Living Things
fiction by Nathan Munn
Extracting Value: One Startup’s Quest to Monetize Your Biology
Jules Stringham, New York
I’m looking around the fashionably cluttered apartment of Akari Kato while she cooks, admiring the floor-to-ceiling shelves brimming with books on biochemistry, brining, oenology, mycology, and natural medicine; collections of kimono silks and hand-dyed linens are stacked in neat rows. Her slight frame is draped in a nearly see-through black blouse, her legs sheathed in jeans. I watch as she leans over a pan simmering on her stovetop, the sauce inside a vibrant red. A sweet smell of tomato, basil, and an odd but not-unpleasant hint of copper reaches my nostrils. Finally, after a few minutes of seasoning and tasting, she nods, skims off a spoonful of the red mixture, blows softly on it a few times—she’s very courteous—and approaches me smiling with the spoon outstretched.
“Try this,” she says. “It’s made from something my coworker is coming down with.”
In normal circumstances, I would swat a spoon away upon hearing those words, but Akari’s sauce—infused with the refined essences of bacteria and viruses she acquired from a colleague on the verge of sickness—is the reason I’m here. I close my eyes, say a silent prayer, and sip gingerly from the spoon.
Keep us breathing fire!
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