"Hello, dear," answered Mom. "How are things going?"

Grayson, feeling a little homesick, replied. "Mom, I think something is wrong. My plants are growing way too fast and are already mutating in just a couple of months. I'm not even sure they aren't doing it in a single generation. That shouldn't be possible, should it?"

Making a little gasping sound, Charlotte shot a quick text message over to Trevor to get on this call, answering Grayson. "I certainly didn't program the nanites to do something like that on their own. I am bringing your father in on this. Maybe he has some insights. He did most of the biology work."

Trevor had been watching the video feed of his son's adventures every chance he got. Though it didn't come with sound, and he didn't know what conversations he was having with Egg, Trevor had been keeping an eye on the spread of green and white on the islands. As he was watching the most recent feeds, he saw the blinking icon pop up in the middle of his vision to indicate the text message from his lovely wife.

"Hey, my boy, how are things going in your little slice of godhood?" Trevor chimed in the moment he connected to the call. "I see your work is spreading rapidly. Is that what you're calling about?

Grayson, relieved at not even needing to describe the situation much, answered, "yeah, dad. Things are going a little too well. I don't know how these things are growing this fast or how they are mutating within a single lifetime. I was really hoping you guys had found something like this in your previous experiments. I don't want to have to scrap everything already."

Trevor, shocked by this extra information. asked, "mutating in a single lifetime? That is not only something we didn't see in our experiments. That shouldn't be possible at all. What sort of mutations are we talking about here?"

Grayson replied, "so far I've only noticed that things are growing super fast and that the chalk kelp mutated a way to propagate itself that I hadn't included in the design. I intentionally left it out so this stuff wouldn't run amok before I could find a balance point."

Trevor thought about this for a while, going silent as he pondered possibilities. Eventually he had some likely scenarios in mind, saying, "ok, um we never knew why the fossil record showed the stair-step pattern of massive speciation seemingly all at once over and over again. It had been assumed that it was some condition of the Earth's cycle that just made fossil formation much easier for brief windows of time."

"Ok, what does that mean, then? I'm not following what your hypothesis is," Grayson questioned.

"It means," Trevor continued "that maybe it wasn't a change in fossilization but that some condition of the Earth was actually triggering massive speciation. Or maybe there was one little mutation that, once it came around, just changed the paradigm completely and did this on the regular."

Charlotte chimed in, "So something in the new species is acting as one of these paradigm changing situations?"

Grayson informed, "Egg said it looked like all the new plants were made up entirely of stem cells. They were able to actively differentiate between tissue types almost on demand. "

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Trevor mused, "That makes sense. With the conditions on Earth being so harsh, you are probably incapable of getting samples that aren't under stress. Extreme stress can cause epigenetic changes and activate dormant genes to deal with the stresses. If this is what happens during environmental disaster, then it isn't surprising your work triggered it. You just happened to sample several things that were desperately looking for a way to mutate and gave them a whole other packet of genetic information to draw from."

"So I am responsible for this? Or is it just that I jump-started something that was going to happen anyway?" Grayson questioned.

"Well, yes and no. You selected on purpose some traits that were going to do very well in the current climate. Natural selection may have taken millennia to do that. You also gave your designs access to one of the most advanced immune systems in the entire animal kingdom. Humans aren't unique in that way, but we are one of the newest species in existence, so we have one of the most updated immune software that exists." Trevor gushed the words out.

He seemed to be getting more and more excited and when that happened, Grayson and his mother knew there might be no stopping him from going on a verbal rampage of explanations, hypotheses, alternatives, and exposition. That might bore the audience, but it really got Trevor going. "Mom?" Grayson said, in a tone that communicated everything that needed to be said.

"I know, son," Charlotte assured. And she disconnected the call. The full exposition would need to wait for another chapter of Grayson's adventure. Trevor, of course, kept talking more and more animatedly. He hadn't noticed the end of the call at all.

---

Back on Earth

Grayson had a lot of information to work with now. His dad was always brilliant, of course, but he could carry on about a fascinating subject until even those formerly excited by it began to lose interest. Trevor could approach a problem from so many angles, anyone listening to him might lose confidence that they had looked hard enough.

This was just as true for Grayson. He would rather plot his own path through the experiment than hear every angle he had never considered.

-------------

Grayson sat quietly watching the sunrise after another night of restless sleep. His father's words during their last conversation still echoed in his mind: "Your creations are evolving far faster than anything nature could design alone. You're giving life a chance to adapt to this changed world."

It was true - the accelerated evolution of Grayson's engineered organisms was yielding adaptations in months or years rather than millennia. The coral reef strains now thrived in hot, acidic seas that would have rapidly dissolved natural coral structures. His augmented vegetation flourished across environments from deserts to tundra.

But seeing his fantastical creations take root so quickly in the wild also unsettled Grayson. Adaptation through natural selection was an eons-long dance. His work introduced a chaotic Variables that could disrupt entire ecosystems in unpredictable ways.

What unintended consequences might unfold from such rapid leaps of evolution? Grayson knew ecosystem balance was intricate beyond any individual's grasp. His terraforming tools were powerful but crude compared to nature's nuanced choreography.

Staring pensively at the crashing waves along the shoreline, Grayson wondered if humanity was once again playing god, twisting life's fabric to suit their immediate needs. Or was this guidance necessary now - a gentle hand to help nature find its way again?

The questions weighed heavy on Grayson as the rising sun burned away the morning mist. He longed for his father's simple clarity of purpose. But there were never easy answers when navigating the porous boundaries between nature and technology.

With a resigned sigh, Grayson opened his interface to begin the day's work. All he could do was move ahead carefully, moderating the pace of change and monitoring for disruptions. This precarious planet had always molded life through trial and error. Perhaps his meddling was just one more variable in an experiment billions of years old.