Ok so I added some stuff, subtracted other stuff, tried my damnedest to make the wife a more reasonable character, changed the ending, etc. It's still mostly the internal conflict of the main character, but I think the wife is now more, sympathetic maybe? She's less of some crazy woman who preaches all the time,instead she's just conservative/cautious and doesn't want things to change. The ending is still kinda abrupt but I can't think of anything to add right now, maybe I will later. I also didn't do any of the formatting I did for the last one, because I'm busy right now.
There were three things in the world that Jacob Billings could say he hated without reservation: his last name, the color sandalwood, and the Pope. The first was not on account of some historical wrong doing - indeed Billings was a name that had slunk through history practically unnoticed-but had to do with Jacob's chosen profession. Jacob, with a characteristic lack of foresight, had taken a job as an accountant in the billing department of Pribnow Incorporated. Puns connecting his name to his department had, naturally, become a daily annoyance. He had considered changing the name, but had never liked the prospect of having to explain to his supervisor how the constant use of the moniker “The Bill Man” had driven him to change his identity in lieu of suicide.
The hatred of sandalwood stemmed from the fact that the color seemed to prelude personal tragedy. It was the interior of the car in which his first teenage rendezvous had ended, far too quickly; it was his socks the day he fell down a flight of stairs, his first wife's dress the day she jauntily revealed her infidelity, and the color of the hospital room in which his grandmother had expressed her disappointment with his life choices before stroking out and staining the bed. He avoided the hated shade with religious zeal and for years refused to enter the paint isle of any hardware store for fear of glimpsing the wretched thing.
His final anathema, that of the Pope, revolved around his current wife and her strict adherence to specific aspects of dogma . Jacob considered himself to be a humble man, one who did his job and suffered the inanity of his colleagues before returning home with the desire to indulge in a few simple pleasures: a warm meal, a soft chair, a puff or two on the water pipe, and tinkering with genetics in his garage. If he wanted to spend his evenings smoking dope and cloning the hibiscus for kicks then he thought it well within his rights to do so. His wife, a woman to whom moral outrage was rare but fierce, thought otherwise. She considered herself a catholic, non-practicing, but with a habit of falling back on obscure doctrine when normal arguments didn't suffice. She'd take her birth control with a steak on Friday, but denounce his smoking; firstly because she disliked the smell and secondly because some long dead bishop disliked the habit . His hobby of “playing god in the garage” as she put it was a subject of constant debate, and her constant fall back was to drag out the virtual copy of Dignitas Personae, and point at one of a dozen passages which denounced Jacob, and any other mortal meddling in God's domain, as a hellbound heretics. He would then remind her that he didn't subscribe to her faith and the debate would end in awkward silence. His subsequent vilification of the Pope was simply an outlet for his frustration: in his mind it was far better to hate an old man who lived half a world away then to admit he couldn't agree with the woman who shared his bed. Convenience trumped reality, as it so often does.
While his hatred was particularly focused, Jacob's dislike was far from exclusive, and a great deal of it was centered around his neighbor's apple tree. The tree, which had its roots in his neighbor's yard but its canopy directly over Jacob's driveway, dumped a constant barrage of dead leaves and rotten fruit, which in turn elicited endless harassment from the Home Owners Association regarding his “unkempt parking area.” Negotiations for the tree's removal were stalled by the fact that they had never begun; Jacob's only interaction with his neighbor was the occasional wave and forced smile when the two accidentally left the house at the same time. It seemed, all together, far too awkward to even strike up a conversation, let alone request the removal of a major piece of landscape. The solution Jacob decided upon was, by his judgment, the simplest answer for all involved. And so, during the last weeks of winter, Jacob focused his attention and skill toward the pursuit of murder.
“What is that?” his wife asked as he stepped into the house, pointing at the machine cradled in his arms.
“Centrifuge” he muttered, already making a hasty retreat toward the garage.
“Where did you get that?”
“Company store, it was on sale.”
She frowned, “What's it for?”
Nothing special, I'm just going to use it to kill the apple tree because I'm tired of raking leaves for our asshole neighbor.
“To mix weed killer”
She narrowed her eyes and stared at him.
“You've never needed to mix the weed killer before.”
“It's a new formula.”
“It's not something you're making in that Frankenstein lab of yours?
