By Jenny Williams

Henrik starts coughing at 8:00 a.m., as Xuan and I are making pancakes in the cramped kitchen of our cargo-container station. We’re celebrating preemptively: In five days, after a year in this tundra, we’re finally going home.

Xuan furrows her brows at Henrik. “You okay?”

Before we came, our lab director had warned us about possible exposure to ancient viruses unearthed by melting permafrost. Highly unlikely, he’d said. You’re more likely to die of boredom. Still, we worry.

“Bah,” Henrik says. “Throat tickle.” He coughs again.

Boredom was our director’s intention. We’re seven in total; the others are out collecting sensors today. We’re what the director publicly calls “frontier scientists,” which is code for people who piss him off. (Xuan spurned his advances. I called him a shill for big pharma. Henrik is Henrik. Et cetera.)

Xuan and I putter around the makeshift workspace, cataloging lichen, poking at moss, trying to ignore Henrik’s hoarse barks. He retires to his nook around two. The others return at dinner. Nelson opens Henrik’s curtain to check on him.

My watch chimes with a message from Polly, my AI research synthesizer. I listen: Fun fact! In my conversations with indigenous AIs, I’ve learned eighty-seven words for “permafrost.” Would you like to hear some?

I’d programmed her to glean amusing facts from regional data. Since she’s open-source, the director forbade me from using her for “real” research. “Can’t patent her discoveries,” he’d said. “What’s the point?”

I’m about to murmur back when Nelson shrieks and stumbles back, hand over mouth, eyes wide. I approach, peek past Henrik’s curtain, and see his lifeless body splayed over his sheets. His skin is the color of eucalyptus leaves, a green so pale it’s almost gray.

~

A hazmat team arrives by helicopter within hours. In the summer Arctic light, we watch through the windows as they build a perimeter of barbed wire fifty feet outside the station. Two of them carry guns.

“We don’t know if it’s contagious,” Tess had begged our director over the sat phone.

“Protocol is protocol,” he said. He sounded downright pleased.

Observing the hazmats, Xuan grips a photo of her teenage son. “Maybe Henrik had a heart condition.”

Nelson goes into a coughing fit that echoes off the metal walls. When he’s done, his eyes are red and watering. He stares out the window at the vast expanse. “Fuck.”

~

Nelson’s dead by dawn. Before he lost consciousness, he described an unexpected taste filling his mouth: citrus and sweetness, “Like lime and honey.”

~

We each cope in our own ways. Xuan records video messages for her son, silently weeping. Tess takes meticulous notes. I stare at the hazmats and imagine a flood sweeping across the tundra, carrying us somewhere clean and new.

Polly keeps sending me tidbits–Most human languages use a numeric base of ten, but one ancient tribe used base three!–until I scream at her that we’re fucking dying. She can find a cure or go to hell.

~

I can’t decide which is worse: the coughing or the silence that falls after it stops.

~

Two days later, we are three: me. Xuan. Tess. We’re all coughing. Mourning. Resigned to die. The hazmat team paces outside. 

A ping: All ancient local languages have a term for “green death.”

Henrik’s skin. The color of sage.

Except, Polly adds, one tribe uses “green sleep” instead.

They didn’t die?

I’ll investigate. 

My chest cracks open with something that feels dangerously like hope. Then I look closer at the skin beneath my watch–is that a green tint?  

Faster, I whisper. Please.

~

The taste of lime is sharp; a drizzle of honey cuts its tang. I’m drifting into mind fog when I hear Polly’s chime.

The “green sleep” tribe may have had a cure. Sick people drank tea made from Saxifraga maripinosa in intervals dictated by their numeric base of three. Polly even suggests a dose. 

Maude’s Saxifrage. Tiny purple flowers shaped like stars. As abundant as weeds in this icy tundra.

I haul myself outside and am blasted by frigid air. The hazmats’ reflective helmets obscure their faces, but they’re all turned towards me, guns poised. I wonder if they have children, siblings, lovers. My containment is their protection.

Next to my colleagues’ corpses, I yank a fistful of leaves from the hard earth and stumble back inside. The kettle can’t boil fast enough. 

The tea tastes bitter and earthy. I drink three sips, then wait. Three sips, then wait. Three last sips. Just like Polly said we should.

I see Xuan and Tess watching me with hollow eyes from the living room couches. I bring them cups. They’re almost too weak to sip, but they do: three sips. Three times.

Then we lie together with our eyes closed, melting into oblivion. Faith turns to despair. Brightness turns black.

~

I wake up.

We all wake up.

We’re weak, we’re groggy, we stink of sweat and poison, but we’re alive.

My skin is pinkish-pale, no hint of green, and my mouth tastes like walrus armpit. It’s exquisite.

Tess gets back on the phone. There will be questions. Examinations. Endless tests to make sure we’re well and truly cured. But Xuan is deleting her video recordings and making new ones in their place, and her face glistens with joy.

~

At the press conference later, we sit in a panel under fluorescent lights while the lab director boasts of his team’s ingenious resourcefulness and—he puffs up his chest—the pharmaceutical potential of Maude’s Saxifrage. Proprietary, of course.

I clear my throat and speak into the microphone. “Actually, the discovery was made by an open-source AI, so its knowledge is public domain.”

Journalists murmur. The director’s face goes crimson. He fumbles to turn off my mic.

I continue, “And data ownership laws require anyone building on indigenous AI outputs to compensate the communities who built them.”

The director’s face puckers as if he’s sucked a lime.

The feeling in my chest is as sweet as honey.