Nissi
"Hey, did you forget to sleep again?" A voice rumbled from over my left shoulder.
I glanced at the clock displayed on the terminal screen, which told me it was just past six in the morning. I had been running pharmacological simulations on one of Todai's servers of the action beta-amyloid treatment that my team had been developing for the past few weeks. The enzyme described in SamIAm's data dump was certainly up to the task of cleaning up the damaging plaques, but we had quickly discovered that the process had a mildly toxic byproduct. There needed to be a high enough concentration for the enzyme to work, but too much too quickly, and we would cause even more damage to Nonna's brain. The best solution appeared to be to administer a controlled dose and wait for the body to clear the toxins, then administer more.
I had been tweaking the dosage and intervals between treatments repeatedly, trying to find a sweet spot between efficacy and safety. The last time I had looked at the clock, it had been around nine at night. Besides that, I had already spent most of the previous night awake, huddling in a cold barn waiting for what I knew would likely be a violent morning.
I swiveled the chair to face the newcomer. My voice sounded raw when I spoke. "Hey, Nock. Yeah, I guess I did. I-" My gaze settled on the steaming cup in his hands as the smell hit me. "Sweet baby Jesus son of Mary, is that coffee?"
"Fresh-brewed," he said, handing it over. "One spoon of sweetener and enough cream to drown a calf."
"Just how I like it," I said, and took a deeply satisfying sip. Of course he wasn't being literal about the cream. All we could get was the non-dairy powdered stuff made from vegetable fats, but it had been long enough that I had forgotten what real cream even tasted like.
"And, oddly coincidental turns of phrase aside, did you also forget what day it was?"
I didn't have to look at my terminal to remember. "Oh shit, it's Christmas morning."
He nodded. "Right. Though I don't think that's the traditional holiday greeting."
"Asshole," I said, giving his shin a kick, though not hard enough to really hurt. "I mean that I completely forgot the presents. The kids aren't up yet, are they?"
We had put makeshift bedding down for Alice and her kids in the only unoccupied room in the house, the sewing room. They would be moving into the house next door to the farm but without someone like Stansy's cousin coming out every few weeks to check on it, it had fallen into disrepair. Norm, Stan, and Stansy would start today on replacing broken windows and fixing the water damage accumulated from years of neglect, but it would still be probably weeks before it were truly habitable.
"Nope. No nightmares either."
I smiled, "That's good to hear." They had gone through a lot yesterday, losing their home and their adoptive father on Christmas Eve, of all things.
We had all been in shock to one degree or another as we worked in the aftermath of our rescue to conceal our role in the deaths of the two corrupt deputies and their hired flunkies, and not necessarily thinking clearly, but it had been Nock who noticed the big pile of presents arrayed around the tree in the family's living room. He had come to me to ask my opinion, whether it would be the right thing to bring the gifts that their father had no doubt had some role in picking for them, or if might be better to leave those reminders behind.
"Let's bring them," I had said without hesitation. "Those gifts are going to mean a lot to those kids. Especially now."
We were nearly out of room in both our own vehicles and had begun filling up Alice's trunk, but the cab of Jack's truck was still empty. I kept watch for the kids while Nock filled it up with the wrapped gifts. They were helping to load the other vehicles, carrying stuff out from the front porch, so he was able to sneak through the garage.
Somewhere along the way, we had decided to keep our little mission a secret from everyone, and I had gotten Alice to agree to let me and Nock take her late husband's truck, making sure that we were the only ones to unload it once we got back to the farm. We left the presents inside and parked the truck around the side of the barn, just in case. We agreed to come back out in the morning, before the children woke up, and bring all of the gifts inside to put under our own tree.
I took a long sip of the coffee, sighed, and set it down. "Alright. Let's get to it."
The sky was still dark except for a band of indigo on the horizon, but the moonlight was enough for me to see well enough, and to Nock it must have been as clear as daylight. We took a chance and brought the truck around near the front door to cut down on travel time, but as soon as we got through the entryway, I knew we had been had. Tilly saw us bringing in a load of presents descended the staircase in her pajamas. Her face clouded in momentary confusion at seeing what Nock and I were carrying.
"These are for the children," I said quickly, keeping my voice just above a whisper, since Stan and Stansy were in the next room. "We brought them with us from their house."
"Oh, that's wonderful," she said. "I'll help."
