It was her phone.
Sam had tried everything else first. It had been a part of the background noise of the crowded bar, then a hum in the voice of the alligator pretending to be her aunt, then just another speck of the fuzzy static filling her ears on waking. But now she was opening her eyes and it was still there and now it had become Doctor K telling her to come up over to Vertebrates, there was a problem that needed her attention. Again.
There was a shower first, with water that smelled of freshly-scrubbed salt. It stung her skin and cleared her eyes but left her head fogged and thickened. Then she took a mug and filled it with whatever liquid dregs were still in her personal fridge and wandered there the long way, up the staircase, because it was better to be five minutes late when it also meant five minutes more awake.
The staircase was nicer, anyways. It had the windows.
Blackness fading into blueness as she went up and up and up the winding corkscrew, watching the pale sheen and shimmer in the water from the nutrients and hormones and bacterial cocktails the station was disgorging into the long-wandering currents of Thalassa.
Sam didn’t like the name. Regurgitating earth genes, earth organisms, wriggling, thriving, multiplying earth life into the planet’s waters was one thing, but shoving earth mythology on top of it seemed wrong somehow. She’d never mentioned this to anyone and knew she never would and she thought about it every third day or so.
Doctor K was waiting for her there in the lab, looking cross. Doctor K always looked cross; it seemed to be part of her face. Sam knew she shouldn’t think things like that and she knew she was too tired to not do it. She was too tired for a lot of things, including listening to precise words. So instead she nodded and bobbed her head and let her hooded eyes stand in for concern instead of confusion and let the information drip in through the back of her skull.
The new fish were reacting badly to the delta-stage planktons; their skin was wearing in places and flaking away into raw flash. It was unprecedented, but unsurprising.
So she nodded a little more, for good measure, and went to her station, and pressed a button and tried, really tried, not to vomit.
She’d long ago decided it was the eyes that disturbed her so much when she worked on vertebrates. It was unsettling, the way they didn’t follow you around the room. A black glassy sphere turned flat as a penny in her grandmother’s collection.
An eye – a proper, socketed eye, an eye in a solid bony skull – should follow you. Instead, it seemed like all her projects followed her with their mouths. Their little jaws hinging and unhinging, gasping for water that wasn’t there, that they didn’t need as they rested in the gene cradle.
Sam tried not to look at it, looked at her notes instead. Abrasion, that was the thing. Abrasion. Chemical, mechanical, but always abrasion. Thalassa’s waters were unkind; the fish were being wire-scrubbed just swimming.
Thicken the dermis. Harden it. Harden it. There, maybe.
She’d done this four times already, each for a different reason, and she knew there’d be a fifth.
File, save, pull over the wastebasket and heave until nothing came out at all.
Sometimes, in her more tired hours, she’d imagine a coworker, helpful and kind and with a nice cup of coffee (not tea; she hated tea) would stop by late at night when she was tired and alone and nobody cared about her as usual and they would ask her, Sammy, why DO you work on fish when you hate them so much? Why dedicate your life to something you dislike? And she, smiling despite the deep exhaustion, would explain the words she’d rehearsed a thousand, thousand times, about how DNA was DNA and ninety-per-cent-plus of any species was ninety-per-cent-plus of another species, and the tools didn’t change too much, and prior subaquatic living experience counted for a lot in these postings. She’d worked on corals, she’d tell them, admiring the suppleness of their fingers and the softness of their smile, and plankton. Small things, with well-defined borders and elegant shells. Clean things.
And then she’d remember the things that weren’t clean or small or elegant and she’d come crashing back in to the world as it was, with the little paralyzed fish lying flat on its side in front of her, its genome unzipping into her computer, and all her lunch trying not to rush back into her mouth.
Doctor K was standing there at her side. Sam could almost feel her there, resisting the urge to tap her foot. Trying to remember how to look concerned while not accidentally asking something like ‘are you through.’
“Yes,” said Sam. Her voice felt tight and tiny.
“Pardon?”
“It’s all done.”
The walk back downstairs was longer and slower. Her workday didn’t start for another three hours, and she needed the sleep. But her feet dragged as she went back down into the dark levels, and the bed felt too warm and too stifling and the floor was cold and so she sat in her chair and read her notes without reading them and let her mind drift instead while her eyes boiled in her skull. She looked out the window, at the calm clouds of invisible life, and she tried not to think about fish.
