You're an A+ Specimen, Ben B.

This one was supposed to be a "ninth" story within a story that would appear at the end of the Five Survival Tips story in the earliest version of Eight Hurricane Maria Stories from Puerto Rico. While the tale had a loose connection to Hurricane Maria, it didn't fit the with non-fiction foundation of the other stories, so out it went! This is its home for now:

***

Dear Dr. Frag.

Ill get my tag

Ill be the Ginxi man

That is my awsome plan

Even be the hero when Im beter

So heres my lucky leaf with the leter

Yes I know it rimes Frag tag man plan leter beter. Thanks!

-Ben B.

Dr. Maria Frag, whose name did not rhyme with “tag” and was instead pronounced like the “frag” in “fragile,” read the note for perhaps the twentieth time. One of Don Sluglord's men had delivered the message earlier that morning to mess with her.

A plastic four-leaf clover, Ben B.'s lucky leaf, had come with the note. Foolish. Ben B. would need all the luck he could get. Maria dropped the pitiful clover back onto the workstation woven out of the Ginxi's winding roots. To avoid staring at the Ginxi seed for too long, she watched the world spread out below the window cave.

Sheet metal shacks outshone the setting sun, and boar tunnels crisscrossed through sawgrass that had overtaken crumbling fortifications. A muddy river flowed toward the coast, which was lined with ramshackle resorts reserved for adventure cruise passengers from the Celestial City. Except for the orange slime yard lining the mouth of the river, the entire island glowed green and silver, a conduit for the Ginxi tree's matchless energy. Even at this altitude, the island's permanent inhabitants looked stooped as they marched to and fro, bent under the weight of a power that could light up an entire world.

The base of that power stood motionless behind Maria.

The trunk of the Ginxi tree formed the centerpiece of her cavernous lab. Its trunk was so wide that looking at it gave Maria vertigo; she had to constantly remind herself that she was upright and not about to do a painful faceplant on a vast wooden floor. A generation ago, the Ginxi tree had tunneled through the stone, growing higher and higher to pierce the island's tallest peak and to claim its throne. But this particular tree's reign was nearing its end. Maria was here to see to its successor.

Her eyes shifted inadvertently to the harvested Ginxi seed, nestled securely in its workstation nook. Despite all the greatness locked within, the spiny seed looked like an alien's discarded testicle.

The Ginxi seed rattled. No, the clanks were echoing along the window cave's subterranean corridor. A giant man rounded the Ginxi trunk's corner. His size was made all the more apparent by the way he ducked and bowed his shaggy head, and by the tiny security wasp that flanked him on either side.

Each specimen was allowed one personal item, and Ben B. had chosen to wear an overcoat that was more buttons and trinkets than actual fabric. Rabbits' feet and broken compasses vied for space with forgotten medals from forgotten wars.

“Where's Dr. Frag?” Ben B. asked.

“That's me.”

“How can YOU be the doctor?” Ben B. looked her over. As first female director of the Ginxi station, Maria was used to this line of questioning. Men on the island, Don Sluglord chief among them, wondered whether a woman was up to the job. Even the Ginxi seed had only ever taken to male specimens.

“Why don't you have the white coat?” Ben B. continued.

“Oh, I left it at home?”

“With your coffee and foam? Maybe your comb made of chrome?”

“No, in the garden next to my gnome.” She shouldn't have encouraged him, but Ben B. was already off, soaring from poem to superdome before Frag was able to retrain his focus. She did so with an intricate hand wave, which grounded the security wasp that had been hovering on his right.

“Specimen A, fix that thing. Another test before you can become the – the Ginxi man.”

“Can I be special man A+?”

“Um, sure. Fix it specimen A+.”

Blessed silence followed as the mountain of a man crouched over the oblong wasp. The Ginxi, humanity's ultimate power source, took to the curious – probably because the first person to have tried swallowing its wicked seed must've had curiosity in spades.

During the first round of selection, Ben B. had asked so many questions that Don Sluglord had wanted to throw him to the ruins to fight the Tartarus pigs. Maria had intervened (ever so carefully... the Don had earned his moniker after quelling the island's last rebellion. He had done this by rounding up the ringleaders, cutting off their arms and legs, then forcing them to squirm across the slime yard. Hence, the name Sluglord).

