Daughter

The two bodies appeared intact, which was the first thing that made Professor Sekh frown in thought. The drill had been grinding through solid granite, far below where there should have been an end to solid granite and a beginning to basalt. Then the drill had broken through into a much less dense layer of rock, and the sudden movement should have pulverised the two forms, not wrapped them like spaghetti around the workings of the drill head and shaft.

The second thing was that immediately they were released from the shaft along with the drill, both forms expanded rapidly back to a normal human shape, albeit grotesquely twisted, but fully clothed in some sort of form fitting dull blue jumpsuits.

Professor Sekh walked slowly toward the figures, both apparently female from their shape, one about the size of a small teenage girl and the other much smaller, like a delicate child. The drill was still humming as it wound down, and the bodies were still turning slowly and dripping with the water from the hoses above the drill head.

But no delicate child, or even the remains of one, could have remained intact or even recognisable at the end of that drill. Professor Sekh paced around the forms as they slowed to a stop. Two years earlier she would have reached out to touch them, but the latest pandemic had erased that impulsive gesture from her repertoire. She stood, without realising it at precisely one point five metres from the two figures, and noted that the fingers of their hands were entwined. Were they mother and daughter, perhaps? Had they died in some strange accident, or had they been hiding in a cave or hollow when some geological disaster buried them forever in the bedrock from which they had just been extracted? Had they tunnelled down into the two billion year old rock in which they were encased, only to be fossilised after their demise?

They were the plumpest, healthiest fossils she had ever seen though. She shook her head, her thick dark hair tossing across her face with the motion. “What the....?”

She said, “Film.” The tiny camera encased in her forehead began filming immediately, but she hoped one of the other workers had the presence of mind to film earlier, as the figures had emerged from the drill hole and expanded like sea monkeys into full human figures.

“Are they alive?” asked an excited voice at her shoulder.

She turned to the young intern, Sam, and shook her head. “Don’t be silly. The rock we pulled them from was about two billion years old.”

“But of course they couldn’t be that old.” Sam nodded wisely.

She sighed. With interns, you tended to expect so much more than you ended up with. “I’d guess not.”

It was his turn to frown at the frisson of exasperated sarcasm in her voice, and he asked, “Do you want them taken back to the lab?”

“I want them bagged and tagged properly in impermeable clear wrap. Then you can throw them in your truck. Try not to break them, or catch anything. I’ll be right behind.”

“Are you going to study them straight away?”

Professor Sekh nodded. “Who knows what state they are in, or what they even are. They returned to their normal forms very quickly when we lifted them out. They might disintegrate just as quickly, and we don’t know when that might happen.”

“But they’re human, obviously.”

“Have you even seen a human body come out of two billion year old rock on the end of an industrial drill, then pop back into pristine condition?”

“Well, I… no? But then I haven’t…” He stopped and frowned.

“Sam, look at me.”

He looked earnestly into her eyes.

She said slowly, “I want you to treat these forms as though they are potentially the most contaminated objects you have ever come across in your entire existence, alright? We have no idea what they are, but I sure wouldn’t be touching them without full PPE, and for that matter I wouldn’t be breathing in, too close to them, okay?”

Sam looked suitably abashed and nodded. “Right, boss.”

The only reason he had survived as her intern longer than the usual three days, was that when she was stern with him he actually took notice and did a good job of carrying out her instructions, and although she hated to admit it, behind the cheerful blue eyes was a decent intellect, combined with a cautious nature, both qualities that she valued. “Good.”

Six hours later, Professor Sekh and Sam had their arms in the operating sleeves of the isolation room back at their field laboratory, and Professor Sekh was expressing her disappointment. “Someone must have drilled down and buried these things down there. This is state-of-the-art A.I. But it’s strange. I can’t get a magnetic reading on any part of them.”

“It’s probably just not ferrous,” said Sam as he pushed back the blue material and peeled back the white robotic flesh of the lower arm of the smaller form.

“There’s always some ferrous material. It’s the law.” Professor Sekh shook her head. “Unless these are contraband?”

“At least they’re not radioactive. The counter’s sitting on zero. But I wonder if there are more down there?” Sam mused.

“More bodies like these?” Professor Sekh shrugged. “We’ll find out what these are first before we worry about that.”

“I don’t- what the hell is that?” Sam stuttered in the face of his own disbelief, “It’s s-some sort of curved ivory insert along the centre of the limb.”

“Sam,” whispered Professor Sekh, after leaning over to look at the chemical readout on the scanner over his head, “That’s a bone.”

Sam recoiled back, dropping the implement he was using and tangling his wrist in the operating sleeves in his haste to back away. “No!”

Professor Sekh took her arms out of her own isolation sleeves, stood up and walked over to take his place and suggested, “Get a coffee.”

He glared at her back, but made his way out of the room toward the hallway, his hands still shaking.

Professor Sekh placed her hands in the sleeves, and picked up and rearranged the smaller body’s arm to a more natural position. Now that she knew these forms were human, or had been, she wondered whether they should call in Ethics or the Autopsy team rather than her own team, who after all specialised in archeology and fossil retrieval and didn’t really have authority for this. She shrugged. She probably would, in an hour or so, but in the meantime curiosity, her main weakness, got the better of her. The only evidence of living tissue they had found, after all, was the bones, and bones were in her realm of responsibility.

She removed her arms from the sleeves and reached up to the scanner, pulling the screen down to face her. She grabbed a controller without looking and scanned closer to the body, curious whether there were any more signs of humanity in the body before her than bones.

And there, embedded atop the solar plexus, was a small heart-shaped device, definitely not part of the body’s normal structure. She scanned closer, and suddenly the formula bar at the base of the screen flickered to Au, and a beautiful scrollwork pattern appeared on the heart shaped device, with what looked like a small hinge at the side. The scanner continued to zoom in, then the letters C25H25In2 appeared on the screen and she gasped. An image was hidden beneath the heart shaped gold, an image of two smiling faces, dark haired, smooth-skinned, smiling faces with flashing smiles and bright eyes full of joy. Professor Sekh wondered again if they were mother and daughter, and looked at the other body, wondering if it had bones too.

She heard Sam come in from behind her and the scrape of his chair as he sat at the far end of the room.

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

His voice sounded a little terse, so she removed her hands from the sleeves and turned to him. Suddenly, she froze, her skin crawling with apprehension. Behind him, the charging tower on his desk was lit up like a Christmas tree. She managed to ask, “Are you charging your phone? Or… all your phones?”

Sam did not answer, and Professor Sekh saw the look in his eyes and spun around just as the glass smashed between her and the bodies on the table. She shielded her eyes with one arm from the glass, but as the sound died away looked up again. The form standing before her was that of the larger body they had brought in, but the eyes were glowing, flicking back and forth from blue to red, then settling to a steady blue. The expression even on the impassive robotic face gave the impression the creature was glaring at her. Then the creature looked over to the tiny body on the next table, with the peeled back flesh on its arm, and back at Professor Sekh. This time the eyes glowed red, and there was no mistaking the fury in those semi-robotic eyes.