Chimera, p.11
Chimera, page 11
Dougherty didn’t need to be told twice. He stepped right up beside her and piloted the drone straight toward the island, which appeared in outline on a satellite map in the lower right corner of the screen.
“Listen,” Sammie said from the transceiver. “I didn’t call just to check up on you. I think I figured out how the archaeon creates the illusion of invisibility.”
“Do tell,” Mira said, her eyes never leaving her laptop, where green water roiling with disturbed silt and microbes streaked past beneath the camera’s lens.
“You remember how when the archaeon ingested the diatom, a chemical interaction occurred between the two species that created what looked like parallel striations on the diatom’s cell wall? That outer layer is called a frustule. It’s made of silica, which is a type of quartz with both reflective and refractive properties. I believe those striations are actually raised ribs that serve as microscopic magnifying lenses, which, based on their columnar shape, change what you can see through them when viewed from different angles, just like those optical illusions that transform from one picture to another as you walk past them. Or remember those little cards that used to come in Cracker Jack or cereal boxes? Tilt them from side to side to make a butterfly’s wings move or a cartoon character dance?”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” Mira said, watching the red dot marking the drone on the map as it neared the island. “They used to put them on the covers of horror novels when I was a kid. Faces turning into skulls and that kind of thing. I had to close my eyes when I walked past them in a bookstore.”
“Exactly, and in the process of researching my theory, I came across a magician on YouTube who used a sheet of lenticular plastic to build an invisibility shield. By bending the sheet at just the right angle, he utilized Snell’s law of refraction to make anything directly behind it disappear. What you see is the white light striking the bowed surface of the shield being redirected toward the center of it by all of those thin, corduroy-like lenses, effectively hiding the magician crouching behind it by refracting the light around him, creating an artificial blind spot.”
“And you think this chimeric organism—or, more specifically, the sum of its parts—causes the biofilm to function the same way?”
“That would explain why the white light essentially makes it invisible, while the green and black lights reveal its individual components.”
On the monitor, the passage of water slowed, and the organic matter suspended in it coalesced into the familiar nebulous cloud in the lee of the island.
“So what are the implications?” Mira asked.
“At this point, I don’t have the slightest clue,” Sammie said. “It could be merely an intriguing coincidence in need of further exploration or . . . ”
Her voice trailed off. Mira was about to ask her what she was going to say when something caught her eye. A glimmer in the water, at the farthest reaches of the camera’s range, where the green light dissolved into the darkness.
“ . . . or maybe we’re witnessing the evolution of an entirely new species,” Sammie said, finishing her thought.
Mira’s pulse rushed in her ears. The entire world seemed to slow around her.
“We’d better figure it out,” she heard herself say, her voice distant, as though originating from the bottom of a well.
“Why?” Sammie asked. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s in the lake.”
21
20,000 Feet Above the Southwest Greenland Ice Sheet
70.399835, -47.735173
Now
“We’ve been poring over the satellite imagery, but we can’t find any indication as to where the scientists might have gone,” Ryder says. “Assuming they left at all. Of course, with as hard as it’s snowing, their tracks would already have been erased and they’d have been forced to seek shelter.”
“It’s also possible that they’ve returned to the station and they’ll be waiting when we arrive,” Bashir says. “If not, our only choice will be to track them blindly across the glacier by Susvee.”
Cameron nods and glances at the NeXgen contingent through the window of the all-terrain SUSV. He feared that whatever their priorities upon landing might be, tracking and rescuing the scientists wasn’t near the top of the list. He needed to figure out what kind of mess they were walking into, and he was running out of time to do so.
“Keep looking,” he says. “We’re searching for highly educated individuals—”
“Which means somewhere between jack and shit in weather like this,” Ronny says.
“His point is that they have a better than average chance of survival,” Speedy says. “If they’re still out there, they’ll find a way to signal us.”
“If they were as smart as everyone seems to think, they wouldn’t have left the infernal station in the first place.”
“Just keep looking,” Cameron says. “There has to be some sign of them.”
“You mean other than the bodies on the satellite images?” Ronny says.
Cameron glares at the senior airman, who holds up his hands in surrender and resumes his perusal of the satellite photographs on his tablet. As their commanding officer, he feels a pang of guilt for not sharing his suspicions with the men he’s asking to risk their lives for him, but at the same time, he has no idea what they’re up against. While he’d initially believed that the threat to the scientists was human in nature and that someone had digitally altered the footage he’d seen in Colonel Patrick’s office to conceal the identity of the person attacking Dr. Stone, he’s beginning to think they’re dealing with something else entirely, something beyond his limited ability to comprehend. And the more video logs he watches, the more convinced he becomes.
He resumes playback as soon as his men have returned to their assigned tasks.
