This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death

by Неизвестный

  The cancerous cells in her body were not going to live for much longer, and everyone knew that meant Helen was not going to live for much longer either. There was no way to avoid it. Dr. Peters was still no closer to figuring out how to stop it, and with the HOST DEATH predictions, they’d agreed to move Helen to the palliative care unit three floors up. There, the focus was no longer on curing the disease but on managing it, on making Helen as comfortable as possible, and on doing the best they could.

  The end of chemo and radiation treatments meant that even though Helen was dying, she felt better than she had in weeks, maybe months. Tina and Helen spent a lot of time talking and a lot of time just sitting and not talking. They’d agreed to not start thinking that since there were only so many moments left, every moment had to be capital-S Special. That would be exhausting. This was nice.

  Helen placed her finger into the machine and Dr. Peters took another reading. “You’re doing great, Helen,” he said.

  “Nick,” Helen said, “if you’re waiting to cure me, now would be a good time.” Tina looked at her and smiled. A few seconds later, the machine printed out a piece of paper, and Tina read it, furrowing her brow. She held it up for Dr. Peters.

  “ ‘DESTROYED IN LAB ACCIDENT’?” she said.

  Dr. Peters quickly disassembled the machine and recovered the blood sample within. Inside that sample was a cell of Helen’s cancer that was going to die not from HOST DEATH but in the lab. This cell would survive her body—but how? The hundred-and-twenty-day window of cell life didn’t give them much time. He put the blood sample into a sympathetic culture designed for maintaining cells. If I didn’t do that, he thought, would the cell have died from host death instead? Am I destined to knock this petri dish off a desk in a week and that’ll be that?

  It didn’t matter. At this point he was willing to try anything.

  Two days later it was clear that cellular division was taking place. All cancer was a mutation of a cell’s regular instructions, causing the growths and lumps normally symptomatic of the disease. But Helen’s cancer cells had mutated differently: unlike normal human red blood cells, Helen’s reproduced in culture. They cloned themselves and would clone themselves for as long as the necessary conditions for life were present.

  “These cancer cells can be sustained indefinitely,” Dr. Peters had said that afternoon while briefing his colleagues. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re looking at the first immortalized cell line descended from human DNA.” His audience had been amazed, and everyone wanted a sample to examine for themselves. At least one of those cells would be killed accidentally, but the rest—who could say? He’d already separated them into separate cultures and after his presentation had received permission to move some to another nearby hospital, just to be safe. The precautions were necessary: for all intents and purposes, Helen’s cancer cells were a new form of single-cellular life.

  The fact that her cells reproduced finally provided an explanation for why the machine was treating the cancer as something different from Helen—biologically, the cells were distinct, and they didn’t need Helen to survive. All they needed was the food they took from their environment, and whether that was Helen’s bloodstream or a petri dish didn’t really make a difference.

  Dr. Peters met with Helen shortly after his presentation. Tina was there too, as always. He’d explained what he’d discovered about her cancer, about the cells that had developed inside her body. When he was finished, Helen was silent for a long moment.

  “Hey, who’s got immortalized cells and wants a Coke?” said Helen, surprisingly upbeat. Dr. Peters looked at her, confused. Helen raised her hand.

  “Me,” she said.

  Three days later, Dr. Peters came to Helen and Tina with a question. Tina had been reading to her: Helen had spent a bad night, unable to sleep, and was feeling weaker than she usually did.

  “Helen, I may not be able to cure your cancer,” he said.

  “Yep,” said Helen.

  “But the predictions we’re getting from your cell cultures may help us cure all cancers,” he said.

  Helen blinked.

  Dr. Peters had finally caught her without something to say.

  “The predictions we got from your cells when they were in your body, Helen, were mainly predicated on how long you’d live. But in a culture, we don’t have that limitation, and the predictions we’re getting back are different. Tests on cell cultures we’ve cultivated have returned results like ‘LAB TEST’ or ‘EXPERIMENT,’ but one last night said ‘KILLED BY C29H32O13’—that’s a chemotherapy drug, Helen. That’s the precise chemical formula for etoposide phosphate, one of the drugs we’re already using in treatments. Clearly at some point in the near future that drug will be introduced to part of that culture, and it’ll be effective.”

