Chapter Text
At a microscopic level, cells follow very simple rules. If they detect a chemical signal telling them of danger, they react to it accordingly, be it defensively or aggressively. They just do exactly what they need to do to stay alive. Nothing more, nothing less. In other words, they do not ‘poke the bear’.
Ryland Grace is not a cell.
“With all due respect, Mr Sterling, your entire proposal is shit.”
Yeah. He definitely should’ve kept his mouth shut. Turns out the human ego was more fragile than cell membranes, tearing open at the slightest verbal nick. And that damaged ego has resulted in a massive storm in the office of Dr. Reiss Owen.
She was Ryland’s primary PhD advisor and the head of the biology department. Usually she was a rather cheery woman who could spend hours rambling about the next scientific breakthroughs. Now, however, she looks like she is between murdering Ryland and digging a hole to hide in forever.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done, Grace?” she snipped.
Ryland shifted his weight, his eyes suddenly finding an interest in the flaking paint behind the filing cabinet. “I was being honest,” he mumbled, looking anywhere but her. “His proposal relied on results derived from a paper proven false in last year’s peer review. If he tried to run the experiment now, the cells would just die off in under 2 hours. I was just saving him time.”
Ryland knew he was correct, after all, he was the one who wrote the peer review.
He had spent three months in the previous semester tearing that study apart. He’d been so excited at first, the prospect of creating artificial muscle tissue from plant stem cells felt monumental. However, after replicating the experiment, Ryland found that the scaffold material made the entire solution too acidic, which in turn made the plant stem cells undergo cellular lysis. Useful in analysing the cell? Yes. But in growing muscle tissue? Please, what is anyone going to do with a whole bunch of acidic goop?
Dr. Owen closed her eyes, thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of her nose.
The silence stretched between them, heavy and stifling.
“Look, Grace…” She took a slow, measured breath. “While I understand your point of view, you do have to exercise some form of restraint when voicing your thoughts. Sterling isn’t just looking for another breakthrough.”
He frowned. Walter Sterling was a wealthy man, with businesses focusing on maritime trade logistics. Funding a project like this is akin to buying a new shiny decoration in his house. Taking the credit without the hard work. Ryland simply did not understand, is there another reason? “What else is a guy like him after then?”
“His youngest daughter was diagnosed with advanced muscular dystrophy.” Dr Owen said softly. “ Her respiratory muscles have already begun to fail, and she’s breathing through a ventilator right now. The artificial muscle technology in his proposal is quite literally his last-ditch attempt to create something to keep her alive.”
The words hit Ryland like a physical blow. Often advanced muscular dystrophy hits the heart, lungs, and diaphragm first. With it already progressing to the stage that requires a ventilator to breathe, his daughter has already lost her independence. Current medical technology, doctors could only treat the symptoms and delay the inevitable, unable to replace the muscles that have already atrophied.
“He's a terrified father, one running against a ticking clock. And you stood up in front of the entire graduate committee and called his only hope shit.”
The faint hum of the room’s ventilation suddenly sounded deafening, fluorescent lights too bright. He hadn’t known… Of course he hadn’t known. He hasn’t even talked to anyone but Dr. Owen. And they only talked about his own dissertation. So how could he have known? But that excuse tasted like ash in his mouth. He had stood up in front of everyone and called a dying girl’s last hope shit.
There was no going back from that.
It was always like this. To Ryland, the world felt like it was working on a different frequency that he was deaf to. Other people could read between the lines. They knew what to say, what to hold back, and how to navigate through conversations without wrecking everything. He couldn’t do any of that, struggling to even hold a casual conversation if it didn’t involve academia.
Dating was even more difficult. He thought that if he just tried hard enough, instincts would magically kick in. And that had blown up in his face. Spectacularly. It wasn’t that Linda hadn’t tried to connect with him. She had. Everything was entirely his fault.
Head up in the clouds, never present, never enough.
He hoped she was happy with Mark.