For her part, Maria saw potential in Ben B. She respected the power of questions. After all, the question of who would be next in line to bear the Ginxi seed had once spawned religious wars, unsustainable alliances, and global collapses before the selection process had finally, firmly, been put into place. Now, the most important question was who would select the right specimen. That person, so Maria hoped, was her.

“Do you want it to shoot lasers or dance?” Ben B. asked while using the odd bit of metal from his strange overcoat to pry off the unfortunate wasp's smaller parts.

“Make it do both.” She glided behind Ben B., who was still hunched over his project.

The tip of his earlobe sported four fine clefts. The outer two clefts were longer and more rounded while the middle clefts formed an inverted V. Taken together, they looked like a tiny upside-down heart had been stamped into his ear.

Maria had noticed this slight deformity and skimmed through holo-records of the previous Ginxi-bearers while zooming in on their earlobes. Each one had that quadruple cleft ear. From there, she'd simply had to scrounge up all available images and genetic sequences of the millions upon millions of failed specimens. No heart-shaped earlobe. Maria had traced this feature to a piece of junk DNA shared by all Ginxi-bearers but absent from every failed specimen.

Maria figured that now, while Ben B. was otherwise occupied, would also be a good time to insert the specimen's compliance tag. She rubbed her index finger against a blue mosaic set into the cavern floor. A single turquoise sliver adhered to her fingertip. The sliver glowed maroon when she tapped her pinkie against her thumb in a sequence to test the reception.

Maria readied herself to stick this sliver behind Ben B.'s ear. Once there, the compliance tag would burrow under his skin when a corkscrew motion from her hand signaled it to do so. Beyond allowing her to track his location and vital signs at all times, the sliver could also be detonated to sever both carotid arteries if Ben B. proved to be, well, non-compliant.

She hesitated. She'd already tested out the compliance tag's artery-slicing feature on several Tartarus pigs, but Ben B. would be her first human implantation.

“Complete!” Ben B. rocketed up from the ground, and Maria had to jump back to save her nose from the back of his skull. The compliance tag lost contact with her finger, clinked against the floor, then slithered across the stone to rejoin the floor mosaic.

Ben B.'s updated wasp looked like a crippled sea urchin. Out of curiosity, Maria reactivated it with another hand wave. The wasp didn't shoot lasers, but, to be fair, it did kind of dance before emitting a burnt bacon odor that trailed out of the window cave to float across the expansive vista.

“Did I pass?”

“Sure, A+. You're almost ready, but you have to take off your coat.” Maria could always insert the compliance tag later, but she didn't want any of that mess on his jacket to get in the way during the procedure to attach the Ginxi seed to his stomach wall.

Instead of removing his coat, Ben B. began unpinning its decorations one-by-one. Maria didn't rush her first specimen. Instead, she took the time to explore the dark power that lurked within her own questions.

What if her first attempt was successful? She stared out the window cave, looking past the radiant leaves that dotted the island and toward the shining metropolis that beckoned to her beyond the water. Every Ginxi station director was assured a place of honor in the Celestial City once the job was complete, once the next generation of the Ginxi Tree was in place. Most directors required approximately 50,000 specimens before they got it right. The all-time record, a mere 16 certified failed specimens before getting the Ginxi to grow, belonged to a director named Ricky Rose-cello from 23 generations back (although rumor had it that Rose-cello had underestimated the body count to garner favor with the Celestial City's Emperor at the time). So if the Ginxi seed took to Ben B., her first specimen, Maria would shatter all real and imaginary records. She'd be able to get away from the island and Don Sluglord's slimy overtures a lot sooner. She would be hailed as a hero – no, as a goddess.

“Where's the lucky leaf?” Ben asked. When Maria realized he was asking about the plastic four-leaf clover, she pointed absentmindedly at the workstation. All of the tech was coded to her touch alone, so there was no harm in letting him loose in the lab while he could still walk.

What if Ben B. was destined to be her first failed specimen? Simple. His body would be discarded on the trash heap of history. Maria knew that there was a running bet on the island, organized by the Don and his toadies, on how many lives it would take to power the next generation. No one expected her to get it right on the first try, so Maria's reputation would remain intact. She'd just have to revise or altogether abandon the earlobe hypothesis.

