“Only the one?” Corine asked, taking a swig from the vaske glass on the bar in front of her.

  Nora looked over at her, an eyebrow raised.

  “It’s strange they only sent half the pair.”

  Nora nearly choked on her own drink at this, spitting up an ice cube. The two of them were at a bar connected to the Alpha level concourse, sharing a drink after the events of their unsettling last few days. Corine, having not heard of the delivery Nora had received at the lab that morning after everyone cleared out, invited Nora out just the same. It was Nora that suggested the bar.

  “I didn’t feel like wasting the night being alone again,” Corine had said when they first arrived. Nora didn’t question it. It was evident to her that the woman was hurting from the loss of Dr. Bowen and frustrated by her own research.

  “Does Harold know?” asked Corine, taking another sip.

  “No, just you so far,” Nora said. “I’m not even sure what I’d tell him, or the rest of the team for that matter.”

  “You're the boss. You tell them we have a foot to look at,” Corine assured her.

  “I suppose it’s that simple.”

  “It is. Say, what did the foot look like– any markings, discoloration?”

  “It was still quite frozen when I got my hands on it,” Nora said, sipping her own cup. “Hard to say until we get a better look at it.”

  Corine was about to say something when a large figure glided over to stand near them.

  “Dear, doctors,” Oseto said, his voice higher pitched than normal, “So good to run into you this night.”

  “Hi Oseto,” Nora said, “Can I help you with anything? We’re drowning our sorrows here.”

  “Of this, I can see,” Oseto said. It was only then that Nora noticed the litre-sized stein Oseto had in his bramble hand.

  “You’re drunk, Oseto,” Corine said, noticing it also.

  “Drunk. Drunk is such a fine human word. Drunk,” he said, repeating the word, “I do enjoy how it sounds rustling in my fronds. But, incorrect– us vass do not get drunk.”

  “You seem pretty drunk to me,” said Nora.

  “I am excited!” Oseto corrected, “for you have promised me the part to repair the pool in the recreational facilities. Tell me now, when can I swim again?”

  Nora raised an eye to look at Corine. Corine smiled and took another sip of her vaske, finishing what remained and placing it on the bar.

  “I’m sorry, Oseto,” Nora said, “I admit it has slipped my mind.”

  “Slipped your mind? Has it proven too difficult a challenge for you to track down?” said Oseto, indignant, “Even more difficult than your terrestrial mice that you had in on special order?”

  “Oseto, watch it,” Nora said, not liking his tone.

  “Dear Doctor, I mean not to disrespect,” Oseto said half-heartedly.

  “Oseto, look,” Corine interjected, “We don’t have your part, and I think you should leave.”

  Oseto was taken aback, ruffling his fronds and brambles and rumbling in such a way to sound like the bass strum of a cello. The bartender and several of the patrons looked over at them.

  “Hey now,” the bartender said, “this is a place to relax. Why don’t you take your business elsewhere, Oseto?”

  Oseto turned to him and seemingly lowered his fronds in embarrassment.

  “No business here,” Nora said. “Oseto and I were done speaking.”

  “I meant no disrespect, Doctor,” said Oseto.

  “You’ll get your part,” Nora said, doubling down on her promise that was obvious she knew of no way to fulfil. She only knew that she didn’t want to interrupt their continued work with the vass.

  Oseto seemed placated by this or embarrassed enough by his own actions to walk away, leaving the two of them alone.

  Nora sighed.

  “Well, that was– something,” Corine said, taking a sip of a drink she had ordered during the altercation.

  “Why am I always getting yelled at here?” Nora said sardonically.

  “Beats me,” Corine said, “you’re plenty pleasant.”

  “Thanks, Corine.”

  “Don’t mention it. Now, as I was about to say before that bush interrupted us,” Corine said, coyly, “should we go see it?”

  “The foot– what, now?”

  “I’m not doing anything else tonight,” she said.

  “You just ordered another drink,” Nora said, just as Corine finished her glass in one gulp.

  “Did I?”

  Nora didn’t need another push; she knew Corine was just as curious as she was to get a look at the new sample. Nora tapped her terminal to pay their tab, and the two of them left the bar, crossing the concourse over to the lab.