“No, no, its some new brand from Pribnow. Kills the weeds without hurting your flowers”
“It had better not hurt my flowers.” she concluded sharply, pointing a sauce spotted wooden spoon at him, “The last kind practically wiped out my roses.” With that she returning to the pot simmering on the stove.
“Don't worry, I won't hurt the garden.” Jacob said, already closing the door behind him.
Once safe within the sanctuary of his garage, Jacob leaned against the door and stifled a giggle.
Mixing weed killer? That's the best I could come up with?
He set the centrifuge on his work bench and surveyed the room. The garage workshop was the culmination of tireless of scavenging, jury-rigging and repurposing: still air cabinets made from abandoned aquariums, drug store solvents, and baby food jars (now specimen containers), second hand medical tools, forceps, scalpels, and syringes, arrayed across sterilized metal plates, latex gloves, and disinfectant, homemade agar solution, a pressure cooker autoclave, and organic samples, both bought and stolen, plus an improvised and now obsolete centrifuge. The walls were papered in articles, magazine clippings, and internet printouts; years worth of self taught biology and chemistry on display. He smiled and ran a finger across the centrifuge's chrome base, tracing the Pribnow logo's double helix lovingly.
“Now then,” He said aloud, rousing himself from his technology addled stupor,“time to get started.”
The plan was simple, or at least as simple as genetic engineering in one's garage could be. His weapon was Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Crown Gall disease, a sample of which he'd stolen from the Pribnow botany lab. In nature the bacterium invaded the cells of plants, incorporating its DNA into plant's genetics and causing rampant, usually fatal, mutations. In the lab its capacity to edit the genes of plants was invaluable, allowing genetic engineers to meddle and splice with ease. Pribnow's signature holiday product, a tree with naturally glowing “Christmas light” tumors, was the end result of one young scientist's determination to splice firefly luciferase into a pine tree by way of this particular bacterium. Jacob's plans centered around his wife's orchids and the pollen they would release in the coming spring. With the proper modification this pollen, carried on the wind into the boughs of the apple tree, would deposit a fatal payload of modified Crown Gall. It would be untraceable, the scavenged tumor-inducing plasmids, opines, and transcription factors hidden within the pollen's genetic code.
While the plan was simple, the act of modifying the orchids would be difficult, Jacob lacked the knowledge and equipment necessary to preform on par with company engineers. They could covertly insert methamphetamine producing proteins into company cattle and still get the particularly addictive meat that resulted past even the most draconian FDA guidelines; he, on the other hand, would have to use brute force, the end result more then likely being a barely functional amalgam of junk DNA and vestigial proteins. It would be far from pretty or efficient, paling in comparison to works such a Jackson's prototype Organo-computer.
But, he thought with a smile, at least mine won't hemorrhage uncontrollably whenever it's exposed to an improper fraction.
***
“It's a recipe I found online.”
It's just chicken and noodles, nothing special.
“Had to go to one of those specialty non-Genetic Engineering shops to get the oregano.”
“Mhm”
“It's getting hard to find non-GE food these days, its flooding the market. The only places that sell normal stuff are those little shops on the north side, the ones near that naturalist commune. ”
“GE is easy to grow and you don't have to worry about bugs. Its cheaper too ”
“I know, that’s why all those big companies love it. But I think I'd prefer expensive and buggy to whatever they're doing with it.”
“It's not like it's untested.”
“You know they've got the FDA in their back pocket.”
“Even so, its not like you see people getting sick.”
“Not yet. Who knows what will happen later though.”
“But you could say that about anything, but then nothing would get better. We can't just sit around and ignore possible advances because it might be dangerous.”
His wife looked up from her plate, pausing half way through cutting her chicken.
“Is it wrong to be cautious?”
“I didn't say that.”
“You think we should just do whatever we feel like without thinking about it?”
Jacob said nothing, but turned toward the television; he'd heard this before.
Fighting continues to escalate along the border of East and West china.
“I'm not saying we should sit in a cave and never change.”
American soldiers and Western Chinese Militiamen successfully defended a Naturalist commune from Eastern invasion.
“But we can't just do things without considering the consequences.”
Japan has incited international outrage and condemnation from both scientific and Naturalist groups by continuing its nationally funded research into human cloning.