“This is Dr. Mira Stone.” She wears a hooded sweatshirt she’s already worn in several other entries and an expression of utter exhaustion. “The date is October twenty-seventh. It’s now been three days since we confirmed the presence of the biofilm in the lake, and its growth rate has already surpassed our most ambitious projections. While accurate measurement is impossible under field conditions, we’ve detected a total of eight amorphous biomasses between twelve and sixteen feet in diameter. Each of them is larger than the specimen in the aquarium, confirming Dr. Rantanen’s theory that, like many other species, the biofilm’s ultimate size is dictated by the available space it has to grow.”
She hits a key and the screen splits in half. A video recorded by some sort of submersible vessel plays beside her, demonstrating a wavering emerald carpet of slime. It’s patchy and misshapen, but, after everything he’s learned from the previous entries, truly magnificent in every other way.
A narwhal passes through it as though it isn’t even there, strands of webbing floating outward in its wake as it races toward the camera. The green light shuts off, and Dr. Stone stops the footage.
“Thus far, samples collected from each of the individual biomasses—identified by Greek letter, from alpha through theta—have failed to demonstrate the presence of any species of archaea.” She breathes a long sigh and allows her shoulders to slump. When she again speaks, it’s in a tone that mirrors the expression of discomfort on her face. “I suppose that should be good news, but I can’t imagine the presence of the Ymirarchaea in the aquarium is an anomaly since it originated in the substrate collected from the seafloor of the lake. Maybe I’m wrong—scratch that; I hope I’m wrong—but I believe that once the biofilm is established, it’s only a matter of time before conditions favor its awakening, if you will, from its state of cryptobiosis. And once that happens, I’m afraid it will be impossible to predict how it will respond in the open water.”
She nods to herself and terminates the recording.
Cameron opens the index for Dr. Rantanen’s logs. He’s begun alternating from one scientist to the next as it seems like each of the women is privy to a subset of the information he needs and approach their work from different perspectives. He’s also beginning to think that their motivations don’t entirely align, which is somewhat alarming considering Dr. Rantanen’s prior relationship with NeXgen, and presumably the four men quietly plotting inside the SUSV.
The blond microbiologist appears on the screen. With her green T-shirt and her hair piled on her head, she looks remarkably like an overworked Tinkerbell. She speaks more formally than in previous entries, as though communicating directly with a specific audience, rather than merely recording her day’s work for posterity.
“This is Dr. Sammie Rantanen. Date: October twenty-seventh. Subsequent experimentation on the three mutualistic organisms—which I shall collectively refer to as ‘the chimera’ from this point on—has demonstrated the very results we had originally hoped to achieve with Project Araneidae. The Ymirarchaeon appears to have independently conquered some of the limitations of our bacterium. The dragline silk generated by the chimera is five times as thick and ten times as strong as that of the purple marine bacterium alone. Given more time to work with it, I believe we can achieve the goal we envisioned when we originally devised our project. Throw in its lenticular properties, and suddenly we’re looking at success beyond our wildest imaginations. Not only will we be able to secure inexhaustible government funding for its use as a climate change mitigant, but we’ll also be able to harvest unlimited quantities from the open ocean. The potential profits for a polymer with such staggering physical properties are incalculable.”
Dr. Rantanen smiles, dons a pair of rubber gloves, and produces a bowl from somewhere off-camera. She holds up a small canister with color-coded values on the side, removes a slender length of studded paper, and turns it over and over, presumably to demonstrate that it’s an ordinary chemical test strip. With a theatrical flourish, she dunks it into the bowl, which appears to have been filled with some sort of acid, because when she removes it, only half of the test strip remains. She grabs a tissue, wipes down the test strip, and the missing half once more appears, only now it features a range of colors aligning with those on the label of the container.
“What the hell . . . ?” Cameron whispers.
“I’m in,” Rush says through the headset. “You need to see this.”
Cameron casually checks to make sure the men in the SUSV aren’t watching and makes his way to the ladder leading up to the communications center situated behind the flight deck. His tech specialist sits before a bank of satellite and radio equipment, his networked laptop propped on the table in front of him and an indecipherable expression on his face.
“I was able to hack into NeXgen and access the surveillance footage from inside the station without much difficulty,” Rush says. “I figured I’d start at the point where they lost power and watch it in reverse until I found something useful. I notified you the moment I saw it.”
He unpauses the recording on his computer and the video begins to play. The perspective switches from one camera to the next every few seconds. There’s a staircase, at the bottom of which is an open door, through which the blowing snow has drifted; a hallway, the floor smeared with dark fluid and littered with plastic shards from the broken lenses of the overhead light fixtures; and a cafeteria, the tables upended below shattered windows that admit the gusting wind.
Rush pauses the playback and points at the top left corner of the screen, where a man lies on the ground behind the serving bar. His face is blistered, his teeth bared, his skin seemingly melted to the consistency of candle wax. Ice clings to the sparse clumps of hair sprouting from his scalp and chin. A tatter of flesh curls away from the exposed tendons and muscles in his neck.
“Jesus,” Cameron whispers. He looks up at the monitor displaying the Hercules’ cargo hold, past his team and to the SUSV, inside of which the four men from NeXgen are little more than dark silhouettes. “What in God’s name were they doing up there?”
