Metamorphosis by Grist

Author:Grist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

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Ceiba pentandra was sequenced by machine learning years ago, one of a hundred species rendered down to its genetic code and evaluated for utility. But that was years ago, before recombination tech reached its current heights, and Minerva’s lab has been focused on adaptable lianas, carbon-sucking mosses.

When she goes to access its simulated DNA, hers is not the only user icon on the file. The lab in Guatemala, in cloudy Kob’an, is already at work. She pulls up a call window, sees Eduardo, one of her collaborators, with dark rings under his eyes but a gleam inside them. They speak over each other, but she knows they have dreamed the same dream.

The lab in Belize joins them a moment later: Celeste, the youngest biotech on the project, still tying up her jet-black curls. The three of them coordinate their efforts, sectioning up the code, hunting for the gene or genes they saw in the inframundo. Kike is already feeding possibilities into the sim queue.

Minerva works until her eyeballs ache and her eyelids scrape. Sometimes Ish pushes a glass of water into her hand, a thoughtful phantom in the void beyond her goggles. Sometimes she stretches her legs under the table, feels the flex of far-off tendons. Most often she is still as a rooted tree, only her eyes moving. She turns off all exterior notifications.

When the key arrives, a snippet of genetic material buried deep, a tiny unexpressed fragment of the ceiba’s long history, Minerva recognizes it like family. So do the others; they all three highlight it in nearly the same instant. They clear the sim queue, request processing power. They watch the sim grow begin.

It’s close to midnight when Minerva finally pulls off her goggles. Ish is slumped snoring across from her, head nesting in his folded arms. “It’s going to work,” she says, and the words are stones lifted from her chest. “We’ll need to make tweaks. We’ll need to run more sims. But it’s going to work.”

Ish only drools, but she doesn’t mind. There is someone else she wants to tell. She can stand the goggles a few minutes more; she is reaching to put them back on, to call her grandmother, when she sees her thumbnail screen is acid yellow. The message is not from the lab.

Her stomach plunges. She calls, and the hospice nurse answers. Explanation washes over her and only a few words emerge intact: arterial blockage, successive strokes, the second fatal. Her grandmother’s vitals had been so steady for so many weeks. So steady Minerva thought nothing of switching off notifications.

“She was conscious for a few moments in between,” the nurse says. “She asked where she was, and when she was going home.” He pauses. “And then she said Xibalbá was calling. Nos vemos en noviembre.”

Minerva pulls the goggles off, and weeps.

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