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“-. October 28, 5 ANB .-“

Turns out I’m rich.

Not enough that I wouldn’t have to work for the rest of my life, but the equivalent of an S-rank mission was apparently a fair bit of money. Especially the equivalent pay for an infiltration S-rank mission. Paid by the day. For the entire period that I was engaged in my research project, which was basically the entirety of the past four years. Though the Third had apparently tacked an extra year’s worth on top as a bonus. I stared at the numbers. I’ll have to go to the seamstress to modify my order, I thought dimly. If Shisui hadn’t just desensitized me to literally everything by turning me into the most terminal sort of intelligence leak, I might have gone into shock.

Then again, that wasn’t even the most surprising thing in there. That honor went to the book deal. A book deal. For my research methods. And not with any random mouthpiece from Shukuba-Machi, it was for Sword Drop Publishing out in Heian-kyō, the Land of Fire capital. ‘Merely’ the third biggest name in the business. Considering that the first owed its fame to the Daimyo’s patronage, and the second ran entirely on trashy romance novels like Jiraiya’s Icha Icha series, Sword Drop might actually be the brand with the highest business acumen of all of them. It clearly had the most discerning taste.

A book deal. To be published either under my real name or my pseudonym. If I’d been any less depressed and suicidal at the time, I might have been less of a troll when I took フィン・マックール as my pen name of choice. Now I had to live with it. Hopefully this didn’t mean I’d have people asking if I could transform into a giant baby and shit out basalt. “I was sure my research would be classified to the deepest hell, what gives?” Maybe modern statistical methods weren’t as paradigm-shifting as I thought?

“It was strongly suggested,” Shisui mercilessly ruined my hopes for mankind’s collective good sense between spoonfuls of cake. “But the Hokage overruled those arguments.”

Fuck you too, Shimura Danzo. Also, what? Maybe Sarutobi Hiruzen was feeling so indebted that he didn’t think he has the right or vision necessary to censor anything I did anymore? Yeah, that’ll happen. Then again, if he wasn’t at least a bit self-deprecating about his performance as Hokage now, I’d be worried about his self-awareness.

Though speaking of self-awareness… “Hey kid, was that 10-year time frame the cooldown for the completely hypothetical holder of that horrifying crime against mankind you theorised, or for whoever were to, say, steal the eyes for their own use.”

Damning silence.

“Well that’s just great. If you didn’t want me to be even more existentially terrified, you’ve failed miserably. Incidentally, my knees are suddenly all weak again and I haven’t had lunch today. There’s pilaf in the fridge, and some steak, bring them out will you? That’s a good lad, now why don’t you heat them up, the slow way without fire techniques that entirely relies on that stove over there. Wouldn’t want you to make poor excuses and run away to ‘spare me the burden of your company’ or ‘stop taking advantage of my goodwill’ or something silly like that.”

Shisui complied but not without giving me weird looks throughout all of it, the nerve of him thinking I’m the strange one, honestly. Kids are all ridiculous, and becoming assassins before puberty apparently makes them even worse.

I looked back down at the folder. “This book deal, is it a one-time thing or can I add anything? Exchange? Make a counter-offer?”

Shisui glanced at me between checking the pans precisely as often as necessary because he apparently had experience. That’s right, Shisui was the breadwinner for his parents, right? Or just mother now, maybe, his father’s already dead isn’t he? “The matter was raised in council pertaining to your claim to your techniques. The Hokage will respect your decision if you wish to classify them, but I’m afraid their use by those present for your presentation is out of your hands.”

“Don’t be silly, the ways of science should be transparent to all. I’m definitely taking the book deal, can you imagine if someone like Orochimaru reads it? You realise it includes raw, scientific evidence to the inadequacy of his inhumane approach to human testing, right? Can you imagine his reaction? I’ll probably enter the bingo books as the one who got closest to killing him once he finishes having his aneurism. No, I’m more wondering if I could have two books made. One for this, one for all this basic history you lot seem to be completely ignorant to. Honestly, the fact none of you ever heard the name Ootsutsuki is unconscionable, you do realise Kaguya is where the Kaguya clan comes from, right? And the Sage and his brother were her kids too, the Uchiha and Senju all descend from her and Emperor Tenji, ultimately. Indra? Asura? The sage’s kids? Ring any bells? No? Gods, kid, this is kind of a big deal to just forget about, it hasn’t even been a thousand years.”

Shisui pursed his lips as he served me a portion, and then one for himself after I stared at him long enough. “I think you seriously underestimate the value of the lore you possess, sir. The Warring Clans era was not kind on record-keeping, and even harsher on oral traditions. If you can prove the veracity of your tales even a tenth as well as your other research, you can probably expect to be called Loremaster in addition to Doctor.”

Yes, I am officially Doctor Masanari now. I am a physicist who went and betrayed my field and all of STEM for the fickle fibs of soft science. Go me. “Proof like knowing several different languages nobody else in the world seems to remember either?”

Shisui blinked. Whether at the information or the fact I admitted it, I couldn’t tell. Probably the latter. “That would probably go a long way, yes.”

For that and other things, I’m sure, most of which I probably wouldn’t like. “Well, don’t get your hopes up. Or mine. Unless you can rustle up Tsunade Senju – unlikely – and a Kaguya – despite the Land of Water being Fire’s enemy even now – the odds of a successful genetic cross-comparison are negligible.” The Kaguya should still be alive as a clan right now though, and Yagura wasn’t even Mizukage yet for Tobi to mind-fuck into starting the bloodline purges. There was never a clear timeline on when all of that happened, alas. Not that I had anything but the vaguest recollections anyway. “That’s without the minefield of the third subject of that genetic test being one Uzumaki Naruto.”

