Post
Biomarkers
5:36 AM
5:36 was too early to get out of bed. But Yuxin felt silly staring wide-eyed at the clock just to wait for a socially acceptable time to get up. She was awake. Her mind was spinning with worries about her day. Nothing was going to change that.
She put on her glasses and saw that her iPhone was alive with a slew of missed WeChat calls overnight. That would be her Laoma – her Mother’s nickname, which translated to “Old Mom” in Chinese, said with affection and, yes, a fair amount of friendly digging.
Yuxin opened the app and confirmed it was, indeed, Laoma calling. Jesus – there were seven voice memos wishing her “good luck today,” the tone increasingly concerned when there was no response. The last message came in at 2:06 AM. Five years after Yuxin moved, Laoma still didn’t get the fifteen hour time difference between Beijing and Riverside, California.
Maybe Laoma didn’t care what time it was and expected her daughter on the other side of the planet to respond regardless. Laoma was nearing 85 years old. Her daughter should pick up the phone.
But Laoma should be aware her repeated “good luck” messages did not help – they only made Yuxin more nervous. Ugh.
Yuxin slowly sat up on the edge of her twin bed, her feet effortlessly finding her warm slippers as they did every morning. Through the plastic vertical blinds above her desk it was still dark outside, still the middle of night. Technically by this time the sun had begun to fill the upper atmosphere as it travelled closer to the Eastern horizon – they were in what was called astronomical twilight, or predawn. But scientific facts aside, anyone looking out their window right now was seeing the dead of night. No getting around it.
Yuxin got up and shuffled out of her bedroom, not bothering to turn on any lights, scratching her scalp through her thick hair that jutted out in all directions from a restless sleep.
The shared living area was too dark to see beyond shadows of furniture so she locked onto the tiny green digital light from her kettle on the kitchen counter like a beacon.
Once in the kitchen she flipped on the light, igniting a fluorescent attack on her eyes. She closed them tight and turned away.
“What the fuck, Yuxin?” It was her roommate, Betsy, rising from the couch in the living room, shielding her eyes from the sudden bright light. And there was someone else on the couch with her, shifting under the blankets.
“Oh shit, sorry,” said Yuxin. “I didn’t know you were out there. I’ll turn the light off.”
“It’s okay, we’re up. What time is it?”
Yuxin did not want to admit she’d interrupted their sleep so obnoxiously early so she changed the subject: “What are you even doing out here?”
“Faye took my bed. I’m really hoping she didn’t puke. We went pretty hard at Dukes.”
The guy said, “I think I left my card there.”
Yuxin asked, “What time did you guys get in?”
“I don’t know,” said Betsy. “Midnight or something?”
The guy clarified: “more like one.”
Yuxin saw their iPhones light up as they both reflexively checked their screens. No hiding the time now.
“It’s 5:30? What the fuck?” said Betsy.
“Sorry, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know you were out here.”
Now Betsy and the guy were sitting up on the couch, blankets shoved aside. The guy stretched his arms out. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and Yuxin wished he was.
Betsy – thankfully in a pink tank top – said, “are you worried about your big talk?”
The answer was a hard yes. The Talk was the reason Yuxin couldn’t sleep. Professor Keller asked her to give the Special Seminar on their discovery later that morning.
The Talk was organized for all the EPS students (Earth and Planetary Sciences) at UC Riverside. Plus the entire faculty would be there. Keller would normally give a talk of this magnitude, but he’d been giving interviews non-stop since the discovery, and he really needed a break. In just the last week he spoke to the New York Times, Nature magazine, and NPR, and completed the first of two scheduled interviews with 60 minutes. No, today he would stay home and lounge on his deck. He would let Yuxin handle the student seminar. It would be a great opportunity for her to raise her profile. And Keller would enjoy a well-earned beer overlooking whatever valley his deck looked out on (she’d never been invited to the house, and was actually thankful for that).
The Talk should go fine. It was in the friendly confines of the University. There would likely be no gotcha questions, or accidental admissions of drug experimentation as happened in hour two of Keller’s three hour interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast. (Keller tried to backtrack, say it happened a long time ago, before he was at the University, he just wanted to sound cool for Rogan’s audience, but his wife and kids didn’t know, so maybe not the best thing to blurt out.)
But giving the seminar was still nerve-racking, friendly crowd or not. It would be the first time all those grad students would hear first hand about the big discovery that happened right on their campus. It would be the first time they could ask questions. Would Yuxin have the right answers?
“Yuxin?”
She’d forgotten Betsy asked her a question. “Yeah, no. I mean, I shouldn’t be nervous. I’ve practiced it enough.”
“She’s nervous,” said Betsy.
The guy asked, “is this the alien thing?”
The ‘alien thing’ was, indeed, the subject of The Talk, and the reason the 100 seat lecture hall had a line out the door and an overflow hall set up with a live feed across the quad.
THE SEMINAR
Standing a safe distance from Winston Chung Hall,Yuxin took in the crowded scene, giving herself a beat to build courage before anyone recognized her and the chaos officially began. Ironically, the hall was named after a Chinese scientist which somehow made her feel more unworthy of the day’s assignment.