“The world would fall apart if we just chased any possibility without thinking ahead. ”
Japan defended its action, stating that its research will ultimately extend human lifetimes up to two hundred years.
“We could cause more problems than we solve.”
The President authorized further use of Orbital Kinetic Kill Vehicles against paramilitary groups in the Shaanxi province.
“I know you want to charge ahead and let everyone play god in the garage.”
The FDA has officially authorized use of Adenovirus gene therapy as a treatment for several types of cancer.
“But that's just too dangerous.”
Cloned pandas reintroduced into natural environment.
“Sometimes there are thing we're not meant to have.”
Laboratory grown organs ready for transplant
“Are you listening to me?”
“Huh?”
Jacob turned and faced his wife.
“Are you listening?”
“Of course.” Jacob replied as he turned the volume on the television up, “Of course.”
***
Jacob squatted next to the still air cabinet, and squinted through the condensation that had collected on the glass. The weak glow of the growing light was almost entirely obscured by branching leaves and premature blooms. Most of what he could see was brown or black, fatally mutated, with tumorous growths and great rotting patches. Amidst the strained and broken tissue grew the survivors, unopened buds hanging low, weighed with the promise of destruction. The orchids, cloned from the meristem cells of his wife's original, were nearing maturity as spring approached.
He stood and lifted the top of the growing chamber, coughing as the smell of fetid water and decaying flora belched forth and mingled with the harsh odor of peroxide in the air. He dug his fingers into the agar growth medium and lifted one of the surviving plants, along with a handful of agar and rotting vegetation, out of the cabinet. He replanted the orchid in a pot of agar and set about examining it with a magnifying glass. The desk light of his workbench revealed that the orchid was not as flawless as it had first appeared: dozens of tiny purplish tumors lined the stalk and the normally round leaves had become serrated and honeycombed with thin capillaries of the same hue as the tumors. Jacob bit his lip and set the magnifying glass aside.
“It's close, but not perfect.” he thought aloud, drumming his fingers on the surface of workbench. “If someone looked carefully they'd be able to tell it wasn't the same as the others.”
He sat in the office chair near the workbench, pulled off his latex gloves and run sweaty fingers through his hair. Genetic engineering with the intent to cause harm was a felony usually reserved for corporate scapegoats and homegrown terrorists toting vials of engineered hemorrhagics; it wasn't something that happened in the suburbs. Chances of being detected were slim, but these tumors were exactly the sort of thing that could do it.
And then there's her.
His eyes flicked toward the kitchen door.
The garden is hers and those orchids were the first thing she ever planted here. She knows them better then most mothers know their kids and I really don't want to see what she'd do if something happened to them.
He rolled the chair over to the plant and looked at it again, resting his head in his hands.
There's not enough time to make another batch;I'm not sure I could even come out this well. I can't delay it, a flower blooming later then all the others would just attract more attention. If I plant it in the center of the rest of the orchids she probably won't notice.
“Dinner is ready.” his wife called from inside.
Jacob stood and looked down at the plant for another instant, running his tongue over dry lips.
“It will have to do.”
***
Jacob lay in bed, watching the silver of moonlight and pale orange of the streetlights mingling together as they flowed across the ceiling. His wife had been asleep for hours by now, an uncertain and only vaguely human shape wrapped in blankets; she hated the cold. He had planted the weaponized flowers weeks ago in the dead of night, and so far no one had noticed. Both the apple tree and orchids were in full bloom, the air filled with buzzing insects and, with any luck, pollen aided death would soon descend upon his neighbor's foliage. Everything was going to plan, but he couldn't shake a sense of dread that had followed him ever since he'd first planted the modified orchid.
He drove home every night with the possibility that his wife had discovered the mutated plant hanging over him. He practiced excuses as he drove, and became increasingly desperate as he neared his destination. He tried to anticipate what the argument would be like, rebutting or placating her in his head. He stood outside, hand on the door knob, unable to step through for fear of the screaming that might come. He looked at her, or at least the vague shape of her beneath the blankets, and wondered what she would do if he just told her. She didn't like that tree any more then he did after all.
“Hey.” he whispered, “Hey.”
A groan surfaced from somewhere and the blankets shook as the body beneath them turned.
“Hey.”
“What?” her voice was barely audible, more grunt then reply.
“Would you let me work on some of your plants?”