It was the end of the week and the end of the day and every single thing that had been in Sam’s gene cradle had a backbone. Her mouth tasted like acid and her coffee tasted like ash and all the base pairs were starting to look the same to her and all her subjects WERE the same, the same problem. Too thin, too thin, too frail, too ephemeral. Delicate flesh and wafer-thin scales rotting on the fin, bruising under life.
They shouldn’t be here, she thought. They shouldn’t be here. Why come hundreds of lightyears and put things somewhere they shouldn’t be. Let the planet sit here on its own for a billion years or so until it figures itself out. Let it make its own namers to make its own myths and name its own oceans. Let it make its own life, if it wants to.
Doctor K was telling her that she needed to try harder.
So Sam breathed deeply but a little too quickly, and she thought of corals, and shells, and calm, clean surfaces, and she looked a VERY long ways back through the genome of the little fish, and she retrieved a few things and improvised others, and when she was done they released a trial batch. Tiny armored plates glinted in the station’s lights as they swam away into Thalassa’s long twilight.
Harder worked.
It worked so well, they did it four more times next week.
Three the next.
Seven after.
Sam felt calmer after the eighth, the ninth, maybe. There was something about ringing the bulbous little eye in bone, about covering the softness with smooth plates. It made it farther, safer. Extra layers between her and it, farther away. Bulkheads. Bulky heads.
Some of the newer ones were so thickly armored it was getting awkward for them to move. Not a problem of the plating, she told Doctor K, but the gross morphology. Muscles had to be moved, bones reworked, planes of symmetry jiggled.
They looked like bullets, thought Sam. Or maybe torpedoes. Their sides were so encased she could barely see their muscles tense. It had been hours since she’d thrown up.
It was the end of the fifth week and there were spots in front of her eyes and shaking and finally she put down her computer and went to the bathroom and realized she felt fine. She felt so fine she couldn’t blink, eyes locked tight.
That night she stayed up late, doing anything but sleeping. Staring, coughing, shivering, making coffee and throwing it out again.
Finally she went for a walk. Late shift, an inch from early shift, when the last of the night owls had gone to bed and the early birds still dozed. The halls were quiet and in that quiet all the softly mechanical noises that kept the station full of air and warmth and humans were loud and hard on the ears.
The lab was dark, calm, and cool; thirty metres below the surface and feeling like it. Sam’s hands shook as she turned on her computer; maybe she should’ve put on more clothing. Maybe she should’ve taken off yesterday’s clothing. Maybe she should, maybe she shouldn’t.
Maybe she shouldn’t do this.
The gene cradle was empty, but its memory was full. Sam scrolled through, looking at familiar patterns, proteins, pictures, plans. It was amazing how far they’d come in just a few weeks. The seas were awash in infant neoplacoderms, growing fat fast and furious on the enriched waves pulsing out of the station’s guts. They would be obsolete soon; they were a holding pattern, a temporary measure. When the waters were made tepid and tolerable, they would be repurposed, reprocessed. Their armor would fall away and their bodies would wriggle and gasp in calm cool waters that rocked them gently in its grasp.
She’d seen enough here, not that there was much to see. The computer was just a little local terminal; its powers began and ended at formatting: a typewriter for organisms.
But Doctor K’s computer was far more than that, and its password was far less than it should’ve been, and it had the authorization Sam needed and more to pump the planktonic tanks full of a transgenic blend that had been sitting quietly, very quietly, at the very back of her head for what seemed like her entire life but had surely only been just now.
Sam sat in her chair – in Doctor K’s chair – and leaned back until the springs complained in strident voices, and she thought about clean things, about smooth angles of shell and bone and horn and eyes that were so small against a skull that they were pinpricks, barely there at all. About well-measured borders and the kindnesses of surety, and certainty, and the discreet masking of the indiscreet and grotesque underneath the coolness of calm steel.
She thought about the picture books when she was very small, with their pictures of octopi, and eel, and shark, and sardines that had made her cringe. And the one her sister had liked, with the dinosaurs and mammoths and apes that weren’t quite apes any more. At its very beginning, there had been squids with spiral shells and scorpions that swam and just after that there had been a fish. A fish with bony eyes and a bony skull; a body like a bullet with a mouth made of blades, all flat and blank like a mask.
The door was ringing. Security would be coming in. She wondered if she would go quietly.
She wondered how big they would be when they grew up.