Aliens 2035

Chapter 2-1

2

Hiawatha National Forest

October 22nd 2032

UP

Birgit Gunderson never thought she would be one of those who would become so gripped with fear that she would be unable to move, frozen while others died in front of her but she did.

Now she breathed deeply and counted backwards from twenty once … then again. The panic ebbed and disappeared. Her mind clear and functioning again, she felt a little sheepish about the panic attack. The US Fish and Wildlife Service’s truck’s backfire hadn’t really sounded like a gunshot, though the memories were real enough. They would always be there, according to the psych-doc who had counseled her at her discharge from the military at Fort Myer, Virginia.

“When a memory comes, count backward from twenty to zero,” the short Muslim, psychiatrist, Dr. Muhammad Arafat, had told her.

“In English or Pashtu?” she had asked.

“That’s good … you can joke. Remember to breathe and count backwards.”

“How many times?”

“As many times as you need.”

“And that’s all there is to it?”

The man shook his head. He smiled sadly, white teeth in an olive brown face. “Coupled with counseling, over time these episodes will occur less and less and be less destructive.”

“Counseling!” Birgit glared at him. “You’re joking right? I had to sign the freaking paper agreeing I didn’t have PTSD before they’d discharge me. Now the Army won’t pay for a goddamn thing.”

He stood then and looked at her with the compassion of a man who’d heard this before and couldn’t believe the Army brass mistreated their veterans this way. He handed her a card. She read it quickly, automatically memorizing the number. “It’s my private phone number. Call me whenever you need to talk.”

She pocketed the card. “Thanks, Doc. I hope you aren’t put out if I never have to use it.”

More now than ever she wondered what her life would have been if she continued her career in microbiology rather than joining the Army as her father demanded.

Birgit pulled out her iPhone 15, located Doc in her contact file and lightly tapped his name. ‘No signal’ came up. She checked and sure enough there were no bars. “That’s what comes from being out in the middle of osh-gosh goddamn nowhere on the cheapest wireless communication network,” she groused. She pounded the dash and felt another twinge of panic. She quickly breathed deeply, counting backward from twenty, this time in Norwegian.

Birgit shoved her phone into her back pocket. At least Michigan’s northern forests didn’t feel like an ambush lurked around every tree. The bright reds, golds and silvers of the fall foliage were a stark contrast to the dusty, rocky hills of Helmand. And she couldn’t get lost. The truck’s GPS had her pegged within two hundred feet of the Seney National Wildlife Refuge. The screen even showed the rutted service road that led back to the county road that would take her to US 41. From the angle of the sun slanting through the trees, she figured she had four more hours of daylight. “Those fish aren’t going to tag themselves,” she told herself.

Getting out, Birgit shivered. It was the first crisp day in an unusually warm autumn. The sugar maples were ablaze with color. She stuffed her long blond hair under her wool cap and pulled it over her ears. She went to the rear and pulled out her gear. Simple and lightweight – net sample bags, and a dorsal fin tag applicator, like the kind they used on cows on her farm back in Iowa, only smaller. Each one had a nano-scale GPS tracking device that sent information about the game fish movements to the cloud where it would be analyzed by one of the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s machine learning, enhanced computers. It was a lot easier than the old way of scooping up fish, making a small slit, inserting a tracker, and releasing them back into the streams. Easier on the fish, too. Hardly any of them died until caught by an angler or poisoned. Birgit knew that soon satellite LIDAR – Light Imaging Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing method – would replace fieldwork like she was doing.

The reason US Fish and Wildlife Service wanted the tagging was to see how many game fish survived the lampricide chemical designed to target the larvae of lamprey eels in the Upper Peninsula’s river systems. Though the chemical killed off most of the invasive lampreys larvae quickly, it also affected some game fish. Her bosses wanted to know if the tradeoff was still justified. The Great Lakes ecosystems had never truly recovered after being connected to the ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Birgit picked up her gear. Looking up into the lazy, blue, afternoon sky, she marked the position of her truck against the sun, made corrections for the relationship after the sun had moved three hours across the sky, then headed toward Myrtle’s Creek where it joined Owl Creek, feeding into Owl Lake. With luck she’d be done long before sunset.