Shisui had been quiet for a while. Looking at him, I saw a look of raw surprise on his face – oh, he’d just tasted the steak. I smirked as I partook of my own. With a fork because I’m an asshole like that, thank you very much. For years now I’d been amazing these poor souls with my Irish traditional broiled steak with whiskey sauce. Never had a single failure.

Shisui controlled himself at my look and deployed that most ancient face-saving strategy known as changing the subject. “I don’t suppose I need to ask how much you know about Orochimaru and related matters.” Okay, the strategy of changing the subject but not really. “I admit, with the benefit of hindsight it’s surprising you didn’t bring him up in your presentation. Even in the thesis proper, you made no mention of him after the Kyuubi incident.”

I grimaced. “Yeah, well… That’s because Orochimaru had to have gotten his hundreds of test subjects from somewhere. By the hundreds. In mere months at best, given the time frames involved. There’s a difference between ‘everyone’s guessed about the nin-who-must-not-be-named’ and ‘by process of elimination I now know exactly who in this here room has been kidnapping and doing unspeakable things to our children.”

Shisui paused mid-bite and lowered his chopsticks, giving me a look that was outright worried. Worried and taken aback, but I doubted he really hadn’t known or deduced all this. “Mister Masanari, that…”

“Has me surprised I still haven’t suffered a tragic suicide, yes.” Half of everyone may know or suspect about everything happening, but the identity of the man behind it all? I was technically the only one who categorically knew. That wasn’t a ninja anyway. Also, for that number to even be possible, Danzo must have had free run of the orphanages – at least – which means Sarutobi had looked the other way. His whole reign. Possibly still was. But I wasn’t going to tank my goodwill on that front. “Incidentally, when you’re the head of the most secret of secret organisations but everyone from one coast to the other still knows you on sight as ‘Shinobi no Yami’, you are terrible at your job.”

Shisui gaped.

That reminds me. I reached in my pocket for the little notebook – I had lots of them, even spread over my house for when I got brainwaves I needed to write down before I forgot, which was often – and made a note – in English – to include a list of species that shared genetics with humans. Just in case Orochimaru felt like banging his head against the walls in the future that may or may not be. Frogs, toads, mice, rats…

Through it all, Shisui continued to stare at me in horror. Literal horror, I could actually read him this time.

Baby assassins should not be this cute.

Shisui flushed. Because I’d muttered that part aloud. Just because.

“Mister Masanari, could you at least try not to be so careless with your life? For my sake, if nothing else? Please?”

“Says the kid who just leaked me the most sensitive actionable secret of the Village right now.” I watched the colour leaving the kid’s cheeks as fast as it had come, until he was pinching his nose, eyes closed in clear upset. “The chief-who-must-not-be-named will kill me if he finds out, I hope you know. Before or after he uses me as bait to draw you out.”

Shisui put his chopsticks down and clenched his fist. “I was only speaking in hypotheticals. “ I truly apologise for that.

That’s what I chose to take it as anyway. “Eat your food, I worked hard on it and you’re still growing. Actually here, have some seconds.” Spoon clank. “I know you ninja burn through energy faster than Naruto eats through my goodwill.”

Shisui’s expression soured, but he complied again because of course he did, he was a hypercompetent contract killer that only felt guilty when he didn’t mean to kill you.

While Shisui finished eating, I went to my garage – yes, I had invented the garage before the car, because why the hell not? – and carefully carried my very fragile package from my cart to my dumbwaiter. It barely fit, but that was fine, making it as big as possible without having to carry it down the stairs was the entire point.

I spent the rest of the time preparing the rest of the food and cake for him to go. He tried to refuse, but didn’t insist because manners. Good boy.

He looked worried as he lingered in my dining room though. Worried and tense. “Mister Masanari-“

“You can call me Hanzo if you like.” Don’t see any point to wait until I bleed for you, but I didn’t say that. I was jaded, but not that unkind.

“Mister Hanzo then.” Shisui hesitated, visibly choosing his words. “I… need to know exactly what you know about Orochimaru versus what everyone else might reasonably infer, absent of your personal experience.”

I smiled sadly down at the kid. As I would even when he finished his last growth spurt. I felt for him, really, but I wasn’t going to indulge his vain hope that the distinction would make a difference just to make him feel better about himself. “Orochimaru is a mean scapegoat, but the logistics don’t make sense for a single person, no matter how powerful or sly. It was too many kids in too little time.” And the fact he could even mistake Yamato for dead amidst the multitude of corpses meant he’d done the experiments all at once in a very short span of time, before Sarutobi found him. “Besides, he had to have received his more… atypical training from someone, and I doubt it was Sarutobi Hiruzen.”

Shisui grimaced. He sealed the casserole in a storage seal – on his skin, and took a deep breath.

And he still didn’t leave.

Instead, he looked from his arm up to my eyes and very seriously said “Ask me something important.”

Eh?

Shisui ran through hand seals at a speed I could actually track. I could see and feel faint wisps of smoke around the lower half of my face.

“This is the Loose Lips technique, an illusion ninjutsu I cast during our talk on the street, to protect us from lip readers in addition to the wind barrier.”

I gaped at him in disbelief.

“The only ones who know about Kotoamatsukami are the two of us for now. I haven’t even told th-“

“Stop!”

