The Offset

by Calder Szewczak

  “Must be,” he replies and then quickly presses on, turning to point out the large corpse flowers, adding that they are fortunately distant enough not to be subjected to the distinctive rotting stench they emit.

  Looming over everything else in the very middle of the greenhouse is a tall octagonal structure. This, the Personal Assistant tells them, is where the real work of Project Salix is conducted. A narrow spiral staircase leads down from the veranda into the maze of glass cubicles below. Following his lead, they set off down the steps and make for the octagon. Inside, everything is silent except for the ordered swoosh and beep of a hundred priceless machines. The stacks spread out before them, wild with willow trees at various stages of life. Some stand tall in soil containers, others grow up and out from experimental pods and floating pots. Smaller saplings grow in hydroponic tanks or on agar plates under the bright lights of incubating houses; others still are kept in suspended animation under bell jars and in airtight vacuum cabinets. Within the tub she carries, Miri can feel the white rat is squirming more than ever in the heat, but she keeps a tight grip on the plastic.

  Towering high above everything else in the greenhouse is what the Personal Assistant describes as the founding tree, the first willow bred for Project Salix. Its thick trunk, grey-brown and deeply fissured, culminates in a knotted crown that then branches out into taller, thinner limbs which stretch up towards the glass roof. From these hang hundreds of thin, whip-like stems, each one bristling with leaves. These are long and tapered, a very light green on one side and, on the other, silvery pale.

  The tree, he tells them, is the first willow that was successfully engineered to be radiation hardy. For the project to work, the tree’s native DNA repair machinery had to be replaced with that of a radiation-resistant bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans, to protect the trees from mutations caused by nuclear fallout. It was that groundbreaking transformation, he explains, that means the trees can now survive the ARZ.

  “I suppose you’re both familiar with the term ‘ARZ’?”

  Alix catches herself mid-nod and turns to Miri with a questioning look. Miri shrugs.

  “How about the Kvanefjeld disaster?”

  Miri shrugs again. There is something about that name that sounds familiar, but if she ever did know what it means, she has long since forgotten.

  “It was the accident that turned the Arctic into a nuclear wasteland,” says Alix patiently, glancing over to the Personal Assistant as though to tell him to step in if she misses anything out. “It all started in the Barents Sea. That’s where the Russians established a series of floating nuclear power stations. Despite the warnings of past calamities, it was claimed the stations were perfectly safe, precisely engineered to prevent the kind of disasters that had given nuclear energy a bad name… this was long before my time, of course, but I believe there were protests when the stations were first set up?”

  “Several,” confirms the Personal Assistant. “Not that it made any difference.”

  “No, I suppose it wouldn’t have. Well, as I understand it, several years passed after that without incident. The stations were seen as a success, and their example was used to establish more nuclear plants all over the world – including one in the Kvanefjeld. Which is where, Miri?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “It’s in Greenland,” says the Personal Assistant, stepping in. “Not all that far from the site of an old uranium mine.”

  “Sounds like a stupid place for a nuclear station.”

  Alix half-smiles, half-frowns. “You’re on the side of the history books there.”

  “So what happened?” Miri asks, interested in spite of herself.

  “There was a tsunami. One of the most powerful ever recorded, on a scale never before seen in the Arctic. The floating stations had wave defences, I think, but nothing that could withstand anything on that scale. One by one, the plants were dislocated from their anchor bases. They drifted…” As she speaks, Alix raises her hands flat before her, then skates them through the air until they collide. Her hands explode apart to show the violence of the impact. “Every time the vessels smashed into one another or the shoreline,” she continues, “it triggered a catastrophic nuclear explosion. Some drifted for hundreds of miles before they crashed.”

  “And one such station was the Akademik Lomonosov,” interjects the Personal Assistant. “It was cast out from Kola Bay and made it all the way across to Greenland, where it crashed into the shore just below the Kvanefjeld. They say the impact of the explosion was like an earthquake and it triggered another, much larger explosion in the power plant there.”

