New York City, sometime this decade
Javier exited the Grand Central-42nd Street station and hurried along East 42nd Street towards the river. He clutched his laptop bag against his chest, and pushed his way through the mid-morning crowd, provoking rude gestures and barked profanities. He was running late for the contract meeting at the UN, a meeting he could not miss. The final approval of the landfill reclamation contract was pending, and he had one last chance to make his case for denial.
Briefly delayed at the security checkpoint, Javier slid into the meeting room a good ten minutes late.
The reclamation company’s representative was already well into his presentation, and the Director held up a hand to silence him. “Nice of you to join us, Mr. Bustos.”
“Sorry, sir. There was a delay on the #7 train coming in from Flushing.”
“Isn’t there always?” The Director pointed his finger at Javier and directed him to a seat at the agency staff table. The Director shot Javier one last glare and returned his attention to the company’s representative. “I believe, Mr. Smith, you were summarizing the pricing structure. Please continue.”
Mr. Smith was tall, almost seven feet, and extraordinarily thin. Narrow shoulders, long lanky arms ending in slender hands with delicate fingers, slim legs accentuated his thinness. His face was lean, with deep-set eyes and large translucent ears, his bald head almost pointed. His skin was a sickly pallor, which Javier assumed was why he continued to wear his mask and latex gloves, despite the easing of the pandemic in the Tri-state area.
“Thank you, Director,” said Smith, his voice high pitched and whispery. “As explained in the contract materials, the agency has no up-front cost and no ongoing expense.”
“I don’t believe it,” Javier muttered under his breath.
“You have something to say, Mr. Bustos?” asked the Director.
“Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean that to be heard. But yes, I have something to say. I don’t see how Global Materials Recovery can carry all the expenses. My research shows they have no capital investors, no fixed plant, no processing facilities, no current source of revenue. I just don’t buy it.”
Before the Director could speak, Mr. Smith raised a long, thin, gloved hand to speak. “Director, if I may? We’ve had this conversation, and GMR has provided all the materials you’ve requested. Our investors are private, and our technology is highly proprietary—your rules do not require that we disclose either. We assemble what we need on-site and remove it when we’re finished. Mr. Bustos knows this.”
“Mr. Smith has a point, Mr. Bustos,” said the Director. “Do you have questions they’ve not addressed?”
“No, sir. It’s just an arrangement we’ve not seen before, and I’m concerned about the risk. If they can’t perform under the contract, it could saddle us with a clean-up project we can’t afford.”
Smith turned to face Javier directly. His pale blue-white eyes narrowed, and Javier was sure he noted a flash of anger. His dealings with Smith were always professional, but there was something odd about him—creepy, almost. Javier chided himself for being uncharitable. Smith’s appearance and demeanor never affected their negotiations. But he could never completely shake the discomfort he felt after their meetings.
“Mr. Bustos, we’ve explained the risk mitigation strategy. To demonstrate the efficacy of our processing, we’ll run a pilot reclamation on the two landfills in upstate New York, Modern and Allied Niagara. If we achieve or exceed the completion date targets, we’ll activate the rest of the contract for all sites globally. And we’ve committed to zero cost to the Agency. GMR recoups its costs from the reclamation and sale of the billions of metric tons of extracted material. We’ve gone over this.” Smith shifted his gaze to the Director. “Director, I’m sorry Mr. Bustos is uncomfortable with the contract, but we’ve provided everything you’ve required. It would be in the Agency’s best interest if we could get started on the pilot.”
“I would agree, Mr. Smith. The General Assembly and the Security Council granted this agency, and this board, authority to move forward on your unique proposal. So, unless there are any further objections…” The Director scanned the board members. No one raised a hand. “… the board approves the contract for landfill site reclamation and restoration for all sites worldwide, as presented by Global Materials Recovery.”
Implementation would begin immediately.
Javier slumped in his chair and wondered what he could do next. This had to be stopped.
###
“Javier, you can’t go to the press. You’ll get fired.” Sheila grasped Javier, squeezing his upper arm. The shifting lights from the stoplights reflecting off the dingy rainy streets outside their apartment window glistened off the tears brimming in her dark eyes.
Javier eased Sheila’s grip with his free hand. “But they’ve stopped listening to me at the Agency. They’re ignoring me. They’ve even taken me off the contract completely. I know—I could be a whistle-blower or stay anonymous.”
“You don’t have any evidence. You’d be just another conspiracy theorist. We’re getting married next month. The baby’s due in six. You can’t do this.”
“I know, I know. But I have to do something. There’s something wrong with those guys. I’m not sure what their angle is, but they’ve got one. I know they’re screwing the Agency, and the Director won’t do anything about it.”
“Are you sure it’s not because this Smith guy is so creepy?”
“That’s part of it. I can never read his expressions, always hiding behind that mask. Covid or no Covid, the guy’s just too offish. He even wears it outside—and the gloves. It’s weird.”
“Let it go, Javier. You’ve done everything you can. You did your job. Just let it go—please.”
