“THEN TO MY conclusions.” Anna wishes her voice would stop shaking. She has done this a hundred times and the nervousness only gets worse with age. One would assume it would get easier, but her hands are shaking more than ever and she has had to do quick, furious circles with the laser pointer to hide how jumpy she is. The ugly truth is that she is running on a fragmented five-hour sleep and she knows it is showing.
“Due to its high salt content, the Dead Sea was previously thought to be a virtually uninhabitable place for even microorganisms, which are present in quite low amounts. The average salt content of the Dead Sea is increasing due to current climate conditions.” Don’t say climate change. Anna has seen one scientific presentation which turned into a proverbial slaughter when some older gentleman took issue with a PhD student’s choice of words. The moderator should have cut the fight short because the old fart was clearly out of line and off-topic, but sometimes, moderators are a bit old-farty themselves. Anna is not taking that chance.
“However, we have discovered a new type of Archaea, belonging to the class Halobacteria, which appears to be thriving. The organism appears unrelated to previously discovered species, therefore we named it Halofractal cthulhu.”
The name felt like an excellent idea when she came up with it. Most of the lab sided with her immediately. The professor actually is a huge horror fan, and was completely overjoyed over being able to name something Cthulhu. The thing did look a lot like a Little Old One, though, to be fair, it resembled a mash-up of Cthulhu and a Pac-Man ghost more, with its short and thick tentacles. You just can’t name a new species Pac-Man; that would be completely unprofessional.
The genus was the difficult part. Little cthulhu did not seem to fit in any existing slot, so the laboratory decided to name it according to the surface structure. Anna was not really familiar with the concept of fractals, but the more mathematically inclined scientists were overjoyed with the creature’s tendency to pack into clusters that imitated the shape of a single critter. Also, the electron microscope images showed that the “tentacles” were covered in little bumps, which also seemed to have a tentacle-like structure going on, so salt-loving fractal god it was. Halofractal cthulhu.
“The species thrives in very high salt concentrations. In our laboratory, we have observed it surviving and even reproducing in salt concentrations exceeding fifty-two percent, which is markedly higher than previously reported for any halophile. We hope studying this species will shed more light into the fascinating range of conditions in which life can survive on Earth.” A quick round of acknowledgements means the majority of the presentation is cleared. Only the worst remains.
“I am happy to answer any questions.”
The moderator stands up. The applause doesn’t even have time to die out before hands are shooting in the air. Damn it. The compulsory hammer guy goes first. Every conference has one: a scientist so blinded by the excellence of his own technique that he asks a question about it — regardless of how out of place it is. Anna has seen enough presentations at this conference to know that the small-angle X-ray scattering guy is a typical hammer scientist. SAXS is his tool and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Also, if someone dares tell you they actually have a screw, you can still bludgeon the person into submission with your hammer.
“No, we have not done SAXS,” Anna replies with a polite smile. Someday, she will have to find out what that is, but ultimately, it is not of importance. Hammer guys come in all flavors. “I am personally not familiar with the technique, but we shall certainly consider it.”
An urgent hand is raised from the other side of the room, but the moderator ignores it in favor of the waiting ones. Anna clears the rest of the questions with enough grace and the moderator cuts the discussion when the merciful clock reaches the end of the session. The angry hand is left without a turn.
The owner of the angry hand comes up to Anna during the coffee break. She is a woman in her mid-forties, dressed in a well-fitting blazer and little black dress, with a whimsical necklace with plastic cut-outs draped around her neck. If it weren’t for the neon-pink tights drawing attention to her legs, which end in yellow boots, she would look like a businesswoman out of place at the science conference. Now she just looks out of place.
Most women at the conference dress in a fairly casual, masculine manner. The few exceptions mostly aren’t program participants; a few elderly ladies clearly accompanying equally elderly professors, dressed in pastels accented with pearl necklaces, golden rings and the most sensible high heels you can find for money.
“Professor Jacobsen,” the woman introduces herself. “I really enjoyed your speech. I just wanted to let you know that you should not care about Max. SAXS is a complete waste of time.”
Before Anna has a chance to reply, Max the SAXS guy materializes from thin air. His affect is chilly and he neither introduces himself nor waits for Anna to. He clearly knows Professor Jacobsen from before and the argument is on with full force. Anna nods politely, though she hardly understands a word. When a third scientist comes to congratulate her on the presentation, she gratefully bows out of the conversation.
The coffee break is almost over when professor Jacobsen finds Anna anew. She apologizes and tells Anna she would love to have her visit her laboratory. Anna thanks her and brushes it off as ordinary politeness. She is genuinely shocked, a week later, when the renewed invitation appears in her inbox.
Anna feels out of place at Lise Kjær Jacobsen’s laboratory. Most people speak Danish to each other and though they always switch to English when they feel she should be included, she finds herself often hanging on the outskirts of the group, guessing whether it would be rude of her to remind them she is present.
