2017 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide

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2017 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Page 10

by Maggie Allen


  Lucy put her kit away, tucked her tablet under her arm, and retrieved her backpack from her class chair. She waited in line to see Dr. Nelms. With any other teacher, most students would bolt for the door rather than spend an extra minute in class, but Dr. Nelms was different. She had been a soldier in the Bio-terror wars and later, a lab director at Anthrodynamics, a major bio-defense corporation. She had been there and done that. Not only was she interesting, she genuinely cared about the students and the subject matter.

  "Dr. Nelms, you wrote ‘See me’ on my project folder," said Lucy.

  "Lucy dear, I need to talk to you about managing your expectations. I think you might be biting off more than you can chew," said Dr. Nelms.

  "I don’t understand."

  "You are a very talented and ambitious designer, but this is a capstone project. We are pulling together everything we have learned about evolutionary pressures, genetic activation, and biosynthesis. Nature gets to eat its mistakes, but we have to live with ours. Your proposal is extravagant. At the very least, it is university-level work, and I don't know if you have the time or the skills to manage it. Flight is a very hard problem. There are not many people who can design a flying creature."

  "It’s a chicken. I think I have a good start. It has wings," said Lucy.

  "Chickens have wings, but they don't really fly. They flap and jump to roost out of reach of predators, and that is typically the best that any student at your level can accomplish."

  "I still want to try."

  "Lucy, you wouldn't be trying to make a dragon now, would you?" asked Dr. Nelms.

  "Dragons aren't terribly practical," said Lucy

  "No, they're not."'

  Lucy left the room cautioned yet resolved. She could visualize what she wanted to create, and in her experience as an artist, that was the toughest battle. She was optimistic because she took to the subject so well that Dr. Nelms insinuated that she might have a career in the field of genetic engineering. Dr. Nelms said that all of life was art, and Earth was its canvas. She liked that idea, and it changed the way she viewed the world. Whenever she saw an opossum waddling across the road or a raccoon digging in a garbage can, she saw them as something special, like a carefully laid brushstroke, rather than just blurry background objects in her life. Lucy figured that for some part of the day, she could trade the feel of a brush in her hand and the rich smell of oil paints for the soft whir of sequencers and compilers.

  She caught the bus.

  It dropped her off, and she walked the rest of the way to her home, a cottage tucked inside a half acre of ancient live oak, a microcosm untouched by developers. Her mom inherited the cottage from her parents and made it her permanent residence after the divorce.

  Lucy’s mother was a talented artist. With art came financial uncertainty, and her mother's anxiety transferred to her in the form of conflicting advice. "Follow your heart," her mother said, right up until the past-due notices showed up, and then her tune changed to, "Do something practical." Her senior year, Lucy realized she had enough science, math, and English credits to follow her heart with a schedule heavy in art classes and study halls, but it was over a stack of bills that her mother badgered her into taking the practical AP biology class.

  She was so angry at her mother's meddling that she did not bother to point out the $3000 lab fee associated with the course. If her mom was going to pick her courses, then her mom could pay for them, and when the bill came due, her mom had to empty the savings account to cover it.

  Lucy didn't care all that much. Another job would come along, and her mother would paint her way out of the hole. In book cover art circles, her mother was a bit of legend. She painted gorgeous scenes pulled from the book’s pages. But the fantasy and science fiction books she illustrated shifted away from traditional media to the digital. Digital art was faster and cheaper, and nearly anyone could hang out a shingle and call themselves an artist. Her mother competed with a lot of talented amateurs who undervalued their own work and undercut hers.

  Still, Lucy felt pretty good. She enjoyed the class, had plenty of time for her own artwork, and got to teach her mom a little lesson about interfering with her life.

  Everything was cool until her mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

  Her father's car, a shiny black Lexus, menaced the dirt driveway with its sleek form. Her mother and father had a good relationship since their divorce. Her mother had a casual, barefoot kind of attitude, while her father, a partner in a law firm, was serious and professional. She could not fathom the universe that brought them together.

