A Dreamer's Worlds

Death's on the Couch (Part 1 of Trees Grow in Dirt)

Julianna McCleary was busy staring at the readings. Much too busy to pay attention to whatever Allan Johnson and Trevor Micheals were up to. Certainly too busy to investigate the sounds of shouting and breaking objects. No, she was far, far too busy.

Yet she still found herself looking over the debris from the men's latest project. The living part of it was making a break for it, but Trevor had gotten stuck under a shelf and Allan seemed to be flat out unconscious. Julianna found a jar that was still in one piece and slammed it over the project. It hissed and spat acid, cracking the glass. Julianna backed up and let the damn thing escape.

Not her problem. Not her problem at all. Trevor could get himself out from under that shelf himself. She had much more important things to focus on.

Her work made much more sense than constantly engineering plants. Even if it wasn't, her work had never made the team wonder if they should make a panic room. She just had to find a chemical composition that would support life. No need to alter any plants to flourish in this environment.

Julianna paused at a window. The world outside was barren and vast. The horizon was easily visible. The sunsets and sunrises were beautiful, but a stark reminder that the only life on the world were the humans in their little box.

There'd been hope that Arete would be hospitable, but that clearly wasn't the case. Even before anyone had landed they'd known that Arete was worthless without terraforming.

They'd known the same thing about Mars, and Julianna was born on Mars. It wasn't impossible. It was just incredibly difficult.

Arete was an anomaly even among uninhabitable worlds. The soil was devoid of any life sustaining nutrients. The only chemicals in the soil were poison. The atmosphere itself was carbon dioxide, like the primordial Earth. If they wanted to colonize the planet, they'd need to grow some plants.

And that was extremely difficult. The geneticists had their own ideas while the chemists did their best to find something they could put into the soil. That didn't even cover what the other scientists were doing. Julianna hadn't seen their projects, just the monstrosities that the geneticists ended up with.

Julianna went back to her lab, hoping that the latest experiment didn't wander anywhere important. That'd be bad. She was pretty sure all the doors to important stuff were closed, but even if they weren't, she had more important things to do.

She checked the progress the computer had made. So close, yet so far. The poison in the soil remained a mystery. She'd done every scan she could think of, but the poison's composition still eluded her. It wasn't airborne or anything, but it was easily absorbed by plants. That was mostly the problem. They didn't have any pure soil to grow plants in except for the soil in the greenhouse. That soil was strictly off limits, especially to the scientists.

The only thing they could take from the greenhouse were seeds, and those went to the geneticists for what can only be described as mad science. Sane science didn't result in plant monsters scurrying around the building.

Julianna set the computer to do more tests, but didn't have much faith. None of the other tests have shown anything, and these were just spin offs of tests she'd run before. She was running out of ideas.

The hallway was empty. Everyone else was probably working. She started on a walk. It was just more and more waiting. She needed something to do while she waited but there really wasn't much to do. They had a rec center. The key word was had. It'd been destroyed early on in the mission. That was about the only entertainment they'd had. Sure, there'd been attempts to fix it, but some things just couldn't be fixed.

Julianna walked past the old rec center. The pilot and someone else were playing chess. Julianna was pretty sure the chess board and pieces had been destroyed, but someone must've glued it back together. She wondered if she could join in at some point. It'd be something to do while her tests ran.

Trevor darted past her. He was probably headed back to his, plant monster forgotten. He was probably in a hurry to figure out what other monstrosities he could make in his lab. Julianna wondered if the next one would actually had teeth.

Trevor paused at the end of the hallway, then turned and ran back to Julianna. His eyes were wide and his grin was even wider. Julianna wondered if space crazy was actually a thing. If it was, Trevor was definitely space crazy.

"Julianna!" Oh God, his voice was just a crazy as the rest of him. Damn it, Trevor. "You got a pure sample of the poison in the soil?"

"No, but I can get it. Why?" Please don't be making a plant with it, she thought.

"I wanna see if I can make resistant plants." Shit.

"I can get it to you tomorrow." Trevor was shaking his head.

"No, no, no. I need it ASAP. What's tomorrow anyway? Time's not the same here."

That said, he darted back towards his lab.

Definitely space crazy. Still, Julianna headed back towards her lab. She'd get the poison to him. The worst that could happen was that Trevor and Allan made a monster that went and killed them all. Given that they were probably going to die sometime next year anyway, it wouldn't do anything that wouldn't happen on its own. The monster would just make it quicker.

Julianna wished it was easier for ships to get through this atmosphere. Now, it was just too hard to send supplies down. All they had were the original supplies, and those wouldn't last too much longer.

She reached her lab. Some of the tests were done. They didn't give anything useful, like always. She started a program to extract the poison. It'd be done in an hour and she could run it down to the genetics lab when it finished.

In the meantime, she could take a walk around the building a bit more. She wished she could go outside, but the atmosphere was carbon dioxide and other gases. Not good for humans, that's for sure. They didn't have any oxygen tanks either. Just hazmat suits and gas masks, neither of which would stand up to the outside.

Nothing happened during her walk and she returned to her lab without interruption. The poison was extracted into a nice little test tube and she corked that up and made her way to the genetics lab. She glanced outside a window as she went. Trevor was right. The planet's night and day were different than the planets they grew up on. Days were more than twenty four hours, though everyone had just kept their sleeping schedule from before.

Given what those generally were, Julianna wondered why the supplies hadn't included coffee.

Trevor was one of those people that didn't sleep. Allan, on the other hand, either had narcolepsy or just fell asleep whenever he felt like it. Julianna wasn't sure. She wasn't going to ask, either.

True to form, Allan was asleep under a desk and Trevor was looking over readings on his computer. When he heard the door open, he leapt up and nearly knocked Julianna over.

"You got it?" His grin seemed wider than earlier. When Julianna held up the poison, he snatched and when back to his workspace. He was muttering, but Julianna didn't want to know what. The less she knew, the better.

Not having anything else to do, she went to her quarters. Sleeping would make tomorrow come all the sooner, and she was tired anyway.

Maybe she'd be woken up by Trevor's latest monster, whatever it ended up being. That would be interesting, if not incredibly deadly.