The Vital Abyss: An Expanse Novella (The Expanse) by James S.A. Corey Page A

didn’t want to be what I had previously been any more than a depressive would long for despair.
    And anyway, as Dresden said, we at Protogen weren’t concerned with remaking the destiny of rats and pigeons.
    I left Earth for the first time when I shipped to Phoebe. All I knew of the planets and dwarf planets and moons that made the habitable human system—Mars, Ceres, Pallas, Ganymede—I learned from watching the feeds. The politics of the alliance between Earth and Mars, the dangers posed by the Outer Planets Alliance and other Belter resistance groups. The story of mankind’s torturous reach out into the vast emptiness of the system formed a complex story that felt as removed from my experience as the crime dramas and musical comedies that appeared on the same feeds as the news. Phoebe Station wasn’t even among that number.
    An obscure moon of Saturn, it began as a cometary object that found itself trapped by the gas giant’s gravity as it passed by, presumably from the Kuiper Belt. It stood out from the other moons, four times as far from the planet as the next nearest. Its retrograde orbit and the lampblack darkness of its surface gave it a sense of menace. Phoebe, the ill-omened moon.
    The alien weapon.
    Tucked within the planetesimal’s icy layers, the joint research group—Protogen and the Martian Naval Scientific Service—had found tiny reactive particles the size, roughly, of a midrange virus, but with a design structure and informational depth unlike anything Earth’s biosphere had ever imagined. The protomolecule, we called it, branding it immediately in a territorial move that irritated the Martian scientists. We ignored their protests as irrelevant.
    Our best guess was that it had been sent from some distance we couldn’t guess at a time when a defined cell membrane stood as the heights of terrestrial life. The protomolecule appeared to be a message in a bottle, but one that included its own grammar books and instruction tutorials, ready to teach whatever aboriginal cells it found how to become the things it required. We argued whether something as inert as a spore might be intelligent, at least implicitly, but without coming to a conclusion. The first evidence of a tree of life apart from our own enchanted and confounded us. Me.
    The base itself showed its military origins in its bones. The corridors, hardened to shield us all from the void’s vicious background radiation, were in the colors of the Martian navy. Each hallway bore the identification marks that told installation order, structural specifications, location within the base, and the date on which it needed replacement. The walls sported the same anti-spalling coatings as the ships. The food in the mess tasted of Mars: hot chile peppers, hydroponic fruit, ramen noodles in vacuum-sealed pouches, daily low-g pharmaceuticals. We had no extra space. The rooms I’d had on basic were larger than the cells I lived in there: a rack of bunks four high with a shared head so small that I braced my knees against the opposite wall every time I used the toilet. Of my eighty-five kilograms, I felt a little over three. Exercise took almost a third of the day, the lab a third, eating and sleeping and showering in the tight steel-and-ceramic shower a third.
    The Protogen nanoinformatics team there claimed only four seats: Trinh, Quintana, Le, and myself. Mars had a matching number who joined us. The others would join in later, when we shifted to Thoth Station, though by then the Martian contingent would no longer be in play. The rest of the research team wasn’t more than fifty, all told. With our counterparts from Mars and the naval support staff, Phoebe Base was a few hundred people on a black snowball so far from Earth that the sun would have been no more than the brightest star if we had ever looked for it.
    If I chose a time in my life to return to, a high-water mark, those months on Phoebe would be it. The protomolecule astounded me every day. The