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“It feels…”

“I know,” he said, tapping his temple “I did it too”

I sat up A feeling of alh me A calm like the sea after a stors I’d taken at the university—the focus of the nootropics, the euphoria of the sedatives I reet addictive Whatever fear I er seemed important

“It’s nice,” I said

“So tellethical? Or does it make more sense to skip to human trials?”

I blinked at hihed I re just er experienced it A clarity and calm took that space for its own, and the relief felt joyful, like I’d just heard the punch line to the best joke ever I couldn’t stop giggling That was the retted it

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the s as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and s, to coin a tautology I gave e per back into nitive states I didn’t miss or want them Excite invanished, and my uilt or neurosis would have kept me from before I didn’t want to be what I had previously been anyfor despair

And anyway, as Dresden said, we at Protogen weren’t concerned with reeons

I left Earth for the first time when I shipped to Phoebe All I knew of the planets and dwarf planets and moons that made the habitable human syste the feeds The politics of the alliance between Earth and Mars, the dangers posed by the Outer Planets Alliance and other Belter resistance groups The story of mankind’s torturous reach out into the vast emptiness of the system formed a complex story that felt as removed from my experience as the crime dramas and musical comedies that appeared on the sa that number

An obscure an as a coravity as it passed by, presumably from the Kuiper Belt It stood out from the other moons, four tirade orbit and the laave it a sense of menace Phoebe, the ill-omened moon

The alien weapon

Tucked within the planetesien and the Martian Naval Scientific Service—had found tiny reactive particles the size, roughly, of a n structure and inforined The proto it immediately in a territorial nored their protests as irrelevant

Our best guess was that it had been sent frouess at a tihts of terrestrial life The protoe in a bottle, but one that included its own grammar books and instruction tutorials, ready to teach whatever aboriginal cells it found how to beco as inert as a sporeto a conclusion The first evidence of a tree of life apart from our own enchanted and confounded us Me

The base itself showed its ins in its bones The corridors, hardened to shield us all froround radiation, were in the colors of the Martian navy Each hallway bore the identification marks that told installation order, structural specifications, location within the base, and the date on which it needed replaces as the ships The food in the mess tasted of Mars: hot chile peppers, hydroponic fruit, ra pharmaceuticals We had no extra space The rooer than the cells I lived in there: a rack of bunks four high with a shared head so sainst the opposite wall every tirams, I felt a little over three Exercise took al and showering in the tight steel-and-ceramic shower a third

The Protogen nanoinformatics team there claimed only four seats: Trinh, Quintana, Le, andnumber who joined us The others would join in later, e shifted to Thoth Station, though by then the Martian contingent would no longer be in play The rest of the research team wasn’t more than fifty, all told With our counterparts from Mars and the naval support staff, Phoebe Base was a few hundred people on a black snowball so far frohtest star if we had ever looked for it