  Alix nods, sombre. “Around one hundred people died immediately. Many, many more were directly affected and suffered greatly.” There is a brief pause, a moment to consider the upheaval, the brutal loss of life. Then, with a wave of her hand to dismiss the ghosts of disasters past, Alix goes on. “From that day to this, the entire Arctic continent has been in an exclusion zone, considered too dangerous for any human to enter and survive. It became the ARZ – the Arctic Remedial Zone – when it passed into neutral international governance nearly twenty years ago. The only things that can survive there are your mother’s radiation-hard trees and the robots that tend to them.”

  Miri doesn’t know what to say. She throws her head back to peer at the branching tree that rises above. “So if this tree was uprooted and moved to the ARZ–”

  “It would be just fine. This is the very first willow sapling that the team successfully transformed, the very first tree to express the bacterial genes that make it radiation resistant.”

  “That’s right,” says the Personal Assistant, smiling broadly. “And terrible though the Kvanefjeld disaster was, you might say it all worked out for the best. Greenland was a good site for us anyway: the world’s largest plantable tundra; average annual temperatures of fifteen degrees; moist, loam-rich soil… and because it’s in the ARZ, it’s entirely uninhabited. That means it qualifies as the world’s most stable location in the Global North Peace Index. We have eleven billion trees out there now, and all of them thriving.”

  “This one certainly seems to be doing very well,” says Alix, returning his smile.

  The willow in front of them stands at almost fifty-seven feet tall. It is, the Personal Assistant says, affectionately referred to throughout the Borlaug as Salix boltanskiae and will live out the rest of its days in the greenhouse.

  Miri considers this briefly, adjusting her hold on the tub as her palms grow slick against the plastic. Then an idea comes to her. With a silent apology, she drops the tub heavily onto the floor. The lid flies off and the rat – startled and disoriented – lets out an agitated squeak and scurries away across the greenhouse floor, pink tail whipping along behind and the ear on its back reddening as the creature passes through a shaft of the sunlight filtering through the glass panels above.

  For a moment, the Personal Assistant stares in open-mouthed dismay. Then he lurches into action, scrambling forward as he catches sight of a flash of white darting between the gnarled roots of the willows that stand rank about them. Alix is close behind him. It is all the distraction that Miri needs. Swiping a scalpel from a nearby workbench, she approaches the founding tree, the Salix boltanskiae, ducks between the hanging leaves and slashes a rough circle into the bark. Halting the blade before the line is complete, she carves the flat diamond of a serpent’s head to close the circle: a crude ouroboros. Miri tilts her head and admires her handiwork with satisfaction. The symbol will be emblazoned on Jac’s precious tree for as long as it stands; a riposte to every breeder who dared believe that Project Salix gave them the right to bring another life into this burning world.

  Picking her way carefully back across the twisting roots of the tree, she drops the scalpel back on the workbench and then joins the chase. She spots the rat climbing up the trunk of a young sapling, its long pink tail stretched out behind it for balance. The Personal Assistant is closing in on it but Miri is faster, dart
ing in front of him and lunging for the rat. Her fingers close on fur and cartilage with a crunch and she carefully prises the rat away from the sapling. Although the rat struggles to get away, twisting and turning in her hands, she doesn’t loosen her grip for a second. She holds it tight to her chest, repeatedly running a thumb across its skull with slow, deliberate firmness until the rat soothes and falls still. Only then does she look up to see the bewildered way Alix and the Personal Assistant are staring at her.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles. “Lost my grip.”

  Although they don’t look like they believe her, they don’t say anything and neither of them seem to notice the pale gashes in the bark of the tree that are just visible through the leaves. But it brings the tour to an abrupt end. The Personal Assistant has clearly had enough. Making an excuse about needing to get back to work, he leads them out of the octagon. Just before they pass out of it and into the wider space of the greenhouse, however, they come across a girl in a lab coat whom Alix recognises and greets warmly.

