by H. A. Swain
“Hmmm,” says Uma as she lays out the dishes on the counter. “Some of these did nothing, but look at this one!” She holds up a petri dish covered with a gorgeous swirl of blue and green striations with tiny bright dots of deep orange spiraling out from a white center. “That is from a swab of Talitha’s nose. I added dyes so we could see the contrast better.”
“Looks just like a galaxy,” I say.
“What do you think it is?” Talitha stands up to join us at the counter.
“Some kind of virus and bacteria combination from the look of it,” says Uma.
“I didn’t know viruses and bacteria could be so beautiful!” Talitha says.
Uma lets go a tiny gasp of surprise. “That’s exactly what I always say!” Then she and my sister gaze at one another with goo-goo eyes.
“Gross, you guys. Stop it,” I say.
“Jealous?” Talitha asks.
“Hardly,” I say, but that’s not exactly true. Watching my sister and Uma cozied up together, heads cocked toward each other, grins on their faces, uncovers a hole inside of me. It’s one thing to stay on MUSC to learn, but I don’t think I could ever fall in love with a Moonling or feel truly welcome here.
“You’ll get used to it,” Talitha jokes.
“I’m not sure I want to stay,” I admit.
“I thought you’d be excited,” says Uma. She carries the galaxy dish to the largest machine in the room and sets it gently on a small loading platform.
“Looks like a vending machine,” Talitha laughs.
“This is Tiny Titan!” Uma pats the machine fondly as the specimen is drawn inside and the little door closes tight. “It’s the most powerful all-in-one sample preparation unit and 3-D holographic electron microscope ever built. We can see everything that’s happening inside from this holo projection.”
We crowd around to watch a small robotic arm remove the top of the petri dish, then the bottom of the dish with the material is moved into another chamber, like a pizza going into an oven.
“First, it’ll stabilize and freeze the sample to preserve it.” A burst of thick white spray covers the dish. “When that dries, the specimen will be encased in hard resin so it can be sliced.” An arm comes down from above, plucks the frozen disk out of the dish, and moves it to another chamber, where it’s suspended upright like a medallion. Next, a bright red beam of light scans the tiny frozen galaxy.
“Now watch this!” Uma says, inching closer to the projection. “This is my favorite part! First, the laser cuts the disk into cross sections.” The scanning beam breaks into a row of lines that slide down through the disk like a bread slicer. “It’ll do that over and over,” Uma says. “Cutting it into smaller and smaller units until we have ultrathin sections, one tenth of a micron thick. It’ll be too small to see, but in a few minutes, those ultrathin slices will be prepped onto slides and loaded under the electron beam for us to study.”
“Whoa,” I say, almost dizzy with excitement as I watch the process unfold in front of me.
“The electron microscope is what’s truly amazing,” Uma says. “It’s as strong as the Zeiss telescope but instead of looking far away, we can see the universe right beneath our noses.”
Talitha and I lock eyes at the mention of the Zeiss.
“We have to find Mom,” she says to me.
“I know,” I say. “I’m trying.” I’ve replayed the scene of the Observatory’s destruction over and over in my mind since I left the Earth, and I’ve pinged Talitha’s old device at least a hundred times, but our mom has yet to answer. I’m too afraid to think about what that could mean. “We’ll keep trying,” I tell my sister, because what we need now is hope.
“And then what?” Talitha says. “You’re just going to go back?”
I shrug.
“You obviously love this stuff,” Talitha says, motioning to the Tiny Titan. “If you stay, you can finally go to school and use your brain for something more than thieving and have a better life and—”
“I was doing just fine down on Earth,” I protest.
“Yeah, except when you got us caught and nearly killed by a lunatic who wanted to take over this entire survival colony,” Talitha says.
“You should be grateful for that!” I tell my sister.
“Why?”
“That’s how you met Uma,” I say.
“True!” Talitha pecks Uma on the cheek.
“You two are so in love it’s annoying,” I say, and look back at the machine so I don’t have to watch them fawn over each other.
“Our love is beautiful,” Uma says.
