The Vital Abyss

How long did it take before we understood how badly we’d underestimated the task? In my memory, it is almost instantaneous, but I know that isn’t true. Certainly for the first day, two days, three, we must have withheld judgment. So little time afforded us—meaning me—only a very narrow slice of the overall dataset. But too soon, the complexity on Eros outstripped us. The models based on examinations in the lab and the human exposure on Phoebe returned values that seesawed between incomprehensible and trivial. The protomolecule’s ability to make use of high-level structures—organs, hands, brains—caught me off guard. The outward aspect of the infection skipped from being explicable in terms of simple cause-and-effect, through the intentional stance, and into a kind of beautiful madness. What is it doing to what does it want to what is it doing again. I kept diving through the dataset, trying one analytical strategy and then another, hoping that somewhere in the numbers and projections I would find it looking back out at me. I didn’t sleep. I ate rarely. The others followed suit. Trinh suffered a psychotic break, which proved something of a blessing as it marked the end of her coughing and sighs.

Listening to the voices of Eros—human voices of the subjects preserved even as the flesh had been remade, reconfigured—I came to grips with the truth. Too many simplifying assumptions, too little imagination on our part, and the utter alienness of the protomolecule conspired to overthrow all our best intentions. The behavior of the particles had changed not only in scale but in kind and continued to do so again at increasingly narrow intervals. The sense of watching a countdown grew into a certainty, though to what, I couldn’t say.

I should probably have been afraid.

With every new insight in the long, unbroken stretch of consciousness that predates even humanity, a first moment comes. For an hour or a day or a lifetime, something new has come into the world. Recognized or not, it exists in only one mind, secret and special. It is the bone-shaking joy of finding a novel species or a new theory that explains previously troubling data. The sensation can range from something deeper than orgasm to a small, quiet, rapturous voice whispering that everything you’d thought before was wrong.

Someone would have to be brilliant and driven and above all lucky to have even a handful of moments like that in the span of a stellar and celebrated career. I had five or six of them every shift. Each one felt better than love, better than sex, better than drugs. The few times I slept, I slept through dreams of pattern matching and data analysis and woke to the quivering promise that this time, today, the insight might come that made it all make sense. The line that connected the dots. All the dots. Forever. I lived on the edge of revelation like I could dance in flames and not burn. When the end came, it surprised me.

It found me in my cell, silent in the dark, not awake and not asleep, the bed cradling me in its palm like an acorn. The sharp scent of the air recycler’s fresh filters reminded me of rain. The voices I heard—clipped, angry syllables—I ascribed to the combination of listening to Eros for hours on end and the hypnagogic twilight of my mind. When the door opened and the three men from security hauled me out, I could almost have believed it was part of my dream. Seconds later, the alarms shrieked.

I still don’t know how the Belters discovered Thoth Station. Some technical failure, some oversight that left the trail that came to us, the inevitable information leakage that comes from working with people. Station security pushed us like cattle, hurrying us down the corridors. I assumed our path ended in evacuation craft. It didn’t.

In the labs, they lined us up at our workstations. Fong commanded the group in my room. It was the first time I’d recognized her as anything but another anonymous extension of the lump of biomass and demands that was security. She gestured to our workstations with her nonlethal riot gun. All their weapons were designed for controlling research, not defending the station.

“Purge it,” Fong said. “Purge everything.”

She might as well have told us to chew our fingers off. Lodge crossed her arms. Quintana spat on the floor. Fear glinted in Fong’s eyes, but we defied her. It felt like nobility at the time. Ten minutes later, the Belters broke through. They wore no standard uniform, carried no unified weapons. They shouted and screamed in shattered bits of half a dozen languages. A young man with tattoos on his face led the charge. I watched Fong’s eyes as she reached her conclusion and lifted her hands over her head. We did as she did, and the Belters surrounded us, peppering us with questions I couldn’t follow and whooping in a violence-drunk delight.