NEAR FUTURE ON A ROOFTOP IN NEW MEXICO
Piero whispered into his picture cellphone, “I know it sounds ridiculous.” His fingers trembled, requiring him to grip the phone more tightly.
“Speak up, Piero, this must be a bad line. Why do you need rescue?”
He snapped his phone shut and then cursed himself at the unnecessary sound. He heard telltale rustling only metres away. Would Lisa clue in on his need to be silent or had he just given her another reason to hook up with that better-looking hydroponics engineer? Damn. He shook to clear his stupid head: he had to face his own survival within moments and yet wasted effort pondering illogical relationships.
He risked raising his head to look over the sun-heated whitewashed parapet. The green tide inched closer and upwards. With no one to blame but himself and a greedy absentee biotech management, he rued that black Tuesday a year ago.
PIERO RECALLED TWO epiphany moments. The first being in the lab watching a three-dimensional computer simulation of his dwarf maize shrug away every plant disease in the database. He laughed at the prognosis of no known side effects if humans consumed the corn, even though it was destined for animal fodder. He grimaced at the decision to continue the research in secret, in a State with a relaxed view on GM experiments.
“Piero, you know you can have everything you need,” the director had said, his oily skin glistening in the desert heat. “The best labs, computers and assistants. Maybe a friskier girlfriend?”
“I hope I live up to your confidence in me,” Piero said, damning the director for his sordid thoughts. So, his skinny Dustin Hoffman appearance tended to keep women at bay, but he did attract active minds, like Lisa.
“Your thesis impressed my board. They’re confident of tripling their investment return. All you need is to bring us results in eight months.”
“Out of the question. It’ll take that long to produce the simulations and the proto-gene; another two years for consistency trials, and—”
“Eight months for very large rewards, Piero. Unless you are worried about ethical considerations?” The director laughed as if that couldn’t be possible.
Piero wasn’t. Couldn’t let himself. When other boys in his Milan suburb kicked a football, and each other, he played with a microscope and the Internet. He realized long ago that Mother Nature constantly evolved. All GM did was speed matters up. Of course precautions were necessary, hence the trial periods.
“You can’t buy time, Sir. With respect, it isn’t possible... unless...” And then the big idea hit him; his second epiphany moment.
“Unless we pay you more? Or make the incentive more sinister?”
“There’s no need for threats. You say I can do anything as long as the board gets the new seeds in eight months from now?”
“We want the fastest-growing disease-free corn on the planet, Piero, nothing less.”
“I believe I can do it. All I need to do is use a compatible hybrid phylum I know from a strain of bindweed. What I’ll do is—”
“I don’t need to know, Piero. Tell it to your staff.”
HIS FEAR INCREASED in proportion to the crescendo of the rustling. If only he’d listened to Lisa at the beginning when he’d persuaded her to leave Napoli University, bringing the bindweed rhizomes with her.
“You’re mad,” she’d said. “They’re not compatible in the slightest. Grain versus Convolvulus.”
“Not versus, Lisa,” he said, stroking the adorable soft down on her arm. “Intertwined–their stripped genes mingling, just like us.” He recalled her dirty laugh as she kicked off her chinos, and tugged at his.
He should’ve known better. Bindweed was a hell of a wild plant. It could kill shrubs and small trees by strangulation. It propagated via seeds and runners as well as roots. His prototype GM version had unpredictable side effects. He couldn’t understand where he’d gone wrong. He never assumed... Lisa’s father, a physician, once quizzed him on assumptions.
“Piero,” he’d said, sucking his pipe; empty for three years. “You think you know everything.”
“Not at all, sir. Like Socrates, ‘my knowledge only informs me of the extent of my ignorance.’”
“You think you’re Socrates?” he said, tapping the side of his head for Lisa’s benefit.
“That’s not what I meant...”
“He was put to death, wasn’t he?”
Piero found communicating with people so difficult compared to plants. On the other hand, this blasted Convolvulus...
He raised his head over the parapet of the single-floor laboratory roof. All he could see was a living green carpet speckled with pink and white flowers. Where a month ago a sandy desert stretched to the Sandia Mountain horizon, now his creation, Convolvulus-M-2 thrived. It sucked moisture out of the air, and used sunlight and salts as food; a perfect eco-warrior.
THE LAB WORKERS had to be dressed in protective suits and the rows of C-M variants grew in hermetically sealed cloches, which were housed in an air-filtered glasshouse lab.