“As beautiful as that?” I point to the projection of bright green spheres covered with orange and blue protrusions.
Talitha steps up closer to peer at the image. “Is that what was inside of me? In that silver disk up my nose?”
“Oh, my gad…” Uma zooms in on one of the critters, getting closer and closer until we’re looking at only a single ball. “Bacteriophage!”
“Bacterio-what?” asks Talitha.
“Phage. Viruses that infect bacteria to reproduce inside them,” I say, crowding in with Uma.
“How do you know that’s what it is?” Talitha asks.
“By their shape.” Uma points to the image. “The big green ball is one bacterium. A single cell. They’re much larger than viruses. These little blue and orange protrusions are the phages.” She zooms in on one bacteriophage for us to study. “See the funny multifaceted prism on the top? That’s the head, or capsid. It’s filled with nucleic acid or DNA that has the virus’s instructions for replicating. The head sits on top of this stalk, or sheath, that’s balanced by these tail fibers.”
“Those things that look like spindly spider legs?” Talitha points and Uma nods.
“The phage inserts little tail pins, these things that look like spikes below the base plate at the bottom of the sheath. Then it burrows down, sending in the DNA from the capsid, through the sheath, into the bacterium, where it will reproduce.” She zooms out again so we see the full image of the phage-covered bacterium.
“They look like lunar landing modules,” says Talitha.
“No,” says Uma, stepping back. “They look like MUSC.”
I burst out laughing. “We’re nothing more than a giant bacteriophage stuck to the Moon!”
Giddy and tired from all that’s happened, the three of us giggle stupidly at the idea.
“You know what’s more creepy?” I ask. They look at me. “There are billions of those things still in the air and more inside the brains of nearly everyone on this station.”
That kills the mood. We all stare at the image.
“Let’s see if the DNA sequence is done yet,” Uma says. The three of us hurry back to the GenExtSeq and wait as the machine spits out lines of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts.
“What’s it doing?” Talitha asks.
“Looking for known DNA matches so we can identify the phage,” Uma explains. “Come on, come on,” she coaxes as we watch the code roll by.
After a few more seconds, the screen displays the message: No known matches.
Uma shakes her head. “That can’t be right. This database has everything. And I mean ev-er-y-thing! DNA from bacteria and viruses found everywhere from the Earth’s upper atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean and inside volcanoes; fossilized samples from Mars and off meteorites that fell to Earth; viruses that have wreaked havoc for centuries like hantavirus and Marburg and rabies; every influenza variation, rhinovirus, rotavirus; swabs from tribes in the Amazon that died out hundreds of years ago; new mutations of Ebola and dengue and HIV running amok on Earth last week. I’m going to run it again.”
We all wait with bated breath, but the same error message pops up.
“I don’t understand,” she says.
I step back, thinking over my conversations with D’Cart. “I do.”
Uma and Talitha look at me.
“This phage doesn’t come from nature. D’Cart must have engineered it,” I tell th
em.
“Then…” Uma holds her head in her hands. “What are we going to do? I can’t whip up an antidote for something we’ve never seen before.”
We all stare at the screen. I think through the problem, one step at a time. “Wait,” I say. “It’s not the phage that matters, right?”
“Of course it does!” says Talitha. “It knocked everyone out.”
“Right, but the first step is stopping the spread,” I say. “And for that, we don’t have to kill the phage…”
“You’re right!” says Uma, popping up again. “We have to get rid of the host bacteria. Without the bacteria, the phage can’t reproduce.”
“Exactly!” I say.
“Huh?” says Talitha. “I don’t get it.”
“Think of it like this,” says Uma. “If the phage is MUSC and the bacterium is the Moon, if you get rid of the Moon, you’ll definitely get rid of MUSC.”
“So … you’re going to blow up the Moon?” Talitha asks.
“In the universe of these little critters, we are!” says Uma. “If…” She pauses to take another sample tube from the centrifuge and load it into the GenExtSeq. “We can figure out what the bacterium is.”
“It’s from here,” I tell them.
“Can’t be,” Uma says.
