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Getting suited up for cellular laboratory work is always a pain. If it isn’t the impossible to fit gloves that are always too thick to feel or hear through, then it’s the full xenonite suit for the cold labs. And of course, the suits for student labs are never fitted right, so you have always had to make do with one that was slightly too small. The day you don’t have to suffer through a full day and a half lab of the coolant system buzzing irritatingly against your back the entire time cannot come too soon. The surface of the suit is too close to your carapace as well, so you can faintly feel that utterly frigid coldness of the alien environment enough that, if you had it in you to stand the costs you would incur from it, you would try and take the cooling system out of the suit entirely. Better to be a bit too warm than have to stand feeling your claws tingle from the chill after a long work period.
Still… even in spite of the myriad things that you cannot stand about cold lab, you cannot help but continue to be fascinated by the work you do. So you had that ‘Earth life is so cool’ phase as a pebble. So what? Everyone does! You just happened to keep it with you as you grew older, that’s all. And while this lab isn’t quite the Earth biology experience you had always wanted (it’s not fair that you were always the weird one out of the bunch, wanting to know what crocodile skin felt like rather than imagining the feeling of fur or hair like your crechemates had) you cannot deny that it was interesting getting to be in the same place as many cell cultures of Earth life.
The communication probes between Erid and Earth have exchanged a few items over the many years, and some of the most celebrated bits (at least to the biological science chords) had been examples of life from Earth that were able to survive the conditions of long travel and even endure the conditions of Erid when transported down the Elevator without imploding dramatically. Microscopic moving-type life that undergo suspension of all internal organic reactions until exposed to Earth-like environments once more. Embryonic states of sessile-type life that lay dormant in unsuitable environments for as long as is necessary until the correct conditions are met, and suddenly switch on and develop fully. Even the dead and preserved life was interesting in its own right; deep-water creatures that, originating from high heat and high temperature environments at the bottom of Earth’s terrifyingly cold oceans, were of great scientific interest for their similarities to some oceanic life on Erid. Even some single-cell-type life which, while it had been expected to not survive transit, had yielded a few viable spores of some extremophile variants that were very quickly quarantined and studied closely by Eridians far more skilled than you. It probably wasn’t Earth’s plan to send some kind of alien plague, but the fact that any alien life can survive on Erid unassisted is itself a big enough surprise that the entire science chord had agreed to the precautions.
But that isn’t what you study, specifically. No, you are a student, and that means that you get the mass-produced Mercy cell lines. Not that those aren't interesting as well! The team that you act within are working on deconstructing retroviruses out of the genome given, and that's really neat in its own right!
But. Well. It's a little weird, to have a single cell line be so closely studied, right? Maybe you're thinking too much into this. But it's a little strange to be able to listen to the clumps of muscle cells on the body-incubated plate that you work with most often and say things with such confidence as "the donor had these kind of epigenetic factors" and not know for sure if it's actually true or a result of such a small sample size. Did Mercy have a childhood allergy that resulted in a strange expression of these certain proteins, or is this something that all humans have? All large moving-type Earth life?
And what kind of name was Mercy anyways? Or to have the ship be named Blessing? It's almost like all of Earth came straight out of an old operatic drama, with names as obviously accurate as that. You wonder if it's some case of improper translation, semantic drift, or if aliens just have a great sense of naming their most important things meaningful names. Maybe the next human ambassadors will show up in Erid’s orbit in another Blessing ship with names like “Good At Communication” or “Genius Climate Science Chord Member.” That would certainly help with the whining you hear constantly from your peers in the next vocation over.
Not like your vocation didn’t lack in reasons to complain as well. The little cells were hard to please. It really is a relief that the science behind keeping these specific cell lines happy happened far before you were of chord-schooling age, as it was apparently a cacophony of issues one after another. Then again, if you had been around during that time, you might have had the chance to work directly with Mercy. It was apparently a cellular biologist chord by trade as well, which is always a little strange to think about. An Earth creature who had to do such banal things as pipetting samples and preparing new cultures, just like you do!
Maybe it would've liked you. It apparently liked students well enough, even if it only taught courses to younger pebbles. Though, you suppose in a sense it is still around. After all, its cells sure are lively enough on its own to fill in for the rest of it!
You can’t help but admire that liveliness in of itself. It’s not like they flick around like starkiller does; they have a sluggishness to them that shows that they are cells that normally make up a larger being. But they differ so much from the colony cells of an Eridian… Like something communal, rather than something collaboratory… You aren’t sure if that makes any sense. Doesn’t matter! You can enjoy the art of cellular biology without needing to thrum it to the world, you don’t need to exactly know what you are feeling!
Every cell in the human body has the same genetics, comes from the same source. Everything in it is organic, a scaffold built on a scaffold with no solid ground to build from. Not like an Eridian’s body, solid and dependable and able to weather the forces that life throws at it. No wonder there was so much panic back in the day about keeping Mercy alive, when its very body was so ephemeral. Like a tower built on a foundation of sand, somehow keeping itself up by how upright it already was, building new structure as fast as the old is eroded beneath.
And yet it's so much harder to remember that when at the microscopic level. Especially for some of the things that you have witnessed, when larger cell cultures have been cultivated into tissue masses. The coordinated chemical responses to stimuli. The flickering signals barely millivolts in measurement of water and salt flickering up and down the length of axon cords. The little fighter cells that get to work despite a lack of body to defend, sending out complex signals to body parts that no longer exist in response to threats that cannot survive Erid. Even, once, the human equivalent to a pump organ, which used its own natural metronome to keep time and writhe rhythmically in patterns that maintained a natural water pressure differential.
Your peers had all reacted with appropriate disgust and horror to the alien fluidity, to the slosh of liquid on liquid, to just how flayed and exposed it all was. You had watched on with a fascination that something so fragile and soft could have been made at all. How, in life, Mercy was apparently constantly echoed in every other sound it made with the constant thumping tenacity of its pump. It was so alive that nothing could stop others from being able to hear it at all times.
(You had heard, once, a rumor that Savior Rocky has a cultivated collection of Mercy heart cells growing in a specially designed tank. That they were so broken by the grief of the alien's death that they had grown a new pump just for themself to hear. You... don't know how true that rumor is. It seems kind of creepy. Worse than those elders who go crazy and keep around whole chunks of their mates' carapaces after they pass. But then again, you've never met Savior Rocky.)
It's this constant push for life that you admire the most about these cells. That makes you want to, some day, hear the entire substance of a living being from Earth dance in concert on its own fragile feet. You're still young, maybe a second Blessings ship will be sent before you finish your studies.
You poke at the tools, feeling the pipetting needles slip in cold-deadened hands as you try to pick them up. "Alright, Mercy, let's see if we can't figure out more about Earth from you again." Then you get to work.