ONE CELL, ONE LIVESTOCK, 1500 DINNERS

It was my act of technological penance to contract research at the University of Victoria and, given the ascetic pecuniary propensities of my employer, also reside and dine there. Undergraduates at any People's Republic of Canada university are therapeutic exercises in ruthless extortive wallet devourment. Student loans are discounted. The first repayment (discount fee forked over up front - a whopper!) comes out of student pockets. They pay fees for class registration priority, fees for "free" Canukistani health care, and spend a fifth year to their undergrad degree in work-study - slave wages less tuition and fees though they see the campus in their dreams. A UVic Commons' meal became a TV special effects' prop. A 100% Canadian content science fiction show used it as alien excrement.

The ham steak was especially appalling. It was edematous with saline, boiled in plastic wrap, and promenaded as a failing grade in Materials Science 201. The smell was well-placed in an organic chemistry fume hood, the blower being set to "Military Emergency High." UVic ham steak is where swine byproducts unfit for Spam or landfill uneasily rest.

I took some ham steak from the Commons cafeteria to the science complex, down the hi-tech halls, past cancer and flammability placards, through the double airlock, past biohazard and radiation warnings, to the guys with microscopes. They donned rubber gloves, isolated an aliquot, fixed it in glutaraldehyde, cured it in epoxy, sliced the glassy bead with a vibrating diamond blade microtome, mounted the wisp on a copper grid, did a heavy metal stain, and placed it within an electron microscope. We proceeded to look around at various magnifications, dodging the odd insect splinter and rat hair. UVic hamlette was a hoot! Imagine an animal with no cellular structure whatsoever.

A single cell swine is quite the hi-tech concept. Did it die of natural causes, disease, malnutrition, electrocution, blunt instrument trauma, knife work, or erotic asphyxiation during a late morning tryst with the manufacturer? They don't call it "animal husbandry" as a totemic shibboleth endemic to the vocation for nothing.

Dolly, the first sheep (a real cutie! of course) cloned from an adult cell, could not hide. I surmised unicellular hogs had left decipherable scholarly spoor of uncompartmentalized protoplasm across acres of refereed paper. I was not to be disappointed.

Large complex unicellular organisms exist - dimensioned in feet - wending their streaming multinucleate cyotoplasmic way through the world, Scientific American 271(6) 100 (1994). I'm not talking slime molds. Single cell Caulerpa prolifera and Caulerpa toxifolia infest warm waters from Italy to Florida, inexorably extending 4.6 mm/day in all their parts. 73 distinct species are growing, fragmenting, rapidly sealing their wounds, and setting up new shop as you read this. Beyond vegetative propagation Caulerpa leads an enthusiastic and risque, though obscure, sex life. University Administration was written all over the concept.

One question remained: Where was the UVic monocoque hamlette cloistered? I listed all possibilities within a 50-mile radius, spurning Women's Studies. Where would I securely keep something contravening the laws of God and man, loathsomely disgusting, possessed of unnatural appetites, and scheduled for routine fractional vivisection? I looked about the dormitory, and wondered why every fourth door on the first floor was a mechanical room, warm pulsations perceptible through locked steel doors. My room's door was hollow wood.

Frontal assaults recall the Charge of the Light Brigade and an annoyance in Gallipoli. I retired to my room, one wall of which bordered the local version of Area 51, and unscrewed a propitious electrical socket. The faceplate popped into my hands backed by the usual wires and their connected trappings. They emerged as honor guard for a warm, pink, lightly haired bulge which proceeded to slowly ooze through the rectangular portal with no indication of surcease.

Like a torn Caulerpa fragment coming to rest in a happy place, the fleshy pseudopod began differentiating in response to its new environment. My mouth went dry and my forehead trickled sweat as my sphincters screamed. Had there not been a package of nylon ties on the adjacent desk... I secured the paired ligatures, cut the thin pink neck between them, and secured the socket plate back into the wall. This left one problem remaining, overfilling my hands, responding to its environment, and most likely growing hungry. Chemists are hazardous waste situational ethicists.

UVic, amidst its many rarefied academic endowments, boasted the largest compost heap in British Columbia. About as large as the campus library and loaded with better stuff than the latter's "Inevitability of Scientific Socialism" mezzanine, it seeped and steamed in a forest clearing at the end of a serpentine jogging trail. I went there and returned a pink pound lighter. Don't go there. Official postings now warn that a never-seen mountain lion has come down from the mountains and is exercising its appetite on undergrads and untenured faculty.

If socialist swine are disappearing, then turnabout is fair play.

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