“That’s good,” Irene said, lifting a bundle of grass from the tractor, her hands trembling with mental rather than physical exertion. How long before I snap? If she hadn’t fallen in love with Nimkii, if things didn’t change soon for the better—much better—she’d pack her suitcase and go. Anywhere would be an improvement.
I, Peng, designer of life and master of its language, began my day tasked with the unsealing of a package of dead chickens. Three chickens, to be precise, sent express from a farm in Iowa to the lab in Chicago where I labored. My life had come to that, and I hoped it would not grow worse. I still had much to lose. Every day I looked death in the eye and quaked.
To stave off impending disaster, I activated the armatures inside a biosafety cabinet to slit open the seals of the package. I sat on the safe side of the glass window. A coworker stood next to me, as was protocol, and offered encouragement; we took turns doing the physical donkey work, a small act of mutual kindness to share the burden. We were about to perform a crucial task. Together we would discover exactly what had ravaged a distant flock of chickens to determine whether it would also ravage the Earth and all of its biota.
“Wanna bet what it is this time?” my fellow donkey asked.
The armatures eased out the half-grown chickens, their feathers soaked in blood. I shuddered. Life offered splendor, death only repulsion.
“You okay?” the donkey asked.
“I feel better when they send vials of fluids.”
“Me, too. Someday this job is going to make me puke.”
A minimum of two people worked in the lab at any given time, but the exact staff varied by the day, as did the shift, depending on who was available and how much work there was. We were contract donkeys, all pretty much alike. Efficient. Skilled. Reasonably friendly and often enjoyably snide. Willing to take turns on the most disagreeable jobs, like handling bedraggled blood-soaked chickens. Bored out of our minds despite the urgency and terror, but we needed to earn a buck, so we were doing this until we could find something better. Although I might never find a better way to hide.
I said, “Given all the blood and detached heads, I conclude that they died of knife wounds.”
She laughed. Today’s fellow donkey was a middle-aged woman, a refugee from flooded New Orleans, one of the few from that disaster who had been allowed to relocate while the rest languished in ghastly camps. She was wasting enormous talents in this job—and she had just asked me the most worthwhile of questions: What was it this time? The specific answer—the specific cause—meant life or death. If a flock of fowl (or some other assemblage of livestock) fell ill, farm managers would slaughter and incinerate the animals. Or they would douse them with some kind of treatment that might be worse than the affliction but would cut their losses.
If we had reason to believe that the answer we found could endanger more than just that flock or species, we could try to trigger a national or even worldwide emergency, for all that shamefully underfunded public health services could do. Meanwhile, we would all pray, stiff with fear, asking our various gods to keep us safe from everything being created by nature or fools with gene-splicing labs in their garages. Major havoc was being wreaked in too many places. Inevitably, and no doubt soon, it would reach us. (You might think that all this responsibility would be reflected in our paychecks. No.)
“I’ll collect some of the blood for analysis,” I said for the record.
She made a note. “We’ll get external material in the blood, too. Feces might add special flavor notes to the final dish.”
“A full autopsy would be wise,” I added. That was the running joke. It was always true that we ought to be performing a more in-depth analysis, especially given our usual findings.
“Not in the budget.” That was the cynical punch line, although obsolete. Budgets had increased lately, but it was soothing to think that closer scrutiny hadn’t become our anxious routine.
“A safe bet,” I said, “would be avian infectious bronchitis.”
“Yeah, a safe bet for big operations.” She hated big farming operations, although we owed our jobs and dinners to them and the flabby lumps that chickens had been overbred into.
I gave the machine a few commands, then checked the electronic label. “These were free-range chickens. Outdoors. Maybe they got it from wild birds.”
“I heard that chickens outnumber wild birds in Iowa.”
“That’s the most disastrous thing I’ve ever heard. We took all of nature and overran it with chickens.”
“I can top that disaster. The Sino cold.” After a moment, she added, “Sorry. I hope that isn’t a problem for you.”
Yet another epidemic had befallen China, and anyone who looked Chinese might be shunned. Or murdered—apparently some misguided patriots considered homicide an effective vaccine. Unfairly, too, since that coronavirus had been traced down to a wild boar carcass revealed by thawing permafrost in Siberia, nothing Chinese about it, and China had responded fast and well. Borders had slammed shut like guillotines, the population frozen in place by quarantine, medical procedures applied with rigor and success. But everyone was jittery about epidemics, China was an enemy, and slander was a potent weapon. She knew me by my official name, Huning Li, not my artistic name, Peng, but both were unequivocally Chinese.
And she saw my broad, elderly man’s face and heard a slight accent I tried but could never erase. With my wispy white beard, I could pass for Confucius rather than Peng, and as Peng, I had once been known as a lovely woman. Gender presentation ought not to serve as concealment, it ought instead to serve as one’s genuine identity, but a bullet in a lung can lead to desperate measures. I, founder and CEO of SongLab, designer of life and master of its language, was protected
