Transitional Forms, page 2
He tried to trace her, but had no luck. She was in the wind, as they said.
He drifted from job to job, ended up working security for the Salton Sea plantations where she had once worked. It was a monoculture of pretty basic alife organisms, but even so, hackers were slipping under the wire, inserting rogue traits. At night, patches of red or green bioluminescence showed where they’d been at work.
Ray had been there about a year when he saw a brief item in the news. The State of Arizona was suing an experimental alife facility that had recently started up in South Korea, on the grounds that the organisms it was using were based on code stolen from the hot zone. The head of the place was Dr. Janine Childs. Ray emailed her, expecting to hear nothing. A reply hit his inbox the next day.
It wasn’t an apology or an explanation, but a tall story about this old scientist in Denmark who was into yeast and wanted to do research on the strains lager makers used, each one slightly different, each one producing a different brew. He wrote to the breweries, asking for samples, and without exception every one declined, citing commercial reasons. But the old scientist had what he wanted anyway: he took swabs from the rejection letters, swiped the swabs on agar plates, and cultured the yeasts that grew up. The air of each brewery was full of floating yeast cells, which had contaminated the paper of the letters.
Ray thought about this, and realised that he had an answer to his little mystery. And the next day went back out on the line. Only a few forms are ready to make the transition into something new. Most have to make do with what they already are.
Paul J. McAuley, Transitional Forms
