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“I do.”

“All right then.”

“You sure?”

I nodded.

“How do you see yourself?” she asked.

“Aren’t we all the heroes of our own stories?”

She smiled. “In the psychology game, that’s what we call a classic deflection.”

I sighed. “You want to talk about guilt now?”

“Do you still feel guilty?”

I looked at the photograph above her desk—a mountain lake with mist hovering over the surface. Black-and-white, of course. There was a thin line of calligraphy below the photograph: It’s okay to be who you are in this moment.

Sure.

“I try not to think about it,” I said.

“How old were you when you started working in your mother’s lab?”

“Twenty-two.”

“And how would you describe your relationship with her at the time?”

“She was a god. The world’s preeminent cell biologist. She’d already made a billion dollars off The Story of You, her ancestry and genetic testing company. Her Scythe patents were even more lucrative.”

“I can read her Wikipedia page. How did you feel about her?”

“I looked up to her. Wanted to please her. She was the only family I had.”

“What happened to the others?”

“My twin brother, Max, died when we were thirteen.”

“I’m so sorry. That’s a huge loss, Logan. How, may I ask?”

“Leukemia. He had the big brain between us. Mom’s favorite. Dad died shortly after that, and Kara, my older sister, went overseas in the military.”

“Sounds like she bailed.”

“I’m not saying she wasn’t a good sister, but Kara takes care of Kara. So it really was just Mom and me.”

“You and Kara close today?”

“Not really. She lives in Montana. We talk a few times a year. I wish we were closer.”

“How do you view your role in what happened in China?”

I felt my chest tightening up like it always did when my thoughts turned to that summer.

“We were trying to do a good thing.”

My mother’s main lab was in Shenzhen, and there was a bacterial leaf blight impacting indica rice in a nearby region called Zhaoqing. Mom wanted to genetically insert a virus into locusts so that these carrier insects would be able to infect the rice paddies with the virus, which we could program to bolster the plants’ blight resistance without otherwise changing the plant.

It’s one thing to genetically engineer seeds in the lab and charge outrageously for them. This held no interest for my mother. She was trying something far more ambitious—sending insects directly into the fields to somatically edit crops in real time. The potential applications went far beyond the Zhaoqing rice blight, to all of the world’s breadbasket crops.

We built several bio-contained greenhouses and released our genetically modified yellow-spined bamboo locusts on infected test plants within the containment facility. It worked. There was no chlorosis, or browning. The plants thrived.

“Were you closely involved with the experiments?” Aimee asked.

“I was helping where I could, but I’d only just finished my undergrad degree. I was there for the summer. Thought I was part of the team, but I know they all saw me as a tagalong who was only there because I was Miriam Ramsay’s son.”

I felt an ache in the back of my throat. It had been years since I’d talked openly about what had happened.

“The greenhouse phase was successful. The data looked great. We had the support of the Chinese biosafety board, so we released our carrier locusts into the Zhaoqing fields.”

I took a careful breath.

“It was a perfect, blue-sky day. The mountains were shining in the sun. The flooded rice paddies were this lovely, emerald green. I had a large canvas bag slung over my shoulder. We all did. I untied mine, opened it. I still remember the twinge of pride as I watched the cloud of our modified locusts fly away. Look at me, changing the world.

“The initial results were positive, but then the viral-control systems began developing mutations at an accelerated rate. In addition to emboldening the plants against the blight, it started knocking out genes essential for seed production. We tried to contain it, but…”

“The virus had generalized,” she said.

“Yeah.”

Miriam had engineered the virus to only target this specific strain of rice, but it developed cross-species virus transmission, made worse by new rounds of viral mutation and selection, infecting and targeting other food-crop species. Within a year, the vector locusts began propagating exponentially.

I said, “My mom died right around the time the effects were first beginning to be felt in the American Midwest.”

“The car accident?”

I nodded. But accident? Not quite. Miriam had driven her car off Highway 1, between Jenner and Sea Ranch, California, where the road runs highest above the sea.

During the next seven years, each growing season yielded less and less, and before the locusts were finally eradicated, China’s strategic grain supply was critically depleted.

The famine spread to every continent and affected every human being in one way or another. When you wipe out millions of hectares of crops, it changes where the rain falls. When you destroy rice paddies, you destroy everything that needs them to live.