Dark Pattern (The Naturalist) by Andrew Mayne

Author:Andrew Mayne [Mayne, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

EVERYTHING

The sun is rising over the bay at Smith Point to the east. Drinking coffee and leaning against my truck, I watch the golden rays on muddy green water create a color I’m sure no artist who wanted to sell their work in a gallery would try to emulate. It’s not an ugly shade per se; in fact, it reminds me of the skin of a river frog, Lithobates heckscheri, which isn’t completely coincidental. Well-camouflaged animals don’t simply emulate the environment around them; they also re-create the way light refracts around smooth and rough surfaces.

As the sun begins to ascend for its daily reign, the eastern-facing sides of buildings on a distant island begin to shimmer above the haze of the gulf. It’s kind of appropriate, in a way, if I’m looking for a tortured analogy for my life.

Yesterday was like the San Ciriaco hurricane, a most unfortunate natural disaster among natural disasters. When the brutal winds of the longest-lived Atlantic hurricane had finished devastating the Caribbean and East Coast of the United States, more than three thousand people were dead.

“What could be worse than this?” many people probably asked themselves. One year later, Mother Nature had an answer: the 1900 Galveston hurricane, which killed as many as twelve thousand people. The first messengers to reach Texas City on the western side of the bay were accused of exaggerating when they told authorities how many lives were lost. As rescuers navigating through the debris-strewn waters of the gulf saw the bodies, they began to realize that the early death-toll estimates were a massive understatement.

More than a century later, I can see the shimmering, eastern-facing sides of Galveston in the morning light.

Yesterday was San Ciriaco. Today is Galveston.

My lab is gone.

Figueroa himself called me with the bad news. The Department of Defense suspended my security clearance, and my current research programs were put under the custodial supervision of DARPA.

It was a temporary precaution, he told me. For a man who hates to lie, I could tell that he was only able to say it with great difficulty.

The suspension wasn’t directly because of my accusation against Filman. It was the last straw in a series of problems I’d created for my patrons at the Department of Defense.

The Hyde virus has turned into a political mess, and there’s certainly a bit of shoot-the-messenger going on. There are two schools of thought. On one side, Theo Cray is a brilliant genius who single-handedly saved us from a national disaster that we were too dumb to see coming. On the other, Theo Cray is an attention-seeking glory hound who has blown this way out of proportion to exaggerate his own self-worth.

My running off at the mouth about catching another serial killer while I was supposed to be back in my lab and giving Hyde investigators help, not hindrance, settled the issue.

To be honest, I’m not sure they’re completely wrong.

My lab. Sure, I spent as much time out of it as I did inside, but it was more than the time I spent there.

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