  “Lovely to see you. How’s the PhD going?”

  “Not bad, thank you,” returns the Student, self-consciously smoothing her short natural afro from her brow. “Just waiting for a final report from Professor Boltanski,” she adds.

  Alix gives her a sympathetic look but doesn’t miss a beat. “Oh, you know Jac. Always working hard. I’m sure it will be with you soon.”

  Miri looks from her mother to the Student, expecting to be brought into the conversation, but it’s as though she’s become invisible. Alix does not introduce her and the girl demonstrates no curiosity about who she is. Impatiently, Miri nudges Alix and jerks her head towards the door, but Alix ignores her.

  “What are you working on?” she asks.

  “Some embryonic willow matter,” says the Student. “It has to be done in one of the laminar flow cabinets,” she adds, pointing to a large, glass-fronted metal box into which filtered air is being continually pumped. “It’s a perfectly sterile environment.”

  “Do you mind if we watch?” asks Alix.

  Miri lets out a soft groan but Alix pays no attention, eagerly pulling on her glasses. The Personal Assistant is tapping his foot and glancing anxiously at his watch, but the Student beams and says they are more than welcome to, so now they have no choice but to stay. As their small group gathers more closely around the cabinet, Miri notices how the Student’s right eye lists to one side and trails a fraction behind the left.

  Despite her reluctance to play along, Miri finds the slow, methodical nature of the Student’s work utterly transfixing. First, she pulls on a pair of gloves that she sprays meticulously with ethanol. Then she sprays the interior of the cabinet as well, waiting a moment for the alcohol to evaporate. Once the surface is disinfected, she opens a container and tilts it briefly towards them through the glass so that they can see what it holds: an untouched willow sapling. Using a small scalpel, she removes its delicate leaves. One by one, she places them on a large glass plate inside the cabinet. These are then transferred onto individual Petri dishes, which, she explains, are filled with agar gel. She tells them that the process will speed up the development of the saplings, allowing for hasty cloning from the founding tree lines. When she has closed each of the Petri dishes, she stacks them up and moves them carefully from the cabinet to a nearby incubator.

  “I’m testing them for cryogenic sensitivity,” she says, as though why she would do so is perfectly obvious. “I don’t expect them to take more than two weeks of freezing. Then they’ll die.”

  “Two weeks,” says Alix with a tight, wistful smile. “Wish Jac and I still had that much time.”

  The Student’s face falls. Seeing this, Alix knocks her on the arm affectionately. “Oh, don’t mind me. Only joking. Now, tell me, once you’ve measured this–”

  As Alix continues with her inquiry, the Student turns and – accidentally or otherwise – looks Miri straight in the eyes. Miri holds her stare. A vague line of understanding passes between them. Breeders.

  17

  Clutching a glass of wine, Jac hovers around the edge of the crowd. Usually she would be in the centre of things but today she’s avoiding someone. She wishes Alix could have come with her, but she is back at home, bedridden with morning sickness. While the illness blind-sided them at first – no one at the hospital thought to warn them – really they should have expected that Alix’s body would punish her for the pregnancy, just like everyone else is hell-bent on doing. Jac left her reluctantly that morning. “I can miss it…” she said, hesitating at the door. But Alix insisted she go.

  The memorial service for the Laureate, hosted by the Royal Society, is being held in a hall of Burlington House. Jac is one of the select few fortunate enough to be invited to this private ceremony. She’s not surprised; everyone knew she was his favourite student. Jac met him during her PhD, working in his lab on the trial of the project they all believed would save the world. They stayed in touch after Jac graduated, the Laureate often writing her letters of recommendation that secured Jac a series of enviable positions in labs all across the city.

  The hall is magnificent. Intricately carved white stone pillars are recessed at regular intervals between vast panels of gleaming red marble, and the ornate wood-panelled ceiling is covered in gold leaf. Just as Jac tilts her head upwards to get a better look, she is approached by the one person she’s been hoping wouldn’t spot her.