Within seconds, we have a readout.
“Look at that!” I point at the screen. “ExB2435. It was formulated for the ExploroBot program. I found it in the MUSC Dumps.”
“It’s the goo?” Talitha asks.
I nod. “It’s a carrier. You can piggyback other things on it. I used it to send in the harmaline for DopaHacks, and D’Cart used it to transport the phages across the blood-brain barrier.”
“But if it was made by MUSC for the ExploroBots, why is everyone here so susceptible to it?” Talitha asks.
“It’s a combination of S. mitis and S. pneumoniae, plus some other stuff I don’t recognize,” Uma says, reading from the screen. “Streptococcus pneumoniae would explain the runny nose, coughing, and wheezing you experienced. And MUSCies would be particularly susceptible to Streptococcus mitis, because they have a low white blood cell count. My guess is, since MUSC only intended to use it in the ExploroBot Creation Center on Earth and ExploroBots never share our air, they didn’t think it could get to us.”
“But somehow this organism has been altered to ramp up the reproduction rate,” I point out. “Wouldn’t it usually take a half hour or more for something like this to spread?”
“Yes,” says Uma. “D’Cart did something so it can hop from person to person in less than ten seconds.”
“And that’s why everyone with a neural web implant who breathed it in passed out?” Talitha asks.
“And why we stayed awake,” Uma says. “D’Cart didn’t want to kill the MUSCies, just put their conscious minds on hold while their bodies kept running, spreading the infection, until she could get here and take control of their brains.”
“Just like MUSC does to the soldiers when they become ExploroBots,” Talitha says.
“Exactly,” Uma says.
“So what do we do now?” Talitha asks.
“Fight phage with phage!” Uma says. She opens Curie’s cold storage containment area and rummages among the vials. “We’ll try some different pneumococcal phage lytic enzymes, like Cpl-1 or Dp-1, to see if they’ll kill off the combo S. mitis/S. pneumoniae critter. If that works in the lab, we can grow enough antidote to spray through the ventilation system, which could stop the infection from spreading further.”
“Then we have to deal with the damage done inside the brains of all the people who are now asleep,” I say, talking as fast as Uma as I pull together my thoughts. “D’Cart’s next step was to hack into the cybermind. She said we’d be able to overwrite the instructions on everybody’s neural webs. So, in theory, we might be able to hack into the cybermind and install a patch that would fix the damage, then we could reboot the system so everyone comes back online.”
“Would that work?” Talitha asks.
I shrug. “If it doesn’t, it won’t cause any harm. People will either wake up and be fine or they’ll stay in this state and we’ll have to try something different.”
“While you’re in there…” Uma says as she preps cultures with different combos of phage-fighting enzymes. “Can you reprogram some of their neural web code?”
“To do what?” I ask.
“Have compassion for Earthlings?” Uma says with a dark chuckle. “Insert a hatred for the ExploroBot program? Make them all appreciate dogs?”
“Worth a try!” I joke.
The lab door opens, and we all jump, afraid we’ve been caught cracking jokes about reprogramming the brains of everyone on MUSC. But it’s Persis, carrying Aurelia’s head on the podium.
“Talitha? Castor?” Persis says. “I think that you should see this.”
“Is everything okay?” Uma asks as the three of us move toward Curie’s desk where Aurelia’s head now sits.
“Aurelia, could you please project the image you showed me?” Persis asks.
“Yes, of course,” says Aurelia. Her left eye dilates to black, and she projects a holo to the middle of the floor.
We are looking down on Earth. Immediately, I feel a twinge of longing for the blue sky and green trees and wish I could pull in a breath of fresh air. Beneath us, a person moves around the perimeter of a precarious cliff, where rubble lies strewn as if a giant hand has toppled a mountain. Radial arms of a blast pattern cover the scorched ground like rays from a black sun. Glittering stones, bits of twisted metal, sparkling shards of quartz, and splintered scraps of wood alternate along the striations in an intricate and beautiful pattern.
“Where is this?” Uma asks.
