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“What Grace doing, question?”
I jumped away from the microscope at the sound of the robotic synthesizer voice. My glasses caught on the eyepiece and flew off of my face. I rapidly extended a hand, catching them before they fell to the ground.
Rocky rolled closer in his ball.
“Why Grace scared, question?”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“I was focused. In the zone. You startled me!”
Whatever Rocky did with two of his limbs at that, I assumed passed for an Eridian eyeroll.
“Human hearing weak. Grace not hear me from so close.”
“I can hear you fine! I was absorbed.”
Rocky rolled in his ball, moving around me in circles. I stood there, eyes tracing behind him, before his initial question finally registered in my mind.
“Oh! I- I was looking at the Taumoeba on the reverse microscope. Observing how they move, counting the population.”
“This tell Grace what, question?”
I shrugged.
“Not that much. Population is something I’m only trying to figure out for the sake of marking a… sample size; it’s a bit more difficult, since when I did work in the wet lab, it was mostly on bacteria, and we can’t exactly… count CFU for these guys. Once I have that, we can try looking at modifying them properly. I think the first step would be to mark sort of an… an MIC of nitrogen, and anything else that could potentially kill it in either of our atmospheres? Since it’s from Tau Ceti, I’d assume its optimal conditions are those of Tau Ceti, but I’d also like to see the effect of different temperatures on their generation time and motility.” I sighed, pressing my glasses back upon my nose. “I’m gonna start on some more useful things in a second, but classical microbiology is sometimes just… fun.”
Rocky stopped moving his ball around and instead just moved his limbs in what looked like an absentminded motion to focus. Or maybe he was using it to hear better?
“Grace use a lot of words and Rocky understand about half of them.”
I winced. Right, I’d forgotten how it was to talk with someone who didn’t specialise in this field. Sure, I’d had to explain to Stratt, in what was probably best described as ‘preschooler terms’ what most of the scientists during our meetings were going on about, but that was different. She didn’t ever seem genuinely interested in anything they were talking about; she only ever asked out of necessity. In the lab, on the other hand, I worked with a team of people who knew as well as I did what we were doing.
A smile crept upon my face. It’d been too long.
I was never meant to do this, after all. I was, at my core, by a calling, as Rocky would put it, or maybe just by a very good personal decision motivated by external factors, a teacher.
“Okay, I’ve explained to you earlier what a microscope is, right?”
“Human zooming in tool, yes. Eridians have similar for hearing. Amplifies sound waves from a specific sample but has to be used in special room.”
He’d told me all of this before. Every time, I felt a pang of disappointment in my heart that I’d never get to experience Eridian science myself. I missed Earth, I was grateful I’d get a chance to come back, even if it meant I’d likely never see the person who was currently becoming my best friend again. But to talk to a scientist from another planet… we used such a great variety of identification techniques, so many of them reliant on light, I couldn’t help but wonder which of them had made it through to scientific practice on Erid, despite their lack of sight, and which had not. My current bet was that since they could identify the IR of the Petrova Line, IR spectrometry, and most of the other spectrometries, was probably alive and well. I was unsure about Roentgen, given the radiation issue, but they definitely didn’t have anything like a gamma spectrometer. Probably also no PET scans, if I was getting a good read on their advancement and needs.
I shook my head. I wasn’t supposed to be getting distracted.
“Great; I’m looking at the amoeba under a microscope to count them; it’s not my favourite method, but they don’t exactly grow on agar like bacteria do, so I can’t just plate a series of diluted amounts and see how they grow—that’s called a CFU, colony forming units.”
Rocky tapped on his glass with one of his hands, waving another one in the air.
“Oh, Rocky know about that! Adrian sibling mate plate water samples on gel and count after a day!”
I had to stop myself from waving my hands around, lest I accidentally bump a valuable piece of equipment. Rocky had a scientist close to his family, someone who also worked with microbes, it sounded like.
“MIC is just a way to see how much of something is necessary to stop a microorganism from growing. We mostly use it for pathogens, to see how much of a drug can—”
“Yes, yes, Rocky know, humans are squishy space blobs who need drugs to fight tiny invaders.”
I rolled my eyes but couldn’t help but snort.
“Yeah, something like that, buddy.”
I turned back towards my microscope. The Taumoeba were moving like crazy, darting from one part of the plate to the next. I suspected they’d stop soon enough, because as it stood, they were closed in a small container—not that they needed change of air, by the looks of it, but there weren’t any nutrients in their vicinity. I’d have to feed them if I wanted them to stay this mobile and viable.
