The Influence
By the third day, the changes were subtle enough to be dismissed and pervasive enough to be alarming. The ship's cook, a veteran of twenty years at sea whose emotional range normally spanned the territory between stoic and asleep, began preparing meals with an elaborate care that his colleagues found charming until they noticed that every dish featured raw fish, served rarer than the day before, the flesh barely distinguishable from the living tissue it had recently been. The navigator spent her off-duty hours on the stern deck, staring at the water with an expression of longing that her cabin mate described as "like homesickness, but for somewhere she's never been."
Aiko monitored the specimen with increasing frequency, drawn to the aquarium by a professional curiosity that she recognized, with the detached self-awareness of a scientist studying her own contamination, was becoming something less professional and more compulsive. The organism had grown. Not dramatically — perhaps two centimeters in three days — but growth in a pressurized cold-water tank with no food source was biologically impossible, which meant either her initial measurements were wrong or the organism was operating according to metabolic principles that her training had no framework to accommodate.
The bioluminescence had changed too, settling into a pattern that repeated every forty-three seconds — a