So—nomenclature, the name we scientists give to the way we name things. Crimsy got her name the scientific way—by committee—but not without the rules of our name game, aka nomenclature.
Crimso comes from “crimson,” the color of Mars, better known as the Red Planet. “A coccus is any bacterium that has a spherical, ovoid, or generally round shape.” (I got that from Wikipedia, which I “shall never cite,” according to the Ten Commandments of Academic Research). Crimsococcus, therefore, means “oval-shaped bacterium found on the red planet.”
The second part of Crimsy’s name is two names combined: halocryophilus. “Halophiles” love salt. “Cryophiles” love cold. Halocryophiles are ready-made for salty, icy Martian water. Crimsococcus halocryophilus is, therefore, an oval-shaped bacteria found on Mars that thrives in frozen saltwater.
Not very exotic, I know, but that’s part of Crimsy’s ironic charm: she’s boring. In fact, if we had found her on Earth, she probably wouldn’t even merit an article in a mid-tier microbiology journal. We might have to shoot for a (dread) bottom-tier journal, and load the bylines with pre-docs and post-docs just to get them the publication credit.
But hailing from Mars makes Crimsy special, an exotic foreigner like her Earthling cousins in all ways except her hometown. The details of her drab existence in a pool of frozen saltwater on a cold and lifeless planet (if you define “life” as “lively”) have prompted me to ponder just how exotic she is. Or even how foreign.
But Mars. She’s from Mars!
It was like I felt on my first trip to Paris, my first upward stare at La tour Eiffel as the scruffy guy next to me ran off with the cell phone some naive tourists lent him to take their picture. “But this is Paris!” I said to myself, which made even the pettiest theft, and the homeless people sleeping around the Cathedral de Notre Dame, and the rude waiters at the Left Bank Cafes, and the long lines to see anything cool, like the Mona Lisa, seem thrilling.
Her Martian roots may also explain why I gave Crimsy a pedestrian nickname. It made her more accessible, especially to the kids in my brother David’s sixth grade science class, where he persuaded me to give a guest lecture on the exciting life of a scientist in a field with a very cool name—astrobiology—who just happened to be on the team that discovered Life on Mars. We weren’t allowed to talk to the media, but as far as I knew, it was okay to talk about Crimsy absent reporters or recorders. I asked the class to turn off any recording devices. I guess if a student went to the press, I could say “a sixth grader told you that?” and decline further comment.
I put up a slide on David’s 3D whiteboard, which projected a three-dimensional image next to me I could manipulate with my fingers. Discovered in a treasure trove of “lost” Steve Jobs papers and designs, 3D projectors, whiteboards, phone apps, books, televisions, video games, and wristwatches didn’t display mere holograms, but images you could barely tell apart from the real things. When companies introduced the projectors a few years ago, the images looked more like wax figures. Now, my brother’s class could explore a fantastical creature from a faraway place with every feature perfectly rendered and exquisitely displayed.
“Introducing Crimsococcus halocryophilus,” I told the class. “Crimsy, for short.” It was a high-res image of green-blue spots captured after BiolEyeT had infected the microbes with the colored phages on the planet surface.
“How do you know it’s a real germ?” a boy asked.
“We did lots of tests on Mars. We won’t know for sure until Crimsy is here on Earth, but we’re ninety-five percent positive she’s the real deal.”
“Why is Crimsy a she?” another boy asked.
“She’s really an it,” I said. “But she’s tough. How many of you have a really tough sister or aunt or mom?”
Lots of hands went up. Point made.
“What if she attacks us?”
“Could she kill us?”
“My grandpa said Martians invaded Earth when his grandpa was a kid.”
“That was just a radio show,” I explained. “By a man named Orson Welles. It scared the whole country, but it was only fiction.”
“The first fake news, guys,” my brother interjected.
“We’re not that worried about Crimsy because we think she’s like other bacteria found on Earth,” I said. I put up another image, Planococcus halocryophilus OR1. “This guy was discovered in the Arctic. Planococcus lives in frozen saltwater, just like Crimsococcus.”
I called on a girl with her hand up.
“Orson Welles was born here,” she said. “My mom says he lived just down the street from us.”
“When did you guys finally land those projectors?” I asked David as he locked the door to the classroom.
“I don’t know if we’ve landed them yet. They’re on loan. School board is having a cow about paying for them.”
“So you’re not getting them?”
“I think the idea is to get us used to having them—at least, on the manufacturer’s part—then reel in the board later. The kids love ’em. Parents at Westwood already bought one with PTA donations.”
“You guys don’t have that kind of money.”
“No,” he said. “Our parents are lucky if they can make it to an after-school night after second shift or third job.”
We were outside now, standing next to my rental car.
“I’m sorry about what happened with mom last night,” he said. “You know she didn’t mean all that.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m the girl. I wasn’t supposed to leave home so soon.”
“You’ve busted your ass. You have nothing to apologize to mom or anyone else about.”
“I think she thinks I work in Hollywood or something. Some kind of fantasy land.”
“She wants you to suffer a shitty marriage like she did,” David said.
“I don’t think she feels that way.”
“I’m not married. She doesn’t go after me.”
I looked at the 3D time hovering above my wrist. I can’t fly—kills my ears—so I drove the thirty hours from Seattle. “Gotta get back to the lab. Crimsy’s due home in a couple weeks.”
“You mean here? Earth?”
“I should say to her adopted home.”
“I haven’t read or seen anything.”
“News blackout,” I said. “JPL wants to make sure everything’s safe on the space station before we do the grand entrance.”
“No crushed hands.”
“You mean that movie?”
“And its two sequels,” David said. “Martian germ morphs; brings Earth to the brink.”
My car door opened and I kissed my brother on his cheek. “If only real life were that exciting,” I said.