Allister McCullinay sat aboard a non-rapid civilian transport ship beside Itomi Pratchet and Cpl. Hayes. The NRcT ship had departed Arrokoth hours earlier, and it would be hours more until they were at Dysnomia. Outside, through the windows, the blackness of space seemed still. It was almost as though they weren’t moving at all, the stars twinkling in the black not drifting along with them, though to an outside observer, should they blink, they would miss the craft entirely. “Non-rapid transport” was a bit of a misnomer; it was quick, it just wasn’t fast. They’d be to Eris and Dysnomia in a matter a dozen hours or so, and that was with the Kuiper Belt experiencing a clustering event.
Allister stared down at her PDA, sifting through her data on the new tholins program Commander Xiao had gotten authorized for her a year ago. There was a wealth of data here, all leading to more possible research branches, potentialities, and possibilities. Occasionally, she would lean over to her assistant Itomi, mention something or other to her about some line or packet of data on her PDA, and Itomi would respond. Cpl. Hayes sat in the back-facing seat all the while, rifle in hand.
After a time, Allister and Itomi eventually stopped reading and rereading their data, and settled into a quiet peace aboard the NRcT ship. Allister stared out the window, Itomi read a book on her PDA, and Cpl. Hayes had actually fallen asleep, much to Allister’s amusement. He was the personal guard for her team, and he too had an ATS clearance, one of the few guardsmen allowed in the labs. She eyed him for a time, and then grinned, before turning back to the window.
She’d still not heard anything from Sedna, or her husband, and the Administration Zone was still being suspiciously quiet on the matter, but some piece of her was slowly starting to accept that something was deeply wrong, and another piece of her was busy stuffing that understanding piece into a compartment which was never to be opened again.
Beginning to space out, she shook her head, and blinked away the thoughts. At least, she tried to. The Admin Zone had been deflecting for some time now, telling her over and over again that they were, in fact, in contact with Sedna. They told her her husband and his team were on an “extended mission” on the planetoid, though they refused to tell her what that mission was and when he would return.
So they were lying. She knew that much.
She wasn’t stupid.
But what could she do? The Kuiper Administration had the full backing of TerraGov, and she was just one tiny scientist in a big, big solar system. What could she do, where could she go for answers? Nothing and nowhere, was the answer. She was doomed to wait in silent agony for any news. And in the meantime, she had a job to do, but her focus had been deteriorating as her mind clouded with thoughts of her husband and of Sedna.
Her thoughts turned to Eris, and the friends she had in the Administration Zone. They were few, but they were good, and perhaps she could pull some strings with them, she thought. Though, they were all scientists, much the same as her. So what could they do? Some frustration welled within her, and she found herself clenching at her white lab jumpsuit and gritting her teeth. But, eventually, she simply sighed, and relaxed her grip – and her jaw – before turning to Itomi and saying, “It’s been a while since you’ve left Arrokoth.”
“It has been,” she said, eyeing Allister wryly. “The same could be said about you though. It’s been a few months right?”
Allister chuckled. “It has been,” she said. “I’m looking forward to the dining. All the freeze-dried stuff gets old after a while. The fresh food is going to be delicious.”
A silence passed over them, and it wasn’t entirely comfortable either, Allister noticed. Itomi squirmed a bit. Eventually, the two looked at each other, and Allister could read a question on Itomi’s face.
“Are you going to ask about him again?” she softly asked.
Gaze falling, Allister sighed, and found herself clenching at the legs of her jumpsuit again. She shuffled her feet on the carpet, and shifted in the plush red chair in which she sat. “I don’t know,” she eventually said. “I don’t know if there’s a point.”
Itomi softly placed a hand on Allister’s shoulder. “He’ll come home. I’m sure whatever is going on on Sedna will be resolved eventually, right?”
Chewing on her lip, Allister said, “I don’t know Itomi. Think about it, why won’t the Admin Zone give us a straight answer as to what’s going on with Sedna? And why has this ‘mission’ taken so long? It just seems fishy. He was only supposed to be gone for a few months.”
“It’ll be okay Doctor,” she said. “If I were you, I’d just focus on the presentation.”
She slowly nodded. “Right.”
