Thousand+ Words a Day for Nov 30, 2025

"This Stuff is Quite a Bit Different than the Life on Earth," the Woman in the White....

"This animals are all quite a bit different than the life on Earth," the woman in the white lab coat said. "It's not that it looks different, but it is different, biochemically." She looked up from the microscope and stood up. "Take a look at that, for instance."

She gestured toward the seat, and Franklin sat down. "What it is?" he asked.

"Just have a look and tell me what you think."

"You've got live samples?"

The woman shrugged. "Sure. They don't seem to need anything except light and an inert atmosphere to survive."

"Inert atmosphere," Frankliin repeated. He looked carefully at the microscope's sample tray and saw that whatever it was that he was being asked to look at was encased in a sealed, flat glass container, as opposed to simply being sandwiched between two small panes of glass. "What's gas do you have them in? Argon?"

"Yes, we use argon," the woman said. "But anything will work, as long as they're prevented from being exposed to oxygen."

He put his eyes to the eyepieces and rotated the focusing knobs a little. "Looks like some single cells to me," he said.

"They do look like that, but they're not," the woman answered. "Take the probe and touch one of the cells on the edge of the colony."

Franklin looked up from the eyepiece, grasped the slender instrument lying on the table, then put his eyes back to the eyepieces. Through the microscope, he saw the end of the probe and touched one of the cells. It twitched--and so did all the other cells. "Whoa," Franklin said.

"They're like a school of fish. They respond as a group."

"School of fish, huh?" Franklin did it a couple of more times, gently prodding cells on that side of the colony and observing how the cells throughout the colony responded. He continued to gaze through the microscope as he spoke. "You know, small fish of the kind I think you mean, mackerel and such, they do communicate. They do it through their motion. Even a large school can seem to turn simultaneously. But they don't. Slow motion films show how each fish starts moving after the previous one and before the subsequent one." He looked up from the eyepieces. "But I don't think that's what's going on here."

"No, it's not," she said. "Most of the Devonian animals we've examined are able to access some sort of shared consciousness. We don't know how much information they can share or how detailed it is, but they seem to be able to share community-critical information."

Franklin stood up. "Well, there's survival benefit in it, I guess."

The woman shrugged. "There's something else I want to show you," she said as she stepped over to one of a row of white cabinets that lined the wall. She opened a door; inside were all manner of jars, each of which filled with a yellowish fluid and each containing some sort of embalmed specimen. She carefully picked up one of the jars and closed the cabinet door. "Take a look at this," she said, putting it on the counter next to the microscope.

"What is that?" Franklin said.

"It lives in shallow water, near the poles," she said. "It's one of the few animals we've seen on Devon that has--" Once again, she stopped short. "Well, I was going to say fur, but it's not fur. It seems to be some sort of scales. But it traps the atmosphere and acts as insulation."

"Is it mammalian?"

"No, not in the traditional sense," she said as she rotated the bottle around. "No animal on Devon makes milk, as far as we know, and this one sure didn't. And it doesn't have a placenta either."

"How cold does it get on Devon?"

"Not very," the woman said. "At the poles, there's water ice, in the depth of the Devonian winters," she said. "Now, look at this little adaptation." She pointed to a pair limb- like projections coming from the ends of the animal's twin spines, that ran together like train tracks down the back of its body. The projections met and formed a sort of small rectangular panel.

"What is that?"

"It's full of nerves," she said. "The nerves are laid down in a very interesting pattern. They don't branch, as human nerves do. When we showed it to some electronics experts, they knew immediately what it was."

"So what it is?"

"It's an antenna," she said. "A pretty sophisticated FM antenna."

"So this thing could listen to the radio?" Franklin asked.

"No. But inside its head is another structure. A transmitter."

"Radio?" Franklin asked.

"Right," the woman said. "This creature could communicate in radio with--" She paused and picked up the jar. "Well, with its family or whatever has evolved on the other end to receive the transmissions, I guess." She put the jar back in the cabinet and closed the door.

"Naturally evolved radio communication," Franklin mused. "The cells couldn't have that, though. They're too small."

"Yeah, we don't know how the cells do it, whether it's radio or something else."

"Tell me something," Franklin said. "These cells, and those creatures in all those jars inside those cabinets. Where'd you get them?"

"Devon," she said.

"Oh, come on, everybody knows that the Devonians don't let us on their planet. Did they give them to you?"

She turned away. "They're Devonian species, Dr. Franklin. We received them from our sources on the planet and we just study them and try to make sense of them."

"Did you decant them?"

She looked at him levelly for a few moments, then looked down. "No, we didn't," she said.

"Hmm." Franklin responded. It was her defeat and his victory; as a scientist, she had to admit that having not sourced the specimens herself, she was without any way to verify where they actually were from. "For all you know, they may be some sort of created creatures."

"I don't think so," she said. "We've got one in the freezer. It's alive. And it's broadcasting."

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