“What?” his editor said. “Do I have something on my tie?”
“Sorry.” It was the way the spaghetti had been drooping from his boss’s fork that had caught his attention. William was a winder. His boss was more of a shoveler. Not the most pleasant thing to watch, but the dangling spaghetti had reminded him of something. “Did you ever hear of the old spaghetti-tree hoax?”
“Uh-uh.” His editor snagged another fork of spaghetti. “What’s that got to do with alien babies?”
“Nothing. Or everything. I’m not sure yet. It’s been called the best April Fool’s Day joke of all time.” William paused, trying to remember the details. “I think it was BBC who did it, back at the dawn of TV. They ran this wonderful segment about how a mild winter and improved control of the dreaded spaghetti weevil had given the Swiss a record spaghetti harvest. There were even videos of peasants plucking noodles from trees, with interviews explaining how they’re straightened and dried for packaging, and how the trees are carefully bred for each strand to be the same length.” He lifted his fork in mock salute. “Half the world fell for it.” He grinned. “Even though everyone knows spaghetti trees don’t grow that far north.”
His boss was staring at his plate. “Spaghetti grows on trees?”
“Of course not.” His editor was competent enough, but nowhere nearly as bright as the editor-in-chief. “But the scam was so good that even smart people fell for it.” Smart or not, there was no point not buttering him up a bit.
William’s mind was still churning. “We need a spaghetti tree.”
“Huh?”
“A scam of our own. Something to make them change their minds and leave us alone.”
“You want to run a fake news story?”
“Yes.”
“What about?”
William sipped his wine. “I don’t know yet.”
“We’ll be laughing stocks.”
“Only if we play it wrong. We might also save the world.”
His editor leaned back. He might not be the brightest bulb on the planet, but he’d come up the way most senior editors did: through news and editorial. If you wanted to be read by millions, you went into sports or features. But news writers, however hard-bitten they might claim to be, didn’t just want people to read their stories. They harbored a secret desire to change the world.
“Okay,” his editor said. “I’ll have to convince the publisher, and we’ll need something that will give us deniability if too many people freak out. But go ahead and run with it for the moment. Too bad April Fool’s Day has passed.”
Actually, William realized, that was precisely when the aliens had landed. They must have found that inordinately funny. It was also amazingly arrogant. But then, William realized, he’d always been that way himself.
For three interminable days, William read about practical jokes. He found a way to make a saltshaker blow its lid the first time someone tried to use it. He found ways to make people vomit, and to give their bodily fluids bright, exotic colors. There was even a formula for glow-in-the-dark semen.
Meanwhile, word from his off-the-record sources was that the White House was getting very nervous. The current theory was that the alien baby had reached a stage where its nutritional needs were changing, and its caretakers were seeking advice from every trade association that had ever put a dime in the president’s coffers. The Apiary Institute suggested honey. “All that pollen in it is good for you,” a representative said. “It’s got lots and lots of phytochemicals.” The Confectioners of America lobbied for chocolate. Enologists United urged red wine. “Just because alcohol isn’t recommended for human babies doesn’t mean it’s bad for aliens.”
William sighed. Time was running short, and the White House was obsessed with micronutrients. Potato skins. Whole grains. Broccoli. Spinach. Citrus peels. There was an expert for everything.
It was the citrus peels that did it.
The aliens looked like limes. They were even kind of bulby around their joints. He could do something with that. Years ago, he’d written a story about some trade dispute involving Key limes. It had involved subsidies, tariffs, and a bunch of posturing between governments, but what really mattered was that he’d learned more than any reasonable person ever wanted to know about limes. Not to mention that lime growers are a small industry. If he was going to get the Western Times sued, better by them than someone bigger, like the spinach, broccoli, or Christmas tree folks.
It’s amazing how easy it is to write when you don’t have to worry about truth. The hardest part was finding a picture of a frog whose natural color was nearly indistinguishable from the aliens.
The headline was also a challenge. It needed to catch attention, without looking too much like that’s what it wanted to do. Eventually William settled on a combination of techno-babble and scare words: Prion Blamed for Rapid Spread of ‘Green Cancer’—Mad-cow-like disease kills frogs and fruit, but officials say no cause for alarm.
The last bit was the best. Nothing produces panic better than bureaucrats saying “no problem.” The photo was good too. Not only was it the most vividly colored amphibian William had ever seen, but its neck, back, and limbs were covered with tumors that looked like chartreuse raisins. A memorable mix with your morning coffee and Danish. Who cared if the frog died twenty years ago, probably due to dioxin or something like that. Within hours of publication, that photo was going to be everywhere.
Once he knew what he was doing, the article practically wrote itself. “A new plague, sometimes called the ‘green cancer,’ has escaped from a Mexican hothouse and is sweeping toward the U.S.,” he began:
A representative of the Baja Citrus Institute, who spoke on condition of anonymity, revealed that the plague appears to have originated in a clandestine biotechnology laboratory where scientists were seeking to strengthen the color of Key limes.
Key limes draw their name from the Florida Keys but are widely grown in other parts of the world.
“They turn yellow when they ripen,” the official said. “Customers sometimes confuse them with lemons.”
Also, she said, market research has shown that people who’ve never eaten Key lime pie before expect it to be green, not yellow. “Strengthening the color would increase sales, especially to first-time customers,” she said.
To green up the fruits, the researchers developed a subcellular particle called a prion.
Prions are deformed proteins that cause similar biomolecules to deform as well. “Some people think they’re the simplest form of life,” said Siti Medeski, a virologist at the Moldavian Centre for Advanced Epigenetic Studies. “They reproduce, mutate, and spread like wildfire. They’re also damn near impossible to eradicate.”
This particular prion causes green pigments to reproduce themselves. It worked well in limes, but nobody expected it to affect frogs.
“Unfortunately, the prion wasn’t color-blind,” the Citrus Institute official said. “Even though frogs have different green pigments than plants, it saw them the same way.”
In fact, the reaction in frogs is even stronger than in limes.
Xander Hollyfield is a herpetological biochemist, currently on sabbatical at the University of Central Jamaica. “The prion causes the pigments to duplicate themselves very rapidly,” he said by satellite phone from a remote research station. “That makes them run rampant as they attempt to turn the entire frog into nothing but themselves.”
Infected frogs can live for days. “By the time they die, they’re nothing but hopping, flopping balls of greenness,” Hollyfield said. “It’s like mad cow disease, but only if you’re green.”