“What? Work?”
“Yeah, try to some of the stuff that Biohobbyist magazine talks about.”
“Why?”
“Make the garden better.”
“It's already perfect.”
“But I could make the plants not need so much water, or make the aphids stay off them, or,”
“No.”
“But.”
“No. I don't like that lab of yours, it doesn't hurt anything though, so I don't mind you playing with it. But I don't want you messing with the garden.”
“But there is so much I could do.”
“No.”
He didn't respond and eventually she turned over and went back to sleep.
***
At first Jacob thought the ovoid mass of brown fur was a coconut, placed there by forces unknown. He stood, holding the car door, briefcase in hand, wondering what a coconut would be doing in the middle of his front yard. Was it a joke? Some esoteric technique that his wife had pulled from the forgotten reaches of a gardening website? He stepped closer.
“Oh. It's a squirrel.”
The mass of flesh on the carefully manicured grass was identifiable only by the incisors jutting out of what was once a head. The rest of the body was twisted beyond recognition: Limbs bent at unnatural angles as boney tumors dislocated joints, organs laden with cancerous growths split the skin and fused to the hair, and the entire creature had swollen several times its original size. He looked at his neighbor's apple tree. It had been several weeks since the spring bloom, and the poison pollen had done exactly what it was designed to. The tree was laden with great, bloated protuberances which hung and collected like obese flesh across the entire length of the trunk and branches. Obscene and misshapen apples hung from its blighted branches. He looked back at the corpse on the lawn. His stomach tightened.
“Huh.”
He opened the garage, retrieved a shovel and garbage bag, and disposed of the carcass, dumping it in his neighbor's can. He went inside, changed his clothes, and sat down on the edge of the bed, looking at his feet until his wife called him for dinner. He watched the news and ate dinner without without a word, hands shaking slightly. After dinner he stood in the back yard and watched the sun set; as the reds and yellows gave way to dark blue and uncertain shadow he began to pace. He walked to one end of the yard and back again, stopping every so often to run his hands through his hair and shuffle uneasily before pacing again.
It jumped. Not between species but between kingdoms. How is that even possible? Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe the squirrel ate some of the effected fruit? Would that do anything?
He closed his eyes and tried in vain to remember if any of the articles in Biohobbyist magazine talked about something similar.
I know Pribnow uses it to modify animals, but that's a specialized strain, and this is infecting plants as well. Something is different, the medium of infection has changed. Type III infects plants, Type IV infects animals, or was it the other way around?
He stopped and chewed his thumbnail, staring at the bushes lining the backyard. How long till they developed tumors; long long till he did as well?
Is it my fault? Something in one of my processes? Maybe my cells got in the mix. Or I damaged the original bacterium and forced a mutation. Could be natural, some combination of junk DNA or a rudimentary protein syringe. Everything was packed in so haphazardly, anything could have coalesced out of that mess.
“What are you doing out here?” a voice asked from behind him. His wife stood in doorway between the kitchen and the backyard, a silhouette leaning against the door frame with its arms crossed.
“Nothing,” He called back to her, “Just thinking.”
“Everything all right? You've been quiet today.”
“Yeah. Everything is fine, don't worry.”
“Are you sure?”
He smiled, not sure if she could see him. “Yeah. Everything is fine.”
She was silent, her face indiscernible in the dark. After a moment she spoke.
“Alright, just come in soon. It's cold out.”
“I will.”
She pushed herself off the door frame and disappeared into the house, closing the door behind her. Jacob lowered himself down onto the lawn and began picking out blades of grass absentmindedly.
Doesn't really matter how it happened I guess. Even if I knew it wouldn't help me fix it.
He leaned back, propped himself up on his arms, and looked at his house. He'd bought it a dozen years ago with his first wife and it was practically the only thing she'd left him with. It was white when he'd bought it, but the Home Owners Association made him repaint it some asinine color called “Eden's breeze”; which he quickly found was an overwrought pseudonym for gray. The bushes and flowers that bordered the yard were his current wife's work, something begun the day she moved in and continued ever since. She'd given him some sort of incredibly sappy reasoning as to why she wanted to plant a seed on their first day living together, but he couldn't remember what it was, only that he'd laughed at it. As he watched the stucco walls fade to silhouette, back lit by orange streetlights, he felt something else was slipping away with them, something that wouldn't return the next morning.
