Chimera, p.9
Chimera, page 9
Cameron silences Ronny with a glare, slips off his headset, and speaks to Rush so that no one else can hear.
“I need you to find a specific video log entry for Dr. Stone. I don’t have the date, but I can tell you that she’s wearing . . . ” He closes his eyes and concentrates on remembering the freezeframe he saw on Kato’s tablet. “ . . . a gray hooded sweatshirt. Her cheeks are red and her hair is damp.”
“I’m on it,” Rush says. His fingers buzz across the keyboard. Images of Dr. Stone seated at her desk blur past, her outfits changing with blinding speed, until she appears in a gray sweatshirt. “This one?”
“No. That’s the right outfit, but we’re looking for a recording where she appears flushed, like she just got out of the shower.” Rush flips past several more images. “That’s it. Right there.”
“October twenty-second,” the tech sergeant says. “You can access it easily enough from your tablet.”
Cameron nods his thanks and leans closer, his words barely audible over the thunder of the high-pressure spout hosing down the plane with an anti-icing agent.
“Also, I want you to see if you can find something for me. Discreetly. I think there are security cameras inside the installation. See if you can access them.”
“The mainframe’s offline and convincing the NSF to let us view the video logs was like pulling teeth,” Rush says. “There’s no way they’re granting us access to surveillance footage, not without someone even higher up the chain of command than Patrick exerting some pressure.”
“If I’m right,” Cameron says, studying the men in the SUSV from the corner of his eye, “there are other ways to get into those archives.”
A smile slowly spreads across Rush’s face.
“That will take time,” he says, “but it can definitely be done. I’ve been itching for an opportunity to flex my cyber muscles. Hacking into NeXgen ought to do the trick.”
“Just don’t get caught.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to here?” Rush winks and closes his laptop. “I’m going to need a little more space and a whole lot less supervision to work my magic, though.”
He tucks his computer under his arm and heads for the flight deck, where he’ll be able to patch into the communications network, leaving Cameron to watch Dr. Stone’s video log on his own. The senior master sergeant plugs in his earbuds, seats the cans over his ears, and presses play.
“At approximately ten this morning, we discovered that the biofilm was no longer in the cube,” Dr. Stone says in a tone of resignation. Her eyes are red as though she’s been crying. “We were able to recover it shortly afterward, although I’m afraid the damage has already been done.”
She hits a key on her laptop and a gray-scale image resembling a textured concrete wall appears on the screen beside her.
“This is the top layer of a forward osmosis membrane as viewed under a scanning electron microscope,” she says. “As you can see, there are no apparent disruptions to allow anything larger than a water molecule to pass through.” She taps her keyboard and the image is replaced by another. It looks almost like the surface of the moon, with subtle ridges, craters, and dark holes. “This is one of the membranes we excised from the cube. Its integrity has been compromised to such an extent that it’s little more than a biological sieve. The majority of these holes are easily large enough to facilitate the movement of microorganisms as large as diatoms from one side to the other.”
Dr. Stone rubs her temples and stares blankly into the camera for several seconds before continuing.
“Our working theory is that the damage was inflicted by a recently discovered species of archaea. We believe that organism to be methanogenic, meaning that it produces methane gas as a byproduct of carbon metabolization. This process also produces a small amount of formate, a simple carboxylate anion that hydrolyzes with water to produce formic acid, the substance responsible for the burning sensation of an ant bite or a bee sting. While considered a relatively weak acid, its corrosive properties are more than strong enough to damage such a delicate membrane.”
She lifts her laptop from her desk and carries it across the lab, the view jostling chaotically.
“While such a development is troubling on its face,” she says from offscreen, “more concerning is the fact that the individual components of the biofilm would have had to dissociate—presumably as a result of the acid dissolving some unknown amount of the spider silk holding it together—in order to cross the membrane. This implies that the microorganisms were able to reintegrate on the other side to form the intact specimen I collected in the lake.”
She sets down the computer so that its camera faces an enormous aquarium and kills the overhead lights. Kelp wavers in silhouette near the bottom. There doesn’t appear to be anything in the water above it.
“I fear that any amount of material I failed to collect, no matter how small, will thrive in the environmental conditions for which it was specifically designed and within a matter of weeks will look like this . . . ” A green glow blossoms above the tank, revealing a glimmering film floating where there had been only water before. It looks like thousands of spiders had spun a mat of emerald webbing, tendrils of which creep up the glass like ivy. “And once it does, there will be no way of stopping it from reaching the open ocean.”
17
Academy Station
Greenland
81.906296, -29.744960
Three Weeks Ago
Mira piloted the Zodiac away from the rugged shoreline, rising and falling violently on the rough chop. Thanks to Aaron’s tutelage, she’d gotten considerably better with the controls during the past week. He’d been kind enough to free up a little time every afternoon to take her out on the lake, while Jen remained at the observation center and in constant contact via a remote transceiver, just in case they needed assistance in a pinch. The precaution hardly seemed necessary since they weren’t actually getting in the water. Not that they stayed any warmer or dryer in the boat with the way the spray burst from the bow and crashed down upon them.
