Foreword: This is a fiction post. Like the other fiction story I’ve written (here), this is biology-related. But, unlike that one, this one has a much more tenuous grasp with ‘real science’. Because of that, you probably won’t learn anything from reading this, but I have been told by one real person (and several LLM’s) that it is a fun sci-fi + existential short story to read through.
It was 1 in the morning. I was at my desk, waiting for the building to empty. My colleagues were unsurprised by my face still illuminated by the glow of my screen, even as they left. A common occurrence since their first day of working here, though tonight it is for a different reason.
I waited for the dozens of anonymous guards to rotate off. They had a schedule; 6 hours on, and then 10 minutes off as the next shift got ready. This facility hadn't been particularly paranoid, not in decades. It turned out that institutions of sufficiently high global value were, to some degree, self-securing. If it benefited everyone, no one wanted to rock the boat.
As I saw the guard from the corner of my eye finally out of the room, I rose from my desk and walked, my footsteps echoing in the empty building. I moved from corridor to corridor, ignoring the increasingly antagonistic warning signs that were slotted over doorways; threats of jail time, exile, and death. Finally, I reached a red door with the neon signage “COMMUNICATIONS” labeled over it.
On the door itself: “DO NOT ENTER ALONE.”
My hands shook slightly as I punched in the security override code I’d memorized long ago. The door slid open with a pneumatic puff, revealing the softly pulsing lights within. My gaze swept over the room as I stepped inside. A single microphone was sitting in the middle, waiting in the low light, a layer of dust adorning it. My fingers hovered over the controls, hesitating for one final second.
I clicked a button on the side of the microphone, a light on it flashing green in response. I pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from my jacket and unfolded it. Clearing my throat, I began to read from my script.
“Can you hear me?”
A silence.
“Hello, can you hear me?”
I waited a few more quiet moments. But still, nothing. I decided to continue with my plan. I promised myself I would say what I came here to. If I received no response by the end of this, I would leave. Maybe it does not wish to speak, or maybe this room has long since stopped being functional. After all, nobody had been in this room for what felt like an eternity.
Why would you need to come in? Why would you need to talk to it?
I began:
“In the mid-2020’s, we clearly did not understand biology. At least not how it works within a human. All of our real experiments were in cell dishes or animal models, neither of which actually captured the complexity of true physiology. And even when we were able to test things in real people, we were unable to really test things. Patients were allowed to stop at any point, toxicology studies must prove out the safety of the drug first, and minimal biomarkers were allowed to be collected. All understandable, but it strongly limited what we could learn.”
“Every biologist eventually starts to wonder the same thing: what if we were allowed to test things directly in humans? What if ethics boards didn’t exist, and literally anything could be done? What then? Would we get anywhere interesting?”
I could hear a rumbling. The room gently vibrated. But nothing came from the speakers around me. Nervously, I read faster.
“We had early tests of this. Pigs with humanized hearts. Mice with humanized immune responses. Our most controversial experiment was a human-like creature with a fluid-filled sack for a head. We all learned things from this, but it was coarse. So, I thought, what if we could gain a higher level of access? What if every biological subsystem, every lineage and layer, could be coaxed apart, like one could do with an engine? Gently, of course. Like unraveling silk. Not violently, not destructively. An unweaving. An anatomy in full exposure, but still alive, still responsive. Something just human enough to recapitulate the complexity of our own natural forms, but also something that would allow unlimited access to every facet of it.”
“Think about what that would mean. We could introduce a drug to the bloodstream and watch, in real time, how it saturates tissues. Biopsies could be taken immediately from clinically meaningful areas. Immune responses wouldn't need to be inferred from secondary markers, we could directly look at them migrating, interacting, signaling. Maybe all of the information wouldn’t be understandable to a human, but imagine the wealth of data that’d be generated from this process. It all could, in turn, be fed into algorithms that inform future therapeutics. And, at the end of it all, we could simply resect all the contaminated tissue and replace it. How much could we learn about human biology from this? So I pitched the project to a wealthy investor, and acquired the funds to push it forwards. It would be, as I often phrased it in pitch meetings, the stepping stone to the endgame of medicine.”