  Two suitcases stood guard in the living room. She went out the back door to the studio.

  She walked into the studio and inhaled the comforting scent of oil paints. The smell always said home to her. Her mother slept in the recliner under a blanket, her bald head covered with a black knit watch cap. Her father sat at the small breakfast table, sifting through her mom's reference materials for her current project.

  "Dad, what are you doing here?" Lucy asked. She kept her voice low.

  "Hey, how about ‘Hi, Dad—glad to see you’?" asked David Cardiff.

  "Hi, Dad—glad to see you."

  "Your mom had an oncology appointment, and she asked me to take her. And then we talked."

  "What does that mean?" asked Lucy.

  "Maybe we should wait for her to wake up."

  "No, tell me now."

  "I'm coming back for a while," said her father.

  "Why?" Lucy always thought she would want him to come back, but she had grown so used to his just visiting that having him under the same roof would be weird.

  "To help take care of your mother."

  "She is getting better."

  "She's not, Lucy. We should wait for her to wake up."

  "Tell me, Dad." Her lips trembled and her eyes watered. Her mother was prone to tiny white lies, while her father was relentlessly truthful. She took a look at her mom, so small in the oversized chair, and thought that if there was any time for a comforting lie, it would be right now.

  "The chemotherapy and radiation aren’t working anymore. She doesn't want to go to a hospice and be sick until… She wants to stay here, and I am going to help her. She's decided to try a new therapy. It can't stop the disease, but it will make her feel healthy, it will give her the energy she wants. She'll be able to finish her painting."

  For how long? were the first words that came to Lucy’s mind, but instead she lashed out, "Why do you care? You left." The moment those words left her mouth she wanted to pull them back. Her father did care, and the divorce was mutual, but she was too angry and upset to apologize.

  "Lucy, I never stopped caring."

  "Then why did you…"

  "Lucy, I don’t want to rehash a decade-old divorce. This is the wrong time. Your mom asked me to stay, and I am. Now, please keep your voice down. She is sleeping. We can talk about it when she wakes."

  "Fine."

  She held it in because that is what she did. She wiped her eyes before a tear could fall. She knew what her father was saying and understood why he was here, but it seemed so wrong that she was left out of the decision.

  "She is going to be fine," said Lucy.

  She left the cottage, careful not to slam the door, though she wanted to. She would slam the door right off its hinges. She would slam it so hard it would burst into splinters. Outside under the covered walkway that connected the cottage to the studio, bees buzzed in the tangles of honeysuckle and wisteria. A gentle wind rustled the pine and oak. Her heart pounded louder and louder, drowning out the buzz of stupid insects going about their stupid lives. She felt her father watching her, and to his credit he did not chase her down to hold her and say stupid things to her like how it was going to be all right. She left, walking head down along the dirt driveway to the road and then to the bluffs where the aeronauts flung themselves into the sky to catch the rising thermals. She turned away from the few cars that passed so they would not see her
face.

  At the bluffs, she sat on the rickety bench, and it sagged beneath her weight. The aeronauts launched themselves over the edge, falling into space until their translucent wings caught the air and cast them into the sky. She sat on the bench and held it in, even as she wanted to scream.

  Saturday morning was usually breakfast-in-bed day. Her mom would make bacon and eggs, and then they would lounge on the bed, eating and talking to late morning, but her father's moving back had disrupted the usual routine. He was an early riser even on the weekend and had stepped out to go shopping.

  Sometimes she felt like a spy in her own house. Lucy watched her mother and father and captured glimpses of what they must have been like before she ever graced the world. He held her and rubbed her back, and she seemed to sink into him. He kept her warm and brought her what she needed without complaint. How could they ever fall apart?

