She Walks in Shadows (27 page)

Anna feels slightly bad whenever she is irritated at Bianca’s accent. She knows her own English makes it very clear her native language neither uses intonation nor manages to teach it well to schoolchildren.

Professor Jacobsen is as cheerful and as oddly dressed as at the conference. She has tons of ideas that she flings in rapid meetings, expecting her underlings to catch them all, weed out the impossible ones and do the rest within a day. Anna works long days in the wetlab, testing the growth of little
cthulhu
in different environments.

Max the SAXS guy turns out to be a close colleague of Professor Jacobsen. He always remembers to switch the conversation to English, which is only one of the qualities that make him a highly likeable guy despite his hammer-like qualities. When he asks for samples, Anna sees no reason to say no. “What would Professor Jacobsen say?” she asks jokingly.

“Lise has many good qualities,” Max answers with a wink, “but understanding my technique is not one of them. How I waste my time is not her business.”

Anna feels unnerved by the Archaea. They seem to be thriving in all sorts of conditions, as long as lethal amounts of salt are present, and looking in the microscope is puzzling every time. The edge of the biofilm looks the same regardless of the magnification, with the nested patterns present in all size scales.

When the critters are thriving, they easily grow into colonies that cover the whole petri dish. The edges of the colony are frayed, but one end (the top, Anna calls it, even though it makes little sense in the context of the edge of a horizontal pattern) being smooth and the bottom growing in tail-like appendages.

If Anna puts a sample in the microscope and zooms in, the edge has little tentacles. Zoom into the edge of a tentacle, and it is covered in smaller tentacles. She repeats this until the microscope runs out of resolving power. Electron microscopy shows the same. It is unsettling having to check the size bar of images to know what the scale is.

“How do they do that?” she asks Max rhetorically.

“How do they do this?” Max asks back, showing her graphs that make little sense. Max explains that the fractal structure goes down as far as he can see, down to nanometers.

“We could see that from electron microscopy,” Professor Jacobsen points out sharply.

“Can you quantify it from your precious microscopy? Can you get out a number? Standard deviation?” retorts Max, but no one is interested in the fractal dimension he has so meticulously calculated. No one except Max seems to even know what a fractal dimension is — except Bianca, who exhausts Anna with a discussion Anna has little to say in, seeing as she neither understands the underlying mathematics nor the crucial words due to Bianca’s pronunciation.

When Anna disrupts the centimeter-sized, ghost-shaped colonies and scoops parts of the gel to new petri dishes, they regenerate their shape. No matter which way she slices the thing, it repairs itself to a new ghostly image. “Zey know which way zey are growing,” Bianca says. Max comments that perhaps the shape of the Archeon favors packing in a certain direction. There is talk of an article in the air.

“It is going to sound like a joke paper,” says Anna. “‘
H. cthulhu
grows in its own image’ — who would publish that?”

“Who
wouldn’t
want to publish that? We just have to figure out why this happens. Have some faith. Don’t be so depressing.” Max smiles.

“I’m Finnish,” Anna retorts. “We don’t do optimism.” Everyone laughs.

The stay in Copenhagen takes its toll. Anna sleeps badly and often startles awake in the middle of the night, damp with cold sweat. She doesn’t remember her dreams, but the unnerved feeling she wakes up to stays with her until early afternoon.

The time difference to Helsinki is negligible, although she blamed her tiredness on that for the first few nights — she had to take the morning flight out and wake up at five o’clock Finnish time. During her second week, the viability of the excuse has run out.

Every morning, she is met by a chipper Bianca in the wetlab. Anna frankly doesn’t know why Bianca spends so much time there — she would have supposed a postdoc would have left the tedious, repetitive experiments to Masters students or lab technicians. Bianca’s chatter is a non-stop mix of hard science, interesting TV programs, and her own worldview, which is a collection of oddly science-based New Age beliefs. She has perfected the art of changing conversations from genetics to the power of thoughts to shape the reality and back again without a blink. Anna notes that Bianca, too, seems more and more tired, but the growing dark shadows under her eyes do not seem to affect her mood.

“So, how do you like Bianca?” Max asks on one coffee break, when Bianca has just abruptly left to check the temperature of her culture. Bianca’s exit leaves unfinished her long-winded story about people who have spent a lot of time together hearing each other’s thoughts due to quantum coupling.

“She’s nice,” Anna says noncommittally. “Very perky.”

“She’s under a lot of pressure, but she is a good scientist, you know,” Max says. “Just not a physicist. You have to let the force fields and twisted quantum telepathy go in one ear and out the other. What she does in biology is close to magic. In a good and scientific way.”

“So, you can be a good scientist without being a physicist?” teases Anna. Max smiles.

“It is rare,” he admits with a wink, “but you can be a good scientist even if you are not a physicist. Not knowing about SAXS, though, that’s another matter.”

Anna laughs.

“How do you feel about going home?” Max asks.

