Author: Susan Kaye Quinn

Susan Kaye Quinn

The days were more dear now.

She could give minutes to the snapdragons, pruning their spent blooms and freeing the stems to flower again. Or spend an hour with her glasses and notebook, hoping for a tufted titmouse to report to the lost species trackers.

Or she could stay inside on Shredder and save a person’s life.

She plucked a call from the ether. Shredder’s voice channel gave them privacy, no storage or data mining for the AI, and it dumped as soon as the call was over. But there were hundreds of callers and who she connected to was random, a cosmic lottery no more fair than the Fates spinning the wheel, but there wasn’t a better way. Not yet.

“Smilin’ Charlie’s Energy Pills,” she intoned. “We’ve got what you need to recharge your life! How are you doing to today?”

“I’m . . . okay.” English, so no AI-translator echo on top of their words. The voice was young, but then they all were compared to her.

“I bet you need some recharging! I can set you up with our free starter kit of a month’s worth of energy at no price today. How does that sound?” She wished they were real. She’d sign up herself.

“I . . . I was told to ask for Grandma Maisy.”

“Well, we don’t have any Grandma Maisy here, but I can assure you, I’m fully qualified to take care of you.” The schtick was rough some days, but it was important to delay, so Salomé could validate the call, no voice manipulation or tracing, make sure it was someone desperate for help, not the police. Or worse, the Department of Biological Integrity.

“I was told I should ask twice. For Grandma Maisy.” Hope was leaking out of their young voice like the last breath leaving a body.

“Maisy is a funny name.” Which always brought her a smile, given she’d picked it. “Kinda old-fashioned. How old do you think that name is?”

“Before plastic.” A common-enough saying, but strange enough in context to work as old-school security. Plus, the all-clear had come in from Salomé.

Her shoulders relaxed. “That’s right.” She used her normal voice, the one that didn’t sound like she was selling magic pills, when in fact, she was now free to share the real magic. The kind that worked. “Before plastic. You’re not looking for more energy—you’re looking for a cure. Isn’t that right?”

“Are you Grandma Maisy?”

“I am.” Close enough.

“I’ve got three kids, Maisy. All depending on me. Not all mine, either, but they’ve already lost too much.”

“They can’t afford to lose you too.” She said it strong. People didn’t need to justify it to her, but they always tried. Which was one way to tell they were real. The Bio Integrity thugs always assumed everyone was as slimy and manipulative as they were. She’d been able to spot them 10/10 so far.

“Does it actually work?”

The only real question. “It does. But there are some risks.” She listed them off. Full disclosure. More than you’d get in a clinical trial, which this was, only the illegal kind. A global operation that circumvented the official channels, given they’d been taken over by the sort of people whose politics were responsible for the carnage she was trying to stop. If they got hold of her magic—and it didn’t belong to her, nor did she invent it, but she was holding together the operation to quietly proliferate the hell out of it—the powerful would shut it all down before she could blink. They were all-in on necropolitics, using their power to decide who deserved to die so the rest, including them, could continue to live in the style to which they’d become accustomed. The necropoliticians would take her magic pills, test them on a few unfortunates, then hoard it for themselves, their cronies, sell it to the well-connected and the wealthy. As if they couldn’t buy plastic-free livers any day of the week. Everybody lived in the ubiquitous soup of microplastics, but some people had a bigger lifeboat than others.

She was selling tickets to the biggest lifeboat of all. Or rather, giving them away.

But only to a few, for now: the ones the Fates had selected. She was good at keeping the cops out, but she couldn’t bear to decide which of the normies would live. Too heavy of a burden, on top of everything else. She was glad for the randomness and secrecy of Shredder.

She processed the caller through and handed off the order to Salomé. She was in Colombia, but they had labs on every continent now, and in most countries with populations over 50M. Local shipping was key—avoiding customs meant higher likelihood of the capsules reaching the caller before they expired. It was a miracle the cure worked at all, but a strong secondary miracle had made the bio-active materials transportable in little room-temperature capsules you could slide into a box and send anywhere that shipping reached.

