Lucy lay in the pressure tank. She had dropped from 130 pounds down to 85, but considering she hadn’t eaten or drank anything in seventy-eight days and was living in a high-pressure oven, she was still in pretty incredible condition. Her hair was now long gone. At 375 degrees, it had simply baked off. Her skin, once simian, was now a slimy gray. Her ape belly, already big before she was infected, was now bulging tremendously. The bacteria in her trophosome had thrived. Her tongue hung out of her mouth, aimed at the simulated sunlight in her tank. She had been breathing poisonous hydrogen sulfide in the superheated tank, which was now pressurized to simulate 660 feet below the ocean surface.
The two NASA scientists stared through the glass at their subject.
“I’m still in awe every morning I come down here and find she’s still alive,” said Dr. Chung Lee.
“Yeah, Dr. Summers was saying he’s changing the schedule, though,” answered Dr. Palmer.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, he was originally going to wait until she died to autopsy, but she’s lasted so long, he wants to reduce her down to normal pressure and temperature and take her out. See if she can ‘go back to normal.’”
Chung looked through the glass at Lucy’s swollen tongue. She was salivating heavily down her chin. “Think she’ll ever be normal after this?”
“Who knows? We’ll take her out and see how she does. Hey—you hear about Ted Bell?” asked Dr. Palmer.
“Last I heard he was at the bottom of the Pacific on the Challenger,” answered Chung.
“Oh shit—you didn’t catch the news yet, huh?”
“I’ve been down here all night. What happened?”
“Disaster on the sea lab. They sent a DSRV down to try and rescue the survivors. No word on whether he made it up or not. Sounded pretty bad. Guess we’ll know more when they hit the surface.”
“Wow. Sorry to hear it,” said Chung. Ted was a well-regarded scientist who was missed when he transferred to ODSR. “You know, without Ted, we never would have had this success with Lucy.”
Dr. Summers nodded. “Yeah, the guy really knows his Deinococcus. Wonder if he had any luck down there with the deep-sea tube worms.”
************
Twenty-one thousand feet below the surface of the ocean, the broken Challenger lay on its side, not far from the billowing vent where it had originally rested. In the frozen dark, a fuzzy crab scurried through the mussels and clams that had flourished in the inhospitable deep-sea world of the black smoker. Only a few hundred yards away, a blue whale carcass had started a new ecosystem. The barren seafloor now teemed with life, as scavengers ate their way through the enormous carcass. A hagfish began to wriggle out of the blowhole, having tunneled its way through the massive beast. Its head had only just appeared when a suction-cupped hand grabbed it and pulled.
The eel-like fish sent out a cloud of slime to defend itself, but the creature holding it fired its own slime back at its prey, enveloping it in digestive enzymes that paralyzed the fish. What had once been James Lewis, the commanding officer of the broken vessel that lay nearby, gripped the fish tightly in its suction cups, the hooks tearing open the flesh as his tongue shot out to slurp up the nutrition. He ate quickly, preferring the hot water near the vent to that of the whale fall. As soon as he had eaten his fill, he would head back to the colony of tube worms and reanchor himself to rest and warm up.
Nearby, an arm pulled itself along the ocean floor by its fingers, feeling around for copepods and scraps of food.