The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Is he trying to be calculating? That’s new too. I look down at my own cup. I don’t know where the anger rising in my mind is coming from. I want to scream at him. Throw my coffee in his face and drive a cigarette into his eye. But then he will be done with me. Deep breath. But he can’t be done with me. He needs me to write his papers and design his experiments. Another deep breath. What am I worried about? He’ll never get it. He’s not going anywhere. I look back up and he’s staring at me. Whatever. The anger’s gone and I’ve been sitting here long enough.

  “I need some enzymes,” I say. “I want to start cloning the genes I need for my first round of experiments and the biotech companies won’t sell to someone not affiliated with a research institution.”

  He doesn’t answer right away. Just that stupid frown again. “I don’t know.”

  Is he gonna make me beg? No. Not beg. Bargain.

  “Look, have you put together your presentation yet?”

  “No, but I was going to put together a few data slides from lab meetings this afternoon.”

  Of course he waited until the last minute—he still doesn’t know how to put together a research talk. Idiot. “No, Andrew. You need to present a narrative that makes the department heads wet themselves over all the Nature and Science papers you’re gonna publish and all of the grant money you’re gonna bring in. You can’t just throw a bunch of data slides together.” I let that sink in and take another sip of coffee. He’s never been good at using his data to tell a story. From the way he shifts in his seat, I can see he’s starting to feel anxious. Good. It’s time.

  “If you give me the plasmids I need to make the enzymes myself, I’ll fix your presentation.”

  “I was hoping you’d help me anyway,” Andrew says.

  Of course he was. That’s the reason he wants to see me. I’ve helped him so much he never developed his own legs to stand on.

  “I’m not comfortable helping you with your folly, Joe,” he adds. “I mean you’re trying to make a triffid. I don’t get what you’re trying to accomplish.”

  “How many times do you want me to explain? All things decay, Andrew, but there are things that transcend the trappings of matter and biochemical pathways and even life itself. People like you are going to destroy those things with hubris and shortsightedness. Someone needs to make a statement, Andrew. You call this a folly, but what you do is folly.”

  Andrew laughs at me. He laughs. “I don’t understand how that has anything to do with making a fictional people-eating plant monster from a story written fifty years ago.”

  “You don’t have to,” I say. I’m fighting to keep the edge from my voice. I need this to be done. Now. “We’ve known each other for a long time. I’m asking you to trust me. I have to do this. It’s important.”

  And he breaks. I can tell by the way he slumps his shoulders.

  “Fine,” he says. “I need to make more anyway.” He drains the rest of his coffee and stands. Transaction complete. No point in sticking around. I do the same, but he reaches for me and rests his hands on my shoulders. He’s looking me straight in the eye. What’s this about?

  “I am worried about you, okay?” he says. “You know I love you like a brother, right? So I hope you understand it’s killing me to see you do this to yourself. Can you make me a promise? Can you promise me you won’t ever give up like your dad did?”

  Where the hell did this come from? He can’t possibly think I’m depressed, can he? No. Of course not. He doesn’t understand me at all. I nod to make him stop staring and he takes his hands off my shoulders and pats me on the arm.

  “Okay,” he says. “Come by Friday. I should have new stocks made up by then and I can show you what I’ve got together so far for my presentation. And take care of yourself, okay?”

  I nod again and he heads back towards his lab with a quick wave. My legs feel heavy, so I sit back down at the table and look at the crushed cigarette on the ground. Andrew didn’t put it out completely with his shoe and during our conversation it reignited and burned down towards the filter. I fumble in my pocket for a fresh one and follow the thin lines of the smoke as they dance and dissipate towards the sky.

  I was seven and home sick with the chicken pox the first time Dad read me John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. The itching kept me from falling asleep and he had just finished playing connect-the-dots with the calamine lotion when he pulled the dog-eared copy from between the mattresses in his room.

  “My dad first read this to me when I was about your age,” he said. “I liked it then because of the triffids. I liked to imagine they could one day be real because the only limit to what we could do with science is our imagination. I like it now because it shows us humans can survive anything—even each other.” I didn’t understand what he meant by the second part, but when he started reading and the images spun in my head, I didn’t want him to stop.

  We read the entire book in two days and as soon as he trusted me not to scratch I was in the backyard, looking for a triffid of my own in the garden Mom had started after I was born. Though there weren’t any, my curiosity raged. Could we really make a triffid? What made plants different from animals so that animals could walk and plants couldn’t? Were there plants that ate meat? Did those plants still need to eat sunlight? Could plants really communicate with one another? If they could, what did they say?

  The garden had been left to the ravages of nature since Mom’s funeral a few years before, so I took it upon myself to get it back in working order. Dad seemed eager to help so we planted tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, and herbs, and, soon enough, we’d transformed the weed-tangled mass of vegetation back into a thriving garden.

  I know he never got over her. It was apparent in the way he would cry whenever two people fell in love on television. How he stopped leaving the house except for work and rarely for errands for fear of running into someone we knew asking how we were holding up. But it was easy to keep him from getting too sad as I got older. I could just change the channel or run the errands myself to protect him.