She fielded three more callers before Salomé broke in, the translator’s English heavy over her whispered Spanish. “Sorry to interrupt, but Diego wants to talk.”

“Is there a problem?” Diego was her master biologist, the inventor of the magic cure for plastic liver. He also tracked all the results of their illegal clinical trial.

“He wouldn’t say.”

“Put him through.” She waited while the line clicked over.

“Maisy, hello, how are ya this fine day?” Diego wasn’t his name any more than hers was Maisy, but she knew people who knew people who vouched for his bonafides. That’s how it all started.

“As well as can be expected. Tell me there’s nothing wrong, and I’ll feel better.”

“I have too many capsules.”

“That doesn’t sound like a problem.” She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her forehead because she knew better.

“They’re sitting in the labs. Spoiling, Maisy. You know this.”

“I’m training Salomé. She’ll be ready soon. I’ve got trainee candidates lined up in Brazil and Nigeria, next. And we’ve got . . . .” Fatigue clouded her brain for a moment. “Almost a hundred volunteers on intake now? We’re fielding thousands of calls a day, Diego.”

“It’s not enough. You know this, too.”

“I know this,” she admitted. The weight of it suffocated her, all day and night. Worse when she thought about it.

“We need to go public,” Diego said.

Not this again. “We’re not ready.”

“We are.”

“Bio Integrity will shut us down.”

“Only in America—”

“Which happens to be where I live. Besides, the Ministério da Biologia will do the same in Brazil. The Australian Institute for Population Monitoring will have a field day. I can’t even think about the Russians. Diego . . . .” They’d had this fight so many times, and her energy wasn’t there for it. The fatigue got worse every day. She couldn’t even keep her breakfast down lately, so she skipped it this morning, but that left her empty and weak. “We’re not ready.”

“Maisy, my dear friend . . . .” They had never met, but that didn’t matter. “You are not ready. But we are.”

“That’s not fair.”

“But it is true.”

She balled up her fist, wanting to smash the button to disconnect the call. But even that took too much. Her shoulders slumped. “I’ll think about it.” He didn’t need her permission for anything . . . but he was asking for her blessing. And that chewed her up inside.

“Are you okay?”

“Worse now, thanks for asking.”

“Maisy—”

“I need to go.” She clicked off the call and crumpled head-down on the table. One breath, two. She lay there until she knew that if she didn’t move, everything in her would stiffen. Slowly, she rose. The bed beckoned, and a nap might do her good, but the garden would do her better. She struggled to pull her socks over her ankles, which were swollen to unrecognizable lumps, but at least her loose shoes still fit. Her garden gloves and hat hung by the door, and she’d need those to keep the blazing sun from cooking her too fast. She checked the air quality before she ventured out, not that a slow death by air pollution would matter at this stage. But an asthma attack wouldn’t do her any favors.

She brought a small basket, in case there was any harvesting to be done. Then she shuffled down the sidewalk to the community garden. It wasn’t far, but she had to stop twice to catch her breath. It was a brutal metric. An unforgiving one, impossible to ignore. But she tried.

A few neighbors were at the garden, which was already bursting with the fruits of summer. A micro-utopia. She snagged a kneeler from the front and found a spot alone in the forest of tomato plants. It was well past noon, so one row shaded the next, and down between them, she could dig her hands into the dirt, finding a slow peace in uprooting the weeds that didn’t belong and gently plucking the cherry reds from the vines. If they weren’t quite ripe, they wouldn’t release, but the ones whose time had come, who had reached their peak, let go so easy they almost fell off the vine with the slightest nudge.

Maybe Diego was right. Maybe it was time to let go.

This project was the last of many acts she’d taken to heal the Earth and its beings of all the harms done. If they’d stopped plastic production entirely a decade ago, that still wouldn’t have been enough, and they hadn’t even done that. Instead, the necropoliticians decided that bodies stuffed with microplastics just meant a shorter lifetime for some. Sorry about your luck. The rich were fine, of course, able to swap out for lab-grown livers once theirs became hopelessly scarred. Five years or fifty million breaths: time for a filter change!