She looked at her charcoal blazer and slightly mismatched charcoal skirt and wondered if she looked like a poor front desk clerk at the Hilton trying too hard to seem professional. Embarrassingly, just as she was doubting her outfit a grad student walked by and said “Looking good, Xin. Can’t wait for your talk!”
She waved her hand as he passed and forced a polite smile, quickly dropping it as soon as he was safely away.
Yuxin gave serious consideration to turning around and calling in sick or calling Keller and insisting he be the one to appear, that the students deserved to hear directly from him. Which was true. She contributed to the discovery, sure, but it was Keller’s earlier work that made it possible. That was the real breakthrough.
Five years ago, before Yuxin had ever set foot on American soil, Keller published a groundbreaking paper showing a new way to search for alien life.
Before, astronomers looked for single elements on other planets as evidence there could be life there. Oxygen was the holy grail, but carbon or hydrogen were also positive signs. Life as we know it required certain elements to exist and astronomers would look for them, simple as that.
But what about unusual life, extreme life? Life that could survive in harsh or toxic atmospheres? In other words, most every planet out there?
Keller and his team addressed this challenge, and discovered a way to search for life in a new way. Turns out, all living systems — even the most extreme — create chemical patterns, whether they breathe oxygen or not. And these patterns can be identified.
Keller’s team looked for chemical patterns in a wide range of samples and it always worked, from common mud in the ground to fluid in deep undersea hydrothermal vents where temperatures reach a staggering, alien-world-like 660 degrees Fahrenheit. Wherever bacteria found a way to thrive, they could identify it.
The big win for NASA was that Keller’s process was data-driven. It didn’t require a physical sample, which was impossible to get from planets millions of lightyears away. Data, they could deliver. Spectrometers or photometers could measure the chemical elements of a distant atmosphere. Suddenly the Universe was open to the search for alien life in ways never thought possible.
It was a breakthrough study.
And it is why Yuxin was able to stand in front of 100 grad students and professors and media members – with 100 more in a separate overflow hall – and confirm Keller’s team had found alien life on Europa, an icy moon orbiting Jupiter.
It was a moment that captured the world’s imagination. After decades of conspiracy theories and pseudo-documentaries and blurred pictures claiming to be UFOs, it was Yuxin’s team in Keller’s lab that confirmed that for the first time in human history, alien life was discovered.
“Not the kind of aliens people imagine,”said Yuxin, clicking to a Keynote slide showing the alien from Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a red line across, a version of the Ghostbuster logo.
There were chuckles in the lecture hall, the students well-aware Keller’s scientists found chemical patterns, not lanky gray humanoids with big eyes. This was the same slide deck Keller presented to the national press and civilian groups, and he’d included the movie alien on slide 31 to make the point. Many who’d gotten to this slide in the talk were disappointed, hoping to be visited by one of these wise, hairless beings. Turns out, the message we are not alone came from a computer drive.
The prized data was from NASA’s Europa mission, which involved the largest spacecraft NASA ever built for an interplanetary mission, the Europa Clipper. Through a series of gravitational slingshots – meaning the ship used the gravity of other planets to generate speed – the Clipper travelled six years and a mind-blowing 370 million miles through space, achieving orbit around Jupiter in 2030.
The Clipper would have orbited Europa directly, but the moon’s radiation was too intense. The ship’s electronics would have been destroyed in a matter of months. By keeping its contact with Europa to brief flybys – over thirty so far and still counting – and collecting data in these windows, the Clipper was able to extend its mission for years. In fact, it was still out there collecting data. But the analysis already sent back to Earth was successful enough to justify the five billion dollar effort. It was simply the greatest discovery of any NASA mission, the ultimate discovery in man’s exploration of space. It would change the course of history.
NASA’s primary goal with the Europa Clipper was to determine if Europa was habitable. Keller’s team discovered it was not only habitable, but someone already called it home.
Chemical information from Europa’s atmosphere was sent back to Earth using NASA’s network of deep space radio antennas. The data was given to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The JPL team managed the Europa mission and served as the central hub for receiving the raw data streams. But JPL was not the only institution allowed access. The data analysis was a massive, collaborative effort, shared with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio Texas, and multiple research labs at Universities around the world.
NASA was particularly interested in Keller’s work at UC Riverside, since he discovered this clever, mathematical way of identifying alien life in extreme environments.
And it was in anticipation of analyzing the data that Yuxin was brought onto Keller’s team. As a student in Beijing, she’d made a name for herself analyzing the chemical fingerprints of rocks using mass spectrometry. And she had written her thesis at Peking University using computational modeling to simulate planetary atmospheres. Heady stuff. Keller took notice. Grad students were always rotating in and out of his lab, and Yuxin’s impressive work in statistical chemical patterns meant she could step in and have an immediate impact. If his original study was the rehearsal, the Europa data was the big show. Yuxin made his team and hit a home run.
When she finished her talk, there was time set aside for Q&A. The first question was about the moment the team found an actual biomarker — when did they first know the data proved alien life was present? The student asked, “Like, did you have a ‘whoa’ moment?”
“Yes,” said Yuxin. “When we realized the chemical assemblages in the thermodynamic vapor showed a high internal evenness and a diverse mix of amino acids instead of simple glycine or alanine compounds.”