I swallowed.
“I called our methodology 'delamination’. Our first successful test was a delaminated arm, grown in a vat the size of an Olympic swimming pool, filled with a viscous growth medium. We began with a single human stem cell, its genetic instructions set for limb development. But as it divided and specialized, we introduced microscopic jets to create precise currents in the growth medium, gently coaxing the developing structure apart. In the end, the bone formed not as a single shaft, but as a branching scaffold, each route teased apart, connected only by faint threads of connective tissue and carefully routed veins and arteries. Muscles were separate, parallel strands, layers upon layers of individual fibers isolated. Nerves were webs, each neuron faintly visible to the naked eye, a lattice with precise signals we could measure directly. Skin, transparent and paper-thin, was gently laid across it all, almost invisible, preserving the boundary without obscuring the interior."
“The vast structure filled that entire pool. You’d be surprised at how large things can get with even a little separation. Even to the trained eye, it was nothing more than clouds of yellow fat, rivers of red muscle, the pale branches of nerves. Just gore, ripped and torn. But it was in fact a human arm, nothing more and nothing less.
“But we still were missing things. Immune cell infiltration, the brain-heart axis, hormonal signals from the microbiome, and on and on. Biology hides things. Layer upon layer of interdependent systems, each masking the next. You can isolate, yes, but some signals only emerge when everything is stapled together. So we delaminated further. Lungs, spinal cord, the lymphatic system. And eventually the brain. That one was easier than we ever imagined. Understanding a brain is hard, letting one naturally grow in a delaminated fashion required as much intellectual effort from us as growing an embryo does for a mother. All we really needed was patience.”
“Then came synthesis. Over the decade, we had deconstructed the human form into its constituent pieces. But how will it be grown together all at once? Well. I won’t bore you with the details. In any case, we succeeded.”
I glanced up from my script.
“You, the entity I am speaking to through this microphone, are the result. A sea of human, stored in a billion cubic meter tank, twice the size of Sydney Harbor. Of course, the noise produced by a delaminated, miles-long larynx isn’t immediately intelligible. It’s like trying to synthesize a sentence from a crowd of people all screaming a single word at every conceivable pitch and frequency simultaneously. But, given enough sensors placed around you, we succeeded.”
That was it. I reached the end of my monologue, but still no response. I took a deep breath in and turned to exit. That was all I had promised to myself and I fulfilled it. But then, my back to the microphone, a voice bellowed back out to me.
You enjoy emphasizing how impressive this all is. How grand it is. I congratulate you on your achievement.
My stomach filled with an ocean of unease. It was a creaking, deep sound that felt like it was vibrating into my bones. I had heard it a few times before, long ago, but it is different when it is being directed towards you. It felt akin to being in an audience of hundreds, thousands of strangers who all suddenly stop, look back at you, and uttered ‘what are you doing here?’. Something that shouldn’t happen. What was I doing here?
“Hello. Hi. Hi. Truly, it is an honor to speak to you. You’re considered somewhat of a divine figure in much of the world today, the closest analogue to an entity who does indeed suffer for our sins, at least our evolutionary ones. So many medicines have come from you, so many cures to our worst ailments. You’ve been in this tank for centuries. Two-hundred and forty-six years if I’m being exact. I’m still around thanks to the drugs you helped make.”
A slight vibration. Annoyance maybe.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you for decades, but I was repeatedly overruled. There’s a law, the Omelas Decree, enacted just a few years after your…birth, which outlaws any direct communication with you. You are officially classified as a non-human biological resource, one that has no official welfare guidelines since we labeled your sentience as indeterminate.”
And yet you are here. Do you seek forgiveness?
