Two and Five slept in the same dorm room that night. Five barely slept at all. They both went to the commons on edge. Five was still spooked by the fear that there was something roaming the ship with them, while Two was more preoccupied with thinking about how they were going to deal with it.

They both squeezed a droplet of the strange gel food that had so far sustained them well enough into their mouths before sitting back down around the common room table.

“I wonder if this is how Three felt on the first day.” Five muttered tiredly “Just… stressed and worn out about our situation.”

“Probably. Though at least she’s got something to focus on this time. They never came back to the dorms, right? We should probably check in on them before we continue working on the box.” Two spoke as a call to action, but she wasn’t in any hurry to get back up either, her body still drained from the rough night “You didn’t cry though.”

“She cried?” Surprise showed over Five’s face. She hadn’t gotten a chance to spend much time alone with Three and hadn’t seen her more emotional side “She can cry?”

“She’s not a robot. She just… feels like she has to put a wall up I guess. Act tough. In a different way than you act tough.”

“Pff, I am tough.” Five pounded her fist at the center of her chest as if to demonstrate.

“You couldn’t sleep because you think a sewage monster’s going to eat you.” Two teased, a small smile growing on her face.

Five glared at the other girl “You say that like it wouldn’t try.”

“I suppose it might? But if it’s just acting erratically like Three said, it’s probably more likely still just moving around randomly at the helm.” Two really didn’t feel as threatened as Five did by the creature. If it was going to be a danger to them, it would take a long time and a supreme amount of bad luck.

“Maintenance is gonna be a pain to clean once we deal with that thing. If we can deal with it.” Five muttered, an obvious pessimism to her tone “I hope it didn’t eat through any of the control boxes.”

Two finally managed to convince herself to stand back up “We don’t even know if it’s corrosive yet. Come on, let’s go see what Three’s found out. And make sure Seven’s okay.”

The two girls stood outside of the medbay door. It seemed that Three was serious about having some time alone with the patient, because the door was locked from the inside. “Three, come on, open up, it’s… well, it’s the time we decided should pass for morning.” she knocked on the door several times. There was no response, though they could hear movement behind the door.

Five stepped forward and pounded on the door more loudly “Hey doc! Help! I slipped on a ladder and my leg’s bent a way it’s not supposed to be!” she shouted. This elicited a much more chaotic response behind the door, which promptly opened to a disheveled Three with sunken eyes and a grimace that could have cut a hole through the station, causing both Two and Five to recoil in surprise.

The exhausted-looking Three looked down at Five’s legs before she muttered “Liar.” and turned back around to return to Seven’s side, past a makeshift bed that she’d made on the floor “What do you want?”

Seven was still lying naked on her stomach on the examination table, thankfully still breathing, as Two noted. Her back, however, looked like it was scratched up, worn rough by the rash that had grown since they last saw her. A thin layer of some kind of gel rested over top of it though, most likely something Three had applied to help it heal. “Hey…” she called blearily “Is it morning already?” she sounded like she had been asleep until moments ago.

“Sit still, I need to change your medicine.” Three mumbled as she pulled on another pair of gloves.

“Again?” Seven whined.

Two chimed in to answer Three’s question “I wanted to see how Seven was doing. And what you’ve learned about the… thing.”

“Seven’s going to be fine. It’s just a skin infection. It could have been worse if we didn’t get it off her when we did though.” Three took her gloved hand and started pulling up at the edge of the gel on Seven’s back, revealing that it was a semi-solidified mass when dried. “Ready?” Three asked.

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“No.” Seven whined again, but she braced herself against the table anyway. Three pulled up slowly on the gel, eliciting a yelp from the smaller girl as it came off of the rash, apparently painful to have it exposed to the air again. Seven whimpered and sobbed as the last of it came off, and Three tossed it into a biohazard bin. “How many more times do we have to do that!?” she cried while Three appeared to prepare another batch of the gel.

“Hopefully once.” Three sighed, then got a relieved groan from Seven as she reapplied the medicine, looking back to Two as she spread the more liquefied gel out over the rash “Don’t touch the residue. Definitely don’t touch that creature. I think we should all be wearing gloves around it. I’d say we should be wearing hazmat suits if we had any.”

Five gulped “It’s that irritating?”

