The Deep (5 page)

Luke leaned forward, dimly aware of the throbbing tension in his chest.

“I really don’t think security matters much, anyway,” Felz said, more to himself than to Luke. “I’m not sure anyone could move it, even if they wanted to.”

“Why?” Luke asked.

“Because,” Felz said softly, “it’s exactly where it wants to be.”

The cooler contained a single sealed petri dish. Felz reached for it with great reverence, fear, or some combination of both.

“You need to keep it that cold?” Luke asked.

Felz gave a tepid smile. “We don’t know. It seems unwise to place it
in an environment conducive to growth. I mean, we don’t want it growing. Not yet.”

He set the petri dish on the lab bench. The lid was fogged. The condensation evaporated, the glass clearing by degrees.

“Isn’t it magnificent?” said Felz.

11.

MAGNIFICENT
was one word for it.

But
mundane
also came to mind.

A gelatinous blob the size of a robin’s egg. It looked like a glob of partially set Jell-O. Not one of the colorful flavors, either. A drab
nothing
color—the color you’d get if you scraped a billion thumbprints off a million windowpanes and collected them into a ball.

“What is it?”

“It’s resistant to categorization,” said Felz. “Every standard test—DNA cataloguing, cellular identity, chemical pattern bonding . . . all inconclusive. No matches to any known flora, fauna, DNA structures, or chemical compounds. It’s . . . well, like I said, uncategorizable.”

“Is there a name for it?”

“Formally? Scientifically? Nothing yet,” Felz said. “It’s known internally as Specimen 1-G. We’ve had a few other specimens in hand, but they vanished.”

Vanished.
Luke hated that particular word.

“What do you mean?” he said. “They died or . . . ?”

Felz shook his head. “No. They just disappeared and . . .
evanesced
. Vaporized. Gone away. Informally, your brother and I have a name for it.
Ambrosia
, after the Greek word for nectar of the gods. Initially it was lying on a bed of agar gel—the standard petri dish base. Microbial growth does not destroy the gel structure, as microorganisms are unable to digest agar. But this specimen did something to the agar. It, well . . .
harmonized
it, I guess you could say.”

“You mean
ate
it?”

“No, no, it
added
the agar to itself. Transmuted the agar to make
more
of itself. The sample used to be much smaller. There’s nothing
left of the agar, and its mass has been added to the ambrosia. It would be the equivalent of, oh, I don’t know—say instead of eating a loaf of bread, you somehow
added
the loaf to your body. Changed its cell structure to mimic your own, retained its shape and size, and ended up with a new appendage exactly resembling that loaf.” Felz pointed. Luke followed his finger—which he noticed was trembling. “If you look carefully, you can see it’s started to do the same to the dish.”

Luke noted a slight depression in the petri dish, as if it’d been eaten away by acid. He imagined the ambrosia eating through the glass, then the cooler and the floor until it plopped into one of the nitrogen-filled bladders, assimilating the gas somehow, making itself bigger, spreading across the bottom of the
Hesperus
like a tenacious weed.

“Is it some kind of parasite? Or something from the fossil age?”

“It’s something much more than that,” said Felz. “If it’s primitive, I suppose it would be in the way sharks are: they were perfectly built from the start, so they never needed to evolve. But sharks are common. They’re of this world. This thing is infinitely more complex.”

“What do you mean—it’s
alien
?”

Felz didn’t answer. Luke realized that the specimen wasn’t quite as lusterless as it’d seemed at first. It
sparkled
. The shimmer reminded Luke of marbles. Marbles in a mesh sack, each one glossed by the sun. The marbles he’d played with as a child.

Luke leaned in to get a better look. Veins of light streaked through the ambrosia’s interior. Coin-bright shafts of light, like zaps of lightning but more colorful: reds and violets and emeralds and incandescent whites.

So transfixing. Luke could watch it all day and night . . .

Felz squeezed Luke’s elbow. “Hey. You shouldn’t look at it for too long. It’s got a strange way about it.”

Dull anger hived in Luke’s stomach. He wanted to look some more, but Felz—the killjoy bastard—was intent on stopping him.