“Dr. Frag, if you please. I have to tell you about these. My treasures cover all of the fees.” Ben B. had laid out all of his overcoat ornaments on the workstation. Maria drifted closer to him, and Ben B. used his awkward rhymes to stumble through an explanation for each and every item. He wanted her to know their value.

Maria guessed that someone had played a joke on Ben B., telling him that he had to pay her for the Ginxi seed. Minus the Don and his security force, all of the island's permanent inhabitants were taught that being chosen for the Ginxi program was their finest privilege. Each generation watched thousands of its brethren leave for good and imagined those lost friends had crossed over to the magical empire across the sea. That lie was necessary to minimize the possibility of rebellion, but convincing Ben B. to part with all of his prized possessions that were worthless to anyone but him was cruel – it was probably Don Sluglord's idea of fun.

Independent of Maria's success or failure, Ben B. would die, stripped of all that made him special. Most rejected the Ginxi within days, and it was left to the director to extract the prized seed from the expired specimen's remains. If the seed accepted Ben B., then he'd have a few months before it blossomed.

The next Ginxi tree would spread through living tissue and dead circuitry alike to keep the world running. When that tree's power waned, it would produce another seed. The next director would eventually find the next right specimen. So the cycle would continue.

Maria stroked Ben B. behind his ear, along the spot where she'd failed to insert his compliance tag. He was too focused on explaining his trophies to stop talking, but he leaned into her touch like a puppy.

Wasn't there another option? No, more options led to more problems, like when the second-to-last director tried genetically engineering the hyper-intelligent Tartarus pigs to bear the Ginxi. The Ginxi simply need a human life to complete its cycle, and they, for better or worse, needed it.

“I must say it's a steal. So do we have a deal?” Ben B. asked, his fingers imparting a last loving touch to the junk cluttered across her workstation.

“That depends. You have one last test. Give me a word the rhymes with purple.” She left him to figure that one out and walked around the gargantuan Ginxi trunk. About 10,000 compliance tags could do it. She'd need only 2 for the seed. The blue floor mosaic held more than enough slivers.

“Well, I gave you plenty of time. Did you think of one?” She asked once she got back to Ben B.

“Burp-bill.”

“That isn't a real word. Plus, I said just one word.”

“Slurp-ville. Chirp-hill!”

“No. Wrong and wrong. None of those rhyme with purple. Clean your crap off my desk.” She pointed at the workstation.

For once, Ben B. was tongue-tied. He blinked back tears while trying to fasten each item back onto his overcoat.

Having implanted 10,000 + 2 compliance tags, Maria couldn't feel her fingers. Yet she managed to yank the fabric out of his hands, tie it into a rough bag, and scrape the remaining clutter into it. She fumbled for the plastic four-leaf clover then held it level with Ben B.'s eyes.

“I'm keeping this because you wasted my time. Now, get the hell out of here.” She watched him trot around the trunk and out of the window cave while the remaining security wasp followed behind. She closed her eyes and listened to Ben B.'s distant rattle and occasional “-urple” retreat down the corridor. She held onto that lousy clover.

Maria knew Don Sluglord would come to investigate if she waited too long. Once he found out what she'd done, he'd feed her to the pigs. But she couldn't move her hands. They felt so heavy with the fate of the world resting in their fingertips.

How long would night blanket the world? What strange ideas would rise out of its depths? And what would the islanders do with their newfound independence?

Maria's fingers moved of their own accord.

They wiggled through a whirlwind dance to start the compliance tags' self-destruct sequence.

If a single tag could destroy a man's life, then 10,000 strategically-placed slivers should be enough to saw through the Ginxi trunk's sapwood. And 2 should be enough to send its single seed back to Hell.

The seed was the first to go. It split like a rotten melon, its flesh painting the workstation black. The Ginxi tree sighed but held steady, until a hair-thin line of molten blue spread across its trunk. The lines of luminescence that blanketed the island unraveled. Across the water, the shimmering spires of the Celestial City winked out of existence.

As for Maria, she slipped away into the blinding darkness.