Beware

of

PPP- 923

Chapter 1

A Body in the Road

“It’s just a plant,” said the neighbor with tired rims around her eyes.

“It’s just a plant that kills children,” Allison Brunner replied. “I know you don’t have children,” she said with a little too much contempt, “but if you honestly think it’s a good idea for children to be wandering onto that property and dying!”

“You’re the one who bought a house in Love Canal,” replied the shut-in neighbor before retiring inside and slamming her door.

Allison was worried. She sipped her wine; the newspaper said the vine had killed another child. How come she had never heard of this vine before? Where did it come from? Her friends had told her Mexico. How many deaths was that now?  It was a lot. She was angry and frightened.

Many plants develop defense mechanisms such as spikes or thorns. There are those plants that can shrink, and there are plants that are poisonous if eaten, but to my knowledge there has never been any plant quite so lethal as the jelly fruit. Beware of the jelly fruit. Seriously. Yeah, it sounds, ridiculous doesn’t it? The name sounds so harmless, it sounds like a condiment or something you spread onto toast. Jelly fruit are actually quite delicious, but just as the first victim and the auntie of Allison Brunner, Timmy Clarke was about to find out their quills are quite deadly.

Timmy Clarke was a latchkey child of above average intelligence, but if he was so smart, why was he walking home in the rain? The air had a tinge of sting to it, but it was more than just the rain. His teacher, Mr. Robinson, had scolded him again. He couldn’t help it if his teacher was boring. Always droning on about quadratic equations, he was a bit of a douche, though, in truth, Timmy didn’t even know what a douche was. He knew it was something dirty, or so his friend Scot Neiderman had said. Timmy walked along the tall oak trees down a long road that ended in gravel, thinking little of life or mortality. It might have been picturesque had it not been Love Canal in Western New York. The site a chemical company chose to dump its toxic waste. Of course, Timmy didn’t know that; neither did his mother nor his ambitious father.

            As little Timmy Clarke walked beneath the shade of the oak trees, he could not help but notice the unusual vines that had sprung up. What were they? Where did they come from? He didn’t remember seeing them last year. Timmy didn’t know, but they looked sinister, yet seemed to call out to him in the same instance. Maybe it was just a raspberry plant. Timmy reached out and touched the vine and half expected it to grasp him back, but it didn’t. Timmy followed the vine into a thicket where the shade was deep and dark and the sun didn’t shine. As he walked beneath the shaded limbs, he noticed the birds had stopped chirping. He was about to turn back, but then he saw it, dangling from the vine like a Christmas ornament. He thought it looked like a cross between a blackberry and a seashell. As he reached out for it, something told him not to, but then he went ahead and plucked the fruit from the vine. Holding the fruit, Timmy examined it. It was so shiny, he briefly thought about taking a bite. Timmy’s mother had warned him of poison crabapples and mushrooms; not knowing if it was edible or not, he didn’t dare eat it. It could be poison. As Timmy headed back toward the road with the fruit in his hand, he felt a small prick. It stung a little but honestly didn’t even hurt as much as a bee sting. Timmy looked down at his hand and saw what looked like purple stitches. He wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating, because within a few moments the purple stitches had disappeared. But Timmy didn’t think he was hallucinating; he thought the purple stitches had been absorbed into his arm. Timmy felt light-headed the way he did one time when he had had a high fever. He stumbled toward the road; he could see it, but it seemed very far away as if it were another land or something. The road started to waiver, and all of a sudden Timmy felt this burning in his armpits. Timmy staggered to right himself and wandered down the road. He didn’t even make it home. His blue body was found bloated, lifeless in a ditch a few days later. The crows had pecked out his eyes, and the fruit was still attached to his now stiff, rigor-mortised hand.

            Unfortunately for Timmy, the corporation that named the jelly fruit gave little concern to the people it killed with its defense mechanism. When a jelly fruit is plucked, it releases poison quills that spring forth and are lethal. No, sir, the corporation was far more interested in marketing it as a health food. Before the corporation known as Real Earth Foods got ahold of the patent for Jelly Fruit, the CDC tried to rid the planet of this very invasive species. They went through the area with flamethrowers, scorching anywhere they saw the wicked vine, but reportedly within three months it had completely regrown. The death toll was up to seventeen, yet even after poison control came through, the vine just refused to go away. It seemed immune to man’s tricks, as if it were, in fact, a superior species.

            The CDC tried to fight back. They started an advertising campaign against the jelly fruit, which from a journalistic perspective was a little foolish. All around Western New York they put up signs that said “Beware of the Purple Poison Plant.” The Purple Poison Plant? Seriously. No one even referred to it that way. No one even knew what the advertisement was talking about. Some people even thought it was a drug. The name brings to mind WWF Wrestling Federation gimmicks; they might have just referred to it as Triple P. The sign did have a picture of the plant and said in red letters “DO NOT PICK,” but one might argue that the advertising campaign was misleading at best and moronic at worst. It was misleading in that number one, the jelly fruit was more black than it was purple, and that two, if you had never heard of the jelly fruit, the idea of a purple poison plant or killer vine that stings its victims sounds so silly, it brings to mind fairy tales and nursery rhymes. The advertising campaign was extremely ineffective, and by the next August the death toll had risen to 36.