  I always looked forward to our weekends in the garden. We would weed and prune, kneeling together in the rich soil. The smell was incredible—the sharp tang and sticky yellow fingers from pruning the tomatoes, the moist earth beneath my fingernails, and how the fresh, dry dirt would get into my nose and mouth, all sweet and sharp like the taste of iron. Later I would be startled as I sat down to read between the rows and had a mineral clump crack between my teeth.

  We didn’t need to talk to communicate how important the garden was to both of us—to him as a part of the woman he’d loved and lost, and to me as a way I could bring him back to life, week by week. We would let our sweat and occasional blood speak to our dedication. At the end of a long afternoon we would sit on the back porch, me with my iced tea and him with a sweating bottle of beer, both of us leaving rings of perspiration on the dry wood. The same, but different.

  “They’re breathing now,” I remember him saying late one afternoon as we sat drinking. I was still young and didn’t yet understand about plant transpiration, so I asked him what he meant. He just smiled one of his rare smiles, his teeth so white in contrast to his dusty face. We sat there a long time and I watched the plants and imagined deep breaths, long held against the heat of the day, passing into the sky like asphalt sweating in summer.

  I’m going to tackle the hardest part of the triffid first: communication. In Wyndham’s story the triffids could communicate where food was by clacking woody growths against their bases.

  At first I was stumped how one could build a complex trait like language in an organism that never evolved to need it. But I soon realized I was thinking like a human—in gestures and touch and speech. Plants do communicate with one another. It’s just done through chemical signals instead.

  One such chemical is ethylene, which plants release into the air when they’re wounded to tell nearby plants to be on their guard. Though one might find it romantic or altruistic that plants t
alk to one another this way, anthropomorphizing a plant is an act of fiction. It’s the result of evolutionary fitness, where the whole point is to pass on your genetic material. If one’s prevented from doing so, it’s in its interest to protect the next best thing: its closest relatives, with whom it shares many of its genes. In many cases, nearby plants are likely to be related to the wounded plant, so having them steel themselves against the same threat increases the likelihood of leaving behind their molecular legacy.

  I used to think it ironic there was a structural relationship between ethylene and ethanol, and how their emission by a victim communicates a state of internal distress. My dad reeked of ethanol for much of my life, so it’s understandable I would think that. But I was extrapolating from experience, just like a child. I know now there are only so many permutations of small molecules.

  Since triffids communicate using sound rather than traditional chemical signals, I cannot use these innate signaling pathways. However, I can manipulate these pathways in such a way to recreate the triffids’ signature clacking. Communication can be broken into signal input, reaction, and signal output. The ethylene system follows these parameters: signal input (wounding), reaction (signaling events in the plant that result in ethylene production), and signal output (release of ethylene). Responding plants sense ethylene (input) through cell surface receptors and a different set of pathways are triggered (reaction) to increase the plant’s defenses (output).

  For my triffids, I will utilize aspects of both communicating plants and receiving plants. For input, all I have to do is modify one of those receptors on the surface of the cells to detect a volatile chemical humans emit, signaling food is present.

  The reaction phase will require more work, since I will need to genetically engineer the plants to create the woody organs at their bases to do the clacking. There are innate pathways I can exploit for this end too. First, to make the growths, I can manipulate the genetic pathway responsible for root branching, except arrange it to occur in aboveground tissues. To make them woody, I need to increase the deposition of cell wall material in those new branches and around the base to make them thicker, so when they bang against one another they’ll make a sound.

  The movement of these growths is not complex. There already exist methods by which plants can move suddenly, as seen in Venus flytrap or mimosa plants. They don’t move because they’re hungry or frightened. Ion channels in the walls of the cells at the base of the leaves open and cause the cells to swell, which results in a mechanical deformation we interpret as movement. Ironically enough, ion channels are responsible for the contraction of our muscles. But again, there is no higher meaning in this. The more you learn about nature, the more you learn it’s a bit of a one-trick pony.

  Creating a rhythm other plants can recognize is the last piece and for this I can exploit a small quirk of neurobiology. The sudden fluctuation of the concentration of calcium ions inside and outside of neural cells is the basis of neural signaling in animals. The rate of fluctuation is mediated by neurotransmitters like GABA and glutamate. This is what Andrew does research on—he’s interested in how these modulations might be playing a role in memory and behavior. These neurotransmitters are what make us do what we do: breathe, run, love. Our experiences create neural patterns that condition our neurons to behave a certain way in the future, which helps us later understand and react to our environment.

  Plants have GABA and glutamate that also influence calcium ion fluctuations. Their role is to help the plant understand and react to its environment, though this is limited to monitoring the nutrient concentrations around it. I can exploit this system to get these ion fluctuations to occur in a specific rhythm, thus causing the deformation of the woody stalks to beat in time. It’s hard to not think it’s funny that, despite the vast evolutionary distance between plants and humans, we’re the same, biologically.

  In sum, communication isn’t complex when broken down into its components and simplified into a binary system of present/absent. Act/don’t act. At times I envy this dispassion. Now I just need those enzymes since I can’t manipulate any of these genes or pathways without them.

