Ep 5 - The Pull of the Dough

I hope you are having a wonderful week.

“I'm excited to share our fifth story of Season 1.”

If you believe in supporting great stories and the authors who write them, subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. You can also support us on Patreon and get early access to all episodes and more. Our story today is the pull of the dough by Nicholas Packwood. Nicholas Packwood has taught narrative design in game design at George Brown Polytechnic

Toronto since 2009 and has been program coordinator for screenwriting and narrative design since 2015. Currently on hiatus, he appears to be taking refuge in Quaker Body Horror. And now let's live this story together. Dear Harlan, it is what we still call July here, where at least the calendar insists

on it, 700 years and 2/3 of the way to wherever it is we were meant to arrive.

“I am docked at Pod 37 in the shuttle, engines idled, the hull making the small metallic”

complaints it always makes when it settles against the docking ring.

The air that came in when the lock cycled had a smell I did not expect. Sweet at first, then sharp, the way bread dough smells when it has been left too long in a warm place and begun to turn. Not unpleasant, only insistent. It stayed in the back of my throat while I ran the first diagnostics and opened the view

port shutter to look at the pod itself. The dome is smaller than the schematics suggest. Icecoats the lower third of the support struts where the heating coils failed 180 years ago and were never properly replaced.

The failure was supposed to have been fatal, instead the colonists did what people always

do when the systems they trusted begin to fail. They improvised. They rerouted coolant through vats seated with something that had come with them from earth soil samples, a strain of yeast that liked the cold. The yeast lived, it thickened, it began to glow.

Now the pipes were a faint luminous skin that pulses in time with the temperature cycle and the air carries the faint alcohol breath of its metabolism. The pod has not frozen, that is the first thing one notices. The second is that the people inside no longer seem to require the old silences. Under the dome lights the yeast films show subtle gradations.

In the lower corridors the glow leans toward pale amber, almost honey colored, where the condensate collects and drips slowly back into collection trays. After up, near the apex where the heat pools, the color shifts to a soft, blueish white, the light scattering through layers of cells like frost seen through breath on glass. The scent changes with elevation too.

Down near the vats it is heavier, yeasty and warm, carrying faint notes of over-right pair and cut grass after rain. Up in the common spaces, it thins to something cleaner. Almost metallic, the alcohol edge softened by the constant slow exhalation of the colony itself. I have stood at the open hatch and tasted it on my tongue, a thin film that lingers like

the aftertaste of weak beer left standing overnight. The pipes sigh softly as pressure equalizes, a low continuous note punctuated now and then by the brighter sound of children's voices drifting through the corridors, carrying a newborn, unguarded laughter that was not in the older logs. I have the footage, the oversight board sent it with the quarantine order I helped draft after

pod 19 and pod 12 litdark.

“You remember the language, immediate abort on any sign of emotional contagion?”

We wrote it in the belief that what had happened in those other pods could be contained by protocol.

We were wrong in the ways one is always wrong when one mistakes biology for metaphor.

Here, the biology is literal. The yeast produces metabolites that cross the blood-brain barrier, they lower inhibition, they heighten empathy, they make confession not only possible, but necessary. The colonists drink a thin beer brood from the same strain, they drink it in the town hall

They stand up in front of one another and they say what they have spent the rest of the year not saying.

“Then, the temperature stabilizes, the heat exchangers clear, the dome holds.”

The boards saw the footage and called it frenzy. I watched it alone on the shuttle while the air recyclers hummed in the yeast sent deepened.

Commander Alden Hart spoke first.

He is a tall man with the kind of face that looks as if it has been set permanently to reasonable. He said he had begun to fear his wife loved the engineer more than she loved him. He said it plainly, without drama, the way one might report a clogged filter. Sierra Veil stood beside him in the plain grey cover all they all were.

She said yes. She did. She said she had loved kale frost since the day he repaired the first still that the love had arrived uninvited and stayed. Kale frost, thinner, darker, hands still stained with lubricant, said he had tried not to

want her.

“He said the wanting had become a weight that blocked the lines the same way resentment once”

blocked the heat. They spoke for 43 minutes. No one interrupted. The room was quiet except for the soft rasp of breathing the collective rhythm, slowing as each speaker finished.

Shoulders, eased, eyes remain steady, not averted. When they finished, the temperature inside the dome had risen three degrees. The pipes stopped their groaning, the yeast films brightened. In the days that followed, I watched small re-adjustments. A shared glance across the common table that held longer than protocol once allowed.

A hand resting briefly on another's forearm during a repair, the touch, neither heard, nor withdrawn. Collaborative labor on the secondary exchanger tools passed without the old tension. The dome temperature held steady at 21 degrees. I ran the numbers.

“The stress hormones that once froze the exchangers in place had dropped below detectable”

levels. The confession were not chaos. They were maintenance. The old Puritan arrangements the pod had carried from earth, arranged parings, public restraint, private frost had worked until they did not.

The yeast simply finished what the cold had begun. It made silence impossible. In its place it offered an equilibrium so precise, it felt almost tender. We would recognize the pattern, Harlan, we have seen it before in other forms. People build structures they believe will last.

Then the weather changes, or the soil changes, or the air changes, and the structures reveal themselves as arrangements, no more permanent than the light on a wall. The interesting part is what happens next. Some pods fought the change. The 19 turned its kelp vats into shrines and walked into them singing.

Pod 12 fused its citizens to the circuitry until no one could tell where the ship ended and the people began. We called those failures. We wrote protocols to prevent recurrence.

We never asked whether the failure was in the pod, or an hour refusal to let the biology

speak. I sampled the air. I told myself it was for the monograph, a baseline reading. The metabolites are subtle. They arrive as a mild warmth behind the sternum.

