The question “Who’s in charge here?” may apply on very large scales…

Willow Robertson smoothed the skirt over her thighs and perched on the examination table. Her hands gripped the edge, and she spent some time studying them-pale, with the slightest yellow tinge. Like nicotine. Jaundice. Old T-shirt.

She chased the thought away and instead rehearsed her words for Dr. Margulis. She arranged them carefully in her mind, fearful that the moment she started talking they would scatter like pearls, the string of resolve that tied them together broken.

She looked out of the window at what used to be tundra just a few decades back and now became the pale scrub of pines and oaks. The sun beat down on the tarmac roads and the haggard town of hastily erected houses, shops, hangars, but people stayed indoors. Not safe. Even the farmers had to work in full protective gear.

Dr. Margulis entered the examination room, and as she walked she flipped through Willow ’s chart, skimming every childhood hurt (appendectomy at six, a leg broken on the monkey bars at ten), every adolescent embarrassment (laser removal of acne scars at fifteen, corrective eye surgery at seventeen), and every adult self-denial (tubal ligation at twenty-four, breast reduction at twenty-eight).

“What can I do for you?” Dr. Margulis said.

Willow gripped the edge of the table harder, watching the half moons on her nails pale into white. “My mother died last week.”

“I am sorry to hear that.” Dr. Margulis’s face folded along the well-worn lines into a habitual grimace of sympathy. Every doctor Willow had ever seen had that prefab expression, and these days their faces assumed it almost automatically. Too much cancer. Too much sun.

“It’s all right,” Willow said. “I mean, she was in her eighties.” And answered the unspoken question, “I was a late child. Anyway, since my parents are gone now, I would like my alterations reversed.”

“Your skin?” The doctor did not hide her surprise.

“Yes. And hair. I understand why my parents did it to me, they wanted me to have a better shot at getting ahead, but now I can do what I want. Right?”

“Of course. It’s just… what are your coworkers going to say?”

Willow shrugged. She did not have an answer to that. People’s opinions mattered less to her with each passing year.

“Don’t you like being the way you are?”

“I don’t hate it,” Willow said. “But my parents did not ask me about it. They just had it done. And when I was little, I could not understand why I was a different color than they, and why they wouldn’t come to my school plays. And I was angry that they didn’t ask me. And they said that they didn’t want me to change color when I was grown up-people would wonder, they said. You’d never pass then; someone will always remember that you used to be black.”

Dr. Margulis raised her eyebrows and gave a sigh of resignation. I’m not going to argue with that, her demeanor said, I have better things to worry about. “Fine. The receptionist will schedule you for some time next week. I’ll prepare your inoculation.”

“Oral?”

The doctor nodded. “A very simple one. A single gene that will release the suppressors on your melanin genes.”

“And hair,” Willow reminded softly.

“And hair. You’ll have to shave your head, of course, and your new hair will grow with your original keratin structure. Anything else?”

“How long will it take?”

“For hair, a few weeks. For skin-it will be gradual. As your old cells slough off, the new ones will have a heavy pigmentation. The virus will target the skin cells only.” The doctor spoke with obvious pride in her ability to communicate complex information in simple terms.

“Thanks,” Willow said. As she was leaving the examination room, she heard Dr. Margulis say, “What are you trying to achieve?”

“I don’t know,” Willow said and closed the door behind her.

It was true, she didn’t. Color did not equal culture, and that was one thing that she had lost and could never reclaim. She still would be a white person, even if her skin turned the deepest shade of sienna. But she owed it to her mother to at least look like her.

Willow was growing impatient-two weeks after she took the viral pill, her skin tone deepened only a little. Still, people noticed. She saw heads turn as she walked from her apartment complex-a new ugly building made even uglier by the massive solar panels on the roof-to work.

“You really shouldn’t be out in the sun,” Andre, her coworker at the Corn Institute, said. “Skin cancer is no joke.”

Willow rolled her eyes. “If you’re done stating the obvious, do you mind looking over these data with me?” She spread the sequencer printout on the lab bench and rifled through the reference library of plant genomes. “Does this look right to you?”

Andre tugged on his upper lip. “Nope,” he said. “Which strain is it from?”

“IC5. The dwarf.”

Andre’s face lit up. “I love that strain. They’re so cute.”

Willow smiled too. Everyone at the Institute anthropomorphized corn; Willow used to find it ridiculous when she first started here, but now it seemed natural. And this corn was cute-tiny plants, no taller than wheat, with a spray of succulent leaves and thick robust stems, burdened by ears bigger than the rest of the plant.

“Anyway,” Andre continued. “They’re not stable yet, so shit like this is to be expected. Did you find this mutation in the library?”

“Uh huh, only it’s not from corn. It’s a cauliflower gene.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“See for yourself.” Willow moved the sheaf of papers toward Andre. “See? This is all corn, but this little bugger is cauliflower. Except for this G and that A.”

Andre nodded. “Don’t tell me. We used the cauliflower mosaic virus as a vector for this one.”

Willow did not comment on stating the obvious. Instead, she thought of the viruses-always multiplying, always mutating-especially in Alaska, so close to the polar ozone hole. The rest of the country was even worse off, with its scorched land and tepid oceans, with its heat and dust storms, but here… Willow shook her head. Not even glass and cement of the Institute could keep them contained.

“What?” Andre said.

“Do you ever think that viruses made us bring them here?”

He stared at her, unsure whether she was joking. “Made us bring them here how?”

“By making us smart. Too smart for our own good, so we messed up everything, and the viruses are our only hope, and we put them into every living thing, we give them new genes to carry around from organism to organism, we make UV radiation so high that they mutate like there’s no tomorrow.” She bit her tongue.

“Viruses made us smart?”

“Why not? We use them to make things better, to shuffle genes about. They could’ve done it on their own. The unseen force of evolution.”

He sat down, rubbing the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “It’s possible, I guess. But what do we do with the dwarf?”

“Start over.”

Andre made a face. “You sure we can’t fix this one?”

Fix virus with virus, Willow thought. And why wouldn’t they? She was doing the same thing-she introduced a virus into her body to counteract the effects of the one her parents put in her. She imagined that virus when she was a kid. In her mind, she pictured it taking her melanin genes and twisting them into little black coils, tight like braids of her old neighborhood friends, so they would lie dormant and not betray her blackness to the world. Now, quite grown up, she imagined the virus untwisting them, she imagined the pigment seeping through her cells, reaching the surface of her skin, coloring her-like a letter written in milk, she was just waiting for the right stimulus to reveal her hidden meaning. She was white paper, and the black viral letters would soon become bright enough to read.

“ Willow?”

“I suppose,” she said. “Maybe. ‘Fire with fire’ is our motto, right?”

Andre looked puzzled. “I don’t think you’re having a good day.”

“I’m having a great day,” Willow said, and stood. “I’m going to the greenhouse.”

“Grab me a tray of EB-A seedlings, will you?” It was Andre’s pet strain; he called the seedlings ‘babies.’

“Sure thing. How’re your babies doing, by the way?”

Andre sighed. “Tumorously. If that’s a word.”

“It should be.”

In the greenhouse Willow walked along the aluminum benches with rows of trays housing green sprouts. Each tray bore a label indicating its strain and growing conditions-with traditional agricultural soils gone to dust or underwater, everyone at the institute worked hard to create corn that would grow in the peat and sand of Alaska.