irisstory2021

[irisstory2021]

be pricked with a few shots. I assumed the parents approved any vaccinations that their child would eventually need anyway and that this would just save a doctor’s visit in the future. I assumed I was pricked like that when I was first born. It all seemed so mundane; any shifting looks at my father were shut down and I was shushed, told by his eyes to not only keep watching, but to pay attention.

I didn’t know how much harder I could pay attention, but I obeyed anyway, forgetting my carrot mush and pushing my chair out from underneath the table, fully facing the television. I hunched forward, leaned my elbows on my lap, and amused my father. 

In the next clip, the baby slept soundly as the father sang to her; his voice drifted away in a matter of seconds and it looked as if he was about to turn the camera off when the baby began to shriek. She wasn’t fussing in a sleeping state; she was wide awake, shrieking as if about to lose her life and somehow aware of the consequences of that, and her complexion -- even in the dim light of the hospital nursery -- was, within a second, completely drained of its color. Her veins, however, which were shades of red and blue and purple, stood out so vividly, despite the age of the footage. They throbbed, resembling a fast-beating heart, as her father panicked inaudibly in the background.

“Hey, what the hell is going on?!” he demanded from the nurses, who were quick to whisk him away from his child. The camera was the last of his worries now, and yet he still held on, capturing every moment, even if it was all blurry and nonsensical. 

“Mr. Ruth, you’re going to have to leave the nursery and let us take care of your daughter. She’ll be fine.” The nurse’s consolation sparked more outrage from the father as he was shoved out of the nursery. In the big windows up front, a gaggle of people in lab coats -- the very same ones my father and I donned -- surrounded the baby’s bassinet. Her shrieking could be heard outside of the nursery. I wondered if any other newborns were in there with her. 

The father yelled, banging at the window. Unless it was completely soundproof there, I wondered if there were any other newborns in the nursery. And if there were, why hadn’t they begun crying, too, at all of the noise? As soon as someone noticed his banging, they shut the blinds, and shut the father out. 

“What, so the baby had a reaction to one of the shots?” I tried rationalizing it in some way in my head. Though I was far removed from having any maternal instincts, the event was bizarre -- what happened to the child was bizarre and concerning to say the least -- and yet I looked at it through a scientific lens, not letting my emotions cloud my judgment. What vaccination could have that reaction on a newborn? 

“Yes, it did. But think hard, Iris. What immunizations could cause a baby to practically die like that?” 

Hepatitis B, influenza, varicella, measles, mumps… Those had been used and administered for nearly a century and had as much time to be perfected. The only one in that list of vaccinations that could have a chance of malfunctioning and having such an abnormal reaction would be--

“The serum, Iris. The one you and I work on, every day.” My father must have noticed my brain going a thousand different directions, all trying to avoid the only answer in the middle. 

I wasn’t understanding. “So the baby died?” I asked. 

“No, the baby lived,” he said, shaking his head and removing the disc from the television. He placed it back in an unmarked case and set it down on the dinner table with a sigh. Our food had been forgotten and cold at this point. “They gave her an antidote and within 12 hours, the parents could see her again. I’m showing you this because--” he sighed, feeling very much defeated. I felt somewhat guilty for not following this string he’d put out, but even he should have recognized how difficult he was to keep track of. 

“If you look in the database, there are no known records of the serum failing on who it’s meant for, right? The babies.” He leaned close to me, and looked around the room before inching forward. His glasses hung over his nose and I could see his sunken, sleep-deprived eyes; they lost their warmth when his glasses didn’t cover them up. “There are records, sure, of it failing on the animals, but if you look, their symptoms or causes of death have nothing to do with whatever happened to Susie. They either die when they fall asleep for the first time since taking the dose, lose appetite to starvation, anything like that -- eventually. Susie’s case stuck out to me because it happened right away, and it’s nowhere to be found in our system.”

I pushed out a breath and looked at him. “So, how did you get this? How do you know that our serum did this?” 

He flipped the DVD case around and it turned out there had actually been something written on it: Susie’s birth, New Year’s Day, 2011. A silver stamp was smudged on the corner, reading Property of Plethora. That was the year that started off with him having longer days at work than usual, sometimes never even coming home, up until the point Plethora asked him to begin living at the lab. The extra money would pay for my college, he said -- now I knew they swindled him in for some damage control. 

It was then that I remembered the image of that infant. This wasn’t the first time I had seen footage of Susie’s shift. I remembered the first weekend of the new year; it was snowing, and my parents and I would take a walk through the neighborhood to watch the inaugural snowfall. When I tugged on my father’s sleeve to pull him out, ever excited despite being in my tween years at this point, he berated me for even setting foot in his office. He had paused whatever he’d been watching, and it froze in a frame of the baby, the cameraman pointing down into her bassinet, catching the exact moment as her veins sprawled out like roots all over her tiny body. 

After I was sent to my room, the frame haunted me, and I’m sure my father didn’t want me to see it then. It looked as if it came out of a horror movie. At the time, I didn’t understand much about my father’s work, only knowing he could be protective of it at times when he felt severely under pressure. It was surely one of those times. He apologized to me the following day. 

