RECOVERY
LISA
Toronto, Canada
Day 672
I’ve been working on a vaccine for 657 days and I’m so close to finding it I can almost taste it. The last days of summer are winding down, and I refuse to mark the second anniversary of the Plague unless it’s with the bottle of Dom Pérignon Margot and I have been saving for the day I find it. Endless rounds of testing, testing, testing—I feel like an AV guy sometimes bellowing, “Testing, testing,” into a microphone. Just fucking work. I’m so close. The last vaccine worked in 96 percent of cases. I managed to isolate the female chromosome that was resisting it, and now I’m waiting. Waiting for the test results. Waiting for our lives to change. Waiting to change the world. The chimps have served us well but after killing 253 of them over the past two years, I’d quite like to reduce my monkey kill count. They’re a nightmare to dispose of.
I watch over the office as I wait. It’s probably not much fun working for me, I’m self-aware enough to know that. I’m demanding and insistent and I expect everyone to be as smart and dedicated as I am, which they’re not, and they can’t ever be. As soon as I read the reports of the Plague Ashley compiled for me, I knew we would work on a vaccine the minute we could get hold of a specimen. I said, “That would be interesting to study,” and Ashley looked very sad and said, “Hopefully we never have to. People are dying. It’s a tragedy.”
Ashley doesn’t work for me anymore. Fortunately, the University of Toronto has been producing first-class virology PhDs for the past two decades, many of them women, thanks to me. That’s why we’re going to win this race. We started before anyone else, I’ve been training virologists for years and I’ve always prioritized the hiring of women in my department. Despite many accusations to the contrary, I’ve never prioritized diversity over ability. I’ve always had a simple policy. The best female applicant gets the job. Invariably, she’s as good as, if not better than, the best male applicant. As a community, the scientific world has sexism running through it like gray swirls in marble. It’s deeply woven into the fabric of labs, university departments, hiring panels, boards determining tenure. And guess what? The preponderance of senior male scientists and majority-male teams, specifically in virology, was a disaster when the Plague came, so who’s going to be right in the end? Me. I am.
It’s going to be a bit less satisfying being right when my former enemies are almost all dead. But still, some satisfaction will no doubt shine through.
I’m trying not to pace around the office but the waiting is too much. I could call Margot but she’s teaching a class and besides, there’s nothing she can say or do. The tests have been done; it either works or it doesn’t. I can’t be down there as they run the final checks and validate everything. I hover and then people get nervous and they make mistakes and the hope is too intense. This isn’t our first rodeo. We thought we had it last time, three months ago. We really did. But the few dead chimps were there, heavy and cold and that was that. My team is exhausted. Margot keeps reminding me not to push them too far because they’re tired, but she doesn’t see their determination every day like I do. I have no idea how the other labs are coping around the world but I’d be amazed if they had the stamina of my lot. Of fourteen virology postgraduate students and postdoctoral scientists in this lab in November 2025, there were thirteen women and one man. Poor Jeremy, RIP. All the other top-ranking, virology-focused labs in the world capable of creating a vaccine for the virus had far more men than we did. God only knows how they’ve been dealing with those people dying. We’re way ahead. We’ve retained our knowledge and our morale. There are personal motivations for all of us to create a vaccine—saving husbands, sons, the world, our careers. But we’re not fighting for our own lives and that makes a big difference. No one can do their best work in what is essentially a war. The male scientists around the world who are frantically battling to understand the virus, attack it, control it and beat it have too much skin in the game. Had. Most of them are dead now. They were and are desperate and the best scientific discoveries rarely arise from desperation. Logical, calm, dogged persistence is far more likely to win the race.