Just then, Cpl. Hayes jerked awake, and began to struggle against his restraints, struggling to pull his rifle up to his shoulder and aim it down the length of the ship. Allister and Itomi both cried out, and the three of them, the only ones aboard the ship, save the pilots, all screamed in unison.
“Hayes! Hayes!” Allister cried out. “Put the gun down!”
Cpl. Hayes blinked and stared at her for a moment, breathing heavily, before slowly letting the barrel of his rifle fall. He looked disoriented, eyes rapidly flicking around, scanning the cabin of the ship. “Doctor McCullinay…” he said.
“Corporal Hayes!” she stammered, unbuckling and standing up. She walked down the empty aisle, to the back-facing seat in which Hayes sat, and bent down to stare directly into his eyes, concern in her gaze. “Are you okay? What on Earth got into you?”
The man swallowed dryly. “I had a nightmare,” he said, breathing rapidly. Allister could see that he was sweating profusely, and there was still a hint of panic behind his eyes.
She frowned. “About what?”
“I… I was in an ocean, under stormy skies, but… the ocean was calm, and I just,” he said, blinking, staring off. “I don’t remember.”
Allister stared into his eyes for a moment longer, though his gaze remained averted, before standing back up and sighing, letting her thumping heart start to calm. “Okay. Maybe stay awake for the rest of the trip though, okay?”
Cpl. Hayes swallowed, and nodded. “Okay. Sorry, Doctor.”
“Okay,” she said, lips taut, before turning around and heading back to her seat. Once there, she and Itomi exchanged glances, both nervous and confused. She sat down, and straightened out her jumpsuit, clearing her throat, and turning to stare out the window again. Once more, her thoughts drifted to her research, to her husband.
To Sedna.
The auditorium was still filling up, but was quite full already. Many of the top administrators and scientists in the Kuiper Belt were in attendance, all chatting amongst each other in a low murmur, while the dim auditorium, lit by sconces on the walls like an old time movie theater that cast the rows of seats and walls and people in dark blue shadows. The stage of the Seraphim Auditorium, deep within the Administration Tower, was the most illuminated piece of the room, where Allister McCullinay and Itomi Pratchet stood, talking amongst themselves off to the right. Long red curtains hung down at the back of the stage, and both right and left sides were curtained too, as though plays would occur here; this was, of course, absurd, as the only things to occur here were high level military briefings and scientistic presentations. But TerraGov insisted on having a high-class auditorium for its well-off.
As usual, the elite had it best.
Allister chewed on her thumbnail, staring out into the crowd. Itomi was telling her something, but she’d spaced out a few moments ago, and an orbital return seemed unlikely at the moment. She was never one for large-scale attention, and while this had been in the works for the past four months, she didn’t quite feel prepared for it. This was her presentation, after all, her moment to really make an impact on the Kuiper Administration and secure more funding, much more at that.
It was a big moment, and her findings were potentially monumental, if they were received as she hoped they would be. Something akin to butterflies welled up in her stomach, but they bit like locusts. She continued to gnaw on her nail for a moment, letting her mind blank.
“Doctor?” she eventually heard Itomi say. She blinked, and shook her head, as Itomi cocked hers and furrowed her eyebrows. “Doctor, are you alright?”
She swallowed, and cleared her throat, brushing down her jumpsuit and saying, “Yes, I’m alright. I apologize, I just…”
“You’re nervous,” Itomi said, offering a reassuring smile. “It’s okay. I’m up here with you.”
Nodding, Allister said, “You’re right. I am nervous. What if they reject our findings? They’re a bit… controversial, I suppose.”
“They are,” Itomi said, “But that’s why they’ll eat it up. It’s bold, and fascinating, and encourages more research. We worked hard on this. It’s gonna be great, Allister. Trust me.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
She looked to Itomi, and after a moment of searching in her eyes, she smiled. “You’re right. Okay. Are we almost ready?”
“Yeah. I think we’re just waiting on the Commander.”
Allister looked out amongst the crowd, checking for any sign of Commander Xiao and Director Yu. The Director was there, sitting in the front row, eyes darting between the stage and her PDA, but the Commander was still nowhere to be seen. “Okay,” Allister said. “Let’s go over the project one more time.”
Itomi nodded. “We start with the tholins, then the fertilizer mixture.”
