On the Wings of a Pig
Some stories stick with me. This one’s been in my bones for a long time. I hope it lands with you the way it did with me.
Samara
June 12, 2108
Outskirts of Kansas City
Wedged between a matching set of security guards in the back seat of an armored Reaper, Dr. Samara Makinde watched through bulletproof glass as Missouri farm country scrolled past like a documentary of the apocalypse. A century ago, these fields had stretched endlessly with golden wheat swaying in the breeze, punctuated by red-painted barns and white farmhouses with American flags snapping in the wind. Now it was just mile after mile of death. Brown chytrid fungus covered everything—rotting barns, abandoned farmhouses, the stunted remains of crops in the fields.
A pack of dogs and some entrepreneurial crows were making an all-you-can-eat buffet from the bloated remains of a cow coated in fungal growth.
Guard number one, Vega, had the decency to look uncomfortable about the whole armed-escort situation. Guard number two, Jacobs, kept shooting her looks like she’d personally engineered the apocalypse. Fun times.
“We’ll be there soon,” Vega said, probably trying to be reassuring.
“Can’t be soon enough,” Jacobs muttered, giving Samara another death glare.
“Don’t mind this Neanderthal,” Vega told her. “Some of us realize that not every scientist is to blame for what happened.”
This is a science fiction story inspired by my real-world work in biotech. This may be fiction, but it’s my way of exploring the world around me.
Maybe so. But Samara couldn’t help blaming the panicked mob that had broken into the research facility where she’d worked until two days ago.
She’d been eating breakfast when the first footage had popped up in her feed—streamed by one of the rioters to all the socials. The mob tore through the facility, smashing delicate equipment, shattering beakers and test tubes, scattering notebooks and files in senseless vengeance against the inanimate.
Then they found Dory.
The livestream stopped as the mob closed in on Samara’s coworker.
Samara had searched with numb fingers, pulled up the local news station to find a drone-shot image of the research park where the lab was located—and the recording of Dory’s 911 call playing over it. The lab manager begged for help until her pleading turned to a series of ear-scraping screams that pierced the frenzied cries of the rioters.
Dory wasn’t even a scientist. She simply ordered supplies and kept the lab running.
She’d been one of the first of many victims in the worldwide backlash against scientists, but far from the last. When the citizenry discovered that genetic engineers working on a vaccine had accidentally transformed the chytrid fungus into an unstoppable plague that started with frogs and spread until the Earth’s already-fragile ecosystem collapsed, rendering Earth uninhabitable … they lost their collective shit, erupting into violent mobs overnight. They didn’t care whether the scientists they were attacking had anything to do with it. See someone in a lab coat? Must be guilty. Biologists, climate scientists, environmental engineers—they all became targets.
“Did you work on the fungus?” Vega asked, snapping Samara back to the present as they passed Kansas City’s defaced Welcome sign.
Samara didn’t dare tell them the full truth. “Before the plague, I studied frogs. Specifically, their ability to hibernate during winter.”
That was how she’d ended up studying chytrid—the genetically-modified fungus had hit the frogs first. But no one outside of the scientific community paid much attention until the lack of frogs to control crop-eating insects triggered a global famine. And by then, the fungus had spread everywhere.
“Frogs? That’s just as bad!” Jacobs spat. “How many millions in taxpayer dollars went to your worthless research?”
“That research is the basis for the cryosleep system in the colony ships,” she shot back.
“See?” Vega punched Jacobs lightly on the arm. “She’s one of the good ones.”
“A lot of good people are staying behind.” Jacobs leaned in, crowding her in an attempt to intimidate. “What’d you do to get a spot?”
The thing was, she didn’t know. When eccentric billionaire Aurelius Hofstadter sent her the application, Samara had assumed it was a joke. And when he’d personally emailed her, she replied that she’d already committed to the global research project seeking a way to kill chytrid. She hadn’t been ready to give up on Earth yet.
Until yesterday, when Hofstadter sent her a link to an encrypted file that changed everything. A file that erased itself after she’d viewed it. Samara accepted his offer immediately, and this Reaper had appeared in her driveway nine hours later.
But the question still haunted her. Out of all the geneticists on the planet, why her?
“I asked you a question,” Jacobs growled.
Samara shrugged. “It was Hofstadter’s decision.”
Which wasn’t really an answer, but it seemed to satisfy him.
