I stood in front of the fire, sipping on a cup of the foul tasting alcohol as I watched my wife and son make their way around camp, shaking hands and receiving congratulatory slaps on the back. It could have been the booze, but I felt a spark of hope bloom in my chest.
Maybe we were going to be all right after all.
Chapter Four
I bent over a row of potatoes, intending to harvest the plant and set it back to grow new spuds. The sun shone hot against my back and my thin clothing did little to protect me from the heat. We were still wearing the scrub-like garments that were provided for shelter use. Not the best for getting your hands dirty. As I pulled up the plant I felt a shadow being cast over my shoulder.
“Dad, do you need something else to do?” I turned and dusted my hands on my pants before taking the gloves off.
“What can I say, I am ‘doing something’. I’m coming to check on my daughter and our precious food supply.” He smirked and settled himself on the ground next to me. “Okay, what I really wanted to know is when I can look forward to eating something other than potatoes with salt, potatoes with pepper, potatoes with…:”
“You want to get down here and dig with me? Because I’d have more energy to work on growing a more varied diet if I didn’t have to work by myself all the time.”
“Where are your fellow farmers? I know Pascal can’t be far away. I think he’s got a little bit of a crush on you.”
I flung a dirt clod at him. “Pascal is half my age and hasn’t quite gotten the hint that I’m a raging lesbian. Now either help me dig or go find someone else to bother. I really don’t have time for you right now, old man.”
He scooped up a handful of dirt and hit me in the back with it, showering my hair with soil. “Raging lesbian indeed. My god, how could I have raised such a daughter.” I rolled my eyes at him and continued working. The potatoes came off the plant easily enough and looked healthy. Surveys of the nutrient levels in the soil showed us that it should be good to farm for years to come. The planet had effectively been thrown around in its own juices. Enough dead plant and animal matter had decomposed into the land around us that farming worked quite nicely. I was about to trade places with Dad and start on the next plant when I caught sight of him frowning.
“What’s wrong?”
He held up a potato that looked normal enough at first glance. As he turned it around, I saw that his thumb had sunk into the skin almost to the first knuckle. “Is that bad?”
“It probably means that some kind of worm or other animal got to it before us. Here, let me see it.” I took the vegetable from him and split it in half with my utility knife. The indent ran well into the flesh of the potato. Radiating outward from it was a kind of blueish blackish color, almost like a bruise on skin. I prodded the discolored part with my knife and found that it went straight through with no resistance. “Shit.” I sheathed the knife again and lifted the halves of the potato to my nose. There was a faint sweet smell, unnatural and cloying. “Double shit.”
“What is it, sweetheart?” A note of uncertainty crept into my father’s voice. He had just been starting to relax and now I was giving him reason to worry.
“It almost looks like potato blight.” There was no way for me to tell what the stuff was without a microscope and a hell of a lot of research, but I could determine that whatever it was, it wasn’t good. “I need my old lab capabilities back.”
“Potato blight? Like the Irish had a thousand years ago?” Dad picked up the other potatoes and started to palpate them. His eyes widened when he found another potato with the same kind of discoloration on it. “They all died, Fiona.”
“The blight was a major peril that killed millions of people, yes. But the Irish survived, and so will we.” I was confident that I could find a cure for whatever this was. The shelter’s laboratories were still operational, if at a reduced capacity. “Do me a favor, though? Don’t tell anyone.” Dad looked at me dubiously. “We don’t even know what’s on the potatoes, never mind if it’s poisonous to the plant or humans. Just inform the requisite people to lookout for any funny spots in their food, and to cut them out. If it is potato blight, the infection only goes as far as the discoloration.”
“You got it, kid.” He stood and wiped his hands on his own pants, a little extra throughly.
“Oh! And would you ask them to count the spots for me? Just tell them there’s an anomaly with the soil and I’m collecting data to keep track of it.”
“Sure.” He left. I turned to watch him and I could already see the tension radiating out from his shoulders. A minor setback like this wasn’t completely unexpected. We didn’t even know what it was yet. For all I knew it was something completely curable. Perhaps even harmless. Something in my gut twisted as I even thought the words. I was probably kidding myself. I looked at the seemingly endless fields of potato plants, some in full bloom, others just starting to put their roots in. If this was potato blight, there was no cure. We could lose the entire crop. It wasn’t something we would recover from. The amount of food we had available to us now was precarious. Losing the potatoes would mean the death of hundreds, maybe everyone. The other scientists in the shelter had done the math. In order to establish a stable population, we needed at least eight hundred and fifty. Preferably nine hundred or more. When you accounted for natural death, we were cutting it close as it was.
I had to work fast. First things first, I had to bring a sample to the lab. I picked up half of the infected potato and pocketed it. Making my excuses to the others, I climbed back down into the shelter. The place I had grown up in no longer felt like home. Since things were running in full swing outside, the entire structure had been gutted; every piece of recyclable or useable material was brought to the surface for repurposing. Only the vital systems had been left untouched. I smiled and waved to the medial staff in the infirmary, busy patching up the day’s cuts and scrapes. The hydroponics lab was largely as I had left it. A few plants were scattered about but for the most part it was empty. The equipment had little dust on it, but I got it up and running easily enough.
