Iris absently flicked the screen on her tablet, paging through the charts the computer had made for her detailing the brain waves that had been coming from her containers of cogicyte mixture. She'd produced the substance by mixing the slime -- cogicyte suspension -- produced by many of the life forms on 2Big C with a culture filled with human nerve cells.
There was something unsettling yet incredible about what she had achieved here in her laboratory. In effect she had created primitive brains inside test tubes. But what were the implications of this? Were these new minds conscious? Would she be committing murder when she disposed of the samples?
She would need to make a point of asking next time she met with the aliens in the cave system. She felt a tingle between her legs at the thought of it.
One thing Iris had yet to be able to explain was how exactly the creatures were able to communicate with her through her skin -- particularly the linings of her body cavities such as her vaginal canal and mouth. She'd experienced this the first time when she'd been exploring the caverns for the third time and encountered a chamber with a pool of the alien goo that had turned out to be cogicyte suspension.
Technically the suspension was a form of blood -- it was, after all, a liquid tissue that carried nutrients and cells between individual creatures in the caverns -- but Iris had simply called it slime. And so had Stephanie, recently.
In many ways it was different from blood. Most animal life on this planet possessed tentacles of one sort or another that oozed it from their membranous skin. It also seeped from the walls of the larger "atria" deeper inside the caverns, pooling to form rivers and ponds that were then sucked and pumped via fleshy contractions throughout the planet's underground, like blood through a heart. It was a remarkable substance. Iris had seen many of the walking spherical aliens she'd dubbed neuromonsters carried along by the currents of subterranean slime, sucked into small holes in the cave walls or pumped out from other orifices.
Her research had come to consume most of her life now that she lived in exile. At first she'd kept it private out of modesty. The sex hadn't been the only reason for this. Ethical questions loomed over most of what she'd done. Her Earthling body was filled with and covered in all sorts of defensive acidic compounds. The night after her first encounter in the caverns, she'd felt a profound anxiety and shame as she'd thought of all the ways the foreign life in her vagina, with its enzymes and acids, might have been reacting with the delicate ecosystem there.
When she'd returned the next night to check on things she'd half expected to find some kind of damage or blistering where she'd been with the creatures. She'd found nothing but more slime. She'd stood in thought a long while, debating whether it was a good idea to double check what kind of interactions the creatures might have with human biology. After all, she'd reasoned, she'd lost some of her readings in the fall, when she'd accidentally switched off a critical piece of equipment.