System Storyteller

What are you telling me?

Nothing read back at me from the computer screen. The GUI was still and consistent, tapping out the same reasonable numbers over and over. Flow, dissolved oxygen, mixed liquor levels were all normal, no, more than normal. Consistent.

I walked out of the lab to the primary clarifiers. There was an odd green color to them today. Faintly luminescent in the twilight. Everyone else had gone home and the night shift was slowly getting settled. Two operators and me, listening to the rush of water and the hum of machinery in the great station. I stepped through the railings separating the walkways from the polishing wetlands swishing underneath and around us in the cool night air. The great pools that acted as our clarifiers trickled steadily down a fixed film membrane in two controlled waterfalls along the ridged concrete wall that held the microbes with its built-in hollows and crevices filled with ferns and other nutrient-loving macrophytes. Cool air drifted off it and the scent of something herby and fresh.

The elevated walkway took me past the aeration basins, mini-lakes with gently waving fresh-water algae rippling in the current as the oxygen-enriched injected water swirled in and out of the underwater forest. It also had a faint tinge of luminescence, unusual though beautiful. The color seemed to intensify as the sun set, turning from electric blue to a strange iridescent purple the further along the treatment train I went. Tiny bubbles of oxygen produced from the algae burbled along the ridges of the stone tank, clinging to the edges in pretty bubble nets that the fish congregated along pushing them up with their noses as if playing.

The lily pads and water hyacinth blooms were closed now, gently respiring oxygen and resting from their long day. I nodded to one of the operators scooping duckweed for processing into protein powder and took the other railing to the next stage of the process to stay out of his way; the long hook and net were heavy and the collection bin took up most of the walkway on that side of the basin. He’d also collect fish for the market early in the morning. The tilapia provided most of the protein for this side of the mountain, especially during winter.

The first of the vertical wetlands popped up, black against the background of the river and the forests. Cattails and waving grasses highlighted against the last rays of the setting sun, all highlighted in that strange purple color. It didn’t seem to be hurting anything, but it was baffling. E. coli numbers were within tolerance. No volatile organics, no polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, no radiation detected, everything was fine just lit up in a bizarre purple color. The vertical wetlands had a set of aeration pipes popping out of the underground tanks on either side—two line of 6 pipes humming slightly with the air pumps. Their white plastic reflecting the eerie color in stereo down the line. I sat on the walkway, tracking the wetlands out to the diversion that spread it into the horizontal wetlands that expanded around the plant and drained into the aquifer below our feet. After a few moments, the nightbirds started up their calls again and the purple seems to pulse like a heartbeat. Like a long, irregular heartbeat. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast. Sometimes it seemed to harmonize with the birds and insect calls. Other times, it seemed to flash on and off like a firefly communicating with itself. I noticed different parts of the wetland and treatment train flashing at different intervals. Sometimes it was a true flash, other times it was a gentle dim that held its intensity before ramping up again.

The ecology is communicating. It was the only thing that made sense. Steady pulses from the aeration basin, a continuous stream of light from the clarifiers, and here in the polishing wetlands, a constant cacophony of visual cues to plants and animals. Is it showing where it has the most nutrients?

I pulled the in-line samplers from the port near me to see the read-out. Nitrogen and phosphorous were relatively low. The color seemed dimmer, but that could be my imagination. I’d never heard of any of these new biological plants being able to communicate, but these were relatively untested.

Something caught my eye along the underside of the railing. I leaned down to stick my head under the walkway and was greeted by a massive slime mold; a brilliant purple slime mold spanning along the entire bottom of the walkway as far as I could see, even trailing along the outer edges of the stone aeration basins. It could have been my imagination, but as I looked at it, it seemed to flare purple and pulse along the space I occupied as if in greeting. I fumbled in my coveralls for a sampling jar and tiny sampler to slip a piece of it off the walkway, hesitating to make sure I wasn’t going to hurt it, but the thing seemed to reach back towards me, breaking off a piece of itself as if volunteering to be sampled. I muttered a thank you under my breath and slipped it into its jar before hurrying back to the lab.

The sample didn’t seem to be purple anymore, didn’t seem to pulse. As I slid it onto a slide and focused the microscope on it, it seemed like a perfectly normal, utterly average slime mold. Just as I thought that, a flash of light had me refocus the microscope to see a purple highlighted smiley face that made me blink and laugh.