Being good at something—even the best that humanity’s billions could offer—didn’t make him good at everything. It just made him too powerful to say no to. And so when he decided to make himself into an immortal god-king, not for his own benefit, but to selflessly provide the human race with the continuing stable leadership that it needed in order to storm heaven and kill God, he’d already talked himself and everyone around him into thinking he was as impressive as the story about him claimed.
Only a few people officially knew how badly that plan had gone. Elvi was one. Fayez was another.
He heard Elvi and Cara talking as soon as he came into the corridor for her lab. The door to Elvi’s office was open, and Cara was floating in the open space between the workbench and the medical scanners. The young woman’s—girl’s—face was bright with excitement, and she gestured as she spoke, as if she needed to stuff more meaning into the words than mere syllables could hold. Elvi was strapped into her crash couch, taking notes as they spoke. Except for the part where they didn’t look even vaguely genetically related, they reminded Fayez of a grandmother and granddaughter bonding through solving some great puzzle. Even before he could make out what they were saying, the tones of their voices told the story. Giddy and enthusiastic was the good spin. Fevered and manic also fit.
“Then there was this sense of . . . of light?” Cara said. “Like we were eating eyes and it made me able to see.”
“That actually fits,” Elvi said.
“It does?” Fayez said. “What does it fit into? Because I just learned a lot about light, and it was really weird.”
Elvi’s smile wasn’t annoyed at all, and Cara’s was only a little. “I think our sea slugs hit a milestone,” Elvi said. “They already had a method of exchanging information through direct physical transfer, like bacteria trading plasmids. If we’re getting this right, they formed a mutualistic relationship or successful parasitism with a little goo cap that could go down to the volcanic vents and come back up.”
“Ooh. Dirty,” Fayez said, pulling himself fully into the room. With all three of them, it was a little tighter than comfort, but Cara grabbed the wall and made space for him. “How did the eyeballs come into it?”
“They harvested evolutionary innovations from the faster ecosystem. Something down by the vent figured out a rudimentary infrared eye so that it could navigate the vent. The slugs got it, put it on the signaling protein mechanism, and all of a sudden they didn’t need to stick plasmids into each other to share information anymore. They could do infrared semaphore.”
“No, it was light,” Cara said.
“Maybe bioluminescence,” Elvi agreed. “At that point, the very slow things started being able to talk very very fast. And they start looking a lot less like jellyfish and a lot more like free-floating neurons. Plus we already see the deep strategy of sending out semi-biological runners to inhospitable biomes and implanting instruction sets into whatever life they find there. Which—I’m stretching here—starts sounding a lot like the protomolecule’s mission on Phoebe . . .” Her voice trailed off. Her smile shifted to something more rueful. “But that’s not what you came to talk about, is it?”
“There’s a briefing you should totally listen to, but no,” Fayez said. “I needed to talk about something else.”
“Cara? Could we take a quick break?”
The black eyes were still for a fraction of a second, then flickered up to Fayez and away. “Sure. No problem.”
Cara pushed herself to the doorway and out into the corridor, closing the office door behind her as she went. Fayez drifted to the medical scanners. Cara’s readouts were still on the screens. He traced the curve of her stress metabolites. He wouldn’t have known what they were, except Elvi had explained them.
“They’re not as high as they look,” she said, a little defensively. “We don’t even really know what the upper boundary is for someone who’s been modified like her.”
“I didn’t know you were doing another dive today,” Fayez said.
“She felt up to it. That’s not what you came for either, is it?”
He shut down the screens, rotated back to face Elvi, and braced on a foothold. “The Tanaka thing is a problem.”
She had looked tired before he said it. She looked worse now. “What are we seeing?”
“She’s reallocated and retasked four workgroups. Instead of doing deep background scanning, they’re searching for an artifact that may or may not have left from Laconia and doing deep brain scans of Trejo looking for . . . I don’t know what.”