Chương 39: Chapter 38: The Tomb (09/27/1983)

DATE: Tuesday, September 27, 1983 LOCATION: Alamogordo, New Mexico LOCAL TIME: 11: 00 AM The desert wind smelled of sagebrush and failure. A fleet of dump trucks rumbled across the cracked earth of the Alamogordo landfill. They were carrying the corpse of an industry. I stood on the hood of the rental car, seven years old, watching the burial. Uncle Jack and Bob Yauney stood beside the car, managing the logistics. But standing a few feet away, leaning heavily on a wooden cane, was Bucky Fuller.

Bucky wasn't looking at the heavy machinery. He was staring down into the massive dirt trench as millions of dollars of intellectual property—thousands of plastic cartridges of E. T. and Pac-Man—cascaded into the earth.

"Look at it," Bucky whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of grief and profound disgust.

"The pinnacle of human engineering. Silicon, copper, petroleum-derived plastics. Mined from Spaceship Earth, refined at massive energetic cost, and for what? Disposable entertainment. And when the entertainment fails, we simply bury the poison in the dirt and look the other way." He turned to me, his thick glasses catching the harsh desert glare.

"This is the entropy you warned me about, Chad. The system eating itself."

"It's not poison anymore, Bucky," I said softly, sliding off the hood of the car to stand next to him. Down in the pit, wearing heavy industrial coveralls, Larry and Hank Moore walked over the mountain of plastic games, spraying them with a thick, opaque biological slurry from a pressurized hose. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"What exactly are the boys spraying on those cartridges before the concrete goes down?" Jack asked, squinting through the dust.

"The cleanup crew," Bob murmured.

"Chad's wax worms. Galleria mellonella. Our biologist, Tom Ray, isolated the digestive enzyme in the lab and hyper-concentrated it. We're seeding the pit." Bucky leaned forward on his cane, his scientific curiosity momentarily piercing his gloom.

"A biological solvent for polyethylene?"

"The concrete is just the lid," I explained, looking up at the old futurist.

"It seals them in. In a year, there won't be a single piece of plastic left under there. It'll just be biochar and topsoil. Atari thinks they are paying us to hide their mistake. In reality, they are paying us to run the largest biological waste-disposal test in human history."

"Look at that," Jack said, shaking his head with a predator's grin.

"We're literally eating them from the inside out." Bucky looked at Uncle Jack, recoiling slightly at the salesman's raw greed. He looked back down at the pit.

"You are using nature to erase human arrogance. And then you are capping it with indestructible Roman stone. It is a tomb, Chad."

"It's a foundation," I corrected. I reached into my small backpack and pulled out a folded Japanese newspaper. I opened it to a page showing a red and white plastic console—the Famicom. I handed it to Jack.

"Cool robot box!" I chirped, using my loudest, most persistent kid voice for Jack's benefit.

"I want the red one, Uncle Jack! Buy the red one!" Jack looked at the picture, his salesman instincts waking up.

"Atari is dead. The retailers are clearing the aisles. They have a massive vacuum."

"We buy the leases," Bob realized.

"We buy the distressed distribution rights for pennies on the dollar. When this Nintendo company tries to cross the ocean in '85, they won't have a supply chain. We'll be the only gate into the American living room." Bucky closed his eyes, leaning his weight onto his cane. I could see the conflict in him. He loved the biological elegance of the wax worms, but he hated the ruthless, monopolistic calculus that funded it. I gently tugged on Bucky's sleeve.

"We have to own the gates, Bucky," I whispered, dropping the kid act so only he could hear.

"Because the things I'm going to put through those gates will change the world."