Maria sat in her car in the Triniton Labs parking lot, giddy. She had just cured the disease everyone knew by name. Maria Korvantes had cured cancer.
Not a treatment. Not a therapy that extended life by months or years. A cure. Complete cellular restoration. The data was clean. Three years of trials, two thousand patients across forty-seven cancer types, and every single one was in remission. Not regression. Remission. The cells didn’t just stop growing. They reverted. The body remembered what it was supposed to be.
She was forty-three years old. She had given Triniton Labs seventeen years. She had given cancer research twenty-two. And now, sitting in her Subaru with coffee stains on the cup holder and a check engine light that had been on for eight months, she had won.
Maria pulled out her phone and typed to her friends: “I did it. Drinks tonight?”
She drove through the city as the November sun dropped behind the buildings. The streets were full of people, all of them looking down. AR glasses caught the light at odd angles as heads bobbed while walking. A woman nearly stepped into traffic, her hand waving at something only she could see in her visual field. A man stood at a bus stop, laughing at his phone, shoulders shaking, alone.
Maria had stopped wearing her AR glasses two years ago. She’d put them in a drawer when she realized she was spending more time dismissing notifications than looking at data. Most of her colleagues wore theirs during experiments now, checking feeds between measurements. She didn’t understand how they could think like that, with the constant ticker of information crawling across their vision.
The bar was called Morton’s, and it was the kind of place that didn’t try to be anything. Wooden booths, decent beer, lights dim enough that you could ignore how old the carpet was. Her four closest friends were already there when she arrived. Sarah, Kim, Devon, and Marcus. Real friends, the kind she’d had since grad school, before anyone had careers or children or the rhythm of disappointment that came with middle age.
“There she is,” Sarah said, standing up to hug her. Sarah was a civil engineer who designed water systems for developing countries. She wore her AR glasses pushed up on her head like a headband. “You sounded cryptic as hell.”
Maria slid into the booth. “I did it.”
Kim looked up from her phone. “Did what?”
“I cured cancer.”
There was a beat of silence. Devon’s mouth opened. Marcus put his beer down.
“You fucking did it?” Devon said.
“Yes.”
“Holy shit,” Sarah said. She reached across the table and grabbed Maria’s hand. “Holy shit, Maria.”
Kim’s phone buzzed. She glanced down, her thumb moving. “Wait, wait,” she said, looking back up. “You actually cured it? Like, all of it?”
“All of it.”
“Jesus,” Marcus said. He raised his beer. “To Maria Korvantes, who just saved the goddamn world.”
They clinked glasses. Maria felt warmth spread through her chest, the kind of validation she hadn’t realized she’d been starving for. Sarah’s eyes were wet.
“Your grandmother would be so proud,” Sarah said.
Maria nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Devon’s AR glasses lit up with a notification. He glanced at it, then back at Maria. “Sorry, one second.” His eyes tracked something invisible. He smiled. “Oh my god, you have to see this.”
He held up his phone. A video played: a golden retriever wearing a tiny chef’s hat, trying to flip a pancake with its mouth. The dog knocked the pan off the stove. Everyone at the table leaned in to watch. They laughed.
“That’s incredible,” Kim said.
“There’s like fifty videos of this dog,” Devon said, scrolling. “Each one is better.”
“Guys,” Maria said.
“Hold on,” Marcus said, pulling out his own phone. “I have to show you the one from yesterday. It’s the same dog but with a waffle iron.”
They were all looking at their screens now. Maria sat there, her hands on the table. Sarah’s hand had slipped away. Maria pressed her palms flat against the wood.
“So,” Maria said. “The cure.”
“Right, right,” Kim said, eyes still on her phone. “That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you.” She tapped something. Her face lit up. “Oh my god, he’s trying to make toast now.”
“Wait, didn’t they cure cancer already?” Marcus asked, looking up briefly.
“No,” Maria said. “There are treatments. Immunotherapies. Targeted drugs. But not a cure. This is different. This reverses—”
“Huh,” Marcus said. “I thought I read something about that.” His attention dropped back to his screen.
Devon’s AR glasses flashed again. He laughed, a sharp bark of sound. “Sorry, it’s just—there’s this thread about the dog and someone edited it so the dog is cooking meth like in Breaking Bad.”
They all laughed. Maria looked at them, at their faces glowing in the blue light of their devices, at the way their expressions were animated by something she couldn’t see. Sarah was the only one who noticed Maria watching. She put her hand on Maria’s forearm.
“I’m really proud of you,” Sarah said. Her eyes were sincere. Then a notification bloomed in her AR display, visible in the slight movement of her pupils, and her focus drifted.
Maria finished her beer and left twenty minutes later. No one tried to stop her.
She drove to her parents’ house—a forty-minute drive to the suburbs, the streets emptying as she got farther from the city center. Her parents lived in the same house she’d grown up in, a two-story colonial with a sagging porch and a maple tree in the front yard that was older than Maria.
She knocked. Her father opened the door, surprised.
“Mija!” he said. “You should have texted. We’d have put in a pizza.”
“Surprise visit,” Maria said. She stepped in and gave her father a hug.
“Oof, that’s a big squeeze!”
Her mother appeared behind him, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s great,” Maria said.
They sat in the living room. Her father wore his AR glasses on a cord around his neck. Her mother’s were on the coffee table, next to a half-finished crossword puzzle that Maria suspected had been abandoned for days. The house smelled like her childhood: coffee and old books and the faint vanilla of her mother’s lotion.
“I have news,” Maria said.
“Good news?” her mother asked.
“I cured cancer.”
Her father blinked. Her mother’s mouth formed a small O.
“You did it?” her father said.
“Today. The final data came through this morning.”