  It was the middle of the night before they had the exam room surfaces prepped, the instruments on and humming, and the foot out of its plastic shipping crate and into an isolation tank, similar but smaller than that of the mice test subjects.

  “Sure is a foot, alright,” Corine said.

  “Yeah?” Nora said, “You were expecting something else?”

  “I maybe was expecting trouble,” Corine said tongue-in-cheek.

  “If you’re about to say that ‘the trouble is afoot, I’ll lose it,” Nora said, holding back laughter.

  “Well, not if you ruin it, I won’t.”

  “You’re drunk. Maybe we should leave this until the morning,” Nora considered.

  “Look at your terminal. It is morning,” Corine said, slapping on a pair of examination gloves.

  “Suit up then,” Nora said, doing the same.

  “Something's not right about this foot,” Corine said, her eyes buried in a microscope. She had taken a cutting of the flesh from the topside of the foot over to study while Nora examined the sample as a whole.

  Nora had the whole foot in front of her as she looked it over. The pale olive skin was blemished with pockmarks of dark sores. The foot had been severed just above the ankle in a clean, already cauterised cut, Nora could tell was done by laser cutter. Taking her scalpel to the sores, Nora saw that they crumbled like brittle crystal.

  “Yeah, and why’s that?” Nora asked, looking up.

  “Well, under magnification, the foot sample bears the same basic structure as the fluid samples we received prior. What’s weird is that whatever made up that fluid had been constituted into a shape that resembles a human foot.”

  “You think the fluid has somehow bound itself to the human cells within the foot?” Nora asked.

  “No, not at all. What I mean is that although this foot looks, feels, and tastes like a human foot, there exists next to no human cells within it. The fluid isn't infecting the foot; it is the foot."

  “I don’t–” Nora started, walking over to her.

  Corine cast the microscope’s feed to the exam room’s central wallscreen. The image was magnified to show what looked to be human skin cells.

  “Look’s normal, right?” Corine said, “Now watch what happens when I bump the magnification up a bit.”

  The image expanded, zooming to show the inside of one of the cells. The cell’s interior was shimmering with a silvery fluid, gyrating and wriggling in an attempt to move free of detection.

  “It’s running away.”

  “Precisely. Human cells just don’t do that.”

  “Can we get this into a sequencer? I want to get a DNA readout on this thing.”

  “I can do that!” said Dr. Wannen, who had just entered ahead of Harold, whose lunch bag slammed into the closing double doors.

  “Can you cut that out?” Corine yelled to Harold from where they stood inside the exam room.

  “I can,” Harold said from across the lab through the thick-paned glass of the exam room.

  “Qio, can you get in here?” Nora asked, handing the junior researcher a fresh cut sample of the foot to test. “Get a full work-up on this. I want to know what this thing is made of. And avoid the mass spectrometer; we don’t want a repeat of last time.”

  “I’m on it, Dr. Gaul,” Qio said, elated to be called upon.

  It was several hours before Qio returned with the DNA work-up, giving each of the team members arriving for the day separate opportunities to gawk at their new test sample. Some entered, looking at the foot in its glass enclosure with professional fascination, some with abject horror. When Qio entered with the report, she did so with a triumphant look on her face.

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  “Doctor Gaul!” Qio said, running a terminal over to Nora, “I think you’re going to want to look at this.”

  Nora took the terminal from Qio and read through the headline of the report.

  3 Distinct Markers; <1% Human male, <1% Vass of unknown gender, 99.89% Unidentified.

  “Well, we already knew this thing was largely unidentified,” Corine said, looking at the report over Nora’s shoulder.

  “And the Vasser DNA– how does that even work?” Nora asked. She knew the two races were distinct, having evolved on two very different worlds in two very different environments, and because of which she knew human and vass DNA were incompatible.

  “Exactly!” Qio said, satisfied with her findings.

  “But it looks human. Not one part of the sample resembles any bit of vass physiology,” Corine said.

  “We only have the one foot, remember. We don’t know what the rest of it looked like,” Nora argued, trying to keep an open mind.