The lecture hall remained quiet but for a few confused murmurs. No one understood what Yuxin just said, and, she realized, she probably meant it that way. She was showing off. But it was also an accurate answer.
After a beat, she added, “whoa, right?”
This brought a round of laughter.
Out on the quad after the lecture was over and the crowds dissipated and every member of the EPS faculty had their chance to shake her hand and give her proud eye contact for uncomfortable lengths of time, Yuxin found a bench under a massive oak tree and called her Laoma.
Yuxin’s phone displayed “waiting for response” over a blurred photo of her mom’s giant oval face. The picture was a selfie taken outside Laoma’s small house in the Western hills of Beijing near the woods full of pine and cypress and wild walnut trees where she took her daily walk. Yuxin had asked her mom to take a photo of herself in front of the house so she could remember how the house looked. But Laoma held the phone inches from her face so it filled the frame, and the house was not in the picture at all. Yuxin found this hysterical, and made the absurd selfie Laoma’s contact photo, which was now being artistically blurred by the WeChat app.
Melodic chimes looped over and over signaling the call was ringing but no one was answering. Finally the call timed out. Abruptly, Laoma’s blurred image turned to a black screen with the message “No Answer”. Now it was Yuxin’s turn to realize the time difference – it was 6:30 in the morning in Beijing, exactly when Laoma would be taking that morning walk.
Zāole. Yuxin was excited to tell her Mom how well the lecture went. There was even applause at the end. But her bragging would have to wait. Laoma’s morning walk was always the same route through the woods and past the creek and back again. Laoma would return soon.
THE FIRST SIGN OF TROUBLE
The first sign of trouble with the Europa data wasn’t much of a sign at all. Yuxin was back at her station in Keller’s lab later that week, one of the few researchers showing up while Keller was out on his victory tour.
Yuxin couldn’t help but come in. She felt giddy knowing the data from Europa’s atmosphere was sitting on the University’s servers and — nerdy as it was — she wanted to play with it. She was excited to dig in. This wasn’t some fluid from a distant corner of Earth standing in for an alien world, this was actual chemical patterns from one of Jupiter’s moons, where the air is so thin humans would instantly asphyxiate, their bodily fluids boiling away from the vacuum-level low pressure. Yet this microscopic organism was able to live there. The first true alien life. And Yuxin wanted to know how it possibly survived.
She’d identified the organism based on the pattern of complex amino acids it made in the data. The alien organism was a chemical generating machine. But what was it taking in that it generated these patterns? What did it eat?
Yuxin knew it likely lived under miles of ice on Europa with no access to sunlight. There would be no photosynthesis, no help from the sun. That meant it fed by chemosynthesis, meaning it ate inorganic compounds, possibly from hydrothermal vents on Europa’s ocean floor.
It took three days and nights of running the data, but Yuxin found the answer. She was 99% certain.
“It’s iron.”
“Sorry?”
“What they eat.”
“What who eats?”
Nathan Kim sat across from Yuxin in the loud and crowded Ramen place he’d chosen at the popular promenade. He did not know what Yuxin was talking about, which was understandable since she brought it up out of left field.
Yuxin clarified, “the aliens.”
Nathan slowly put the pieces together. “You were back in the lab.”
Yuxin slurped a mouthful of noodles before responding. “Yeah, couldn’t resist.”
He thought about her statement – they eat iron – and became confused the more he considered it. “But how did you –”
“Reverse engineering.”
“Because we don’t actually have the organism, we just –”
“Exactly. We only have the chemical patterns generated by it. But that’s enough. Based on that, and what we know about the moon and the elements there, I figured out what they must ingest.”
Yuxin could tell he didn’t see the implications, what it might mean that the organism fed on iron. Of course, it was unfair to expect groundbreaking insights from the poor dude right on the spot, fellow researcher or not. But she was getting bored silently eating tonkotsu across from him. Turns out, Nathan wasn’t much of a conversationalist. And the lab work was on her mind.
Nathan sat back and tried to think of something great to say back. He started with “wow”. Then he looked at a table of four undergrads and spent a few seconds too long watching their excited conversation about some horror movie. The two girls seemed to catch his eye. Finally he looked back at Yuxin and repeated, “wow.”
She picked out a piece of fatty pork from the rich broth with her chopsticks and ate it. Then she said, “you know, it’s very unusual. Living things don’t feed on iron, not like this.”
Nathan played along, still not understanding the implications. “Right. That’s odd, right?”
“I mean, there are bacteria, stuff living around thermal vents in the deep ocean, that react with iron to gain energy, but these organisms on Europa, they seem to feed on iron directly.” Then Yuxin looked at Nathan and said, “that’s an evolutionary leap.”
“Okay then.”
“We’re talking about a new species. I mean, not surprising, right, since it lives 300 million miles away on an ice moon. But really, this could rewrite the biology textbooks. This is nobel prize shit.”
Nathan smiled in a way that struck Yuxin as patronizing. He seemed to be smiling at her, versus sharing her excitement. “You are amazing.”
“I just did the math.”
“When did you get here? To the States?”