It took two more trips, but we managed to get everything inside and situated in the living room without waking anyone else up. We had finished decorating a few days ago, so the walls, windows, and banister were festooned with banners, lights, garland, fake holly berries and sprigs of fake mistletoe. I grabbed my coffee from the den and headed for the kitchen to top it off. Tilly and Nock sat at the table, enjoying their own cups. She nodded at me when I came in and said, "It's great to see the two of you together."
"Oh," I said, glancing over at Nock. My face heated slightly. "No, Tilly, we're not-"
"I think she meant," Nock cut in quickly, "that it's good that we're not at each other's throats anymore. Didn't you Tilly?"
"What?" she asked, looking first to him, then me. Her brows raised. "Oh, you thought...? No, oh no, I didn't mean that. Remember, I can tell what you're feeling, most of the time. So, yeah, like he said. You're friends now, aren't you?" She cast an oddly questioning glance at Nock, but he looked back at her with a thoroughly blank expression.
"I guess," I mused. "I guess you could say we are friends now."
Nock's entire demeanor had changed since my breakup with Norm, and that's not to say that he looked at me once more as a potential romantic partner. We'd done that little song and dance back in Sasha's basement before Norm arrived. I had been interested initially, until he mentioned that he was engaged. It hadn't been too difficult to redirect him back to his fiancé, which told me that he valued his integrity more than he let on in his interactions with me. In any case, I was quite sure that he had no real designs on me now and just wanted to try to put the whole ugly mess with Norm behind us.
Nock shook his head and grinned. "Just don't forget, I'm still an asshole."
I nodded. "I think that is already well-established."
Tilly again gave him that look again, her lips parting as though she might say something to contradict that statement, but then she shrugged and closed her mouth. I grinned as it occurred to me that Nock, with his contrary nature, might actually be more of a pain in the ass for her to figure out than he ever had been for me.
I took the break in the conversation as my chance to get my refill and sat down next to Tilly. "So, how is saving the world going?" I asked.
Tilly gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes. "About as badly as you could imagine. You would think that with this superbug out there killing all of our food that somebody, somewhere would have more data on it. I mean, I get it that genetic research is off-limits, but you'd think a few biologists might try to, I don't know, actually run some practical experiments to figure out what makes some plants resistant or even immune to the Rot, while basically any crop that we can cultivate on an industrial scale gets destroyed by it."
"It's the grasses, isn't it?" Nock said. He ticked off his fingers, "Wheat, corn, rice, barley, rye?"
Tilly put up a hand, "That was one early hypothesis, and supported by its ability to kill uncultivated grasses as well as grains, but then we started seeing it attack potatoes and beans. And you've got your gourds, squashes, melons, tomatoes, strawberries, all very quickly killed."
"But not blackberries," he said. "Not fruit trees or nuts."
"It hits peanuts," she said, "but that's actually a legume. Cranberries are susceptible, but blueberries are resistant, and those two are in the same genus. The problem is that you can't feed the whole planet with fruit. Human civilization relies upon the density of food production that we can get out of grains or crops like potatoes."
"It's almost like someone created this thing on purpose," I said, referring to a long-standing argument among many experts about the oomycete's origins.
"But who would do such a thing?" Tilly countered.
"The Chinese," Nock said.
Tilly sighed and shook her head. "I've never bought into that explanation. It might look suspicious that the Rot has apparently left them alone and also made them into the world's most robust economy, but you have to realize three things about China. One is its geographic isolation from the West. It has very high mountains to the west and desert to the north. The second thing is that the Chinese are very good at directing masses of people and instituting sweeping social programs. The third is that they were willing and able to invade their neighbors to the south and east to ensure their own safety. They realized very early on that Rot spores can stay dormant long enough to cross the ocean, if they can hitchhike on a ship or plane, so you have to tightly control the shipping lanes and air travel. That's how we ruined South America. Learning that lesson, we barely managed to save Africa."
"You don't seriously think that it's naturally-occurring?" I asked.
"No," she admitted. "That's so unlikely as to be ludicrous. Diseases and parasites evolve in relation to their hosts. They don't just pick up superpowers to kill anything in their path."
"So someone created this thing in a lab," Nock said, "because they were supremely stupid, and then it got away from them."
"The mainstream hypothesis," Tilly said, nodding. "That one isn't terribly satisfying either. Designing this thing would have taken a huge effort. Tens of billions of dollars at least. What possible profit motive would there be?"