“Only when it’s fresh.” Three noted “All the samples we got are inert by now, but I observed some… alarming properties.” she snapped her gloves back off and disposed of them as well “It’s a bacterial cesspool. All sorts of microorganisms swimming around in that stuff. But it thins out over time. The bacteria cannibalizes itself over time, so it’s self-sterilizing. But here’s the thing. Those bacteria will grow and change rapidly. Like really rapidly. They evolve at a… ludicrous pace. If they weren’t also killing themselves out, they might actually become multicellular organisms in the span of… a couple months, maybe?”

“Living things don’t evolve though. It happens generationally.” Two crossed her arms “How is that possible?”

“How indeed.” Three muttered as she washed her hands and then sat back down on her sheets with an exhausted sigh “My running theory is it has something to do with the cloning tanks. We were made to develop much more quickly than a human does, at least mentally. And whatever this thing is was born in that same environment. Could be whatever… process was being used there continued its work with the tissue left over after One died. I wouldn’t know for sure without reading up on the cloning process.”

“So we were born in evolution juice.” Five rolled her eyes “Great. That’s a comforting fact. Don’t suppose you know how we might kill that thing?”

“Or capture it.” Two added “If it can evolve that quickly itself, we might actually be able to make use of it.”

Five looked extremely uncomfortable towards Two when she said that and grumbled “Yeah, let’s milk it for its rash juice.”

Three gave an exhausted sigh “I hate to say it, but Five has the better idea here. It’s too dangerous to keep alive. Normally, I’d say to douse it in alcohol, but that might not have any affect on it if it’s evolved to deal with harsh chemicals given where it spawned. Extreme heat or extreme cold would probably suit us better.”

“What about vacuum?” Two put forward. They’d already seen just how useful vacuum could be as a tool for its cold with the preservation of food.

Three laid back in her bed “Are you planning on exposing it to space?” she yawned.

“Why not?” Two gave a little smile “If we can lure it into an airlock somehow, we could just jettison it entirely.”

Five shook her head “I can’t guarantee that opening an external airlock won’t depressurize the entire station, Two.”

“It’s not like we have an incinerator on hand.” Two sighed impatiently “At least not one that I’ve found.”

“No, but I think I can put a flamethrower together.” Five muttered back.

“Ah yeah, that’s what a pressurized environment needs, more napalm.” Two rolled her eyes.

Seven groaned out “Will you two stop fighting? Just try and trap it somewhere.”

“Trap it somewhere else.” Three mumbled, pulling up a paper cover she’d been using as a sheet “I need rest.”

Two and Five nodded to each other, silently agreeing that Three probably had the worst night out of everyone, and left the room to let them both rest.

—

Two held the box in both hands, staring down at Five’s creation with distrust for the flimsy cube of steel in her eyes “Are you sure this thing can hold it?” she asked.

“Of course not.” Five snipped, throwing a screwdriver she was holding back into her toolbox “But it’s watertight and airtight, at least when it’s closed. I’m pretty proud of it.”

“It looks pretty… ramshackle.” Two tilted the steel box around and looked at all the welding spots and discolorations on it “And it’s so light.”

“Look, if you want old world tech, you’re welcome to go digging around for it in the unstable engineering bay. If you want whatever I can make with garbage and hand tools, well, that’s what we’ve got.”

Two took a deep breath and tried to let go of the tension she was holding onto “Okay… I think we’re just both on edge. Neither of us got great sleep, and we’re both stressed out. Seven’s right, let’s not fight over this stuff.”

“Yeah…” Five conceded, stepping away from her bench to stand by Two “What’s the plan for this thing anyway?”

“Don’t have one. If it is acting erratically, all we can really do is put it down somewhere near it and hope it just wanders in. If it’s intelligent, then we need bait.”

“Let’s just bait it anyway then.” Five shrugged “May as well, right?”

“With what? What do zombie monsters eat?” Two gave a humorless chuckle.

“Please don’t call it that. I really don’t want to think of this thing as if it were actually still One or something.” Five turned her head in disgust.

“I mean, the only thing we have is that gel we’ve been eating. I wonder if that’s the same stuff that the cloning chambers use.”

“Yeah, if it is, thing might have a taste for it.” Five nodded in agreement “Here’s an idea. I make a weight trigger on the bottom of the box. We put it in helm maintenance with a dab of food in it, and if it wanders in there, it closes up on it and we can retrieve it later.”

“That way you never have to see the thing.” Two gave a teasing smirk “I get it.”

“Yeah, well, neither does anyone else then.” Five grabbed the box back from Two and set it back down on the table “If you want to run up to the thing and see if you can wrangle it in there yourself, you’re free to try, just remember what Seven’s going through right now from a tiny bit of its residual slime touching her. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to touch it directly.”