The Vital Abyss

We prepared then and we waited, the tension of every day growing more refined and exquisite. Rumors swirled of the sample going awry and being recovered, of information ops plans put in place to distract any possible regulatory bodies from our work until they also understood the transcendent importance of what we would have accomplished, of our sister research stations on Io and Osiris Station and the smaller projects they were engaged with. None of it mattered. Even the greatest war in human history would have been paltry compared with our work. To bend the protomolecule to our own will, to direct the flow of information now as whatever alien brilliance had done before, opened the concept of humanity beyond anything that even we were capable of imagining. If we managed what we hoped, the sacrifice of Eros Station would unlock literally anything we could imagine.

The prospect of the protomolecule’s designers arriving to find humans unprepared for their invasion gave us—or me at any rate—that extra chill of fear. I had no compunctions, no sense of regret. I’d had it burned out of me. But I believe that even if I’d refused the procedure, I would have done precisely as I did. I’m smart enough to know that this is almost certainly not true, but I believe it.

The word came nearly at the end of shift one day: Eros would be online in seventeen hours.

No one slept that night. No one even tried. I ate dinner—chicken fesejan and jeweled rice—with Trinh and Lodge, the three of us leaning over the tall, slightly wobbly table and talking fast, as if we could will time to pass more quickly. On other nights we would have gone back to our rooms, let ourselves be locked in by security, watched whatever entertainments the heavily censored company feeds provided. That night we went back to the labs and worked a full second shift. We checked all our connection arrays, ran sample sets, prepared. When the data came in, it would be as a broadcast, available everywhere. We only had to listen, and so tracking us through that signal became impossible. The price of this anonymity was high. There would be no rerunning a missed sample, no second chances. The equipment on Eros—both the most important and the most vulnerable—lay beyond our control, so we obsessed over what we could reach.

My station, and the center of my being, had a wall-size screen, a multiple-valence interface, and the most comfortable chair I have ever had. The water tasted of cucumber, citrus, and oxiracetam. The stations for Le, Lodge, and Quintana shared my space, the four of us facing away from each other in a floor plan like the petals of a very simple flower. Eros had a million and a half people in an enclosed environment, seven thousand weather-station-style data collection centers in the public corridors, and Protogen-coded software updates on all the asteroid station’s environmental controls, including the air and water recycling systems. Each of us waited for the data to come, hungry for the cells in our databases to begin filling, the patterns we felt certain would be there to emerge.

Every minute lasted two. My sleep-deprived body seemed to vibrate in my chair, as if my blood had found the perfect resonance frequency for the room and would slowly tear it apart. Le sighed and coughed and sighed again until the only things that kept me from attacking her out of raw annoyance were the security guard outside our door and the certainty it would mean missing the beginning of our data stream.

Quintana cheered first, and then Le, and then all of us together, howling with joy that felt sweeter for being so long delayed. The data poured in, filling the cells of our analytic spreadsheets and databases. For those first beautiful hours, I traced the changes on a physical map of Eros Station. The protomolecule activity began at the shelters that we’d converted to incubators, feeding the smart particles with the radiation that seemed to best drive activity. It spread along the transit tunnels, out to the casino levels, the maintenance tunnels, the docks. It eddied through the caves of Eros like a vast breath, the greatest act of transformation in the history of the human race and the tree of life from which it sprang, and I—along with a handful of others—watched it unfold in an awe that approached religious ecstasy.

I want to say that I honored the sacrificed population, that I took a moment in my heart to thank them for the contribution they were all unwittingly making for the future that they left behind. The sort of thing you’re trained to say about any lab animals advanced enough to be cute. And maybe I did, but my fascination with the protomolecule and its magic—that isn’t too strong a word—overwhelmed any sentimentality I had about our methods.