“Fine, I guess. I haven’t slept so well here. I guess I’m in need of a long holiday,” Anna answers truthfully. “Frankly, I miss my cat. My parents are taking care of it.”

On her last Saturday in Copenhagen, Anna fails to sleep at all. She cannot pinpoint the reason for the nervousness that makes her hands shake. She falls into a restless slumber, only to jolt back to consciousness mere minutes later, drenched with sweat and shaking from the cold. She is sure she has seen nightmares, but cannot remember. The feeling of dread lingers.

Anna finally gives up and takes a long, warm shower to wash off the sour-smelling night sweat. Not knowing what else to do sleepless in a strange city, she decides to go into work. Riding the noisy bus only strengthens her resolve. She cannot handle crowds in this state of tiredness — it is best to exhaust herself with work and maybe take the beginning of the next week off for some last-minute sightseeing.

The lab is almost as dark and empty as one would expect, but Anna notices a cone of light through the open door to the wetlab. Curious, she turns towards it and steps in a puddle of water.

“
Perkele,
” Anna swears, then looks around to see whether anyone heard her. The laboratory, which until that point was quiet, bursts into a high-pitched hum, drowning out the rest of her surprised, Finnish curses.

The water level is higher closer to the laboratory. There are waves going around in the liquid. Anna dials the campus security and tells them there is, at a minimum, a plumbing problem in the microbiology laboratory.

“Do you know what happened?” asks the bored-sounding person on duty. “Can you go and check? Perhaps this could wait until Monday.”

“I’m ankle-deep in water,” Anna retorts. “I don’t know what happened, but I’m certain it cannot wait.”

The phone operator promises to stay on the phone with Anna while she goes to check. Anna sighs. Her shoes and trousers are already wet to the knee, so there’s nothing to be gained by refusing. The light from the wetlab flickers and the piercing hum drowns out every thought in her mind.

She imagines burst pipes, wet laboratory books, and ruined experiments when she walks towards the laboratory. Nothing could prepare her for what she sees. The phone falls from her limp hand — the water has risen above knee-level and the foaming wave tops brush Anna’s fingertips when her hands fall meekly to her sides.

The laboratory is covered in water. Bianca stands a few meters in front of Anna, her face turned towards the middle of the room and her hands raised in a salute. Laboratory benches have fallen. There is a vortex in the middle of the room and from that vortex rises a familiar shape. It is green and yellow, and smells disconcertingly of salt and biofilms under the stench of rotten guts and sulphur.

Anna tries to look at the ghost-like shape of the
cthulhu
and her eyes are drawn to its short, thick, strong tentacles. The edges of them are lined with villi, each one a perfect miniature of the creature standing in front of her. The creature’s edges are dissolved into a fuzz. Anna suddenly realizes it is because every tentacle is lined with perfect little
cthulhu
shapes, which have perfect little tentacles, which have perfect little
chulthu
shapes ....

Bianca turns to face Anna. Her eyes are wide and bloodshot, her mouth frozen in a scream, but Anna cannot hear it. She does not know whether it is because Bianca is not making a sound or because the buzz of the creature fills her ears.

Anna tries to grab Bianca’s arm. “Come! Run!” Her tongue feels thick in her mouth, but she manages to spit the syllables out. Bianca looks at Anna without a sign of recognition. Waves of darkness emanate from the Ancient One and the dread almost brings Anna to her knees. The vortex spins faster — the water is almost up to Bianca’s neck.

Anna reaches out again and manages to get a hold of Bianca’s forearm. Bianca looks startled, and Anna tries to pull her away from the horror. Away from the vortex, away from the impossibly rising water. Bianca loses her balance and Anna manages to pull her, floating, towards the doorway.

“
Apua!
” Anna pants, all the words in the English language gone from her mind. “Run! Help!”

Bianca struggles to regain her balance. For a moment, she looks at Anna and there is a sad smile on her face. Then it is gone and she emits a manic laughter. She grabs Anna’s hand in a death grip and pulls her towards the center of the room.

“Stop!” Anna screams. Bianca’s fingers are like steel and she pulls on Anna with a determination Anna can barely match. She grabs onto whatever she can, but the wall is sleek and there is nothing to hold onto.

Suddenly everything stops. The buzz and hum dies out. Bianca stops pulling and the terror in the middle of the room raises its front tentacles. Even the vortex stops.

The
cthulhu
slams down its tentacles and time starts again. The vortex changes direction and Bianca is not prepared. She is slammed into Anna, who makes a final, desperate grab and gets one arm around a thick, round pipe. When it starts to give away, she realizes it is not a pipe.

The safety chain of the nitrogen bottle gives away and the bottle starts to fall. It goes into a slow, wobbly spin, almost regaining its balance before finally toppling over. The top hits the wall, the nozzle breaks, and the explosion sends the bottle bottom-first towards the center of darkness. The light flickers once more and goes out.

Anna struggles to get her head above water, but she doesn’t know which way to go for. She is thrown around by the vortex. Her legs are cramping and her sides sting from fighting the reflex to breathe.