“I’m okay,” Luke said. “I’m fine, damn it.” Luke snapped back to himself. He smiled sheepishly at Felz. “I’m sorry.”

Felz returned the dish to the cooler. “It’ll pass. It’s one of the effects the ambrosia possesses.”

“So where the hell did it come from?” Luke asked, half knowing already.

Felz pointed downward. “The deep.”

“How did you—?”

“Four years ago a pollack ship, the
Olympiad
, was bottom-trawling twenty miles north of here,” Felz said. “Their winch broke, so to avoid damaging the net the captain charted a course for the Mariana Trench. It’s so deep that the ship could circle safely until the winch was fixed. When the net was dragged up, it was full of by-catch—that is, marine life they hadn’t set out to capture. They found a lantern fish, a species that commonly dwells several miles beneath the surface. It was still alive, which was the first shock. Lantern fish live in darkness, under tremendous pressure. If they swim toward the surface, the lessened pressure pulls their body apart. Not only that, but the sunlight attacks their flesh like acid. The only way to study lantern fish, or anything that dwells at those depths, is to do so in their habitat. Which is why so little is known about them.”

“The lantern fish they found was intact?”

“Not just that, Dr. Nelson. It was
alive.
It may’ve been thrown over the side if not for the intervention of Dr. Eva Parks, a marine biologist who was onboard to study pollack migratory patterns. She spied the fish and recognized its inconceivability. She was scrupulous: she pegged the ship’s longitude and latitude, fixing its position. Otherwise your brother and I wouldn’t have known where to begin our search. Dr. Parks took a few measurements—length, girth, weight—before the fish started to show signs of incipient mortality. She began to hastily count the annuli on its scales. Perhaps you know of these?”

“They’re what, age rings?” Luke said. “The same as when you cut down a tree; count the number of rings, you get its age.”

Felz nodded. “Exactly so. But Parks couldn’t count the rings. There were simply
too many
. They were lapped over and over, ring upon ring
over
ring, making an accurate enumeration impossible.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, Dr. Nelson,” Felz said, “the fish was functionally ageless. So old that the common method of analysis was useless.”

“How long do lantern fish live?”

“Twenty or thirty years, likely. This one could’ve been several hundred years old, a thousand years old, or even older. As in, immeasurably old.”

“How is that possible?”

Felz showed Luke his open palms as if to say:
It shouldn’t
be
possible.
“During Dr. Parks’ examination, the fish expired. As she related it, it didn’t just die—it
decomposed
. Almost instantaneously, it surrendered cellular integrity. It rotted in real time. Imagine the trauma it would’ve sustained while rising to the surface, the attacks by pressure and sunlight. Now imagine it all happening at once. Dr. Parks took a video of the aftermath. A black pool of gunk. And shortly after that came another shock.”

Felz gestured to the cooler.

“Dr. Parks discovered a tiny particle of ambrosia beside the carcass. No bigger than a few stuck-together grains of sand; it’s a miracle she was able to distinguish it from the rotted matter. She put it in a petri dish, as scientists do.”

“So you’re saying . . .”

“That the ambrosia kept the lantern fish alive for a minor eternity? That the ambrosia kept that same fish alive, protecting it somehow, as it rose through the oceanic zones? That the ambrosia didn’t
allow
that fish to die until it deserted its body, either voluntarily or through some other organic process?” Felz showed Luke his palms again. “Many signs point to yes.”

“So this stuff is floating around down there, attaching itself to aquatic life?”

Felz shook his head. “The lantern fish was an anomaly. We’ve found no further presence of ambrosia at that depth. Our speculation is that the fish hunted near a thermal vent; a tiny shred of ambrosia could have floated up from below and moored to the fish. The only place we’ve found any concentration of ambrosia—or what we
believe to be
ambrosia—is much deeper. The deepest part of the Mariana Trench, in fact. Right in the area of Challenger Deep.”

“Which is where the
Trieste
is.”

Felz nodded. “We sent down observation cameras first, when the idea of constructing a station at that depth was still in its infancy. We had to know if the effort was worthwhile. The camera lenses kept shattering under pressure, but the footage was promising. Globules of matter drifting over the trench floor. Strange movements—the sort commonly associated with sentient life. Which goes against all prior understandings of those depths. For decades, nobody thought
anything
could exist down there. The monolithic pressure, a total absence of nourishing light. How could anything survive?”

