“Formless stuff and stuff-less form,” Kruger said softly to himself, his voice filled with awe as he peered into the lens of the microscope. “What dreams are made of.”

 

He looked up, sudden tears in his eyes. He wiped them away and just stood there for a moment, taking in the darkened lab, the blank windows, red lights glowing faintly over the specimen tanks. It seemed like a poor environment for what he had just seen, a dismal setting for such an important discovery.

 

His mind flew back through the years to a lecture he had heard long ago by an eminent biologist. He remembered the man saying with a touch of melancholy, “We just don’t know what life really is.” Now, maybe they did.

 

Kruger looked again at the shapes mutating on the microscope slide. Was he sure of what he was seeing? Were they really alive? Or was it nothing more than blind groping? A rote, inanimate application of physical laws? If only, he thought, we could touch them, question them, know for sure...

 

The lab door opened and someone came in.

 

“What are you doing here, Don?” Irwin asked, surprised to see him. Irwin was the lab’s lead scientist and manager, Kruger’s boss.

 

Kruger, startled, didn’t answer right away. He felt suddenly exposed, embarrassed. The immensity of the secret he possessed swelled in his chest. He wanted to hold onto it, to protect it. Keep it for himself.

 

He turned his head away, coughed, and mumbled something inaudible. Then he shoved his hands in his lab coat pockets, his fingers searching for and finding the key he had stolen earlier, just in case. It was cold, its edges sharp.

 

“Well,” Irwin said after an awkward pause, “since you’re here, did you check on the latest results? That’s what I was going to do.”

 

Kruger nodded, trying to recover his voice. His throat worked. When he finally spoke, he heard himself lie. “It was nothing,” he said, his voice dry. “The same as before. Dead. Nothing at all.” He adopted an attitude of disappointment. “See for yourself.” He pointed at the wrong microscope, the one he had looked into first that night.

 

Irwin peered into the lenses, adjusting the focus, his hands stained blue with the iodine they used as a marker. There was nothing there, Kruger knew, a lifeless blank.

 

Irwin straightened up, with a quizzical look on his face. “I thought,” he said, “maybe this time...” His voice trailed off. Then he brightened. “Well, tomorrow we can add more reagent, get a better reaction, perhaps increase the temperature a bit. What do you think?”

 

Kruger shrugged. There was a burning sensation in his mouth and he felt a little weak, but he forced himself to stay calm. An idea was forming in his mind. “Yeah, why not? We can try that.”

 

“If the amino acids can be excited to just the right pitch,” Irwin continued, thinking aloud, “in the right solution, they should start to recombine independently. To grow. To become...” He hesitated a moment. “Well, alive,” he finished a little sheepishly. He looked at Kruger and suddenly grinned.

 

He has such a positive attitude, Kruger thought, so hopeful. And he isn’t wrong, exactly.

 

“Anyway,” Irwin went on, more brusquely now. “I’ll be in early so we can get started. I’ll see you then. Be sure to lock up when you leave.” He turned and left, the door clicking shut behind him, leaving the room still again.

 

Alone in the faint, numinous light of the specimen tanks, Kruger touched his face. His fingers moved slowly over his mouth and nose, his cheeks, forehead, and ears. He felt an obscure desire to confirm his own existence. To ensure that this was, indeed, real.

 

Then, suddenly deciding, he took the slide he had been looking at from under the microscope and left the lab, carrying it cupped in his hand like a precious liquid.

 

Down the hall he went to another, different lab. The door was locked but Kruger had the key. He went in, carefully set the slide down, and flipped on the lights. This was the physics lab.

 

A complex machine stood in the center of the room, a maze of wires and tubes spreading out from a central hub like a many-limbed octopus. These connected to another device that stood against one wall — a control panel with a chair for the operator and a keyboard.

 

Kruger approached the central hub, touched it reverentially, then circled slowly around it, his hands feeling the cold of the steel chamber at its heart. He found the power switch and turned it on. It made no sound, but an acrid smell ebbed into the room. Kruger felt himself becoming warmer.

 

He did not know how the machine worked. He was not a physicist. He did not understand it, but he had seen it demonstrated and he knew what it did, or was supposed to do. It stimulated the growth of living cells.

 

The machine had a small hatch on one side. Kruger opened it and carefully deposited the slide into the reaction chamber. Excitement gripped him as he closed the hatch and walked over to the control panel. Sitting down in the chair, he pulled the keyboard close and typed in a command. Then he looked sidelong at the reaction chamber, expectant, anxious, slightly afraid.

 

Inside the chamber, a stream of nanoparticles bombarded the cells that had formed on the slide. The cells began to multiply rapidly, explosively. In seconds, something grew in the chamber, emerging seemingly out of nothing. A form took shape, expanded, wriggled, stretched.

 

When the reaction finished, Kruger shut the machine off and opened the chamber. He looked at the thing inside. Did it work?

 

“Hello,” he whispered hopefully, his eyes wet again.

 

And in his own mind — or was it his imagination? — he heard its response.

 

“Hello.”