Pumpkin Splice
It's probably impossible to quantify the havoc wreaked upon history by the high fantasy art murals airbrushed on a certain type of van native to the 1970s. But surely the impetus for this little gothic can be traced to one such vehicle so adorned. It lived next door to our protagonist. Protagonist? A strong word. Perhaps main character is more apt. HIs name is Trip. He's not the nicest person. When we meet him here, long in his past, he was just a sweet kid. Innocent and curious and a little bit nervous. But you would be nervous too, if, when you were 8 years old, the aforementioned painted van moved in next door.
It arrived by mysterious means, for subsequent investigations revealed it to be engineless. Probably brakeless, too, though Trip lacked the mechanical wherewithal to check. Even he could tell it didn't have an engine, though, since the truncated hood was permanently open, revealing its gaping maw. It was parked directly across from Trip's bedroom window, and it never moved. Because, engineless.
It was a Halloween scene, full of all the usual motifs and cliches. Bats. Full moon. Lots of orange. And so many pumpkins, the most prominent of which served as the head of a scarecrow-like figure, but instead of the usual triangle slices for eyes, it instead had these angry, intense blue eyes that seemed to stare directly into Trip's heart. Evil eyes. They looked wrong on that pumpkin head, and something about them disturbed Trip deeply.
At night those eyes would stare into his room, and into his soul. If he buried his head underneath the covers he was safe, but if he had to go to the bathroom, he was doomed. Doomed. When his full bladder convinced him that maybe he wasn't 100% doomed, that perhaps his doom percentile was more like 36% whereas his bladder capacity was at 126%, then he would race to do his business and then sneak, ninja-style, back into his own bed and under the covers once more.
In the daytime, the spell was broken, somewhat. It still held an almost magnetic fascination, but it wasn't irresistible. There were other things to see in the daytime. Like the girl who lived across the street from Trip. Her name was Sadie. Sadie wasn't interested in evil eye Sinatra pumpkins. She was interested in kissing. And running. Kissing and running. She would sneak up on Trip, give him a smooch on the cheek, and take off running. Trip would howl and run after her, and even though Sadie was at least twice as fast as Trip and would win any head-to-head race any day, he always caught her. And then Sadie would kiss him again. Trip would get so mad that one could only assume his higher brain functions were impaired, because he never seemed to recognize the pattern. Until he did, and by then he was clever enough to pretend that he didn't.
Innocent enough, right? Fast forward a few years and maybe not so much. Sadie having a sleepover with her best friend in her yard, camping out in a tent. Trip sneaking over to see what he can see. All in good fun, you say? As the omniscient narrator I can tell you with confidence that Trip wasn't exactly pure of heart. Did he deserve what happened next? Yes. He did.
Sadie's friend had a dog. And this dog, like all of her kind, was pure of heart. Stout of nose. So when she smelled ole Trip slinking about she raised the alarm. And then answered the call herself! Trip had to put all his years of practice chasing Sadie to avoid getting a big chomp mark on his butt.
The dog chased him straight to the van, where she had him cornered. Trip cowered underneath those evil blue eyes, while the yellow dog eyes glowed at him in the dark. HIs personal Scylla and Charybdis.
Sadie's' friend called off her dog, and Sadie punched Trip in the gut for his crime, leaving him winded and crying, not to mention grounded because his parents heard the commotion and were not impressed.
Doomed. Trip was right all along.
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So it turns out growing pumpkins is easy. Trip discovered this sometime between grades 11 and 12. He started his horticultural career in junior high with tabletop gardens, with the LEDs and the water pumps. Easy enough. And then he convinced his parents to obtain a double plot in their local community garden, which he turned into a small pumpkin patch.
And since all that was so easy it wasn't much harder to learn about GM. Through the wonders of Kickstarter and CRISPR technology, Trip was able to set up a small and surprisingly powerful gene editing lab in his bedroom.
What was hard was convincing an organism that lacked a nervous system to grow eyes.
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Nothing. Just a plain old orange pumpkin like all the rest. Trip was disappointed but already had an idea for version 6.0. On Halloween he did what he always did. Cut the top off to scoop out its guts. So gross. So fun. When he saw the little eyes dangling down from the lid, though, he dropped his knife and jumped. I'm pretty sure he swore loudly. Once his heart started beating at a normal pace, he examined what, after all, he should have been expecting.
