Pearl

Chapter Four: The Color of Sentience

The junior researcher rested his head in his arms, staring ahead at the observation tank in the middle of the otherwise empty room. 

Along the sides of the glass enclosure at even intervals were thick rubber gloves attached to the glass itself, turned inside out when not in use. They allowed the research team to interact with the contents of the tank without risking contamination of either the occupant or themselves. A small double-door airlock was set into both ends of the rectangle, currently latched tight.

The object of the researcher's gaze sat in a lump on the bare glass surface. It had neither eyes nor mouth, nor any visible appendages. 

It was a lump true and simple, a bubblegum pink lump. 

The only movement on the surface level of the substance was an inconstant pearlescent sheen that rippled down its length despite the unchanging light conditions.

Pearl.

It had started as a third generation of the P-strain symbiont family. 

Their primary family, the T-strain, was everything they could have hoped for: docile, quick to adopt whatever genome it was presented with, and only active in the first few minutes after it made contact with a steady source of nutrients. 

Its main drive, as far as they could tell, was to find a home and bunker down: Once it had integrated itself into the host, the T-strain would obediently enter into a permanent dormant stage that made it nearly undetectable to all normal medical scans. They had found that in its dormant state it was easily mistaken for scar tissue.

The P-strain, however, had always been more willful. 

It was picky, to say the least. It would accept or reject hosts seemingly at random. In the early days, at the old lab, it was given rabbits and rats. 

Those hosts it rejected it would drain dry of nutrients and leave as a husk. Those it accepted, well, what remained of them was difficult to classify as "living," even if they weren't truly dead. 

Despite these incidents, the researcher's original team had continued cultivate the family in the hopes that its aggressive tendencies could be bred out. It was valuable among the twenty-six original strains for its limited ability to move and remain active even without incoming nutrients. 

After months of failed attempts, the team had successfully bred a stable third generation of the P-strain family. They had begun testing the new symbiont for its ability to match skin tones, with members of the research team donating trace amounts of skin and blood to feed to the symbiont. 

And then one of his colleagues, a work buddy on a different team, had returned from vacation with a severe sunburn. 

A corner of the researcher's mouth quirked up at the memory, his jaw digging lightly into his forearm. It had taken two full days, but he had managed to harass his friend into submitting a skin sample to see if their team's symbiont could match the color of sunburn. His friend had vowed all sorts of retribution as he had scraped the rough sample collector across his sun-brutalized skin. 

Really, though, the researcher considered, karma had come too swiftly. 

The symbiont had liked the pink. 

It had liked the pink so much that it had altered its own base genetic structure so that its resting color was no longer the grey that was the trademark of the P-strain family, but rather an exaggerated sunburn pink.

Pink, apparently, was the color of sentience, at least as far as the head researcher was concerned.

The symbiont's display of will had drastically shifted the tone and intent of his research team's focus. The head researcher had become entirely preoccupied with testing the limits of this generation of the P-strain symbiont's intelligence, neglecting the other research teams and the symbiont families under their care to pursue her interests.