  Andrew’s lab is in the midst of the sprawling campus. The afternoon is agreeable, like every afternoon along the shoreline. This place smells of dust and the sweet, medicinal scent of the ubiquitous eucalyptus trees. There’s hardly any grass—just ruined soil, strips of sloughed white and brown bark, and a few hardy weeds marked for death by some green-tinted herbicide. Eucalyptus is toxic to humans, and their canopy hangs over the campus like a halo of death the students don’t seem to notice or mind.

  I park in the lot behind his building, which looks like a prison with its narrow, dark windows and heavy concrete façade. How lovely it’s named for naturalist John Muir, who advocated the preservation of America’s natural spaces, and here he is, immortalized in concrete and glass, surrounded by non-native eucalyptus trees that destroy and displace the natural flora and fauna. What a way to honor a life.

  Andrew was too busy to come down and get me himself, so he gave me the code to get into the building, and now I’m standing at his bench, watching him fiddle with an image in Photoshop on his desktop. I haven’t been inside this building before—we both did our graduate work elsewhere on campus. The windows do little to let in the light, so the fluorescent lights are already humming overhead. They cast no shadows on the floor, which, together with waiting for Andrew to acknowledge me, gives me a peculiar feeling of limbo.

  His bench is meticulous. It’s a common affliction of two types of scientists. The first is so detail oriented they demand perfection from their experiments and their workspaces. The second feels they’re losing control over their projects, and thus their lives, so they control the one thing in lab they can: the cleanliness of their benches. It’s an effective method of mimicry, but only goes so far to mask their inadequacies. Andrew is the latter and I already know he’s going to tell me he didn’t get around to making the aliquots.

  He looks up from his monitor and gives me a smile. “Hey Joe. Sorry about the wait, I’ve been working on my slides. Want to take a look at what I’ve got so far?” He turns the monitor towards me.

  “No. I came down here to get the aliquots. E-mail me your presentation and I can fix it tonight. I don’t need you to walk me through it.”

  He looks at me for a long moment. Is he sizing me up? He shrugs and turns the screen back and opens another file. “I didn’t have a chance to make them,” he said. “This has taken more time than I thought. I can make them next week after I get back from my interview.”

  Is he trying to make sure I uphold my end of the bargain by withholding the enzymes until I fix his presentation? Does he honestly think that’s going to work? Keeping me happy is in his best interests. He needs to remember that.

  “I didn’t come all the way down here to chat, Andrew. Streak some colonies out on a plate right now—I can do the purification myself.”

  He doesn’t look up. He just keeps staring ahead, defiant. No. He doesn’t get to ignore me.

  “Do you really expect to get this job without my help, Andy? Do you really expect to get any job? You and I both know you don’t have the head for this sort of thing, so if you want to stand a chance, you’d better stop pretending to ignore me and give me what I want.”

  He stops fiddling with his computer, and his eyes drop. He’s still not looking at me. Look at me. I grab the box of gloves off his bench and throw it at his head. I miss and the box hits the wall, but it gets his attention. Now he’s looking.

  My face is hot and I’m shaking, but why? All I can think is too far. But too far for whom? Him? Me? Then what have I done. No. No to what? What I just did? That it was too far? I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. So I wait for Andy to do something. Andrew. Do something.

  His eyes narrow and he grabs the box of gloves off the floor. He gets up, slams the box down on his bench, and pulls on a pair. He leans in close to my fac
e, his voice quiet, but every molecule vibrating between us is charged with hate.

  “Fine.”

  He brushes past me and disappears through a door into a labyrinth of freezers and cell culture hoods. I look around. His labmates are all staring at me, so I follow after Andy. Andrew. My face feels like it’s on fire, but I can’t tell if it’s anger or shame.

  Andrew has his back to me. He’s pulling white boxes out of a minus-eighty freezer and setting them on top of an adjacent centrifuge until he finds a box with a peeling strand of green tape with his neat handwriting on it. He puts the other boxes back in the freezer and slams the door. You shouldn’t do that, I think. The door will stick.

  He throws the box into one of the hoods. The tape flies off en route and flutters down to land at my feet. Numb, I bend over and pick it up as Andy flicks on the ventilation and disappears back into the maze. While he’s gone, I watch the steam rise off of the thawing box.

  He comes back with a box of pipette tips and a few agar plates. He sits down, opens the box, and pulls out a few tubes filled with yellow-white pellets.

  Before I can stop myself, I speak. My voice sounds faraway. “You shouldn’t pull out all the other stocks. Freeze-thawing is bad for the cells and based on the ambient room temperature and the cells being at minus eighty, their temperature is rising at a rate of—”

  “They’re in glycerol, they’ll be fine,” Andrew says and jams the pipette tip into one of the pellets before wiping the tip across the surface of the plate. He does the same with a few more tubes, then puts the tubes back in the box, puts the lids back on the plates, and turns off the hood. He grabs the box and heads back over to the freezer and tries to lift the handle, but it’s stuck. He puts the box on the centrifuge and tries to lift it with both hands, but it doesn’t budge. He tries again and the freezer slides forward a few inches.