Extermination, page 6
Whatever was that?
Tara grabbed a sample jar and scooped some of the material up. It was surprisingly tough and stringy, even if the material was almost transparent. She had never seen anything like this before.
She closed the lid, and set the tube aside for later analysis. She also took samples of the remains of the mushrooms, before tossing the mushrooms into the incinerator.
It was with pain in her heart that she turned it on. Whatever had happened to those mushrooms, she would probably never know, and it was another part of Ken gone forever.
By the time she could hear Ashley coming into the lab, Tara had finished cleaning up. She went to tend to the regular experiments and take her daily measurements.
She took the trays from the shelf and put them into the dryer so that all the moisture could be sucked out, she could grind up the samples, and she could start analysing them.
She then went and looked at the carrots.
And when she opened the temperature cupboard, she almost let out a squeal of surprise.
The little plants that grew in the tubes glowed. They had acquired that same phosphorous and blue-green glow that had also laced the mushrooms.
Was that some kind of infection or bacteria?
“What’s that?” a male voice said behind her.
Sure enough, it was Mr Fred the frog.
“Has this strange phenomenon now spread to the whole room? I thought I told you to get rid of the mushrooms.”
“I did.” She was not crazy.
“Is this part of the secret experiment as well?”
“This tray is, but the one over there is not.” Whatever conclusion he wanted to draw from that. She didn’t like his insinuation that Ken’s experiments were the source of all this trouble. They didn’t know what caused it, so let’s not put blame.
“Then get rid of all of them. This experiment is now finished. Clean out the entire room.”
Tara did not protest. She knew he was right. “Do you want me to get Ashley to help, too?”
“Yes, please. We need this entire room cleaned out and disinfected, and the lab as well. I want all the rubbish gone.”
And that was probably about the heap of equipment that still sat in the corner of the lab, equipment that had been Ken’s and she had not yet found a place for.
Yes, it was all very much within regulation, but he sure knew how to make it known what he thought of Ken’s work.
Tara called Ashley, and they spent most of the day cleaning out trays and putting the content into the incinerator.
She hated to think of all the new material that they would have to fly in to replace all this.
Normally, the organic material that resulted from the trials was recycled, and they used volcanic beads as potting mix, but they reused them, too, after thoroughly cleaning them and exposing them to a vacuum.
But all of that went out, and the incinerator was doing overtime.
Meanwhile, Tara collected the last of the data from the trials.
In between that and managing the incinerator, it was very frustrating.
Whenever she had been away from the computer for a while, she would find that the program reset itself, and that the data disappeared, or went somewhere entirely nonsensical.
“Are you having problems with your computer, too?” she asked Ashley.
“Yes, I was just going to ask you.”
“It keeps moving the data that I’ve just entered.”
“Yes, or deleting it all together.”
At that moment, the lights flickered and went out. Tara sat in the darkness, where she could only see a few pinpricks of emergency lights that were still on.
“Okay, that explains our computer problems.” Ashley turned on the small light on her pad.
Tara could see her getting up from her seat.
“I think I’m going to visit operations to see what’s going on. We can’t do our work when they’re having issues.”
“Maybe we’ve drained all the power with our incinerating.”
The lights flickered and came back on, only to go back off again immediately.
“Well, whatever, I’m still going,” Ashley said.
And she left the lab, shutting the door behind her.
At that moment, something made a loud popping sound on the other side of the room.
Chapter Eleven
JONATHAN WENT BACK to his room, feeling sorry for himself. He knew he was stupid and he knew it was only because alcohol went to his head and did funny things there, and the best thing he could do was ignore it.
He took off the uncomfortable suit and his shoes, and the shirt that Gaby had made him buy, and flung it on top of his open suitcase.
Then he went into the shower cubicles, where he perhaps spent a little bit more time than was warranted drowning his sorrows.
Worst of all, he knew that Gaby was right. He had behaved like a ridiculous teenager.
When she asked him to ask her out, he should have said something witty and complimentary about her dress or something like that. But he had just been so afraid of getting it wrong that it had paralysed him into saying nothing.
Was there still a way to apologise? Or had she indefinitely taken off with a handsome soldier with a strong face and broad shoulders? The one who believed, hand on his heart, that aliens were coming to threaten humanity and he was going to jump in a spaceship and fight the aliens on his white horse.
He liked to think that Gaby wasn’t as shallow as all that, but right now, rational thinking was not at the forefront of his mind. He felt like banging his head against the wall, and all of his dysfunctional family life came rushing back at him. His mother and her failed political career, his father having been sent home from working as a nuclear scientist with the Force, both moping at each other, not talking about their problems, neither wanting anything to do with him, palming him off on the other. Wasn’t that the first thing his mother had said when Jonathan told her he’d gotten into a study program for astrobiology? You can go and live with your father. Meaning: get out of my life.