Shisui stopped.

Then I sat heavily on my wife’s glory box and put my face in my hands. The silence that followed was deep, heavy and earnest. It pissed me off so fucking much.

“… This is precisely why I didn’t say anything before, I know you’re sensitive to illusions-“

“I’m sensitive to the threat mind rape, not light-bending ninjutsu barely one step removed from the basic clone technique that every other kid in this village can use, and that’s not the problem!”

Shisui paused in front of my outburst. “I’m only trying to establish mutual leverage. It’s how we ninja show goodwill.”

“Shisui.” I rose back to my feet and very pointedly looked Shisui right in the eyes. They were still black, but who’s to say that wasn’t an illusion too? “I get what you’re trying to do. But there’s one, big, fatal flaw with this plan of yours: I’m not a ninja. I have no power, no skills, no ability to defend myself or any knowledge from literally anybody of consequence, I can’t enforce any leverage. So please, when you think about making me privy to even more sensitive information, do us both a favour and-“ Suddenly, my words stopped as my thoughts made a course-correction. My critical reasoning skills made it past my wall of dismay and fear and replaced everything with just one, sudden, thought-searing flash of absolute misery so deep I couldn’t understand what it was for a moment. Then I did, and I couldn’t believe I ever thought I was above such feelings. “This is just another fucking test, isn’t it?”

Shisui’s expression flickered like-

But no, I just didn’t care anymore. “You have my gratitude for volunteering to answer my questions, honourable ninja. I’m grateful for the Hokage’s generosity and have learned all I needed about his dispensations and ancillary matters. I have no more questions.”

“… Mister Hanzo, I-“

“Beg pardon, sir ninja, but I couldn’t imagine imposing on your time any longer. I will resort to the standard channels of communication when I have my answer for the Third. Thank you for your assistance.”

“… You’re welcome, then.”

Finally, Uchiha Shisui quietly, blessedly, left my house.

What proof of good faith do you people still want that you haven’t already taken?

I watched him go. I didn’t need to see the neighbours to know they were out there being inconspicuously conspicuous. I recalled that this entire visit began with Shisui’s revelation that the Uchiha Clan had followed my advice to begin redressing their optics in the village.

I still almost slammed the door. Almost.

I was going to invite you to watch me create life in a bottle.

Police states suck.

“-. .-“

Mercifully, I had a true best friend that would always distract me from my woes and who’d never betrayed me – science.

As with most other things in this world, the existence of magic and four world wars in quick succession had made science very unevenly developed, and even more schizophrenic in its application. This world knew about charge neutrality and Debye length, for example, albeit under different names. But it didn’t know about plasma double layers even though they form naturally in any sufficiently complex plasma. Like, oh, lightning, the aurora borealis, literally any form of current-carrying electricity, even neon lights. In fact, this world didn’t even have the term plasma, calling it all lightning or electricity or some variation thereof. Which made sense, plasma was only coined by Irving Langmuir after he noticed its resemblance to living blood cells.

Maybe there’s a foreign continent out there with more advanced science, like from that film with the kid with a magic rock for a heart, but I doubted it. Based on the maps of this place, the Elemental Nations added up to roughly the same landmass as the combined continents of my past life. Also, things like the Kurama Clan, movie theatres and the Land of Snow didn’t exist, so that foreign continent probably didn’t exist anymore than all the filler stuff. Which was good for me because I never watched any of it. I already had a hell of a time just fitting chakra into my research paradigm, never mind anything else like, oh, the Ryumiaku for example. Though it certainly would explain where the Shinju found the energy to harvest chakra from. Or make it.

I was still developing my theories there. Also, I got sidetracked.

Back on the other Earth – or maybe the same one in the past or future, who the hell knows what Pangaea was like way back – a guy called Bohm discovered that putting electrons into plasma made them stop behaving like individuals and instead as if they were a part of a larger and interconnected whole. Even seemingly random movements of individual electrons actually added up to collective, organised effects. Effects not unlike what you’d see in a biological organism. The plasma behaved like an amoeba, constantly regenerating itself and isolating impurities in a wall, like a unicellular organism might isolate foreign objects in a cyst. The plasma literally formed into a double layer that behaved like the membrane of a living cell.

I didn’t have a computer, never mind the sort of system that could run and display models of molecular dynamics. So I couldn’t do like Tsytovich and virtually simulate the right conditions in outer space where particles of inorganic dust could undergo self-organization, as their electric charges become separated until the plasma becomes polarized, thereby forming helical structures that interact with each other as if they were organic life.

I did, however, have the means to recreate the Lozneanu-Sanduloviciu experiment. Which is to say, I should be able to simulate the ionising superstorms of primordial Earth by inducing the right conditions within an isolated environment of low-temperature plasma.

My order from the glassworker had been for what basically amounted to a giant fishbowl. Except instead of housing fish, I had just finished mounting it upside down over my little setup of empty space populated by two electrodes in the middle, three tesla coils along the outer circle, and all over the floor was a layer of the closest approximation of space dust I could rustle up. My heart had been in my throat for the entire time that the glass bowl was suspended on my jury-rigged crane – it was too wide to carry by hand – but I was eventually able to lower it in place without shattering it to a million pieces and causing me to self-combust from pure apoplexy. It had been the most stressful part of my preparations, even though the real drudge work went into making everything airtight.