Yuxin was confused now. “Five years ago. Why?”
“I don’t know. Just . . . only five years? You really made the big leagues in a short time. Pretty amazing work.”
She took another mouthful of noodles, not sure how to respond.
Nathan said, “my parents were born here, you know. But my grandparents came over from South Korea in the 60’s when they lifted the quotas for immigrants with medical experience. They were pharmacists. My Dad’s parents.”
Yuxin said,”uh-huh.”
“Even being born here, though, third gen. It’s odd, right? Like, you always feel like a foreigner, right?”
Now Yuxin saw what was happening. He was trying to bond, trying to get her to attach to him in some emotional way, a lifeboat in a confusing cultural sea. He was here to save her or give her comfort or something. He was here to get her in bed.
“I am a foreigner.”
Nathan said, “no you’re not. See? That’s what I am talking about. This country makes us feel like that, but we can have both, right? We can keep our sense of who we are and where we came from, and still be true Americans.”
Yuxin said, “I’m serious. I’m still F-1. I don’t even have a green card yet.”
Nathan seemed deflated by this. “Oh. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I do.”
SYNTHESIS
Of course Yuxin was not the only researcher on the planet to isolate the iron-oxidation pathway. This became apparent when Professor Keller called her into his office and positioned her in front of his giant computer monitor where she was confronted with a live zoom call.
“Oh,” she said as she found herself staring at a massive grid of faces, at least 30 scientists of all ages and races and genders, some she immediately recognized – top row third from the left was Maya Vance who led the team at UT Austin responsible for analyzing ultrasound radar data of Europa’s surface. Yuxin recognized a few more, Dr. Lin from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, Rostov from the University of Jerusalem. But there were many more she’d never seen before.
Keller had Yuxin crouch next to him at his desk like a proud Dad, making sure all his colleagues could see her in his web camera.
Yuxin found it embarrassing that these accomplished geniuses from around the world now found it necessary to wave at her like she’s a five year old. She could think of nothing better to do in response but wave back like a five year old and smile.
What was the purpose of the global zoom call? Had something happened? Keller hadn’t explained, he’d just called her in from the lab.
One of the faces said, “thank you so much for your work.”
Yuxin looked at Keller, not understanding. Keller explained, “I pushed your data out to the group. Everyone’s been trying to reconstruct the lithoautotrophic pathways, and your math resolved it.”
“Oh, great. That’s great.” Yuxin felt herself sounding dumber and dumber by the minute. That’s great? Who says that? She was in front of scientists from every University she applied to, most turning her down, but a few she had to turn down as well. She was dying to get away from this video call.
Keller said, “your name will be on the paper, when we publish.”
“Oh, that’s amazing. I am just glad to help the team.” Yuxin was horrified with every phrase she uttered. She sounded like some game show winner giving rehearsed answers.
“We should fill her in on next steps,” said the older man near the middle of the grid wearing a lab coat. His display name was ‘DR. BADASS’, which Yuxin assumed was not his real name.
Keller agreed, “yes, please, the floor is all yours.” He explained to Yuxin, “that’s Dr. Robert Warren, Chair of UW’s Department of Microbiology and Adjunct Professor of Astrobiology. He’s taking all our work to a new level.”
Warren said, “I was just explaining to the group here, the bio-safety board gave us the green light to trigger synthesis. Based on our lab’s experience with deep-sea extremophiles, NASA asked us to attempt an in vitro reconstruction of the Europa organism. If we pull it off, we’ll have active biological data, not just telemetry.”
Yuxin understood Warren but still felt the need to confirm, to say it out loud: “You’re going to make one of these things?”
Dr. Bad Ass smiled like Michael Jordan walking onto the court for game one of the NBA finals. “We’re gonna try.”
DAY ZERO
Yuxin was never officially made lead on the study of the alien organism, but over the following three months it just happened. Ananya Joshi and Chloe Sager, two 2nd year grad students working in Keller’s lab, began helping Yuxin as new data from the Europa Clipper came in. Nathan Kim continued to hover as well, grabbing assignments, making sure he stayed in Yuxin’s orbit. Eventually, Keller had to specifically assign researchers to the work outside the Europa project just to make sure other stuff got done, otherwise the entire lab would have migrated under Yuxin’s direction.
Data from Europa’s surface continued to confirm the existence of the organism. In fact, it became clear the distant moon of Jupiter was infested. Ananya pointed out the organism wasn’t surviving but thriving. It was a shift in how they thought of it, that it wasn’t finding a way to survive in an extreme environment, but an aggressive creature built for that toxic world, happily feeding off elements we consider non-metabolizable. They’d found a true alien being. And based on Yuxin’s calculations, there were millions on the moon’s icy surface.
The thought was chilling.
Yuxin went into Keller’s office to vent, express her irrational fear of a microbe hundreds of millions of miles away.
She noticed something off when she knocked on the half open door and stepped into Keller’s small office. He had a bottle of Sierra Nevada half finished on his desk and at least one in the trash she could see.
“Is this a bad time?”
Keller stared at his computer screen, sapped of his normal hopeful energy. “It’s looking that way.”
Yuxin didn’t understand the response. She wondered if he had a close family member die. “What happened?”
