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  “Would that be common wisdom among other civilizations? Would Mims think the same way?”

  “They’d be facing the same galactic hazards, wouldn’t they?”

  “Okay, let’s take that as our starting position,” Vars said. “Any civilization advanced enough to be capable of crossing from star to star would use that technology to ensure its own survival by starting colonies.”

  “I’d say that’s a sound assumption. It would probably make sense to talk about stellar neighborhoods.”

  “Keeping the colonies within communication distance?”

  “Well, it would still be difficult to communicate between colonies even if they spread within just a hundred-light-year radius.”

  “Yes, and so we come back to the Tasmania problem,” Vars said. “At such distances, it’s easy to lose touch with far-flung colonies. And then there’s divergent evolution problem—once the populations split, it’s just a matter of time before the colonies would speciate.”

  “Point taken. So after just a few thousand years, if the colonies survive, they’ll become something else.”

  “And cultural evolution—and divergence—will progress even faster,” Vars said. “Think how fast human language split up.”

  “And how equally fast it came back together,” Ben noted.

  “That too. Societies evolve to take advantage of their circumstances.”

  “And yet some traditions stick. We still put up a Christmas tree in my family every year. Isn’t that a pagan tradition?”

  “It is,” Vars agreed. “But the point I’m making is that time makes a cohesive star-faring civilization difficult. The Mims’s artifact is thousands of years old.”

  “Perhaps twenty-seven hundred years. At least, that’s our best guess at the moment. We’ll refine that estimate once we get our hands on it.”

  “I still think that’s a bad idea,” Vars said. She stood up and started pacing or as close to that as one could get in a low g and cramped space environment. The trick was to keep her head and limbs from smashing...

  “Don’t worry, Vars. We’ll figure out a way to test the artifact without bringing it on board. Ron is working on a solution with Liut’s people, Ziva and Jay from engineering.”

  That made Vars feel a bit better—not only that people were looking into solutions but the fact that scientists and crew were working together on something. She stopped pacing...bumping. “Okay. Let’s assume, just as a starting point, that aliens live about as long as we do. Let’s call that one hundred years. Twenty-seven hundred years would be twenty-seven lifespans. And over a hundred generations.”

  “Good point. Twenty-seven lifespans ago, we were in the peak of Hellenistic civilization. The Roman Empire had yet to rise and fall,” Ben said. “Which means we’re not thinking about this the right way.”

  Vars liked that he got her thinking so fast, without too much explanation. “Exactly! So why would an alien civilization send a probe to another star system, wait for almost three thousand years, and then attack the dominant intelligent species of that star system on its homeworld and colonies? What would be the point?” A wave of exhaustion hit Vars so hard that she swayed and had to settle back down on her bed pod.

  Ben noticed. “And that’s why Ian put you on the team, Dr. Volhard.” He smiled at her. “It’s been very productive talking with you. Shall we pick this up again first thing tomorrow morning?”

  “Sure,” she said. She was asleep within moments of Ben leaving her stateroom.

  Chapter Eleven

  “So what’s our goal now?” Sophie asked from her hospital bed. She was still too weak to be of much help in the lab, and she would require a lot of reconstructive surgery when...if they ever got out of this place.

  “Now we try to grow out these beasts,” Phoebe said. “I want to see what they can become, understand their true purpose.”

  “Aside from taking over every human?”

  “I don’t think that’s their true purpose. If you sent a probe across the galaxy, would you want to take over the dominant intelligent species at the end of your destination?”

  “Depends,” Sophie said, trying to get out of bed. The woman was unsteady but determined. One had to admire that...

  “You can give yourself a few days,” Phoebe said.

  “We don’t have a few days,” Matteo muttered. “Vars will be on Mimas in just a week.”

  “Does it matter? We have no way of communicating with her ship,” Phoebe said.

  “Us? No. But the Elders do. By now, Alice would have removed all of the cyberhumatics from the team—”

  “How do you know that?” Sophie asked.