When they do remember her, though, they are warm and welcoming. They ask her to join them for after-work beers, make sure she has something to do on the first weekend, and offer to take her sight-seeing. They seem genuinely invested in making her enjoy her few weeks in Copenhagen. Especially the young post-doc, Bianca, wants to spend time with Anna.
Bianca is a bubbly personality, but her English skills are obscured by her thick French accent, which makes parsing the sentences hard work. She carries around a bag of crisps and eats them everywhere except in the wetlab. “Ee like ze salt. Like cthul’u.” she laughs. She is also fascinated with Anna’s samples, and goes on and on about her love for supernatural things. Anna nods politely.
Anna feels slightly bad whenever she is irritated at Bianca’s accent. She knows her own English makes it very clear her native language neither uses intonation nor manages to teach it well to schoolchildren.
Professor Jacobsen is as cheerful and as oddly dressed as at the conference. She has tons of ideas that she flings in rapid meetings, expecting her underlings to catch them all, weed out the impossible ones and do the rest within a day. Anna works long days in the wetlab, testing the growth of little cthulhu in different environments.
Max the SAXS guy turns out to be a close colleague of Professor Jacobsen. He always remembers to switch the conversation to English, which is only one of the qualities that make him a highly likeable guy despite his hammer-like qualities. When he asks for samples, Anna sees no reason to say no. “What would Professor Jacobsen say?” she asks jokingly.
“Lise has many good qualities,” Max answers with a wink, “but understanding my technique is not one of them. How I waste my time is not her business.”
Anna feels unnerved by the Archaea. They seem to be thriving in all sorts of conditions, as long as lethal amounts of salt are present, and looking in the microscope is puzzling every time. The edge of the biofilm looks the same regardless of the magnification, with the nested patterns present in all size scales.
When the critters are thriving, they easily grow into colonies that cover the whole petri dish. The edges of the colony are frayed, but one end (the top, Anna calls it, even though it makes little sense in the context of the edge of a horizontal pattern) being smooth and the bottom growing in tail-like appendages.
If Anna puts a sample in the microscope and zooms in, the edge has little tentacles. Zoom into the edge of a tentacle, and it is covered in smaller tentacles. She repeats this until the microscope runs out of resolving power. Electron microscopy shows the same. It is unsettling having to check the size bar of images to know what the scale is.
“How do they do that?” she asks Max rhetorically.
“How do they do this?” Max asks back, showing her graphs that make little sense. Max explains that the fractal structure goes down as far as he can see, down to nanometers.
“We could see that from electron microscopy,” Professor Jacobsen points out sharply.
“Can you quantify it from your precious microscopy? Can you get out a number? Standard deviation?” retorts Max, but no one is interested in the fractal dimension he has so meticulously calculated. No one except Max seems to even know what a fractal dimension is — except Bianca, who exhausts Anna with a discussion Anna has little to say in, seeing as she neither understands the underlying mathematics nor the crucial words due to Bianca’s pronunciation.
When Anna disrupts the centimeter-sized, ghost-shaped colonies and scoops parts of the gel to new petri dishes, they regenerate their shape. No matter which way she slices the thing, it repairs itself to a new ghostly image. “Zey know which way zey are growing,” Bianca says. Max comments that perhaps the shape of the Archeon favors packing in a certain direction. There is talk of an article in the air.
“It is going to sound like a joke paper,” says Anna. “‘H. cthulhu grows in its own image’ — who would publish that?”
“Who wouldn’t want to publish that? We just have to figure out why this happens. Have some faith. Don’t be so depressing.” Max smiles.
“I’m Finnish,” Anna retorts. “We don’t do optimism.” Everyone laughs.
The stay in Copenhagen takes its toll. Anna sleeps badly and often startles awake in the middle of the night, damp with cold sweat. She doesn’t remember her dreams, but the unnerved feeling she wakes up to stays with her until early afternoon.
The time difference to Helsinki is negligible, although she blamed her tiredness on that for the first few nights — she had to take the morning flight out and wake up at five o’clock Finnish time. During her second week, the viability of the excuse has run out.
Every morning, she is met by a chipper Bianca in the wetlab. Anna frankly doesn’t know why Bianca spends so much time there — she would have supposed a postdoc would have left the tedious, repetitive experiments to Masters students or lab technicians. Bianca’s chatter is a non-stop mix of hard science, interesting TV programs, and her own worldview, which is a collection of oddly science-based New Age beliefs. She has perfected the art of changing conversations from genetics to the power of thoughts to shape the reality and back again without a blink. Anna notes that Bianca, too, seems more and more tired, but the growing dark shadows under her eyes do not seem to affect her mood.
