A THUMPING SOUNDED FROM inside the egg. The monster spoke: Shit - shit - shit - shit - shit - shit - where - are - your - health - and - safety - protocols - now.
Shulgi strained to understand the words.
I’m - the - child - of - your - child’s - child’s - child.
It laughed. A human sound, but demented. Perhaps it would attack now. He readied his weapons.
* * *
Minh added a manual arthropod biodiversity survey to the workflow—no analysis, only collection and cataloguing. The samples would have no provenance, no metadata, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to work with incomplete information. It was better than nothing. Arthropods had been an unsolvable problem, but now they were a research management hassle.
She filled Kiki’s work breakdown with fab tasks. They needed hundreds of sample jars, in all sizes, stackable, airtight, sterile. And it would keep Kiki away from Fabian.
Minh paced around the fab. “We need cellular fixative to preserve the samples. Formalin isn’t much more than formaldehyde in solution. Easy.”
Kiki looked up from the humming fab. “This kind of fab can’t print liquids.”
“But you can make the equipment to make liquids.”
“Technically, yes. Let me see.” The skin under Kiki’s left eye twitched. “To make formaldehyde, we need alcohol. I could make a still. Where do you want to get the carbohydrates?”
Minh looked around. “Palm trees?”
“Do you really want me to fab a chain saw and start cutting down trees?”
“No, that’s ridiculous. Can’t you print carbohydrates?”
“Not while I’m making sample jars.”
“Why didn’t we bring any alcohol with us?”
Kiki shrugged and turned back to monitor the fab as it chugged out sample jars.
Minh scrubbed her fingers through her hair. This was getting out of hand.
“Most samples can be stored dry,” Minh said to Kiki’s back. “Soft-bodied specimens can go into a saline solution.”
“Salt water.” Kiki didn’t turn around.
“Not perfect, but we’re improvising.”
“A lot of improvising going on,” Kiki said under her breath.
Kiki stacked a row of tiny jars onto the rack she’d fabbed earlier. Two dozen jars took nearly twenty minutes to create. They didn’t even have lids.
“How do you want to sterilize these?” Kiki asked. Her back was still turned.
“You’ll have to fab a dry-heat sterilizer. Easy. Why is this taking so long?”
Kiki plopped a jar into Minh’s hand. “This fab isn’t optimized for small, fine work. It chokes on the jar threads.”
“Then make a different kind of container.”
Kiki rounded on her, eyes narrowed. “You said make jars.”
“Make whatever fabs fastest. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s airtight.”
By the time they were ready for the second landing, Kiki had filled every corner of the skip with jars, tubs, cartons, and containers. When Minh strapped into her seat, Kiki dumped a bandolier of test tubes in her lap. They were still hot from the sterilizer.
Two minutes into the upskip, Hamid was snoring as usual. Behind him, Kiki was asleep, too, long arms softly drifting. Fabian was head-down in the feeds, unfocused eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. He’d promised to keep close tabs on their landing site, and Minh dropped into his feed whenever she could, to make sure health and safety was top priority in his workflow. Their second landing was scheduled to last thirty-six hours, and Minh didn’t want lose one moment on the ground.
She glanced at her workflows. Her analyses were running well, with climate data funneling in from the microclimate sites, and biodiversity survey cameras running their programs efficiently. The microscopic floating gauges she’d released into the Euphrates were beginning to illuminate the rivers with hydrometric and water temperature data. The gauges were flowing into the Tigris through the narrow canals joining the two rivers, and were making their way up into the tributaries, through the canals, the ponds, irrigation ditches, and reservoirs, and down to the coastal wetlands. The data was still patchy, but the numbers looked solid.
The instream biodiversity survey was another matter. High levels of suspended sediment kept the underwater cameras from trapping visual data, so the seers extrapolated species from infrared and sonar. A lot of gaps in those data sets.
Minh checked her queue. It was packed with bookmarks, mostly from Hamid. She flipped through them and got an eyeful of horse docs, full data trapped from multiple angles. A dizzying parade of animals grazing, laboring under harness and saddle, or lazing in the shade. She dove into the biota survey feeds. More horses.