When it was over, I went around locking every door and window, then spent another ten minutes running like a chicken with its head cut off from one end of my workshop to the next, tossing nails and wrenches all over the place at random. When I was panting from exhaustion and still hadn’t nailed any invisible watchers with my crazy behaviour, I decided I was as observer-free as I could possibly get. Unless the Hokage was taking time off during his work hours to use his crystal ball to watch me right this moment, I should be alright.

Unless there were spells or seals to see and listen remotely, but I doubted it. If those things existed, ninja wouldn’t need power lines, bulky film cameras and VHS tapes.

… Portable earpiece radios were a thing though. Or would be by the time Naruto graduated, did they exist already right now? I don’t remember them in use prior to Naruto’s birth from the series, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t used during the Kyuubi attack either.

I still spent another half hour checking every nook and cranny for bugs and even ultramodern spy cams I was pretty sure didn’t exist here yet before I decided to call it. Blessedly, I didn’t find any.

Now…

Time for science!

I carefully uncorked the two valves on the glass vessel, leaving one open for the air to escape through while hooking the other to my pressure can of Argon gas. And boy, collecting that had been another bitch and a half, even in this little quantity. Not only did I not have the right equipment for cryogenic fractal distillation, but this world didn’t even know the element existed. I’d had to recreate the Rayleigh – Ramsay isolation method from first principles and repeat it ad nauseam for days.

When the little lightning arc began to turn purple between the little pair of powered electrodes I was holding near the opening, I quickly closed the valve. Then I just stood there before my setup and waited for my jitters to die down. They always seized me when I was about to commence an experiment. It took a fair bit of willpower to refrain from the immediate gratification of doing science without minimising the risks of something going wrong. When the jitters took their sweet time leaving, I checked everything over again. Even tossed various things at the walls and corners in increasingly silly ambush setups to trip up any invisible watchers. Three times. Finally, I was calm enough to proceed.

“Igor,” I called with perhaps too much glee. “Pull the switch!”

I pulled the switch.

The Tesla coils came to life.

Ba-bum-shriek-crackle-ba-bum.

Suddenly, the inside of the glass dome was filled with arching electricity amidst purple light. Lightning shooting here and back all over the place.

I watched as the lightning became softer and softer, jagged crackling bolts increasingly turning into sustained, continuous beams whose tips crawled languidly over the inside of the glass as the purple gas was steadily ionized. No tiny balls of lightning spontaneously coming to life though.

It was just as well. This was just the preparatory phase anyway. First you ionized the atmosphere to create the birth conditions of Earth-that-was. Then you played god.

The lightning calmed to slowly meandering streams, like thistle spurs bending around each other. Or the coronal mass ejection of a star. It was a much more advanced effect than I expected, I didn’t think the Tesla lightning would change behaviour so soundly, how exactly and how far had the environment changed? Slowly, I thumbed the switch to off.

The coils deactivated. The arching lights disappeared. The purple glow lingered like an afterimage. Amidst it all, the dust hung suspended, spread all throughout the orb as if weightless. I’d expected some manner of disturbance from the coil bolts, but not this. Not gravity nullification.

Then again…

The theory was that plasma helical structures could undergo the same changes as biomolecules. Divide, form copies, interact to induce changes in the neighbouring structures, induce evolution into completely new structures. Could that mean that it’s possible to make structures that interact with energy and force in ways that are fundamentally different from the rest of matter? Even if that wasn’t the case, though…

Gravity and static electricity are the same force at the Planck scale.

Quietly, I thumbed the second switch.

The two electrodes at the centre of the medium came to life, the space between them split in half by bright, vivid lightning in a continuous arc.

A faint shriek broke the silence, like birds chirping far in the distance. Sparks flew between the metal rods and away. The suspended dust ripped in place.

Nothing else seemed to happen for a while, not even that I could see through my lens array. Curse this world for its lack of electron microscopes.

I dragged a chair over and sat down just outside the circle of rails that my amplification lens array was mounted on. Watched the spectacle before me, the lights and shadows dancing all over me and the floor and the walls top to bottom. I wonder how Primordial Earth looked like, when it was all like this. What I’d done was improvise the Earth as it was back before life began, when the planet was enveloped in electric storms that caused ionized gases to form in the atmosphere. Even as I watched, the arc of electricity between the two electrodes looked more and more like a miniature lightning strike, increasingly so as the concentration of ions and electrons raised around the positively charged electrode.

Then, suddenly, something happened like what I imagined a nova looked like, and there was a little sphere of light floating there.

I got to my feet and cautiously approached, hoping I wasn’t imagining things.

I wasn’t. It really was there. Just floating-

The sphere moved. It was about the size of a pinhead, but it was bright. Clear. Somehow I could see it moving in place. I quickly drove the lens array along the rails around the medium for a better look. I hadn’t imagined it, the sphere was moving under its own power. I almost called it its own orbit, but then the thing moved the other way as if-

No, not as if, I nearly missed it with how fast it happened, but it literally moved out of the way of second cell that appeared. I tried to tell myself it was just the effect of the moving gas, but then the sphere wandered off, avoided a couple more of its kind, phased through dust particles without issue, absorbed a few stray sparks, and then passed through the inactive Tesla coil as if it wasn’t even there.

Collisionless plasma. It wasn’t the gas. The thing had moved of its own accord. Survival instinct. I forced myself to breathe. Be still my pounding heart.

