The Glaciermen #35: Microscope

BONUS SECTION: prepublication manuscripts of "The Glaciermen"

Hey everyone,

I know I’m a day early, but that’s because I’ve got a BONUS SEGMENT for you! Woohoo!

Also, welcome to any new readers—if you’re looking for the beginning of Part Two, you can find it here in the index.

In a fit of creative mulling, I added in a little segment at an earlier point in the story (don’t worry, it doesn’t mess up timelines or anything), but I also wanted to keep things moving forward and not delay tomorrow’s segment, so here is a juicy Monday Bonus Segment for you!

Confused? No worries, all you have to do is read today’s segment today and then read tomorrow’s tomorrow, and I promise it will all make sense.

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Recap (spoilers!): The station crew barely survived their horrifying encounter with two tunlaq hunters. Amanda and Rolf both took a beating, David hid in a corner, and Lee came back just in time to save the day. (Read it here)

Microscope

David winced as he adjusted the dial on the microscope, the fresh glass cuts on his forearm stinging with each twist. He held his breath for a moment to help steady his hand, bringing the sample into focus as he tried to block out the jabber of anxious voices coming from the main unit of the station.

“I need more gauze,” Amanda was saying.

A cry of pain from Mikkel. 

A grunt, that would be Rolf.

“Pressure here,” said the young man, Lee. 

David groaned in frustration—didn’t they know he was trying to concentrate? He was in the midst of the most important discovery of the decade, if not the century, and they were whining about poor Mikkel. The dumb bastard should have jumped out of the way instead of standing there with his mouth hanging open like a deer in headlights. No wonder the crazed glacier man got him. David shut down the thought before it pulled him back to the gruesome tear across Mikkel’s large belly, or reminded him it was done to him by a man with only his bare hands. He also did not want to remember his own reaction, cowering and whimpering in the corner.

Instead, he squinted into the microscope lens, adjusting the light and zooming in further on the sample of the viscous luminescent coating that had covered the crazed attackers. There had been two of them: the one who crashed in through the skylight, and another outside who had sabotaged the generator. Lee had somehow dealt with the one outside on his own before coming in and finishing off the first. The boy had grit, if nothing else, and clearly enjoyed some modicum of DNA adaptation to allow him to hold his own. But those scar-laced, goo-covered men stiffening on the back platform just outside the mess unit—they were truly fascinating to David.

Now that he’d seen them in action, he knew there was truth to Lee’s stories—despite the obvious embellishments about magical lightning. It meant David’s theory about dormant massively-adaptive DNA in humans was on the verge of validation. These ‘toon-laq’ were even better examples of it than Lee. All he needed now was confirmation. He’d swabbed one of the dead fellows and loaded it into the analyzer, but with a half hour left on the automated process, he was spending the spare time studying the mysterious blue gel—a drop of which was now pressed onto the glass slide of the microscope.

From what Lee described, it clearly contained a psychedelic molecule—no surprise, given its fungal mycelium origin—but it was the stimulant effect that piqued David’s curiosity.  While some natural compounds could produce both effects simultaneously, the stimulation was usually mild at best, nothing like the frenzied strength these attackers displayed, and David highly doubted these brutes had a pharmaceutical-grade laboratory hidden away under the ice to synthesize something so potent. There had to be another explanation as to how this blue goo made them so hyper-physical.

And he was determined to figure it out, but was having a hell of a time bringing the sample into focus. He adjusted another knob, and finally the illuminated circle of the eyepiece clarified into recognizable shapes and structures. David was surprised to see a vast plethora of microbial life forms, but then remembered that this sample came from the skin of a man whose hygiene practice included rubbing human blood all over himself, so lots of microbes made sense.

He zoomed in further on a little cluster of the single-celled organisms and amoebas,  watching them swim around each other. Mixed among them were the recognizable donut shapes of red blood cells. He watched as one of the amoebas wriggled its way toward a blood cell, then in the amazing manner typical to the microscopic, instantly mold itself into a crescent shape to suck the blood cell into itself before morphing back into a roughly circular blob. The blood cell began to come apart as enzymes within the amoeba broke it down, and as it did so the whole amoeba began to glow a dim blue.

David smiled with delight at the spectacle of nature—and at the thought of putting his name on this new, predatory, bioluminescent single-celled species. The glacier men must have been remarkably clever to discover that feeding this apparently inanimate gel made it glow longer—and they were surprisingly accurate about the true mechanism of action, despite having no knowledge of the microscopic world. He continued watching as the amoeba lazed its way along toward a nearby cluster of pill-shaped parameciums, wondering what it might do next.

As the glowing amoeba neared the cluster, the parameciums seemed to detect its presence and began wriggling their flagella to swim away. The amoeba was slow, and it looked like the parameciums would easily evade it. But then the amoeba did something.

“It can’t be,” David whispered.

One of the parameciums had gone still. He watched to see if the amoeba would do it again, his eyes stinging from not daring to blink and miss it. For a second, amoeba glowed a brighter blue—then there it was! A tiny spark, barely noticeable and lasting only an instant, jumped from the amoeba to another paramecium. It twitched, then went still. The glow from the amoeba faded after the spark, but only until the predatory cell had absorbed its next prey, and the glow returned.

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And that’s it for now folks

Thanks for reading! That’s it for the Bonus Segment, so keep your eye out for the next Segment coming tomorrow.

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– Xavier Macfarlane
Author, The Glaciermen

©Xavier Macfarlane 2024. All rights reserved.