“Yes. Then, we launch into the presentation, the slideshow, and finally, the demonstration.”
“Which involves,” Itomi said, “you creating the second mixture and me pouring it into water.”
“Yes.”
“Simple enough,” she said, giving Allister a friendly little punch on the shoulder. “See? We’ll be fine. Oh, oh, there’s the Commander. We can get started now.”
Allister looked out into the crowd, and sure enough, Commander Xiao had entered the auditorium. The doors had closed behind him, and the murmur was quieting down, leaving Allister and Itomi in the spotlight of the stage. The two stepped out into the center, and stared out into the audience. The lights dimmed even further, and illuminated the stage with arc lamps. There was, on stage, a table in the center, with a pulled down projector screen behind it. On the table was a series of vials and tubes, a bunsen burner, and a bucket of water. Allister held a small clicker in her hand, and Itomi adjusted her glasses. It was time to begin.
All was silent.
One could hear a pen drop as the lights focused in on the stage.
Then, Allister spoke.
“Ladies, gentlemen, those in between and outside, I am Doctor Allister McCullinay, and this is my assistant, Itomi Pratchet. We are here to present to you the findings our team has made on Arrokoth, involving tholins, water, a peculiar mixture of compounds, and – potentially – the very origin of life itself.”
She cast a nervous sidelong gaze to Itomi, who flashed her a subtle thumbs up.
Clearing her throat, she continued, “Tholins. What are they? And what does it mean for our understanding of the origin of life? If you’ll look here…”
She clicked the button on the clicker, and the projector screen blinked to life, showing the compounds methane, nitrogen, and benzene. Little sunrays were cast upon the methane and nitrogen, and arrows pointed to the words ‘dissociation’ and ‘ionization’, before another arrow pointed to the word benzene, and then finally, to tholins.
“Tholins are created when inorganic compounds, such as methane and nitrogen, as seen here, are hit with sunlight and cosmic rays and through the processes of dissociation – a general process in which molecules separate or split into other things – and ionization – the process in which a molecule obtains a negative or positive charge by gaining or losing electrons – and these inorganic compounds transform into benzene and other organic molecules through transformation. Then, these compounds precipitate down to the surface of a planetoid and settle as reddish compounds known as tholins. I know, that was a lot, but here you can see it simplified,” she said, pointing to the slide.
She clicked the button.
A slide appeared that read: Tholins – Where are they Found?
She clicked the button again.
A series of planetoids appeared on screen. “Tholins can be found from Titan to Pluto, from Charon’s north pole to Makemake and especially on Arrokoth. In fact, Arrokoth is so red precisely because of the tholins present on the rock. Tholins have also been discovered outside of our Solar System, such as in the case of the star system HR-4796, which is approximately two hundred and twenty light years from Earth! The implications of this will be examined shortly.”
She clicked a button.
A slide appeared that read: What can we do with Tholins?
She clicked the button again.
Another slide appeared with a list of applications for tholins.
“Here we see that these organic materials can be used for fertilizer, as potential artificial nutrition supplementation, if modified, and more. These are a few uses of tholins my team has examined so far. Here, we’d like to focus on the fertilizer mixture, which was approved for production four months ago and is currently being used on Eris’s southern farm as we speak!”
A wave of murmurs went through the crowd, and an odd feeling of pride swelled in her chest. She smiled, feeling a little emboldened. “My assistant here will now show off the tholins mixture we have worked on.”
Itomi stepped up, shoulders square and face stoic and proud, and picked up a vial of tholins in water, the red mixture clouding the clear liquid like a subaquatic stormcloud. Then, she poured it into a vial of nitrates, which she then poured into a vial of potassium, before she finally heated it up on the bunsen burner for a time. After a moment, the liquid turned a deep, deep crimson, and she poured it onto a tray, where it rapidly cooled and solidified, becoming loamy and crumbly. She ran her hand through it, and then scooped up a bit of the mixture and crumbled it down onto the pan.
“As you can see, the tholins solidify the mixture and create a uniquely profiled fertilizer. This is because the organic compounds within the tholins, when heated up, mix with the nitrates and potassium and ‘stick’, if you will. When it dries – and it does so rather quickly, oddly – it produces this crumbling mixture of fertilizing agents that has increased production on the southern farm by nearly sixty percent!”
