As night approached, the scant light penetrating the tangled canopy vanished completely, plunging them into darkness, and leaving them with little choice but to stop for the night. They huddled together under a hasty shelter made from Bishop’s parachute — still damp from the plunge into Lake Kivu — and in the glow of a chemical lightstick, he handed out an MRE. Knight had no appetite, but Bishop hassled him into eating a piece of bread and drinking some water, along with a hefty dose of penicillin to combat infection from his injuries. He also passed out some mefloquine as an anti-malarial. Knight soon fell into a restless slumber.
After a while, Bishop turned to Felice. “Tell me about your project.”
She tore her gaze away from Knight and stared at the green chemlight as if composing her thoughts. “The Congo region sits on enormous reserves of fossil fuel. Despite that, it is one of the poorest nations on Earth, energy-wise. Except for the cities, most people don’t have electricity or automobiles, but live the way they’ve lived for thousands of years. Most of the petroleum that is recovered gets exported to foreign markets, so while there is some revenue from energy production, most Congolese don’t see any benefit.
“President Mulamba commissioned my team to find a new source of energy — renewable energy — that would address the needs of the people living here, as well as providing a long term source of revenue.”
“You’re American. How did you get involved in this?”
“For the last couple years, I’ve been working with a non-profit agency that’s trying to use cutting edge technologies to help developing nations stand on their own. Most of Africa is stuck in the 1950s. Not much has changed in the Congo since the Belgians left. The economy is driven by natural resources, but that’s not sustainable in the long term. If the Congo follows the pattern of other developing nations, they’ll keep exploiting those resources, with most of the money leaving the country, and they’ll deplete everything long before they make any kind of progress. Our goal is to find a way to leapfrog straight into the twenty-first century. Energy production is critical to such a plan. You can’t put computers in every school if there’s no electricity to run them.”
“That doesn’t exactly sound like a job for a geneticist,” Bishop said.
“We’re a multi-disciplinary team…” She paused abruptly and Bishop saw that she was blinking back tears. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “It just hit me that they’re all…”
Bishop laid a hand on her shoulder. He felt awkward trying to comfort her. He kept such a tight lid on his own emotions that he didn’t really have much experience reading or reacting to the emotions of other people. “It’s okay.”
He didn’t know what else to say, but he left his hand where it was until he sensed that she was ready to continue. “I guess I got involved by accident. I was working with a group in Kenya, trying to develop new gene therapies to stop the spread of AIDS, when I heard about some research going on at Lake Kivu, involving extremophiles.”
“Like the organisms that live around deep-sea volcanic vents?”
“Exactly. Extremophiles are life-forms — usually unicellular organisms — that can survive and thrive in conditions where nothing should be able to. Many are autotrophs — they produce their own food, like plants — but instead of using sunlight, they can transform heat and energy from chemical reactions into food. Lake Kivu is situated in an area of extreme volcanic activity, which makes it a perfect environment for extremophile organisms to thrive.
“These microbes interact with escaping volcanic gasses, to produce hydrocarbons in huge quantities. There’s an enormous bubble of natural gas at the bottom of Lake Kivu — about sixteen cubic miles”
“That sounds like a lot.”
“Enough to supply about a hundred large electrical plants, and it’s constantly replenishing. Unfortunately, it’s also very dangerous where it is. The methane breaks down into carbon dioxide, and there’s an even larger bubble of that trapped at the bottom of the lake. If the methane spontaneously ignites — which can happen without any warning — the resulting explosion would release the CO2 to the surface and suffocate everyone living in the lake basin.”
Bishop stiffened in surprise. “You’re kidding, right?”
“In 1986, a carbon dioxide cloud released by Lake Nyos, in Cameroon, killed 1,700 people. The cloud was believed to have contained about 300,000 tons of CO2 and affected people more than fifteen miles from the lake. Lake Nyos is fairly remote, with just a few rural villages. The bubble at the bottom of Lake Kivu is believed to contain 500 million tons, and there are more than two million people living along its shores.”
“Why would anyone choose to live near something like that?”
Felice shrugged. “The same reason people live on the San Andreas fault, or in Tornado Alley. You’ve got to live somewhere. Most of the people in the Kivu region probably don’t even know about the danger, and spontaneous eruptions happen on geological time scales — thousands, even millions of years in between.
“Several agencies have been working to come up with a way to mitigate the threat, as well as to harvest the natural gas for energy production, but those solutions carry a lot of risk. Disturbing the gas deposits might very well trigger the catastrophe they’re trying to prevent.
“Our research isn’t — wasn’t — concerned with that, though. We were looking at the cause, the microbes that produce the methane in the first place. If we can find a way to adapt them to a different environment, we would be able to produce an endless supply of renewable energy.”
“You want to use bacteria to make natural gas?”
“It’s a natural process,” she explained. “Scientists in South Korea have found a way to use E. coli to produce gasoline. We just need to find a way to make it efficient and cost effective, and we were very close. Our research would revolutionize energy production everywhere. There would be no more need to drill for petroleum, no more tearing up wilderness areas to sink wells, no more fracking or pipelines. And since the process would be carbon neutral, it would pretty much solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.”
“So why would anyone want to stop you?”
“A lot of people have invested heavily in the status quo. This process would be available to anyone, and that would mean the end of the fossil fuel industry.”
“So the rebels who attacked us, and the Army… they’re all working for oil companies?”
“Possibly. Or they might just want to keep things the way they are. People fear change, even when that change means a better life for everyone.”
Bishop had no response to that, so he switched gears. “You said you had to find a way to adapt these extremophiles. You’re a geneticist, so I’m going to assume that your plan is to re-engineer their DNA. Isn’t that kind of risky?”
She frowned at him. “What have you got against genetic research?”
“Oh, let’s see… tinkering with the blueprint of life, creating organisms that aren’t supposed to exist and that can’t be controlled, only figuring out when the shit hits the fan that there might be unintended consequences… I could go on.”
“Humanity has been modifying the genetic code for thousands of years, long before anyone ever knew that such a thing as DNA even existed. Most of our food supply derives from plant and animal strains that were produced through selective breeding. This isn’t Frankenstein science. Sure, there are abuses, but that doesn’t mean we should go back to living in caves.”
He wanted to argue with her, to tell her how he knew firsthand just how much damage one misguided person could cause by playing God, but there was no point. Genetic engineering was a genie that was already out of the bottle. There was no turning back the clock. “Better get some sleep,” he said, finally. “Tomorrow could be a long day.”