Keller looked at Yuxin. “We need to gather everyone. Can you get everybody in the conference room?”
“Of course. What’s going on?”
“They had to quarantine Bob Warren’s lab. DHS officially declared it a hot zone.”
“What? Why?” It didn’t make sense to Yuxin. The hot zone designation meant the laboratory had infectious germs loose in the open air. It meant the entire lab was considered a container of a virus and sealed off, the air inside too toxic for anyone without a specialized suit equipped with an independent source of oxygen. But, as far as she knew, they weren’t studying airborn toxins or anything contagious and deadly at UW.
Keller explained: “it’s the organism. They recreated the molecular structure using a Class III cabinet – remote controlled robotics, rubber sleeves, the whole deal. Yet somehow it got away from them.”
“What does that mean, ‘It got away’? Sorry – I just – it shouldn’t be so dangerous. It’s one microbe.”
“That’s why I need to talk to the team. No one knows how it happened. DHH is directing all institutions with access to the Europa data to come up with possible answers.”
“Right, of course,” said Yuxin. But she still didn’t understand. “When you say ‘no one knows how it happened’, what are we talking about? What exactly happened?”
Keller looked at Yuxin. He seemed raw and afraid. “There were seven people in that lab, Bob included. They sent all of us a note that they successfully replicated the organism. That was a week ago.”
“Okay, so that’s good right?”
“No. I think it was a big mistake. No one’s heard from them since. And no one has come out of that lab.”
“For a week?”
Keller nodded. “Two days ago, NASA had the lab sealed off. Until we understand what happened.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
Yuxin’s mind was spinning with all the implications – of the people in the lab, of NASA locking the doors. Of the unknown. But she sensed the time to ask questions was over – now was the time to act. “I’ll gather everyone.”
“Yeah.”
In the following days, Keller’s lab operated non-stop, with several scientists from NASA and the Center for Disease Control joining the team, and 24/7 security stationed outside.
Yuxin rarely left Keller’s 2nd floor lab, grabbing stretches of sleep in an empty cubicle across the hall before rejoining the effort. Other grad students followed her lead, adopting nearby cubicles, turning the empty office space in the Geology building into a makeshift encampment everyone hoped would be very temporary.
Forty-eight hours into the urgent research, the CDC official confirmed what they all knew: everyone in Bob Warren’s lab was dead. How they died was confounding. The seven scientists had been stripped of their blood iron, leaving the remaining fluid a disturbing, dark chocolate-brown. Without iron, oxygen had nothing to bind to – their lungs kept drawing breath, but no oxygen circulated. They suffocated from the inside out.
Yuxin knew they were missing something. A single microbe safely confined could not have replicated and caused this outbreak of deadly hypoxia. She focused her efforts on uncovering potential exposure pathways – what might trigger the microbe to replicate itself.
The data offered nothing – the organism should have no way to spread. It didn’t have the necessary cellular machinery to become an aerosol, or survive Earth’s atmosphere. And the containment suite in Warren’s lab was secure. The microbe they generated had no way to move independently, no spore-forming defense mechanism, and no biological way to replicate outside its chemical bath. The synthetically generated alien organism should have been a source of knowledge, and no danger to anyone.
The answer came in the canned goods aisle at Stater Brothers.
Nathan Kim suggested he and Yuxin escape the stress of the lab to shop for food and other supplies the team needed: beef jerky, cashews, hummus, pretzel chips, string cheese, Kind Bars, LaCroix, Gatorade – the list grew fast once Nathan announced to everyone they were making the trip.
Yuxin went along for the ride, acting reluctant but honestly happy for the break. Her brain needed to get away from the numbers. She needed to see the sky, watch civilians live their lives free of the knowledge some alien organism was on the loose. The grocery store was a welcome oasis of mundanity.
Nathan stopped their grocery cart in the canned goods aisle because he wanted vegan chili. Yuxin agreed that sounded good and wanted in. But where was it? They both stared at the fully-stocked shelves of cans and saw no chili. They knew they were in the right area. There were lentil soups and barley soups, cans of kidney beans and black beans and chickpeas. They had every type of broth and stock. Yuxin pointed out the refried beans when she spotted them – they’ve gotta be close to the chili. But no. They saw no chili.
It got absurd, two trained scientists staring at shelves completely flummoxed.
Nathan said, “maybe they’re out?” He knew even as he said it, this was stupid. Maybe they were out of a certain kind of chili, but not all chili.
“I can ask someone,” said Yuxin, not really wanting to ask. The damn chili must be right in front of them.
She tried focusing on one can at a time, thinking her eyes must be flying right by the chili. She noted each label, one by one, organic black beans, cannellini beans, bean trio, the refried beans again . . . then she was into the tomatoes, diced and crushed and . . . oh come on.
Nathan said, “we’re not telling anyone about this.”
“I’m just going to ask.”
Yuxin found a young stock clerk resupplying the sliced bread and asked where they kept the vegan chili. The clerk snapped into action, walking right back to the shelves they’d been staring at and grabbing a can of vegan chili from the shelf above the black beans. Same damn beans Yuxin was looking at for over fifteen minutes. Now, suddenly, it was obvious, a whole shelf with a variety of chilis right there in front of her. What the fuck?