He wasn’t fit to build long-term relationships with anyone, because no one in his life had ever shown him how to.
He got out of the shower.
In order to turn the station into a proper conference venue, the organisers had installed little cupboards with provisions in each room. Inside his, he found a couple of containers with various beverages.
There was carrot beer and synthetic whiskey, as well as cheap artificial wine and mixes with reconstituted juice.
Out of all those, he judged the whiskey the least obnoxious. At least that was mostly alcohol, which was just a chemical that could be produced artificially.
He sat back on the bed, with his feet up against the opposite wall and his pad on his lap, so that he could watch the presentation Fred Wilkins had wanted to give.
It opened with the slide he had already seen, telling the audience that he was about to reveal the real reason for the demise of Opis Station.
Then the presentation cut to a movie clip looking into a lab from the view of a security camera near the ceiling. There were benches and testing equipment on the benches and a desk with a computer against the back wall. A window on the other side of the room looked into a brightly lit greenhouse room. A woman came and sat down at the computer. After a minute or so, she got up and turned around to the benches. She looked at a rack of samples that stood on the bench. Then a second woman came in.
She said, “Have you done next door?”
“Yes, I did. It’s all gone.”
The second woman left again, and the first woman leaned her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands.
Jonathan wondered what this was about. She was clearly distressed about something.
There was some shouting out of the view of the camera and then a crash of glass.
The woman turned around sharply, and grabbed onto the desk.
All around her, pieces of paperwork were flying through the room in the direction of the greenhouse window. There had been a breach of the hull.
Then she could no longer hold on. She flew to the side, her lab coat flapped. She crashed into the wall of the greenhouse against the closed door.
The screen went dark.
What the hell had caused that?
Jonathan was suddenly all alert, the fuzziness from the alcohol gone from his brain.
He flicked to the next screen.
It said, “The authorities will say that Opis Station failed because of a breach of atmosphere. They will not tell you why this happened and what caused it. This presentation will make that clear.”
The next slide started with a list of a number of random events that happened during the first few days of Fred Wilkins’ tenure at Opis Station.
Events like mysteriously glowing plants and mushrooms, lights turning on and off, computers giving their own commands, and the very dramatic-looking breach of atmosphere, with a note that the female lab technician had survived at least that event. Since Fred was the only survivor of the disaster, Jonathan suspected that things were about to get worse.
Next, a table came up with some diagrams and analysis.
Samples from the glowing material, taken during the first day that Fred had started at the station.
It showed a table of the results of a chemical analysis of material from several plants and mushrooms, with a red circle around the level of phosphorus.
Normal plant material contained less than one percent of phosphorus. This sample had almost two percent.
That was definitely abnormally high.
Most of the other trace elements were out of proportion, too.
Did the plants show any effects of poisoning? Where did this come from?
Jonathan went to the next slide.
It consisted of several photos, each of them of a section of the laboratory, with glowing semi-transparent threads stringing between walls and tables, between walls and experiment trays, and across the ceiling and floor, linking the furniture and plants and computers.
It said, “Overnight growth on the day after the hatch blow-out.”
They had analysed the slimy material and found that the chemical composition was virtually identical to that of the infected plants and mushrooms.
The next slide was a photo of glowing threads in the dark.
Then another table, one of the conductivity of the material.
It said underneath, “Please note that some of these materials were artificially created after the fact, since all the original material was lost with the destruction of the station.”
The next slide showed an experimental set up where tiny pads and cables had been attached to infected plants.
Below, it said, “Through experimentation off-site, we were able to replicate the effect that computer data can be transferred through plant material when it’s been infected with the slime.”
Then there were two slides, side-by-side, of bits of computer code, that showed where certain parts of code were taken out and inserted in other programs.
Underneath, it said, “The true software on the right, and the recreated software on the left. Note the highlighted code, which allows for operating the light stations in the lab. The organism copied the code and repeated it elsewhere, causing the lights to behave erratically.”
Jonathan moved to the next slide, but found there wasn’t one. Clearly, the owner of this device was still working on the presentation that he was not going to be allowed to give. Why? Where was he and why hadn’t even Jonathan’s superior said anything about this?
Chapter Twelve
PHOSPHORUS AND MUSHROOMS and computer programs that change themselves. What was going to go wrong next?
Fred had been looking at the results from the analysis that Tara had sent him, and he could see a lot of problems with this data.
For one, if they did have some sort of contaminant in the lab, most of the experiments conducted in here would be invalid. The first priority should be to clean the place out, and to make sure that they had no contaminants.
