White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Nineteen

The confirmation that we're stuck here for the next five months flips some kind of switch in the two scientists. They disappear into the lab again together, only emerging when I call a team meeting the next morning. There's a new kind of light in their eyes.

I pick one of the less-uncomfortable lab stools and force myself to sit down as Liu and Krüger debate over what they're going to show us first. Liu especially seems to have recovered from her shock of the day before. I would like to know what Krüger has been telling her.

"Nope, we're doing it," says Liu, and jabs a key on Krüger's laptop. He makes an exasperated noise. The image that pops up on the wall is a planetary cross-section. Every similar image I've ever seen—from a textbook diagram to a schematic for exoplanetary mineral mining—has been exaggerated, but this one looks like a kid took to its surface with a white crayon in hand. Given that white generally means ice, I have reason to believe this is a rendition of Mahaha.

"So," says Liu with a perfunctory clap. "We have a theory."

When do they not?

"Enlighten us," I say.

"We think Mahaha is conscious, and that it's controlling its own ice."

There's a sinking feeling that comes with having my hunches confirmed by a pair of the UIS's brightest young scientists. Liu plucks an old-school laser pointer off the lab desk beside her and waves its little red dot across the white crust of the moon on the screen. "This..."

"No, start with the butterflies," says Krüger.

I can tell they haven't rehearsed this.

"Then why didn't you start?"

"That's what I was trying to do!"

The laptop changes hands, and the image on the screen changes to a freeze-frame of the butterfly that posed for our mini-probe's camera two nights before. Krüger clicks sideways, and a second picture replaces it. It's another butterfly-like creature, but even in the grainy image, I can tell it's differently shaped. Its background, meanwhile, is definitely not ice. I recognize the rocks and dust of Jenu, all a uniform and resounding rust-orange.

"Sorry for the shitty resolution," says Krüger. "This is from that article you gave us, Boss. This is one of the first pictures someone managed to take of a rock moth demighost on Jenu. They're basically the species that started demighost theory; most of them are real, but when people first moved in permanently on Jenu, every now and then, there was a story about a rock moth showing up in someone's house, inside the city domes. If anyone whacked it, it just turned into dust. Someone finally took it seriously and investigated, and they discovered demighosts."

"Aren't the real ones annoying, too?" says Liu.

"They're scavengers, so yeah. Anyway, fast-forward a few years, and Dr. Adgate and his team start looking through the stories in more detail again. They basically noticed that some of the demighosts seemed to respond to their environment, which wouldn't make sense if they were just copying their hosts. Another few years of study later, they've finally managed to find and observe a rock moth and its demighost at the same time."

He clicks to the next picture, a paragraph plucked from the article Yahvi sent me. Several snippets are highlighted. The first reads, "host pantomimes scavenging activity," the next, "responds to demighost's environment." If I'm reading correctly, the conclusion drawn was that the host seemed to be using its demighost as a puppet to search for food.

Krüger flips through several more paragraphs, all with highlights. He summarizes the experiment as he goes. In a controlled experiment, Adgate and his team watched a rock moth create a demighost from scratch in a completely separate tank, fly that demighost around that tank until it found food, then drop the demighost and move directly to the food itself when the tanks were connected.