1k words, 4 minutes reading time

Year 1891

“After the Struggle, the gods departed. But they would not leave the humans to fend for themselves. They bestowed upon the First Shawoman the seeds, as well as the Spit, the only defense against the human-devouring nodules sent by the malicious spirits.”

This is the scripture. There are also the apocrypha: the Shawoman chanced upon a divine substance or was bitten by a sack-gourd-sized tetrapod. “Sack-gourd-sized.” I shake my head with amusement. They might as well say fairies. Besides, imagine a fever-hexapod that size! The pincers would’ve surely severed the limbs of even a demigod like the Shawoman.

But I remember the thrill of sharing such apocrypha in school. The thrill of kids let into secrets that adults frown upon. J sometimes trafficked them from unnamed sources and sometimes made them up. She would act out the scenes, puffing her cheeks to imitate our village shawoman, as well as the gods that watch over us from the classroom walls. That often earned her a gentle scold from our teacher, Nu. Unfair. If I were caught disrespecting the gods, Nu would’ve been much stricter. He raised me and didn’t want to appear partial.

Our village is receding into a dot in the sunset. Is Nu sending the last kids home? Is J as nonchalant about the nodules in her throat as she let on, now that she doesn’t have to hide her coughs so that I wouldn’t be worried? I look ahead at the stretch of gravel and dirt that barely qualifies as “road”. A proper village road would be overgrown with pavement-grass that hugs your toes. I train my eyes on the northwestern horizon. A bright haze in the dusk. Nu says that’s where I will find the Center, where the 173rd Shawoman sits.

J is too young for nodules, but they’ve been growing unrestrained for months. She is now limping, which suggests nodules nibbling her thigh nerves too. Healing-gourd treats headaches and hexapod-bite fevers, but nodules are battles between the gods and the spirits that only the Spit can fight. Our village shawoman used to perform the healing kisses, which to me look more like bites. Maybe that’s what inspired the tetrapod-bite myth? Since her passing though, the Center couldn’t dispatch another, because none has been inducted in years. I hope they have a Spit stash. They must.

That is my last thought before drifting into sleep. The wasteland is dotted with lantern-bushes escaped from settlements. I’m used to them lining the roads, but here their dwindling lights are joined by the stars. I dream of the lantern-hexapods I read about. To think that a flying hexapod could light up like a bush! J once supposedly brought one for my birthday, but when we peeked into the grass cage, there was no life left, nor light. I don’t think J was pulling one of her pranks. She was trying too hard to look casually disappointed. But then are lantern-hexapods more real than tetrapods? The dream is interrupted by a stinging bite. I must have been too tired to seal the tent properly against fever-hexapods.

I put on the healing-gourd jam too late, and my body temperature is rising to my throbbing temples. Also, I shouldn’t have teased J when she “squandered” an afternoon packing my sack-gourd with crispy-hexapod bread. Judging by the faraway haze, I need to start rationing. The next three nights are unremarkable, or am I too feverish and famished? Has it actually been four days? I am not sure if I’m delirious when the lights burst into view. Where my village has bushes and vines, the Center flows from towering torch-woods that I’ve only seen in textbooks. Flowing right up to the opposite bank of a creek. I dip an aching toe into the freezing stream and shiver. I pick up pace, to stay ahead of the fever that screams for me to retreat. Then I slip. I hear people yelling, and someone plunging into water…

…I find myself reclining in bed when I surface back into consciousness. The Shawoman is as I have always imagined, solemn and tired eyes, protruding cheeks, and a robe made from the magnolia bark of the cloth-wood unlike the sun-bleached cloth-vine on our village shawoman. She is surrounded by apprentices, well-nourished except for six pale ones – the most devout try to starve out lurking malicious spirits before induction. Rumor has it that the induction has been failing for lack of devotion from the apprentices, and one could see they are putting up their best effort to prove the rumors wrong. If I weren’t focused on my request, I would’ve been self-conscious that even the most emaciated apprentice is still more dignified and in better shape than me.

“Pardon me, daughter. We never managed to transport the Spit. Besides, I’ve grown too old to produce much,” the Shawomen strained a wrinkled smile. “I pray this Spit-spiced nectar restores your wellbeing.”

I gulp down a bowl of mixed-hexapod stew to wash the nectar aftertaste. My tears finally find the strength to stream down, with raindrops pattering on the shingle-vines. What is the first thing I’m going to tell J? That I’ve failed and she’ll join mama and baba? As I drown in a dream void of J’s mischiefs, I catch a tingling waking up in my cheeks, like the sun about to pierce through the malicious veil of rain, to erupt into another glorious dawn.

Year -27

The national biotechnology lab, doomed by outages and wars, is being decommissioned. A vial of lyophilized oncolytic rabies virus rolled off a cart. No one was around to read the label again: “risk of chronic salivary gland infection when immunocompromised”. Next-door, the greenhouse is buried in an unruly lush tangle of plants breaking free.

Year 1891

Thanks to the small entourage, the return trip takes longer despite all my prodding, as the first shawoman inducted in thirteen years. I smile. J and Nu smile back, leaning on walking sticks.

So we Zoom on. Science. Life. Sobering discussion of recent events.

Many years later, as the earliest lab members bid each other farewell, they are to remember that distant summer when they work at the bench while social distancing, in a lab fully operational for a mere couple of days.

There is a meeting on the cloud

Alex hacks protein in the north

Eerik prepares for quarter fourth

All in our meeting on the cloud

Update 4/2: Now Prima joins us for a rotation too. That’s why we shouldn’t have lyricized the post…

The Gao Lab started at Stanford on April 1, 2020. We are growing the lab, one member at a time, so as to engineer mammalian biology, one module at a time.

Prospective students: please apply through Stanford’s Chemical Engineering PhD program. If you are already at Stanford (in any program, not necessarily ChemE), please email Xiaojing (xjgao at institute name dot edu) to chat about rotation projects.

Prospective postdocs: please email Xiaojing (xjgao at institute name dot edu) directly. Please write briefly about your research interest, attach a CV, and list three references.