  Once she saw her father lean in and kiss her mother on the cheek. He spoke to her so softly that Lucy couldn't hear what he said. Her mother smiled. If he could make her smile like that, create a moment between them, precious and sacred, then he could stay as long as he liked, as far as Lucy was concerned.

  Her mother rallied, but the doctor had said she would. The new therapy took away the pain and gave her new energy, but it could not cure the disease. The doctor said she would run strong until the end. Lucy imagined it like running towards a cliff, faster and faster, picking up speed until the ground dropped away from beneath your feet.

  And then the long, terrible fall.

  She made her mom some coffee and brought it in.

  "Mom, made you some."

  "Lucy, thank you. You are reading my mind."

  Her mom set her brush down and took the cup; she wrapped her hands around the warmth and sipped. "Good."

  "Can I see?"

  "No, not yet, no peeking."

  With her renewed energy, her mom had returned to painting, and Lucy enjoyed nothing more than to watch her mother paint and sketch, but this time her mom had spun her easel away from general view and tucked herself in a corner.

  When her mom was a student she studied painting in France and the Netherlands. She audited medical and veterinary classes to learn about anatomy and dug up dinosaur bones in the Gobi Desert and the American Midwest. Her mother's imagination lived and breathed on the canvas. Her creatures swam in alien seas, stampeded across grassy plains, and soared across lightning-split storm clouds. There was a depth and realism about her paintings that made them true. They were situated in a world. It was what Lucy aspired to in her own art.

  "Lucy, we need to talk about after."

  "I don't want to. Not now."

  She didn't have anything else to do. She wanted to be with her mother, but she couldn't talk about what her mother wanted to talk about. "I have to work on my Neosaur. Can I take the jeep?" Anxiety clawed at her insides; she just needed to leave and avoid the conversation. If she didn't hear or didn't know, then it couldn't be real.

  "We don't have to talk, not right now, but stay with me until your father gets back."

  She sat. "Okay."

  "It's nice having him around, isn't it?" asked her mother.

  "It is," she conceded. Having her father lunk around the house in his underwear took some getting used to, but overall it was not as bad as she expected. She found herself drawn into conversations that she never suspected she would have with him. She and her mom talked about the same things, but they were always theoretical questions framed in metaphor, and the answer always revolved around trusting your instincts. What if she didn't have any instincts? Not to worry, her father had a plan. He would flat out ask about boys, sex, and drugs. He outlined strategies for her to avoid the pitfalls of the teenage years. Her father's you-need-to-have-a- plan mentality conflicted with her mom's trust-yourself attitude. Both systems had their merits, but until her father moved back, her mom's held sway. Her father's infuriatingly logical way of viewing the world challenged issues that she thought had been long settled.

  "Why did you get divorced?"

  "Oh goodness, the real question is how we ever got together!"

  "How did you get together then?"

  "Have you ever looked at your father? I mean, come on, he's gorgeous. Those blue eyes..."

  "Mom!" Lucy’s face flushed with embarrassment. She couldn't think of her father as anything but her father. "He does have pretty eyes. Tell me."

  "Well, besides the obvious physical thing…"

  "Okay, Mom, I get it."

  "I don't know. Opposites attract. He was determined and focused. Grim, even. He had a way of making you feel safe. And I was a bit, I don't know…"

  "A free spirit."

  "I guess that’s the nice way of putting it."

  "So, why did you get divorced?"

  "The opposites-attract thing works out great for a while. We complemented each other, but when life got serious, when you had to choose a direction or a philosophy, an approach to how to face the world, we couldn't agree."

  "When I came along?"

  "No, you were the only thing we could agree on."

  "Then why?"

  "First, we grated on each other and then…well, if we didn't… if we didn't divorce, I think we might have learned to hate each other, and I love him too much for that. If you ask me, we divorced in the nick of time."

  "Why did you ask him to come back?"

  "For you."