Her mother stood up and hugged her, pulling Maria’s head against her shoulder the way she had when Maria was small. “Our little girl is so smart,” she said. Her voice cracked. “Oh, baby. I’m so proud.”
Maria felt tears coming and pushed them down. “Grandma kept me going,” she said. “I always loved seeing her in the news when she made a new discovery. I wanted to be like her.”
Her mother’s eyes teared up. “She would have been so proud,” she said. “God, Maria. She would have—”
Her father’s AR glasses chimed. He glanced down at them, hanging against his chest. The lenses glowed faintly. He picked them up and put them on.
“Oh, you have to see this,” he said.
“Roberto,” Maria’s mother said.
“No, no, it’s—hold on.” He tapped the side of his glasses. “It’s that spring water thing. The one I was telling you about.”
Her mother frowned. “The what?”
“Here.” He turned so the AR display projected onto the wall, a feature Maria had helped him set up last Christmas. A video played: a man in a pristine kitchen, pouring an entire bottle of spring water into a metal bowl. He leaned over it, staring at his reflection. Then he splashed the water onto his face, gasping.
“See?” her father said. “That’s the thing. Everyone’s doing it now.”
The video cut to another person doing the same thing. Then another. A montage of people pouring water into bowls and splashing it on their faces, their expressions ranging from ecstatic to bewildered.
“I don’t understand,” her mother said.
“It’s a meme,” her father said. “It’s supposed to be about, like, purity or something. Or maybe it’s making fun of wellness culture? I’m not sure. But it’s everywhere.”
“Everywhere,” her mother echoed. She was watching the video now, her attention caught. “Why are they using spring water?”
“That’s the bit,” her father said. “It has to be spring water. Store brand doesn’t count. Someone tried to do it with tap water and everyone flamed them.”
“Does distilled water count?” her mother asked. “That’s about as pure as water gets right?”
Her father shook his head. “Someone tried that too. The comments were brutal. They said that you needed the minerals from the spring.”
“What about filtered then? That’s got to have some minerals and still be pretty pure.”
“No way. Has to be actual spring water. From a spring.”
Her mother laughed. “People are insane.”
Maria sat on the couch, her fingernails pressing crescents into her palms. After ten minutes, her mother seemed to remember she was there.
“So, honey,” her mother said, turning to her. “The cure. That’s wonderful. When does it—”
Her father’s AR glasses chimed again. “Oh, there’s a new one,” he said. “Someone did it with Perrier.”
They both looked back at the wall.
Maria stood up. “I should go,” she said.
“Already?” her mother asked, glancing over.
“Yeah. I have to feed Missy.”
“Okay, sweetie. We’re so proud of you.”
Her father nodded, not looking away from the projection. “So proud, mija.”
Maria let herself out.
She walked. Not back to her car, but down the street, past the homes she’d grown up knowing. The Bergeron house with the perpetual porch light. The corner where she’d learned to ride a bike. She walked without thinking, her feet taking her toward the small downtown, three blocks of storefronts and restaurants that served as the suburb’s center.
It was full dark now, the November air cold enough that she could see her breath. A few people were out—more than in the residential streets—walking with their faces angled down at their phones, or with AR glasses painting light across their eyes.
Maria stopped walking. Her hands curled into fists. She started again, faster.
A young man walked toward her, maybe twenty-five, wearing a puffy jacket and AR glasses with bright blue frames. He was smiling at something, his head bobbing slightly as he walked.
Maria stepped in front of him.
“Excuse me,” she said.
He looked up, startled. “Yeah?”
“I cured cancer today.”
He stared at her. “What?”
“Cancer,” Maria said. “I cured it. All of it. I’m a scientist. I’ve been working on this for twenty years. I cured cancer today.”
The young man’s expression shifted from confusion to something like concern. He lifted his phone and pointed past her, toward the end of the street. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s been out for like an hour now.”
He stepped around her and kept walking, his attention already back on his screen.
Maria turned.
At the end of the street, mounted on the side of a building, was a massive AR billboard. It dominated the skyline, bright enough to wash out the streetlights. Maria walked toward it.
The billboard showed a cartoon cancer cell, round and lumpy, with X’s for eyes. A glowing fist punched it from the side, and the cell exploded into pixels. Bold text appeared: CANCER = BUSTED 💪🔥
Below it, in smaller text: Triniton Labs. Sign up to stay in touch and learn when YOUR vaccine is available.
A counter at the bottom showed shares: 47,293,019. As Maria watched, the number ticked up. 47,293,847. 47,294,203.
Comments scrolled across the bottom of the display, user names and profile pictures she didn’t recognize:
lol finally
bout time
my aunt gonna be stoked 😂
wait is this real or a bit
big pharma W for once
still gonna get my tarot reading just in case lmao
Maria stood in the middle of the sidewalk. People flowed around her, none of them looking at the billboard, all of them looking at their phones. A teenager walked past her while watching the exact same meme on his phone, laughing at the cartoon fist.
She let out a stuttering sob and caught her breath. She read the comments again.
lol finally
She pulled out her phone. The screen lit up: 1 unread message.
It was from her dog walker. Hey Maria, won’t be able to take Missy out tomorrow, sorry! Family thing.
Maria opened her contacts and scrolled through the names. The list bounced off the bottom of her screen. She stared at it.
She walked to a garbage can on the corner, held her phone over it for three seconds, and dropped it in.
The phone hit the bottom with a dull thud. Maria looked at her hands.
She kept walking down the street. Screens glowed in windows, on wrists, on faces. Maria’s hands swung at her sides. She walked past the billboard, past the people, past the light. She didn’t know where she was going, but her face felt strange. It took her a moment to realize she was smiling.