Allister tapped the clicker with her thumb, and switched to a slide containing the words: Tholins and Life? On this slide was a diagram of Kuiper Belt Objects, with red circles over the major objects containing tholins, as well as the path of multiple Kuiper Comets that contained tholins, according to the observatory on Arrokoth and the Thomas-Burgess Deep-Space Telescope. She pointed to the paths of the comets.
“These are comets that contain tholins. As you can see, tracing the paths here, very, very occasionally, one grazes Earth. It’s entirely possible that, in the early Solar System, some of these Kuiper Belt Objects containing tholins slammed into Earth, or at the very least grazed by it, and deposited the building blocks of life as we know it.”
She stared out into the crowd, and noticed that they were all enraptured, especially Commander Xiao, who locked eyes with her, curiosity and deep seated intrigue painted in his eyes. They were hard, but encouraging. She continued on.
“Through a process known as hydrolification, a term we on the Arrokoth labs have coined for the transformation of external substances and substrates by and through water – through the process of hydrolification, tholins begin to change once more, especially when mixed with mineral rich water, like we have here,” she said, pointing to the bucket of water beside the table. “In this bucket, we have mineral infused water, with such things as calcium, sodium, and manganese, as well as nitrogen. Now, Itomi will display what is quite possibly the most extraordinary finding we have discovered in our tholins research. Itomi?”
Itomi stepped forward and nodded, taking another batch of tholins in purified water, the red cloud swirling around, and poured it into the mineral water, before starting to stir it with a large metal rod. She stirred it for a while, and Allister spoke again.
“She will stir this for the next few minutes, and then we will show you what we have discovered. In the meantime, let us look at the similarities between the organics of tholins and the organics of life. You see,” she said, switching slides to a slide depicting a strand of RNA, “tholins contain the building blocks of the building blocks of RNA. In other words, tholins have the potential to create guanine, uracil, adenine, and cytosine, through the process of hydrolification. The molecules within the tholins mix with the compounds within the warm water and settle, becoming something else entirely. Itomi?”
Itomi nodded and reached over to a box of gloves on the table, putting on a pair of blue nitrile gloves, and reaching into the bucket of water. Then she pulled out a red, goopy slime that dripped through her fingers, viscous and thick. The audience gasped.
“As you can see,” Allister said, confidence in her voice and her stride as she walked over to the bucket, “the tholins become a thick mess of slime that transmogrify into the building blocks of the building blocks of RNA – nucleosides. These sugar-like molecules are only missing phosphates now, and once mixed with phosphates, become nucleotides. These nucleotides are the building blocks of RNA and DNA. Called monomeric units – monomeric units being molecules that can react with other monomer molecules to create a larger three dimensional network of molecules through polymerization – these are the basic pieces of all life as we know it. And the tholins, as we’ve discovered, have the potential to make them when mixed with mineral rich water, such as the water on the early Earth and potentially even the early Martian surface.”
She could see it. She had the full attention of the audience. Every eyeball was locked onto her and what she was doing, and if they weren’t, they were locked onto notepads and PDA’s taking notes. Commander Xiao specifically was taking notes furiously, and casting serious, intense looks to the stage, as though he was enraptured by the information.
“Are tholins the cause of life on Earth? Are they our progenitors? We propose the theory that they may be, and humbly request more funding from TerraGov for the research we are conducting into this theory. There are still elements we do not know, such as how these nucleotides bind, but with more funding and personnel we may be well on our way yet to discovering the answers to one of the greatest questions humanity has ever asked! Thank you all for your attention and time. We will be here to answer any questions you may have for the next twenty minutes.”
Immediately people stood and approached the microphone at the base of the stage, forming a long line that wormed its way through the central aisle of the auditorium. She’d done it, she knew. She’d secured that funding and more. Casting a look to Commander Xiao, she found that he was simply staring at her, and when she locked eyes with his, he gave her a nod, and that alone made her heart swell. She’d done it.
She’d made her case and she’d done it.
Now, it was time to answer questions, provide context, and most importantly, get the funding she so coveted. She looked to Itomi, who gave her a wide, proud smile, and gestured her to the center of the stage. She took her position, and began taking questions, pride in her eyes.