“Aurelia connected to a drone on Earth—” Persis begins to say, and then I recognize the place.
“It’s the Observatory!” I nearly shout. “Or what’s left of it now. That’s the view from one of D’Cart’s drones. It must have survived the blast.”
“Is that Mom?” Talitha tucks herself in beside me.
“Zoom in, please,” I ask Aurelia. She brings the drone close enough for us to clearly see our mother moving about with purpose, collecting pieces of the ruin like a little ant, then placing them deliberately in the design she’s creating.
“Look how gorgeous it is!” Uma says.
“Only Mom could make art out of total destruction,” I say, and feel my heart swell with pride.
“Mom! Mom, can you hear me?” Talitha shouts.
“We haven’t been able to make contact with her yet,” Persis says.
“Of course not. Look!” I step closer to the holo and point to Talitha’s old device that lies on a rock ten feet from our mother. “I’m pinging her again!”
The device flashes.
“Aw, jeez, Mother! Pick it up!” Talitha yells at the image.
“She’ll see it. Give her time,” Persis says calmly.
“Wait! Look. She’s heading that way,” Uma says.
“Come on, Mom! Come on,” I say, trying to shoo her over toward the rock where the tiny beacon beckons to her.
“Maybe I should send her a brain wave!” Talitha closes her eyes and presses her fingers against her temples.
“I can try to invade her dreams,” I say. My sister and I snort. Persis shoots Uma a look.
“Their mom is—” Uma starts to say.
“A little wacky,” I tell her.
“But in a good way,” Uma adds.
“Oh, how I miss her!” Talitha cries.
Mom passes the device and picks up a large chunk of what was likely Observatory wall, now pockmarked and speckled by debris from the blast. She struggles to lift it, then, cradling it in both hands near her belly, she duckwalks back toward her sculpture and stops. She seems to ponder the flashing light on the rock, as if debating what it could mean.
We all jump and shout, “Pick up! Pick up!”
As if she heard us calling from the Moon, she tosses asi
de the chunk of wall and dives for the device.
We watch her struggle to get it on her head. On my HearEar, her voice, scratchy and distant, calls our names. “Castor? Talitha? Castor? Is that you? Talitha?”
I hold up my cuff to project her holo to the room, then I launch my PEST so we can all see one another.
“Mom! Mom!” Talitha jumps up and down and waves her arms.
Mom’s knees buckle, and she falls to the ground in a heap. “I thought I’d lost you. I thought you were gone from me forever!” she sobs.
“We’re here!” I tell her. “We’re safe!”
“But, but, but…” She looks all around. “Where are you?”
“We’re on the Moon!” Talitha says.
My mom looks up into the dark blue evening sky, where the first stars have begun to glimmer. “The Moon,” she cries with such sadness that I know, right then, I can’t stay here. My mother can’t lose everyone she loves to this sterile rock in the sky. And she’ll never be able to come here. She’s too connected to the Earth.
“But I’m coming home,” I tell her. Beside me Talitha flinches but can’t seem to speak. “Somehow or another, I’ll get back to you.”
TIME STAMP
MOON
DAY 1, MONTH 7, MUSC YEAR 94
EARTH
JULY 17, 2XXX
TALITHA NEVA
MOON UTILITARIAN SURVIVAL COLONY
“HOLOGRAM OR REAL?” I whisper to Persis as Valentine Fornax struts onto the stage of the large MUSC auditorium to begin Cohort 54’s Life’s Work Assignment ceremony. Sitting between Uma’s mom and Aurelia, Castor and I fit right in. Like everyone else, we wear blue and white MUSC tunics and sit quietly, waiting for the CEO to speak.
“Real,” Persis whispers. “This is a big day on MUSC. Dr. Fornax always announces the LWAs in person.”
I scan the rows of Cohort 54 members surrounding the central stage down below us. Uma is easy to spot among her peers. She’s the only one with dark, springy curls and warm brown skin—the most beautiful one of all. The pale Third Gen Moonlings still look like maggots to me, although I suspect Castor finds them attractive, or one of them, at least.
