Incorporated with DeepSeek
The Amazon sprawled beneath him like a green ocean frozen mid-swell, and for the thousandth Sunday in a row, Jake was watching the game from the most remote living room on Earth.
The satellite feed flickered once—someone in Leticia probably kicked a generator—before the 49ers' offense solidified on the screen. His wife Marta set down a bottle of Club Colombia and two glasses on the weathered table between their chairs. She didn't say anything. She never did on game days. She just sat, and watched him watch, and sometimes read, and that was enough.
It was enough. That was the problem.
His phone buzzed. A picture from his daughter—the grandkids at a pumpkin patch in Oregon. He smiled, sent a heart, and set the phone down.
The 49ers ran for six yards. First down.
Behind him, through the open back wall of the house—because "wall" was too strong a word for the screens that kept the bugs out—the Bearhawk Companion sat on the short grass strip he'd carved himself ten years ago. Its ramp door hung open, waiting for the ATV that was currently parked under the house, connected to nothing, doing nothing.
He'd flown it yesterday. Circled for an hour. Landed. That was the whole mission.
The 49ers kicked a field goal.
"You're sighing again," Marta said, not looking up from her book.
"I'm not sighing."
"You're sighing with your shoulders."
Jake rolled his shoulders deliberately, which proved her point. She turned a page.
Down in the valley, where the Amazon proper began its slow crawl toward Leticia, a thin column of smoke rose from one of the processing huts. AI-supported bioreactors, running on algorithms written in labs ten thousand miles away, turning local plants into compounds that would end up in pharmacies in Berlin and Tokyo and São Paulo. Clean. Quiet. Sustainable.
The world had gotten clean and quiet while he wasn't looking.
Thirty years ago, he'd first come to this region with a different purpose entirely. Night insertions, black helicopters, faces he couldn't remember if he tried. The war on drugs had been hot then, and the Amazon had been a battleground. Now the cartels were gone—not defeated, exactly, just obsolete. Synthetic drugs cooked in European labs for pennies a dose had undercut the whole business model. The profit had drained out of the jungle like water through sand.
What remained was the jungle itself, and the people who'd always lived here, and a new generation of scientists and farmers who'd figured out that you could make more money growing things *with* the forest than burning it down.
And one bored old ghost who didn't know how to stop haunting a war that had already ended.
---
The ethanol refinery was three klicks upriver, a low-slung operation that processed sugarcane from a cooperative of small farms. Jake had helped negotiate the land rights five years ago, using skills that felt absurdly overqualified for the task. But the refinery meant fuel for the planes, and fuel meant he could keep flying, and flying meant—
Meant what, exactly?
He banked the Companion over the refinery, watching the morning shift trickle in on motorbikes. His ATV was strapped down in the cargo bay, ready to deploy if he saw anything interesting. He never did.
South of the refinery, the new airstrip was coming along nicely. The third one he'd helped coordinate, working with a consortium of villages that wanted better access to markets. The logic was simple: if farmers could fly their goods out, they didn't need roads. No roads meant no loggers. No loggers meant the forest stayed standing. The carbon credits alone would pay for the strip in five years.
It was good work. Important work. The kind of work his younger self would have called "nation building" with a sneer, before realizing that building things was harder and more valuable than breaking them.
But it wasn't *his* work. Not really. He just showed up, made calls, leaned on contacts who still owed him favors, and watched other people build things.
The Companion hummed along at 140 knots, ethanol burning clean in the 315 horses under the cowl. Marta had picked the engine option—"If we're going to be environmental hypocrites, let's at least be interesting hypocrites"—and the conversion had cost more than the plane itself. But the math worked: fuel from the river, power from the sun, carbon neutral enough for the scientists to stop giving him side-eye at village meetings.
Below, the canopy broke for a moment, revealing the braided channels of a tributary. In the old days, those channels had been smuggling routes. Now they were tourism corridors, with the occasional eco-lodge tucked into the trees.
He circled once, low enough to see a family of capybaras scatter from a sandbar, then climbed back to altitude and turned for home.
---
The compound was quiet when he landed. Marta had left a note on the table: *Gone to Leticia for supplies. Don't burn the house down.*
He didn't burn the house down. He sat in his chair, watched the shadows lengthen across the strip, and tried to remember when he'd stopped feeling like he was supposed to be somewhere else.
His phone buzzed. Not a text—a call. The number was unfamiliar, but the country code was local.
"Jake." Not a question. A woman's voice, mid-thirties, professional.
"That's me."
"My name is Dr. Elena Santos. I'm with the biopharma cooperative in Puerto Nariño. We have a situation."
He sat up slightly. "What kind of situation?"
"One of our collection teams is stranded at a research site up the Pupuña. Flooding took out the trail, and they're running low on supplies. We've tried contacting the usual air services, but everyone's booked solid for the next three days. Someone said you might be willing to help."
The Pupuña. Three hundred klicks southwest, deep in the reserve. He'd never landed there, but the satellite imagery showed a decent sandbar during dry season. Wet season, like now?
"How many people?"
"Four. Two researchers, two local guides. They have three days of rations left, maybe four if they stretch it."
He was already standing, already moving toward the Companion. "Send me the coordinates. I'll need to check the strip length and surface. Tell them to clear any debris they can reach."