The rich got them like clockwork. Some folks in the middle were able to “work for their liver.” But the rest of the world? Couldn’t afford a trip to the doctor much less a lab-grown miracle.

Then Diego and his pills showed up in her circles, and she had another chance to save the world, one life at a time. She didn’t understand all the tech—some combo of plastic-eating single-celled creatures and genetic-mod technology that Diego called an evolvant—but in the end, it was simple. A part of you wasn’t you anymore, but collection of organisms adapted to thrive in the Anthropocene, feasting on the toxins that would kill you otherwise. A biological cyborg. Mutant. But the result was clear: you got your life back. The world had become a chemical soup that eventually drowned everyone, one way or another, but you would be adapted to survive.

Not that it was an easy process, transforming an internal organ, one cell at a time. Sometimes it didn’t work. They screened for age and counter-indicated conditions. Because this was only a cure for those who weren’t too far gone already.

Like her.

Too bad that train had left the station before she could get onboard.

Still, it gave her something useful to do. Like picking cherry tomatoes or tracking the birds. Only this was more powerful. Probably the best thing she’d ever done.

“Devika! Are you okay?” Her friend Ezra rushed through the tomato forest, concern crinkling up that young dark-skinned face.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” She waved him off.

“You don’t look fine.” He got more concerned as he knelt down beside her.

She was quite a sight, a heap of bones and tired, swollen flesh, a smattering of tomatoes in her basket and weed carnage at her feet. “Just sitting in the dirt with the tomatoes. Nothing to see here.”

He scowled. “Let me help you up.”

She wasn’t ready to leave, but Ezra would fuss, and she didn’t have energy for that, either. She gave him her hand, but he bent down with those youthful muscles and practically scooped her out of the soil. She laughed a little as he set her on her feet, but then the dizziness made her wobble.

“That’s it,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”

“Alright.” No sense in fighting it. And with his arm firm at her back, she was steady. Wouldn’t even have to stop to catch her breath.

“You’ve got the liver, don’t you?” Ezra said quietly on the way.

“Well, everyone does.” She wheezed a little. “Why should I be any different?”

“You should try those pills.” He watched the sidewalk for cracks that might be hazardous to her.

His words drew her gaze. “What pills?”

“You haven’t heard? It’s a cure. A real one.”

“Sounds like snake oil to me.” But her heart was thrumming.

He dipped his head and lowered his voice. “They fixed my cousin. Complete reversal. You can’t get the pills from any doctor, but they’re the real deal. I can get them for you.”

“Can you, now?”

His fervent nod settled something deep in her bones. Ezra was quiet until they got to her door. “You want me to come in?”

“Ezra, I’m fine.”

“I’ll get you those pills.” He was very serious now. “You just say the word. And don’t be stubborn, Ms. Patel. I’ve got more stubborn than you. I’ll wear you down.”

She smiled. “Now, that’s a threat.” But she waved him off again. She needed some time alone before she broke the news to him—that even the miracle cure was too late for her. “Give me a minute to rest, then you come back. We’ll have ourselves a chat.”

He nodded his acceptance.

She’d left all her energy at the garden, and without Ezra’s help, it was rough getting to her desk, but she made it.

She’d wanted to wait until they’d built up enough of a network that she could be sure no one could shut it down. Or even better, wait until the necropoliticians were shoved out of power again, at least in her country, because then they could really do something, with the right folks in charge. In the meantime, she’d spent all her effort on getting the pills to whoever they could. But if word of them had spread so far that they were showing up in her own backyard . . . maybe the network had grown big enough. Maybe people like her friend Ezra would see it through.

She mustered her energy and got on Shredder. Direct to Diego.

“Maisy! It’s good to hear from you.” He was surprised.

“Diego, I’ve been trying to stop the bleeding, all this time.”

“What?” His alarm blasted through.

