Genus: Evolving
Day Seventy-Four (Later)

Loni, Tim, and Michael listened to James explain his job in the company while they went to Nathaniel’s quarters, hoping to replace something that would tell where he went after he caused the evacuation.

A horrible smell permeated out from the living quarters of one Dr. Nathaniel Johnson. The temperature controlled environment kept the smell from worsening, but it was still strong enough to induce a gag reflex.

The source of the odor was slumped in a chair, hand clutching a tiny glass amber bottle.

Michael moved the chair around for Loni and Tim to look at the remains. Tim went to the corner to throw up.

Loni was trying to not vomit as well, “That’s dad.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Michael said, turning the body away again. He grabbed a sheet from the bed and covered the corpse.

Loni was tearing up, both from the loss and from the odor, though the sheet was helping a surprising amount. “He must have had a heart attack. From the shock…”

She glared at James. She wanted to shoot him, and she figured he knew it. He carefully stayed with Michael, presumably for protection. She turned her attention back to her father, and to his computer screen. She wondered if she could see anything inside the lab.

She quickly typed in her father’s password. The screen unlocked and she could see all of the surveillance shots from the lab – she figured he had them so he could monitor any changes of the creatures quickly.

A large tank was empty, broken outward into the open ocean.

“What was in there, James?” Loni asked, pointing to the tank.

“That dumb jellyfish your dad used for testing his vaccine.”

“How would that have happened?”

“Shouldn’t be able to happen; that tank is made to not break. It stays closed because of electricity…”

“So what used to be in that tank is what has caused this?” Tim asked, his question was venomous, and angry.

James was ashamed, “My mom is CEO of this facility and the research. If her own child was a progeny, she would look even better to the share-holders, like she’s the genius who made another genius inside the genius facility.”

“And that excuses what your mother did? How she stole our father’s work – what he gave up time with us for?”

“Of course not, not more than it excuses Dr. Johnson for what he did.” James didn’t want to play a game where each person was able to replace someone else to blame, but he wanted to be accurate about the blame not laying exclusively on his or his mother’s shoulders. His mother’s actions were her own, and Nathaniel chose to take this action.

“Let’s try to be practical here,” Michael suggested, “How do we kill these things?”

“I don’t know how,” James admitted. “I’d have to see what the tissue looks like currently to see how different it is than when it first got out of here.”

“That’s not impossible,” Tim started. “Those crazy people in the forest, they were worshiping a dead one, weren’t they?”

“The one that calls the globsters ‘The Savior.’ Those freaky people…” Michael recalled his encounter with those people back in California in an abandoned church. “And I have samples from them, from the first sighting, and the first victim.”

“Dad has a microscope here,” Loni said, pointing to the old microscope he kept in his quarters since college. It was heavy and clunky, but Nathaniel swore by her ability to keep on going.

Loni set it on the table, and plugged it in. James carefully took the slide and put it on the stage. He looked through the scope, but couldn’t see anything. He adjusted the settings, but still found nothing. Loni turned the light on, and quickly found the sample on the slide, and got it into focus for him.

She started opening drawers and flipping through files until she located her father’s laboratory logs. She watched James from time to time while he was quietly talking to himself as he looked over the various samples Michael painstakingly collected.

“So this jellyfish, why is it so much bigger than it was when it lived here?” Tim asked.

Loni replied, “It was infected with the prion, but doesn’t have a CNS, so the prion can’t act on anything…”

“Dad was mentioning the jellyfish was starting to pay attention to its caregivers; aware of feeding times…”

“It developed a consciousness?” Michael interjected. “And with the prion in its system, it must be able to control the prion somehow… and alter its own proteins based on what it encounters.”

“How tough?” Tim asked.

James interjected, turning away from the microscope, “We don’t know everything about the prion yet; there are some people who believe it got here by an asteroid. If that was true, then it would be a completely alien infectious agent. We can’t truly anticipate the repercussions of every scientific endeavor.”

“Loni, you need to look at this,” James shifted his attention to just her. “The prion from this sample is a lot larger than I would expect to see.”

Loni glanced into the microscope, “They are huge… and there were none in any stage of mitosis…”

“Loni,” Tim was getting irritated. “What does that mean?”

“It’s aging,” Loni replied. “The prion is degrading…”

“The state of the prion is different in each of the samples Michael took. Each time it develops a new characteristic, the cell structure degrades slightly. All of them are dying, each time they face new stimuli from their environment,” James added.

“How are there so many organisms able to do this when only one started this?” Tim asked.

Michael chimed in this time, “It can control its reproductive cells too, and it’s able to reproduce exponentially. But it’s evolving itself into extinction…”

There was hope that this creature would soon be gone. Those samples were old now, Michael felt hope for the first time in a long time. The world might return to normal.

But what would be the new normal? Would people learn to try to research possible consequences before the next leap forward, or would another discovery bring our species to its knees once again?

Then the lights began to flicker. The electrical system was being disrupted.

“We have company,” Michael said.