At first, in the 80s, there were less than seven million people living with it all over the world. The government virtually ignored it. Just a passing disease. No one but gay community and drug addicts infected. And really, let’s not fool ourselves, it’s not like Ronald Regan was a big fan of gay people to begin with. By ’95, there were about 17 million people. Now it was a problem. Not that society really cared anyway. Then came 2008. Now it wasn’t just a fad. Sure, it wasn’t quite the plague, but still. People started to pay attention. It’s hard not to when there were 33.2 citizens living with it. When one child was dying every minute from it. When five people per minute were becoming infected with it. When it was the leading cause of death for African Americans. Now though, it is the leading cause of death for everyone. Not just Latinos, not just Asians, not just Ethiopians; everyone. AIDs is the number one killer for everyone all over the world, today, in 2080. And it is my job to stop it. “Analise, can you grab two vials from the stock room please?” I shouted through the lab. “Sure Alek,” Analise, my lab partner called back, her voice bouncing off the gurgling test tubes and Petri dishes containing seemingly harmless, although lethal chemicals, colonating bacteria, and, of course, the rapidly changing retrovirus, AIDs. I refocused on my task at hand, completely and utterly engrossed in transplanting the plasmid from one bacterium to another, in hope that this would be the one. The one, out of the hundreds of trials preformed, that would save the human race from extinction. The pressure was overwhelming. To begin with, I never pictured myself doing this. Any of it; being a scientist, working with Analise; I had a completely different life planned. I wanted to be a musician. I would live in a small studio in California. Every day I would wake up to find Leah, the love of my life, lying next to me. We would seclude ourselves to our own little world. But that all changed when Leah got AIDs. She wasn’t sure how she contracted it, but it doesn’t matter now. She’s gone and I’m still here. Out went my plans of singing about her strawberry colored lips and rainbow personality, and in with my life of sterile white coats, white walls and the bland white taste of a life, unfulfilled. “Analise, do you want to be here when I perform this test?” I asked Analise, “This could be the one.” Analise’s cold laugh echoed through the spartan lab. “That’s what you’ve said before. So no thanks, I am quite busy on my own project,” Analise snapped back. Ideally, if everything went correctly, not only would the cell stop multiplying, but the millions of mutations would also come to a halt. I’d yet to see this happen. Sure I’d see a decrease in the number of clones made, but, ultimately, if the mutations could not be cut off, neither could the disease. I left the vaccination to get to work while I grabbed a Coke out of our fridge. As I strolled back, I glanced at Analise; her long hair falling over her shoulders and piercing green eyes staring at a test tube. Absentmindedly, I glanced at the Petri dish, expecting to see it covered in hundreds of thousands of tiny cells from the AIDs virus. Rather than what I expected though, the yellow green of the agar on the bottom of the dish was still visible. In fact, it looked identical to how it did before. There had been no clones. No mutations. … As I walked down the gravel path, the lyrics to my favorite song replayed over and over again in my head. It was one of those times when it won’t get out. I couldn’t seem to remember the rest of the song, so instead, my brain just continuously sang: “Even the rose grows from the pavement”. It seemed uncannily fitting, as I stared at the mass grave in which thousands of people had been buried, including Leah, after dyeing from the AIDs pandemic. Yet, sprouting out from the shroud of dirt, was a collection virginal green grass and strawberry colored flowers. I hoped that one day, this grave would just be another bump in the ground. Just as AIDs was just another curve in the road. Which was, possibly, stopped forever by me.
“Analise, can you grab two vials from the stock room please?” I shouted through the lab.
“Sure Alek,” Analise, my lab partner called back, her voice bouncing off the gurgling test tubes and Petri dishes containing seemingly harmless, although lethal chemicals, colonating bacteria, and, of course, the rapidly changing retrovirus, AIDs.
I refocused on my task at hand, completely and utterly engrossed in transplanting the plasmid from one bacterium to another, in hope that this would be the one. The one, out of the hundreds of trials preformed, that would save the human race from extinction.
The pressure was overwhelming. To begin with, I never pictured myself doing this. Any of it; being a scientist, working with Analise; I had a completely different life planned. I wanted to be a musician. I would live in a small studio in California. Every day I would wake up to find Leah, the love of my life, lying next to me. We would seclude ourselves to our own little world. But that all changed when Leah got AIDs. She wasn’t sure how she contracted it, but it doesn’t matter now. She’s gone and I’m still here. Out went my plans of singing about her strawberry colored lips and rainbow personality, and in with my life of sterile white coats, white walls and the bland white taste of a life, unfulfilled.
“Analise, do you want to be here when I perform this test?” I asked Analise, “This could be the one.”
Analise’s cold laugh echoed through the spartan lab. “That’s what you’ve said before. So no thanks, I am quite busy on my own project,” Analise snapped back.
Ideally, if everything went correctly, not only would the cell stop multiplying, but the millions of mutations would also come to a halt. I’d yet to see this happen. Sure I’d see a decrease in the number of clones made, but, ultimately, if the mutations could not be cut off, neither could the disease.
I left the vaccination to get to work while I grabbed a Coke out of our fridge. As I strolled back, I glanced at Analise; her long hair falling over her shoulders and piercing green eyes staring at a test tube. Absentmindedly, I glanced at the Petri dish, expecting to see it covered in hundreds of thousands of tiny cells from the AIDs virus. Rather than what I expected though, the yellow green of the agar on the bottom of the dish was still visible. In fact, it looked identical to how it did before. There had been no clones. No mutations.
…
As I walked down the gravel path, the lyrics to my favorite song replayed over and over again in my head. It was one of those times when it won’t get out. I couldn’t seem to remember the rest of the song, so instead, my brain just continuously sang: “Even the rose grows from the pavement”. It seemed uncannily fitting, as I stared at the mass grave in which thousands of people had been buried, including Leah, after dyeing from the AIDs pandemic. Yet, sprouting out from the shroud of dirt, was a collection virginal green grass and strawberry colored flowers. I hoped that one day, this grave would just be another bump in the ground. Just as AIDs was just another curve in the road. Which was, possibly, stopped forever by me.