MICHAEL AARON Julia’s Garden

Michael is a lapsed Taoist of mixed parentage and fixed abode. He can be seen riding bicycles with occasional passengers. His work has appeared in many places over the years, often on purpose. Like the square root of three, he is positive and irrational.

Julia’s Garden was inspired by recent research into the human biome: Our personal collection of microbes, two kilos of bugs that science has only just come to realise is as vital to our wellbeing as a functioning liver or pancreas. Since the birth of germ theory, they’ve been seen as parasites and invaders. Only now are we beginning to unravel the complex symbiosis between us and our gut flora, and we disturb it at our peril.

It’s warm, the beginning of summer, and I’m sitting on a bench in a children’s playground. Swings move in a gentle breeze, their chains creaking. I take a handful of petri dishes from my bag, and line them up beside me.

The labels are in my handwriting: Bacillus anthracis (true to form, the Anthrax spores are a brilliant white), Yersinia pestis (Bubonic Plague, not black but orange), and Mycobacterium tuberculosis (a suitably phlegmy green).

I note the time, wish them luck and open them to the air.

My stomach clenches. Infection, already! I rub my belly, feeling an almost maternal rush. But no, it’s a reminder of my skipped breakfast. Couldn’t face another bowl of extruded nutrient mush this morning. I crave something with taste.

I look behind me, more out of habit than need. The paranoia of the early days is ingrained. Police and other Government forces are long dead or disbanded, and the Skin-Gangs that replaced them have vanished away to nothing in recent weeks. It seems there is a limit to the persistence of organized barbarism.

Satisfied in my privacy, I dip a finger in the Anthrax dish and scoop out a taste. The layer of spores breaks with a delicate crunch, like a pie crust.

I lick my finger. It’s surprisingly sweet, but with a dusty, sour aftertaste. I try them all, ending with a creamy dollop of plague. I clean out the dish, smacking my lips.

The chains jangle louder for a second. I twist my head to see the swings. Were they rocking that high before?

I examine the remaining dishes. My heart sinks to see they’re already greying over, a billion little victims of bactericide. As grey as the trees and the grass, as grey as my life.

I check my watch. One minute, fifty-eight seconds. A new record.

Back to the car, which I kept in sight the whole time. Even so, I circle round and check underneath before getting in. It drives itself back to the lab while I keep an eye out, M16 on my lap. Only when we enter the underground car-park do I put the safety back on. Old habits.

I punch in the code and let the machine read my iris. The outer door opens and I step inside. Another code, another scan and then I’m into the bunker, home sweet home.

The first level is an open-plan office, a big spread of desks and chairs like you’d find in any modern city circa one lifetime ago. Angela stands waiting.

Unlike me, she still looks the part. White coat, black hair in a bun. She even wears her name tag, lest we forget she is Doctor Cortez.

“What happened to the test cultures?” she asks.

“I ate them.”

Her bottom lip wobbles. “You what?”

“I ate them.”

“You ate them?” She sits at her desk, takes off her glasses and rubs her temples. “She ate them. Ate them. Why would she even think to do that?”

She talks to herself a lot. I think she’s going crazy.

“Doctor Mackenzie — Julia,” she says, not looking at me, “we’ve got to stick to professional standards if we’re going to beat this.”

I stifle a laugh. Beat this? We got beat the day we engineered the first bacteriophage. She was part of the company that sold the first wave of designer viruses.

“You could go,” I say.

Her hand twitches, covers her missing right eye. No, Doctor Cortez will not be going outside.

“You bitch,” she says. “I didn’t ask them to rescue me.”

I close my eyes, suppress. “I’m going to the Garden.”

“What for, dessert?”

She remonstrates with herself, hands waving in the air. Definitely crazy.

I walk on. A couple of familiar faces look up from their workstations, say hello, then put their heads down. When your electricity comes from solar panels, computer time is precious. The stairs are unlit, another energy-saving measure.

I open the door at sub-level three. Ahead are benches stacked with equipment, all dead and useless. The one bit of high-tech that turned out useful, the printer on the next level down, is busy churning out food from hoppers of chemical ingredients.

