LUCY ZHANG

MUTATION

The cell didn’t remember when it evolved into a human. When it had grown hands and feet. When it gained the ability to pull, tear, hold. That it could accidentally scratch its skin. That it was possible to harm oneself. How water slipped through its fingers as it cupped dew from an evergreen. When it had last rained, what the downpour had sounded like, why the wet streaks down its face could feel cold one day and liberating the next. Who had formalized its existence, kept it fed, and with what. What it was called, if its purpose extended beyond hunting, growing, foraging. How big the world was, that oceans went deeper and further than land, where these places ended, how the earth stayed stratified. What the cell did remember was a girl.

It encountered her while chasing a rabbit. The girl had been digging up potatoes with a spading fork, the foliage at the tops of the dirt mounds already dead from hard frost. Doesn’t affect the tubers, she had said. She welcomed conversation as she worked. They played games when she took breaks: rock, paper, scissors, word games, fractal tic-tac-toe with the grid traced in dirt. They marked their Xs and Os with a tree branch. When her break ended, she’d rub the potato skins with her thumbs, and if they rubbed off under a bit of pressure, the tubers went into one bucket for long-term storage, else they went into the other bucket, to eat within the week.

The potatoes were larger than the girl’s fist, some as large as her head, some with odd protrusions, mutant limbs, potatoes spawning from potatoes like tumors. You still eat these, it wondered. They might look weird, but they’re still food, she said. Everything is food, it said.

At the end of the day, they resumed their game of tic-tac-toe. It learned quickly: if you go first, pick a corner. If you go second, choose the center or a corner—whichever the opponent hasn’t taken yet. If you can’t win, you can always force a draw, assuming no one slips up. The girl was good at not slipping up. She remembered where all of her Os stood with respect to its Xs. And for the first time, the cell felt challenged. This wasn’t like pulling mushrooms from soil and stamping the ground flat again, not like launching a sharp rock at a heron’s head, not like stepping on a trail of ants on their way to toss their oleic acid-covered brethren into a dumping ground.

The girl won. They began a new game. The baskets gradually grew full of mutant potatoes. When the sky darkened, the girl welcomed the cell into her small house, where they continued to play under a dim light. This continued for weeks, the girl winning every match.

But the cell could tell the girl was growing weaker. How she staggered while lifting potatoes, how the spade clattered to the ground and she made no move to pick it up, how her hair thinned, how she vomited blood behind trees when she said she needed to pee. And because it had once been a cell, once knew DNA as the only truth, it could detect a slight change in the girl’s cells, some unable to replicate, some dividing out of control. At some point, she no longer had the energy to stand, but still, she clawed at the dirt. When her hands grew numb from the frozen earth, she pulled at the leaves. The roots would not give. The potatoes remained hidden.

When the cell asked why, the girl said that she’d rather die than knowingly let people starve. Perhaps it was this confession that distracted the cell, causing it to lose the round. An easily block-able trap—missed. Again, it demanded. Again, they played. Again, it lost. And tried again.

They were inside her house staring at the grid when she stopped speaking. Your next move? The cell asked. But the girl had frozen. Her hands had taken on a waxy blue appearance and began to blister. Her pulse fluctuated to the beat of a moth trapped between window meshes. She looked thinner than ever. The cell memorized the grid positions, wiped the lines away with its foot, then placed her on the bed. It tried to feed her soup and porridge, but the liquid trickled out of her mouth. It watched over her for nine days until she died. On the tenth day, it held her blue, limp hand, and if the cell’s hand began to turn blue too, it never noticed.

On a hill just a short walk from the potato fields was a lab. Inside the lab was a nub of plutonium, a half-shell of beryllium, a long screwdriver meant to wedge the components apart, humans in masks and rubber boots and thick vinyl hazmat suits, an invisible trail of electrons dancing in the air.

Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in EX/POST, Third Point Press, SOFTBLOW, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.