The clerk said, “sometimes you need a new pair of eyes, eh?”
Nathan gave a dismissive chuckle, put the cans in the cart, and moved along, eager to forget the whole incident.
But Yuxin kept standing there, staring at the shelves. Then it dawned on her. She knew the answer, how the organism became so deadly so fast.
IN PLAIN SIGHT
In the lab, the team became worried about Yuxin. She’d broken off from the urgent work of sifting through data on the Europa organism in favor of what seemed a crazy side project: feverishly re-doing Keller’s original research that led to the discovery of life’s chemical biomarkers.
She duplicated Keller’s study as if she was trying to prove it all over again. She ran tests on more than 90 molecular combinations — from Earth samples to space-origin materials to lab experiments — and refused to tell anyone why. Was it to validate Keller’s work? She insisted that wasn’t the goal. But whatever her aim, she went at it with an urgent intensity, like a homicide detective convinced the DNA of the killer was about to reveal itself.
Yuxin examined chemical samples from asteroids, meteorites, bacteria, fungi, plant materials, marine sediment, surface mud, fluids from deep sea vents, grassland soils, ancient fossils, dinosaur eggshells, plankton – everything from the original study and beyond. In fact, with every sample tested, Yuxin became increasingly stressed, demanding more samples from a growing diversity of sources.
After a week, she began requesting samples of raw materials, metals, wood, and everyday plastics. It made sense to nobody, and the government researchers stationed in the lab began to ask questions. They were trying to stop an active pathogen, and Yuxin did not seem to be on the same page.
Keller finally had to step in.
He insisted she get coffee with him, with as polite a tone as he could manage while still making it clear he was pulling rank as the scientist running the lab. Even then she was reluctant to leave her station. But there was no choice here – Keller couldn’t have a rogue project operating in the middle of a crisis.
They walked downstairs and across campus to the cafe inside Winston Chung Hall and found a private booth. Keller got them both a latte, purposely choosing a drink that would take a few minutes so Yuxin had a moment to calm down, take a breather.
When Keller returned with the lattes, Yuxin did not seem calm at all.
Keller said, “did you need sugar? I got sweet and –”
Yuxin didn’t let him finish: “It was already here. There’s a terrestrial homolog.”
Keller put her latte in a lidded to-go cup in front of her. He didn’t understand what she was getting at. “Sorry?”
“There is a terrestrial homolog. A strain of the organism we found on Europa, but here on Earth.”
“What do you mean? From the hydrothermal vents?”
The question was logical. If the extreme organism found on Europa actually lived on Earth, it would be in an equally extreme spot. But this was not what Yuxin was saying, not at all. The situation was much worse.
“It’s not a living strain,” she explained. “It’s dormant. Or it was.”
Keller said, “back up. What are we talking about here?”
“Five years ago, you discovered life generates a molecular diversity resulting in observable statistical biosignatures.”
“I’m aware.”
“Right, but now we have an actual living organism with a very specific biomarker. We saw it all over Europa. We continue to see it in the data NASA sends. There are millions out there.”
“Aware of that, too.”
“So now we know what to look for. So I looked for it. Here. In every possible terrestrial sample I could find.”
Keller’s phone rang. He checked and it was the CDC official. “Hold that thought.”
He answered the call. “This is Keller . . . say again . . . Jesus . . . okay, I’ll be right back.”
Keller put his phone down, his mind putting facts together now, processing unprecedented events, horrific implications.
Yuxin said, “more people got attacked?”
Keller said, “you could say that. There seems to be no isolating the pathogen. Every single person that came anywhere near Warren’s lab has died of acute hypoxia. And everyone in their orbits – their families – they are in ICU’s, hit with the same cellular asphyxiation. Something is very wrong here.”
“No, it makes perfect sense.”
Keller raised his voice, at the end of his rope. “This doesn’t make sense, Yuxin. This isn’t a virus. This is a single, synthetic organism with zero ability to replicate, not in our atmosphere.”
“It’s not replicating.”
“So what the fuck is happening?”
Keller said it louder than he intended. The other students in the cafe looked over, then opted to mind their own business. Keller kept his eyes on Yuxin – it was time to learn what it is she’d discovered.
Yuxin repeated, “there is a terrestrial homolog.”
Now Keller realized what she meant in the first place. “You mean the structural sequence is already here. But it’s dormant, locked in stasis.”
“Yes.”
“And the reverse-translated strain triggered the dormant organisms.”
“Yes, it woke them up.”
“What pathway could . . . that lab is set up to contain the most extreme samples.”
Yuxin said, “my best guess is some version of lateral gene transfer –”
“The microbe injected functional metabolic operons –”
Yuxin had a spark of creative enthusiasm that arises when two researchers are on the same page, that rare collaborative joy. For one brief moment she was the star researcher working with her mentor. “Yes. Doctor Warren’s synthetic phenotype essentially cross-contaminated the terrestrial spores, teaching them how to feed on inorganic elements, something the Europa version did naturally and aggressively.”
Keller sat back in the booth and allowed himself a sip from his latte, even taking a moment to enjoy it. He had a feeling this might be the last calm moment of his life, given what Yuxin was saying.