“And that was enough to kick-start all of this?” Luke said. “A few blobs fluttering around at the bottom of the ocean?”

“Desperate times, Dr. Nelson.”

Luke lapsed into silence.

“You seem underwhelmed,” said Felz. “Or is it dubious? I felt the same way at first.
Nothing should live down there
.
What good could it do us, anyway?
But then I saw for myself. Your brother showed me.”

“How did Clayton get involved with all this?”

Felz said: “When you discover something like ambrosia—the equivalent of an intricate organic riddle—who would you summon, if not the world’s foremost riddle solver?”

He waved Luke toward the back of the room.

“Come here. Let me show you something else.”

12.

FELZ’S LAPTOP
sat on the lab bench.

“Hang on. It’s here somewhere.” He scrolled the mouse across the files littering the computer’s desktop. “You’ve followed your brother’s work, I take it? Surely you know about his cancer mouse?”

How could Luke not? It was his brother’s best-known contribution to science, far more impressive than Doug, his nose-mouse. Clayton hadn’t discovered a cure for cancer, far from it. But he had found a way to
give
cancer to a mouse. And he gave it with pinpoint precision—he could isolate the location, the organ or tissue, and control the complexity of its spread: malignant or benign, dormant or devouring.

Clayton’s very special mice were
born
with cancer. They were engineered to be sick—specifically and perfectly, from a scientific point of view. A researcher could order fifty mice with Stage 2 lung cancer. Or a hundred mice with advanced liver cancer, or ten with benign stomach tumors. Clayton’s mice were a boon to science. They were born carrying the pathogen that would kill them—and they were never truly healthy, not for one moment of their lives. Animal rights activists were none too thrilled, to put it mildly, but that didn’t stop researchers everywhere from hoisting Clayton on their collective shoulders.

“Your brother heard about Dr. Parks and the foreign matter she’d isolated,” said Felz. “Shortly thereafter, the sample was delivered to our lab for study.”

“And Dr. Parks had no problem with that?”

“Dr. Parks was given an opportunity to stay with the project. She opted not to take that opportunity.”

“Clayton muscled her out?”

Felz looked up sharply. “Nothing like that, I assure you.”

Luke saw no use in pursuing the issue. “So when the sample arrived . . . ?”

“Your brother absented himself for several days. He’d emerge from the lab weary but excited. As the days ground on, confusion wore through that excitement.
I don’t know,
he told me.
I really can’t tell you anything about this substance. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before on this earth
.”

Felz located the .mov file he’d been searching for.

CANCER MOUSE AMBROSIA, TEST 1-B.

“For this test, Clayton created a special mouse,” Felz said. “It didn’t have
one
cancer; it had virtually all of them. It was sick in every way it was possible to
be
sick. Liver, pancreatic, spinal, skin, bowel. It was on death’s door by the time the first experiment took place.”

“Why 1-B?” Luke asked. “What happened to 1-A?”

“The ambrosia didn’t interact with the first test subject. It . . . refused to, is I suppose the only explanation. As such, the subject expired. Now watch, Dr. Nelson. I think you’ll find it quite extraordinary.”

Felz clicked the
play
arrow on the file.

A tight shot: a mouse in a lab tray. It squeaked in obvious pain and tottered a few inches across the tray before toppling over, breathing heavily.

A hand entered the frame—Clayton’s hand, his fingers gripping a pair of tweezers. Clayton’s other hand appeared, and in it, a petri dish. He tweezed out a speck of ambrosia and laid it beside the mouse.

The mouse lay still. Luke was aware of the passage of time only in the tension that built up in his arms and fingers, and the sheen of sweat slicking his forehead.

The mouse dragged itself to the ambrosia. Its squeaks sounded different: almost
pleading
, though that was surely only Luke’s interpretation. It drew nearer to the speck until—

“Whoa, what the hell happened there?” Luke said.

Felz moved the cursor, backtracking the file. He played it again. Luke concentrated this time—he
knew
it was coming. And still . . .