  “The Elders told the military about the problem before they left. So even if Alice didn’t get a chance to push for removal early on, the top officer on the expedition would have ordered it once they were far enough past Mars for the mission to proceed regardless of the condition of its members.”

  Phoebe glanced over at Sophie. She hoped Alice had done better with her crew than she managed with the Australian Seed. But of course that was a given—Alice had known she would need to perform the excisions; she had practiced. Phoebe, while a trained surgeon, had been unprepared. Others were to bring those skills into their lab...others that never made it here. Everything happened too fast.

  “So let’s get this done,” Sophie said. She used her IV pole for support as she walked over to the lab side of the room. “Show me.”

  Matteo carefully explained the experiments he and Phoebe had set up in the week Sophie spent on ice. Once again they were using isolation chambers to grow the various structures from the different samples of nanobots—excluding the one sample that had gotten out of control. Then Matteo walked Sophie over to a thick glass wall. There, behind the glass, he and Phoebe were working on an ethically unsavory experiment. The lab had several rats, and Phoebe had implanted them with simple cyberhumatics. The rats were then exposed to the various “species” of nanobots.

  The truth was the Elders had wanted them to use primates or even human volunteers for this experiment. Back then, Phoebe had flatly refused. Somewhere out there, she was sure, other labs were experimenting with humans, but she wouldn’t do it. The thought made her skin crawl. For now, just rats. And later? Well, there are only the three of us left in here. Still she found it unsettling that the first four volunteers sent into their lab were heavily implanted with cyberhumatics. Coincidence? She didn’t think so.

  “We’ve discovered that nanobots evolve,” Matteo was saying. “Here’s a rat infected with the nanobots from Northeastern Australia.” Phoebe noted his use of the word “infection”—which wasn’t how she thought of it. “And here’s one with the nanobots we removed from your body.”

  The rat with Sophie’s nanobots was almost twice the size of the other specimen. It had grown a carapace that shielded all of its back and part of its head, with several protrusions coming off the top. The nanobot-created structure was still flexible enough for the rat to sit up on its hind legs, but the animal didn’t move much. Could it if it wanted to? Phoebe had no idea. Imaging internal organs and skeletal structures, i.e., exposing the ray to X-rays, could change the behavior of the nanobots. Thus, imaging was saved for later analysis. They did leave food and water two feet away from the creature—when it got hungry, it would have to move. But for now, the rat monster just sat there, passively observing them. Unnerving.

  “What are those for?” Sophie asked about the protrusions.

  “No idea,” Matteo said. “We’ve just been allowing the various growths to take form and tracking the differences.”

  “They are very different,” Sophie said.

  Phoebe noted that as Sophie was examining the modified rats, the woman started to turn a nasty shade of green. Perhaps Sophie was just doing too much…or perhaps she was experiencing the same reaction Phoebe had looking at the
se nanobot-modified rats: fear. Deep-seated, elemental fear.

  Phoebe rolled a desk chair under Sophie. “Here,” she said. “Sit.” Sophie collapsed into the chair. “It gets easier with familiarity,” she added. And that was almost true. Phoebe could now force herself to look at the rats with a degree of scientific detachment…almost.

  “Would I have…” Sophie didn’t finish, but Phoebe knew what she was asking. Would I have grown into something like that?

  “It’s not what happened to… You know,” Matteo said and turned away.

  Phoebe had noticed that Matteo couldn’t really talk about the three research assistants who died. They both knew they should have dissected them and looked for clues, but… Well, some things required getting used to, and some were beyond even that.

  Even under total isolation from the world outside, Matteo and Phoebe decided to continue their work in the lab. They would get the results out somehow. And Sophie was getting strong enough to start contributing significantly to their work. It was good to have another pair of hands and a brilliant mind applied to the problem. The regiment of blood-filtering that each of them needed to endure took a lot of time. It was exhausting, draining.