She flicked a sharp toe across Hamid’s shoulder.
Have you looked at anything other than horses since we got here?
Hamid snorted, then nestled back against his headrest, hand over his eyes. His fake hove into view. It smirked.
I knew you were going to say that. Take a closer look.
It tossed her a metadata catalog. Hamid’s portion of the biota survey was ahead of target, with hundreds of species recorded and prioritized for the sampling wasps. But when she rifled through the bookmarks, all she saw were horses. She shook her head and looked closer. No, the catalogued species were there with the horses. A fox slipping behind the hocks of a dozing mare to nab a field mouse. A crested lark hopping across a pair of brown haunches. A tall heron fishing in the shallows with a mare and foal in the pasture beyond. Sheep in a dawn-lit corral, nosing a few flakes of grain from the dirt beside a horse hoof.
Hamid had found a way to do his work and feed his horse obsession at the same time.
You’re sneaky.
Thanks, boss. The fake tipped its ridiculous hat and faded away.
Fabian had sent her bookmarks, too. Violent ones, showing the faces of brutality—cold, heartless, bloody. Screaming fights witnessed through windows. Men beating men, men beating women, both beating children, all of them beating animals.
Fabian’s message was clear. No point in sympathizing with past population members. They get what they deserve.
It was enough for Minh. She flushed the whole stack.
Only three bookmarks from Kiki. One showed a crowded open-air pottery workshop, the artisans chattering to each other as they sweated in the heat from a glowing kiln. Another showed a row of children in the shade of a plane tree, poking sticks into wads of clay under the watchful eye of a stooped oldster. The third bookmark showed a pair of people lazing in a blanket-strewn alcove, holding hands and chatting quietly. If Hamid’s passion was horses, and Fabian was fixated on violence, Minh supposed what Kiki really cared about was people.
A harmless obsession, she figured.
Minh reached back into her history and pulled up the falconer bookmark. The pink tunic’s color signature was distinctive; she grabbed the string and ran a search through the past few days of data.
Easy. Yesterday, a camera had trapped the falconer in the background of the vegetation survey, perched on a wall, eating bread smeared with something greasy. It dripped down her chin and blotched her tunic, then the camera moved on.
Minh cross-referenced the time and location on the previous day’s satellite feed and ran the feed backward, tracking the falconer to a mud brick shack in a village surrounded by vineyards and orchards. Then she grabbed that morning’s satellite feed and tagged the falconer as she left the house. The feed zipped ahead, tracing her route through the fields. The falconer’s long shadow shortened as the sun rose. The bird flew from her wrist and snapped back like a toy on a rubber band.
The satellite feed shuddered into real time. The falconer was striding through a riverside village. Minh grabbed the nearest camera and sent it spinning toward her.
By the time the camera arrived, a gang of farmers surrounded the falconer. They were clearly upset, throwing their arms around and yelling, but the falconer didn’t seem worried. She listened patiently, scuffing her foot in the red dirt and waggling her head from side to side in a gesture that appeared to be the local version of a nod.
A child spotted Minh’s camera and yelped. Heads turned, jaws dropped, but before the crowd could erupt into chaos, the falconer barked an order. The farmers formed a ragged line and clasped their hands in front of their bare bellies.
The falconer turned and stared into Minh’s eyes. She was about the same age as Kiki, and like Kiki, her skin glowed with that impossible sheen of youth, marred by a few tiny imperfections: a pale scar on her chin, and a constellation of shallow pockmarks on her cheeks.
She’d been through a plague of her own, this one.
Minh turned the camera toward the farmers. Thumb-to-thumb and finger-to-finger, their navels peeked out from between their hands like pupils in a line of shadowed eyes.
We see you, the gesture clearly said. Go away.
I see you, too. Minh tipped the camera from side to side, mimicking the waggling nod the falconer had made moments earlier. Then she let the camera go back to its survey.