seemed quite regular now that every weather event, military sabre rattling or OPEC announcement caused dramatic fluctuations in the price of oil, resulting into amplified increases at the pumps. 

Manipulation of Joe Citizen happens on many levels on a daily basis.  This include
s financial traders, oil companies and even the government as they look to squeeze the consumer.  How else do you explain immediate price increase at the pumps or for heating oil when the price of a barrel of oil rises, while the downward movement at the pumps significantly lags behind the reduction in price of a barrel of oil?  There are also those multi-billion dollar profits posted by the oil companies that correspond to when there were higher prices at the pumps.  With a look of disgust at the $3.94 and of course the 9/10 of a cents sign, I decided to grab a couple of those breakfast taquitoes from inside and my daily energy drink from AMP.

Returning home I was surprised that
Bill had gotten the water sample tested and was already back at the workbench intently browsing Internet pages.  I threw a couple of extra breakfast tacquitos onto the bench and asked how it was going. “Interesting, interesting,” he repeated.  “Well, are going to fill me in I said?”  Tenting his hands together and holding them just below his nose he started to fill me in on the details.  First, he said, they ran the test in less than an hour on an outrageous machine called a ‘
Total Organic Carbon Analyzer’
used specifically with brine based water samples.  I told the tech what I wanted to test for and when he asked me for details of the where the water sample came from, I told him that I wanted it to be blind test.  It only took about 20-minutes for it to run which was faster than I expected.  Grabbing the two sheets of paper off the desk, he handed them to me and told me they were the results.  I quickly glanced at them but immediately new I was out of my league.  The organized results came under categories such as; total salinity, dissolved gases and elements.  “What do this mean I asked?”  “Well, Bill said, based on my research, the water sample is pretty much as expected based on the location and depth of the sample, which held no surprises there.  There are two key references in the report critical to our research.  The first confirmed the presence of organic material of unknown source, and the second identified a trace element that was anomalous in high amounts.”

I stood there with what was probably a confused or stupid look and Bill said, “
Let me explain a little better.  In regards to the trace element in question, it is Arsenic, which is usually present in seawater but at a diluted amount of .0026 parts per million, however this test came back at .143 parts per million which is considered significantly higher.  I have to admit that determining what this organism is stumps me.  The closet organism I can associate it with is Phytoplankton, however there many key differences.  I believe, just like with Phytoplankton, that this organism does need sunlight to survive, however it is not ultra-sensitive to not having it for long periods or can survive on minimal amounts.  The reason I say this is that the specimen has alternated between mostly brown to mostly a green color and based on my observations this directly correlated with access to sunlight.  The other key point I wanted to make, was that the specimen came up from deep water where sunlight is almost non-existent.  This organism must have evolved itself to adapt to low light situations and slow its metabolism down to reflect the amount of available sunlight.  It is apparent that the amount of light and not just sunlight correlates to the strength of the electrical charge that it can generate.  That is the only real correlation.  Another big difference is Phytoplankton needs to be near the surface water while our organism does not.  We should probably start considering what to name our find since I am getting tired of referring to it as ‘The Specimen’.’  “Hey professor,” as I was finally able to get a word in edgewise, “all said and done, you found it, you get to name it.”  With a big grin on his face, Bill responded by saying “I think I can handle that” and added, “You know naming something that will be this famous is not as easy as you would think.”

For the next hour, we identified the testing
we needed to achieve and who was going to perform them.  Bill kept two of the sample jars to perform experiments. He needed to determine how the specimen reacted to dilution with seawater and to try to figure out if the organism reproduces.  Assigned with the other two jars, my job was to try to determine the electrical characteristics of the specimen such as voltage and amperage output per sample size, effects of sunlight and research ways in which the specimen was creating electricity in the first place.  Under Professor Bill’s advice, we spent the rest of the evening detailing test plans.

To say the next few days were a blur would be an understatement.  We virtually did not t
alk to each other and lived on food remnants in the fridge and a few fast food deliveries.  I detailed every step of every experiment in the computer log.  The excitement in realizing that the results of the testing were consistent and predictable was overwhelming.  In my limited electrical engineer brain, I associated these results with the knowledge that anything that was consistent and predictable was much easier to harness and control.  The hardest part was determining how current flows and the presence of positive and negative polarities.  I stumbled upon how our organism achieves this purely from a lucky guess.  My initial attempts to determine polarity were futile.  Using the voltmeter probes, I could never get a steady reading.  After half a day, I decided to remove the tip from the negative probe and trimmed the wire to leave the copper showing only if you looked directly at the wire end.  No copper strands extended past the sheathing.  Running the wire down the inside of the container holding the specimen, I had placed the wire at the very bottom of the solution.  Using the positive probe I touched the just the surface of the liquid.  The meter display immediately displayed some numbers, which stayed consistent.  I taped the positive probe to the jar to free up my hands and adjusted the meter scale.  The 8 ounces of fluid was generating a steady 2.2 volts with amperage reading 8 and wattage equaling 17.6.  The other sample showed almost identical results.  Halving the liquid resulted in the same voltage, but it cut the amperage in half.  This was shaping up to be very consistent to how batteries work.