22
Academy Station
Greenland
81.906296, -29.744960
Two Weeks Ago
Mira watched the fluttering green mat pass beneath the camera, glimmering at the very edge of sight. Yesterday, there had been several disruptions in the biofilm known as Beta, but the webbing appeared to have knitted itself closed overnight. There was only a single new hole inflicted by one of the whales, which she’d become quite skilled at distinguishing from the different shapes of ripped biofilm caused by schooling fish, swirling currents, and diving seabirds, which she feared would be the source of the chimera’s initial spread beyond the dam. They had yet to find any trace of it in the fjord on the other side of the dam, although the current could have easily carried it several miles farther inland and swept it under the glacier.
Despite the laser tape measure Dougherty had installed on the drone, it was becoming harder to accurately gauge the dimensions of the biomasses with every passing day. The growth rate wasn’t quite exponential, but the individual colonies had nearly filled the lees of their respective islands and had begun testing the more tumultuous waters. She’d witnessed the currents tear sections from the edges of the film and usher them toward the shoreline, where the shallows, including those surrounding the dock, were already carpeted beneath the ice. It was only a matter of time before the biofilm either adapted to the currents or reached the limits of its proliferation.
Either way, they’d passed the point of no return long ago.
At least it was doing everything they’d hoped it would. There was already a demonstrable difference in temperature between the water immediately above and below the biofilm, and the laser thermometer registered a three-degree decrease at the bottom of the lake in the last three days alone. The water chemistry had also changed dramatically. The pH had risen by a measurable amount, and the concentration of diatom frustules collected from the silt had increased by five percent, both of which were proof that the biofilm’s efficacy was well on its way to surpassing even their most ambitious projections.
The problem was that if they were right about the origin of the archaeon, it was only a matter of time before it awakened from its eons-long metabolic stasis and began absorbing the individual components of the biofilm. If that happened, their only option to ensure the extermination of the resulting chimeras would be to turn the lake into an uninhabitable toxic stew and hope to God they didn’t contaminate the fjord and the Arctic Ocean in the process. But before they could even consider taking such drastic measures, they’d have to arrange for the relocation of the whales, which would be too expensive for the NSF to shoulder alone, and based upon the current perception of keeping such noble creatures in captivity, it would prove a public relations nightmare that would drag on indefinitely. So all they could do was hold their breath and pray—
A tendril of silt passed through a hole in the biofilm and dissipated into the water. One of the whales must have disturbed the sediment on the bottom.
Mira carefully toggled the miniature joysticks on the remote and guided the quadcopter out from behind the island. Water rushed past on one monitor while the red dot of the drone’s GPS beacon crossed the satellite image on the other. She’d already spent too much time surveying the previous biofilms and she’d nearly burned through what little daylight she had left.
Documenting the chimera’s growth patterns grew more monotonous by the day. It would have been nice if Sammie had been willing to spell her from time to time, but, like Dougherty had said, the controls took some serious getting used to and she wanted her partner focused on the bizarre mutualistic relationship between the bacterium, the diatom, and the archaeon. They needed to understand everything about the chimeric organism and Sammie was the only one with the skill to ascertain the truth, not that she was very good at sharing what she’d learned. In fact, she almost seemed secretive about her research.
Mira glanced at her partner’s unattended station. Where was she anyway?
The drone rose and fell on the waves before swirling dizzily into the lee of Arendelle Island, where they’d first discovered the biofilm known as Alpha. It had grown so large that it had folded back upon itself in several areas. Ridges and valleys had formed, creating river-like seams through which the current passed unimpeded, carrying larger nutrients that would have otherwise become trapped in the webbing.
Again, a cloud of silt billowed through the gaps and drifted away.
Mira heard footsteps on the stairs behind her and whirled around in surprise, knocking a pencil and notebook from her desk in the process.
“Sorry,” Carrie said, holding up her hands in mock surrender as she crossed the lab. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I guess I just got a little too wrapped up in what I was doing.” Mira smiled and gestured for the paleoclimatologist to pull up a chair. “I’m sure you know how that goes.”
“And then some.” Carrie inclined her chin toward the monitor. “Not that I work with anything as cool as that biofilm of yours. It looks like something from a different planet.”
“It’s sure growing like it is.”
“And it’s working?”
“Better than we ever could have hoped.”
“Then why don’t you look like this is cause for celebration? It’s not every girl who gets to say she’s saving the world.”
Mira offered a halfhearted smile. She wasn’t entirely sure how to answer without dumping all of her problems on Carrie, who’d already been on the receiving end once, so she changed the subject.
“How’s your research going?” she asked.
Carrie’s face lit up.
“That’s why I came down here,” she said, jumping from her seat and staring out across the lake toward the opposite ridgeline. “Moore and his team found a void anomaly during their magnetometric survey of the glacier. They think it’s probably a cave, so they called Leo, who’s already getting everything ready to head out at first light tomorrow. I figured you needed a break and might want to come with us to do a little exploring.”