  With their student ID Cards, AP Biology students had access to the school lab after hours. Lucy would much rather be anywhere else on a Sunday afternoon, but final coding was due in a week, and her genetic program was riddled with errors and incompatibilities. If she wasn't careful, she would turn a perfectly good chicken embryo into a rotted puddle of slime.

  She leaned back in the lab chair and took out her tablet. Though she had not seen her mom's painting, she had seen and photographed some of her reference sketches of a feathered dragon. The sketches were energetic gray-scale slashes of paint, full of life and energy. Scribbled on one of the pages was a URL. Lucy typed it in and it brought up an academic article from The Journal of Chinese Paleontology.

  The authors had discovered the fossilized remains of a giant maniraptoran theropod, a flying, bat-winged dinosaur. It seemed that at one time China really did have dragons, and they had the bones in the ground to prove it. The dinosaur stood five meters tall, the height of a giraffe, and had a nineteen-meter wingspan, the length of two school buses. They were the biggest known animals to ever take to the sky, larger even than a Quetzalcoatlus, an extinct pterosaur and the previous record holder.

  A photograph showed the find, a set of dark fossilized bones set in dun-colored desert stone. The creature's neck was stretched back, its mouth frozen open in a carnivorous smile. One of the long-fingered wings was fully extended. A man, dwarfed by the size of the animal, lay on the ground to lend a sense of scale.

  Lucy sat down at her workstation and opened the Bionics programming language.

  Her mom's sketches and the single fossil photograph did not fill her with any workable inspiration. She wiped her previous changes and stared at the baseline Neosaur code. Her mom said that a mature artist did not rely upon inspiration to simply appear, but got to work so inspiration had no choice but to show up. It took an act of faith to believe that her imagination could be translated into a concoction of amino acids and proteins that could result in a living breathing creature. Act as if you have talent, said her mother, and it will be granted to you.

  She read through the baseline Neosaur code, seeing the overlapping patterns and intertwined genetic compositions. She started typing, altering the Neosaur egg's destiny. There was a rhythm to coding that was like painting. She layered protein sequences like she layered rich oil colors on a canvas, adding depth and style to bring the vision in her head to life.

  Flying creatures were engineering marvels, frighteningly strong yet delicate. Weight needed to be distributed considering a center of gravity and the ae
rodynamic center of pressure. They needed powerful immune systems and fast recovery times to repair the physical wear and tear of flight. She knit contradictory requirements together to find a balance. Nature had eons to experiment; she had a weekend. It didn't seem possible, but there she was, in the zone, coding a dragon. A secondary monitor updated the morphology of the animal. She could see her mistakes in real time. The system tried to drive her towards the easy answers encoded in the drop down menus. Most of the students would let the machine do the hard creative work. They would compile a selection of compatible choices from the menus and create an imitation of originality. She despised the idea.

  She had to create something unique and beautiful.

  She was doing it for her mother.

  When she was done, she ran her final program through the compiler. The Bioscholastics computers would take an in-depth look and give a refined analysis of her dragon's viability. She waited. Chugging on the novel genetic code of a new creature took more than a few minutes. The machine displayed the results—a cryptic assortment of access or parameter errors without any amplifying explanation. She Googled the errors and discovered that the Bioscholastics Neosaur kit used a truncated version of the Bionics programming language to keep young bioengineers within safe guidelines. No one wanted a high school kid to unleash a venomous devil chicken on an unsuspecting public.

  The student version of the program would not let her make what she wanted. She sat back in her lab chair and spun. Her code was good. She was sure of it. She had divined the recipe for a Chinese dragon dinosaur. She just had to prove it.

  She snooped at Dr. Nelms’ lab table. Her teacher had a successful career in the industry and still consulted on the side. Consequently she had access to the full-powered genetic compiler programs at three different design houses. The drawers were locked, but the slide-out desk extension pulled out. A piece of paper with URLs and passwords was taped to the extension.

  She logged into Anthrodynamics Inc. as Dr. Nelms and ran her program.

 

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