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How long did it take before we understood how badly we’d underestimated the task? In my memory, it is almost instantaneous, but I know that isn’t true Certainly for the first day, two days, three, weme—only a very narrow slice of the overall dataset But too soon, the complexity on Eros outstripped us The models based on examinations in the lab and the human exposure on Phoebe returned values that seesawed between incomprehensible and trivial The protoans, hands, brains—caught uard The outward aspect of the infection skipped froh the intentional stance, and into a kind of beautifulto what does it want to what is it doing again I kept diving through the dataset, trying one analytical strategy and then another, hoping that so back out at me I didn’t sleep I ate rarely The others followed suit Trinh suffered a psychotic break, which proved so and sighs

Listening to the voices of Eros—human voices of the subjects preserved even as the flesh had been rerips with the truth Too ination on our part, and the utter alienness of the protomolecule conspired to overthrow all our best intentions The behavior of the particles had changed not only in scale but in kind and continued to do so again at increasingly narrow intervals The sense of watching a countdown grew into a certainty, though to what, I couldn’t say

I should probably have been afraid

With every new insight in the long, unbroken stretch of consciousness that predates even humanity, a firstnew has conized or not, it exists in only onejoy of finding a novel species or a new theory that explains previously troubling data The sensation can range froas that everything you’d thought before rong

Someone would have to be brilliant and driven and above all lucky to have even a handful of moments like that in the span of a stellar and celebrated career I had five or six of them every shift Each one felt better than love, better than sex, better than drugs The few ti and data analysis and woke to the quivering proht come that made it all make sense The line that connected the dots All the dots Forever I lived on the edge of revelation like I could dance in flames and not burn When th

e end came, it surprised me

It found me in my cell, silent in the dark, not awake and not asleep, the bed cradling me in its palm like an acorn The sharp scent of the air recycler’s fresh filters rery syllables—I ascribed to the coogic twilight of my mind When the door opened and the three men from security hauled me out, I could almost have believed it was part of my dream Seconds later, the alarms shrieked

I still don’t kno the Belters discovered Thoth Station Soht that left the trail that cae that co with people Station security pushed us like cattle, hurrying us down the corridors I assumed our path ended in evacuation craft It didn’t

In the labs, they lined us up at our workstations Fong conized her as anything but another anonymous extension of the luestured to our workstations with her nonlethal riot gun All their weapons were designed for controlling research, not defending the station

“Purge it,” Fong said “Purge everything”

She e crossed her ar’s eyes, but we defied her It felt like nobility at the tih They wore no standard uniform, carried no unified weapons They shouted and screa ’s eyes as she reached her conclusion and lifted her hands over her head We did as she did, and the Belters surrounded us, peppering us with questions I couldn’t follow and whooping in a violence-drunk delight

They threw me to the deck and tied my hands behind my back Two of theant violence I don’t knohat happened to her after that I never saw her again I lay with ravity would alloatched their boots and listened to the chatter of their voices At my workstation, an analysis run ended with a chime and waited for attention that would never come

Less than two ht have been the one, that ht have cracked open the et to it In that moment, I understood fully the depth of the abyss before ed to look at the results I whined, I wept, I cursed The Belters ignored me

Hours later, they hauledcell A man with a hand terminal and an accent almost too thick to parse demanded my name and identification When I told him I didn’t have a union representative to contact, he asked if I had fa like a third of a g, but without a hand terminal or access to a control panel, I lost track of tithreats to do worse They stopped only when the larger of the two started weeping and couldn’t be consoled

I recognized the dockingvectors of the ship We had arrived at wherever ere going, for however long ere meant to stay there Guards came, hauled me out, shoved me in a line with others from Thoth They marched us as prisoners Or ani a death, only worse Because out there, like hell being the absence of God, the experi on but it had left me behind