Ch. 004| The First Sample

P4 containment was the innermost room of the Biology Section. The whole section had been built for one purpose: to take an alien organism apart inside it. Every engineering decision assumed the thing in there might kill you.

In four months, Voss had been inside twice.

The third time was now.

Before she entered she peeled off her EVA suit and changed into a P4 hazmat suit, her fingers still damp inside the gloves. She set the sample cases on the workbench—seven of them, the last holding just a single leaf.

Lin Mei-chen was waiting for her on the wall screen.

Lin Mei-chen wore the white isolation gown of the medical team, no gloves, sitting at her own desk. At this hour she should have been at the command-deck morning briefing—the medical chief was one of the people who always had to attend.

"You skipped the briefing," Voss said.

"I said I had something else to do," Lin Mei-chen said. "Vale didn't show. Nobody cares whether I'm there."

Voss opened the first sample case.

"001."

"Surface slime layer," Lin Mei-chen read off the label. "Your note says 'more viscous than water.'"

"Yes."

"Elena, preliminary read?"

"I don't guess before the scan's done." Voss slid the sample into the electron-microscope chamber and started the scan.

---

Twenty minutes later she had her first image.

Lin Mei-chen looked at the screen for three seconds.

"Elena."

"I know," Voss said.

"You haven't let me say it yet."

"You're going to say 'this isn't water.'"

"Yes."

"I've seen electron images of moisture in alien crust. They don't look like this."

Lin Mei-chen didn't answer.

Voss zoomed the image to maximum. The microstructure of the surface slime layer was a series of extremely thin organic membranes, with a fluid between them that looked like cytoplasm. But there were no nuclei in the cytoplasm.

"Are you trying to tell me it's like something living?" Lin Mei-chen asked.

"I'm telling you it's like a skin secretion," Voss said. "But the skin secretion of a large multicellular organism. The closest match on Earth is the mucus on the surface of amphibians—frogs, salamanders, that family."

"The entire surface of Kepler-942c is amphibian skin."

"Not amphibians. But that functional grade."

Lin Mei-chen was silent for eight seconds.

Voss picked up the sampling forceps on the workbench—the pair she'd used to grip the first sample out of the surface slime layer—held them up to the light, looked the tips over, and set them down again. On her side of the screen Lin Mei-chen watched the forceps for a second, said nothing.

"Run sample 005," Lin Mei-chen said.

005 was a fragment of petiole from the first tree. Voss lifted it out of the case with the forceps and set it under a different microscope.

---

The petiole cross-section had vascular-bundle structure; that part was like an Earth plant. But at the center of the vascular bundle ran a duct about 0.4 millimeters across, filled with an electrolyte solution.

The ionic composition of the electrolyte was almost identical to the intracellular fluid of a vertebrate neuron's axon.

"Neurotransmitter-protein signature," Voss said.

Lin Mei-chen pulled her chair closer to the screen. "Run mass spec."

The sample went into the mass spectrometer. Twelve minutes.

Voss sat in front of the screen and waited. Lin Mei-chen didn't leave. Neither of them spoke in that stretch. Lin Mei-chen uncapped a water bottle on her end of the feed and drank slowly—Voss remembered she only drank water while she waited for bad news.

The mass-spec result came up.

Lin Mei-chen read the first line and put the cup down.

"Amino-acid composition is wrong," Lin Mei-chen said.

"Yes."

"How many did you run?" Lin Mei-chen said.

"All twenty-one," Voss said. "None of them match."

"Not a single one matches."

"Not one."

Lin Mei-chen was silent. Voss looked at the mass-spec plot for a full minute—the peaks fell at positions no known Earth organism had ever produced. Earth life uses twenty-two standard amino acids. The sample she'd just run used nineteen non-standard amino acids and two organic molecules resembling amino-acid analogues.

"Elena," Lin Mei-chen said. "This leaf doesn't belong to Earth's biological history."

"I know," Voss said.

"And it doesn't belong to any alien life we've ever modeled," Lin Mei-chen said.

"I know."

"So what are you going to say next?"

Voss looked up at Lin Mei-chen.

"I'm going to say the neurotransmission mechanism in this sample is functional. It's carrying a signal, not just dead chemical content—and it's wired into the same system as the whole forest, and as the pulse underneath the planet's surface."

Lin Mei-chen didn't answer.

"Mei-chen," Voss said. "The internal-diameter error on the leaf-vein duct is under 0.02 millimeters, and the combination of nineteen non-standard amino acids is optimized for metabolic efficiency—this forest has strong artificial signatures."

