"Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed." -Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859.

Lucy removed her glasses, holding the thin black temples in one hand and rubbing her tired eyes with the other as she leaned back in her chair.

Away from the microscope.

It had been another long, fruitless day, and her eyelids danced with bright green and purple squiggles, wavy after-images of the tiny, wriggling lifeforms that she’d been staring at for the past six months.

Were they lifeforms? Sure, they moved, but so did fire and the wind. They could reproduce, but so could viruses. What made living things different? What made them alive?

That’s what they were paying her to find out, but as the first days of excitement dragged into weeks of dullness and then months of drudgery, Lucy was beginning to feel the ebb of the passion she had so long taken for granted.

The things…squiggled. What more was there to say? It was crude, but the truth was that life, as far as she could tell, was about feeding and fucking, and everything else was just…extra.

It was an odd sentiment, perhaps, coming from someone with Lucy’s background. With a freshly minted PhD in microbiology, she should have been over the moon with her new responsibilities. She had been, when she’d started at The Big Lab six months ago. The gleaming stainless steel and flawless glass, the programmable incubator and thermocycler, the refrigerator…

Lucy never thought she’d be gushing about a refrigerator of all things, but that’s just what she’d found herself doing when she’d spoken to her dad on the phone the week after accepting the job. He’d been more impressed by the six-figure salary and sizable benefits, but he’d still listened patiently as she went on about temperature zones and specimen specific environments. He’d even mustered some enthusiasm of his own. Lucy knew it had been her excitement he was happy for, and she loved him for it.

The low hum that constantly filled the lab droned on, and for the first time Lucy realized how tiring it was to listen to. The lab usually felt like home to her, but she suddenly had the strange feeling that she was a specimen in some petty god’s own little research project, dropped into one of the dozen or so labs just like hers in the complex.

“How Former Valedictorians Respond to Extremely, Horribly Boring Jobs They Thought They Would Love” would be a pretty catchy title for a research paper, she thought.

She sighed. No god had dropped her here. She had long ago given up the idea that gods of any kind were real, and knew it was up to herself to make something of this life. She just…didn’t know what that looked like.

Lucy grabbed a notebook, looking around over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching.

They weren’t. The lab was dark and silent and still, except for her little station of light and tiny movements. Her pen scratched hypnotically on the paper as she wrote.

No blades of grass now billowing,

no shades I’ve not yet seen.

No bowers, flowers bristling,

no life in seas of green.

Poetry had long been an outlet for her, some small rebellion of creativity in her carefully ordered and structured life. She always felt a bit silly doing it, and shared it with no one. That’s what you did with poetry, right?

She yawned widely, and her head slumped down onto her chest a little as she continued to write. Without realizing it, she sank into that liminal space between waking and sleeping, and her hand stayed still even as the words danced around her head in a sing-song chant.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

No life in seas of green…

No shades I’ve not yet seen…

The harvest came in spring…

The crops were all still green…

Lucy drifted off to sleep. As she dreamed of grey and lifeless fields and endless horizons, a hooded figure walked slowly up behind her.

***

“Hey George, do flowers bristle?” Jim called from his desk, as he tossed a chip into his mouth and stared at the display, where one section of the control screen showed a zoomed-in view of a poem scrawled on notebook paper.

“Nah, not really. They more...bloom, ya know?”

Jim counted on his fingers, then shook his head. “Gotta be three syllables.” He crunched another chip as a green-skinned Avatar materialized behind the woman sleeping at her desk.

“What? What the fuck are you doing over there Jim? Aren’t you piloting an avatar right now?”

Jim leaned forward to twist a knob on the control panel. “Piloting” was a strong word, he thought. Compared to his previous job in Intergalactic Affairs, this gig in Divine Intervention was a cakewalk. These Goddess avatars basically ran themselves.

He continued eating his chips and bantering with his coworkers as the avatar walked up behind the sleeping woman. When the avatar lightly touched a finger to the woman’s head a confirmation screen popped up, but he didn’t bother to read it, mashing the ‘yes’ button a few times as he told George about what he’d gotten up to last night.

