Termination Shock

As he cut across the grain of the crowd, headed for Dr. Rutledge’s office, he got a good look at the signs the protesters were carrying. A lot of them had to do with the notion of humans as an invasive species, a topic that was very much on point as far as Rufus was concerned.

It would have been easy enough, and satisfying in a certain way, to make the comparison between what Rufus was trying to do to the pigs now and what the Comanches had tried to do to white people two hundred years ago. But you had to be careful. The Comanches themselves were invaders from the north who had “displaced”—a euphemism if ever there was one—the Indians who had been in Texas before them. And they’d been able to do it because they were early and enthusiastic adopters of the invasive species known as the horse.

Some of the other protest signs, he couldn’t help noticing, were on the theme of extinction: a fate that all humans were facing if we didn’t get a handle on climate change. So by the time Rufus finally got to the front door of the building where Dr. Rutledge worked, he was thoroughly confused. Did these kids hate humans because they were an invasive species that should be eradicated? Or did they love humans and not want them to become extinct? Imponderable questions, these, which perhaps college sophomores stayed up all night hashing out over pizza and beer while Rufus was out alone with a tripod and a rifle hunting a demon.

He noticed a few of the protesters toting, or rather wearing, odd getups that in retrospect were the early prototypes of earthsuits: garments that looked much too heavy for such a hot day, because underneath they consisted of networks of cooling tubes against the skin. Those were connected to backpack units with lithium battery packs driving a refrigeration system. Heat had to be got rid of eventually, so the backpack had a chimney projecting straight up above the wearer’s head, shooting hot air that was visible from the heat waves coming off it. Those who wore them tended to be heavyset nerds.

 

“Something like ten thousand years ago, people, who were always on the verge of starving to death, noticed that pigs could eat things they couldn’t,” Dr. Rutledge said.

“They can eat anything,” Rufus said, and then drew back, worried that he might have been too vehement.

But she was a cool cat. “Right, and my point is that humans can eat them. And we are just slightly smarter than they are.”

“Not by much,” Rufus scoffed, and he couldn’t restrain himself from glancing toward her office window, through which protest chants were dimly audible. Though he had to admit that those personal refrigeration systems were pretty clever.

“They are very intelligent,” she agreed, with a glance toward the window that made it somewhat ambiguous. “Anyway, that’s how they—pigs—got domesticated. We have genetic data on many domesticated breeds, of course. Getting data on the Eurasian wild boar is harder, but we have plenty of that too. That’s the source material. Where it gets fun is seeing all the combinations that emerge among the several million wild pigs running around Texas.”

Rufus was pulled up short by her use of the word “fun” and so spent a few moments taking stock of things. He’d never before set foot on a university campus. Some of his expectations had been correct. Lots of young and startlingly attractive people with protest signs: check. But her office wasn’t paneled and book-lined like professors’ offices in movies. The walls were reinforced concrete, and it was small, with cables and computers all over the place.

Not a bad fit overall with Dr. Rutledge, who was a reinforced concrete kind of gal, lacking in the far-fetched adornments that Rufus was used to seeing on females of the species Homo sapiens. Photographic evidence pointed to the existence of a husband and at least two children. Medium-length hair held back out of her face by a pair of laboratory safety glasses pushed up on top of her head. Middle American way of talking—either she was a transplant from out of the north, or one of those Texans who somehow grew to adulthood without picking up a Texan accent. A little prickly and short with him until he showed that he respected her. Reminded him in that way of some female army officers.

“Speaking of fun,” he finally said, “the Eurasian wild boar introductions were—”

“For sport.” She nodded. He felt he might have scored a point by his use of the word “introduction.”

“They’re more fun to hunt if they’re harder to kill,” Rufus said.

“I’m not a hunter but that sounds like a logical assumption to me.”

“Wily, fast, vicious.”

She raised her eyebrows and turned her palms up.

“A boar like that, crossed—hybridized—with a domestic variety that was bred up to be just huge—it could . . .”

He trailed off. She broke eye contact and let out a long breath she’d been gathering in as he circled closer and closer to his point.