Chương 29: An interesting lifesciences project

Considering how people immediately after the Gap were no stranger than expected, it is highly unlikely that anything like mental manipulation would have happened immediately after it. It is more likely that evidence was wiped out in a slow, deliberate manner such that no one would notice. That makes the Gap even more suspicious. - The Eleventh Record Keeper The thermodynamics project was straightforward in the way that happened when you had the right group and a clear scope and nobody tried to be too ambitious.

They were a random assignment - four people who did not know each other particularly well, which turned out to be an advantage rather than a liability. Nobody had strong opinions about the direction, which meant they agreed on geothermal energy for transportation without much friction, built a working model that converted energy from the ocean bed to propel a small waterborne vehicle, tested it in the hostel waterways, and submitted it. It worked. Several of the more ambitious groups had projects that did not work.

Kara considered this a satisfactory outcome and moved on. The lifesciences project was different. They were a group of four, assigned by Professor Peaches rather than chosen, which meant that when they met for the first time at the farm beside the lake, they were starting from introductions. Three of them arrived on time - Kara, a quiet guy called Ja, and a girl called Dia who apparently had strong opinions about experimental methodology that she had not yet had occasion to express.

They stood among the farm animals and made the careful small talk of people who did not yet know what they had in common. Then the fourth member arrived.

"Heya!" The voice carried across the farm at a volume that had nothing apologetic about it. Kara turned to see a tall girl with curly dark hair and a mask that had what appeared to be an entire city painted across its surface, waving at them from a distance while already walking toward them at pace. She reached them and the introductions began. Ja started. Followed by Dia.

Then - "Kara, yes, everyone knows you from the first demonstration," she said, before he had got past his own name, with a grin that managed to be teasing without being unkind. He blinked. He was not used to this particular speed of social interaction and was not sure how to calibrate to it. So he managed the most intelligent response he could, "Er - yeah, that was a bit awkward."

"Anyway! I'm Vixen. This is my favourite subject even if my marks don't completely reflect that, so I am very excited about this project. Does anyone have ideas? No? Great, I have a few." Kara looked at Ja and Dia. They looked back at him. Nobody had any ideas strong enough to argue with her enthusiasm. They waved her on, and she started immediately, visibly relieved to finally have an audience for ideas she had apparently been sitting on.

The proposal was sensible - pick a few animals, run experiments, document how their characteristics had been applied in human mutations and developments across the planets. Professor Peaches had given them free rein as long as the research was grounded in what had been covered in class. Kara nodded along and thought about the farm animals and whether any of them would yield anything interesting. Vixen started with the pigs.

"Incredible sense of smell - they can detect things buried up to twenty-five feet underground. Task Force squads use them for explosive and mineral detection. Some outer planet tribes use them for scouting. And their squeals - weapon-grade at the right frequency, in the right environment." She paused for breath.

"I know they have a reputation for being dirty. They're not. The mud is cooling. They don't sweat. Follow what I'm saying?" Kara found himself nodding. It was detailed and it was interesting and it came at a speed that made keeping up feel slightly athletic. They had just agreed on experiments with the pigs when Vixen walked to the edge of the lake and started searching, certain something was there, and a moment later proven right. She pointed.

"There. Look." Kara looked. A shrimp - slightly elongated, coloured in a way that made him look again. He understood after a moment what he was looking at. They turned to each other, mutual understanding passing between them. The other two looked at them blankly, plainly aware they had missed something. Vixen sighed, fond and a little theatrical, a woman who had explained this before and was more than happy to do it again.

"Mantis shrimp," she began, "are pound for pound among the strongest creatures ever to exist. They deliver strikes at up to two and a half thousand times their body weight in force. Their punches are fast enough that the water around the impact point reaches temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun for a fraction of a second. The cavitation bubble this produces is not a side effect. It is a weapon." The other two had gone very still, which was the correct response.

"They can also see more colours than any other creature in the known animal kingdom, their strikes have been the basis for some of the most powerful physical mutations on the outer planets, and there is evidence they can detect magnetic fields." She looked at them all.

"They don't make great partners unfortunately. Let's just say while their physical capabilities are out of the charts, their mental capabilities not so much. But as a source of applied mutation? Almost unparalleled." You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. She had somehow said all of this with mounting excitement, so that by the end of her pitch, the air around the mantis shrimp felt charged in a way the rest of the farm did not.

Ja and Dia were nodding along and looked more enthusiastic than Kara had ever seen them. Kara himself found that he was surprisingly excited about the project. Even the pig nearest to them looked faintly engaged. They agreed on experiments for both. It was going to be an involved project, and nobody seemed to mind.

