GPT2.
The name of the gene hit me out of nowhere. GTP2 was a gene common to most photosynthetic plants-more specifically, potatoes. It was activated when photosynthesis increased rapidly, like when the sun peaks out from a cloudy day. GTP2 was responsible for recycling sugar back into the chloroplast for starch production. It acted as a sort of brake to allow the plant’s cells to keep up with the increased photosynthetic activity and increase starch stores for use at night. Reducing GPT2 would slow down the plant’s metabolism. It certainly wasn’t a cure, but it would buy me time.
I had to tell Eliza. I sent the data from the lab’s machines to my tablet and raced back outside. I found Eliza speaking with a group of men, some of whom I recognized as the members of the exit team Dad had assembled. She looked up and smiled as she caught sight of me and said something to her comrades. They nodded and departed. “Hey, hon.” She pecked me on the cheek. “I was just talking with Jason and the others. They inform me that we are well on track to stabilizing things within a couple of weeks. Just think, soon we might actually be able to put a little weight back on! Did you ever think that would be a plus in our lives?” The excitement on her face was extinguished when she saw my expression.
“There’s a problem with the potatoes.” I blurted it out before I could even think. There were better ways to break the news and I flinched at my thoughtlessness.
“What kind of problem?” She frowned, not fully comprehending what I meant.
“Eliza, they’re infected. They’re infected with potato blight.”
She stared, still not understanding.
“We could lose the whole crop.”
To her credit, my wife managed to keep her expression relatively neutral. No one else other than me could have seen the trembling of her fingers. “The whole…”
“Yeah. Kinda sucks that we didn’t get the chance to gain a few extra pounds while we were chowing down on shelter food, huh?” The determination that I had felt not an hour before vanished, numbness in its place. I thought the humor would make it better. It didn’t.
“How soon?” Eliza put her arm around me and led us back toward our quarters. In deference to her newfound position, Eliza had been gifted one of the already printed houses by the elder people of the shelter. We still had to move our possessions in, but for now a few stray crates served as chairs.
“The truth is, I don’t know. I’ve confirmed the diagnosis three separate times in the lab. It’s potato blight, but it’s spreading far faster than blight normally should. I suspect the radiation in the atmosphere mutated the fungus as well as everything else.”
“Fuck. There’s got to be a cure, right? After all, potato blight is centuries old. Someone must have seen fit to figure out a way to eliminate it before things went to hell.”
“There isn’t a cure.” Her eyes grew wide. “But there may be a treatment. The databases say that there are a couple of anti-fungals that we could try to synthesize, and there’s a copper-based spray that I could put on the uninfected plants. All of the options have drawbacks. The anti-fungals would likely take too long to produce in sufficient quantity. The copper spray needs to be washed off and quite honestly, we don’t have the water. I have another idea.”
“Tell me it’s something we can actually manage.” Eliza had gone white.
“I think so. It would involve injecting a specially designed gene alteration compound that would block the processes needed for the plants to run their metabolism.”
“Won’t that kill them?”
“No. At least, theoretically. It would be like putting a human in a hibernation pod. The potatoes would still grow, but they’d develop at a delayed rate. Developing the compound would be fast enough and it would buy me enough time to figure out a more sustainable solution.”
Eliza’s eyes searched mine frantically. “You can keep us from starvation?”
“I can try. The best thing we can do now is harvest everything. Every single vegetable. Anything that is discolored needs to be burned. Everything that appears healthy needs to be put into the coldest containers we can find, or eaten as quickly as possible. That’ll cheer them up from the prospect of dying. A feast to end all feasts.” Getting the potatoes harvested, organized, and frozen would make it easier to inject the plants for relocation. “The ground where we planted everything needs to be burnt. It’s the only way to ensure that no more spores carry to healthy soil.”
“Okay.” She looked away, mind already working on the problem. “Okay.”
“I can do it, darlin’.” Eliza always laughed at the way I said the endearment. There wasn’t really such a thing as an accent in the shelter. Those of us whose parents or grandparents had come in with one quickly lost theirs due to the utter hegemony of the ‘proper’ way of speaking. I picked up the habit from a set of books that I liked to read as a teenager. They were centered around the only female werewolf, trapped in a world of men, fighting for her independence. The woman’s love interest was a boy from the South who always called her ‘darlin’’. For some reason I thought that adopting the same pronunciation would make me charming. Apparently it had worked, even if Eliza did roll her eyes at me whenever I said it.
“I know you can, sweetheart. Let’s get the rest of our things from our tent and then we’ll set down to break the news to the