“Adjust your angle so you’re not hitting the waves head-on,” Aaron shouted from the seat beside her. Mira turned the wheel ever so slightly and the boat fell into a rhythm with the waves. She beamed at the marine biologist. “There you go. You’re getting the hang of it.”
She’d also gotten better at physically preparing herself for her daily sojourns, wearing multiple layers of undergarments and microwaving homemade pouches filled with dry rice to stuff into her gloves and boots, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get used to so few hours of sunlight. She’d thought herself better prepared—after all, she’d read countless studies and transitioned her sleeping cycles weeks in advance—and yet no amount of research or foresight could have prepared her for the reality of the situation.
The depression and anxiety triggered by the shortening days were instinctive reactions, honed to a razor’s edge by innumerable generations of evolution. Primitive cultures had feared the darkness and enacted rituals designed to reverse the lengthening of the night, offering sacrifices to appease the gods. It wasn’t until now, however, that she truly understood why they’d done so. It wasn’t the fear of the unknown or the things that went bump in the night that caused such unease; it was the hindbrain’s response to the diminishing light cycle, the body’s reaction to the lack of vitamin D, and the psychological impact of the falling temperatures and increasing isolation that set the entire nervous system on edge.
There were nights when she fell asleep praying to awaken in her bed back home and mornings when she woke up feeling so depressed that she wasn’t sure she’d survive the coming day, let alone three months of complete and utter darkness. Somehow, however, she forced herself to crawl from beneath the covers and soldier on. She had a job to do, and she wasn’t about to walk away from it, although the excitement she’d felt about the prospect of her project changing the world had been replaced by the fear that it would do just that, and with potentially unpredictable and detrimental consequences.
Mira cut the engine and the Zodiac drifted into the eddying waters in the lee of a small island. There were nineteen of them in all, ranging in size from maybe fifty to several hundred feet in diameter. She’d named them after the castles they most closely resembled from the animated Disney movies she’d loved so much growing up. She was able to recognize the shape of each by sight, even after the sun had set and she could see only its silhouette against the canyon wall. Every pinnacle and outcropping was rimed with a layer of ice that would just keep getting thicker and thicker through the long winter.
Arendelle Island spared them from the brunt of the wind’s assault, if only momentarily. Mira leaned over the pontoon and shone her green light down into the water, while Aaron did the same thing on the other side. The facilities engineers had taken her request to build more powerful flashlights as a challenge. Dougherty and Nichols had jointly presented her with two that could penetrate the water to a depth of roughly twenty-five feet. While that wasn’t quite as deep as she’d initially hoped, it was theoretically deep enough to identify any burgeoning colonies of biofilm, although they had yet to see a single glimmer of iridescence, a fact that encouraged them to move faster and clear larger sections of the lake with every passing day.
“Still nothing,” Aaron said. “Do you really think we’d be able to see small bits of biofilm so far down there anyway?”
Mira pretended not to hear him. It was the same question he’d asked several times already, and one for which she didn’t have a good answer. They likely wouldn’t be able to see a small colony, but what was the alternative? The fact that the biofilm had essentially disassembled itself to pass through the membrane and reassembled itself on the other side didn’t sit well with her, although not nearly to the extent that it troubled Sammie, who hadn’t left the lab for any length of time in a week.
There were only three variables that could be responsible for the bizarre behavior. Diatoms were essentially single-celled plants that drifted aimlessly on the currents and photosynthesized when environmental conditions were right. Bacteria, on the other hand, were motile creatures known to exhibit sophisticated communal actions, like aggregating to form biofilms, but they lacked what one might even loosely consider consciousness. Under normal conditions, anyway. The presence of the spider’s DNA dramatically altered the paradigm. This bacterium was no longer a naturally occurring species. It was a genetically engineered organism that could never have evolved on its own, one capable of producing webbing like the golden orb weaver spider from which its genes had been harvested, but its apparent sentience wasn’t the most frightening part of the biofilm potentially taking root in the wild. Of greater concern was its ability to create environmental conditions conducive to the proliferation of the mysterious archaea, which Sammie had officially named Ymirachaeota, after the ice giants of Norse mythology from whom Loki descended.
Sammie theorized that the microorganisms had been preserved in a state of cryptobiosis—a condition of metabolic inactivity just this side of death—brought on by either rising global temperatures or carbon dioxide levels. Their genetically engineered biofilm had reversed these conditions in the aquarium, essentially triggering their spontaneous revival. The same thing could happen out here in the lake, which was why it was critical to make sure that the archaea didn’t interact with the biofilm in a setting outside of their control. At least not until she and Sammie had a better understanding of what they were dealing with.
They just needed a little more time to study the bacterium’s nascent abilities and its interactions with the newly discovered archaeon. That was all. Then they could get back to focusing all of their energies on saving the world.