The city’s tech sector loomed ahead—all those sleek glass-and-steel towers that had once gleamed like beacons now looked like broken teeth in a corpse’s mouth, spotted with dull brown fungus. Corporate logos still crowned the buildings: MetaCortex, Nanotech Solutions, BioCore Industries. The biotech district had been Kansas City’s pride—the old oil economy had given way to America’s new heartland tech capital. But now those same R&D facilities were practically tombs. Smoke billowed from the iconic Liberty Memorial Tower.
How many more scientists had to die to satisfy the world’s rage?
Then Samara heard it: gunfire, explosions, and something else. A roar that grew louder as they got closer. It was people. A lot of angry people. Breaking windows with hand-made signs and setting fire to anything within reach as they swarmed around the road leading to the launch site—Samara guessed they had started as a protest, but now they were something much more dangerous.
Her stomach lurched. She might have abandoned her family for nothing, just to die here sandwiched between strangers.
Who was she kidding? She’d much rather die with strangers than watch everyone she loved starve to death—or worse.
“Find a way around,” Vega told their driver.
But it was too late. The mob had spotted them. A wave of bodies surged toward the Reaper as the driver slowed, looking over his shoulder, then shifting into reverse. The mob closed around them, faces contorted with rage as they pressed against the windows, fists pounding the metal hard enough to leave dents. She forced herself to look at them, because even though it wasn’t her fault they were going to die, she still had something that had been taken away from them.
Hope.
“Go through,” Jacobs ordered.
“You’ll kill them!” she protested as the Reaper pushed forward.
A burly man in a hoodie disappeared under the front bumper. She felt the impact vibrate through the vehicle’s frame as he became a human speed bump. Her stomach heaved. These people had families too. Children. Parents. None of them deserved to die.
Vega gave Samara a sad look. “They’re dead either way. At least this is faster.”
She held her breath as the Reaper accelerated. More thuds. More bodies. A young woman rolled across the hood, her eyes meeting Samara’s for one terrible moment before she vanished.
“We have to stop.”
“Feel free to get out,” Jacobs suggested. “I’m sure if you explain to them that you didn’t mean to destroy the planet, they’ll see reason.”
“Shut up!” Vega snapped.
“Most of those people deserve to be in this Reaper more than she does,” Jacobs said. “I saw her brief. She’s not just a scientist—she’s a fucking geneticist.”
Another impact. And another. The Reaper’s thick tires crushed anything in their path, each thud ending yet another life so she could survive. The ethical calculus made her head spin. It was tempting to tell herself that the equation made sense, that her survival increased humanity’s odds of survival, and given that only a handful of people could be saved…
A crash of shattering glass made Samara jump as someone hurled a Molotov cocktail. Burning alcohol splashed against the window, briefly illuminating the interior with tangerine flames.
The fire cast dancing shadows across faces that looked like something from a Renaissance painting of hell. Grief and rage twisted ordinary features into grotesque masks. These weren’t monsters—they were teachers, accountants, store clerks. Regular people whose world had ended. Now speed bumps on her road to survival.
Something hit the bulletproof glass hard enough to crack it before Jacobs could reply. Samara flinched as Jacobs swore and stood to man the Reaper’s turret.
The sound of gunfire filled the air, and the crowd scattered as fury turned to fear.
“That’ll show ‘em,” Jacobs said with a satisfied cackle as he dropped back into his seat.
“You both have spots on the ships, don’t you?” Samara asked Vega, desperate to think about anything other than the shrieking coming from outside the vehicle.
“We’re going on Hofstadter’s ship, the Elysia,” Vega replied. “What about you?”
“The Borlaug.”
“What the fuck is a Borlaug?” Jacobs sneered.
Hating him fixed nothing, but it was a distraction from the horrors Samara could do nothing about. And once she made it to the colony ship, she’d never have to see him again. So, she indulged.
“Norman Borlaug was a plant geneticist who saved millions from starvation by developing new strains of wheat,” Samara explained. “He won a Nobel Prize.”
Jacobs barked a laugh, harsh and cynical. “Doesn’t mean much now, does it?”
The Reaper pulled up to the security gate of the Ad Astra launch facility. Armed soldiers manned towers on either side, their weapons trained on the approaching vehicle. Bodies littered the ground in front of the gate—protestors who’d made the mistake of trying to force their way in. More corpses were piled on either side of the road. The eerie silence here felt worse than all that chaotic racket they’d left behind.
“IDs,” said the guard at the gate.
