The Ministry for the Future

66

You think your birth was hard—my mom exploded! Literally, yes, in that when she went supernova the heat of the detonation exceeded a hundred megakelvins and in that pressure three helium nuclei stripped of their two electrons were crushed together and there I was, as elegant as anything in the universe: carbon, the king of the elements, sweetly six-sided and tetravalent, able to bond with the atoms of my kind in several different ways, and to compound with other atoms in almost countless ways, being so friendly. So, boom! and there I was, flying across the universe. My particular neighborhood was your Milky Way, and I flew right into the knot of dust that was swirling down into Sol, where I could very easily have been roasted or crushed into something else entirely, but happily for me I fell into a swirl of dust that was coming together around ninety million miles from mighty Sol, and not too much time later I was part of a rocky planetesimal.

Earth, you’re probably guessing, since we’re here now, but actually I first joined the Mars-sized rock coalescing at the Lagrange 5 point to Earth, a rock which now gets called Theia. So I was there for that big collision when Theia hit Gaia at speed, and they merged and tossed out a spray that quickly became the moon. A big bang! Although not compared to the real Big Bang, of course. And with that I found myself inside the hot new Earth, but in the mantle very near the surface, luckily for me or I wouldn’t be talking to you now. That was it for my catastrophic childhood and youth, everything since has been fairly sedate and what you might call adult.

Well, but I forget my escape to the surface. That was pretty dramatic too. I came out in a volcanic eruption at a mid-ocean ridge between Pangea and I forget what land mass, they go away pretty fast. Hot lava sprayed into the sky, cooling almost instantly. A few million years exposed to the photon rain of sunlight softened me up, it was like getting a sunburn and I was part of the dead skin about to get sloughed off. Fine, I was ready, a million years is a long time, not to mention fifty million years; but the question was, which atoms would I join to effect my escape? I wanted to be eaten by a dinosaur, Jurassic era, and in those days it wasn’t that hard—photons banged me, my four exposed connector electrons were all quivering tetravalently, hoping for a pick-up, and as it so often happens, I got interest from two suitors at the same time! and wham bang, I had been stuck simultaneously to two oxygen atoms, and I was in a marriage very convenient indeed, as carbon dioxide.

We made a good team. Life got busy. By flying low we kept getting picked up by plants. They would suck us in, and zoop, gurgle, I was part of a leaf, a twig, a tree trunk. I joined a proto-sequoia, that was a long date, then a fern, got eaten by an allosaur, pooped by same allosaur, yes I was a piece of shit then, and have been many times since, but bacteria love to eat shit, and quickly enough I ran into another pair of oxygen atoms and off again. But then, disaster: I was caught underwater in a muddy clutch of my fellow carbon atoms, and down we went back into the Earth, crushed there to graphite, in this case a seam of coal, where I spent many millions of years. Could even have been sucked down tectonically and crushed to diamond, and thus stuck forever in one small town of everyone-the-same, latticed in a veritable jail for all time, meaning really till the burning up of the Earth when the sun goes large, that would be my welcome release from that fate, but in this case I got lucky; my seam was mined by humans and burnt in a furnace, around the year 1634. Freedom! Back into the sky, and how I loved that. I like variety. So back to the sky, and hurray for organic chemistry, I was this and that, pangolin and rice stalk, mosquito and frog, frog poop and bacteria, then back to the sky yet again, hurrah!

There’s that moment that comes when the water molecules drifting around in the air constellate on a tiny speck of dust and become a rain drop and begin their dive to Earth, and you can latch onto that, just get smacked by a downward droplet and join those happy people, your oxygen mates singing hi to the oxygen atoms in their hydrogen-twin marriages, trios are the best, everyone partying for the time of the dive. You lose the sense of gravity pulling on you when you fall at terminal velocity for your droplet, in fact sometimes you get hung up in a cloud or a mist or a fog and it’s just delightful, a delicious no-g sensation, I would suppose that it might be like what you would call orgasm. Bonding, sure, that can be good or bad, but floating in the sky in an orgasmic cloud, wow.

But eventually the droplets are likely to coalesce until you are pelting down again. Snow is fun, sleet even more so. And then you crash onto Earth and things start again. Who would I join this time?

Well, shit—not this time! Turns out that people in Canada had begun to deal with asbestos mine tailings by feeding the toxic rubble into the tailing pools that form in and next to mine pits, then adding some local cyanobacteria. These cyanobacteria grabbed me and then bonded with the asbestos dust, and together we clumped into hydromagnesite, a form of magnesium carbonate. These local kidnappers were all happy to have locked me and many of my mates down again, and the asbestos too, but when you’ve floated in fog, and body-surfed through an alimentary tract, sitting there in a rock is boring as hell. My only hope is that I’ll get ground up and used as a rock-climber’s hand powder, that’s about all magnesium carbonate is good for. Maybe I’ll end up in the powder pouch of some awesome cliff climber, that would be exciting, but for now I’m stuck. Oh well, time for a nap.