The positive electrode birthed another sphere. And another. And a fourth. And more. I could only stand there goggling at them through the lenses. I could almost imagine the plasma particles beading together to form string-like filaments. Filaments twisting into helical strands not unlike DNA. The electrically charged strands of ‘not-DNA’ being attracted to each other into helical structures functionally and visually the same as biomolecules. DNA, RNA, proteins. Their energy-based counterparts at least. But alas, if any of that was happening, it was at a very small scale, too small for even my oversized setup of three huge lenses chained together to see. If I squinted, though, I could almost swear I could glimpse the aftereffects of those structures coming together and apart, like swarms.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

It was ten minutes before I shook myself out of my astonishment and began furiously taking notes, then more notes for over an hour as tiny specks of ball lightning came to life and went wandering out of the way of the dust to move about. Fade. Brighten. Disperse. Merge together, even. Eat.

I stared at the life I had created. I had absolutely no words.

Two cells suddenly merged. Then three. Then ten. It seemed to have happened by chance because they just happened to ride the currents of gas to the same vague point, but I wasn’t completely sure. Suddenly I didn’t need my ridiculously low-tech alternative to the microscope to see what was happening in there. There was a plasma sphere larger than all the others wandering around the place. As it did, it avoided, touched and ate the sparks and argon particles and even a dust mote until it became, quite literally, gigantic. The largest human cell was the ovum, which could reach 0.2 mm in diameter and could only barely be seen with the naked eye. The plasma cell before me right was now as large as a mustard seed. And it was still moving. Behaving in an increasingly complex fashion. Moving around to avoid some charged dust flakes and pass through others, hovering near crafted steel as if curious about it – no, don’t you project now, Hanzo – and then, out of nowhere, the thing wandered over to the very edge of the glass and began rolling along the inside like a ball.

I hastened to drag my magnifying array over and spent the next half an hour absolutely mesmerised by its increasingly unique behaviour when, suddenly, it split.

In half.

Like a cell.

I gaped, utterly spellbound.

Mitosis!

I speechlessly stared at the whirling spectacle in front of me.

Fact: primordial earth had a highly ionized atmosphere. Fact: LUCA was the last universal common ancestor. Fact: In my last life, my predecessors theorised that maybe a plasma form of life emerged on the primordial Earth. Fact: Ancient mythology described the world as being made from a gigantic eldritch creature. Kronos, Brahma, Pangu, the cosmic egg, of Ymir's flesh was fashioned the earth, the mountains from his bones, the ocean from his blood, and the sky… The sky from the big primordial’s skull. And by sky they meant all the sky, the firmament, the starry darkness way up high, the oral traditions of the oldest humans weren’t talking about blueshifted air, they meant the heliosheath.

… Tentative Inference: if plasma life forms acted as the template for the more familiar organic molecules of carbon-based life, then…

“Did I just discover the first universal common ancestor?” The acronym formed itself in my mind without my input. “Wait, no! I am not calling it FUCA.”

Then my heart almost jumped in my throat as one of the now two biggest cells tried to pass through the glass and died.

I winced, though I was also surprised. Collisionless plasma should have passed through just fine, what happened?

The original cell rippled and turned back to its native environment, spending the next ten minutes… eating some more, its luminous sheet growing brighter but also thinner as the cell grew in volume even more. When it returned to the edge of the medium some time later, it was three centimetres wide. I could literally see inside it despite the light it gave off. It wasn’t empty. It wasn’t homogenous. There was an inner nucleus of… it looked like gas. Careful and amazed that this was happening on a scale I could actually study, I brought my magnifying array as close as I could. There were tiny lightning bolts running through the space between the inner nucleus and membrane.

“Plasma life… successfully created in laboratory conditions…” I breathed reverently. I don’t know how long I stood there, just absorbing the reality of my accomplishment. “Ur-specimen will be dubbed…” Yimir was a bit too on the nose, but it was ultimately just a later version of the original sacrifice known to the ancient Europeans, wasn’t he? “Ur-specimen is hereby dubbed Yemo.” My mouth felt dry in the wake of that dedication as I wrote down the words. “A luminous sheet acting as cellular membrane. Double-layered plasma life form with an outer layer of negatively charged electrons and an inner layer of positively charged ions. A nucleus made of gas atoms with an electric field present between the boundary and nucleus, within which electrons are accelerated. Morphological assumptions pending verification.”

Yemo floated there, his nucleus pulsing in and out in a steady, rhythmic inhalation. Breathing. Far behind the first and most precocious of my new creations, the swarm of young lives grew larger and brighter by the minute.

Yemo split again. The child tried to pass through the glass again. And succeeded.

I was shocked.

It lingered out in the open air for a moment, seemingly as astonished as I was. Then it rushed back only to sadly disperse before it could… reunite with its parent?

I swallowed, feeling oddly sad. Maybe it wasn’t tough enough to survive outside its native environment yet? “The evolved sphere appears as a stable, self-confined, layered, luminous and nearly spherical body,” I muttered as I wrote. Reluctantly. Every moment spent writing was a moment I had to look away from them. “Capable of reproduction through mitosis. Reproductive process appears to include inherited command and control functionality for the child cell. Resulting cells identical and capable of immediately acting with coordination. Propagation capacity of ‘genetic’ memory uncertain. The amount of energy in the initial spark seems to govern their size and lifespan.”

Yemo had another feast and even merged with another couple of smaller cells before splitting a third time. The ‘child’ repeated its exodus, but immediately dashed back into its home and merged back with the parent cell. Then Yemo… hovered a bit in place before turning back and floating over to the closest Tesla coil. Then it entered stable orbit around the toroid and didn’t seem inclined to do anything else.

Briefly, I seriously considered turning the coils back on.