  They infected another two rats with Sophie’s strain of nanobots and allowed them to interact in the same enclosure. These rats’ carapaces grew twice as fast, and soon they started to fuse together into one super nanobot-controlled organism. It was sick, and Phoebe couldn’t wait to destroy them…it.

  “Why? What’s the purpose?” Matteo muttered as he went around the lab recording data for a report to the Elders.

  “Are we ready for dissections?” Sophie asked.

  “Are you sure you’re up for it?” Phoebe asked. Sophie was more qualified with the cyberhumatics, but her left hand was gone, and her right was extensively damaged. She was having problems feeling her pinkie in that hand, and there were tremors. The AI-assisted surgical arm would compensate for a lot for Sophie’s difficulties, but would that be enough?

  “I’m perfectly capable of using the controls with my right hand,” she said defiantly.

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ve had years of experience with this, Phoebe. If there’s something worth noting, I’ll note it,” Sophie snapped at her.

  Phoebe helped Sophie get into her biohazard suit, then tucked away the left sleeve so it wouldn’t get in the way. She felt this was a mistake, but Matteo had said it would be good for Sophie, a way for her to regain some control over her new reality. And with just the three of them, they couldn’t afford to baby her. Not that Sophie would let them.

  When Sophie was ready, Matteo opened the airlock doors. He’d set up a double-door system with a passage that could be flash-heated to kill any nanobots that escaped the rat lab. It wasn’t enough to completely keep their living area free of bots, but it helped.

  As soon as Sophie stepped into the lab, Matteo closed the door remotely behind her. There weren’t many precautions for getting through the airlock on the way in—just close the first door and then proceed to open the next. It was only on the way out that they first blew super-refrigerated air into the airlock to slow down any nanobots clinging to the hazmat suits. The suits were then removed and left in the airlock when the person exited, whereupon the airlock would be sealed again on both sides and the temperature would go up high enough to fry the bots. The suits could withstand the heat.

  Inside, Sophie went straight to the enclosure and slipped her right arm inside the control glove for the robotic arm. Manipulating the glove with tactile commands, she grabbed the pair of freshly fused rats and transferred them into the dissection chamber. She injected them both with a tranquilizer cocktail; there was no point in hurting the animals.

  Even as the rats lost consciousness, the nanobots continued to build. If anything, the speed of construction accelerated. At the rate that the bots were repurposing the rats’ tissues and chemical components, there soon wouldn’t be any rat organs left.

  “What are they building?” Phoebe said to herself for the umpteenth time. She and Matteo were watching Sophie’s actions on the monitors, as well as looking directly through the glass wall.

  Sophie placed the rats belly up, carapace down. Before their eyes, the limbs disappeared, consumed by the bots. Then the tails went, too. What had once been two distinct rats was now a mass of undifferentiated tissue that was slowly being sucked into a fractal shape.

  Sophie used the magnifying eye to zoom in, and Matteo and Phoebe leaned in to see the image on their side of the lab. At that range, the nanobots took on the quality of an artificial beehive. There was buzzing and purpose, and yet it was all seemingly random, to the eyes of the human observers, anyway.

  Matteo spoke into the microphone. “Try cutting into it.”

  Sophie instructed the robotic arm to begin the dissection protocol they had programmed earlier. This was the same robotic arm that Phoebe used in Sophie’s surgery, and it was fully capable of doing microscopic work, even removing one nanobot at a time. But at the moment, they just wanted to see if the structure had any differentiated layers like outer skin, organelles, connective tissues, or the equivalent. Were the nanobots mindlessly transmuting everything into a single, ever-repeating pattern, or were they truly trying to create something new? And if so, what?

  Light, pincers, and scalpel descended into the seething mass. Sophie’s right arm plunged with exaggerated movements around the rat enclosure, and the robotic arm translated her big gestures into micro precision cuts. It was clear that Sophie was very adept with this equipment, even without relying on cyberhumatics. There was elegance to her movements, like a dance. With just one arm, Sophie was better at this than Matteo or Phoebe. It had been the right decision to assign this job to her.