At the far end is an airtight door. I go inside, shower and put on a bio suit. Then I shower again, dousing the outside of the suit with antivirals.

It’s a mirror of normal procedure. The entire world is a clean-room now, a sterile wasteland except for the phages.

Through another door, where I get an air bath and a second antiviral shower. Then a high-powered UV light switches on and I turn around, arms raised. Only then does the last door open, and I can enter the Garden.

It’s like visiting an aquarium. You’re in the dark, peering at a giant glass box. Instead of fake rocks and tiny fish, you see racks and racks of test tubes and vials. A robot arm rests in the centre, ready to grab.

There’s a console on one side where I log in. Temperature, air pressure, light levels — mundane, but essential maintenance that keeps the last pocket of microbes on Earth alive.

Everything’s fine. The Garden grows. The hardest part is preparing feedstock, which has to be sterilised to an exacting degree. Not one virion can get through.

All it takes is one. Bacteria are a varied bunch, but they all share the same template: Organic balloon. Our virus latches on, injects its own DNA and performs a hostile takeover. Balloon fills with baby viruses, bursts. Repeat.

Repeat until all the balloons are popped. The party’s over, but like bad guests they stick around. Not being technically alive, they don’t even have the decency to die of old age.

All this happened in nature already, of course. For millions of years bacteriophages were locked in an arms race with their prey, until one of our bright sparks tipped the scales. Maybe even one of the boys and girls upstairs, not that they’d admit it.

It wouldn’t be a problem, we said. Increase the virulence and it burns itself out sooner, we said.

I set the robot to work. It quickly finds an old classic: Streptococcus. Group A strain, everything from strep throat to eating your face.

I add a dash of Escherichia coli and Clostridium tatani, better known as tetanus. Are you sure, asks the computer, are you sure? Yes, yes. The robot places the mixture in the Garden’s only exit, a drawer that passes through two airlocks on its way to me.

I leave, not bothering to follow decontamination protocol. No point. I’m the most sterile thing in there. I throw the suit in an overflowing trash-can.

I place the sample on a counter-top, lean over and take a deep breath. The smell is repulsive, a toxic blend of mould, yeast and rancid meat, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except it has a taste, it is alive and doing what it was born to do.

I shovel each mouthful at speed. In an enclosed environment like the bunker, the phage is more concentrated, so the bacteria won’t last as long as they do outside.

It’s possible I’m a little crazy, too.

Lunchtime meeting. Everyone sits in a conference room, nineteen of us last time I counted. Doctor John Geere, the closest thing we have to a leader, presides.

I stare at his sideburns, which have grown to giant proportions. They sprout out the side of his head like an Orangutan’s cheek flanges.

“We’ll start with Doctor Chung’s atmospheric data,” he says. “I’m afraid it’s not good. Go ahead, Vanessa.”

When we first met, I was struck by Vanessa’s friendly smile and envious of her good looks. Today I notice she has shaved her head completely. Even her eyebrows.

She does not waste time. “The samples from the last twelve-week period show atmospheric oxygen content is currently averaging eighteen point seven percent, down from the norm of twenty point eight. From the current trend, all oxygen will be depleted in six hundred and thirty days, plus or minus fifty.”

She puts her hands on her lap and stares ahead. A man speaks, one of the army chemists who led us here. Matthew something.

“What’s the minimum we need to breathe?”

Vanessa doesn’t check her papers. “Concentrations below nine percent are typically fatal. That level will be reached in four hundred and eighty days, plus or minus thirty.”

A chair scrapes on the floor. Matthew runs a hand through his hair, a luxuriant brown thatch. “That’s less than a year and a half! Is there any—”

“In two hundred days it will be below fifteen percent,” Vanessa says. “At that point we will experience shortness of breath and increased heart rate. Mental judgement and physical coordination will noticeably suffer, and serious scientific work will be almost impossible from then on.”

She closes her eyes. I watch her lips, which are painted a brilliant red.