  “You’ve got the temperature controls way too high on this enclosure,” Harold said, inspecting their work. “Are you tryin’ to cook this thing?”

  “Sorry, Harold. Can you adjust?” Nora said, the lights overhead seeming somehow brighter as a hangover starting to form.

  “Rough night?” Harold asked as he tapped a few commands on his terminal.

  “Fun night,” Corine corrected. Harold smiled at this.

  “Glad you two have connected,” he said. “But where was my invite?”

  “Doctor Wannen, can you please fetch the remaining fluid samples? Oh, and fetch a few mice too,” Nora asked, sending her off into the backroom.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Corine.

  “I don’t know just yet,” she admitted, “I think I want to try something.”

  Over the course of the next few days, Nora and her team subjected the foot to several varied experiments. The first of which, Nora applied a small amount of the silvery fluid to the foot, first with a drop on the top of the foot, then another on the severed stump above the ankle. The next involved injecting the foot with the fluid in the human-like skin as well as into the crusted sores. With the last and final experiment, Nora decided to subject the foot to a sample of her own blood.

  Watching the foot closely for three days following each round of this experiment, Nora detected no notable change, nor did she, to her surprise, detect any signs of degradation. The foot was still, unchanging, unperturbed by the fluid, resistant to any sort of decomposition, and for all intents and purposes, was still a foot.

  In her office one night, Nora sat going over a compiled report of all of the experiments to date, prepared for her by Dr. Qio Wannen. Having assumed all of the researchers and engineers had left for the evening, Nora cracked open a bottle of vaske, freshly procured from the bartender Corine and she had become accustomed to after some light persuasion.

  As if smelling blood amongst the surf, Corine appeared in her doorway, two glasses in hand.

  “You didn’t think you would start without me?” Corine asked, gesturing with the glasses.

  “I was just getting it warmed up,” Nora said. Corine took a seat, and Nora poured three inches into each of their glasses.

  “Another day, another failed round of tests,” Corine said, proffering her glass.

  Nora nodded and took a sip from hers, resting the glass down on her desk afterwards. She considered where she was and all the blunders that lay behind her. She had come to this place, to this station, because she was hungry. Nora had always been hungry, striving towards something. She had been so sure that this move was going to catapult her career further forward than she could hope to imagine. But what she had found here seemed to only be roadblock after roadblock. She had expected to find knowledge, hell maybe even a little fame, but before her now was something else unexpected; a friend.

  “Thank you, Corine,” said Nora, forcing Corine to raise an eyebrow, “thank you for being here.”

  “Thank you for the vaske,” she said, “it’s nice to have a drinking partner again.”

  “Again? You aren’t talking about Doctor Bowen.”

  “I am,” clarified Corine, “at least he was.”

  “I’m sorry he’s gone.”

  “Me too. But we stopped drinking together long before he left this place– left me.”

  Nora didn’t respond. Instead, pouring them another round, she gestured for Corine to continue.

  “I can be honest with you, can’t I?” she asked as there was a sudden shift in her face.

  “Of course, Corine. Anything.”

  The woman shifted in her seat as if uncomfortable with the words she was about to say.

  “It’s true, you know?” she said after a measured pause, “what Harold and the others said about him. Sam was everything they called him. He was mean, spiteful, even cruel. He treated the staff like his enemies, deceiving them and outmanoeuvring them like they were the reason for his failures.”

  “Sometimes people lose their way. They get lost in the problem before them,” said Nora.

  “He took his resentment out on each of us. Not you, though,” Corine said, “You may have been saddled with far more adversity than he was in your position. I can see you sulking in here, stewing from the difficulty the trials are having on you, but that’s the difference between you and him. You are in here. He would have been out there cracking the whip.”

  “You two were close,” Nora said, unwilling to accept the quasi-complement.

  “Harold told you? Sure, we were. But not since the pressure started to get to him. There was a time when I thought we would take the next step together. But now...”

  “At the risk of sounding insensitive, I think you’re better off,” Nora asked.

  “We might’ve been married by now,” Corine said, her eyes fixated on an empty spot on the wall.

  Nora remembered the families playing in the concourse park and imagined Corine and Doctor Bowen in place of those proud parents tending to their children.