Then as an odd clarity in the thoughts, the way objects look after a storm when the dust has settled. One begins to notice small things. The way the light from the dome lamps catches on the frost and turns it briefly gold. The way the yeast films shift color when someone in the pod laughs.

The way I have been carrying a certain weight for 23 years now and pretending the weight was professional detachment. You were my advisor. I was 26, certain that rigor could substitute for feeling. I watched you in the seminar room with the blinds half drawn against the California glare

and I told myself the quickening I felt was intellectual respect. I told myself it was inconvenient, unprofessional, irrelevant. You were older, you were kind and the way that made kindness feel like a rebuke.

You were also, I learned later, living with a man whose name I never quite caught because

I made it my business not to catch it. I buried the feeling, under grant applications, and field reports, and long nights in the archive

I still remember the exact phrase you used once about adaptive equilibrium.

“How you said it was never mercy, but only time, plus pressure, plus viable mutation.”

The coffee aroma in that room always mingled with the faint dust of old paper and the dry

heat coming off the window frames. Sunlight sliced across your desk and sharp parallelograms and caught the edge of your glasses. There was a hallway moment too. Late, after a long session when your hand brushed mine, passing a data slate and the contact lasted one beat longer than necessary.

I catalogued it as accident, the metabolites sharpen those recollections now. They arrive unbidden, clear as slides under polarized light. The yeast here makes burial difficult, it loosens the fastenings, it insists on air.

“I watched the triad and pod 37 move through the days after the frenzy.”

They did not dissolve, they did not fall on one another in remorse or triumph.

They simply adjusted, the way the heat system adjusts. Small recalibrations, shared labor, the occasional hand brushed against a shoulder in passing. The dome temperature held steady at 21 degrees. The yeast, glowed, the children born since the adaptation began, show higher baseline empathy scores than any coher on the ship.

The protocol I helped write would have had us jettison the entire pod. The protocol is wrong. I am sending the full monograph with the sletter, the data tables are clean, the biological

“mechanism is elegant, the yeast is not a contaminant, it is the correction.”

I have left the shuttle hatch open, the air from pod 37 moves through the recyclers now without filtration. The warmth in my chest has settled into something's steadier. I find I want to tell you these things, not because the metabolites can palmy, but because the metabolites have removed the reasons I once had for not telling you. I loved you, in the way one loves a place one knows one cannot stay.

I loved the way your mind worked and the way you listened and the particular kindness you extended to students who were clearly drowning. I loved it and I put it away like a specimen in a jar and labeled the jar professional distance. The jar has cracked, the specimen is still alive. The oversight board will want quarantine, tell them the data contradict the protocol, tell

them the pod is not in frenzy, it is in balance tell them Dr. Rowan Calder who once believed protocols could outthink biology has changed her mind. The change feels like rising like

dough that has been allowed to become what it was always going to become.

The warmth steady is now in my chest, the faint pod sounds drift through the open hatch, soft pipe size and children's voices, my heartbeat settling into a slower, less guarded rhythm. The yeast has found its equilibrium, perhaps I am learning to find mine. Perhaps we all do in the end. The ship keeps moving, the yeast keeps working, the light on the frost shifts from gold to silver and back again and for the first time in years,

the arrangement feels almost sufficient. I will wait for your reply before I request stocking clearance, Rowan. Nicholas Pacquad tells us that the pull of the dough is a tribute to the earth ship arc, a generation ship from the short-lived 1973 Canadian sci-fi series The Earth Lost. In that show, the ship has been traveling through space for such a long time, its inhabitants

have completely forgotten where they are and what mission their ship was on. As in the show that inspired it, the ships and inhabitants are sealed off in separate parts of the ship. Over time, this allows different unique societies to develop. Notably, some of the ways these societies develop, like merging human biology with the larger biology of their environment, seem to go against the rules and protocols that the narrator

and the implied governing body of the ship require. This tension between protocol and adaptation is the central conflict that drives this story and I love how subtly Nicholas develops it. The story is told in Epistolary Form, a style that was popular in the latter half

and many stories were written in the Epistolary Form to give their story an air of

“plausibility, as though the author just happened to find the letters that the story contains”

and that regardless of whether the events really happened, that the narrator who wrote those letters actually believed in them. In the 18th century, the Epistolary Form also cracked open the inner worlds of story characters. Narrators could speak directly about their thoughts and their feelings, opening a rich universe of literary discovery that paved the way for free indirect discourse in the 19th century and autofiction and more experimental

fiction in the 20th century. So while the Epistolary Form isn't as popular as it used

“to be, I think this form still provides a unique and compelling story frame as we see in this”

piece, it conjures a narrator who speaks in the first person and it implies an intended

reader with whom they are in dialogue, a reader who is in this case outside of the direct action. As the story develops, it becomes clear that there are two narratives. Rowan's journey to pod 37 and Rowan's centuries-long conflicted relationship with Harlan, the recipient of the report. As in all great stories, the two narratives are intimately woven together. By the end, we see that Rowan's transformation in pod 37 leaves Harlan with a unique question.

Should they trust Rowan's report and believe the transformation is beneficial or do they follow protocol and quarantine and possibly destroy pod 37 and with it Rowan? I read this story and I wonder, did Harlan receive the message? If they did, what did they do? What would I do? So, what did you think of this story? Email me at [email protected]. You can also find the email address in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. If you haven't

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I invite you to join me for our next incredible story coming out next Tuesday. Thank you

for listening to biome with me, your host and narrator, Alex Zubin. Until next time, farewell wherever the day's take you.