I used a knife to cut off a thin slice of the infected potato and placed it on a slide. Putting it under a microscope lens revealed intact sporangia of P. infestans. The fungus bore almost no difference from its ancestor save one. It was replicating at an astounding rate. A chill ran down my spine. As the world burned above us, there was predictably damage and destruction of nuclear power plants around the world. This meant that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nuclear explosions was vented into the atmosphere. The radiation mixed in with the storms and would have carried particles around the world. We had already seen the effects of this phenomenon in the animal life. The drastic environmental change had forced rapid evolution. It only made sense that plant life had gone through the same alterations.
Now that I knew what I was dealing with, I could start testing out treatments. The data on my tablet told me there were a few different options, but the scientific advancements of the last few centuries had not produced a miracle. There wasn’t any reason to-the plants saved and grown in the shelters were hermetically protected against all foreign organisms. They had been sourced from the global seed vault in Svalbard, a small island near the place my forebears called the North Pole. We would have to work systematically. Every piece of equipment that touched the potatoes at any stage would have to be sanitized. As much of the crop available had to be harvested right away and the healthy plants eaten. There were a few fungicides that I could try to produce, the simplest of which involved spraying a copper-infused solution onto the plants. The biggest catch with all of this is that I’d have to tell an already scattered population that their only food source was in danger of disappearing.
I discarded the initial sample and cut a new one. Same thing. Damn. Some more research proved that the anti-fungals would be relatively simple to make, but I wasn’t sure that I could synthesize enough of it quickly enough. The copper mixture was possible but removing the
copper from the plants after enough time had passed would be the challenging part. Our water supply had been heavily converted over for supplying the surface, both with drinking water and grey water. The copper solution called to be left on the plants for a specific period of time and then rinsed off. Not the most stable. I sat at that microscope for over an hour, wracking my mind for something, anything that could even slow down the spread of the blight.
GPT2.
The name of the gene hit me out of nowhere. GTP2 was a gene common to most photosynthetic plants-more specifically, potatoes. It was activated when photosynthesis increased rapidly, like when the sun peaks out from a cloudy day. GTP2 was responsible for recycling sugar back into the chloroplast for starch production. It acted as a sort of brake to allow the plant’s cells to keep up with the increased photosynthetic activity and increase starch stores for use at night. Reducing GPT2 would slow down the plant’s metabolism. It certainly wasn’t a cure, but it would buy me time.
I had to tell Eliza. I sent the data from the lab’s machines to my tablet and raced back outside. I found Eliza speaking with a group of men, some of whom I recognized as the members of the exit team Dad had assembled. She looked up and smiled as she caught sight of me and said something to her comrades. They nodded and departed. “Hey, hon.” She pecked me on the cheek. “I was just talking with Jason and the others. They inform me that we are well on track to stabilizing things within a couple of weeks. Just think, soon we might actually be able to put a little weight back on! Did you ever think that would be a plus in our lives?” The excitement on her face was extinguished when she saw my expression.
“There’s a problem with the potatoes.” I blurted it out before I could even think. There were better ways to break the news and I flinched at my thoughtlessness.
“What kind of problem?” She frowned, not fully comprehending what I meant.
“Eliza, they’re infected. They’re infected with potato blight.”
She stared, still not understanding.
“We could lose the whole crop.”
To her credit, my wife managed to keep her expression relatively neutral. No one else other than me could have seen the trembling of her fingers. “The whole…”
“Yeah. Kinda sucks that we didn’t get the chance to gain a few extra pounds while we were chowing down on shelter food, huh?” The determination that I had felt not an hour before vanished, numbness in its place. I thought the humor would make it better. It didn’t.
“How soon?” Eliza put her arm around me and led us back toward our quarters. In deference to her newfound position, Eliza had been gifted one of the already printed houses by the elder people of the shelter. We still had to move our possessions in, but for now a few stray crates served as chairs.
“The truth is, I don’t know. I’ve confirmed the diagnosis three separate times in the lab. It’s potato blight, but it’s spreading far faster than blight normally should. I suspect the radiation in the atmosphere mutated the fungus as well as everything else.”
“Fuck. There’s got to be a cure, right? After all, potato blight is centuries old. Someone must have seen fit to figure out a way to eliminate it before things went to hell.”
“There isn’t a cure.” Her eyes grew wide. “But there may be a treatment. The databases say that there are a couple of anti-fungals that we could try to synthesize, and there’s a copper-based spray that I could put on the uninfected plants. All of the options have drawbacks. The anti-fungals would likely take too long to produce in sufficient quantity. The copper spray needs to be washed off and quite honestly, we don’t have the water. I have another idea.”
“Tell me it’s something we can actually manage.” Eliza had gone white.
“I think so. It would involve injecting a specially designed gene alteration compound that would block the processes needed for the plants to run their metabolism.”