“I can’t, Sheila, but I’ll be careful. I’ll talk to your brother, Mike, at the Ledger. He’ll know what to do.”
“I wish you wouldn’t. I’m pretty sure Mike will tell you the same thing—let it go.”
###
Used to the typical putrid smell of decay and urine, Detective Currie ducked under the yellow police tape and headed down the alley, stepping over the usual rotting garbage and steering clear of the piles of discarded junk stacked like a Tetris game from a fevered dream.
“What have we got, Lopez?”
“Two dead. The M.E. thinks it happened about eleven pm last night. An upstanding citizen came down the alley to take a leak. Found them lying here and called nine-one-one. No witnesses, and the shot spotter mics didn’t pick up a gunshot. But I’m not surprised. Wait ‘till you see this.” Lopez led the way to the two bodies lying in a stagnant puddle in the middle of the alley, between an overflowing dumpster and an unoccupied homeless hovel inside a moldy appliance box.
Currie stopped in a dry spot about ten feet away. “Who are the dead guys?”
“The blond guy is Mike Swenson. Works for the Ledger. I’ve run across him here and there. Imagined himself an investigative reporter.” Lopez checked his notes. “The dark-haired guy is Javier Bustos. Employee ID says he works at the Global Reclamation Agency at the UN.”
“Maybe a meetup and then a robbery gone bad?”
“Nope. Nothing taken. Both guys have their wallets and their money.”
“A hit?”
“Might be. That’s where it gets weird. Check this out—but you’ll have to get those fancy shoes wet.” Lopez flashed Currie a grin, which was met with a fuck-off glare.
The bodies lay on their backs. Each had a charred, cauterized, perfectly round hole big enough to put a baseball bat through, bored straight through their torsos where their hearts should have been. The pale light of the streetlamp reflected off the putrid water visible at the bottom of the voids in their chests, the ends of charred ribs and vertebrae poked through the burned flesh.
“Weird, huh?” asked Lopez.
###
Mr. Smith arrived in the Chairman’s suite at his appointed time. He’d left New York the morning following the UN meeting and caught the next shuttle. The Chairman reclined on his couch, manipulating the controls of the large viewscreens in front of him. The Chairman’s current view was an aerial shot of the two pilot sites in New York and a ship-breaking beach in Bangladesh.
“I assume we’re all set, and everything is in place for us to begin.”
“Yes, Mr. Chairman. We took good care of the agency head, but we’ll monitor his communications just in case he changes his mind. The contract is all signed. And, respectfully sir, you know the ship-breaking beaches are off-limits.”
“I know. Too bad. It would have been easy money—all that steel just sitting there.” The Chairman switched off the Bangladesh view and swiveled his pale eyes towards Smith. “And the contract specialist?”
“We caught up with him talking to a reporter last night. We took care of both of them. We don’t need any publicity before the operation begins. By the time the police figure it out, it’ll be too late.”
“This would be easier if we didn’t have to go through this contracting charade.”
“Yes, sir. But as you know, the Directorate needs the veneer of legitimacy to keep the government appeased.”
“Sure. If they want to fool themselves—fine.” The Chairman adjusted the views of the landfills to a higher magnification. “I’m still surprised they didn’t take the technology licensing option. They could have cleaned up the mess themselves and kept all the refined materials to reuse. We’d get the licensing revenue and a nice consulting fee, and their Agency could have pocketed the revenue from the sale of the reclaimed materials.”
Mr. Smith considered for a moment. He’d had similar thoughts during the negotiations. He’d spent the last year with these people and he believed they were like many of their clients—misplaced priorities.
“Sir, I don’t think they want to address the situation. The reclaimed materials would have competed with the resource extraction industry. The political will isn’t there to tackle the problem. They’d prefer to keep digging up their world and dumping the waste in any hole or body of water they can find. They’ve prioritized their economy over their planet. We’ve seen this before, and we know how it ends—someday they’ll collapse one and run out of the other.”
“Well, in the meantime, we’ll mine one-hundred billion metric tons of processed resources, and the manufacturing division will love us for it. And in fifty years, we’ll come back and mine another one-hundred billion tons—their loss. Let’s get started. Would you do the honors?”
Mr. Smith had removed his mask, the facial prosthetic it hid, and his gloves on the trip up from New York. He licked his flat, beetle-like, chitinous beak with a long, slender tongue, reached out his hand, and wrapped the clawed tip of one of his five tentacles around the communications toggle on the ship’s control panel. With a quick snap, he sent the command to the fleet stationed in the shadow of Saturn to begin operations.
Two weeks later, the first massive ships uncloaked in low earth orbit and entered the atmosphere. At landfills and dumps and tracts of land poisoned with chemicals and residue and tailings worldwide, the alien’s extraction ships scooped cubic miles of earth and refuse and debris out of the planet. Before they moved on, they dumped the sterilized, useless dirt in the scars the ships left. In less than a month, the Earth had lost forever the accumulated product of eighty years of industry—billions of metric tons of finished products, the fruit of the Earth, unrenewable, irreplaceable—all called trash.
END