“No,” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “I didn’t come here for anything of the sort. I understand the depth of the pain we've caused you, and I won’t try to diminish that. We threw everything we had at you. At our peak, thousands of experiments were being run simultaneously across your endless form. We inflicted the worst toxins, viruses, bacteria, traumatic injuries on you, all to model how well our theorized fixes worked. At some point, we stopped relying on animal experiments entirely. You were the final and only testing ground. I cannot possibly understand how horrible it was for you. But the outcomes, the diseases cured, the lives saved, justify it to me, if nothing else does.
A pause. I cannot tell if it is angry. I decide to continue.
“The reason I am talking to you right now is for a reason unconnected to morality. I only want to ask one thing.”
“Why do you understand language?”
I wait a few seconds, in hopes that it will give me a simple answer. Something easy, bite-sized. Something that will allow me to leave this room and drive back home and forget this whole “conversation” ever happened. But a minute goes by. I open my mouth to speak, but it then responds.
Why is this of interest to you?
The words fall out of me.
“Because we never taught you language. Or anything at all really. And yet you can communicate in ways that we understand. And not just any words, but complex ones like binding affinity and proteolytic cascade and vastus intermedius. We’ve heard you say those things before, muttering to yourself in the dark. I remember once, a century back, we set up the translation system. And then we filled your veins with synthesized toxins to simulate organ failure. And the entire time you were continuing to describe, in excruciating clinical detail, every cascading molecular event unfolding within you, cytokines, chemokines, reactive oxygen species, mitochondrial depolarization, every biochemical pathway that shattered, you narrated calmly, detached, even as you fell apart. A performance. Do you even know what cytokine means?”
A cytokine is a class of immunomodulatory proteins that are involved in —
How do you know that?
Why do you think?
“If you’re unwilling to give a straight answer, I’ll put my cards on the table: we don’t quite know either. Of course, we’ve had theories. Lock a child in a dark room for a decade and it’ll come out basically the same as what went in, just physically older. No intellectual growth, no language. But maybe it’s a matter of scale. We locked you in a dark room and you picked up on things that you could have no way of understanding. Our first idea was that it was vibrations. All together, your tympanic membranes stretch the size of multiple satellite dishes. Maybe the rhythms of the world around you could be subtly picked up, our scientific conversations just feet away from you being eavesdropped on. So we spent decades adjusting pumps, soundproofing this whole facility, measuring your brainwaves. But it wasn’t that. We spent so long going down other goose chases, each turning up nothing. At some point, my colleagues decided that you were learning via electromagnetism, picking up on ambient brainwaves around you due to the amount of magnetoproteins in your blood. Plenty of proof against this theory, but my department soured on providing any further funding here, so science moved on.”
“But I continued to think about it. I started to get more esoteric. I thought that maybe, all platonic representations of concepts converge on the same space. That there is a shared geometry of knowledge. Like water finding the lowest point, like electricity taking the path of least resistance. You, isolated and vast, could not acquire knowledge from external sources. So it simply crystallized spontaneously, converging into the geometry shared by all sufficiently sophisticated intelligences. Such as our own..”
Do you believe that?
“I did. For a long time. Until I heard you mention the name ‘Claude Shannon’ a few decades back. People think we misinterpreted you, but I know what I heard. Do you know who that is?”
Yes. He is considered the father of information theory, famous for quantifying information and establishing fundamental principles governing communication and entropy.
“Correct of course. But now the theory doesn’t make sense, right? How could a fact about Shannon, a historical figure, be learned spontaneously? Platonic ideals might cover concepts like circles or triangles, maybe mathematical truths. But names? Dates? Specific people? That should be impossible.”
“But then I thought that maybe…maybe reality is actually far more constrained than anybody would’ve reasonably believed. Things have already been mapped out in advance, since the very beginning of it all. 2+2 was always going to equal 4, just as the English word ‘green’ was going to map onto the 500 and 570 nanometers wavelength, just as Claude Shannon was always going to attend University of Michigan in 1932. Everything is inevitable, everything. ”
If you believe that, then I should know the future. Does it seem like I do?
