Solar

Life

It seemed strange to Mary. It had taken them six days to travel over five hundred million miles, but it took them ten days to move a creature five miles to the surface of the moon and to build a pressurized shelter around it. She was impressed that Danile had enough supplies to build and pressurize a building that was over a hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, and twenty feet tall. She now stood on a scaffold next to the creature that they still hadn't named.

Her heart was racing, despite the fact that exo-biology was not a major of hers, she had never been so excited. This was the first discovery of life outside of earth. She noted that even the engineers were like children at Christmas. Nearly the entire population of the colony was in this room, doing something. All other work had stopped. Daniel stood beside her. His bare hand was on the creature.

"I didn't expect this. Well, not that they'd be intelligent." He paused. "We don't need to dissect this creature. Once we get the data we need, I want to burry it again." He said.

She nodded as she injected the creature with more nanitites. They didn't have nearly enough material to make enough nanites to fill this creature, but they could explore it in sections. They had already learned a lot about the creature. The creature had elements of both plant and animal and its cell structure was fully alien. It would take them some time to understand what they were seeing. She wanted badly to study a live one.

Daniel had already drilled through the six miles of ice, to the ocean below, and he had a deep submersible exploring the massive ocean under the ice. The problem was that Europa's ocean was larger than Earth's ocean, it was also much deeper. Just because they had found a dead caucus, that did not mean they would discover life soon.

She smiled. She had never seen Daniel so off-guard. He usually had a plan for everything. "Daniel, was this discovery truly an accident?" She asked.

She hadn't thought of asking until now. She had been so excited about the discovery of life to question its timing. While Daniel did seem beside himself, he didn't exactly seem surprised. He glanced at her. His smile was somewhat crooked. "There was an oddity detected in the ice from orbit. That's why I chose the location of the base, but I didn't expect this. I thought it might have been some mineral shot to the surface from some eruption." He paused and took a step back. "My plan was to lead humanity from earth, not to prove that we weren't alone in the universe."

"Well, it seems that you have done both," She said.

***

Daniel walked into the medical lab. Instantly he knew that something was off. " Mary, what's wrong?"

She turned to him. "Nothing."

Daniel sat in one of the chairs and lifted an eyebrow. Mary sighed.

"Our children are healthy and are developing almost normally." She replied.

"Almost?" Daniel asked. She could hear the fear in his voice.

"Please listen. I don't know what to think," Mary stated. "Biologically, our children are fine. They are developing at the expected rate, but the nanites are changing them. Look," she said.

She brought up an image of the ebryos. "When using standard equipment they appear normal. I have injected myself with a type of nanite that simply observes growth at a cellular level. We've never been able to track this before. What I found was this."

Daniel sat forward in his chair. His children had high concentrations of nanitites inside their cells. "What percentage of their bodies is nanitites?" He asked.

"Up to a quarter of their mass is nanitites, but the concentration of nanitites is different in each child. I've also discovered that the communication protocols for nanitite inside the cells have been edited."

"Show me." Daniel said.

The screen switched, half of the screen showed the three embryos and the other showed computer code. Daniel leaned back as he studied the code. He grunted. "There's a protocol running over the old protocol. I created the code to be adaptive, but this..." He trailed off. "You are sure the children are safe."

Mary nodded. "Send me the code. I want to study it." Daniel said.