“Three hundred days from now, at twelve percent, fatigue is permanent and mental performance severely impaired. In less than a year it will be ten percent, constant vomiting and fainting. Any of us still alive by then will probably die of dehydration.”

John breaks the silence. “Thank you, Vanessa.” He grimaces, crosses his legs. “There we have it, ladies and gentlemen. Does anyone have any ideas?”

Diana, the only other girl my age, raises her hand. The show of classroom etiquette makes me want to slap her.

“This is an army bunker, right? Doesn’t it have its own air supply?”

Matthew answers. “It had a bio-reactor to recycle air and water. But of course, it relied on a microbial ecosystem…”

And so it is dead. As dead as we will be, in a year at most. As dead as the oceans, where the bacteria that made half our oxygen used to live. As dead as the plants that made the other half, because they needed the nitrogen that only bacteria make in sufficient quantity. All this we must fix inside two hundred days for the slightest chance of survival. I want to scream.

Diana turns and fixes her shiny eyes on me. “Julia, you’ve been outside recently. There must still be some pockets of life, a few patches of moss or algae clinging on. We could use them as a starting point for the strongest organisms, breed something that has some kind of resistance, can’t we?”

“It’s possible,” I say. The lie is easy.

“That’s a great idea, Diana,” John says. “Why don’t you go out with Julia on her next field trip? Two sets of eyes are better than one, and safer.”

My cheek twitches. Diana mistakes it for a smile and flashes a nervous grin at me. I glare at Angela, who sits with arms folded tight, head down. She is rocking herself.

We get out at a wooded area near the playground. It’s a mistake to visit the same location again so soon, but I’m past caring. It’s a good spot for our side-mission, I tell myself. There is — used to be — lots of vegetation on the edge of the city.

From here I can see skyscrapers, still pristine and gleaming. No creepers will drag them down. Wind and rain will be their only enemies for the next few thousand years, give or take an earthquake.

Diana slams the car door, making me jump.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she says.

“Sure.”

“I’m not a real Doctor.” She grins like it’s a joke. “I mean, I am, really, I did all the studying and wrote my thesis. But when it happened, it was just before I could get things straight with my supervisor, and the paperwork kind of got lost.”

“That’s too bad.”

She hands me the carry-all. “Mind if I take a walk around? I can check out the undergrowth while you do your test.”

“Better if we stick together.”

“Oh, please. You putting on a show so I’ll tell John you were a good little girl? Give me some credit for having a spine of my own.”

She’s smarter than I thought. I open the car’s gun box and take out the side-arm, a P226. Old but reliable.

“Take this.” I offer it to her, grip first.

She shakes her head. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Besides, I got this far without guns.”

I nod to the playground. “I’ll be in there. If anything happens, run to me in a parabolic curve. That way I can shoot what’s chasing you without hitting you.”

She laughs. “Were you this weird already, or did it turn you this way?”

I am half way between crying and laughing hysterically before she laughs again and lays a hand on my arm. “I’m kidding! The strangest thing would be if any of us were still normal, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

I force a smile and we go our separate ways. I head to the same bench as before, checking over my shoulder to see where Diana goes. She disappears into the dead trees, a dash of colour in the grey.

It’s a good thing she didn’t check up on me. I take out the petri dishes, all of them empty except for sterile Agar nutrient. I’ve decided on a different test.

I open the lids and spit into them. My saliva forms a wet, bubbly island on the gel.

The sun is out and the sky is blue. I sit back and close my eyes, soaking up the warmth. For an instant I can picture children playing, mothers and fathers watching with fear and pride.

They only wanted what was best.

The super-bugs. The drug-resistant strains. The return of diseases that were supposed to have gone forever. Something had to be done.

And so we made a glorious beast to hunt for us. A killing machine forged from lipids and proteins, sold to anyone scared of death.

Don’t care about infectious diseases? It’s also a miracle weight-loss pill. With your gut flora dead, all that food they used to digest goes straight through. No more farts without those pesky bugs metabolising polysaccharides. Good-bye bad breath, body odour and tooth decay! They flew off the shelves.

