When Naomi, at the beginning of womanhood, was deciding what her path forward would be, she chose to study biology in college because she wanted to unlock the secrets of life itself. But not in the way that people typically expect of a woman—with her body, her uterus, pushing life from between her legs, bearing the weight of it for the rest of her days.
This desire to pull apart the fabric of life then learn to restitch it back together was what landed her at BioGenesis, the research laboratory she works at as Principal Scientist.
The problem, as Naomi now sees it, her goggles digging painfully into the tops of her sleep-haggard cheeks, the fluorescent lights flickering over her work bench, is not the scientific analysis of the questions of life. She’s come close to some answers—her lab has begun to create whole organ systems from scratch, first from pig parts then from humanoid tissue 3D printed from massive, futuristic-looking printers with long robotic arms. For years now, scientists have been uncovering the human genome one letter at a time until last year, when the Telomere-to-Telomere consortium announced it had finally filled in the gaps for a complete sequence, start to finish. Naomi has started to memorize it, the human genome—3 billion letters total—for fun. So she can rattle off the basis of human life like a foreign language or a party trick.
Life is not the problem. Death, it turns out, is the real unknowable mystery.
Which has never been put into sharper relief than now—with three neat petri-dished, lab-engineered skin slabs blooming with beautifully technicolor colonies of lethal bacterium that only a day or two ago she’d had under control. The skins’ edges droop with rot. They will be completely devoured within a day or two at which point she will throw the whole thing away into a biocontaminant cabinet so she can start killing fresh, new organs from scratch.
Plus, of course, there’s the fact of the dead woman haunting her home and invading her mind.
An unfortunate new trick of Deb’s. One that Naomi avoids thinking about by throwing herself into her lab work. She cracks open her lab notebook and runs a finger down the long lists of data points, looking for the piece that indicates everything was about to go so wrong with the bioskins.
When Deb had given back control of Naomi’s mind and Naomi’s vomiting finally subsided from heaving to uneasy queasiness, she’d demanded to know how the hell, why the hell, what the hell Deb thought she was doing.
To Deb’s credit, she looked both shocked and extremely remorseful. “I am so, so sorry,” she’d said. “I had no idea it would work that well. I’ve only ever psychic projected with a handful of people, and it was always in broad daylight as they were passing by. Jesus, I never, ever would have done it if I knew it’d affect you like this.” She wrung her hands and looked as if she wanted to reach for Naomi, who swiftly backed away.
“You’ve done this before?”
“It’s stupid. It’s a—” Deb waves her hand in the air, searching for the right word, “—ghost thing, I guess. Sometimes we get bored or sad or lonely and we’re able to connect with people, inject an image or a sound or a memory into their mind. It’s usually super faint, as if the person is having a passing thought, sometimes a premonition or sense of foreboding. Some people are more susceptible than others. Children, for example. They’re always the most fun because they’re not scared, not like adults. And if I had to guess, the time of day makes a big difference, too. The brain is a lot more active in sleep, which makes it more receptive to psychic projection. That’s why you saw me at night for the first time.”
Naomi scribbles a few things into her notebook: the number of bacteria colonies that have grown exponentially in just a few days, the concentration and amount of the solution that she injects into the petri dishes as a last-ditch effort. She jots a few ideas for future experimentations: varying levels of strengths of the solution, different chemical combinations, trying to find the ingredients that might crack this particularly difficult equation of disease and medicine. But her heart isn’t in it. There are too many other things going on—her nausea, her fear, her grief.
“That still doesn’t answer why you did that to me,” Naomi had snapped at Deb.
“I thought it might interest you,” Deb answered simply. “Scientifically, I mean.”
Naomi sits up from her work bench and stretches her neck. Her eyes are sandy with exhaustion. Despite the nausea that still roils in her stomach, it was interesting, Naomi has to admit, to get a glimpse of Deb’s past and to see the world through her eyes quite literally. And it wasn’t just that she could see what Deb saw. There were other senses, too, the slime of the earthworm in her hands, the way her own heart dropped when her eyes snagged on Deb’s sister’s engagement ring. She didn’t just glimpse a memory—she embodied it completely.
Fascinating. A form of history—no, science!—utterly unstudied. Unknown.
Naomi eyes her experimentation notes and sighs. She’s only been at the lab for a few hours, but her patience and her brain are already tired of this particular puzzle. The skins can rot—they already are. Let them. There’s nothing else she can do. At one point in time, not long ago, this defeatist attitude would have chafed Naomi. Buck up, she might have told herself. The answer is right there. It only requires patience, thoughtfulness. You only need to ask the right question.
But here is what she’s starting to realize: it was never life that brought her to biology or to her lab. It’s death, she realizes now. Death and its ins and outs and figuring out ways to cheat it. Especially after she’d birthed Maisie, soft and fragile as an egg against a world of disease and cancer and genetic mutation.
But in the end, it was an accident that got her. Plain and simple. The cause of death that happens every second of every day the world over: human error. A miscalculation. On Maisie’s part and on her own. Something Naomi cannot study in a book or experiment on in her laboratory.
At least, she thinks to herself, opening a new page of her lab notebook, not until today. Not until Deb cracked open a whole new world of possibility the moment she appeared in Naomi’s bedroom only two nights ago.
The answer is right there. You only need to ask the right question.
The skins glow neon and forgotten on the workbench as Naomi scribbles in her notebook: how does psychic linking work? How to catch a ghost? Is Maisie a ghost? Where might she reside? The cemetery? The lake house? Home? How do I get into contact? How do I connect?
Naomi scribbles and scribbles until her hand cramps and lunch time has come and gone and the day begins to wane into night, when she will have to face Deb again in the dark, but still she writes: questions, experimentation ideas, data points, future research. She fills a notebook page, then three, then ten, page after page of questions and possible solutions and future experiments.
The theories of haunting have officially begun.
Oooooohhhhhh. I have a hope/fear/foreboding of where this is headed! Has Naomi read Cujo? Lol
Wow! It’s officially begun, just now.... this is going to get better?! I’m here for it!