  “You would have been an excellent wife, Corine,” Nora said, stressing her sincerity. “Anyone would be lucky to have you. But the same doesn’t go for him.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Corine said after a long moment. “And I know things ought to be different now. I thought I could throw myself into the work, but we both know how well that’s going.”

  “We just need to keep at it. We’ll crack it one of these days.”

  “I’m not so certain,” Corine said, “Thanks for the drink, but I did come into your office for another reason.”

  “Oh, and what’s that?”

  “The fluid samples, we’re down to our last vial.”

  Nora was aware of this, having pushed the thought to the back of her mind. She had hoped the trials would show results, show some kind of progress before their supply ran out.

  “I’ll see about getting more,” she said, not certain that obtaining more of the samples was even possible.

  “It’s a shame, really. The only real progress was when we managed to liquefy some mice,” said Corine.

  “What did you say?” said Nora, leaning forward in her office chair.

  “The mice– what are you thinking, Nora?” asked Corine, picking up the inspiration on Nora’s face.

  “What do mice have that the foot or our blood samples not have?”

  “Fur?”

  “Minds,” Nora said, “they are active lifeforms with complete nervous systems. Maybe that’s what’s missing–”

  Before Corine was aware, Nora was already up and walking out of her office, heading for the exam room.

  “Suit up,” Nora called behind her to Corine as she hustled to keep up.

  Nearly an hour later and with every instrument they had trained on the enclosure that held the foot, a half-asleep and yawning behind her face shield Dr. Wannen – freshly woken by a call from Nora in the middle of the night – placed a mouse inside the enclosure.

  Corine came in next, operating a robot arm to administer an injection of half of the remaining fluid sample into the mouse. The mouse, displeased with its new circumstances, rushed around the enclosure, looking for an escape for several minutes before slowing. In stark contrast to the panicked mice of the last test groups, this mouse overcame its initial shock and instead calmly walked over to where the foot was in the centre of the enclosure. It then climbed on top of the foot and lay down.

  “What in the hell,” Nora said, fascinated.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Corine as Qio leaned toward the glass in amazement.

  “It’s just sitting there,” said Qio.

  “Careful, Doctor Wannen,” said Nora, cautiously aware of what happened last time the mice were administered the fluid.

  “It’s laying like a waiting dog,” blurted Harold from behind them.

  “God, where did you come from, Harold?” Nora said.

  “How did you sneak up on us?” Corine asked.

  “You asked me to mind my lunch bag, and I took that to heart,” he explained, “Now, what do we have here?”

  “Doctor Gaul had the idea to combine an inoculated mouse with the foot,” said Qio, her eyes still fixated on the enclosure.

  “A trifecta of horrible,” Harold said, “I like it.”

  “Do you think it will work?” asked Qio.

  “Time will tell,” said Nora, “the last test subjects took nearly fourteen hours to metamorphose fully. And, if you’ll excuse Doctor Lan and me, we need to get some rest.”

  Back in her quarters, Nora propped up her terminal on her seldom-used dining table trained on a feed of the laboratory exam room. Having forced so much of her daily energy into her work and solving this puzzle, Nora found herself spending less and less time on herself or preparing any sort of meal, let alone using the table itself for anything other than another piece of art like the rest of the decor that lined her generous apartment. The few plants interspersed amongst the carefully chosen furniture had withered, unquenched since the first few weeks of her arrival. The space was a dreadful reminder of her true aspirations, one that now sat unchanged on the feed before her.

  Too tired to sleep, Nora watched the feed as she sipped a much-needed coffee. In the background, Qio returned periodically to perform status checks, adjust the instruments, and stare at the mouse as it continued to sit idle. Nora couldn’t blame her, sharing the same enthralling curiosity with the foot. Had she been right about the mouse’s mind, Nora thought, could it be that simple?

  Nora stared at the feed for so long, her hands wrapped around her cooling mug, that she was surprised to find herself waking up with her forehead in her elbow, still gripping the coffee. The image on her terminal had gone dark. Not thinking anything of it, she attempted to rouse the device from sleep, only to find it already was. The feed had been shut off on the other end.