  Snip, plunk, swish. Another snip. Sophie removed layer after layer of nanobots. The merging of the flesh and the nonbiological material was amazing, nothing like the cyberhumatics, which functioned as separate components with an interface to the body. These structures were fully integrated.

  “We can learn from this,” Sophie said. She opened up the rats like they were some Hieronymus Bosch flower, one hellish petal after another.

  A screech reverberated through the whole building, like microphone feedback but louder—piercing and painful. Phoebe and Matteo clamped their hands over their ears.

  The sound stopped after a second, but then Sophie’s robotic arm started to vibrate. She took a step back from the dissection chamber, her arm still inside the controls. Suddenly, the robotic arm got pulled into the enclosure, and then just as suddenly it sprang free. Sophie was tossed around by her right arm. Without another arm to stabilize herself, it took a moment for her to get to her feet.

  “It’s gone,” Sophie said, looking into the rats’ enclosure. Her voice had a hint of hysteria.

  “What’s gone?” Matteo said. “Step away, Sophie, the cameras aren’t tracking right. We can’t see.”

  Sophie took a step to the side, and Phoebe and Matteo were able to see the now-empty enclosure through the glass wall. Where the rats had been there was now nothing.

  Sophie pointed to the robotic arm. It was still moving, but it was…different. There was a new bend to the robotic appendage.

  “Sophie, get your arm out of it! Let go!” Phoebe screamed.

  Sophie tried, but her arm was stuck in the machine. Phoebe saw her say something but couldn’t tell what it was; her microphone, like the cameras, had just stopped working.

  “We have to get her out of there!”

  Matteo was already suiting up. “Get her to stay away from that thing,” he said as he jumped into the airlock.

  Phoebe looked back at Sophie, who had stumbled and fallen to her knees, her biohazard suit ripped. The nanobot structure was already growing from the robotic arm controls directly onto Sophie’s shoulder and neck, around the bandages—into the area where Phoebe
had cut off all cyberhumatics just days ago. Phoebe felt dread. She lifted her eyes and met Sophie’s. Sophie started to yell, but her throat was immediately swarmed with nanobot structures.

  “Matteo! Don’t go in there! It’s too late!” Phoebe screamed.

  He heard her. Through a combination of effort and extreme fear, he stayed inside the airlock. His knees buckled. From the floor, both arms on the inside door, he watched Sophie being consumed by nanobots.

  Phoebe punched the lock to open the airlock door back into their side of the room. She was confident that the door to the nanobot enclosure on the opposite side of the airlock would now be locked—everything was set up so only one door could be opened at a time. That was a standard feature of all biohazard lab junctures.

  “Matteo?” she called softly. “Please. Come back.” She stepped into the airlock and gently guided him out, locking the second door behind them. She felt better with two doors between them and whatever was left of Sophie.

  She helped Matteo out of his suit. And then they went back to watching the grotesque transformation of their colleague on the other side of the safety glass.

  Chapter Twelve

  For the next week, Vars and Ben were inseparable, spending all of their time brainstorming the whys of Mims. It was a good thing they had paired up too, since it had fallen to Alice to minister to all of the recovering scientists—she was the most qualified medic on board—leaving Vars without her usual research companion. And the kind of work Vars was trying to do—Gedanken experiments on the nature of galactic alien civilizations—required the back and forth of a deep dialogue. Ben was good at this. Almost as good as Alice…or Vars’s dad.

  “I want to get back to your ideas about available resources,” Ben said. He and Vars were in his quarters this time. Ron, Ben’s roommate, was working with engineering crew most of the time now, and Ben and Vars had free run of his space during the day shift. Variety was important to creativity. The nearly identical rooms weren’t ideal for that, but Ben’s did have two bed pods instead of one—something. “If we evolved in a star system with only one planet,” he continued, “our resources post-Keres Triplets would have been dismal.”