We deserve everything we got.

Diana shouts from somewhere ahead. I snap into focus and swing the M16 off my shoulder, thumbing the safety off. She comes out, waving.

“Are you all right? You looked kinda zoned out.”

I lower the rifle. “I’m fine. Find anything?”

“Nope. But I did something I always wanted to do. Took a shit in the woods.”

My smile is not forced this time.

“Been saving one up. I got to thinking: If there’s anything still alive, it’s hiding away inside. In fact, it’s given me an idea. We’ve survived this long, maybe the bug we need is right inside of us. We’re kind of a nature reserve, and we have to re-introduce the survivors into the wild.”

I sling the rifle over my shoulder. We walk to the car, side by side. “I’ve been feeling the same, but I guess I didn’t know how to put it in words until you said it.”

“I know! It’s great, isn’t it? Tomorrow, we can come back and examine my poop.”

I laugh. “And those petri dishes. They’re full of my spit.”

“No way!”

“I’ve been experimenting on myself. Trying to get infected with something.”

“What happens if it works?”

“I’ll have died for a noble cause.”

“Not if nobody knows about it.”

“Now you do.”

For a few seconds we forget the world is dead, that friends and families are gone. We are just two women, walking. I look forward to a few more moments like this in whatever time is left.

Maybe it won’t be so bad. I unlock the car.

Before I can open the door, a pair of hands reach out from under the vehicle and grab me by the ankles. With a sharp tug, they pull hard, slamming my shins into the footplate and knocking me flat on my back. Most of the skin below my knees is scraped off, but the most painful thing is the rifle digging into my shoulders.

Diana screams, backs away. A second attacker scrambles out on hands and knees.

I twist and kick, but the grip on my ankles is too strong. Diana stops screaming, which I am sure is bad. I manage to turn over, in time to see her caught in an embrace with a Thing. It holds her in a mockery of tenderness, jaws closed on her neck, blood dripping. Her arms hang limp.

The rifle is somehow in my hands. I pull the trigger, at the same time as teeth tear at my calf. The Thing sprays blood, drops to the ground. Diana slumps with it.

The teeth let go, but the hold on my ankles gets tighter. It tries to pull me further under the car, but with both of us lying flat, it struggles for leverage.

I break the impasse with a burst of full auto between my legs. The hands on my ankles tighten for an instant, then release.

Instinct and experience take over. I crouch low and sweep round the car, looking for anything else on the prowl. Where there were two, there could be others.

No sign of movement. I check Diana in case the last sixty seconds were part of some intense hallucination, a possibility I refuse to discount until I see her ripped throat.

The car, mercifully undamaged, takes me back without complaining of blood on the seats. I wrap my shins in dressing and closely examine the bite, a near perfect impression of a mouth full of teeth. At least I don’t have to worry about infection.

Back inside, I draw a crowd. Questions lash me. What the hell happened? Why didn’t you look out for her? What do you think you’re doing? How could this happen?

I can’t answer, so I don’t. Vanessa walks up to me, her bald head a totem of understanding. In front of everyone she takes me in her arms and holds me, just holds me.

“It’s all right,” she whispers in my ear. “It’s all right. I understand.”

She turns to face the others. Too late, I see she’s taken the pistol.

She puts it to her chin and fires. A plume of blood erupts from the top of her head, splattering the ceiling, and me. Her body collapses and all eyes turn my way. I’m standing there covered in blood and bad news and they are all staring at me and I don’t know what to do.

“I’m going downstairs,” I say. I push through the silence and disappear into the dark.

Halfway down the pitch-black steps I hear a voice. It’s Matthew.

“Where did it happen?” he says.

I tell him. The car will remember anyway.

He thanks me and heads off to the armoury. I’m pretty sure he’s not coming back.

I walk to the Garden on autopilot. I have no memory of putting the suit on, but here I am, hands on the glass. I am pounding it as hard as I can, screaming.