But he was sure that the staff wasn’t going to like that. The plants, the mushrooms, and everything else in the lab still contained the ghost of the previous manager Ken Ward. The staff hated him for the sole reason that he was not their favourite boss. And there was nothing he could do about it.
He was already sick of this place, but if he wanted to get his post at the Ceres belt with his wife, he would have to do a good job by his superior.
So he ordered Tara and Ashley to clear out all the experiments.
“But we have all these results,” Tara protested.
“If we have some sort of contamination, we need to identify it, and we need to get rid of it before it can contaminate the entire lab.”
They weren’t happy about it, but they started doing as he said, because they knew it was the right thing to do.
Meanwhile, Fred made sure that he collected samples of whatever caused the strange glow, to be sent for identification.
He spoke to Mariani about isolating the air circulation system of the lab from the rest of the station, only to find that this could not reliably be done. Not only that, there was no point getting angry at Mariani about it, although someone certainly deserved a dose of anger. How could you design a station like that? If you had contamination, it would spread throughout the station.
He collected all the samples from the glowing plants and the slimy threads in a sealed box and set it on the bench with a note not to touch it.
Then he went to take a sample from the outside of the station. Like most space vessels, the station’s maintenance facilities included sets of robotic arms that could be used to perform maintenance operations on the outside of the hull. He asked for those arms to pick up a piece of sterilised cloth and wipe it over the outside of the station wall and take it back inside.
He then took this into the lab and added it to his sealed container.
Even though he didn’t work in science, he had studied it and knew how to set up a standard test environment for the presence of biological material from extraterrestrial samples. It was part of the safety training of all operations managers and a test kit was part of the standard station outfit.
Fred transferred the samples into a sealed cabinet and opened the sample jars with the cabinet’s robotic arms. He then spread a small amount of material from the content of each jar into a sample dish containing growth media, placed the lids back on the dishes and set them on the shelves in the cabinet.
There.
He was aware that Tara had been watching him from the corner of her eye. Apparently, she and Ashley had complained to the regular crew that the Force had sent someone to manage them who knew nothing about science.
With the sample setup completed, he went to the office and looked up potential causes of contamination, especially in cases where it had come from an external source.
He found some papers on different types of contaminants, most notably from the Orbital Launch Station, and from Johnson Base on the moon, and from Mars, where they had problems with native bacteria invading the recycling systems.
In case of the moon, these were bacteria that had been brought there by comets long ago in water that lay frozen at the bottom of the craters of the moon, covered by a thick layer of regolith that was disturbed when people started mining there.
Were they dealing with another alien bacteria here?
The test would hopefully be conclusive.
While he waited for the results, he had to make sure that the current contaminated experiments were all discarded and incinerated.
He found that there was going to be a conference where everybody working on the health of closed ecosystems was going to be present.
And so he registered for that.
Meanwhile, the lab staff continued cleaning out the experiment chamber and the lab over the next few days.
Fred checked his test samples every day, and not much seemed to be happening. He was glad about that, because for a moment he had feared that the contamination had come from outside, as it had on the Moon and Mars and that harrowing case at the Orbital Launch Station.
Hopefully, this was only a false alarm.
But on the third day, when he came into the lab in the morning, it turned out that his relief was misplaced, spectacularly so.
The sample dishes in the cabinet had—there was no other word for it—exploded with slimy growth to the point they were no longer visible and the growth had pushed off the lids.
Long, semi-transparent threads of varying thickness came out and wandered over the inside of the cabinet, tangling with the threads from other dishes, and gathering around anything electronic.
He stood there looking at the mess when Tara came in.
“Holy crap,” she whispered.
“You can say that again.”
“What is that stuff?”
“I think the same organism that grew out of the bottom of the experiment trays.”
“Where did you get this?”
“From the outside of the station.”
Her eyes widened. “So you’re saying that by opening the hatch to our plants, we introduced this thing into the lab?”
“Seems like it.”
“So how do we get this stuff out of here?” Her voice sounded horrified.
The inevitable answer to that was to decontaminate everything yet again. Before they opened the cabinet, they took all the furniture and loose items and piled them against the walls in the corridor, including all electronic devices, because the organism appeared to like the warmth emanated by those.
Not all of the electronics could be removed, and Fred personally taped over the screens and leads that remained exposed.
Then they went in and opened the cabinet. By now, almost half the wall space inside was covered in the slimy threads and you couldn’t even see the sample dishes anymore.
Removing the growth was hard work. The threads were slippery to grip in the awkward gloves, tough to break, and many had attached to the walls with sucker pads like ivy. Once the threads were gone, someone came with a disinfectant in a high-pressure blaster and cleaned the inside of the cabinet. The contaminated material went into the incinerator.