"There's... one more thing." She hesitated. "They have samples. Perishable biological material. If they can't get them out in the next 48 hours, two years of work is lost."
Jake stopped with his hand on the Companion's wing strut. Two years of work. People who'd spent two years in the jungle, collecting God knows what, hoping to find something that might become medicine. And now a river they couldn't control was about to take it all.
"I'll be there before dark," he said. "Tell them to look for a blue plane."
He hung up before she could thank him.
---
Marta called when he was an hour out, the coordinates locked in the panel and the ATV still sitting under the house because he hadn't had time to load it.
"You're flying."
"Just a supply run. Quick turnaround."
"Jake." Her voice was gentle. "You're humming."
He hadn't noticed. He stopped.
"I'll be home for dinner," he said.
"I know you will. Fly safe."
The Pupuña materialized out of the green as the sun started its final slide toward the horizon. The sandbar was there, smaller than the satellite image suggested, but long enough if he put it down right. Three figures stood at the near end, waving. A fourth was visible near a cluster of tents, organizing something—probably the samples.
He did a low pass first, checking for soft spots, then pulled up and circled back. The Companion settled onto the sand like it had been doing this its whole life, which it had, just not here.
The researchers were young, exhausted, and desperately grateful. The samples—sealed in portable coolers that hummed with battery-powered refrigeration—fit easily in the cargo bay. The guides helped load while Jake kept an eye on the river, which was definitely higher than it should be.
"We heard about you," one of the researchers said, a kid with a beard that couldn't quite hide his youth. "They said there was an American out here who used to be—"
"I used to be retired," Jake said. "Now I'm just a guy with a plane. Get in."
The takeoff was tight—the sandbar felt softer on the second pass—but the Companion clawed into the air with 200 feet to spare. Below, the river had already swallowed another meter of beach.
---
He landed at Puerto Nariño as the last light bled out of the sky. Dr. Santos was waiting on the strip, a compact woman with sharp eyes and a tablet full of data she didn't look at once while they unloaded.
The samples went into a waiting truck, which disappeared into the village. The researchers shook his hand with an intensity that suggested they'd remember this for the rest of their lives.
Dr. Santos walked him back to the Companion.
"That was fast," she said. "The charter services quoted me three days."
"They were honest. I was available."
She studied him for a moment. "You know, we have a problem here. It's not just the floods. It's the whole system. The river is changing. The weather is changing. The old infrastructure wasn't built for this, and the new infrastructure doesn't exist yet."
Jake leaned against the Companion's wing, feeling the warmth still radiating from the engine. "I've heard this speech before. Usually from people who want something."
"I want you to consider a contract." She held up a hand before he could object. "Not full-time. Not even regular. Just... on-call. When our teams need to reach remote sites fast, when the rivers are too high or too low, when the commercial operators can't or won't go. You know this region better than anyone. You have the skills. You have the plane."
"I have a wife who likes having me home for dinner."
"Then bring her. We have guest quarters. Good food. Better conversation than you'll get staring at the river."
He almost smiled. "I'll think about it."
"Think fast. The rainy season's just starting."
She walked away without looking back, which he respected.
---
The flight home was dark and quiet. The stars came out in layers, first the bright ones, then the millions behind them, until the sky was so full of light it looked like someone had spilled salt across black velvet.
Marta was on the porch when he landed, a single lamp burning behind her.
"You missed dinner."
"I brought dessert." He pulled a wrapped package from the cargo bay—one of the researchers had pressed it on him, some local pastry that probably wouldn't survive the night. "How was Leticia?"
"Hot. Crowded. Full of people who don't know how to drive." She took the package, peered inside. "This looks edible. I'll make coffee."
They sat on the porch, drinking coffee and eating pastries that were better than they had any right to be. The forest hummed and clicked around them, a million conversations he'd never understand.
"Dr. Santos called," Marta said.
"She called you?"
"She called to check your references. Wanted to know if you were reliable." A small smile. "I told her you were the most reliable man I'd ever met, but that you had a bad habit of pretending you weren't."
Jake stared into his coffee. "She offered me a contract."
"I know. She told me."
"What did you say?"
"I said it was up to you. Then I told her you'd say no at first, think about it for a few days, and eventually say yes because you'd go crazy if you didn't have something to do."
He looked at her. In the lamplight, she was exactly the same as she'd been thirty years ago, when he'd met her in a Bogotá café and realized that some wars were worth fighting.
"You have too much confidence in me."
"No," she said. "I have exactly the right amount."
---
The 49ers game was a recording, but he watched it anyway the next Sunday. Marta sat beside him, reading. The forest hummed.
His phone buzzed. Dr. Santos.
*Tentative schedule for next month attached. First run is the 15th, weather permitting. Let me know if any dates conflict.*
He looked at the calendar. The 15th was wide open.
*No conflicts,* he typed. *See you then.*
Marta turned a page. "You're not sighing."
He realized she was right.
"Must be the coffee."
"Mmm."
The 49ers scored. The forest hummed. Somewhere out there, in the darkness between the stars, a river was rising and a village was waiting and a plane was ready.
It wasn't much. It wasn't a war. It wasn't even a mission, really.
But it was something.
And for now, that was enough.