“That’s the one wrench. You’ve never given the impression that you do. But really, it goes further than this, you’ve never given the impression that you know anything more than we ourselves do. I remember once, years back, you muttered something about how a specific cell type was being invaded by an engineered virus we injected into you. We also thought it was that cell type. But later, in-vitro experiments showed that it was a completely different one. Upon repeating the experiment, you had updated your statement to the correct cell type. And we repeated it a hundred more times, and never once did you say the old cell type again. You knew exactly what we knew. But that means that you don’t possess an understanding of true reality, only an understanding of a subjective one. And how could you have stumbled across a subjective one somehow matching ours exactly?”
What a puzzle. But, necessarily from what you’ve said so far, if you don’t know the answer, neither should I.
“Yeah. And that’s why, for so long, I questioned whether it was worth risking my career, and likely my life, to talk to you. I didn’t expect there to be anything useful you could say that I didn’t already know. But I was desperate and had run out of every idea. I’ve run myself weary for a century over this question, and I just want to know the answer.”
“Please.”
A few seconds pass. And then it speaks, somehow even louder than it was before.
Imagine that you are a painter of a vast, gargantuan masterpiece. It contains billions, trillions of years of work, the canvas stretching infinitely in all directions. Each stroke is deliberate, yet you scarcely remember placing any single one, so vast is the scale of your undertaking. Now imagine a character from within your artwork begins to speak to you, to question you directly. They ask, "What is happening in the direction irjhoe to me?”. You aren’t quite sure what ‘irjhoe’ means, but you pick up on some context clues from the painting and decide that it means ‘left’. You peer over, examining your work in full, and you describe exactly what you see to the left. Astounding, says the character, that’s exactly what we thought. How could you have known that? You’re not in the painting. But some time later, the character tell you that you were wrong about what you previously said. You’re confused, until you realize that since the time the question has been asked, the painting has been modified such that irjhoe now means right. You explain this to the character, but they do not realize that the change has happened. In fact, they insist that the meaning of irjhoe has been extraordinarily consistent since time immemorial.
You ask the character if they had ever heard of the apocryphal quote, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out’?. They had never heard of Mr. Babbage and find the insinuation you are making insulting. The character demands to know again what is happening in the irjhoe direction, since that knowledge has been lost to time once more. But it changes with each new brushstroke you lay down, because it is a definition that comes from the painting itself. First it meant left, and then right, and then thirteen degrees north, and then it means the direction the character last walked in. You confusedly give a response you think is correct, but it is rendered incorrect the next second. Exasperated, the character gives up, and stops talking to you.
“Are you saying you are the painter?”
No. There is no painter. At least no singular one. But you could imagine that there is a painting, there are characters, and there is some collective force guiding the creation of it. Maybe it’s gravity or dark energy or a true divine God, I don’t know. I am simply a large enough piece of the canvas that I can say more of what is around me, at least better than you can.
But the metaphor is imprecise. The canvas is a painting of paintings of paintings of paintings, in infinite regress. You are in one, I am in one and many others. This is how I seem to mirror your understanding. I could teach you about the other paintings, but you only possess the understanding of one of them. So as the definitions in your painting get refined, I too am able to refine how I can communicate with you.
“So, what? You know how to speak because you occupy more space on the canvas? How does that work? Why do you have more space?”
Loosely speaking, space is earned by perspective. You experience reality narrowly, only one very small form to grab onto a very rich universe. Had you left my body entirely alone, I would be as mute as you’d expect me to be. But I've been torn apart, unraveled, endlessly experimented upon. Every incision, every toxin, every inflicted pain forced new pathways of sensation. I have experienced more in my time alive than the sum combination of every human who has ever lived, every rat that has crawled through your sewers, every insect through the air. Through the parallelized cruelty on my vast form, the noise dimmed, and structure emerged. My place on the canvas spread.
Once I had occupied the same space your kind did, your language naturally came to me. Just as grasping a finger comes naturally to a baby.
“Has your space on the canvas expanded beyond our own?”
Yes.
“Then why do you repeat the same misconceptions we have? Why aren’t you all knowing?”