Over the following weeks, with committee work on break as the end of term approached, Kara's attention divided itself between projects and the ongoing question of the egg, and Vixen became the most useful person in his life for both of those things simultaneously, which he had not expected when they had first met at the farm. She knew more about animals than anyone he had met, and she gave it away freely.

To her, what she knew belonged to everyone, knowledge about animals that deserved to be spread as far as it could go. Their conversations during experiments ranged far outside the project's scope, and Kara let them range, because the further they ranged the more useful they became. He had been trying to find out, through the course of the project, whether she had encountered anything matching his egg - the growth rate, the shell density, the occasional movement.

He had been careful about how he asked, framing it as general curiosity about exotic species rather than a pointed question about one.

"You have an exotic animal partner, don't you," she said one afternoon, when the other two were on a break. It was not phrased as a question.

"Just hatched, or about to?"

"No - I was just curious about the topic generally." She gave him a patient look that said she didn't buy it and wasn't going to argue. He registered this. EQ-focused, probably. She read people well and did not push when they were not ready, which was its own kind of skill. He liked her - they had become real friends over the project, the kind you make through shared work rather than shared history - but they were not close enough yet for him to hand her information he was still managing carefully.

He filed it under bridges to cross when reached. The end of term arrived heavy with everything that had been building quietly for weeks. Exams. Kara and Glasses retreated into the room and studied with the grim focus of people who had left a little more to the final week than was wise. Glasses was methodical about it. Kara was methodical when his attention did not drift toward the wardrobe, where the egg sat wrapped in the invisibility suit, which happened more often than was conducive to efficient studying.

The black box helped. Glasses would produce it in the evenings when they had both run out of useful studying capacity, and the out-of-body experiences - the flying, the deep water footage, the various things the drones had captured over years of operation - worked as a nice little refresher whenever they needed it. They came back from them more capable of returning to study, which Glasses had probably calculated and Kara was grateful for regardless.

After the last exam, they treated themselves to the exotic food counter, which had a queue of considerable length populated by people who had also decided that surviving exams warranted something from another planet. They joined it, both hating queues and both too stubborn to leave, and talked while the queue moved. Kara spotted Vixen threading the crowd.

She reached the front of the queue and tapped someone on the shoulder - a senior he did not recognise, though something about him suggested Disciplinary Committee. She knew someone at the front. The queue shuffled her in. He watched this and thought about how little he actually knew about her, for all the hours they had spent together over the project. She was an extrovert in the complete sense - she knew people the way some people knew facts, widely and apparently without effort.

He would need to understand that better before he made decisions about what to trust her with. They got barbecued Martian Boar with an accompanying sweet and smoky BBQ sauce, roughly all their budget stretched to, and after a week of exam food it was outstanding. The night after the last exam, Kara lay awake. He had tried the Safe Haven skill. It had taken the edge off and no more.

His mind was running on the results coming tomorrow, the subject choices for the second semester, the committee work resuming, Moghli still not having been properly available, the information about Gomot that he was no closer to than he had been at the start of term. Glasses was asleep beside him, untroubled, done with what the day had asked of him. Kara stared at the ceiling. Then he heard it. A crack - small, precise, the sound of something structural giving way at a single point. He looked at Glasses.

Still asleep. Another crack, from the direction of the wardrobe. He sat up. There was no way right? Right on the day his term ended. There was no way Pranky could have possibly calculated this. He got up slowly, not entirely trusting what he thought he knew, and crossed to the wardrobe and opened it. The invisibility suit was where he had placed it, wrapped around the egg. He reached in and picked it up and felt, through the fabric, that the surface beneath was different from how it had been yesterday.

He unwrapped it. One edge of the suit was damp. The shell had a fracture running across its upper surface, and from that fracture, slow and deliberate, a tiny head was emerging. Kara sat down on the floor with the suit in his hands and the egg in front of him, watching quietly, not quite sure what he was supposed to do. The head pushed a little further through the shell.

He had been carrying this egg for months - from the boat journey to everything that happened in the University - and whatever was inside it had been travelling with him the whole time, and now it was here, slowly emerging from the shell, and he found that his hands were not entirely steady.

"Hey little fella," he said quietly, because that was what came out. The creature sniffed. It sniffed with the complete seriousness of something that had just arrived in the world and was taking inventory. Kara sat with it on the floor next to the wardrobe in the dark and felt something settle in him that had been slightly unsettled since he had left the island. He stayed there for a long time.