Venomous Lumpsucker

by Ned Beauman

No ringed seals anymore, no harbor porpoises, no velvet scoters, no European eels, no angel sharks, and practically no venomous lumpsuckers.

Like a neurodegenerative disease, extinction was a slow hollowing, not a sharp cut.

Nobody had yet tried to bring a dead person back, or at least nobody had yet admitted to trying—the auto-dismembering gibbon was the field’s noblest accomplishment so far. But even if the technology was still dubious, its metaphysical premises were now widely accepted. And if a connectome scan of a loved one meant they were not truly gone, didn’t a connectome scan of an animal therefore mean that they were not truly extinct?

So on one hand you might have an animal which still had a handful of extant specimens, scooped from their habitat just before it was razed, now fed and watered in enclosures like tribesmen exhibited in some nineteenth-century world’s fair after the obliteration of their culture. Death in life. And on the other hand you might have an animal which at present happened to have a living population of zero—yet if any scientist were ever curious about it, she could not only draw on an allencompassing record of its physiology and behavior, she could then test her theories on a virtual specimen in a virtual environment, a simulation which perfectly preserved the memory of all those habits, relationships, territories and entanglements from before they unraveled. Life in death. Which of these animals was really more extinct?

In Ontario, the heat dried up the sap in the maple trees; in Kenya, it wilted the coffee plants and invigorated their pests; in Champagne, it broke down the acid in the grapes; in Kentucky, it cooked the bourbon in its barrels. In Campania, the mozzarella buffaloes stopped lactating for a week after every bout of strange weather; in Iberia, a fungus hollowed out the oak trees that were supposed to drop the acorns that fed the pigs; off the coast of Tasmania, the oysters’ shells dissolved in the corrosive seas; and off the coast of South Australia, the bluefin tuna starved because there were no smaller fish left to prey upon. Even Halyard’s beloved Honey Golds shriveled away because there wasn’t enough water in Queensland to cultivate them.

And it wasn’t just delicacies that suffered. Staples, too. Halyard’s grandparents had often said that fruit and vegetables didn’t taste quite as good as they used to. But if flavor had been very gradually leaking out of produce for decades, the last of it flushed away with a terrible suddenness as Halyard entered adulthood. Potatoes, carrots, beets and apples were distinguishable only by color, not by taste. Aubergines were spongy, kale was bitter, honey was as thin and tasteless as egg white. It was as if fecund Mother Earth had been replaced overnight by one of those food service companies who mostly do internment camps. There were attempts to compensate—genetic engineering, sealed biodomes, AI farmers that nurtured every sprout and youngling with the care an anxious parent gives an only child—but as was the general trend of things, even the boldest advances in technology could not keep up with the rate of collapse.

When you know for certain that an asset is going to drop in price, you can short that asset. Meaning you borrow some of it; sell what you borrowed; wait until the price falls; buy it back; return it to whomever you borrowed it from; and pocket the difference.

It was about an hour before sundown, and the birches groaned in the breeze like a castle’s worth of creaky old doors being opened and shut.

“The extinction industry has never saved a single species. It’s just a performance, a fiction. It’s about extracting subsidies and kickbacks, year after year. That’s all. The price of credits goes up, you make money. The price of credits goes down, you make money. The suits always win and the animals always lose. A hundred thousand extinctions a year and you’re just making it easier for them.”

Truth.

The diversity of life on earth was (as far as anyone knew) the most majestic thing in the universe, and human beings were (as far as anyone knew) the only living things with the capacity to appreciate that majesty, and yet human beings were also the ones who were stamping that majesty out, not deliberately but carelessly, incidentally, leaving nothing behind but a few scans and samples that nobody would ever look at.

Truth.

In the course of her job, Resaint had met people like Megrimson, executives who went into work and sat down at their desks and made decisions that ravaged the world. They didn’t seem evil to her. They seemed more like fungal colonies or AI subroutines, mechanical components of a selfperpetuating super-organism, with no real subjectivity of their own.

But these responses felt self-absorbed, internecine, meaningless, like the human race saying to the extinct species, “You will be pleased to know that, following these unfortunate events, we have conducted a thorough internal review, which has yielded several important recommendations for the future.”

Yep, true today in real life.