Rhopalia. Heard of them? Box jellyfish have them, little clusters of six eyes looking every which way. These box jellyfish have four rhopalia, for a total of 24 eyes! What does a jellyfish need with 24 holysmokin eyes? I dunno either, but they've been around for half a billion years so they must be doing something right. One thing is for sure, though, a pumpkin definitely does not need 24 eyes inside its gourdular cavity. Gourdular is not a real word, but rhopalia is. Seriously. Look it up if you don't believe me.
Anyway. Trip was ecstatic. A huge success! Once his elation died down a little bit he realized success was maybe a bit premature. A huge step in the right direction. Now that he had proof of concept he could work on getting the eyes to migrate to the outside of the pumpkin, where they might do some good. Or rather, evil.
For this next phase, Trip turned to the humble Pectinidae. Aka the scallop.
Let us consider the scallop. I consider them to be quite tasty, but if perhaps they are not to your taste or if you don't eat meat it is entirely possible you have never given them much thought at all. I know I certainly didn't know the following fact, which you may want to sit down for:
Scallops have a whole pile of eyes.
So many eyes. Itty bitty bright blue super intense Frank Sinatra eyes.
You scoff. You sputter. Nonsense, you may be shouting, even now when I can not hear you. It's provable. It's googlable. Or you could even go to the seafood tank in your supermarket and see for yourself. See the seafood and you will see.
Trip saw. He had been seen, seen and haunted by eyes just like these. And now he saw. But even so, having seen, having been seen, the way eluded him.
Now, I can't really explain the technicalities of his problem. Plural, actually. A plethora of problems, probably. But their nature are beyond my powers of description. I know what CRISPR means, or at least what it stands for. Let’s see, the C, that stands for… hmm. Well, the R (one of the Rs, don't recall which at the moment) stands for repeating, and the P for palindromic. I may not be a geneticist or molecular biologist but I am a writer and I know all about palindromes. Racecar. Spell it backwards? Racecar. Repeating palindromes: racecar racecar. See? Easy.
So imagine there was a bacteria out there with this odd little phrase in its DNA:
Racecar holysmokin killervirus racecaR
At first the scientists couldn't figure out what these odd phrases of DNA were for. Because it didn't say “holysmokin killervirus” it more likely said something like ATGCCCATTAGTA etc etc and it took them a while to see that what that meant was basically holysmokin killervirus. And then it clicked. The palindromes were simply bookends, or you could even consider them like a picture frame. And the picture inside, essentially those are “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters. The bacteria use these phrases as an immune system of sorts. Some DNA invades their premises that matches that poster, gone! Not allowed!
Okay, so, yay for bacteria. But what does that have to do with pumpkins and franksinatra eyes? Using this principle, scientists were able to appropriate their little defense system and repurpose it as the world’s most effective gene editing tool.
Along with a protein called CAS9 scientists (and heck, unexceptional 15 year old boys and anyone who wants to, really) can now insert whatever Wanted Poster they want, and CRISPR will find that string of DNA, cut it out, and replace it with whatever they want. Magic. Actually, better than magic. Science. So long as no one abuses it. Luckily no one would ever want to do that.
Trip renewed his efforts, spurred on by the pursuing Furies with pumpkin heads.You know what’s great about Halloween? I mean, besides everything? Halloween doesn't have any important life lessons to offer. It’s just about awesome, scary stuff. And candy. It leaves this narrator somewhat at a loss for just the right simile to describe Trip’s determination, however. I guess it was like a zombie hunting for brains. Or a kid in a Halloween costume seeking out treats. He really wanted to get it done, in other words.
Even so, it took years. His enthusiasm percentile, well, even if it never dipped below 92%, his procrastination quotient often shot up well past the redline to 126% or so. Thus in his twenties he could often be found passing evenings at his local licensed pizzeria, playing vintage arcade games and drinking beer. His favourite game was a pinball machine called Haunted House which had plenty of creepy ghosts and assorted demony creatures. He got especially good at hitting a certain set of mushroom bumpers which reminded him a little too much of rhopalia.
“Trip, is that you?” a vaguely familiar voice from behind him said.
He turned, and the ball dropped, unnoticed, past his inert flippers and down the drain. It was Sadie.
“Cindy, hi!”
She grimaced. “You haven’t changed, Trip. Good to see you. How have you been?”
Trip talked at length about himself, even though there was little to say. Sadie listened politely but even Trip could tell she wasn’t 100% present. Finally, having exhausted the subject of his own accomplishments (and without really going into his CRISPR adventures) he asked, “How about you? What’s new in your life?”
“Oh, well, I’m in med school actually. I …”
“Med school? You? I always thought you were going to be, like, you know, a soccer mom who runs marathons on weekends.”
