“What is it, sweetheart?” A note of uncertainty crept into my father’s voice. He had just been starting to relax and now I was giving him reason to worry.
“It almost looks like potato blight.” There was no way for me to tell what the stuff was without a microscope and a hell of a lot of research, but I could determine that whatever it was, it wasn’t good. “I need my old lab capabilities back.”
“Potato blight? Like the Irish had a thousand years ago?” Dad picked up the other potatoes and started to palpate them. His eyes widened when he found another potato with the same kind of discoloration on it. “They all died, Fiona.”
“The blight was a major peril that killed millions of people, yes. But the Irish survived, and so will we.” I was confident that I could find a cure for whatever this was. The shelter’s laboratories were still operational, if at a reduced capacity. “Do me a favor, though? Don’t tell anyone.” Dad looked at me dubiously. “We don’t even know what’s on the potatoes, never mind if it’s poisonous to the plant or humans. Just inform the requisite people to lookout for any funny spots in their food, and to cut them out. If it is potato blight, the infection only goes as far as the discoloration.”
“You got it, kid.” He stood and wiped his hands on his own pants, a little extra throughly.
“Oh! And would you ask them to count the spots for me? Just tell them there’s an anomaly with the soil and I’m collecting data to keep track of it.”
“Sure.” He left. I turned to watch him and I could already see the tension radiating out from his shoulders. A minor setback like this wasn’t completely unexpected. We didn’t even know what it was yet. For all I knew it was something completely curable. Perhaps even harmless. Something in my gut twisted as I even thought the words. I was probably kidding myself. I looked at the seemingly endless fields of potato plants, some in full bloom, others just starting to put their roots in. If this was potato blight, there was no cure. We could lose the entire crop. It wasn’t something we would recover from. The amount of food we had available to us now was precarious. Losing the potatoes would mean the death of hundreds, maybe everyone. The other scientists in the shelter had done the math. In order to establish a stable population, we needed at least eight hundred and fifty. Preferably nine hundred or more. When you accounted for natural death, we were cutting it close as it was.
I had to work fast. First things first, I had to bring a sample to the lab. I picked up half of the infected potato and pocketed it. Making my excuses to the others, I climbed back down into the shelter. The place I had grown up in no longer felt like home. Since things were running in full swing outside, the entire structure had been gutted; every piece of recyclable or useable material was brought to the surface for repurposing. Only the vital systems had been left untouched. I smiled and waved to the medial staff in the infirmary, busy patching up the day’s cuts and scrapes. The hydroponics lab was largely as I had left it. A few plants were scattered about but for the most part it was empty. The equipment had little dust on it, but I got it up and running easily enough.
I used a knife to cut off a thin slice of the infected potato and placed it on a slide. Putting it under a microscope lens revealed intact sporangia of P. infestans. The fungus bore almost no difference from its ancestor save one. It was replicating at an astounding rate. A chill ran down my spine. As the world burned above us, there was predictably damage and destruction of nuclear power plants around the world. This meant that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nuclear explosions was vented into the atmosphere. The radiation mixed in with the storms and would have carried particles around the world. We had already seen the effects of this phenomenon in the animal life. The drastic environmental change had forced rapid evolution. It only made sense that plant life had gone through the same alterations.
Now that I knew what I was dealing with, I could start testing out treatments. The data on my tablet told me there were a few different options, but the scientific advancements of the last few centuries had not produced a miracle. There wasn’t any reason to-the plants saved and grown in the shelters were hermetically protected against all foreign organisms. They had been sourced from the global seed vault in Svalbard, a small island near the place my forebears called the North Pole. We would have to work systematically. Every piece of equipment that touched the potatoes at any stage would have to be sanitized. As much of the crop available had to be harvested right away and the healthy plants eaten. There were a few fungicides that I could try to produce, the simplest of which involved spraying a copper-infused solution onto the plants. The biggest catch with all of this is that I’d have to tell an already scattered population that their only food source was in danger of disappearing.
I discarded the initial sample and cut a new one. Same thing. Damn. Some more research proved that the anti-fungals would be relatively simple to make, but I wasn’t sure that I could synthesize enough of it quickly enough. The copper mixture was possible but removing the copper from the plants after enough time had passed would be the challenging part. Our water supply had been heavily