“How could you let this happen? You were supposed to survive anything! You were supposed to adapt and evolve and just deal with it! How could you do this to us?”

I slam the glass so hard my nails bleed. Exhausted, I slump down, knees drawn up, the damage to my shins now making itself felt in waves of searing pain. My face is sticky with blood. I tear off the biosuit’s mask and take a deep breath.

I hear the soft rustle of movement behind me. I don’t look round.

“I knew it would end this way,” says a man I did my best not to love when he was alive. “This is probably part of their life cycle.”

This is not the first time I’ve had hallucinations of the dead. Not by a long shot.

“Right.” I snort, wipe snot off my nose. “They planned millions of years of evolution so we’d come along and kill them all.”

“Not all of them,” he says, moving around the Garden. I imagine his sweet, gentle face watching the back of my head. “I bet they’re still hanging on where it counts. Around the deep-sea vents. Miles beneath the surface of the earth, down in the crust. High up in the stratosphere. They have bunkers too, you know.”

“Sure.” I’ve heard it all before. How bacterial colonies are microscopic cities, where they work together to manage their environment. How they train our immune system and shape animal behaviour. How the global biomass of bacteria is greater than animal and plant life combined.

“Doesn’t matter to them if there’s no oxygen,” he says. “It’s a waste product. We exist thanks to flatulent cyanobacteria in the Palaeoproterozoic era. They’ve experimented with bigger life-forms, and decided eukaryotes weren’t such a great idea after all.”

The pain in my shins peaks. I squeeze my eyes tight. “You’re anthropomorphising them. There’s no sign of any intelligent behaviour there.”

“Says the species that killed itself for money.”

“You’re still wrong, though.”

“I’m just following the facts.” I hear him walking away. “Come back in a few million years, you’ll see I was right.”

Somehow I fall asleep, dreaming of floating in the middle of the ocean. I wake to the sound of sirens.

I have no idea what’s going on, but I refuse to face it covered in blood and skull fragments. I strip down, shower, and put on a new hazard suit.

Someone has moved my rifle.

The main lights are off. The weak glow of emergency bulbs lights my way upwards. I can’t hear anything except the sirens, so I’m unprepared for the sight that greets me on the main floor.

It’s a party.

My colleagues carry drinks and lounge on chairs and desks, laughing and talking. I see a couple of men by the control desk, pressing buttons until the sirens stop blaring. Applause springs up when they succeed.

Dr. Geere sits in his huge chair, a sleepy smile on his face and a drink in one hand.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

His head rolls in my direction. “I thought everyone needed cheering up,” he slurs. “So we decided to have a little drink. Just to…relax a little. We’ve all been under a lot of stress.”

Something doesn’t feel right. I take the beaker from his hand and sniff.

“Hey! No need for that,” he says. “Plenty for everyone! Still coming out the printer!”

The clear fluid stings my nose, but there’s another note beneath the alcohol. A sweet, vanilla scent I recognise, from the liquid morphine I once gave a dying friend. A quick breath is enough to get me high.

“Who made this?” I ask when the initial rush passes. The urgency I felt has gone, and I don’t feel so angry. I feel fantastic!

“Hmm?” His head drops to one side.

“You’re going to die from a morphine overdose,” I say. He giggles.

I pull the suit’s mask over my head and control my breathing. In a minute, I’m sober enough to continue. I go up to someone still standing, a chemist I know called Rob. I grab the drink from his hand and throw it away.

“Who made this? It’s too strong. Come help me with the printer so I can make some naloxone, or—”

He shakes me away. “Dammit! Angela said you were crazy. Get away from me, murderer.”

He reaches out to a tray of beakers. I dash the platter on the floor, spilling drink everywhere. He turns to me, blinks.

“Crazy,” he says, swaying side to side. “Crazy.” He falls over, a smile on his face.

Angela. I scan the room, but she’s not there. I run down the stairs and head to the machine.

I’m no expert with the device, so I hit the stop button and take it from there. There’s a long and complicated menu with lists of ingredients and templates. I find a search bar and start typing ‘Nalox—’

Behind me, Angela speaks.

