Frankentown

1776

Six African slaves picked cotton under the blue sky of a prosperous mid-western cotton plantation. The sun baked their skins and their bleeding hands as they carefully but quickly picked little tufts of cotton and packed it in large vats swung over their tired shoulders.
It was hard labor, and being slaves, they couldn’t do much more than sing to make the time pass a little quicker.

Their ‘owner’ was a man who would own up to only one of this spawn, had a son, and an ‘only’ child in his eyes.

The only white one.

It was his duty to ’watch’ over them.

He would own up only to one of his spawn.
A son. His other children were all products of rape, and usually perished. If they happened to make it through an attempt at an amateur abortion or through one of ‘master’s’ beatings, they were sold into another state. So it went for some years.

The walking brainless hard-on was an exact copy of his father, spawned from the same gene pool, and much like him, had a hobby of harassing the female workers. He picked the one who’s hands were bleeding the most.
She was over twenty, but looked at least thirty five, and her hands were covered in red-stained bandages that once were white.

A light came flying through at great speed, just as the man with the snake-whip started yelling at her to ‘hurry up and stop slacking’. The whip dropped down by his feet. With the whip in the air, he instantly turned to ash and fell to the floor in a cloud of dust. The other slaves looked up, saw their savior and froze with fear and panic, but the light above passed right by them and headed to the house far away, where ‘master’ lived.
The fiery chariot in the sky stopped near the house and held there. A great explosion of light sent a beam into the house and the light flew high up into the stratosphere.
The slaves ran back to the house and discovered that ‘master’, too, had turned to ash.
 

Master no more. They were free, and the house, with all the guns and crops was theirs to keep, to prosper and expand.
The toned African man stood up high, straightening his back for the first time in a long time. With his newfound hope, he started singing.
 

“Oh let me fly-“

“Let me fly” sang the lady who’d almost been beaten, but was now saved.

Chapter One

Passing Passés

Frank Cabella was slowly waking up from a strange dream he had instantly forgotten, in a bed that was not his own. The bedding was pink, and although another man lived in the house, it was all kinds of feminine, down to the kelly green wallpaper. His handsome, evenly stubbled face had several wrinkles pressed into it from the last six hours of sleeping under his beautiful neighbor from two doors over.

 
Her name was Kathy. She had a body of dreams, an under-appreciated one. Her husband did not pay enough attention to her, so she found herself a ‘friend’. A friend that she secretly thought she fell in love with. But she’d managed to keep it so much a secret that even Frank was completely oblivious.

She was a beaut’. A real feast for the eyes.
Frank hoped to have ‘one’ like her one day, but his relationships were usually with unavailable women.
He sought to keep things shallow.

Within his head, clocks turned and swayed.

It must have been early in the morning.
Bugs were just a decibel louder behind the windows than they were during the day and birds foretold of the imminent arrival of sunrise.

The moment he looked at his wrist to see it is five, a car was pulling into the driveway. Kathy slept, completely nude and in the middle of dreaming.
The curves of her gorgeous sleeping body waved Frank goodbye as he backed out of the room, tiptoeing in green slacks, commando and his socks, carrying his shoes and backing out of the back entrance of the house.

He pushed on the fence in the back part of the lot and slipped over to the other side. Fortunately, the Fosters were out for the weekend.

When he heard a clap of Kathy’s front door, he took off quickly and crossed another fence to get back to his own lot. At the downstairs kitchen entrance he paused to take off his wet socks and put his shoes down and then headed in for a warm shower.

The answering machine had two messages blinking when he walked in, both from Allen, his University colleague and oldest friend. After the first beep, Allen sounded slightly agitated, asking where he and Steve are, before asking a passerby what day it is, then, the second message was mostly apologetic about the first.

 
“See ya tomorrow then. Heh.” Allen always had a knack for ‘graceful’ exits.
Frank brushed his teeth to mask Kathy from his breath and left the house to grab coffee and breakfast before heading out to the University.

Frank Cabella was a teacher of Biology, but more than that; he was the second most respected pre-tenure authority on biology on campus.

Right now, the Biology was undergoing review under the Government Grant Comission, and from what Steve told him, he was (finally) being considered for tenure. But as with every time he got something new, something old had to go, and by now, he was more than well acquainted with the process of loss.

When Frank had just finished high school, his father, Walter, had intended to take him to Peru over the summer break, so he’d see some of the world before starting college that fall.
 
After an argument, the point of which Frank could no longer remember, his dad, being the spiteful man that he had been, took his younger brother, Lyle, instead.
After two weeks without a phone call from either Walter or Lyle, Grace began looking for a flight to Peru.
 

The day Grace was supposed to fly to Peru, Frank went to watch a french film with his then-girlfriend downtown, while Grace had gone out to buy chewing gum. She never flew without it, otherwise her ears would stay popped forever.
And while the credits rolled and her son was making out with his date, Grace was shot down by a frightened mugger emptying the cash register.
During the funeral service, Lyle showed up dressed in black, looking very sad.
Without having said a word to Frank, he was gone.

Neither Lyle nor Walter had ever returned and the Cabella family had vanished, leaving only Frank,

with regret, and questioning his sanity.

This series of events that lead up to his family’s untimely demise eventually became known as the
‘Cabella family curse’ around the campus, and had aided the unknowing, borderline alcoholic Frank along with climbing the slippery social ladder.

Frank was left an academically successful derelict with only his father’s house on Euclid Avenue, a drinking problem, and little more.
 

