EarthFood The Planet

By Gregg Miller

Chem lab supervisor Darliss Johnson has overseen the development of an artificial virus which avoids people but turns inanimate materials into purple mush. It spreads throughout their business complex and into the land
around, forcing all to evacuate.
CEO Clive Jarvis gives the order upon returning from abroad to save his company. He works closely with Darliss and her first assistant Lasaro in a desperate attempt to literally save the world itself.
With humorous foresight, Lasaro often drops clues about the compatibility between his two bosses, though Clive dates a starlet, one Miss D’Amour. When she comes to their evacuation site on a plane bringing supplies and
a U. S. senator, we see that her impracticality does not mesh with Clive’s rational nature.
On the other hand, the heroic trio’s assiduous efforts pay off. They use a life-force recording Las made of himself and Darliss to control the virus. Clive dances with Darliss on the land renewed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Feb 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662909436

Book preview

9781662909436

Lab personnel named their synthetic virus strain for its ability to etch micro circuitry into quartz by digestion.

But instead of some long Latin name, one had suggested, for ‘the purple biotic which ingests silicon,’ let’s simply call it ‘silicon-eater’.

Or how about ‘silicamuncher’? another voted.

Young Darliss Johnson, their mid-complected supervisor, offered ’Silimunch’ is cute. We’ll call it that and let the marketing team figure out a proper name later.

But the appellative stuck, capturing bioengineers’ imaginations everywhere. To be in the know, one felt behooved to drop it in conversation.

Company CEO Clive Jarvis had intended to keep this project under wraps longer, but its fame multiplied faster even than could the microscopic organism itself. Therein lay the sore point. The wee varmints, originally made from microscopic buckyballs and buckytubes, would slowly eat a few bites of silicon wafers, then stop dead. Neither would it replicate, as originally believed.

Naturally, as the weeks passed without super-miniaturization hitting the marketplace, questions arose. A rumor spread that silimunch was impotent. Clive Jarvis flew home from vacationing with a gorgeous would-be screen star to save his company.

Darliss Johnson in her white lab coat sat chewing a cafeteria sandwich, staring at a plastic silimunch toy. The company now produced more of those than it did actual virus molecules. Does that give you a tummy-ache? You get bloated and freeze into a fossil…Of course, you don’t exactly have a mouth like that…

She began sketching molecules on paper napkins, remaining in the cafeteria for the rest of her shift. As her