Project Silas - 3 The First Harvest
Henry had expected an immune response—you can’t introduce a radical retroviral vector without the body putting up a fight—but he hadn’t anticipated the violence of it. He lay on the hardwood floor of the master bedroom, shivering under a heavy quilt while sweat soaked through his sheets.
His body was a battlefield. While he writhed in fever dreams, the vector was busy hijacking his cellular machinery, hunting down the melanocytes in the basal layer of his epidermis, and overwriting eons of evolutionary code.
By the morning of the third day, the fever broke as abruptly as a circuit snapping open.
Henry gasped, sitting bolt upright. The silence of the old Victorian house pressed in on him. He felt hollowed out, dehydrated, and weak, but the bone-deep ache of the flu was gone.
He stumbled to the bathroom, gripping the porcelain sink to steady himself. He looked in the mirror.
He was prepared for the worst. In his delirious moments, he’d imagined waking up looking like the Hulk—a monstrous, cartoonish gamma-green.
But it wasn't that. It was subtler, and somehow more unsettling.
He leaned closer to the glass. He looked pale beneath the stubble, but there was a new tint shimmering just beneath the epidermis. It was a sickly, yellowish-olive cast, concentrated around his neck and face where his skin had seen the most sun over the years.
He turned his head side to side, catching the bathroom light.
"Fascinating," he croaked, his voice wrecked. It was more Vulcan than Marvel. He looked like Spock suffering from severe jaundice. It was alien, yes, but distinctly, disturbingly human.
His stomach growled, a deep, cavernous sound. He hadn't eaten in two days. Instinct told him to go downstairs, raid the pantry, and shovel carbohydrates into his mouth. But the scientist in him paralyzed that impulse.
If the procedure worked, he didn't need the pantry. He needed photons.
He walked back into the bedroom. The blackout curtains were still drawn tight, sealing the room in gloom. He grabbed his glucometer from the nightstand and pricked his finger.
85 mg/dL. Normal. A fasting baseline.
Henry stood in the center of the room, stripping off his sweat-drenched t-shirt. He looked up at the ceiling fixture. He had installed high-end smart bulbs throughout the house years ago—tunable LEDs capable of hitting a harsh, high-Kelvin daylight spectrum.
"Computer," he rasped. "Bedroom lights. One hundred percent. Daylight."
The room flooded with stark, cool-white brilliance.
At first, he felt nothing but the heat of the bulbs on his bare skin and the squint of his eyes adjusting to the glare. He stood there, arms out, palms up, feeling ridiculous. A man worshipping a lightbulb.
Then, the tingle started.
It began on his shoulders, a sensation like a mild sunburn, but without the pain. It was a prickling warmth that burrowed inward. The sensation sank through the dermis, hit the capillary beds, and rushed toward his chest.
It hit him like a double shot of espresso injected straight into the jugular.
His heart rate kicked up. The mental fog of the fever evaporated instantly, replaced by a crystalline, jittery clarity. He felt a rush of energy so potent it made his fingertips tremble. It wasn't the heavy fullness of a meal; it was a high-voltage buzz, electric and immediate.
He grabbed the glucometer again. His hands were shaking so hard he wasted two test strips before he got a clean sample.
140 mg/dL.
Five minutes. His blood sugar had spiked fifty-five points in five minutes. And he hadn't swallowed a crumb.
Henry laughed. It was a manic, breathless sound. Under the intense LED glare, the Vulcan-green tint was pulsing, vibrant and alive. His skin was drinking the room.
"Computer," he said, breathless. "Turn on the hallway. Turn on the study. All lights. Maximum brightness."
He walked out of the bedroom and into the hallway, moving from one pool of light to the next. He felt like a god. He was bypassing the digestive tract, the supply chains, the water wars. He was self-sustaining.
He reached the top of the stairs and looked down at the foyer, bathed in artificial noon.
But as he took the first step down, a wave of dizziness hit him. The buzz was intensifying into a roar. His heart was hammering against his ribs—thump-thump-thump—too fast. The edges of his vision began to blur white.
210 mg/dL. He didn’t need the meter to know it. He could feel the syrup thickening in his veins.
And then the smell hit him.
A cloying, sickly-sweet taste flooded the back of his throat, like he'd just inhaled a bag of powdered sugar. He could smell it oozing from his own pores—a synthetic, fruity reek on his breath that made him gag. He was fermenting in his own skin.
"Too much," Henry gasped. He grabbed the banister, his knuckles white.
He scrambled backward, away from the stairs, and threw himself into the shadows of the unlit linen closet, slamming the door shut behind him.
He sat in the pitch black among the towels, panting, clutching his chest as the photosynthetic engine slowly spun down.
He waited an hour until his heart rate slowed and the saccharine taste faded from his tongue. When he finally opened the door, he didn't go back to the bright bedroom. He went to his closet and pulled out a thick, long-sleeved flannel shirt, buttoning it all the way to his chin.
He had solved world hunger. Now, he just had to learn how not to eat himself to death.