“The girl is still alive to this day,” he said. “I’m not supposed to have a copy of this. Only one other copy might exist, and this one -- well, they probably meant to toss it years ago or forgot I had one with me. It’s proof that something could go wrong with the serum again if we’re not careful, and more importantly, it’s proof that Plethora knows how to hide anything they do wrong.”

❧

I didn’t realize I’d been focusing so hard until I heard the petri dish crack underneath my tool. I used a metal scalpel to mix it every morning, checking for irregularities -- I wondered how long I’d been swirling the scalpel in the plastic dish, lost in my thoughts, for me to have pressed down enough to crack it. “Ah, shit.”

Maybe my father was right. I cared more about this job than I was willing to admit, and more than the indifference I feigned. Or maybe he’d shown me that footage the other night to light a fire under my ass, send me down a spiral he knew would lead nowhere but at least would rejuvenate in me some dormant passion for the career again. The truth is, I had been feeling more unhinged about working as a biologist, working for Plethora, working in general. I felt I didn’t have much time -- if any time, at all -- to grieve my mother’s death and in the last six months, it had left me feeling off-kilter. From my father I inherited the grit to work through anything, and from my mother I inherited the ability to feel it all at the end of the day, when the work was done. I was probably depressed.

I transferred the sample into a brand new petri dish and sighed. I reached across the counter for a wire-bound booklet we kept on hand at all times of lab protocols, flipping through it haphazardly until a folded-up piece of paper fell out. It contained instructions on how to make the very first version of the serum, Serum Zero, written in the scrawl of its founding scientists almost three decades ago. Of course, it was a photocopied version of the actual written page, and the company’s logo -- along with the word “confidential” -- was printed on it in see-through ink. If the company had known it was there, it would likely get rid of it and suspend whoever stuck it in there. Of course, my father had done it. 

He told me he kept it in plain sight because no one would ever think to look for it in the protocols handbook, and no one would even suspect a want for the very first record of Serum Zero. After all, the alpha was the most recent, most improved upon, and therefore the best version of it -- why bother backtracking? To study its components, of course. 

I dumped the replaced petri dish into the biological disposables bin, along with the serum. There was no need for it; besides, when I cracked the dish, I might have accidentally contaminated it if it touched the counter. I wiped the counter again, grabbed an empty dish, and unfolded the piece of paper, holding it in place on the counter using a paperweight. I wasn’t sure what the alpha version of the serum contained now (it always seemed like valuable information to me, given that I would be experimenting on it and wouldn’t want to add the same components -- but with more thought, I wondered if Plethora kept it that way so as to preoccupy us scientists from poking our noses so much) but having the original formula for Serum Zero would be a start. I knew what the end result did and that was all that mattered in this new quest of mine. 

One by one, I pulled out the components -- all clear liquids, all minuscule samples -- and laid them out on the counter in a mise en place that my mother might be proud of, and went to work.

[irisstory2021]

Chapter 1: Adaptation

2035 -- Present Day

The plants were alive when I last saw them. 

I walked into the testing lab, half-heartedly tossing a coat over my civilian clothing. I wasn’t supposed to be here outside of my shift -- my father’s way of trying to pull me out of my career and brush me against something resembling a personal life -- but I couldn’t get the image of that infant out of my mind. In the footage, she’d been as pink and full of life as a fresh peach, the first baby born on New Year’s Day in 2011. Then, in what felt like a flash, the color had been sucked out of her, she’d turned white as frost and her veins could be seen pulsating, even past the grain of the frames. I couldn’t stop thinking about how quickly she had shifted; her veins sprouted out like the pigment from a brush dipped in clear water. 

I shut my locker, catching a glimpse of the plants again. There was a pot for peace lilies, which stood tall, their white petals mimicking the white walls. A pot for fastia, which my immature coworker always thought resembled marijuana leaves with their pointy ends. Then, a pot for monstera, a plant native to tropical regions that reminded me of the roundness of fat lobster claws. They were sitting in a row against a ledge on the wall that must have been left over when the windows were removed and built over when they first built the lab. They were the plants that needed the least amount of sunlight. I didn’t know why my father bothered to set them out -- their greenness and inert otherness looked stupid in such a white, clean room -- but he insisted. They honored something, or stood for something, he said -- “A reminder that nature can still exist and persist, despite man.” 

I rolled my eyes at the irony. Someone needed to be taking care of the plants, watering them at the very least. In a sunless, rainless environment like the lab, nature could only exist if it was created by and coddled by the likes of us. And the person in charge of watering them -- presumably, my father -- couldn’t even do the bare minimum.

Turning to step inside the separate room where samples of the serum were kept, I suddenly gasped at the sight of my father. The clock behind him read far too late for either of us to be here, and yet he looked at me as if I was the only one in the wrong. 

“Iris,” he said, with a raised brow, his arms crossed over his chest. “You’re not supposed to come in for a few more hours.”