Then Keller asked the dreaded question: “so, where is this terrestrial strain?”
Yuxin’s eyes welled up with tears. Saying the answer out loud was admitting the entire human race was doomed.
But it was time to say it: “They are everywhere.”
CLEAN STATION
Over the next two days the world realized they were being invaded. And it was already too late to do anything about it.
The first sign things were moving to a new, accelerated phase was at the lab where the first quarantine was instituted, at UW’s South Lake Union research facility.
People on the street noticed the smell first, a sharp sulfurous odor some described as an “old basement”. The world would soon learn this was a gas being emitted as the building itself was being eaten from the inside, as the dormant microbes now triggered and awake were in the construction materials of the building itself.
The faint ticking in the walls was the next sign. Folks working in the building complained there were termites, rats, something in the crawlspaces. They had no idea millions of microscopic organisms were sapping basic elements from the structural bonds with a relentless hunger.
It took two weeks for the microbes to get down to the rusted rebar in the concrete, which, when eaten, caused rust-colored liquid to weep through drywall and exterior stucco. It looked like the entire building was bleeding out.
At this point, the complex was evacuated and experts were called in. It was too late, of course. The experts arrived just in time to see screws and rivets and drywall nails fall out like a wave of passing rain as the walls lost strength and there was nothing more to anchor the fasteners.
Hairline fractures appeared so fast and on all sides of the four story building, you’d think they were always there, that the university lab was designed with artistic spider-webbing in its concrete and brick walls.
From there, entire floors bowed down and sagged. There were loud groans as the steel frames buckled, then snapped. The walls turned into a cloud of gray, pulverised dust.
The experts watched with awe behind safety gates as the entire lab disappeared. They said things to each other like, “Jesus” and “What the Hell”, thinking they just witnessed an isolated, if unexplained, building collapse. Then one of the experts told the rest to look behind them.
Every building on the street was lined with hairline fractures.
Keller got the call on a rare morning he was not in the lab, but was waiting at his dentist’s office. Hearing about the escalation, the structures now affected, he drove fast as he could back to his lab. Yuxin’s warning – “they are everywhere” – repeated in his head, the implications becoming all too clear as entire cities were now coming undone, along with untold numbers of innocent people.
The scale was – well, scale isn’t even the right word. It was beyond the idea that this microbe had found its way into so many things. This was primordial, elemental. It seemed this terrestrial version of the Europa alien was literally a part of the natural makeup of Earth itself.
The elevator opened on the 2nd floor and Keller nearly ran into his lab, desperate to focus his team on finding a way to kill these microbes, maybe find some genetic signal to stop the destruction.
When Keller burst in the doors, everyone stopped and looked. The place was packed and had been buzzing with activity. Except for one station.
Yuxin was not just out for a quick breather. Her station was cleaned off. Pictures were gone, documents filed away, her favorite sharpies and safety glasses and oversized water bottle missing.
Nathan Kim answered the question before Keller asked. “She left. Quit the project.”
“Why?”
“She said there was no point. Then she packed up and left.”
Keller’s eyes welled up. He knew Yuxin was right. Those microbes were in this very lab, inside every one of his students, the CDC scientists, everyone. It was just a matter of time.
Keller said, “we have to try.”
FLIGHT 984
The fifteen hour flight from LAX to PEK was half full. Yuxin wasn’t sure if people were afraid to fly – they should be – or if the organisms had awakened so fast and killed so many, there were simply less people to travel in the first place. Chilling thought, but possible. Yuxin didn’t know and didn’t really care, not anymore.
Back in the lab she’d started the calculations, how the microbes would trigger others in exponential leaps in numbers. She tried to statistically predict how much time was left. The initial answers were bad - things got existential fast.
There was no hiding from this alien, which turned out to be no alien at all, but an integrated member of their world. Way more of them than us.
She arrived at customs to find epidemic prevention protocol in place. The National Health Commission funnelled arriving passengers into quarantined areas. This would, of course, do nothing to prevent the pathogen, but Yuxin understood the decision. People in white hazmat suits with blue stripes and blue shoe coverings interviewed each person and took their temperature. Anyone who was sick was not getting into Beijing.
Of course, if the internal microbes had been triggered, the victim may not show signs of sickness, not for a time. Losing oxygen internally due to a gradual loss of iron is a slow process. At first, you might even feel strangely relaxed, maybe find yourself in a mild euphoria. When you lose enough oxygen, the physical tells kick in rather suddenly. Then you’d see ghostly blue lips, blank vacant stares, rapid shallow breathing. At that point no one is getting on a plane anyway.
When they finished interviewing Yuxin and made her sign a health declaration, she said she had an urgent meeting, and showed the workers her student I.D. card from the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at UC Riverside. A few calls were made and minutes later the NHC workers learned they had a global science superstar in their midst who worked at the epicenter for Europa virus response. Chen Yuxin was to be allowed to leave immediately and would be accompanied by the State Guest Escort, an elite branch of the People’s Armed Police. More than a police escort, the State Guest team would clear entire highways so that Yuxin could get wherever she needed to go.