Lisa called, “Hey, Piero, come and look at your new bindweed.”
He left the computer modelling and walked over to her station. He still found it amazing that she picked him out of all the better-looking guys that fought for her. A younger version of Sophia Loren in looks, but with brains, and demonstrating good taste in partners. Hey, the long-haired git next to her was whispering in her ear. What was his name? Alonso. So operatic.
She laughed at whatever Alonso had breathed. Piero knew he shouldn’t let jealousy strangle him but he couldn’t help himself. He forced himself between them. The engineer sniggered and left.
Focus on the work, Piero, he told himself.
Lisa controlled robotic arms to snip cuttings but he could see from the ones she’d done yesterday, that they’d rooted and had a healthy green sheen.
“It sure is growing fast,” he said. “It must be doubling in mass every twelve hours. That has to slow down.”
“No doubt, but the only properties of the maize in the hybrid is its vertical stem strength. There’s not going to be any cobs as we know them. The board won’t be happy.”
“Yeah, the leaf mass isn’t so protein-rich. Kill this batch, Lisa.”
He watched as she withdrew the arms and flipped a switch that released a powerful herbicide.
“Shall I do the others?” she said. “None of these five rows produce cobs.”
Reluctantly, he agreed, knowing that there were over a hundred other variants in the complex. Surely one of the strains will work.
Most of the staff lived in nearby Albuquerque, but Piero and Lisa lived in a newly-built apartment block on site. As did Alonso. They’d stayed up late watching and criticizing a re-run of The Andromeda Strain when they were startled by the breach alarm. Piero glanced at his computer and saw the alerted sensor was from the batch they’d destroyed. Zooming in on the CCTV showed that far from being withered, the plants had reached the cloche roof and broken through.
Piero phoned the duty manager, whose face never looked greyer. “Burn them, Clive. Better incinerate the whole glasshouse, in case of contamination.”
Lisa held her hand up to her head as if she’d a migraine. “Oh no, that’s going to terminate a quarter of the stock.”
“It can’t be helped. At least we know not to use Paraquat on the new plants.”
HE RISKED TURNING ON his cellphone again. Maybe the Convolvulus didn’t home in on sound anyway. What were they–Triffids? It’s a pity seawater wasn’t a simple solution for disposing of his bindweed.
Piero knew he could’ve been away by now. His fault for returning to the lab too long after the breakout, in the hope of gathering the computer data for clues.
“Lisa, where is that chopper?”
“I thought you told me you were fine and so I could cancel it?”
As he rehearsed a choice reply, he saw a green tendril appear over the parapet.
HE NEARLY DISLOCATED his jaw when he saw the burnt out glasshouse. Sure, there was plenty of ash, blackened glass shards and sooty soil. But physically writhing beneath were shoots and ridiculously healthy growth that had resisted the flames.
Lisa dragged him away to look at CCTV footage. On contact with the flames milky sap spurted over the leaves.
“It looks more like rubber-tree latex than bindweed sap,” he said.
A petri dish was put in front of him by a blond labtech. Piero looked at her, remembering she was Angeline, normally drop-dead gorgeous, but she looked as tired as the loser in a half-marathon. Why couldn’t Alonso go with her instead of with…
Focus.
He looked at the covered dish. Lacerated bindweed stems oozed the milky liquid. The young woman offered Piero a book of matches. He noted they were from the Blooz Club, a popular jazz club in Albuquerque. Taking the dish and matches to a nearby gloved control box, he placed the matches and dish inside and removed its lid. With his hands inside the glove he struck a match and held it an inch over the dish. Immediately, more sap oozed from the stems and some fluid spat up at the flame, which phutted out.
“So we can’t burn it, unless, possibly, we use furnace temperatures. And we can’t use Paraquat, Roundup or Milestone. We’d better get onto DuPont and try a range of other herbicides and do some simulated stochastic and biochemistry tests to see if other types of herbicide might slow the damn weed’s growth. Oh,” he said, bringing a magnifying pane into play. “Shredding won’t work.” The lacerated stems had sprouted trichome root hairs.
“Perhaps we’ve solved the world’s food problem,” said Angeline.
“There’s plenty of food for more than twice the world’s population,” said Lisa. “It’s just that it’s on the wrong plates.”
“I was only joking,” said Angeline. “For one thing, the sap is caustic, and it’s in the flowers and leaves as well as the stem.”