I shrugged my shoulders and gave him somewhat of a petulant look. Though I was almost 30, he still treated me like a teenager, and at this very moment, it was as if I was sneaking back into the house after a rambunctious night out. “I’m getting an early start.”

“4:30 in the morning early?”

“You’re here too, you know,” I said, brushing past him to perform my retina scan on the wall. The doors to the separate room swished open, letting both of us into a room where the temperature easily dropped 10 degrees. “Besides… I’m usually up this early. You know how I like my routines.” 

“Yes, you’re just like your mother, you two could never get a full night’s sleep, always restless.” He shook his head and pulled out the day’s sample for me.

We kept two versions of the serum in the lab: The original version, alpha, which was currently in commission, and the experimental version, beta, which was a copy of the original that we could test on and improve upon. Only when we made any sort of notable improvement to the beta could we eventually replicate the same improvements to the alphas we had on hand, and even then, it would take months of approval and months more of the changes to be made for the completed version to actually begin being used. 

Nothing excited me more than a fresh beta. Of course, in the petri dish, it looked clear as water -- yet, the next 10 hours I would spend working on it meant endless possibilities to bring it to life. It almost brought a smile to my face if my father hadn’t been there. 

I put on a surgical mask and a pair of gloves, wiped down the counter with some bleach, and retrieved the sample in the petri dish from my father before setting it down on the counter. “I’ll see you at lunch, dad,” I dismissed him, lowering myself to be at level with the sample as I thought about what I could do to it today. “And water those plants.”

“I will. Don’t forget these,” he said, dangling a pair of goggles in my peripherals. I sighed, snatching them with a sarcastic smile and putting them on. Satisfied, he finally left me in the lab. In the small, square window of the sliding doors I could see him pouring cups of water into the pots. 

My father and I were biologists for Plethora, a pharmaceutical company that worked on cures for human diseases. My father has been working for Plethora ever since he earned his master’s degree; the company paid for his education so long as he remained an employee. In my eyes, Plethora was a good company -- it didn’t seek to reinvent the wheel, and instead sought for ways it could keep the wheel spinning. What stopped it, of course, were terminal illnesses like cancer, heart disease. Plethora looked for cures by exploring what proteins to introduce to invasive cells rather than what could be done to eradicate them, hoping to recreate the way a tree grows its leaves back every spring despite the way it seems to die in the winter, or the way its branches grow around telephone poles instead of stop growing altogether. Adaptation.

I agreed with almost everything that Plethora did. 

As I looked at my fresh sample, I wondered what I always did whenever I started the day. What could I do that any of the other scientists -- especially my father -- hadn’t thought of yet? What could I contribute to change this seemingly perfect, sterile sample into an alpha candidate? It hadn’t killed anyone yet -- was I smart enough to keep it that way with whatever new thing I’d conjured up? I began to think about what the alpha was before it became the alpha; who was the scientist in this very same room and what were they thinking? 

Most mornings, I dove deep into this slump, and my wonderings became intrusive thoughts of whether I was good enough or just following in the footsteps of my father after losing my mother. I could never really focus until somehow pulling myself over this slump. But today, my mind drifted back to footage of that infant again -- and gone were those self-absorbed thoughts. What replaced them dared to be more sinister. 

❧

My father showed me the footage a couple of days ago over dinner. In a strange way of connecting with me, he often told me stories of when he first began working for Plethora. For dual-method purposes, he might have also been trying to convince me to stay at the company long enough, knowing I was slowly but steadily losing interest in it. I always felt indifferent about his stories, but this one has since stuck with me.

“I’m not supposed to be showing this to you, Iris,” he said. He had found an old, cathode ray television that had a disc player built in it -- it was forward-thinking, except for the fact that it had weighed 50 pounds and its screen was only a little over a foot wide. He brought this out in the middle of dinner, while I had been uninterested in my carrots, forking them into mush. I furrowed my brows, of course intrigued by my father’s antics -- and yet something hung over him, something quite serious, and it reeled me in enough to absentmindedly taste my carrot mush for the sake of closing my slacked jaw. 

He slid the disc in and it went straight to footage of New Year’s Day in 2011. Watching diligently, I saw a mother -- her name was Terry -- giving birth in a hospital room while her husband, whose name I didn’t know, filmed the whole thing. 

“Ugh, dad, what the hell are we--” I dropped my fork in disgust, fully resigned from his clear attempt at just grossing me out. He knew I was afraid to have children and didn’t really like them in the first place. 

“Shh, just watch.”

Terry was wailing, her blonde hair stuck to her forehead and her cheeks cherry red and glistening in tears. You couldn’t really see the childbirth, since the doctor had obviously been covering between her legs, but her expression was enough to churn my stomach. Watching on, it was presented like what I expected of any record of childbirth -- the crying from the mom, then the child, then the dad. Footage of them holding the child in their arms, and then later, footage of them cooing over the child as it slept in its crib. 

I was an only child and my parents were estranged from their family, so I had never had an experience of visiting a newborn at the hospital. It didn’t strike me as peculiar when the father filmed his child -- whom they called Susie -- suddenly