“Uh, you know, I am on the varsity basketball team, so that’s cool.”
“Basketball? Interesting. I kind of hate basketball, but I can see how you’d be good at it. Do you remember when we were kids and you used to beat me at 21 all the time?”
Sadie held up her phone. “You know what, Trip? I have to take this call. But it was nice running into you.” And with that she was gone, phone to her ear.
Trip turned back to his game. Her phone must have been on silent, he thought, since it hadn’t rung.
Walking home that night, slightly tipsy, Trip encountered an apparition. If you had been walking next to him, you might not have described it with precisely that term. Probably you would’ve called it a tree, recently denuded of leaves by the autumn winds, that bore a vague resemblance to a pumpkin-headed skeleton creature. And vague is being generous. It’s just a tree!
But Trip’s mind was conditioned to see apparitions. Apparitions with pumpkin heads and bright blue eyes. He jumped. He swore. He decided it was a good night to get into jogging, and he ran home.
Once safely ensconced in the comfort of his house, he abandoned his newfound fitness regimen and instead sat down at his CRISPR lab and got to work. What better way to purge your nightmares than to make them reality? Wait, what? Many people are scared of spiders but that doesn’t mean they embark on a lifelong quest to genetically engineer an even more frightening and deadly arachnid.
Good point. But Trip’s psychological paradigm, his mental operating system if you will, was one of those weird ones no one else ever heard of. Like KolibriOS but more prone to viruses. To stretch the metaphor. In Trip’s mind, outsourcing his fear was one way to lessen it. If he could terrorize his friends and neighbours, maybe his own terror would die down a little. Then, too, there was the know thine enemy aspect- Trip had an intimate understanding of the genetics of his creation, which should have helped his brain process the fact that there really was nothing to fear, but honestly? Obsession and phobia are not rational. Fear had ruled his life, and instead of seeking help he sought to make others feel the same way. Misery loves company, right? More like Misery loves farting in public so that everyone can enjoy the smell.
But while we were busy trying to decipher Trip’s aberrant psychology, he was busy gettin er done. Success! At long last. Well, it’s not quite like baking where the timer dings and you pull a perfect pumpkin concoction out of the oven. These things take time to grow and such. But in a literary (but not literal) and metaphorical sense, he had done it! The end!
Of course it’s not the end. Not yet.
Trip had long ago converted his back yard in to a pumpkin patch. It was quite photogenic, really, at least in the fall when the pumpkins matured. And if you went in the daylight. At night, well, Trip didn’t like going out there at night so much. But during the day he felt a special sort of thrill each time he approached his little pumpkin babies. Imagine the thrill he felt the first time he saw his little blue-eyed pumpkins, the literal fruit of his labour.
It was a huge thrill. It was also hugely terrifying. If only those emotions cancelled each other out, Trip would have been perfectly calm. But emotions are not equations, and Trip was not perfectly calm at all. But let us suppose for just one minute that emotions can be expressed as equations. His thrill factor was at 87%, while his initial terror percentile was easily 128%, though his resting terror index, once the standing startle went away, was a more manageable 66%. Added together you get at least 200% worth of jittery excitement which is why he jumped and hollered and hyperventilated. The little pumpkins watched him impassively.
The first Halloween he started slow. He placed one of his modified (he thought of them as “modifeyed” but I mean, come on) pumpkins on his porch steps alongside a regular jack o’ lantern. Hardly anyone noticed. That’s a gross overestimation, actually. No one noticed. Not one person. Would you? We all love a good jack o’ lantern and are quick to point out particularly clever or skilfully carved pumpkins, but there’s just too much to see on Halloween, isn’t there? The costumes and the decorations and the candies. Everyone’s busy seeing and being seen. A few extra eyes are bound to go unseen.
The next year he went a little bigger, basically transplanting his pumpkin patch from his backyard to his front. And though he got a lot of appreciative murmurs- not exactly gushing praise, but not nothing- once again no one really noticed. Maybe some dogs acted a little strange around the pumpkins but on Halloween everyone is a little strange, or should be. It was enough for Trip to know that his pumpkins were there, watching.
Almost enough, I suppose I should say. He also decided to sell them.
The following year he obtained a stall at his local farmer’s market. He even painted up a sign that read “Pimped Out Pumpkins” and somewhat unwisely hung it up for everyone to see. What he really wanted to do was recreate the scene from the mural that had haunted his dreams since childhood, but he lacked the artistic skill so he settled for his alliterative, if distasteful, company name.
Soon enough he attracted curious onlookers, which attracted more curious onlookers, which attracted, eventually, a local news station.