Striding through the terminal, now flanked by an impressive group of police guards, Yuxin apologized and asked if she could run to the restroom before they climbed into the waiting convoy of HONGQI luxury mini-vans outside.
Once in the restroom, she quickly changed into a red windbreaker and baseball cap she had stuffed in her coat. She pulled the cap down over her forehead and checked herself in the mirror. Pretty good for a fast change: on first glance she was a different person. And no one was looking for her to fool anyone. This should work.
Yuxin walked out of the restroom staying close to an older woman so onlookers would assume they were together. If any of the police guards watched her walk past them, she never knew it. No one called out or tried to stop her, because they didn’t realize it was her.
Once she made it outside, she got in the taxi line which was fortunately (or tragically) very short. She made it into a car before the police in the terminal discovered she was missing.
The young, sweaty driver of the yellow electric BAIC sedan sped across the Airport Expressway to the 5th Ring Road and into the Haidian district in less than an hour. Traffic was near non-existent. Emergency vehicles sped by several times. Yuxin assumed outbreaks had begun in various spots around the city.
Soon the dense over-built concrete of Beijing gave way to quiet neighborhoods surrounded by trees. Mountains came into view, silhouetted gray shapes jagged across the horizon. Two hours into the drive, they turned onto a winding, tree-lined road that climbed into the Western Hills.
Yuxin sat on the edge of the backseat glued to the window, watching for the first familiar sign she was nearing her home. It came five miles into the mountains: bright, neon yellow leaves from a stand of Ginkgo trees on the left. As a kid, this was the landmark she looked for to know home was just around the bend.
When they turned the corner, Yuxin found herself smiling. The row of red clay homes with heavy pitched roofs was unchanged from the 18 years she lived there. Such a welcoming sight. She was surprised to feel a strong urge to cry full-out surging inside, the months of intense work in the lab bubbling up, all the terrible death, needing to compartmentalize it all so she could keep working. All that was over now. She clenched her jaw against the avalanche of emotions and held herself together. She called out to the driver, “this is it, the one with the rusty blue sanlunche in front, fourth on the right after this turn.”
The sanlunche is an odd utility vehicle her father used to drive walnuts down to the markets in Haidian. It’s a sad little truck, technically a tricycle with two back wheels and one front. The original blue paint was rusted and faded. Yuxin remembered the smell of the canvas covering the small truck bed from years of helping her father load crates of wild walnuts. She remembered those last trips, when his eyes were distant and cloudy, his driving unsure down the windy roads. Her mother should have had someone take that truck away by now – it was seven years since he passed. But she kept it parked in front of the house like maybe her husband was still around. It sat there overgrown with weeds, part of the nature everywhere around them.
Inside her mother’s home it was dark and cool, the rammed-earth walls smooth like stone. Her sneakers pressed against the worn wooden floor causing deep creeks as the planks bent, the only sound she could hear. The place seemed empty.
“Laoma?”
There was no answer.
Yuxin peeked into the kitchen and the bedroom and back to the front room. No one was there. A fear came over her. Could it be the organisms were triggered this far out from the city? Was she too late? It was possible. She imagined her poor mother struggling to breath, unable to take oxygen from the mountain air. But wait – even in this worst case her body would still be here. Unless the whole village was affected and the Ministry of Civil Affairs already cleared the bodies. They were brutally efficient. Oh God.
She stepped outside and looked up and down the road at the other homes. At least one had smoke rising from its roof and she could smell wood fire burning. Two houses down she saw Liang Shen out pulling weeds. There were others still around.
Back inside, Yuxin desperately searched the house again.
She thought of Laoma, the bright floral T-shirts she wore over her squat and roundish body, her tiny green sneakers with white stripes that must be 20 years old by now, her perpetual smile like some ancient Buddha who knows more about life than you do. Yuxin longed to hear her low “mmmm” that would sound as Yuxin recounted her current life quandary, followed by curt and often dead-on advice: leave him then, forget that job, study harder next time, eat better. Yuxin often railed at her for making things too simple and always heard her snap back that she was making things too hard.
She saw Laoma’s walking cane leaning in an umbrella holder by the front door and laughed, remembering how Laoma never used it. It was a gift from her mother who lived to be 96. The cane looked fancy at first glance, with a dragon head carved as the handle maybe from bamboo root. But it was actually a store bought version molded in fake wood stained to look antique. Regardless, Laoma never used it. She felt it made her look weak. She needed no cane – which was prideful but, so far, true enough. No, Laoma instead took her mazha on her walks, the folding stool made from woven ropes and wood she would sling over her shoulder and use to sit deep in the woods and meditate, or sit with neighbors and gossip, or sometimes just sit if a place in the woods seemed particularly nice.
Yuxin longed to see her, to hug her and look at that wide face.
That’s when she thought to look at the hook by the front door, above the walking cane. It was a large wooden peg affixed firmly into the hard clay wall just below a picture of her father posing with a bowl of walnuts. The peg was empty, and it made Yuxin’s eyes well-up with tears. The peg is where Laoma hung her folding stool. She must be out for one of her walks right now.
Laoma would return soon.
Story based on recently published study Molecular diversity as a Biosignature from University of California at Riverside with many other institutions.