Instead, I first turned the power dial on all three as low as I could, and then activated just one of them on the lowest setting, the one farthest from Yemo.

There was barely a spark instead of the great arcs of lightning from the beginning, but the change was immediate. The entire environment was disturbed. The floating dust shuddered. The swarm of young plasma cells clustering around the electrodes down below flinched with almost uncanny coordination away from the coil, and Yemo was knocked out of his orbit.

But then, most of the swarm broke off from their… birthing place and gathered around the Tesla coil instead. A few got too close and were zapped out of existence. The others, though, seemingly learned their lesson and settled into a safer orbit. Yemo wandered around the outmost range of the rest, other cells flying to him and back. Either I was seeing things or they were developing social dynamics. Communicating. They also really wanted to be close to the coil for some reason. More than they did the electrodes that birthed them. Static electricity works as fuel? They only managed something resembling far orbit though. Any closer and zap goes the sparkling. I couldn’t turn the coil down any lower without shutting it completely off. I wasn’t sure it would mean anything to them if it was weaker. And turning it off seemed mean now that they chose it over their literal birthplace.

I was amazed at their coordination. Cooperation, even from Yemo who’d grown so large in part by eating a whole bunch of the rest. Well, merging with them, if there was a difference. “Based on the synchronised pulsations of the larger observable specimens, I theorise that the creatures communicate information by emitting electromagnetic energy, making the atoms within other spheres vibrate at a particular frequency. I will need to develop a proper microscope and the appropriate electromagnetic spectroscopy equipment to be sure.” At least one other experiment I read about had observed just that effect, similar to the vibrating diaphragm in a telephone which enables information to be communicated from one point to another. “My new children are telepathic, heh – wait, no, don’t write that down, never thought I’d be glad for the lack of recording equipment.”

Yemo, probably because of his larger mass, went closer than all the rest and allowed the Tesla lighting to hit him. For a moment I thought he was dead, the membrane rippling and the inner working stuttering in place. But then his membrane actually grew stronger, and Yemo’s jittering movements from the shock of the strike steadily smoothed out until he was… floating in stable orbit around the Tesla coil. Oh my god, that’s just-. And then Yemo’s membrane grew thicker and brighter and – magnifying array, quick! – and… and now it was giving off lightning of its own too, like it was some sort of relay for the Tesla coil. The arcs were tiny and soft, floating loosely like strands of hair, but I could still see them, barely.

And then I didn’t need to see them because it became obvious what was going on when the many other, smaller cells swarmed around Yemo and began to orbit him, all but hanging off the other ends of the beams he gave off. Other plasma cells now wandered close to the tesla coil too, as close as they wanted, even float as one in the shape of a double helix around the one, big, smooth arc of unliving lightning because the bolt was now a single, stable arc permanently and safely locked on Yemo’s form like… like he was a satellite.

Yemo turned himself into the moon, I thought nonsensically, though the thought quickly felt increasingly less and less absurd. And he’s basically protecting and nurturing the others now. That’s my boy!

Hesitantly, but not as much as previously, I turned off the power to the electrodes.

Some of the larger kids – heh – swarmed over to check on the sudden quiescence of their previously chaotic birthing place, but then seemed to shrug in unison and went back to their new home to… crowd around their big brother and live their lives I suppose.

Just hanging there.

Living the life.

… Oh my god, I’ve created life!

I stood there for a while, just watching my creations, awestruck. I hadn’t really expected anything to come from this. It was just a whim, a point of pride for me to put at least some effort into my passion, after I spent almost everything I had on soft science and the most exhausting self-imposed task of both my lives, bar none. All for the salvation of a bunch of people that I wasn’t sure deserved it anymore.

No, that’s not really fair. Realisation descended on me out of nowhere, as tends to only happen when you’ve had a good break from wallowing in your problems. I wasn’t sure I welcomed it right now though. Maybe Shisui was deliberately being obtuse at the end there. Maybe this is something Danzo pushed on Sarutobi that Shisui wanted to fail on purpose and I didn’t live up to his expectations.

I was almost sure this was the case the moment it came to me, but instead of the embarrassment or shame I might have felt any other time, I just felt angry because fuck that shit. Shimura Danzo should be six feet under with not a headstone to his name after everything he’s done, not getting his way over the Hokage even now after everything.

I grit my teeth. My fist was clenched. Within the medium, my creations lived their little lives completely oblivious to the world outside. Ah, the bliss of ignorance.

Alas, I couldn’t make the same claim to composure as them.

Sorry, children, but daddy wants to bask in your presence a bit. I promise not to be too overbearing.

Slowly, so slowly, I walked over to stand next to the table with the medium. Stood there. Bent over to watch as close to the glass as I could. Hesitantly raised my hand and tapped on the glass with my finger. Just once.

The creatures started in place. Like a school of fish they jolted away from their prior trajectories, the swarm moving relative to the source of the vibration without exception. And near his place around the head of the Tesla coil, Yemo lurched out of orbit.

Then shot over to the origin point as fast as he could, the other creatures hovering in his wake, their pulses uneven and lacking the synchronisation of before.

Yemo came as close to the glass as he could without passing through it. Rolled around like a ball in a perfect circle along the inside, searching. Waiting.

I tapped the glass again.

Yemo shot to the spot immediately and all but hugged the wall.

That’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Sorry, kids, daddy has a new favorite.

Behind my new angel, the rest of the beings came together in a unified cluster, a cord of lights swaying back and forth in rhythm with the Tesla arc, now bereft and distant.