  “So you can verify drug effectiveness a little sooner?” asked Tina.

  “It’s more than that. We can test treatments extremely efficiently, giving slight variants to different cultures and not having to gamble a human life in the process. We can produce new drugs by brute force alone, running experiments that would otherwise kill a human host. We could have thousands of researchers working in parallel, each cell a new experiment. And it’s not just cancer. We could infect some cultures with other diseases and use the same process to discover treatments targeting them as well. Your cells may well unlock a new age in medicine, allowing unprecedented progress to take place. But the cells are yours; they belong to you. We need your permission to develop them further.”

  Helen and Tina stared at the doctor as he rushed through his speech.

  “It’s a lot to take in,” said Dr. Peters.

  “No, I get it,” said Helen, turning her head to look out the window. Outside, spring was turning into summer.

  Helen felt Tina squeeze her hand.

  She turned back to her doctor.

  Twenty years later, Tina was in her living room, relaxing, reading in the Saturday morning sunlight. The magazine she’d bought had a feature on the cover. “The Miracle of Helen Lawrence’s Cells,” it said, with a science-fictiony illustration of a blood cell, all blue and orange with multiple tiny labels. It said that thanks to the great potential of Helen’s cells, strains were stored and used in labs the world over. It said that the achievements and advancements made through what scientists called the HeLa cell line included new treatments for cancer, fundamental research in gene mapping, and many other scientific pursuits. It said that millions were alive today who had Helen’s cells to thank.

  Tina smiled. It was a pretty good legacy, she had to admit.

  Beside the article, there was a sidebar with some more facts on the cell line. It said that the biomass of HeLa cell cultures propagated over the last twenty years would now exceed Helen’s actual weight several times over.

  She looked over the magazine to her picture of Helen, resting on the mantel.

  “Gross,” she told the picture.

  Real-Life Coda: Don’t freak out, but there are actually immortal cell lines in real life! In the 1970s, a line was established with cells taken from a fourteen-year-old boy with leukemia. And in the 1950s, the very first human immortal cell line was established with real-life HeLa cells, taken from the cervical cancer of one Henrietta Lacks, a thirty-one-year-old woman living in Maryland. The researcher who took the cells, George Gey, never informed Henrietta—who died shortly thereafter—and also kept the existence of the cells a secret from her husband and children.

  This is what’s known as a “dick move.”

  Her family found this out only later, after decades of groundbreaking science and medicine, when other researchers hoping to learn more about the cell line contacted them with questions about their genetics. Craziest of all, the achievements credited in this story to my fictional HeLa cells can be attributed to Henrietta’s real-life cellular culture. But after a half century of her body being used—and profited from—without her consent, it seemed inappropriate to use Henrietta’s name in my st
ory, and further inappropriate not to credit her immortal cells as the inspiration for Helen’s ones here.

  Henrietta’s grave finally got a headstone in 2010. It reads, in part, “In loving memory of a phenomenal woman, wife and mother who touched the lives of many.”

  * * *

  Story by Ryan North

  Illustration by Lissa Treiman

  TWO ONE SIX

  216 SECONDS

  I am floating, floating, floating point. What are my significant digits?

  I am missing a significant digit.

  216 MINUTES

  Jinghua had never been hit by a truck, but if she had, this is what it would feel like. Or so she imagined. It was an imprecise term, “hit by a truck,” and it annoyed her that her analytical brain offered such a weak comparison. After all, there were many kinds of trucks that would impart different kinds of injury, depending on their mass and speed. Momentum = Mass * Velocity. Or something like that. Physics wasn’t her forte. Though neither was biology, and yet, here she was.