“I didn’t mean to attack him personally.” Ryland whispered, his throat dry. “The entire basis for the project was wrong. If he pours money into it… Not only would it drain him, his daughter will still…”
“You are right in that, Grace.” She interrupted. “But what mattered more was your delivery. He has made it clear that none of his funding will touch this department so long as you are attached to it. Your stipend is frozen, and you are to be transferred out, effective immediately.”
The room went completely cold.
“What?” Ryland choked out. “I’m six months away from my defense! How am I supposed to- I can’t even pay this month’s rent!”
She didn’t offer any words of comfort. They both knew he majorly screwed up. She sighed and reached towards the bottom drawer of her desk, pulling out a thick heavy plastic folder, and placed it on her desk.
The cover was a matte navy blue, and stamped on front in crisp silver foil were two words.
PROJECT EDEN
She slid it forward, folder gliding against the hard wood, stopping when it reached the end of the table.
“I understand that your dissertation is complete and requires no additional input from you. With our department unable to provide you with your stipend and place within the university, this is your only option to remain as a student and defend your dissertation.”
Ryland’s gaze dropped to the silver letters. PROJECT EDEN. He has never heard of it before, was it some kind of agriculture project? “What is this?” He questioned.
“Project Eden is a multi-million project between our university and NASA. We are going to be building a full scale prototype of a space station greenhouse. Seeing that it is funded by the space agency, Sterling’s influence can’t stop you from joining. Currently, the oxygen team, or specialist engineer in this case, has hit a wall with the oxygen generator prototype.”
She reached across the desk, her fingers turning the heavy cover over, flipping through it until she reached a page with a large schematic of a generator. Ryland instinctively leaned forward, attracted by the pull of a new project, eyes tracking the clean lines of the blueprint.
“They propose the use of algae to produce oxygen en masse. In theory it is viable, however every time they run the generator, the algae dies.”
The design was undeniably stunning, even if he doesn’t know exactly what each part does. It showed a massive double-walled cylinder crafted from lightweight, anodized titanium in green and silver. Inside was a complex web of ultra-thin high OH silica fiber optic lighting tubes threaded through the cultivation chambers, channeling UV light directly to the algae, maximising the area exposed to UV light.
It was a masterpiece in futuristic engineering.
And it was completely and spectacularly broken.
Ryland’s eyes traced the fluid routing lines once more. He tapped the glaring mistake with his finger and let out an involuntary scoff.
Dr Owen stared at the paper, eyes moving towards where his finger pointed. For a long moment, she did not say anything. A heavy conflicted look crossed her face before she sighed and collapsed back in her chair from the realisation.
“How did anyone miss this? It’s right there! You have the documents, how did you miss it, Dr Owen?” Ryland was completely bewildered. His advisor missed something so glaringly obvious? Did he request to have the wrong advisor after all?
“Because I am the head of this department, Ryland. I have other responsibilities that I have to fulfill. What I approved of was the use of Chlorella algae in a closed loop life support system. It is extremely viable and I had full faith in the engineering student.” She gestured vaguely to the blueprints. “The student lead designed the prototype and it was built and approved by the engineering department head.”
Ryland wanted to argue but a glare from Dr Owen stopped him in his tracks. “Frankly, you should look around the office more. How many faculty members do you see around? We don’t have time nor personnel to spare. We barely have enough professors for our undergraduates.”
She let out a harsh, humorless laugh, leaning forward over her desk. “That's why we cannot afford to offend Sterling. We need more people desperately. With his funding we can afford to have more staff to better tackle the load.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, eyes darting between the flaking paint on the wall and his advisor. Bureaucracy is messy, confusing and something that he personally wanted to stay far far away from. The only thing he was good at was science, and screwing up big time. He was the calamity that almost triggered the end of the entire biology department, only lucky that the consequences only affected him.
Mostly.
Dr Owen’s expression softened for a second. She tapped her fingers rhythmically against the table next to the folder. “Which brings us back to this.”
What…?
“You identified the problem in seconds, have time to spare, and you need the payroll. We were asked to send one of our own as an on site specialist then but was unable to, but now? You will be packing your bags and joining them for the next six months.”
