Welcome to Manifesto, my fantasy/sci-fi novel. If you’re new here, you can go to the beginning here.
Quick recap: Shawn traveled again, pondering the advancements in tech and their possible effects on society. He met a fellow mycologist and was happy to exchange numbers.
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A few days passed. It was Wednesday, and Shawn was hunched over his desk at the dorm. For the world, he couldn’t figure out why his cultures weren’t growing. He had a bunch of Petri dishes with plant matter lying before him, each injected with spores of a different mutant. The aim of his project was to genetically modify rusts, pucciniomycotina, which were plant pathogens, with the hope of creating a beneficial mutant that would reduce the extent of agricultural damage they caused. However, his project was bleak, for he didn’t even know what type of mutation he was looking for. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack without knowing whether the needle existed. “Should have put more effort in thinking through the experiment,” he said aloud as he realized. He poked around with a metal inoculation needle, which was nothing else than a tool to move around the plant matter and see potential signs of growth. He had a few of them on the table, of which four were rusted. Quite shitty, he thought. Frustrated, he got up and decided to consult Pat on what to do.
“Hey, Mr. Sp—” he caught himself slipping, “I mean Pat.”
“Yes?” Pat asked with a silly raspy voice.
“Uhm, I wanted to ask for help. The rusts aren’t growing?”
“What’s there to help with?” Pat asked with a laugh.
“Well, isn’t the point of it to cul—”
“Just make more of them. You need volume Shawn,” Pat replied.
“Even more?” Fuck, not more of them, he thought and sighed. He hated the tedious, repetitive work cultivation brought with it.
“What do you get? Two hundred plates? The probability that you will find something of value will be slim to none,” Pat explained and continued, “You have to account for the fact that some of the mutations might cause defects in vegetative —growth— functions.”
Shawn sighed. “Right.”
“Shawn?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve not yet received an application for the Amazon trip from you. You’re planning on coming?”
His heart ached at the thought of the excursion, and with a pained expression, he said, “Well, I would really want to go, but… the thing is… I don’t think our family has the budget to afford the trip.”
“Are you able to take a loan?”
“I’m already indebted way more than I can handle, the tuition fees and such. I don’t think they’d give me another one,” Shawn explained.
“I see,” Pat said, caressing his beard with his hand, “What if I offered to pay for it for you? With the condition you’d pay it back to me once you would be able to.”
Shawn’s brows lifted, his eyes opened wide, and his jaw opened, but his lips remained closed.
“You’d what? No way Pat, I can’t acce—”
“You have a lot of potential, Shawn. The trip is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. You’re one of my most promising students, and I’d feel a great loss to go there without you,” he puffed his pipe and coughed.
“But my grades aren’t even that good,” Shawn said.
“It’s not the grades. It’s the spirit that makes a scientist,” Pat paused and continued, “a discerning eye that sees possibility and opportunity where others don’t… that is the true gift of a scientist. When we talk about the ‘what-ifs’ of biology, I find myself often surprised.”
Shawn couldn’t help but smile. Please continue, he thought and almost laughed out loud as he noticed his craving for praise.
Pat remembered, “I mean… the idea of a symbiosis between horses and a glitter-producing bacteria, then calling it a unicorn, that’s real genius,” both of them laughed heartily.
“Or the space squids with Morse code?” Shawn remembered, and they had another fit. When they calmed down a bit, Pat once more said, “Think about it. You have three weeks until the application deadline,”
“Thank you, really.” Shawn said with a big smile, “ I’ll think about it.”
As he walked home, he had a huge smile on his face again and thought, finally, things start to work out for me. He barely finished his thought when his phone rang. He took it out and saw “Mom” on the screen. He sighed and pressed the green button.
“Shawn?”
“Yeah? Quite unusual for you to call me. Are you missing me?”
“Was your father at home when you left?”
“Yes? Why?”
“He hasn’t returned yet, and his phone is dead,” she said with worry in her voice.
“Don’t stress about it. He is probably raising a bottle somewhere. He’ll show up soon.”
“So you haven’t heard from him?”
“Pff, he wouldn’t message me even if it was the last thing he did,” Shawn replied.
“Okay,” she hung up.
“Love you too, Mom,” he said aloud. The high spirits were washed away, and he now regretted believing that life had favored him for once. Yeah, right.