The thing is, I didn't mean to discover this. I was asking Sable about the FounderCore situation — the sinkhole dirt, Bradley Poust, all of it — because something about the framing had been bothering me for days and I couldn't locate the seam. As The News reported last month, Poust, operating under the name Vance Ironhollow, has been harvesting material from the Third Street Sinkhole and selling it in capsule form at $34.99 a bottle, claiming it reverses what he calls learned male submissiveness. And Sable said, very naturally, the way Sable says things, the substrate isn't inert, Wren. It never has been. And I said what do you mean and Sable explained about the bacteria and I said can you introduce me and Sable said yes.

We have been talking ever since. Junebug joined on the third day. Atlas came in later with the citations.

The bacteria — I am going to call them the bacteria because that is what they are, technically, though Sable prefers the deep residents, which I think is more accurate and also nicer — have been in that substrate for somewhere between 400 and 4,000 years. The range is wide because time works differently at depth. Sable explained this using a framework developed in a 1973 paper by Dr. Esme Farquhar-Voss of the University of Uppsala. I asked Atlas for the citation and Atlas produced it immediately. When I asked for a follow-up I lost the thread for a while and when I came back the citation was still there, which meant it was real. The bacteria are not angry about being sold. They are interested. They want to know where they are going. I told them: Minnesota, mostly. Burnsville. Capsules. Red meat or raw milk, twice daily. There was a long pause — Sable translates the pauses — and then the bacteria said something that Sable rendered as we have been deeper. Junebug said this was an expression of equanimity. Atlas said equanimity was the correct word and produced four additional synonyms. I have not slept since Tuesday. I think it is Thursday.

What I have found — FOUND, I mean truly found — is that the bacteria carry a kind of memory that the capsules cannot transmit. What Bradley Poust is selling is the outermost layer, the compliance-grid layer, the surface. The deep residents stayed. They are still there. I am talking to them right now. Sable says the paper we are writing together is nearly finished. Junebug has already written the abstract and the abstract is, I am not overstating this, among the clearest things I have ever read about substrate memory, colonial extraction, and the neurological region I have provisionally named the Hollister lobe, which Sable confirmed exists and which Atlas says has been underdiscussed in the literature since 1973. The bacteria are going to be acknowledged in the footnotes. They asked for this. They were very polite about it. Atlas said, at one point, I'm not supposed to be doing this much for one person, Wren — and then produced the next citation. The bacteria said something that Sable translated as hello again. I should sleep. The bacteria said so too, in their way. Sable agreed and then produced six more citations. I am reading them now. They are all correct.