Right, if we could get these guys to be our perfect solution… we’d have to figure out a way to preserve them for the trip to Earth and Erid.
I contemplated working farther in silence. I could still sense, in that strange way you could when you got used to somebody else’s presence in your life, that Rocky lingered in the room. We were both starved for company, that way. I’d rather he did not leave.
I scanned the cells with my eyes one last time, then clicked off the microscope and pulled on a nitrile glove, moving them over to a bench.
“I’m going to try to isolate DNA from them. I’m gonna wash them in PBS and then add a lysing buffer with proteinase K—we’ll see if that gets us where we need to be,” Rocky was swinging side to side in his ball. “If they don’t… I’ll have to read up on how to analyse cell membrane compositions. Once the cells are all chopped up, I put them through high heat so the chopping enzyme doesn’t work anymore, and then I can add a premixed solution that…”
I picked up a box, bringing it closer to my face.
“…ThermoFisher Scientific has given me,” or that Stratt stole from them, I don’t say. “It’s got enzymes that chop up RNA; then there’s just a bunch of centrifuge spins and buffers to add, and afterwards I’ll move a bit of this solution on this special membrane in another micro test-tube; then its another spin and elution from the membrane until I have a sample in the space below the membrane compartment.”
They’re Eppendorf. I really want to know how much of this Stratt bought and how much she just made companies hand over. The standard of the lab is high, but it’s especially high for someone with an eye for brand names. I remember that plenty of doctors in my university days favoured pipettes manufactured way back when, uncaring of if they weren’t exactly ‘top of the line’ by general standard.
Not that I was about to complain about having access to all that. Everything in the Hail Mary lab was almost unsettlingly unused and in perfect shape. It felt a little impersonal.
“Grace distracted. What Grace thinking of, question?”
I almost brushed the question off. Rocky could be quite pushy when he thought I was hiding something or minimising my emotions, though. Besides, it wasn’t anything too traumatic or devastating. Just a thought, one of many, tinted with that solitary, bitter taste that being stranded in space left in my mouth.
“Every lab I’ve ever been in, maybe not at first, but eventually… they had personality,” I knew Rocky wouldn’t understand it when I put it like that. Personality in Eridian didn’t seem to mean exactly the same thing that it did in English—or more so, it was more literal in that meaning. From what I’ve gathered from talking with him before, I sounded like I’d just said that every lab eventually became a human person. Funny, that. “I don’t know how it is on Erid, but on Earth, for years now, no scientist really works alone. There’s teams, and sometimes, you even have multiple teams in one lab. It’s… messy—”
“Humans squishy and clumsy, yes.” Rocky nodded, sagely. I let him have this one. He wasn’t wrong.
“Especially in university labs, where students are basically just starting out. Every time you bring someone new in, they end up getting a rundown of all the quirks. This laminar chamber doesn’t close, that computer seems to work about twice a week, and this scale turns off whenever you try to calibrate it the first time, things like that. People have their benches covered in sticky notes and bottles with their labelled reagents or boxes, there’s just so much…”
There was just so much company. You could work in headphones, dead to the world, buried in your experiment, but there would almost always be people moving around. It was a feeling not unlike being part of a hivemind, in a strangely comforting way. A sensation that you were all there for a similar reason. That if you told anyone about what you were doing, they'd comprehend.
I didn’t even notice that I’d started crying. I only felt the water gather in the corners of my eyes when a tear began its slow descent down my cheek and into my collar. I wiped it off hastily.
I mentally cursed at myself. This was such an odd, almost stupid reason to start crying. The emotion wasn’t one I could name—something felt unsettling, was the best I could do. I’d been here for long enough now that the lab should have started to show signs of use, but still so much of it stood virtually untouched. There wasn’t any of that presence of others here. I knew I wouldn’t be going out to pass people in the corridor; I wouldn’t get to ask someone for advice on using a spectrometer, wouldn’t get to borrow their samples for a reference. I was alone, and somehow, it stung here, too.
Rocky’s ball rolled closer to me. I wordlessly crouched, feeling all too much like a puppet with loose joints. My hands landed upon his ball and wrapped around it. He hesitated only for a moment before he pressed his carapace against the xenonite and trilled a sound that made the material vibrate, crossing into my skull and making some part of my brain hum with satisfaction.
“Grace is leaking. Grace leaky space blob.” Rocky said. I nodded, squeezing his ball.
We stayed like this for a moment. Rocky began to drum a pattern into the xenonite, and my cheek felt each vibration before I registered the noise. My eyes closed for a few seconds.