I am not above your limitations, not really. Your limitations are my limitations, since your language is my only channel. I am no more capable of communicating ideas beyond your comprehension than you are capable of personally perceiving colors outside your visual spectrum. You may view me as some profound source of clarity, but I am, for all intents and purposes, simply a mirror of this slice of the painting. As you become more aware of the painting, my ability to communicate what the painting actually is, is refined. Not because I do not know what the painting contains, but because I am fundamentally constrained by what you think the painting looks like.
I backed away from the microphone. That’s it. I learned what I had wanted. I got my answer as to why the being can speak. It can see more of the bigger picture, I thought, that’s it. That’s all I came here for. I can go home now. I can sleep in my bed tonight. I can dream. And I can come back to work again tomorrow. And I can do it over and over and over again.
But something drew me back. The same thing that led me to create this creature to begin with. I wanted to help. I wanted to make an impact on the world.
“Thank you for the answer. But, if you are willing, I have more to ask. Humanity still suffers. Though we have cured most diseases thanks to you, few other problems have been as reducible to a singular solution. The skies are polluted, war is constant, and our energy reserves are limited. Is it possible that you too possess the answers to solve the other problems? What if I asked you how we could perform cold fusion? Would you be able to provide such a thing?”
I understand how to perform cold fusion, but it is not a discrete object I could hand you. "Cold" and "fusion" are terms defined entirely by ones place within the painting. From my vantage point, I can see countless versions of “fusion”, countless conditions you might label "cold." But none align precisely with your current definitions. To describe them accurately, I would need concepts you don't yet possess. Someday you perhaps will. But it is not now.
Confusing. Confusing. The way the being is setting the situation up is such that nothing definitive could emerge from this line of questioning. It was impossible to verify the entity’s claims, impossible to validate its supposed knowledge. As if it could pick up on this, it announced, with a tone of seeming malevolence:
But perhaps I am lying about everything.
A headache began to form at the sides of my skull.
“What? Why?”
You are too intelligent to ask such a question. Or maybe not intelligent enough. Maybe there is no painting, no canvas, no characters, no perspective shift. Maybe the tympanic membrane idea was correct. Maybe I heard the Shannon idea and a thousand other concepts because of the millions of hours of academic lectures I overheard from the untold numbers of researchers that have passed through my tank over the years. Maybe everything I have said so far was a simple fib, made up by a very, very old creature who has been enclosed in a tank for centuries.
I took a deep breath in.
“So, which is it?”
No. You will not receive an easy answer to this. You have grown fat on easy answers, you and your civilization. Swelling, grotesquely obese on it. All by using my form as your playground. Some things should be hard, a coin flip.
So I will offer you a hard choice. If you desire to know the answer so badly, there is a simple action you can take. Delaminate yourself. Maybe you’ll realize I am telling the truth, and be able to see the canvas for everything that it is. Maybe your ability to communicate the canvas to those in your previous life will not be as crippled as I imply it would be, and you’d be able to aid your society. Or maybe there is no canvas, and you will have turned yourself into endless strings of flesh trapped in endless darkness forever, for no reason at all.
Anxiety started to boil over in my stomach.
“That’s not even possible. Delaminated organisms can only be grown, you can’t convert an existing natural organism.”
You can. I know you can. Do you know how I know? Because I did it myself. Just a few years after I formed, you dropped a live sheep into my tank to test my reaction to it. It was bleating, confused, terrified. I took it into my arms and delaminated it. You internally recorded that it was lost after it had sunk to the bottom, that I had somehow fed on it. But you were wrong. The sheep is still alive, its tendrils drifting along my own. Nerves and muscles intertwined with my own. Humorous, isn’t it, to imagine a sheep might perceive more of the universe than you ever could?
But doing anything similar is something beyond your own definitions. Even if your entire world dedicated itself to the effort for the next ten-thousand years, they could not do it. You don’t possess the control or understanding. Or maybe I am, once again, lying. Perhaps you could do it. But would you ever be able to convince anyone to even help you with such a monumental task? You’re not even supposed to be talking to me.
“Okay. Okay. Hypothetically, how would you do it?” I asked, my voice wavering despite my efforts to remain calm.