Now, some twenty-odd years later, all he had left, and the only thing he could invest himself into, was research of squid and octopodes, and even that was about to be taken away from him.
His research into marine biology that had lasted well over a decade was suddenly scientifically discarded, and due to lack of results that would benefit military application, budgetarily minimized to near-termination.
The government grants were now distributed only to areas that could be repurposed for Uncle Sam’s best men, and rarely, interested philanthropists, but now, America’s fictionalized personification of your average yankee warmonger was at large somewhere far off-shore.
It was the end of an era, but life had brought him here, despite his continuous struggle to keep up with everything and stay afloat.
 

Frank, was a flower child, a product of a bygone era, with upbringing by a botanist and archeologist, sweethearts and hippies that had met on campus and kept teaching until their untimely demise.
Despite turning 42 last April, age had not left its mark on his spirit, or stopped him from crashing house parties; looking to hold his troubles under the water in glasses full of alcohol until they stop twitching. All the while, socializing and mixing with his students.

 
That way “he could sleep at night and got to know his students better” he would rationalize. He lived for his job, and alcohol did help him sleep easier, or at least duller, unless he’d overdo it, which wasn’t really an uncommon occurrence at all. He’d wake up many mornings with terrible hangovers and with his hair carrying the aroma of the night before and cigarettes, which he smoked only when drunk, which happened to be, yet again, pretty damn often as of recently.
 
Professionally, he was well regarded, which came at the price of living through a personal hell. One of the positive side effects, which were admittedly scarce, was that those students he’d spent time partying with, the motivated ones, not only did better in his classes, but also followed throughout to their master’s degrees as well. And did well.
The ones that cared, anyway.
The undergrads worthy of his attention then went on to be highly respected in their fields, not unlike their role model. He did have a reputation for being brilliant, but his drinking had been a secret, except for the closest of colleagues he drank with.
Students almost always gave him the best possible ratings, but generally, as the Dean of the University once said, “Nobody gives half of a fuck about ratings. Just don’t do any stupid shit. You’ll be fine.”.
The only thing that mattered was research, and with nothing else in his life, he could dedicate himself to doing just that.
For 16 years now, Frank had been a highly regarded pillar of the biology community and one of the most accessible tenured professors on campus. A very relaxed and easygoing persona: the true antithesis of his father’s fearsome teaching legacy.
It was about mid-year, the bi-annual government grant came in and slashed the grant for ‘squid tagging’, which basically meant catching Humboldt squid off the coast, tagging them with a very expensive tracking device and letting them go. There was no obvious military application to tagging squid, and his studies have not conclusively shown any combat-benefit implementation, so it was decided it’s a waste of taxpayer’s money.

 
Each little squid tag is basically a capsule about an inch thick and three inches long, costing thousands of dollars to build. If one gets lost, it’s often lost for good.

Two weeks earlier, the review was announced. Today, the final grant decisions were being carried out by the school’s board members on project grants. He was asked to give a lecture about the Humboldt Squid research he and his colleagues, Steve and Allen were conducting for the past two years.

The lights were dimmed in the atrium.
The presentation was about to begin. It was the last attempt Frank could take to restore at least a portion of the grant budget to squid research. He would be addressing nearly a hundred scholars, the grant committee, board members and loiterers who had recently stuffed their faces with free food at the buffet and were now falling asleep.

“In the recent years, the squid have been multiplying in record breaking numbers. Exponentially.
All just in the last year.”

This was a part of a well articulated report Frank argumentatively proposed to the board in a paper he published four months before the grants came.

‘Tax payers’, here meaning government, did not care for cephalopods, or whether, and why,
they multiplied exponentially. ‘There are bigger fish to fry.’ was actually one of the sentences on the letter that announced the cut.

“Of course, the purpose of squid tagging isn't just to 'tag squid'. Tagging started in the first place due to the growing numbers and resilience to increasingly harsh conditions for the species.

The squid now flourish in conditions they would usually die in.

Each tag capsule could tell us a little about how many specimen there are in proximity to each capsule, by which you could roughly start getting an idea the population, or at least in the multipliers. All this data is then sent to the cloud, from where it is downloaded and then visualized.
The squid show up as little glowing dots on a map, once all the statistics are collected from the cloud. By projecting positions and data over aerial photographs, a wealth of data provides an insight into our effects on the ocean and hopefully will help us explain not only why the squid do not perish, but more importantly how they are able to adapt. This could help us discover not a cure for global warming, but a way to prepare for the worst of it.

Squid travel in huge numbers, so one might assume they are similar to fish in existence.
But they are not.
Squid migrate in large complex networks.

 
They migrate. Like birds.
 

Another common misconception is that they are relatively small creatures, when in fact their colonies are, in numbers, the closest that to a human in to the grand scale human civilizations. Only compared to a human, it is about as big as a chimpanzee.
 

The bastards are big,”
Diluted laughter and nervous coughing gave away how many were actually listening to what was being said and how many were asleep. Most were asleep.

“and they get up to around a hundred pounds. That’s as big as full grown female chimpanzee, but it’s slimy, equipped with ten long arms with lethal claws on each end, and definitely will not pose for whimsical pictures on postcards. The Humboldt squid, called ‘Diablo Rojo’ in some circles, looks like a big red dart with tentacles. Although their recorded size and weight has been around a hundred pounds on average, enormous specimen have been recorded on video last year by my team. They estimated it to be at least 240lbs. That is almost two male chimpanzees, or one big man.”
No audible gasps. Nobody was impressed.