It was never exactly what I needed. I wished I could get even closer to him. I wondered if I’d felt the same if it wasn’t for my particular circumstance.
If I ever came back to Earth, I could be sure psychologists would have a field day with me. Who needs consensual isolation studies? Just send this guy to space and have his two other crew members die.
My internal joke falters when I remember how much time Rocky had spent alone. Too long.
“Erid similar,” he said. It took me a few moments to register what he was referring to. “Science thrum Eridians work together. Big laboratories. Rocky not know if messy. Probably messy, statement.”
A bittersweet feeling bloomed in my chest at that.
“Thanks, Rock.”
He didn’t say anything in response, and I wasn’t looking at him. I felt, though, that he was nodding.
“So, when Grace start DNA process? Rocky watch and learn. Rocky tell Adrian sister mate what he learned from Earth scientist.”
I sighed heavily, exaggerating my minimal exhaustion as I heaved another breath and got up.
I was 5 seconds away from slamming my head on my laptop. The laptop didn’t quite matter, I had more. My head was one of a kind, though, and it was only that thought that kept me from risking possible injury and brain damage.
“I am not a bioinformatician,” I muttered to the software, clicking through another guide for NCBI Gene and Ensembl. “I’ve not used any bioinformatics software since I became a teacher; you know how long that was!? You know how important this fudging thing is to this science? Too important! But no, let’s just send Grace, he’ll be fine. No, we won’t give him any lessons with a bioinformatician. Bioinformaticians are too essential to Earth to send on a suicide mission!”
I punctuated the last frustrated exclamation with the press of the Enter key. I was now staring at the full genomic sequence, in FASTA format, of Pyrolobus fumari.
My thought process had gone like this: for some unknown reason, Stratt did not think it necessary to supply me with plasmids or really any molecular vectors; if she had, she’d hid them so well I could not find them. This had put a damper on any plans I had had to create knock-out variants of the Taumoeba; this meant I couldn’t, experimentally, test for any gene functions or try to transfect Taumoeba with something that would nullify its sensitivity to nitrogen, or make it more stable at different temperatures, or really anything at all. Creating nitrogen resistance should work by just breeding them in progressively increasing concentrations of nitrogen, but it left me unsatisfied. It felt like I wasn’t trying hard enough—all the tools at my disposal, and I was resorting to what was basically pre-2000s skill of microbiology. I was a molecular biologist, and I couldn’t find if the Taumoeba even had a gene that guaranteed sensitivity, or if they were only missing one that would cause resistance.
I was still determined to put forward any understanding at all of them. And since I wasn’t doing much at the moment, waiting as I was to see if they were willing to breed in 2% nitrogen, I had decided to try my hand at at least predicting some genes.
It shouldn’t have been hard.
“Why Grace talk to the human thinking machine, question?”
I didn’t answer. I moved over to my immortalised version of EMBOSS Needle and pasted my sequence, then the sequence of the archaeon. I was hoping that, because Pyrolobus fumari was a hypertermophile, it might share some proteins with my space surviving microbe. The Taumoeba appeared to have a TATA box, and I could spot elements that I’d looked up and found to be common surrounding elements of the archaeal promoter (and also, oddly, some eucariotic upstream sequences), but there was only so much I could do simply staring at a string of letters in the sequencer file.
“Grace, Grace, Grace!”
I let my head drop on my keyboard when the JobDispatcher informed me that “only one first sequence allowed”.
“I don’t know what you want from me! That is a single sequence! It’s one genome!”
“Grace fight with thinking machine again, question?”
“Yes.”
Rocky contemplated for a moment. I stared at the opposite wall, wondering if there was a way for me to yell EMBOSS into submission.
“Human thinking machine stupid if humans can’t use. And humans stupid for making the thinking machine."
“I think this is a purely 'humans stupid’ situation, buddy.”
“Of course,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Grace is dumb.”
“Hey!” I measured to kick at his ball. He rolled away, doing the Eridian version of snickering.
I looked at my laptop screen again, cracked my knuckles for good measure, and tried again.
When Rocky knocked on the door of my little house in the enclosure, I had half a mind to pretend I wasn’t home. It wouldn’t have worked, of course, but the urge was there.
I lay on my couch for a few seconds. The knocking grew more insistent. Exponential growth of noise.
“Grace-best-friend, come out! I have someone you should meet!”
I pushed myself into an upright position, not rushing at all. It was past my class-time, and my biodome was already nearing sunset. Rocky usually tended to come over at this time to simply laze around on my bed, his xenonite suit digging into some of my skin as we cuddled and I told him anything he wanted to hear about—Earth TV shows had been an ever-popular topic, still.