Chapter 2

The Jelly Fruit Fad

Despite various warnings and counter warnings, people kept picking the quill fruit and getting that poisonous quill injected into their bodies, and, obviously, they kept dying. The CDC advertised and spent millions of dollars, but the death toll continued to grow. Greg Thompson, a botanist, found that the plant gave off pheromones that seemed to attract humans, especially small children that didn’t know any better. To be fair, though, many a dead deer, rabbit and raccoon were seen lying next to the vine. Greg tried a new approach. He simply picked the fruit with a basket tied to a stick.  He found all the quills were disposed of immediately, and after vigorous tests and experiments on lab rats and rabbits, he decided to try the fruit. He was astounded to find it was delicious. It was so tasty, he kind of wondered if it was addictive. He thought it tasted like a black strawberry. He began to systematically remove all the fruit from the vine. He found quill removal was actually quite easy; once plucked, the fruit would usually fire all of its quills almost immediately. Again, this was a defense mechanism to protect the plant from predators.

Of course marketing it would be near impossible given the way the media had portrayed the fruit. His first attempts at marketing were a failure, but eventually he found a health food store that was willing to sell the fruit. They called it jelly fruit and within a few months they were asking Mr. Thompson for more jelly fruit. It started to sell like wildfire and in a few more months, a corporation named Real Earth Foods was offering Mr. Thompson money to lease more land so he could grow more of the quilled fruit. There were small problems; a worker was killed when he accidentally brushed up against the vine that contained several low-hanging fruit. There were also some exceptions when for whatever reason there was a rogue quill, so one had to be careful. There was an incident when a customer bit into a fruit and a quill pierced his tongue, killing him rather quickly. The family settled out of court for several million, which Real Earth Foods was happy to pay. Another child was stung on the finger from a rogue quill. His mother found his body cold on the kitchen floor. Against his better judgment, Mr. Thompson felt compelled to lease more land. He had saved the seeds, so technically he could plant more of the vine, but wouldn’t that lead to more deaths? Plus there was something odd about the seeds. Was it Greg’s imagination or did they seem to glow from within with an amber light that wasn’t quite right? Greg thought, It almost looks like a tiny fire burning brightly.

Several weeks later Greg dissected one of the seeds and examined it under a microscope, and it seemed to have cells that were similar to human stem cells.

Huh, Greg thought, odd.

He didn’t know what to make of it.

If they can replicate any cell they come in contact with…he thought to himself. His mind was filled with wonder and horror. He had already seen firsthand what the plant was capable of. They ought to call the plant a Blackberry Human Trap, he thought. He didn’t want to think of the long-term ramifications. But he wondered about the many ways it might advance both mankind and science.

He leased 923 acres of land in Allegheny County and started to spread the seed. He called his company PPP-923, combining the 923 acres with mocking the warning about the Purple Poison Plant. Within months he had fields of the lethal vine growing. There were some worker-related deaths, as the quill fruit was still very dangerous and lethal, but Real Earth Foods was always quick to sweep any complaints under the rug and cover them up with a money trail that was as powerful as the Falls of Niagara. Mr. Thompson thought little of the victims or of all the money he was making; he was merely interested in the plant as a scientist.

Meanwhile the progressive movement in America began to protest what they saw was a danger to society. There were signs that said “Beware of PPP-923,” and the liberal left was outraged. If people plant the seeds and you have this plant popping up all over the country, you’re going to have thousands of deaths, one newspaper was quoted as saying.

            Of course, PPP-923 had genetically modified the new seeds so they could produce no killer fruit, but Greg Thompson was secretly worried what would happen if someone happened to swallow the seeds.

Chapter 3

Do You Really Want to Live Forever, or 1000 Years, at Least?

            As more of a young boy than a teen, Greg had gone to a prom. He thought of it as more of a dance. It was awkward, and Greg barely talked to his date, let alone anyone else at the dance. In one of Greg’s first fully functioning adult memories, Greg is holding Danielle awkwardly close, sniffing her hair to the song “Forever Young” by Alphaville. For those of you who haven’t heard it, the song is an ode to the youth and a modern day fairy tale. It is the kind of Disneyesque bullshit that gives kids not just nightmares, but complexes that it takes lifetimes to recover from. Greg had always fantasized about living forever; as a teen he had been obsessed with Anne Rice’s vampire novels. In the box next to the question “Do you really want to live forever?” Greg would check “Yes, please.”

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but perhaps serendipity has just as great an influence on invention, too. The discovery of the seeds’ capability is even more interesting than perhaps the deadly quill the fruit can inject into one’s body. And, of course, it happened by mere chance, an accident, that one of the seeds had fallen into a pen of rabbits that Greg had used for various experiments. It happened late at night, and it wasn’t until early morn that Greg realized the seed had been in the pen for more than six hours. Several of the rabbits had nibbled on the seed, and one had gnawed it down to the center where the amber light lay.

