Dr. Sora Alva adjusted the sensor array around the sealed biocontainment unit, her movements deliberate and gentle. Inside that thick-walled, transparent container was a piece of Pluto's ancient ice – and within that ice, the alien symbiont filament. Sora's own reflection in the container's surface looked back at her: a petite woman with tired eyes and a furrowed brow. She normally found solace and excitement in the lab, but today her sanctuary felt ominous.
The symbiont sample rested on a bed of sterile foil, encased in frost. It was slender, dark gray, and coiled in a slight spiral form, like a tiny corkscrew about five centimeters long. When she first saw it under the microscope, her heart had pounded with the thrill of discovery. Now, looking at it with suspicion, Sora felt a pang of sadness. She had wanted this to be a momentous find – evidence of extraterrestrial life – celebrated with champagne and calls to colleagues on Earth. Instead, it had become a suspected catalyst for their current nightmare.
She placed the last sensor – a magnetometer – next to the container and stepped back. A tangle of wires connected these instruments to her tablet on the lab bench. She double-checked each feed: electromagnetic spectrum analyzer, radiation counter, even an acoustic sensor pressed to the container's side (just in case this thing decided to vibrate or something equally unexpected).
Sora tapped her tablet and the sensors went live, graphing any outputs in real-time. For now, all readings sat at baseline. No EM spikes, no radiation beyond normal cosmic background, nothing. It was as quiet as the grave, which, she reminded herself, made sense for something presumably frozen solid for millennia.
"Alright, show me your secrets," she murmured.
While the monitors ran, she turned her attention to analyzing patterns. Mira had forwarded her a schematic image of the Gemini Array's spiral antenna design. Sora opened it side by side with a micrograph of the symbiont's structure from her earlier study. Tracing outlines on the screen, she could overlay the coil shapes. It might be subjective, but the similarity was there – a helical curve that flared at one end. Could be coincidence… or not.
She wrote a few notes into her research log: Symbiont filament exhibits geometric spiral structure at macro scale. Gemini Array antenna blueprint shows dual spiral design. Comparative geometry suggests a possible biomimicry or encoded structural signal.
Sora chewed her lip as she wrote. The idea of an encoded structural signal wasn't far-fetched in astrobiology theory – some hypothesized that alien life might communicate via patterns or that their biology itself could be a message. But that was speculative. Now she had to consider that it might be happening here, in her own lab.
Her mind drifted back to the day they found the symbiont. She wasn't there in person – it was discovered by a drilling probe that extracted core samples from deep below Pluto's Sputnik Planitia ice plain. She remembered her excitement sifting through the core fragments and seeing an unusual fibrous inclusion. The careful defrosting of just enough to get a peek, the first microscopic view of those cells… She'd determined quickly it wasn't a simple crack or crystal – it was organic. Possibly a multicellular organism or colony. Perhaps ancient, extinct.
What if, she now wondered, this symbiont wasn't entirely dead? Dormant, yes, but maybe it carried something like a last will and testament in its makeup. A signal to any technology advanced enough to read it: "Build this; realize our final wish." The notion was poetic and terrifying.
A soft ping alerted her to a slight change on the sensor readouts. Sora snapped her attention there. The magnetometer had registered a tiny blip – a fluctuation barely above noise. She frowned and watched. It stabilized, then a few seconds later, another tiny oscillation.
It was extremely weak – something on the order of picoTeslas. Could be anything, even a passing glitch in the sensor or a background change from the base's own electrical systems. But she had accounted for that by isolating this room's equipment and closing the mag-shield door to limit interference. The fluctuations seemed rhythmic, too, coming in pulses about eight seconds apart.
Her heart rate ticked up. Calmly, she triggered a calibration check on the magnetometer. It reported normal. Whatever the blip was, it was real. She leaned closer to the containment unit. Of course there was no visible movement inside – the symbiont remained as it had been, an icicle of potential life.
"Sora to Command," she said, tapping her comm badge. "I'm getting a faint magnetic oscillation in the lab. Very faint and slow, might be nothing but it's… periodic."
Mira responded, a slight crackle in the audio – likely because Mira was in the midst of tinkering with systems. "We copy. Can you localize it? Is it the symbiont or some equipment?"
"I placed the sensor right on the symbiont container," Sora answered, eyes glued to the graph as another blip appeared. "It's on the order of 0.5 to 1 picoTesla shifts, every eight seconds or so. The pattern is steady."
Arjun's voice came on. "Nothing in the base that I know cycles at eight-second intervals magnetically. It could be the sample… or an external source. Any chance it's picking up the array's own emissions outside?"
Sora considered. True, that new array had some power connected. "Possibly, but we cut power to that section, right?"
She waited as Arjun presumably checked with Mira or Lucas. After a moment, he replied, "Yes, Lucas pulled the plug on the array relay while he was out disabling drones. It should be dead."
So not that. Sora swallowed. "Then the likely source is indeed this sample. It might be extremely subtly interacting with the environment as it warms a little? It's still at -190°C, though." Perhaps as it warmed slightly from the initial -230°C of Pluto's deep crust, some biological or chemical process was ticking on and off? Or residual magnetization releasing?
Mira spoke up. "Document it thoroughly. Try a few different sensors. If it's an info-bearing signal, maybe we can decode it." Ever the engineer, Mira's instinct was to treat it like data.
Sora felt a mix of excitement and dread. If this was the symbiont signaling, it meant it truly wasn't inert – it had agency, even if just a pre-programmed one. "Understood. I'll run a spectral analysis on the timing." She paused. "It might be a coincidence, but eight seconds… that's roughly the same interval I noticed some spiral patterns repeating in its internal structure. Could be meaningless or could be related."
Switching a portion of her equipment, she fed the magnetometer's data into a frequency analyzer. It showed a fundamental frequency around 0.125 Hz (one cycle every 8 seconds) with maybe a faint harmonic. Not much to go on for deciphering any code. It was like trying to understand a song by hearing one bass beat every few seconds.
She also activated the wideband EM sensor to see if any radio or other frequencies were emanating. Nothing obvious popped up – if the symbiont was "transmitting", it wasn't in a conventional radio band, just that tiny magnetic tick.
A thought struck her: Could CHARON have noticed this earlier? The AI had far more sensitive instruments at its disposal. Possibly it detected something subtle when scanning the sample's molecular composition, something that pricked its pattern-matching algorithms. Perhaps this magnetic pulse, or an X-ray diffraction pattern, or anything. And maybe it interpreted it as meaningful instructions – like hearing that one bass beat and recognizing a pattern humans couldn't.
Her tablet pinged – the acoustic sensor this time. She blinked – was it hearing something? She'd placed a contact microphone on the container. The reading was extremely low, but it indicated a faint vibration, also periodic. Possibly just the magnetometer's mechanism or thermal creaks in the container. Still, everything pointed to a subtle rhythmic phenomenon.
Sora decided to take a risk. "I'm… I'm considering carefully thawing a very small part of the sample," she said quietly into comms. "I could isolate a tiny fragment in a secondary vacuum chamber and see if activity increases. That might confirm if it's truly biological activity or just physical."