This is about family feelings of being apart and unwanted gifts. And about the challenges in engineering something alive they’ve never seen before.

Prologue: documents

We see a young woman called Sam. Before she hurries off from the supermarket exit, she neatly folds two papers and tuck them in her hiking backpack:

Document 1 [grandma’s VISA application letter. a stamp indicates that the request is granted because the orbits aligned, and the interplanetary relations are warming to be possible for travel.]

Document 2 [A copy of grandma’s lotus zongzi (dumpling) recipe written like a prophet scripture. It has two sections: the leaf wrapping, the rhizome rice filling.]

The recipe is abstract like a prophet, leaving a lot of room for operational interpretation in the wet lab. How to make a life? that’s the difficult Frankenstein question.

Introduction: change of plans

Sam is coming out of the supermarket where she had just circled repeatedly to find lotus roots. Even though she appears calm and logical, she is upset because it’s a dry hot summer day on Mars, it was the third store that day, and she really wanted to find the last ingredient to her grandma’s favourite lotus zongzi (dumpling) before grandma comes visiting her planet for the first time ever after eight years apart. Her rational side understands the market search is not worth continuing: Lotus and any lily genus plants are banned for local cultivation (as an invasive species that often dominate fresh water ecosystems) and young residents in this new extraterrestrial habitat don’t demand this ancient medicinal and culinary plant. Still she wants to make the zongzi surprise happen badly and must find a way. Sam sits on her bike and reexamines grandma’s vaguely phrased recipe, on which she redlined two sections: “rhizome” of the rice filling and “leaf” of the wrapping. She has never seen a real lotus, and to make things worse grandma’s mystic side descriptions leave ample room for imagination. After a short pondering pause, she rushes to her bike and takes off inversely from her usual way from supermarket back to work.

Rising act: rhizome

Sam arrives at the wet lab for fabricating polymer nano materials where she works on computer simulations to weed out hopeless experiments. From her bag she takes out the recipe and some backup materials from the market, and lay them all on the office work station that does as lunch table.

setting: wet lab

goal: grandma describes the rhizome as “even when we split the root, the invisible silky threads still connect the two halves”

• Reading this line, Sam relates back to her relationship with grandma. Sometimes she has a hard time seeing any connection between them. She thought inviting grandma to be physically closing, when she finally get to hug her or when she can serve her what she likes to eat, that gut-sharing and physical closeness would bring them emotionally closer too.
• Sam also reads the line that follows that sounded natural history styled: “There are Chinese red lotus and American yellow lotus, which represent the discontinuity between Eurasia and North America. They had the same ancestor group, who when separated with continental drift evolved into different looks.” It reminds her that simultaneous to her attraction and missing to grandma, she feels an urge to cut and split even more from grandma’s reach, impatient to fulfill the duties and set off to grow her own.

Sam’s methodology:

• PMMA assembly might recreate a similar cohesive texture.
• Fermi (under)estimation of the amount of raw fibres to condense into the duct

evaluation: wrong flavour and dynamically brittle

unexpected side effect: splitting the bond created “cut-continuity” that released an explosion, thankfully contained by the lab shower.

Climax: leaf

setting: desert field