The result was nothing less than miraculous and bordering on supernatural. Greg noticed immediate differences in the rabbits’ behaviors. For one thing, they barely ate anymore. It was as if they no longer needed food, as if the seed could sustain their life force for many months without any sustenance. The other oddity was that they needed very little sleep; some were awake 23 hours a day. Greg wondered if the seed was a drug, perhaps like peyote or the betel nut, which is a narcotic. After several tests, some blood work, the rabbits appeared healthy and in no way drugged. He picked up one of the seeds; it still had that touch of amber deep in the center like a fire that has been burning low for hours. He had a sudden urge to pop it into his mouth but refrained.

Months went by and the rabbits seemed not to have aged a day, and Greg got the idea to try it on a white rat. His hypothesis was that it seemed to have abnormal if not supernatural life-extending properties.

Greg wrote in his journal, “It would appear that the seed gives one ten times one’s normal life expectancy; in other words, a person who might normally live 82 years would now live to 820. The stem cells somehow have been able to replicate tissue many times over, giving the body approximately ten times the normal life expectancy.”

Greg ran various tests and still couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible, a seed that gives you immortality and quills that take it away, he thought suddenly.

            Greg decided he would be the guinea pig. He had second thoughts, but his resolve overtook him as he picked up the seed. Did it contain everlasting life? What other changes might it bestow upon him?

            He still thought it odd how the seed glowed from within; his mouth got dry and his pulse quickened as he put it on his tongue and swallowed. He felt the effects almost immediately.

            The madness that ensued after taking the seed was unlike anything he’d ever experienced, and he had once smoked salvia, a shaman drug that causes hallucinations. Reality completely recapitulated itself, and he was at a loss as to who he was or even what he was. He couldn’t really consider himself a homo sapiens anymore. How could he? The first 136 hours were a blur of colors and sound. Greg spoke with sentient beings who taught him how to sidestep time. So he strolled through the Elysian Fields, and for a moment he was immortal. Time really did not exist. He met strange beings from other worldly dimensions, and he met a being who claimed to be the color gray. It might have been a con. He didn’t know how, but hundreds of years passed. It honestly felt like a dream; three hundred years and Greg had aged maybe five to seven years. He didn’t know who he was. In reality, he was Greg Thompson, Father of the Jelly Fruit; at least that’s what was printed in most encyclopedias. Time marched on, well, not for Greg, but you get the idea. Greg felt spry as a teenager as he watched everyone he knew die. Culture changed; it would have been sort of depressing for most, but Greg relished his immortality. Even as civilization itself fell, Greg was content in the knowledge that he could outlast it. A hundred years later, after Greg had lived in a cave for a while, civilization rose again but was enslaved by an alien race from the Sirius star system. The Sirians, as they became known, were only here to mine lead and gold. Once they had taken all the lead and gold from the Earth, including the core, they left. Greg found it odd that there was no more gold jewelry; nobody else seemed to care, as they were just relieved the Sirians had left.

Greg, who was already late into his millennium of immortality, eventually became a distinguished member of society. His knowledge of science was unmatched in the brave new society, and he quickly rose through the ranks. Still Greg kept a secret stash of the seeds and some nights he’d take one out and stare at the tiny fire burning brightly in the center of it. He knew he was near the end of his millennium. He wondered what would happen if he took another seed. Would he live another thousand years? He remembered the madness, that feeling as if he were falling out of his body.

Fifty more years passed, and Greg could feel himself grow weak; his face was sunken in and his hair was gray. He knew the stem cells from the seed had stopped reproducing and his time was almost at an end.

Every night he would take a seed out and let it sit on the palm of his hand, pondering whether he should take another. Would he even be able handle the madness a second time? What if it were magnified because he had already taken the seed? He didn’t know. He had gotten as far as putting the seed up to his lips, but was never able to pop it into his mouth and swallow.

            It began to become a ritual for Greg. Right before he would go to bed, he would reach into the back of his closet, for his secret stash of seeds. One such night, he noticed a small crack in one of the seeds. He could see the amber light beneath the seed and wondered what it contained. Even though the seed was rather small he began to dig at the crack with his nail. At first he fumbled with the seed and dropped it to the floor, but he was eventually able to fit his nail in the crack and lodge it open. To his astonishment, as the seed cracked, a light spilled out into the dark room; upon the wall was the apparition of a woman. The woman seemed to stand before a portal to another dimension. Greg looked at the cracked seed in his hand and wondered if he had swallowed it and if this was part of the madness. Shrouded in white, the apparition reminded him more of a ghost than a genie but seemed awfully familiar to him. Who was she? He didn’t know, but he got this strange feeling he should trust her. The apparition beckoned him to her, repeating the same phrase over and over again, “Come with me if you want to be happy.”

            “Come with me if you want to be happy.”

            Come with me if you want to be happy. What did that mean?

            He asked, but she merely repeated her original phrase.

            Mr. Thompson, who had not been particularly happy with his immortality as of late, thought about it for a moment, then gathered up a few of his prize possessions and went with the woman in white.