“I’m speaking metaphorically.”

“Oh.”

“When you’re in an emergency, it’s important to stop the bleeding, but at some point, that doesn’t matter. At some point, you have to stop patching up the wounds and take away the butcher knife.”

“I’m not sure I follow.” He sounded worried for her mental health. But that was the only kind she had.

“It’s time to go public.”

“Really? You mean it?”

She really did. “You invented this thing. You built a worldwide network to get it to the people who need it most. You waited and played it smart and now . . . .” The dizziness was making her head spin. “Tell the world, Diego. Tell them what you’ve done.” She propped her head on her hands to keep it from swimming. “What’s your name, sweetie?” Her voice was slurring. She could hear it. “Your real one.”

“Patrick.”

“Nice to meet you, Patrick.” It came out a wheeze. “My name’s Devika.” And then she felt something slipping away. She tried to close the call, but she missed the button on the way down into blackness.

She awoke to the taste of metal and Ezra’s smiling face.

“Hey.” Her throat felt thick, and she coughed.

He helped her with water. “The docs said you might be waking up soon. Glad I was here to see it.”

She patted his hand to show she could hold the glass of water and straw herself. “You brought me to the hospital?” She couldn’t remember a damn thing. But Ezra must have come back for her and brought her in. Not that it would help.

He nodded. A bit of smile snuck onto his face. “I bet you don’t remember much.”

“Ezra, I don’t remember anything.” She was in a hospital bed. The yellow walls of her room were dotted with monitors and their silent blips.

“You could have told me, you know.” His smile got stronger. “That you were Grandma Maisy.”

“Oh. That.” She took another long drink of water. Then she frowned. “Wait, how did you . . . .” Her brain felt like it had been packed with cotton.

“A lot’s happened in the last ten days.”

“Ten what.” She leaned over to set down her glass, and a sharp pinch stabbed her stomach. She winced and cradled her hand to it. “What the—”

“Take it easy.” Ezra was on his feet now, like he might barricade her from getting out of bed. “The doc said it would hurt some as the anesthetic wore off.”

She stared at him, like he was speaking German with the translator off. Then she gingerly poked around her stomach and a staccato of dulled pain raced across her middle. She dug around the tangle of blankets and sheets and hospital gown, not caring if she was flashing poor Ezra with her wrinkly old body, but when she got to skin, she could hardly take it in.

The upside-down “T” of a liver transplant incision splayed across her abdomen, stapled together like a railroad track of flesh. She didn’t believe it until she passed her hand gently over it, the touch bringing the winces of pain a little sharper.

She dropped her gown and looked up. “How?” It was the only word her brain could form.

“Turns out there’s a lot of folks who want Grandma Maisy to have a new liver.” He looked fit to burst with that smile. “’Course, I was the one who told them to keep you out, otherwise you might have some sass about it.”

She just sat there with her mouth hanging open.

He cocked his head. “I know what you really want to know.”

“You do?” She still had not a single thought in her head but wonder.

Ezra settled back in his chair and scratched his chin. “Devika would want to know the tomato harvest is coming quite nicely.”

Some of her senses were coming back to her. “And Grandma Maisy?”

He smirked. “She’d like to know her magic pills are in short supply, but every country on Earth has been forced to fund production to meet the need. The network Grandma Maisy built—it’s too big, too pervasive, too connected everywhere. The first day of protests . . . you’ll have to go back and watch. But the politicians had no choice.”

“Oh.” She eased back to rest on her pillow, ginger with her newly stapled stomach. “You’re saying it worked.”

“I’m saying it worked. And Patrick says hello.” His smile was getting downright infectious.

“Well, all right, then.” She blinked several more times before it truly sunk in. “Maybe now I’ll have time to tend my flowers.” Or count the birds. Or watch this miracle unfold and know that she’d done something good. Something real.

“I’d say you’ve earned your retirement.”

She didn’t know if she was ready for that.

But she was surprised to find the days were even more precious when you suddenly had a lot more of them.