“The lantern fish they found was intact?”
“Not just that, Dr. Nelson. It was alive. It may’ve been thrown over the side if not for the intervention of Dr. Eva Parks, a marine biologist who was onboard to study pollack migratory patterns. She spied the fish and recognized its inconceivability. She was scrupulous: she pegged the ship’s longitude and latitude, fixing its position. Otherwise your brother and I wouldn’t have known where to begin our search. Dr. Parks took a few measurements—length, girth, weight—before the fish started to show signs of incipient mortality. She began to hastily count the annuli on its scales. Perhaps you know of these?”
“They’re what, age rings?” Luke said. “The same as when you cut down a tree; count the number of rings, you get its age.”
Felz nodded. “Exactly so. But Parks couldn’t count the rings. There were simply too many. They were lapped over and over, ring upon ring over ring, making an accurate enumeration impossible.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Dr. Nelson,” Felz said, “the fish was functionally ageless. So old that the common method of analysis was useless.”
“How long do lantern fish live?”
“Twenty or thirty years, likely. This one could’ve been several hundred years old, a thousand years old, or even older. As in, immeasurably old.”
“How is that possible?”
Felz showed Luke his open palms as if to say: It shouldn’t be possible. “During Dr. Parks’ examination, the fish expired. As she related it, it didn’t just die—it decomposed. Almost instantaneously, it surrendered cellular integrity. It rotted in real time. Imagine the trauma it would’ve sustained while rising to the surface, the attacks by pressure and sunlight. Now imagine it all happening at once. Dr. Parks took a video of the aftermath. A black pool of gunk. And shortly after that came another shock.”
Felz gestured to the cooler.
“Dr. Parks discovered a tiny particle of ambrosia beside the carcass. No bigger than a few stuck-together grains of sand; it’s a miracle she was able to distinguish it from the rotted matter. She put it in a petri dish, as scientists do.”
“So you’re saying…”
“That the ambrosia kept the lantern fish alive for a minor eternity? That the ambrosia kept that same fish alive, protecting it somehow, as it rose through the oceanic zones? That the ambrosia didn’t allow that fish to die until it deserted its body, either voluntarily or through some other organic process?” Felz showed Luke his palms again. “Many signs point to yes.”
“So this stuff is floating around down there, attaching itself to aquatic life?”
Felz shook his head. “The lantern fish was an anomaly. We’ve found no further presence of ambrosia at that depth. Our speculation is that the fish hunted near a thermal vent; a tiny shred of ambrosia could have floated up from below and moored to the fish. The only place we’ve found any concentration of ambrosia—or what we believe to be ambrosia—is much deeper. The deepest part of the Mariana Trench, in fact. Right in the area of Challenger Deep.”
“Which is where the Trieste is.”
Felz nodded. “We sent down observation cameras first, when the idea of constructing a station at that depth was still in its infancy. We had to know if the effort was worthwhile. The camera lenses kept shattering under pressure, but the footage was promising. Globules of matter drifting over the trench floor. Strange movements—the sort commonly associated with sentient life. Which goes against all prior understandings of those depths. For decades, nobody thought anything could exist down there. The monolithic pressure, a total absence of nourishing light. How could anything survive?”
“And that was enough to kick-start all of this?” Luke said. “A few blobs fluttering around at the bottom of the ocean?”
“Desperate times, Dr. Nelson.”
Luke lapsed into silence.
“You seem underwhelmed,” said Felz. “Or is it dubious? I felt the same way at first. Nothing should live down there. What good could it do us, anyway? But then I saw for myself. Your brother showed me.”
“How did Clayton get involved with all this?”
Felz said: “When you discover something like ambrosia—the equivalent of an intricate organic riddle—who would you summon, if not the world’s foremost riddle solver?”
He waved Luke toward the back of the room.
“Come here. Let me show you something else.”
12.
FELZ’S LAPTOP sat on the lab bench.
“Hang on. It’s here somewhere.” He scrolled the mouse across the files littering the computer’s desktop. “You’ve followed your brother’s work, I take it? Surely you know about his cancer mouse?”
How could Luke not? It was his brother’s best-known contribution to science, far more impressive than Doug, his nose-mouse. Clayton hadn’t discovered a cure for cancer, far from it. But he had found a way to give cancer to a mouse. And he gave it with pinpoint precision—he could isolate the location, the organ or tissue, and control the complexity of its spread: malignant or benign, dormant or devouring.
Clayton’s very special mice were born with cancer. They were engineered to be sick—specifically and perfectly, from a scientific point of view. A researcher could order fifty mice with Stage 2 lung cancer. Or a hundred mice with advanced liver cancer, or ten with benign stomach tumors. Clayton’s mice were a boon to science. They were born carrying the pathogen that would kill them—and they were never truly healthy, not for one moment of their lives. Animal rights activists were none too thrilled, to put it mildly, but that didn’t stop researchers everywhere from hoisting Clayton on their collective shoulders.
“Your brother heard about Dr. Parks and the foreign matter she’d isolated,” said Felz. “Shortly thereafter, the sample was delivered to our lab for study.”
“And Dr. Parks had no problem with that?”
“Dr. Parks was given an opportunity to stay with the project. She opted not to take that opportunity.”
“Clayton muscled her out?”
Felz looked up sharply. “Nothing like that, I assure you.”
Luke saw no use in pursuing the issue. “So when the sample arrived…?”
“Your brother absented himself for several days. He’d emerge from the lab weary but excited. As the days ground on, confusion wore through that excitement. I don’t know, he told me. I really can’t tell you anything about this substance. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before on this earth.”
Felz located the .mov file he’d been searching for.
CANCER MOUSE AMBROSIA, TEST 1-B.
“For this test, Clayton created a special mouse,” Felz said. “It didn’t have one cancer; it had virtually all of them. It was sick in every way it was possible to be sick. Liver, pancreatic, spinal, skin, bowel. It was on death’s door by the time the first experiment took place.”
“Why 1-B?” Luke asked. “What happened to 1-A?”
“The ambrosia didn’t interact with the first test subject. It… refused to, is I suppose the only explanation. As such, the subject expired. Now watch, Dr. Nelson. I think you’ll find it quite extraordinary.”