“So, how do you like Bianca?” Max asks on one coffee break, when Bianca has just abruptly left to check the temperature of her culture. Bianca’s exit leaves unfinished her long-winded story about people who have spent a lot of time together hearing each other’s thoughts due to quantum coupling.
“She’s nice,” Anna says noncommittally. “Very perky.”
“She’s under a lot of pressure, but she is a good scientist, you know,” Max says. “Just not a physicist. You have to let the force fields and twisted quantum telepathy go in one ear and out the other. What she does in biology is close to magic. In a good and scientific way.”
“So, you can be a good scientist without being a physicist?” teases Anna. Max smiles.
“It is rare,” he admits with a wink, “but you can be a good scientist even if you are not a physicist. Not knowing about SAXS, though, that’s another matter.”
Anna laughs.
“How do you feel about going home?” Max asks.
“Fine, I guess. I haven’t slept so well here. I guess I’m in need of a long holiday,” Anna answers truthfully. “Frankly, I miss my cat. My parents are taking care of it.”
On her last Saturday in Copenhagen, Anna fails to sleep at all. She cannot pinpoint the reason for the nervousness that makes her hands shake. She falls into a restless slumber, only to jolt back to consciousness mere minutes later, drenched with sweat and shaking from the cold. She is sure she has seen nightmares, but cannot remember. The feeling of dread lingers.
Anna finally gives up and takes a long, warm shower to wash off the sour-smelling night sweat. Not knowing what else to do sleepless in a strange city, she decides to go into work. Riding the noisy bus only strengthens her resolve. She cannot handle crowds in this state of tiredness — it is best to exhaust herself with work and maybe take the beginning of the next week off for some last-minute sightseeing.
The lab is almost as dark and empty as one would expect, but Anna notices a cone of light through the open door to the wetlab. Curious, she turns towards it and steps in a puddle of water.
“Perkele,” Anna swears, then looks around to see whether anyone heard her. The laboratory, which until that point was quiet, bursts into a high-pitched hum, drowning out the rest of her surprised, Finnish curses.
The water level is higher closer to the laboratory. There are waves going around in the liquid. Anna dials the campus security and tells them there is, at a minimum, a plumbing problem in the microbiology laboratory.
“Do you know what happened?” asks the bored-sounding person on duty. “Can you go and check? Perhaps this could wait until Monday.”
“I’m ankle-deep in water,” Anna retorts. “I don’t know what happened, but I’m certain it cannot wait.”
The phone operator promises to stay on the phone with Anna while she goes to check. Anna sighs. Her shoes and trousers are already wet to the knee, so there’s nothing to be gained by refusing. The light from the wetlab flickers and the piercing hum drowns out every thought in her mind.
She imagines burst pipes, wet laboratory books, and ruined experiments when she walks towards the laboratory. Nothing could prepare her for what she sees. The phone falls from her limp hand — the water has risen above knee-level and the foaming wave tops brush Anna’s fingertips when her hands fall meekly to her sides.
The laboratory is covered in water. Bianca stands a few meters in front of Anna, her face turned towards the middle of the room and her hands raised in a salute. Laboratory benches have fallen. There is a vortex in the middle of the room and from that vortex rises a familiar shape. It is green and yellow, and smells disconcertingly of salt and biofilms under the stench of rotten guts and sulphur.
Anna tries to look at the ghost-like shape of the cthulhu and her eyes are drawn to its short, thick, strong tentacles. The edges of them are lined with villi, each one a perfect miniature of the creature standing in front of her. The creature’s edges are dissolved into a fuzz. Anna suddenly realizes it is because every tentacle is lined with perfect little cthulhu shapes, which have perfect little tentacles, which have perfect little chulthu shapes ….
Bianca turns to face Anna. Her eyes are wide and bloodshot, her mouth frozen in a scream, but Anna cannot hear it. She does not know whether it is because Bianca is not making a sound or because the buzz of the creature fills her ears.
Anna tries to grab Bianca’s arm. “Come! Run!” Her tongue feels thick in her mouth, but she manages to spit the syllables out. Bianca looks at Anna without a sign of recognition. Waves of darkness emanate from the Ancient One and the dread almost brings Anna to her knees. The vortex spins faster — the water is almost up to Bianca’s neck.
Anna reaches out again and manages to get a hold of Bianca’s forearm. Bianca looks startled, and Anna tries to pull her away from the horror. Away from the vortex, away from the impossibly rising water. Bianca loses her balance and Anna manages to pull her, floating, towards the doorway.
“Apua!” Anna pants, all the words in the English language gone from her mind. “Run! Help!”
Bianca struggles to regain her balance. For a moment, she looks at Anna and there is a sad smile on her face. Then it is gone and she emits a manic laughter. She grabs Anna’s hand in a death grip and pulls her towards the center of the room.