The Zodiac drifted out from behind the island, where the current caught hold of it and carried it onto the harsher waves. Sleet clamored from Mira’s drysuit. Her light shook in her hands. Neither she nor Aaron would be able to last very much longer out here. They needed to complete their circuit of the islands before the elements drove them back inside, where she had more than her share of work waiting for her. Despite the one glaring setback, the biofilm was performing better than she and Sammie ever could have imagined, and they were collecting data faster than either of them could process it. Someone was going to have to correlate it and write it up, and it was starting to look like it was only a matter of time before Sammie’s eye merged with the lens of her microscope, so that responsibility would likely fall squarely on Mira’s shoulders.
“Moving on,” she said, setting down her light and taking the wheel. She glanced at Aaron as he crawled into the set beside her. “Have I mentioned how grateful I am for all of your help?”
“Only every day.”
She studied his face, searching for the answer to a question she wasn’t sure how to ask. After several awkward moments of silence, she just spit it out.
“Why are you doing this? You should be back on the observation deck with Jen, not freezing out here in the snow with me.”
“I like to think of Academy Station as our fortress of solitude,” he said, smiling wistfully. “And we’re all superheroes trying to save the world in our own unique ways. More than that, though, we’re a family. Or at least I like to think of us as one. And families help each other, regardless of how close they come to freezing to death in the process. There will always be more work waiting in the lab, but there are only so many opportunities to make a difference in the lives of the people who matter to us.”
Mira felt herself tearing up and had to look away. She cranked up the outboard motor and sped toward Corona Island. It was impossible for any number of people to scrutinize a lake this large, so she’d developed a pattern of searching in the lees of the islands, where the currents were the weakest. The water flowed so fast out in the open that any collection of microorganisms would race past before she caught a hint of their iridescence anyway.
She once more killed the engine and drifted behind a formation reminiscent of a giant sandcastle, its towers white with seabird droppings, its parapets prickling with desiccated reeds from last spring’s abandoned fulmar nests.
“Back to it,” Aaron said, climbing over the seat and grabbing his light.
Mira leaned over the opposite side and aimed her beam into the depths. A school of fish streaked past, the reflective scales on their flanks flashing green. A narwhal cruised lazily behind them, rising toward her like a knight preparing to lance the tiny green bulb with its pointed tusk. She turned off the light, but not before catching an emerald glimmer from the corner of her eye.
“Hold up,” she said.
“Did you see something?” Aaron asked.
Mira switched on her beam and shone it toward the point where she was certain she’d seen a flash of iridescence.
There was nothing there.
It must have been just another fish startled by the boat.
“Never mind.”
The narwhal crested the waves and then dove into the darkness beyond her light’s reach. She was just about to crank up the engine again when she heard a buzzing sound, distant at first, but growing closer by the second.
A black shape knifed through the clouds overhead.
Mira caught a glimpse of eight slender appendages, the ends of which were blurred by the motion of small rotors. A camera protruded from its belly, framed by twin landing skids.
She smiled and watched the drone disappear over the horizon.
“Well, what do you know?” she said.
“What is it?” Aaron asked.
“We’re heading back. I think we’re done out here.”
Mira brought the engine to life and accelerated toward the shore. Behind them, the sun slunk beneath the horizon, abandoning them to another increasingly long night.
18
While Mira wanted nothing more than to climb in the shower and absorb every last drop of hot water, she was too excited to wait for a single second longer. She changed out of her drysuit and thermal underlayers, put on sweats and a pair of fuzzy slippers, and rushed down to the lower level, only this time with a different destination in mind.
“I need to borrow your drone,” she blurted out as she entered Amy’s lab.
The chief scientific officer gasped in surprise and spun around in her chair, clutching her chest.
“Christ almighty, Mira. You just about gave me a heart attack.”
Mira bounded down the steps, grabbed the chair from Elroy’s workstation on her way past, and rolled it right up to Amy’s. There were three computer monitors on the desk: the screen in the center displayed some sort of video manipulation software, while the outer two showed the same live aerial footage, only one was in digital HD, and the other was in the strange colored hues of the thermal register. On the left screen, an enormous polar bear trundled across the glacier with two cubs in tow, nearly invisible through the blowing snow. The sow abruptly stopped, rose to her full height, and stared up into the sky toward the camera. On the right screen, she looked positively demonic, her body standing apart from the black ice and snow in shades of purple and pink. Her facial features glowed orange, and her eyes and mouth burned bright white as though about to shoot fire.
“Your drone,” Mira said. “Tell me you’ll let me borrow it.”
Amy looked at her as though she’d asked for her firstborn.
“Do you have any idea how long and hard I had to fight to acquire that Matrice Six Hundred Pro unmanned aerial vehicle? This isn’t some toy you might buy your nephew for his birthday. This is a fully customized octocopter with a top-of-the-line battery management system capable of extended flight times and a range of more than three miles. Its camera exceeds all professional broadcasting requirements, including four-K resolution at one hundred and twenty frames per second, while simultaneously capturing imagery in the infrared range. To be blunt, it cost more than my car, and it’s likely more valuable to the NSF than both you and I combined. I had to take virtual classes with the manufacturer, log five hundred hours of flight time, and earn a commercial license from the Federal Aviation Administration before they’d even submit the requisition.”