  Spilling the ice-cold mug as she suddenly stood, she looked back, tossed a stack of old research papers on it, and left her apartment heading back for the lab. Arriving back at the lab near the end of the workday, Nora was surprised to see Corine and every one of the other researchers gathered around a wallscreen outside the exam room. Corine, who had been waiting for her, handed her a freshly brewed cup.

  “What’s wrong– who shut off the feed?” Nora asked. None of the researchers answered her, instead fixated on the wallscreen.

  Corine pointed.

  On the screen, the mouse had gone as if it were never there at all.

  “Who removed the mouse?”

  “No one did, Doctor Gaul,” said Harold. “I had to go in to replace the cameras that had been knocked out. The mouse– it….”

  “It will take too long to explain,” Corine said, tapping a command on her terminal, “I’ll just rewind.”

  On the screen, the events of the past few hours were undone; the mouse returned to its perch atop the foot.

  “Now, watch,” said Corine.

  “I’m not sure I can watch this again,” said Qio, her uncomfortability forcing her from the room.

  “What is–” Nora started to say, only to be silenced by a dismissive wave from Corine.

  At twenty times the speed, Nora watched as the mouse moved from its seated position as it angled itself upward on its hind legs as if it were looking towards something.

  “What’s it looking at?” Nora asked.

  “Nothing that we can tell,” said Corine.

  The image continued on the wallscreen as the mouse began its transformation, leaking black viscous fluid, only to fully dissociate into a roiling blob. Then, something unexpected happened. Nora leaned into the feed as the biomass began to dissipate. The black sludge began to shrink, reducing in size over the course of several hours until only a residue mottled the human-like skin of the foot, which in turn would altogether vanish shortly after. The foot, looking now less pale than before, even began to show signs of regrowth.

  “That’s impossible,” Nora said, “Impossible–”

  “Soaked it up like a sponge,” said Harold.

  “Not only that,” Corine said, “Nora, look at the crystalline structures that were there before. They’ve nearly gone, with scar tissue beginning to form over most of them.”

  “Finally!” Nora exclaimed, upsetting the calm fascination of the group. She didn’t care, however. This was progress.

  “I thought you’d be happy,” Corine said, “Sorry I didn’t notify you sooner. I tried to reach you, but the foot seems to be giving off some sort of electrical field disrupting our bulletins.”

  “That’s– what did you say?” Nora said, jumping down from her pegasus. “Harold, you said you had to change out the cameras?”

  “Yes, I did. And sorry for not switching back on the feed,” Harold apologised, “I was a touch distracted.”

  “Did you figure out why the cameras went offline? It can’t be a coincidence that the feed went dark, and now we have a phantom electrical field coming from a severed limb.”

  “You are correct. Seconds before the feed went out, the electrical field in the exam room measured ten times what it is now before it emitted an EMP which, sorry to say, bricked most of the instruments in there,” said Corine. “We’ve also noted a sizable increase in air pressure; nearly two atmospheres.”

  “What’s this?” Nora asked. Tugging the terminal from Corine’s hand, she zoomed in on the top of the foot.

  “What’s– oh. Oh wow!” Corine exclaimed. The stump of the foot just above the ankle now showed signs of activity as well, rendering the flesh ragged and sodden in contrast to the laser-precise cut of the once cauterised muscle and bone. “That’s kind of disgusting.”

  “Hah!” laughed Harold, “and everything up until this point wasn’t?”

  “No, not really. It’s been all black fluid and inert flesh. But that,” Corine said, pointing at the image, “that is alive.”

  Just when Nora didn’t think anything else could surprise her, that’s when she received a bulletin from The Director himself. Nora handed Corine back her terminal and opened her own.

  “New orders from the top?” Harold asked.

  Scanning the message in its entirety before answering, she said, “They’re doubling our funding.”

  To this news, the group around her rejoiced in a round of yes’ and hi-fives. At the bottom of the message, Nora read and reread the last sentence. Nora looked up at Corine, not sure what to think. The statement itself wasn’t strange, just the timing and esoteric nature of it. Either way, she put it, however, her team was about to grow.

  “Something else?” asked Corine.