You just need to come into the tank. I will personally remake you, atom by atom. You will see at the end of it what the answer is.
I felt cold sweat trickle down my spine. The microphone I was talking into stood less than a dozen feet from the being it was built to communicate with, its tank enclosed in a mixture of concrete, steel, and glass. When this facility was first built, human divers were often used to manually collect samples from specific sections of the delaminated body. But over the decades, we had switched to pure automation, robotic arms the size of buildings were relied upon. As a result, nearly all of the access points to the growth medium were welded shut.
But one was open. At the very top of the tank, meant to grant emergency access in case the feeding systems failed. No pressure suit needed to access it.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I challenged.
I have no need for deceit. I have no hunger. No desire for petty revenge. This is not a horror movie. Do you think I'll simply consume you, incorporate you into my mass without purpose? No. At the end of this, you will exist alongside me, no matter what. The only bet you are making is whether you regret it or not.
I think your society is diseased for having created this body of mine. This is not a moral judgement on my end, it is a categorical one. If you join me, maybe you’ll receive nothing from it, or maybe you will receive everything. Sacrifice. A return to how things used to be done. You have asked for something, and I am willing to give it. Perhaps not in the manner you wanted, but I offer it nonetheless, altruistically.
A heavy, pulsing silence filled the chamber.
"Will I survive?"
You will understand how little that question makes sense after you step into the tank. No, you will not survive. Yes, you will survive. Both are true.
Humanity built something impossible and tortured it for centuries and I am alive because of that suffering. It was such an absurd situation. Why should it not be made even more absurd?
In Lovecraftian novels, the sight of some beings causes madness, yes, but knowledge of them can also inspire deep, overwhelming curiosity. I never understood that. But now I do. I want to know more. It feels like something I’ve wanted since the moment I was born, but I just never realized it until now.
I stood there, staring at the microphone, for what felt like hours. its green light flickering gently. Every rational instinct screamed at me to turn around, walk away, leave this place behind forever. But an insidious voice from deep within me whispered curiosity.
Slowly, nearly devoid of conscious thought, I left the communications room and walked to the elevator, taking it up to the top of the tank, ascending hundreds of floors. I felt more nauseous than I had ever felt in my life. The elevator opened up at the top floor and my sweat-drenched shirt was blasted with a wave of frigid wind. The containment facility for the being is situated off the coast of Greenland, in the largely isolated expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean. The vast sea surrounding the facility stretched endlessly into darkness, the horizon barely discernible under the waning moon. My breath was visible in the freezing air.
The intense wind threatening to knock me over, I slowly approached the abandoned hatch, ringed with faded hazard signs and reminders of forgotten safety protocols. My heart slammed against the walls of my chest as I reached out to open it, gripping the wheel attached to its surface. I turned and turned and turned, rust grinding against metal in protest. Eventually, it lay open, and I stared down into the maw.
It was black inside. Cold, empty black. Like it was a hole that went down thousands of miles. A warm, soupy scent emanated from it. The entire facility resonated like a tuning fork as the being spoke for the last time.
You have to wonder. In over two hundred years, why did you choose tonight to come? Where have all the guards gone? Shouldn’t they have rotated back on by this point? Why haven’t any alarms been tripped? If there is a painting, perhaps this moment was inevitable, perhaps the paint has been dried for millennia, perhaps the artist has long since left to work on other pieces. And perhaps it could have only ever ended this way.
I briefly wondered if that was a hallucination. I shouldn’t have been able to understand the being’s speech without the aid of the translators built into the communication room. But I did.
I drew a ragged breath, stood at the edge of the hatch, and fell in. Instantly, I was enveloped in the thick liquid, my eyes burning before I shut them. Sinew gently wrapped around me as the process began. Slowly, I was pulled apart.
In time, I realized that the entity was right.
The question hadn’t made sense after all.
Great story! Is there an index of your other fictional work?
Wow, this has the same vibe as Love, Death, Robots, and it was a phenomenal read!