“It’s concentrated pentobarbitol and ketamine. You can’t save them.”

I turn around with great care. She’s leaning on the counter. The rifle is there, not far from her hands.

“They’ll all go out in perfect bliss, not like Vanessa with her brains blown out.”

“Is that what they wanted?”

“They wanted to be happy,” she says.

I keep my voice level. “Did you take any?”

Her eyes close, almost long enough for me to consider moving, then she snaps back to alertness. “I wanted to. I really did.” She leans back, brushes the barrel of the rifle with the tips of her fingers. “I knew you’d come.”

I nod. “So where do we go from here?”

“We’re not going anywhere,” she says. She reaches behind, still looking at me, and takes hold of the rifle. She lets it hang down and away from her, looking like a little girl with a rag doll.

I hold my breath. She raises the weapon across her chest, then points it at me. Stock first.

“Do it,” she whispers. “I can’t.”

I take a step toward her, just a small one. I’m a little surprised to be alive.

She licks her lips. The rifle trembles in her hands. I take another step, and another, then reach out and put my hands on the grip.

For an instant, she holds tight. Then it’s mine.

Her voice goes up in pitch. “Do it. Don’t make me wait, you heartless bitch!”

She grabs the muzzle and holds it to her chest, dead centre.

No one will judge me. In a few weeks, not even God will remember us. It’s what she wants.

But she is not a Thing, one of the desperate survivors I have trained myself to see as less than human. She is a woman and I know her name. And though I hate her right now as much as I have ever hated anyone, I cannot pull the trigger and shoot her in the heart.

And for what she has done, she deserves to suffer.

I pull the gun away and step back. She drops to her knees, fingers pulling at her hair, a wordless moan escaping her open mouth.

I fill a flask from the printer’s reservoir of euthanasia and make my way to the exit. The party is coming to an end: Men and women lie sprawled everywhere; their lips blue.

They are happy, at least. Perhaps it won’t be so bad.

The car is gone, so I walk. The pain in my shins is bearable, but the injured calf muscle is really starting to hurt. Halfway there, I’m limping. When the park comes into view, I’m hallucinating again.

“Not far now,” he says, walking silently behind me.

Damn, my leg hurts.

“I’ve been having a think,” he says. “Maybe it’s not a plan by all bacteria. Maybe they’re fighting a war amongst themselves.”

“Then they’re as stupid as we are,” I say.

“Not if they’re ruthless and logical enough to destroy pretty much all life on Earth, including most of their own kind, as long as a seed colony survives somewhere. Then the survivors can take over the planet with no competition.”

“Pretty advanced tactics for microbes, don’t you think?”

“Well, they have had a couple billion years to work it out.”

I arrive at the park. The bodies are where I left them. I had thought Matthew might be here, or he’d have buried Diana, but she’s still lying there staring at the sky. Evaporation and wind will break up these cadavers, not the rot we used to enjoy.

Something smells putrid, though. I sniff the air, but can’t locate the source.

I head for the trees. Below the knee, my leg is a solid block of agony.

“It’s peaceful here,” he says when we reach a clearing. I sense him sit down. “Why don’t you rest?”

I’m feeling light-headed from the pain. I take out the flask and feel the weight in my hands. As I sit, the smell of decay gets stronger and I realise it’s coming from me.

I pull up the cloth and take off the dressing. Below the knee, my leg is swollen and dark, the skin crackly to the touch.

“Gas gangrene,” he says. “Clostridium perfringens, or something similar. Anaerobic, so it doesn’t need oxygen. Looks like they think it’s safe to come out.”

The cap twists off in my hand.

“I hope they give dinosaurs another try,” I say.

He moves next to me. “So you believe me now?”

“I have to. Otherwise it’s our fault.”

The trees rustle in the wind, bare branches moving with gentle waves. The sky is clear blue.

I turn to look at him. I see his face clearly.

“Will you stay with me?” I ask.

He takes my hand. “Of course, my love.” I stare into his eyes. They are beautiful.