“Won’t that kill them?”
“No. At least, theoretically. It would be like putting a human in a hibernation pod. The potatoes would still grow, but they’d develop at a delayed rate. Developing the compound would be fast enough and it would buy me enough time to figure out a more sustainable solution.”
Eliza’s eyes searched mine frantically. “You can keep us from starvation?”
“I can try. The best thing we can do now is harvest everything. Every single vegetable. Anything that is discolored needs to be burned. Everything that appears healthy needs to be put into the coldest containers we can find, or eaten as quickly as possible. That’ll cheer them up from the prospect of dying. A feast to end all feasts.” Getting the potatoes harvested, organized, and frozen would make it easier to inject the plants for relocation. “The ground where we planted everything needs to be burnt. It’s the only way to ensure that no more spores carry to healthy soil.”
“Okay.” She looked away, mind already working on the problem. “Okay.”
“I can do it, darlin’.” Eliza always laughed at the way I said the endearment. There wasn’t really such a thing as an accent in the shelter. Those of us whose parents or grandparents had come in with one quickly lost theirs due to the utter hegemony of the ‘proper’ way of speaking. I picked up the habit from a set of books that I liked to read as a teenager. They were centered around the only female werewolf, trapped in a world of men, fighting for her independence. The woman’s love interest was a boy from the South who always called her ‘darlin’’. For some reason I thought that adopting the same pronunciation would make me charming. Apparently it had worked, even if Eliza did roll her eyes at me whenever I said it.
“I know you can, sweetheart. Let’s get the rest of our things from our tent and then we’ll set down to break the news to the others. I need a few minutes to think.”
“Oh, and would I not mind coming to you with yet another sign of our impending death just as your leadership has started?” She laughed.
“If you don’t mind.”
Moving our possessions over wasn’t labor intensive. We had both chosen to only bring a few things up from the shelter. A file with Marcus’s baby photos on it. The paper flower that Eliza had folded and hid my engagement ring in. A few other knick knacks that meant enough that we wanted them along for the long haul. Though it was an easy move, by the time we had finished making up our “bed”—still a pad with a two person sleeping bag overtop it—the hour had grown late. It was well past the evening meal and people would be heading in the direction of bed. Still, we had to break the news. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that we couldn’t address the colony at once; leaking the information out slowly would help control any panic.
At least, I hoped so.
Chapter Five
I ‘knocked’ on the door to Fang’s tent.
“Just a minute!” Shuffling followed and I was greeted by a bedraggled Alexander. He ran his hand through his hair to neaten it. “What’s up Fiona? I was just going to sleep.”
I motioned him to step away from the tent. “I know Eliza’s the official leader now, but given your position and experience, I felt it prudent to speak to you as well.” That caught his attention, the bleariness disappearing from his eyes. “We have a problem with the potato crops.”
“What kind of problem?” he said slowly. The guy had been through enough in recent days to know that a late night talk wasn’t a cause for celebration.
“My father and I were harvesting today and discovered several potatoes that appear to be afflicted with blight.” When no recognition crossed his face, I clarified. “A fungal disease that can spread from plant to plant very rapidly. It’s known to wipe out entire crops in a matter of weeks.”
“Fuck.” He cringed a little, as if trying to spare me from the burden of his swearing.
“I’ve discussed it with Eliza and I have a plan to slow down the blight, but there is no known cure. We’re going to address the rest of the people in the morning, but I have to emphasize that it is entirely possible that we won’t be able to st
ay here.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Alexander’s voice rose far above the whisper I had been talking in. He seemed to remember his surroundings and quieted down. “Don’t you think it’s a little premature to tell everyone? You don’t even know exactly what kind of disease it is yet.” I glared at him. It was the eternal curse of being a woman, and a feminine one at that. Men had the tendency to magically forget that I had years of study and expertise.
“Yes, Alexander. I’m kidding you. I have no idea what’s going on and even with twenty years of experience I’m just taking a guess.” I was tempted to add the words you idiot to the retort but held my tongue. As pompous as he was, I would need his help in the coming days. “Look. I wouldn’t be coming to you and sharing this if I wasn’t sure. Doesn’t matter what strain of the disease it is, it’s infecting the plants-quickly. I want you to help heading up the task of harvesting every single healthy plant tomorrow. Anything with discolored blue or brown flesh is infected. Those have to go in a separate pile far away from the fields. If you touch an infected potato or use a tool to dig it up, everything that touched it has to be sanitized before it can be used again.”
“All this for a fungus?” He rubbed his hand over his face. “Won’t we lose most of the crop anyway, harvesting everything at once?”
“If we don’t harvest we’re guaranteed to lose everything. I’d rather pull the healthy plants and look into preservation options while I still can. We need to open up food access for the foreseeable future, too. I want to see everyone in this camp pack in as many calories as they can. They’re going to need it.”
Alexander stared at me, unblinking. Okay, doing this so late in the day was a mistake. Come the morning I was going to be surprised if he remembered half of what I was telling him.
Destiny: Quantic Dreams Book 3 Page 3