  “Hello, Jac,” comes a voice at her shoulder.

  Her eyes snap back down to take in the familiar face of the Engineer. She hasn’t changed a bit, not since the two first met as students in the Laureate’s lab. Jac, as a mathematical biologist, worked on the quantitative aspects of the five-year pilot, whereas the Engineer specialised in biophotonics and dealt with optical microscopy. Their early collaborations proved highly fruitful and an intense romantic relationship soon followed. It didn’t last. Their temperaments were too similar and their views too disparate. Although their on-again, off-again romance had been turbulent, they managed to stay friends when it was finally done. For a while anyway, until Jac’s meteoric success drove them apart. Now the Engineer looks as radiant and powerful as ever, even if her clothes – frayed and bobbling – tell a different story.

  “It’s been a while,” says Jac.

  “Were you avoiding me?”

  “No,” Jac replies, a little too quickly. “Of course not.”

  “Funny. I got the distinct impression that you were.”

  “You always did have an overactive imagination.”

  The two share a warm, private smile and exchange the requisite pleasantries. Though things are awkward between them at first, Jac soon finds herself relaxing in the Engineer’s easy company. When they are called to dinner, she even turns a blind eye when the Engineer swaps her name-card to take up the seat next to Jac’s.

  Side by side, and aided by the free-flowing wine, the two continue an increasingly animated exchange. Despite the solemnity of the occasion, they are both in high spirits, stifling loud laughter together as the president of the Royal Society drones on about the Laureate’s myriad achievements: the numerous groundbreaking discoveries; the noble institutes in his honour; the forty-year marriage; the commendable lack of children. There are about sixty guests in total – the cream of London’s scientific community – gathered in clutches around circular tables. Not one of them looks like they are enjoying the speech. As soon as the president reclaims his seat, an audible sigh of relief passes through the room. The guests, looking forward to the five-course dinner ahead, finally relax, sipping Highgate Cru and swapping stories about the late scientist as the white-gloved waiters bring out the entrées on sterling silver platters.

  “When did you last hear from him?” asks the Engineer.

  “Only a few weeks ago,” Jac confesses. “He wanted me to finish the UVD paper. But I ignored him, because it meant–”

  “Having to contact me?” the Engineer finishes.

  “I didn’t want the first
time that we spoke in years to be about the UVD,” she says defensively.

  But this is not the only reason why Jac didn’t get in touch. In truth, she simply felt too awkward about the fact the Laureate contacted her and not the Engineer, even though he knew the UVD was mostly the Engineer’s work. It was she who had come up with the idea for an electro-optical device to measure growth rings after watching Jac use ultraviolet light to visualise DNA pieces in agarose gels, and it was she who, extrapolating from this, had been able to create what was effectively an ultraviolet scanner for wood. The UVD was revolutionary. Somehow, though, Jac was afforded most of the credit.

  Shortly after that, Project Salix passed its pilot test and was given the green light for a full run. The Borlaug won the licence to carry out the research in Greenland and the Laureate was expected to head it up – although now that position was vacant, of course. He’d been keen for them to publish their plans for the UVD so it could be patented for use on the project. That explains why he got in touch with Jac but not why he hadn’t contacted the Engineer as well. With a pang of guilt, Jac thinks maybe he forgot the critical role the Engineer played.

  Seeming to read her thoughts, the Engineer places a consoling hand on her arm. “You were always his favourite, Jac. You’re both Londoners. He never thought much of me and my Leicester roots. Besides, it doesn’t matter. Take the plans for the UVD and publish it yourself. I don’t want anything to do with the project anymore.”

  “I can’t. It’s not right. You came up with it.”

  “Don’t be precious. If you publish, it’ll crush the competition to head up the project.”

  “What?”

  “Come on. Everyone knows you’re already the top candidate for the job. And with this publication–”