That gave me an idea. It was kind of silly, but the more I thought about it, the more I decided it was a crime that I hadn’t done it from the beginning. After all, what kind of creator would I be if I didn’t give my world music? The Professor would be ashamed of me!

First I recalibrated the other two coils and activated all three at once. The sudden re-emergence of life-giving energy from all three megastructures caused a whole new form of chaos in the medium. It gave me ten more minutes’ worth of new observations to write down.

But this time, when the creatures acclimated to their new, richer environment, Yemo chose not to enter orbit like before.

Instead, he flew over to the edge of the glass and began hovering back and forth in a circle. Like it was looking for me. Increasingly so as the others again began to come over and join him like the tiniest school of fish. School of the tiniest fish, I mean, the swarm was anything but small now, there must have been hundreds of them now.

Being well past the time where I had to worry about extra variables contaminating the experiment, I brought over my phonograph. Fate was with me for once and I already had the setup I needed to divide the audio signals by channel, I’d played around with the music function a lot since I left Shisui speechless that first time. I’d had to build a lot of the hardware myself, but I was used to that.

I turned off the Tesla coils.

Sorry, kids, dad’ll only be a second.

But a second was probably ages at that size, wasn’t it?

This world was still way off from software equalizers, but I’d managed well enough to split sound channels into three streams, which I hooked to each of the Tesla control boxes.

Then, crossing my fingers, I activated the Tesla coils all at once.

The medium came to life. The lightning sang. My creations danced.

Despite themselves, even. Maybe. The song was a sad one. But it was also one of the few familiar to both the lives I’ve lived, and I didn’t have the heart to pretend positivity.

Sorry, kids, dad doesn’t have a lot of happiness of his own to give right now. I walked over to stand next to the glass. Well, no happiness that doesn’t come from you, little ones.

Sad as it was, the song was beautiful. One of my favorites regardless of life and planet. And the little ones seemed to enjoy it too, despite my worries. I was glad. It’s not every day you get to bend thunder to your will and make it sing. It’s not like I had my wife or kids around either, for them to ask incessant questions and make me rush from one end of the workshop to the next and haul them away amidst laughter in a vain attempt to keep clumsy hands from destroying my laboratory.

Maybe I should’ve named them Dexter and DeeDee.

Or maybe not. Yui may have fit the stereotype, but Kenzo wasn’t nearly enough of an introvert in comparison.

Within the medium, the creatures swam in concert, one long, continuous loop flowing like a river in a circle between the Tesla coils, made of two separate funnels swirling around each other in a double helix.

In that moment, I experienced a deep, fervent feeling swelling in my chest like I hadn’t ever since my past life awakening. My breath felt tight. My heart beat loud in my ears. These creatures were small and fleeting and had only the most basic of life’s instincts, but they were wonderful and luminous and mine.

I tapped on the glass.

Yemo rose from the soul stream, big and bright and still in rhythm with the music, and came over to the source of the sound. And waited. Alive, pulsing in concert with the many others trailing after him, and patient.

I really must stop projecting intelligence on single-cellular life. But I couldn’t help it! Here they are acting alone, here they aren’t, here they are behaving like a hive, here they are eating lightning, look at them dancing and looking for the faintest sign of their creator wherever they find it, oh Occam’s Razor, wherefore hast thou gone? Why have you forsaken me?

I tapped again. They swarmed closer, Yemo leading the way as their dance got even more elaborate, somehow, despite not breaking rhytm with the thunder song. They were completely in sync with my heartbeat actually.

Anam was the Irish word for soul.

Finally giving in to the impulse, I pressed my fingertip against the glass and left it there.

“I name you Anami.”

Yemo was there in an instant, a child cell detaching from him and shooting into and out of my skin in a rush to return to its parent. It tingled. Then it tingled even better when Yemo divided again, then again and again, the child cells coming together more and more until I was looking at a vague likeness of my fingertip.

Children learn through imitation. Was I projecting again? Or was this more than an unconscious reflection of how subtle matter behaved? Wait a minute…

The process hadn’t finished. The division continued. The tip of my finger was perfectly reflected in their amalgam, and they still weren’t finished subdividing and recombining, what were they-oh.

I was looking at a blue, glowing, perfect replica of my fingertip, down to the slightest detail of my fingerprint. “That’s amazing.”

I allowed myself the impossible thought that the way they flickered was due to my praise. Hearing my voice. The way they communicated via vibration wasn’t that different from hearing, was it? They wouldn’t be able to dance otherwise. For a given meaning of the term.

Slowly, I pressed the rest of my finger against the glass, and more, until my entire palm rested on it. Little cells birthed littler cells that strung forward in a chain until theye were mimicking the tesla bolts almost perfectly, streaking and winding in and out of the medium through the glass, tingling atop my skin. I bent forward as close as I could, until I could see my eyes reflected in the glass. See them reflected in the reflection of my eyes, as they lived and pulsed and came together into a unified synchronicity of tiny individualities.

And there it was, finally. There they were, formed into the perfect mirror of my hand. My heart felt like it might burst. “… Good job.” I… I had proud, happy tears running down my cheeks. I could swear I could feel my words and my feelings vibrating through my arm and the glass and all the way to the heart of my little creations and their congregation. “I’m proud of you.”

Something happened. Something amazing. A wave of light rippled over the surface of the shining, mirror likeness of my hand. I could barely tell the little things apart anymore.

Then, without warning, the hand shot through the glass as if it wasn’t even there and right into mine.