When was the last time I asked her if she was all right?
He couldn't remember.
***
“Extreme heterozygotes.”
Jacob lay the printout on surface of the workbench and re-read it. It was one of dozens of articles he'd scavenged in search of a solution for rogue bacterium he'd created. He didn't understand it all, the writers at Agri-culture magazine seemed much less inclined to write for the relative layman then those at Biohobbyist, but he was able to decipher the important parts. It was a long and painfully thorough outcry against the use of apple seeds as a method of plant cultivation. Buried in graphs of projected growth and highlighted genome fragments was the phrase, “The common apple is known for its extreme heterozygosity, and its seeds are prone to drastic mutation. ” It wasn't much, but it gave him an idea.
The apples which had grown from his neighbor's tree had been exposed to the bacterium since pollination, and there was no telling what sort of side effects it would have upon the seeds within. It was possible that exposure had forced some sort of alteration in their already volatile genetic code. If this was true, then those seeds might very well contain some sort of adaption, a jury-rigging immunity to the disease that had claimed their forebearer. Even if they didn't, they would surely contain clues about how the bacterium worked. It was a long shot, based on assumptions that could very well be false, but it was somewhere to start. He needed to get the seeds to Pribnow, use the machines there, and maybe even enlist the aid of an engineer, if he could find one willing to keep their mouth shut.
Jacob suppressed the urge to run as he entered the kitchen, leaven the garage door open behind him, and passed his wife on the way out to the front lawn. The sun was setting and his neighbor was thankfully absent as Jacob crossed the yard, and stood beneath the tree. The leaves were gone, the bark black and peeling, and the limbs were twisted and broken toward the darkening sky. Fruit lay scattered and rotting, anemic roots covered with leaves of fading orange and yellow. Cradled in the dark boughs, eclipsing the sun behind it, hung the last fruit; its flesh red and dappled yellow, swollen but unblemished. The branches seemed to curl around it, protective and forbidding. He reached out with both hands and pulled; it offered no resistance. He walked back, through the empty kitchen and open garage door. He set the apple on workbench and looked for a scalpel to cut it with.
“What is this?”
Jacob's mouth went dry. His wife stood in the corner of the room, wet plate and dishtowel still in hand, staring at the growing chamber.
“Are these orchids? My orchids?”
“Not exactly.”
“What did you do to them? Why do they look like this? They look like,” Her eyes grew wide, “They look like the tree next door.”
Jacob looked away from her, fists clenched tight, and blood pumping in his ears.
“What did you do?” she asked again, her voice low.
“I used them. To poison the tree.”
“Why?”
“Because,” He paused, “Because I was tired of raking all those fucking leaves.”
“You poisoned my flowers so you wouldn't have to rake leaves anymore?” Her mouth hung open, her chest rising and falling rapidly. She started for the door but he stepped in front of her.
“It's still out there.”
“What?”
“The poison, it's still out there. In the air, the pollen. I think it might affect people too.”
“It's not a poison, is it? It's something you made in here.”
He didn't answer.
“I told you. I told you!”
“Yes, I know.”
“I told you not to touch the garden.”
“ I know, I'm sorry. I'll fix this.”
“How can you fix this?”
“With this.” He placed his hand on the apple, “The cure is in here, all I need to do is get it out.”
“That's what got us into this Jacob.”
“I know, but it's the only thing that can get us out again.”
“Jacob, you can't keep doing this. Don't you see what this has already caused? We can't solve problems using the same thing that caused those problems.”
“There's no other way.”
Her eyes darted about as she tried to think of some sort of rebuttal. Finally, with a frustrated gasp she said, “God doesn't want us to have it.”
“If he didn't want us to have it, why did he put it here?”
She couldn't answer, only stare, chest heaving with ragged breaths. Jacob turned to the table and placed his hands on the fruit.
“The garden is already dead, we have to use what it gave us. Otherwise, what was the point?”
She didn't say anything, no approval, but no protest either.
“We have to go, we can't stay here anymore. I have to get this to Pribnow, and let the CDC know whats going on here. They'll have to evacuate the area.”
“We won't be coming back here will we?”
“I don't think anyone will be able to.”
Author
Topic: Another short story: The Apple (updated) (Read 2198 times)