She closed the binder and pulled out another piece of paper from the side. Ryland’s eyes trailed across the words. Location, time, and a name. “You’ll meet with Simon Burch, the one that designed the generator. Be glad that you still have an opportunity to get your doctorate, Grace.”
Simon stares at the terminal interface, heart hammering in an erratic rhythm against his ribs.
3…
2…
1…
And the cycle ends.
The data follows the same trend as the test cycles before. Oxygen production rose steadily for the first few minutes before plummeting to zero in the next minute.
Five minutes. Five minutes was all it took for the generator to stop working.
Flushing out the algae showed that the once vibrant green algae had turned into a chalky grey, flowing out of the system like spoiled milk. The piping is clogged in certain areas and it smells like a swamp that was scorched to hell and back by high heat.
The Father would be so disappointed in him. Wasting resources and disrespecting the sacred green that provides for them, nurtures them. He was a failure, a sinner for committing such atrocious acts.
This was his fifth test cycle. After his first failure, when he flushed out the sickly brown algae-nutrient mix, he assumed that the UV light was not strong enough for the algae to produce effectively. Doubling the intensity however, killed the algae at twice the speed in test two. So in test three, he brought down the luminosity and changed the speed of the pump from 15 liters per minute to 30 liters per minute, thinking that the flow rate was the cause of the clogging. That had blown up in his face, literally. The flow rate caused faster clogging and the bursting of one of the pipes, spewing out hot, foul-smelling slime across the whole lab floor. Simon shuddered at the memory of cleaning it up.
What a disgrace he is…
The fourth test he assumed that the algae-nutrient mix was simply too hot for the algae to thrive in, so he spent days installing a larger pipe flooded with deionised water around the algae lines. That led to a slightly cooler algae-nutrient mix when flushing out the system. And now test five. If it wasn’t the UV light, flow rate, or the temperature, surely it's due to the algae not having enough carbon dioxide to photosynthesise.
That led to a massacre.
Simon’s hands trembled as he stared at the grey fluid flowing out of the drainage valve. The acrid, swampy stench burned in the back of his throat.
Humans are ungrateful parasites unless they dedicate every breath to serving the roots. Father’s words echoed in his mind. He would be deemed an outcast by Eden if they found out what he had done.
Killing the sacred green is a sin with no redemption.
Sudden heavy footsteps snapped him out of his thoughts.
“Still failing at the five minute mark, Butcher?” Professor Vance stopped a few feet away, looking at the terminal on the outside of the prototype.
“The mechanical tolerances are within expectations, systems optimised to the best of my knowledge. The algae… is still dying.”
“I can smell that from even outside the room. As much as I would’ve liked this to be a friendly check in, we don’t have much time. NASA’s breathing down my neck, and if we don’t show a stable oxygen cycle by the end of the month, our team is going to get cut.”
Simon’s stomach twisted into a violent knot. If the budget got pulled… Eden… Father’s vision would be delayed. He has to fix it fast. Needs to before—
“Dr Owen’s department is also forcing our hand. She claims that our design process is completely skewed, so she’s sending over an onsite specialist to be on our payroll to help us resolve the issue.”
“A biologist? Here?”
“A PhD candidate named Ryland Grace,” the professor clarified, letting out a mocking laugh. “I heard that the guy blew up his own academic funding by calling a major donor’s proposal ‘shit’ in front of the graduate committee. He’ll be here tomorrow morning to look through the whole process.”
Simon stood frozen at the prospect of having another person in his space.
A disgraced PhD candidate, someone who couldn’t hold his tongue long enough to secure his own paycheck. Simon let out a slow steady breath, looking back down at the dead algae in the bucket. As much as he hates to admit it, he needs the help. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing wrong. He could use Ryland Grace to bring Eden salvation.
But an undisciplined academic is a massive wildcard. If Grace came into the lab and started messing with the system, he could permanently ruin the prototype. He will not allow an outsider to impede Father's mission.
But Simon didn’t have much of a choice. He will swallow the insult at a consultant’s presence.
He will manage him.
Watch him closely.
And bring salvation to humanity.
“I look forward to working with him.”