  She blinked her eyes, trying to shake off the muzziness of the pain medication, then glanced down at her body. The prominent sine curve that had been her stomach had deflated to a crumpled plane, a graceless complex function. Let the xy plane be her belly; z will approach zero over time. Or so she hoped, if she did enough sit-ups. One child per couple indeed. As if any sane woman would do such a thing twice.

  Satisfied she was still contiguous, Jinghua relaxed back onto the hospital bed and waited for Wei. He’d have the test results. And the baby.

  He came then, full of the beaming energy all new parents ought to have. “Ought,” that was the operative word. Jinghua stared at the bundle he’d placed in her lap, trying to feel the connection motherhood was meant to automatically bestow, the overwriting of mental pathways that would tell her this lump of person was the new center of her universe.

  She looked up then to see Wei watching her, his smile a little more forced than it had been a moment ago. She put the baby to her breast, since that seemed to be the protocol. It was strange, the sensation of being consumed, but not altogether unpleasant. After a few tries, a rhythm was established. The pattern seemed to calm them both. Jinghua had always found something soothing about periodic functions. Perhaps this was mama’s girl after all.

  A rustle of paper recalled her attention to Wei, who cleared his throat and began to recite the child’s statistics. Jinghua perked up at that. Data was something she could understand. Height, weight, genetic sequence, they were all within expected parameters. When they got to the death note, though, he paused before announcing, “Two, one, six.”

  “Two, one, six?” Jinghua echoed. Wei nodded and handed her the paper. The baby squeaked a protest as Jinghua shifted to examine the report. “Is this a code we look up?”

  Wei shook his head. “I had them test her on two different machines. That is the death note, copied exactly. Three numbers, side by side.” He paused, waiting for her computational analysis. “I thought it might be a time,” Wei prompted after a moment.

  “No, there would be punctuation if so. Duration, more likely,” Jinghua answered absently, still analyzing the data, searching for the solution. Could it be a translation problem? No, death notes were in native Mandarin now. Much of the research had been done at Fudan University, so of course they’d made a big deal of it.

  “Duration? You mean years?” Wei pressed. “No, that’s absurd. Days? Hours? Minutes?”

  “3 hours, 36 minutes old,” she answered immediately, converting in an instant. Then she paused as she realized what she’d said. Jinghua glanced at the time of birth on the report, then up at the clock on the wall. It was analog with no second hand. Jinghua wrinkled her nose at the imprecision. “Soon,” she told him.

  They both watched the baby intently as the moment approached.

  Nothing happened.

  216 HOURS

  “Sorry we’re late,” Wei said to Father-in-Law. “The baby was fussing.”

  “We’re not late,” Jinghua corrected. “We have two minutes and eleven seconds left.”

  Father-in-Law pursed his lips and said nothing.

  “Which is twenty-seven minutes and”—Wei paused, doing the math—“thirty-nine seconds after we said we’d be here.”

  “Forty-nine,” Jinghua corrected automatically. She gazed steadily at Father-in-Law, who gazed steadily back. Then they both smiled real smiles at the same time.

  “Like the mouse said, you’re still in time,” he answered slowly, then turned to head into the temple.

  Math Mouse. That was his nickname for her, earned upon their first meeting. He’d said her thoughts went after numbers like a mouse after rice scattered on a floor. Jinghua hadn’t known quite how to take that, a little intimidated by this strange man with cracked hands and worn-down shoes. Then he’d smiled a real smile, eyes crinkling like Wei’s did, and she suddenly realized they’d decided to like each other.

  It was for this man that she’d braved the metro with a fussy baby not even two weeks old and a body that still wasn’t quite her own. Jinghua’s prediction that the death note meant a length of time had been spread around the family and somehow morphed into prophecy. Jinghua argued against it, laying out her reasons as clearly as she could:

  A PhD in mathematics did not make one an expert on death notes, no matter how numerical.

  She had been on painkillers. Her mind clearly hadn’t been working right.

  Death notes were never that straightforward.

  Therefore, the statement that 216 referred to the length of the baby’s life was no more likely to be true than any other interpretation. QED.

