Jeff Jacobson
GROWTH
SATURDAY, JUNE 30th
CHAPTER 1
Bob Jr. thought the whole thing was a big joke right up until Dr. Deemer shot the Vice President of Marketing in the neck.
The day hadn’t started out that bad. Hell, Bob Morton Jr. fully expected it to be one of the greatest days of his life. He’d been promised a party, and by God, he was ready for one. Up early, not too hungover, he joined his superiors on the exclusive little café on the roof of their hotel as the sun broke over Port-au-Prince. Then a short ride to the city’s international airport where a sleek Gulfstream was gassed and ready to go.
Bob Jr. had never been on a jet that small or luxurious. He tried not to let the awe show on his face as he strapped himself into the leather seat. His employer, the genetically modified–seed giant Allagro, owned an entire island almost fifty miles to the west, and flew their executives back and forth all the time. Their proximity to Haiti and its laws gave the corporation quite a bit of flexibility regarding certain safeguards and scientific protocol. Before they had even taken off, the stewardesses, all perky local girls, brought everybody fresh oranges, giant frosted glasses full of hand-chipped ice, and nearly frozen bottles of Iordanov vodka.
Bob Jr. limited himself to just one screwdriver. He was one of the newest members of the upper echelon at Allagro and he didn’t want to get too drunk too fast in front of the rest of the twenty or so other executives, all heavy hitters within the corporation. There was still a tour of the facilities and a whole mess of backslapping and glad-handing to get through before the real party began.
It hadn’t been said aloud, but the message had been received loud and clear. Bob Jr. understood that all of the speeches, all of the presentations—everything—was simply a series of formalities meant to be endured before heading back to Port-au-Prince, where the booze, drugs, and women were all waiting.
And oh good Lord, the women. Bob Jr. had had to bite the inside of his cheeks to stifle a shit-eating grin. Somebody high up in the corporation had clearly spared no expense in showing their appreciation for a job well done. Viagra had been passed around like after-dinner mints. There was a damn good reason no wives had been invited on the trip.
The five-mile island was curved into a little comma. Cornfields covered most of the thin sliver of land. The jet landed smoothly on the airstrip that split the island in half and Bob Jr. got his first good look at the acres and acres of corn. As he disembarked, he couldn’t help but feel a little unsettled. He’d grown up in cornfields; his dad had used to joke that he should have had corn silk for hair. But something was off. It felt wrong, somehow, to see all these endless, perfectly geometric rows of cornstalks with the pale blue Caribbean ocean in the background.
Six air-conditioned Range Rovers whisked the executives down dirt roads to the main campus, a sprawling cluster of massive greenhouses, a four-story office building, and what looked like a large, imposing warehouse. The office building was first, where a waiting contingent of on-site personnel were full of slick smiles and fawning congratulations. A troop of secretaries handed out mimosas spiked with rum-soaked pineapple wedges.
Then it was on to the laboratories.
Bob Jr. couldn’t help but feel that shit just got real when they had to take turns going through a no-nonsense airlock. Everybody had to slip into surgical masks, sterile blue scrubs, and disposable booties fitted snugly over their custom alligator- and ostrich-skin shoes. The subdued, expensive paintings and wood walls disappeared, giving way to gray cement and pipes that clung to the ceilings; corrugated rubber mats protecting evenly spaced drains in the cement floor replaced the ornate rugs on hardwood. There was no doubt they were now squarely in the heart of Research and Development’s territory.
Inside, the air tasted flat and stale. The rest of the tour was a dizzying blur of exotic scientific instruments and freezers and test tubes and obscure machines. They peered through thick Plexiglas into stark white rooms devoid of anything except heat lamps and a couple of cornstalks planted in ten-gallon buckets. Bob Jr. found he was having a hard time concentrating after the Caribbean heat and all the deceptively powerful drinks. The information their guides gave became nothing but endless, confusing blather.
He understood the basics, though. Of course he did. He’d been drilled, first from his father, then from the rest of the executives at Allagro, and finally from the men upstairs who never appeared at any meeting except on speakerphone. He barely knew these men’s first names. He’d never actually met them in person. He didn’t even know what they looked like.
It didn’t matter, though. They certainly made sure he got the message.
These latest corn seeds were something brand new, going so far beyond the current cutting edge in technology that nobody even had a classification for them yet. They represented nothing less than the future of crop management. These special seeds had been armed with a sleeping genetic defense that only became active if the corn plant was attacked by some sort of pest, such as the European corn worm. This was a particularly troublesome moth whose larvae, voracious caterpillars, ate through the stalks, causing the entire plant to fall over and rot.
It had been patiently explained, over and over, that this genetic response was a kind of cocktail fungus grenade, a stew of fungal species that had been programmed to attack and destroy the corn worms. The whole thing was some kind of super-duper, top-fucking-secret. And though Bob Jr. had no idea what the Latin names actually meant, the eggheads certainly had been proud of their accomplishments. They’d combined a healthy dash of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a sizable chunk of Beauveria bassiana, a little contribution from Paecilomyces cicadae, and a sprinkling of God-knew-what.
How they did it exactly, Bob Jr. got a little shaky on the specifics.
All he really knew was that the men upstairs had decided to turn away from their profitable pesticide arm of the company. They sold that for billions and focused their genetic division of the corporation instead solely on organic responses to pests.
The new seeds were the harbinger of the future—a truly “green” solution.
When the tour of the labs had finished, the executives were shown into a plush conference room, and while Bob Jr. was thrilled to accompany the big boys to the island for the grand rollout, he hadn’t realized how many stultifying speeches he would have to endure. One speaker after another had stepped up to the podium to explain, in soul-crushing detail, how their own unique vision had contributed to the success of the new seed. Everybody wanted his own moment in the spotlight.
At first, Bob Jr. had tried to pay attention, but the presentations were taking forever. His chair had become impossibly comfortable and the surface of the conference table had become a glazed, hypnotizing brown sea. The massive table had been built as a stylized replica of the actual island, with the sharp edges smoothed out, curves and angles minimized, until it resembled a thirty-foot quarter moon, curved in sync with the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out across a spotless white beach, revealing a seemingly endless tropical paradise—nothing but sand and waves. The alcohol and the heat were making his head fuzzy, and he was more than a little worried that he was about to fuck up and do something truly stupid, like fall asleep in front of everybody.
He tried to distract himself by watching the gray clouds piling up over the soft blue Caribbean water through the expansive windows behind the podium. The gorgeous view should have been enough, but the gentle rolling waves just made time pass slower. He shifted instead to picturing his fiancée, who was waiting for his return to Chicago, hopefully in something sheer and revealing.