Samara managed to keep her hands steady while pulling credentials from inside her jacket. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t worried. What if the guard said she wasn’t authorized? What if the impulsive Hofstadter had changed his mind?
After a quick scan, the guard waved them through.
Ad Astra logos were plastered everywhere—on the brick buildings, the equipment sheds, even the rocket itself. The stylized phoenix rising from a blazing star had once seemed hopeful—now it looked like one more bird fleeing a dying world. Hofstadter’s foundation had worked with NASA early in the billionaire space race, and soon emerged as the leader, becoming the face of America’s efforts to colonize the galaxy. The entire complex felt like a military base, all order and efficiency in contrast with the dying world outside.
Samara would never tell Hofstadter, but every time she saw the words ad astra, her brain automatically added per alia porci. To the stars on the wings of a pig. The first time she’d met with her graduate advisor, he’d told her the story of how John Steinbeck—writer of The Grapes of Wrath and several other books she’d had to read in school—had once been told by a professor that he would be an author “when pigs fly.” Rather than give up, Steinbeck had given himself this motto, insisting that every book he published be marked with the image of a winged pig. Samara’s advisor had told the story just before showing her around the antiquated lab where she’d be doing her research, reminding her that humble beginnings need not limit how high she could fly.
The driver took them straight to the runway where the shuttle waited, strapped to a modified 747. Hofstadter had revived and updated the old Challenger-style design. Samara shoved aside a thought about how that program had ended.
She followed Jacobs up several flights of portable stairs to a platform level with the shuttle’s main cabin door. One of the waiting launch team members cast her an irritated look.
“You’re the last ones in. We’ve been holding the launch on Hofstadter’s orders.” His unspoken question hung in the air: What made Samara so special that everyone else had to risk missing their launch window?
A tech team rushed to suit them up. She watched as they helped Jacobs and Vega first, efficiently securing seals and tightening straps. Then one of the techs turned to her.
“Good chance you’ll black out during ascent.” He held up a hypodermic. “This’ll reduce your chances of having an aneurysm.”
She didn’t ask what was in it, just nodded and let the tech stick the side of her neck. Then he hustled Samara onboard and strapped her into a seat. Jacobs made a show of sitting on the opposite side of the shuttle, kicking her ankle as he passed.
Vega shot her an apologetic look as he sat beside her. “Don’t take it personally. His wife didn’t qualify to come with. She’d just started chemo.”
“But he came anyway?”
“When she found his acceptance letter in the trash, she made him.” Vega grinned. “Loves that ugly mug to death, for some reason.”
To death, literally.
Samara shot a look at Jacobs, tried to imagine what he must be feeling. Not just the loss of his wife—qualifying also meant agreeing to be partnered with someone. With only one hundred sixty spots per ship, everyone had to be willing to pair up and have children to maximize genetic diversity, reducing the bottleneck that every colony would suffer.
Who had Jacobs found to bring with him? Or had he been assigned a partner, same as Samara?
“What about you?” she asked Vega. “Who did you leave behind?”
The 747 engines roared to life before he could answer, rattling her teeth and rolling through her bones as forty tons of thrust shuddered through the airframe. She tried to take slow, deep breaths as anxiety clawed at her chest. Images of the Challenger disaster flickered through her mind like a slideshow.
Hofstadter had rushed everything, desperate to get the colony ships ready before Earth became completely uninhabitable. How many corners had been cut? How many safety checks abbreviated or skipped entirely? She had watched the Challenger explode on old footage, that Y-shaped cloud of smoke marking the instant seven lives ended in a flash of orange fire. All because of a rubber ring that cost less than a pizza.
That familiar sick lurch hit her stomach as they accelerated down the runway.
This was really happening. She was leaving Earth—leaving her family, her friends, and everyone she had ever known. By the time she came out of cryosleep, they would all be dead. Even billionaires in their underground bunkers stuffed with hoarded supplies would starve before the Borlaug entered orbit around the exoplanet that had been chosen as one of humanity’s new homes.
The ground fell away below them. She was grateful for her helmet hiding the tears that slid down her cheeks. The weight of what was happening—of being one of humanity’s chosen few, selected to survive among the stars—pressed down on her chest until Samara could barely breathe.
Forty-two years of cryosleep lay ahead, then a lifetime on an alien world. She’d studied the colonization plans, knew the challenges they would face.
What she didn’t know was whether her research would save them or kill them all.