LISA’S CELLPHONE VOICE sounded sarcastic. “You’re not actually afraid of our bindweed hybrid, are you?”
“Of course not.” Yes. He rushed over to the bindweed that had scaled the parapet, grabbed the waving shoot and being careful not to break it, eased it backwards. It was like being a medieval castle defender pushing back ladders. While upright, he looked at the dusty road he’d driven along the previous day. It was as green as the rest of the desert. Was he being too soft? Could he make his way down the plant-encrusted fire-escape outside, or the interior of the labs? The inside was out of the question. He’d come to the roof after calling Lisa to arrange a helicopter because the plants had outgrown the labs, choked the corridors and were now pushing at the rooftop door. He’d seen the burns on a technician’s skin when a cut leaf brushed him. One man–pity it wasn’t Alonso–had asphyxiated with a reaction akin to an anaphylactic shock and died. Others were hospitalized and none returned.
“Didn’t you bring your protective suit up with you?”
He’d forgotten she was speaking. What else had she said? Fear addles the brain.
“I forgot.”
“Make a run for it. You should be able to trample on the plant without hurting yourself.”
“You should see it. Hey, I’ll send you a cam-shot. There. See how it’s about waist high near the Jeep in the carpark?”
“Keep your trousers on then. Sorry. Actually, you’d better wait up there for the chopper.”
“Lisa, the plant seems more aggressive, wrestling with each other as tendrils look for anchor points. I’m sure my ankles would be grabbed in seconds. I’d be buried in minutes, ironically, in a green living coffin.”
“You said you wanted an eco-funeral.”
“True, in another eighty years, please.”
“ETA fifteen minutes. Hang on.”
He sniffed, the scientist in him fascinated by the absence of desert smells. The ubiquitous dusty sand had given way to the suggestion of lily of the valley. The bindweed sprouted a profusion of pink and white trumpet flowers. No doubt, swarms of insects would buzz by in the next few days, eager to collect nectar.
“Piero, Green Venture Inc. has reported the plant to the Governor, implicating you as the culprit.”
“Thanks for that, Lisa. We guessed he might. Survival is the issue at the moment though. Any news from your end how far our Convolvulus strain has reached?”
“As far as I could tell when I flew out two days ago it remains in the desert. Even so, it occupies maybe over a hundred square miles and approaching the outskirts of Albuquerque. If any of the technicians took any part of the plant outside the region then it would spread there too.”
“Lisa, can you think of any reason why it might not spread into wetter and cooler regions? I can’t.”
The thought of the Earth swallowed by a plant both intrigued and terrified him. He had to assume there was something in the local environment; the heat, lack of pollution, some rare salts in the desert soil–anything. Wishful thinking was all he could cling to...
“Aaarrgh, Lisa.”
“What! Piero have you been caught? Watch your back.”
“No. Not yet. But those insects, the ones that’ll come to these millions of bindweed flowers; the bees no doubt on their way, would take pollen as well as nectar back to their home territories.”
“Maybe birds would pounce on them, but then they too would spread the plants.”
He’d initiated a subset ecosystem.
The rustling sounded like a million whispers.
“Piero, you’ll be all right. This isn’t your way of getting out of meeting my folks in LA on Sunday, is it?”
He’d forgotten. She must like him more than Alonso after all. He allowed himself a smile.
“Hey, I can hear the chopper.” He stood just as three more tendrils pushed over the parapet. He didn’t bother pushing them back, but kept glancing at them as the red and white Sikorsky out-noised the Convolvulus.
A harness was lowered to him, and he eagerly slipped into it.
“I’m ready,” he yelled, as if the crew could hear him. They must see him and yet moments passed with no upward relief. “Come on, damn you.”
The insane thought maybe the pilot was in league with the Convolvulus heated his brain. Bright green tendrils licked upwards like flames at the rescue ladder.
Finally, the ladder took him upwards away from his vernal nightmare. As his feet kicked at green shoots, he laughed hysterically, but only for a moment. His reprieve tempered by the new view of the disaster he’d caused.
Rough hands hauled him into the cockpit. The feeling of relief ran through him even though there was work left to do in eliminating the bindweed left behind. A crewmember handed him a can of cola. Piero nodded his thanks, looked out at the green carpeted desert and noticed a green shoot curling around the open doorway, heading towards his foot.