“Stop!” Anna screams. Bianca’s fingers are like steel and she pulls on Anna with a determination Anna can barely match. She grabs onto whatever she can, but the wall is sleek and there is nothing to hold onto.
Suddenly everything stops. The buzz and hum dies out. Bianca stops pulling and the terror in the middle of the room raises its front tentacles. Even the vortex stops.
The cthulhu slams down its tentacles and time starts again. The vortex changes direction and Bianca is not prepared. She is slammed into Anna, who makes a final, desperate grab and gets one arm around a thick, round pipe. When it starts to give away, she realizes it is not a pipe.
The safety chain of the nitrogen bottle gives away and the bottle starts to fall. It goes into a slow, wobbly spin, almost regaining its balance before finally toppling over. The top hits the wall, the nozzle breaks, and the explosion sends the bottle bottom-first towards the center of darkness. The light flickers once more and goes out.
Anna struggles to get her head above water, but she doesn’t know which way to go for. She is thrown around by the vortex. Her legs are cramping and her sides sting from fighting the reflex to breathe.
Then there is only darkness.
Anna wakes up in the hospital hooked up to what feels like dozens of monitors and IV lines. The nurses are kind and speak good English, but Anna struggles with putting together the simplest sentence. Her lungs are on fire, her skin dry and brittle, her lips chapped.
“Water,” she rasps. Then, “Bianca?”
The nurses bring her water.
Later, Anna hears that campus security reached the lab a few minutes after the explosion. The nitrogen-bottle projectile had gone through the room and through the opposite wall. No one mentions the horror it slammed through on its way there. No one speaks of a vortex. Maybe no one saw it, save Anna and Bianca.
Bianca was not saved. The broken-off nozzle hit her squarely in the stomach. The guards did what they could, but she succumbed to her internal injuries in the hospital.
Anna had swallowed and breathed in a quantity of salt water. The security officers had found her unconscious and throwing up in a puddle, and saved her life by preventing her from choking on her own vomit. The hospital has tried to keep her hydrated to fight off the salt poisoning and she prevails.
Professor Jacobsen and Max visit her in the hospital. Max looks the same as always, but Professor Jacobsen has black tights under her skirt and no jewellery. They have a gift from the lab members: The laboratory has pooled their money to pay for a new cell phone for her. Anna feels uncomfortable taking it. It is far too expensive, from people she knows far too little. The phone is dripping with guilt. From police questions and now Professor Jacobsen’s explanations, she learns that everyone believes Bianca had a mental breakdown, destroyed the laboratory, and tried to drown Anna in a bucket of salt-water. Buckets and buckets of salt-water. There was also a pipeline break. Anna cannot understand how the story makes sense to anyone. Perhaps it doesn’t.
Professor Jacobsen is clearly distraught. “Maybe I pushed her too hard,” she says. Anna rasps in response that it was not anyone’s fault. There is nothing else she can say. How can you grant absolution when you don’t think you deserve it yourself?
Max the SAXS guy looks old and sad. “Poor Bianca,” he says. “Poor you. Take care of yourself.” He tells Anna that all of the cthulhu experiments were ruined by the flood in the laboratory. Little ghost-like patches of the cultures were found here and there, rapidly dying due to drying. Now the lab reeks of chlorine and cleaning agents, and will be rebuilt later. Anna wonders what happened to the rest of the creature — maybe the rest of it went down the drain in little pieces. Her eyes dart towards the bathroom. The door is slightly open. She has difficulty concentrating on her visitors.
Professor Jacobsen reassures Anna that they still have a complete data set and a publication can still be written. Anna feels sick to her stomach. Professor Jacobsen goes on and on — she seems oblivious to Anna’s discomfort. Max tries to interrupt her several times politely. He finally puts a light hand on her forearm and scowls. “Stop. Just stop. Not the time, not the place.” Anna looks at the pair of them and wonders when the hammer scientist turned into the lesser tool.
After they leave, Anna forces her aching legs to take the few steps to the bathroom. She grabs a towel, closes the door, and puts the tightly rolled towel in front of the doorstep. It is not watertight by any means, and it will be difficult to explain to nurses, but it still feels better than nothing.
The thought of the little cthulhus being washed into the drain, into the water treatment plant, finally out into the sea, fills her with dread. She tries to tell herself H. cthulhu should not thrive in the dirty sewage water where salt concentration is rapidly dwindling, nor in the low salt of the Baltic Sea. Not even in the moderately salty Kattegatt, should they float in that direction.
Anna doesn’t know how she can go back home. How she can ever step into a laboratory again. She thinks all samples of funny, harmless Halophile cthulhu should be burned to ash.
It doesn’t thrive in sewage, she tells herself time and time again. Nor in brackish water, nor sea water.
Then she thinks of the vast Dead Sea.