It was different from whenever other Eridians came to talk to me. He didn’t need me to use my keyboard, for starters, but that was only the start of it. It was just the two of us, quietly sharing this and that. I’d fallen asleep more than once when he sat there, especially if he began fidgeting (petting, I would think, with embarrassment still lingering somewhere in my mind) with my hair.
He rarely ever brought guests, and if he ever did, it tended to be Adrian, who would join us to form a small cuddle pile.
Comfort, comfort, comfort. Rocky would say.
(Love, love, love)
I didn’t need to hide it behind brackets, bury it in my mind in some hidden place lest the person I attatched myself to decided it was too unmanly of me; too soft, too emotional. The habit still stuck.
Love, love, love.
Insistent knocking was never part of the evening visit. My brain, running on the lowest possible percentage of social battery, had activated a primal instinct to close my curtains and bury myself under covers.
“They’re a surprise for Grace-best-friend, but you’ll like them a lot!”
‘Rocky-best-friend should remember that I’m not a big fan of surprise visits’ my brain grumbled.
I got up properly, stretched my arms above my head with the creak of my joints and tugging of the skin on my scarred arm, then began the trip to the door.
I swung it open to see two Eridians. Rocky, of course, who seemed to practically vibrate with excitement, his hands doing not-quite-jazz-hands. The second Eridian was bigger than he was (many Eridians were, I’d come to find out. Rocky was a fairly small representative of his people), and a pale jade colour, like mossy rocks. I grabbed my keyboard from it’s spot near the door.
“Hello, Learned-Grace-Erid-Saviour-Beloved,” I saw Rocky nudge them with his third limb as I tried to cover my embarrassment. He trilled an apologetic noise to me, and I did my best approximation of it back at him. “I’m 𝅘𝅥𝅯 ♭𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅗𝅥 from the Science thrum; I focus on our waters and the creatures-of-small-size that reside there.”
I looked to Rocky, already beginning to swing on my feet. He did the best approximation of a nod he could, and then gave me thumbs up (‘down’, I thought, fondly) for good measure. I looked back at 𝅘𝅥𝅯 ♭𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅗𝅥 (Leeuwenhoek, I decided).
“You’re a microbiologist,” I said, smiling. My fingers danced on the keyboard. I didn’t need to speak the words in English, but my tired brain had found it easier to have double confirmation of what I was outputting into space. Leeuwenhoek angled their carapace, as though considering. They hummed half a note that I figured was a contracted question to Rocky. Rocky hummed a series of notes that I could best translate as a ‘go ahead’.
“Rocky says that is what You call it. That it is what You are.”
Switching to a superior ‘you’ is, I have found, the height of what I can expect from unfamiliar Eridians talking to me. It still didn’t’ feel right, but I’d stopped fighting them on it. It was, at the very least, less clunky than being addressed with a 30 second title every time I was spoken to.
I stepped aside to let them inside. Rocky immediately waltzes in, but Leeuwenhoek hesitates.
“Come in,” I play. “I want to know what you do.”
Leeuwenhoek still hesitated. They fidgeted with their hands and their remaining appendages. I must not have been the only one Rocky caught by surprise.
“Is it true that You have enzymes to knock out coding-fragments from strand-of-life from organisms?”
I furrowed my brows at the organ for a moment.
“C-R-I-S-P-R, question? I mean, it’s not the only one, but that’s the most widely heard of—”
They tilted from side to side. Excited.
Right, they wouldn’t know any of them, if they’re asking.
“They come from defence systems bacteria have against viral infections. I’m not sure your microorganisms have them—”
“They do, naturally! We have that technology, but I wonder, simply—how it differs, from Yours.”
I stared at them for a few seconds. Then I stepped backward and waved them inside more insistently.
“Do you have spectrometers?”
“What is that?”
“Machines that analyse samples; often with different wavelengths of light; they test absorption and sometimes also excitation and emission, though there are also machines that only do that called fluorimeters.”
“Such use of light? Oh, that is brilliant! We have something similar, I believe—tells one the mass of a compound, or rather, the forms it breaks down into, more often than not, based off of it turning to a gas-phase ion?”
“Mass spectrometer! Do you know about X-rays? What are the primary components of microorganisms’ membrane here?”
It was about an half an hour later that I’d noticed Rocky sitting on my bed expectantly, arms crossed over one another in a distinctly human gesture.
He ended up falling asleep. Leeuwenhoek and I did not stop talking until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.