James Hunt - GMO 24 - The Coalition

The only issue with the synthetic foods was the human body’s ability to process it. Humans had evolved to their current state on fresh fruits and vegetables, red meat, and seafood. The human body could only absorb a fraction of what the sticks offered. Its original intent was to act as a supplement, but as the soil crisis grew more severe, it became a meal replacement.

Starving was the slowest death Todd had ever seen. One by one, your muscles, bones, organs, and other tissues weakened. The nerve, immune, and other bodily systems became less efficient, struggling to perform their basic functions. A person’s motor skills would start to fail them, along with the ability to think clearly.

For Todd, that was the hardest part to watch. The mind deteriorated. He could see the light behind each pair of eyes dim. Once the mind devolved to the basic necessities of survival in locating food and water, people became animalistic.

Three years ago, when the relocation efforts were put into place, there were only two types of faces on the people that arrived in the community. The first had a blank glare, a mind fogged and sluggish, a breath away from death.

The other face concealed a mind lowered to an animalistic ruthlessness. The territorial gorillas and bears that guarded their ground fiercely had found their way into the communities, towns, and cities limping along. The capacity for reason and logic had long escaped them. All that was left was instinct.

Instinct. Such a vile word. Todd detested that word. For decades, he was forced to listen to scholars, educated men and women, use that term to describe the actions of people.

“It’s our natural instinct to be violent. It’s our human instinct to destroy. It was his instinct to react that way. It was her instinct that caused her to go down that road. You have to listen to your instincts.”

Well, those firm believers in instincts had finally been given what they had clamored for. The pillars of choice and reason had crumbled. People now lived in slums, forced to work at gunpoint, separated from their family and friends.

Everything Todd had done over the past year was in laborious effort to rebuild those long-forgotten structures. He wanted to return to a time of acumen and intellect. To be able to walk down a street, a paved street, with new shoes. He wanted to look at the faces of the people around him and see their exuberant souls greet him through their eyes. He wanted to go through his day without the mention of the word hunger. He wanted to sleep like he did when he was a child, unafraid and peaceful. He wanted people to act of their own free will and not based off the repercussions from some thug with a rifle. He wanted a world better than what he inherited.

What made it all worse was the fact that they had squandered it. The human race had so many chances to get it right, and time and time again they continued to kill each other. They beat their neighbors. They drained the sources of life around them for the pointless pursuit of empty pleasures.

But he was so close. His research was on the brink of a breakthrough. All of the tests he’d run to ensure it was safe were coming to an end. His body’s nutrition levels were the highest they’d been since before the soil crisis. But if anyone from the Soil Coalition found out about his work, all would be lost. They would return to a world of squandered resources helmed by the same type of men and women who had brought the country to its current state. He couldn’t let that happen again.

Todd was building more than just a cure. He was building a movement, but patience and time were running out. And the new inspector was only going to exacerbate the situation. Something needed to be done. Quickly.

Sydney had never been so happy to be back in Topeka. Every piece of equipment in his lab seemed to glow upon his return. The sturdy walls, the locked door, and the cold air blowing through the vents all made him feel safe. He treasured the security of familiarity.

He opened his briefcase and pulled out his notes from the project he was working on before he was allocated to the field. Upon his search for his work, he stumbled across the data from the blood sampling in the town he visited.

The small personal thumb drive where he kept old pictures and projects contained the raw, untampered data. Sydney drew the blinds to the windows in the lab and locked the door. He stuck the drive into the side of his laptop and downloaded the information. He reached for his notebook while the loading bar inched from sixty to seventy percent.

Sydney flipped through the pages of the notebook, searching for the man’s name who had the high nutrition levels. It was on the tip of his tongue, but it eluded him. The computer beeped, signaling a finish to the download, when he finally found it. Todd Penn.

He traced his finger over the name, feeling the indentation from the ink on the paper. That name, and the man it represented, was a mystery to him. He needed to solve it.

The resources of the lab here in Topeka far exceeded any of the field labs that the Coalition used during blood tests. He had the finest equipment the country had to offer, which was a fabricated truth, because many of the scientific tools that could have helped him solve the puzzle had been destroyed in the violence that thundered after the first failed harvest.

Most of the equipment was actually quite old. And anything that broke down took a very long time to fix. The soil crisis didn’t just kill plant life, it also killed most of the brain power that was trained in repairing these delicate instruments.

However, Sydney’s resources were far greater than anything that Todd Penn could have had access to, and if he was in fact the missing link to the country’s problem, then he was confident he could decipher the hidden codes inside Mr. Penn’s blood.

A knock at the door made Sydney jump, and he spilled the water from the mug in his hand over the keyboard. He desperately patted the keys with his shirt, trying to wipe up the water before it seeped into the circuits. More pounding shook the lab’s door.

“Just a minute!” Sydney cried out.

He closed the programs on his computer and removed the thumb drive. He stuffed it into his pocket as he unlocked the door.

Jared wore a stony expression that contrasted with his three-piece suit and poked his thick forefinger at the wet splashes on Sydney’s lab coat. “What is that?”

“Water,” Sydney answered.

Jared stepped inside, his large frame almost taking up the entire doorframe. “Why was the door locked?”

Sydney twirled his fingers around one another, keeping his head down. He fidgeted from side to side, shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. “All of my work here is considered confidential. You know that.”

“I was told you were sent out into the field? Is that true?”

Sydney nodded, but Jared still had his back to him, so he didn’t see.

“Sydney!” Jared bellowed.

Sydney gave the same startled jump as before. The stern, commanding voice had always caused him stress. There was always a disappointed tone underlying Jared’s every word.

“Y-yes. I was,” Sydney answered.

“I put you here as a favor to your mother, not because of your expertise in the field. Now, the next time Gordon tells you to head out, I want you to tell him no, do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For God’s sake, grow a backbone. Stand up straight!”

Jared grabbed his son by the shoulders and practically lifted him off the floor and dropped him from midair. Sydney’s heels smacked the floor hard, and a jolt of pain rushed up his spine. He rubbed his lower back as he attempted to reach the height he never seemed to be able to as a boy.