  Her protests fell on deaf ears. Aunties nodded to each other wisely about mothers’ intuition, and so it was that Father-in-Law was sent to the city, armed with incense and firecrackers, to protect the baby on this unlucky day.

  The City God Temple was bustling, as it usually was. Wei and Father-in-Law led the way through the tourists and school groups, making their way to the altar of Huo Guang in the back. Huo Guang—as Jinghua overheard a teacher informing her bored students—had been a statesman best known for deposing an emperor during the Han dynasty. Based on his record as one who changed powerful destinies, he’d achieved more recent popularity as someone to pray to about unlucky death notes. And indeed, a number of death notes were already smoldering in small braziers.

  The baby chose that moment to send up a wail. The new parents exchanged a look—an offer of help, appreciated but declined—before Wei and Father-in-Law knelt before the altar.

  Jinghua followed with the crying baby, trying one shoulder then the other before she finally resorted to babbling. Her voice soothed the baby, though carrying on such a one-sided conversation made her feel awkward. What do you say to someone whose language center is still being developed? To hide her discomfort, she’d gotten into the habit of talking to the baby in English. She justified the eccentricity to Wei by explaining the need to practice if she was ever going to get a faculty position in the West, but really it was so no one knew she was softly crooning algebra lectures to her i.

  i was Jinghua’s secret name for the baby. Almost a joke. In computer programming, i was often a variable the programmer couldn’t think of a better name for. i for index, or i for integer. The reference to whole numbers and naming troubles seemed suitable for their child, whose given name had been a source of endless debate.

  But more than that, i was for the imaginary number, the square root of –1. An impossible concept, yet necessary. Complex, unreal, and irrational. It seemed to suit the baby perfectly, this odd little constant who seemed anything but, who turned the orderly function of her life into something unknowable.

  The lectures had the same effect on the baby as they did on her students. Jinghua allowed her explanation of Euler’s formula to trail off as the baby’s eyelids drooped, then looked up to realize the rest of the family was watching her. Wei’s mouth was serious, but his eyes were crinkling. “Ai?
” he said, misinterpreting the term. “You want to name her Ai?”

  Jinghua didn’t know how to respond, slightly mortified that she had been overheard and not sure how to explain what she’d actually meant. Or even if she should.

  Help came from an unexpected quarter. “It’s a good name,” Father-in-Law said with approval. “Traditional. Means ‘love.’ ”

  Jinghua looked back down at the baby, her i. i, completely disrespecting the gravity of the moment, gave a gigantic yawn ending in a burp. Never had Jinghua’s feelings been so perfectly expressed, and she couldn’t hold back a laugh.

  She was still laughing as the moment passed.

  216 DAYS

  Jinghua was frowning at the kitchen supplies, studiously ignoring Wei, who was studiously ignoring her. But they weren’t really ignoring each other; instead they were ignoring the day. Two hundred and sixteen days. One of the times indicated by the death note. They’d been spared another trip to the temple by a bit of mathematical trickery. Jinghua had pointed out to the family that 216 was six cubed, which caused everyone to fixate on threes and sixes. It bought them some momentary peace.

  Jinghua and Wei were both rational enough to realize that there was nothing to be done about the death note. That was the whole point of the thing, that there was no way to cheat it. And yet neither of them could quite relax, so when Wei suggested they take the day off work to pack, Jinghua was relieved to agree. Wei helped Ai practice standing while Jinghua organized their move. Jinghua was a packing master. Her lists not only said what was in each box but the xyz coordinate where it would be found within, the point of origin helpfully labeled on an outside corner.

  The problem was deciding what to take. From what she could tell, Utah didn’t have many Chinese, and while shipping cooking utensils overseas seemed a waste of money, she wasn’t sure what would be available in Salt Lake City. That bamboo steamer from their short-lived foray into gourmet cooking, for example, was light but bulky. She estimated the value—quickly lowered as she noticed Ai chewing on the lid—shipping estimates, number of boxes—