“Fuck me!”

I jerked away with a hoarse shout, reflex throwing me back from the glass but not enough to save me from a nasty fall. I crashed hard on my side, but I barely spared the flare of pain any attention. My hand came alive with feelings, some old, some unexpected, some completely bizarre and unknown. My skin, my flesh, my nerves tingled increasingly as if I’d plugged my hand in a power socket, but it felt strangely good and my heart didn’t scream as if about to give up the ghost from palpitations. At the same time but separately, I felt like that time when I spent an hour with my hands on a Van de Graaff generator just to fill up with static and see what happens. But the feeling was localised below my wrist and what was happening now was not what happened then, and then the tingle reached my nerves and overlayed the neurons.

Humans can’t feel their individual cells, I thought breathlessly as I stared at my hand, who spared no time in proving me wrong immediately with its skin and folds and creases and dead cells, my mind looking over the sweat and fat glands and past the tiny hairs to their roots and beyond, deeper and deeper until I saw the blood. Humans can’t see their- the tingle reached my brain and I-

My hand…

I suddenly knew it, down to the individual haematid and leukocytes and the vessels they travelled through to reach the bone and muscles and nerves, with their cells and mitochondria and every bend in the tiny, endless ball of yarn that was my DNA several trillion times over and… and…

… There was a lot.

And I knew all of it. Everything. To the molecule and everything they contained. And did. They say a drop of DNA has storage and processing capacity comparable to a quantum computer. I could believe that now, this tangled ball of genes and their connections and lack of connections, tangled and folded and wrapped around itself, enclosed in protein and so much else, the cytoplasm beyond with so much more in it than my biology studies had taught me, the biomolecules, the acids, the mitochondria, the membrane of the cell beyond, and all around the cell and over it and through it now there was a subtle, luminous field like...

Exactly like.

Collisionless plasma.

A human cell. A plasma cell. Overlapping perfectly.

The paranormal. All the weird stories and urban legends and strange phenomena back on the old world. Double layer balls of plasma were theorised by some to be the reason behind all of it. I doubted it because I doubt most theories that try to give a single explanation for everything under the sun, but…

… Did my cells just gain their own souls?

When my reality was finally once more macroscopic, when the vivid memory stayed stuck in my mind even as the knowledge didn’t because my short-term memory couldn't offload it fast enough to save even a percentage of it, there was one, immanent thought spanning my whole mind.

Humans are stuck in survival mode.

My second thought was a feeling, like the faintest net of semi-autonomous bio-circuitry laid alongside my blood vessels and nervous system, spread throughout my hand like a half-woven web. It was weak, atrophied and hungry. The chakra circulatory system, I thought sluggishly. My cell souls. It was… eating them? I don’t think I like it.

My third thought was pain.

My sides hurt. And more. There was a sharp, persistent pain under my rib cage and my gut. I tried to stand- “Hgh…nnnn-agh!” I failed. The pain flared, severe and sharp, coming in waves. I could feel it. I could feel it spreading, out from my back down my gut and lower, until it was everywhere from below my lungs to my groin.

My fourth thought was I need to get to the bathroom.

Right now.

Gritting my teeth, I managed to use the wall to climb to my feet – barely – and thanked all my basement dweller forebears for the tradition of always having a restroom next door. Somehow, I made it.

Then I didn’t.

The pain of before was nothing. The moment I let loose, sheer, horrible agony flared from my bladder all the way to the end and I screamed.

It burns, I thought amidst the flames burning my thoughts. Like acid.

My urine was…

It was black.

The shock was the only thing that kept me upright, but even that failed when I thought the worst was behind me, only to see black replaced by red. I was pissing blood.

I fell against the wall and almost the rest of the way before I caught myself on the sink. The glass cup was knocked aside, falling to shatter on the floor, scattering my toothbrush and razor.

I… I could barely think. I need to get to the hospital.

I stumbled out, back into my lab and past it, gasping and moaning in pain with every step, but I barely made it to the door before my knees gave out. Somehow I still managed to crawl up and unlock it, pull it open. But then I must have passed out briefly, because the next thing I knew I was crawling on all fours up the stairs, barely pulling my weight.

Why is it dark? I thought dimly. Squinting up, I saw the familiar sight of moonlight casting faint shadows along the walls at the top of the stairs. When did it get night?

I made it all the way to the next to last step before my body gave out.

I’m not gonna make it, I thought desperately. I’m not gonna make it this time.

I tried to call for help even though I knew I was too far away, even discounting the walls between me and the next person, but it came out as a hoarse, wordless scream.

What’s happening to me?

There was an anbu kneeling over me.

Oh…

Tall. Lean. Mask with the stylised face of a dog. His hands were already mid-way through a series of seals.

They came for me after all.

Well… that explained the pain.

“Kuchiyose no jutsu!”

Archaic Nifon, I thought disjointedly. Jutsu mnemonics are in a different language?

White smoke. Brown fur. White fangs.

“Akino, see if you can track down the poison.”

Poison?

“Roger!”

The ninja dog jumped over me and down the stairs.

“Hang in there, big man,” the Anbu hoisted me up in a fireman’s carry. “Would be a shame to make my junior sad twice in one day.”

Without further words, Hatake Kakashi rushed me off to the hospital.

I was perversely glad when my size didn’t let him jump out the window.

A single thought was left to percolate through my fading consciousness when we finally made it out and he pushed the ground away in a blur.

Was that dog wearing sunglasses?