"Artificial signatures can coexist with natural evolution," Lin Mei-chen said.

"They can," Voss said. "But the two lines of evidence I'm seeing, taken together, lean toward designed. I'll write it as a hypothesis, not a conclusion."

---

Lin Mei-chen poured a second cup of water.

"Are you going to send this up to the command deck?"

"Vale's locked up with Janus in 14B right now," Voss said. "The report was already issued SIGNED yesterday—with a 300-word footnote. What he asked me to do was keep examining samples and report again. I report to him when I'm done, and he decides how to put it to the captain."

"Do you agree with that process?"

"I agree with the process," Voss said. "But I'll put one footnote in the report."

"Saying what?"

"Saying this planet and the 'new Earth' that the overwhelming majority of people on this ship understand are not the same thing."

Lin Mei-chen looked at her, then said: "Do you remember the seven times we fought?"

"I remember."

"Every time, I thought you were too cautious."

"I know."

"This time I agree with you," Lin Mei-chen said. "Put that footnote in."

Voss nodded.

"And there's 007," Lin Mei-chen said.

Voss walked over to the 007 sample case.

---

007 was the dead leaf. Voss lifted it out of the case—lighter than the others, the duct down the center of its veins collapsed into a black line.

She put it under the microscope.

Inside the petiole fragment, the neurotransmission duct showed no trace of natural degradation. It had been cut. The incision was very clean—as if something high-temperature or corrosive had seared it through in an instant. No inflammatory response at the edges, no sign of healing.

The other leaves of the forest were alive; they swayed, they pulsed. This one leaf had already been taken offline by the forest.

For the incision itself, Voss could think of at least two possibilities—one, the forest had cut this leaf off on its own; two, something foreign had cut the leaf first, and the forest had only then let it fall out of rhythm. To tell which, she needed more evidence.

"Mei-chen," Voss said.

"I see it," Lin Mei-chen said.

"This means this forest—this single organism—may have an internal screening mechanism. It might kill off part of itself."

"'May.' 'Might.' You're not drawing a conclusion this time."

"I'm not drawing a conclusion this time," Voss said. "I still can't confirm whether the incision was caused internally or externally."

She turned the petiole fragment over and went on examining the underside. On the underside was an extremely tiny point—smaller than a grain of sand. Voss took the focus to its limit.

The point was not part of the leaf itself. It was a different kind of organic matter.

Shaped like a sphere, very small, a faint spiral structure on its surface.

"Mei-chen," Voss said. "There's something else on the underside of this leaf."

Lin Mei-chen didn't answer.

Voss pushed the focus one step further. The spiral structure of the little sphere was moving—a single internal fold.

On her side of the screen Lin Mei-chen didn't move for half a second, her gaze going from 007-B to the 005 sample case and back.

"When you cut 005, did you check the underside?" Lin Mei-chen asked.

"No," Voss said.

"Folding isn't a motion a dead thing should make," Lin Mei-chen said. "But I can't see its energy source, and I can't see a metabolic pathway. From a parasitic-pathology angle, this shape looks like a unicellular precursor I've seen that hides itself under a host's rhythm—but that one's from Earth. It only resembles the thing in front of us."

"You mean it might be alive, or it might just look alive."

"Yes. To confirm it's alive you'd need continuous folding, or metabolic byproducts. One fold on my end isn't enough."

"Its organic signature—at least from the outside—is different from the leaf itself. Whether it's part of the forest, I still can't conclude. Symbiotic with the forest, an invader, or neither—we won't know until we run composition and metabolism and compare against the forest samples."

Lin Mei-chen was silent for a long time.

"Elena," she said. "If this forest will kill off part of itself—"

"—then this little sphere might be something the forest wants to kill but hasn't killed yet," Voss said. "Or it might be what cut the leaf off in the first place—and the forest never actively killed anything, it was just invaded. I still can't rule out either one."

A new line of data jumped up on the mass spectrometer. Voss glanced at it and didn't read it. She wanted to isolate the sample first.

She locked the sample back into the containment chamber, sealed the case, and rewrote the label 007 into 007-A and 007-B.

A was the dead leaf.

B was B.

She didn't know what B was.

She started to wonder whether Vale, while he waited in 14B for her report, had already rewritten some number on the touchpad at his hip too.

She picked up the intercom and pressed the channel for 14B.

"Lieutenant," Voss said. "You'd better come down to the Biology Section. I have two things to tell you, and the second one you need to see for yourself."

【Ch. 004 End · the Daedalus, P4 Containment】