By the time he looked back to the screen, both the avatar and the sleeping woman were gone.

“Huh,” he mumbled. “Must’ve been a pretty motivating vision.” He stared at the empty lab on the screen. “Hey George, what vision did the Goddess give to this lady? The ‘reliving your own birth’ one or the ‘experiencing life’s first stages’ one?” He paused with a chip halfway to his mouth. “It wasn’t the conception one, was it?” He was pretty sure that one caused more trauma than epiphanies.

Silence. He looked over to see George’s thick middle finger stabbing into the air above his cubicle.

“Find it yourself, dickwad.”

Jim shook his head. His coworkers could be so immature sometimes.

It took him a while to find the report because some jackass had stuck it in the empty, never used Reincarnation folder. He tried to drag it over to the correct Visions tab, but it wouldn’t let him, and as the information on the screen slowly filtered into his brain, he stopped trying and focused entirely on the report itself. After a few moments of reading then re-reading he swore.

“Ah, shit.”

He tapped a few keys on the control board, but his machine only made angry error sounds at him, and when George poked up over his cubicle to ask about the damn noise, Jim quickly alt-tabbed to a different screen. He played it off, but when George sat back down Jim opened up the report again, and with shaking hands clicked the link to the auto-generated display.

For a moment, he was relieved. It was the ‘life’s first stages’ vision after all. There was the original cell, and now it would progress through the stages of evolution in a beautiful display of life’s complexity and diversity, from pathetic single-cell to glorious human and beyond.

But eventually, Jim realized something was wrong. The cell didn’t move, it just floated in the dark water and shook slightly...

***

A few floors down, another Tower of Life employee cursed.

“Fuck! Jeff, did you read where this memo said we were only supposed to show her this sequence visually, not actually put her in it?”

Frank Schlebly felt sweat start to prickle on his brow. He could not lose this job. It had taken him a century to work his way up from the Minor Blessings division.

Jeff snorted, unsuccessfully flattening the wrinkles in his ill-fitting dress shirt. “Uh, yeah. We do that shit like every day man, that’s how Gifts always work. I don’t even read ‘em, just look for the codes.” He paused. “You tried to actually, like, insert her into the vision?”

Frank tried not to panic. He waved Jeff over until the blue-skinned man came over, then he whispered frantically to him.

“I didn’t just try, man," he hissed. "I straight up did it. She’s, like, in there.”

Jeff thought about it for a moment, then shrugged.

“Don’t worry bro, I’m sure the Pilot didn’t send it through.” He gave the newbie a pat on the shoulder. “This is exactly why Jade puts in safety measures and...what do you call 'em?" He snapped his fingers. "Failsafes." Jeff started walking back to his desk. "It’s foolproof, you know?”

Frank had met some pretty impressive fools over in Piloting, but he was still reassured.

Until a feminine voice called down, clear as a chiming bell.

“Hey, guys?”

Frank winced and felt his mouth go dry, and was glad when Jeff was able to call back with a relaxed voice.

“What’s up Jade?” He gave Frank a "it'll be nothing" gesture.

A pause.

“What the fuck did you do?”

“Uhh, uh, what do you mean, Jade?” Frank said as the Goddess of Life appeared next to his station. This was no Avatar, and he felt the full divine weight of her being as she stood there staring at the screen. It felt like a thousand wriggling worms and growing leaves, and, strangely, like death.

Jade’s eyes shone green, lit from within by magic.

“I mean,” Jade said, waving a hand at the screen, “this!”

She waved her hand and the display changed, matching what the Pilot Jim had seen a few floors up.

A tiny, unicellular organism of some sort floated in a very small, very dark room underwater. It didn’t have a mouth, but it squirmed around, almost like it was…

Jade reached down and turned up a volume knob to activate the mind reading protocol, and Frank said goodbye to his job as a piercing shriek filled the room, causing the heads of several other employees to pop up over their cubicle walls.

“AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!”