This strand had far too many errors, Alexander thought as he looked at his work.

In front of him, embedded in a liquid crystal block, was an actual strand of nucleotides, a testbed for the plant he was developing. On the screen below it was the digital version he had originally designed.

They should match, but they did not.

The DNA strand was impossibly small and delicate, and when stretched out as it was right now, it was just over a meter long.

The human genome was twice the length, but the beauty of writing your own DNA from scratch was that you could trim out a whole lot of fat.

Which was tricky, of course. Genetics was convoluted, to put it mildly. Genes could often pull double or triple duty in different cases, multiple genes would be involved in even the simplest tasks, and redundancy often existed to ensure a robust resistance to damage and mutation.

Damage which was always inevitable, he thought. DNA suffered frequent damage, and no matter how many repair proteins you put in, errors could occur.

Yet, to his great frustration, this strand was far, far more corrupted than it should be.

It would be easy to blame space radiation, he thought. Some cosmic rays reached even into the Craton, and even the occasional unlucky neutrino could cause his physical strand here to suffer damage.

But the Craton was heavily shielded. A few stray particles could not account for the damage to the physical strand that he was reading now.

Several minutes ago, he'd told the computer to copy the physical strand as a new layer, which he'd named MistakesWereMade1, and to run viability tests.

Which, scanning the entire thing, simulating it as an actual cell and then putting that sim into a larger sim to try and figure out if it could work was a pretty big ask. He'd been waiting several minutes already, and it seemed to be taking too long.

"Current viability outlook?" he asked.

It fed him the data; it didn't look good. While it was still running tests, in almost no simulations was this DNA able to create a functioning plant, and even in cases where it managed to do something it was horribly stunted and . . . mutant. Its fruit was even toxic to human life.

"Stop the sim," he told the computer with a sigh. "This is useless. What the hell went wrong?"

His system could not answer him on that, only projecting a sad-face emoji.

:(

"What caused these mutations? Were we hit by something odd?" He should have been told if some stray cosmic ray came along, even one that was harmless to people, just because of this exact eventuality.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Checking the logs, he saw nothing recent. Checking general radiation levels, both externally and in various parts of the ship, showed no results either.

"Dark," he muttered, putting his hands together and staring at the strand.

It was sort of a time capsule in the crystal block. It carried marks of every radioactive particle that passed through it in a physical way. Proof that something had happened.

So why didn't the computer system register anything odd?

He opened the history banks. In here were prior scans of the DNA strand, going back over two years.

Almost twenty million iterations were saved in that time frame, far more than he could look through.

Many past errors had been caught and fixed before, but the system had recorded them. Granted, this was worse than it had ever been, but if he could find some kind of pattern, maybe he could figure out what was causing the problem to begin with.

"Run a scan," he said. "Look for incidents of major errors and when they were introduced. I want to check for related variables that could be causing these consistent errors."

After giving a few more details to the computer, it began its check of the data. This would take awhile, too, but not as long as the sims.

In the meantime, he checked if there were any replies on the ship's research message board, asking if anyone else had experienced similar problems.

There were only a few other long-term genetic studies going on. Only a few others noted some problems, but nothing like what he was seeing.

Hm. Well, he sometimes worked from his home office, too, even transferring his prototype DNA strand there and back. He'd have to figure that into the data.

A call came in.

"Alexander," he said by way of greeting.

The HUD said it was Father Sair, and he belatedly spoke again. "Oh, hello, Father!"

"Hello," the Father's voice came, sounding slightly amused.

Sair was younger than he was, and they had both found some amusement in Alexander always calling him by his title. But no matter how often the Father insisted that Alexander only call him by name, he could not make himself do that.

The man may be his junior in years, but in every way that really counted he was his senior.

"I hope I have not called at a bad time," Sair said.

"Ah, well, I am quite busy with work, Father, but I always can make time to talk to you."

"Thank you, though you afford me too much, Alex." Sair paused. "Still, perhaps this is bad timing on my part, as I was hoping to enlist your help. I am planning a ceremony for tomorrow, you see - the discovery of this Star Temple is a major theological event for us."

"Of course!" Alexander said. Reality crashed in on him almost immediately. "I mean - I understand how important this must be! I don't . . . we're not going to be holding an event in the temple, are we?"

Sair's voice came out with the barest hint of bitterness. "No. The Captain will not allow that."

Alexander felt his insides squirm a little. It was reasonable, given the unknown nature of the place and the potential dangers. When the Father got this way, though, he never knew what to say.

"I'm very sorry, though, Father, I kind of am in the middle of important work. If it weren't about making better food plants adapted to the colony worlds I'd be willing to stop, but this is . . . you know, important."

His words felt hollow in his ears no matter how much logic they held.

But Father Sair's reply was calm. "Of course, Alexander. I do understand - what you are doing is vital work."

Alexander felt his stomach unclench slightly. "Thank you, Father."

"But it is almost break time, yes? And as I recall, you do not usually eat a lunch."

"That's right."

"Well, even if we do no work, perhaps you would simply walk with me for a time?"

Alexander smiled. "I would be honored, Father."