Trip was excited. Finally the world would see him! And his pumpkins. Not being an accomplished public speaker, or someone used to being in the limelight in any way, his interview was rather awkward. The station did their best to edit it into something coherent and delightful, local colour after the weather, but the reporter couldn’t quite hide her squeamishness as Trip held up the little blue-eyed gourds for the camera, and the piece had more of a creepy tone than is usual for a kicker.
Local media exposure in turn led to an even more awkward interview with the RCMP. Trip squirmed uncomfortably as the constables inspected his pumpkins and asked questions. Trip tried to trip them up by being as technical as possible but was surprised to discover that at least one of the cops- she identified herself as Constable Baxter- seemed able to follow along.
Eventually, though, they determined that no actual laws had been broken so they thanked him for his time and left.
There was a third significant visitor to Pimped Out Pumpkins, and by this time Trip was weary of the awkwardness. But it was Sadie, and her conversation was not awkward at all. She had only one thing to say: “Do you want a job?”
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After graduating from med school, Sadie went to work for the University Hospital, splitting her time between the maternity ward and doing research in the fertility lab. She was doing a clinical study on the efficacy of converting skin cells into pluripotent stem cells. It seemed the best way to do this was with CRISPR. All labs need lab techs, so Sadie lobbied her supervisor, the principal investigator of the lab, to hire Trip despite his lack of academic training. Dr. Isabel Calvano was happy to let Sadie handle that aspect of her clinical study, what with all the budget cuts her lab had been subject to in the recent past. Her own work was concerned mostly with in vitro fertilization and had little to do with Sadie’s research.
Trip was a lab tech now!
Technically, to be a lab technician, Trip had to promise to enroll in a two year degree program, which he promptly did- he found an online course that seemed easy enough. But for the most part he let that slide. Much easier that way.
On his first day, Sadie showed him the ropes. He was like a kid on Halloween running from one house to the next to get treats. Such shiny equipment! Way better than the stuff he had at home.
“For the most part, your job will be using polymerase chain reaction, you know, pretty easy stuff. Preparing samples, looking at slides. Your job is to help me, Trip. Most of my day is in the clinic, helping patients. You get to do the mundane thankless stuff I don’t have time to. Yeah?”
“Yeah. Sounds good. I got this. Whoa is that a GeneRead QIAcube? Nice!”
He got to set his own hours. At first he tried to come in on a regular business hours schedule, but he wasn’t really a morning person. He wanted his evenings free for his own work, and for pizza and pinball. But entropy set in and he started arriving later and later, and stayed long past when everyone else went home.
The lab equipment and the unused computer monitors glowed blue in the dark.
Trip did his best to ignore them, and over time he noticed them less and less. It helped that Sadie often worked nights and would drop in often to work and to chat. Trip would try to position himself so that she was blocking some of the blue glow.
Sadie thought his behaviour was a little furtive, and privately called him Trippin, but overall she was pleased with his work.
Halloween came around again, at its appointed time, nearly a year after Trip started at the lab. Trip attended a Halloween party as Sadie’s plus one, and they dressed up as Frank and Nancy Sinatra, and drunkenly sang Something Stupid, and it wasn’t even awkward. It was chaste, though, and Trip was home in time to hand out treats to some straggling trick or treaters. It was a very normal Halloween, the best Trip could remember, and he hadn’t even bothered to set out any pumpkins. In fact, he hadn’t even planted any this year. He was past all that. He went to bed, and slept soundly, unplagued by nightmares.
The next day when he arrived at work, Sadie was there, and Dr. Calvano, and even that RCMP officer, what was her name? Constable Backgammon or something.
“Hi,” he said.
No one said hi back.
“What. Did you do.” Dr. Calvano had rarely addressed Trip before. Sadie and the constable stared at him with matching expressions of stern but contained fury.
Dr. Calvano grabbed him by the collar. “How many? You bastard. How many?”
Constable Baxter gently touched Dr. Calvano on the shoulder, and much more forcefully took Trip’s arm and yanked it around his back, handcuffing him while saying “I wish to give you the following warning: You are being placed under arrest, you need not say anything as you have the right to remain silent, but if you do say anything it may be used as evidence against you. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t understand. What’s the problem here?”
Dr. Calvano practically screamed at him. “You know what you did. You sick… you … you…”
Trip looked over at Sadie. She hadn’t moved, and she had tears in her eyes, though they hadn’t yet fallen.
“Sadie, he’s perfect. Go see. They’ll all be perfect, I made sure. Ten fingers, ten toes and ten beautiful blue eyes.”
