"Sorry to wake you, sir, but you're going to want to see this."
According to the time on Rylan's tablet, it was 2:52 AM. It had been roughly a week since his closure with Mei, of whom he hadn't seen or heard from since, not that he would've wanted to. His eyes turned up toward the window leading into Nixie's tank, only to find that not only were the lights on, but the specimen was nowhere to be found. An oddity to be sure, as she would spend the entire night, with some rare exceptions, at the little platform installed in the bottom of his window, tank-side of course, to allow her to effortlessly see inside.
Unfortunately, as he climbed out of bed, he made his way to the window to look for her. He didn't see anything out of the ordinary at first, other than Nixie being gone, and he looked back at the video call on his tablet. It was the night watchman that they had come by to check on Nixie hourly overnight, to ensure nothing strange had happened. For several months, it was no doubt a boring job, but today, clearly, something had changed enough for him to alert whoever needed to be alerted. That included Rylan, and no doubt, Evelyn as well.
He quickly got into his uniform and sealed it up, already anticipating having to do a dive, and he quickly jogged the short way down the hall to the entrance to the research area. He didn't see anyone there upon entry, and so he quickly climbed the stairs to find the night watchman. He was an older gentleman, probably in his 50's, with graying hair and a mustache, wearing the same exact uniform as he was. Individuality, except for rare circumstances, weren't exactly encouraged at CMI. The man's uniform had a name tag that read C. Maurice.
"Okay, can you tell me what you saw?" Rylan asked as he picked up his rebreather from a small vault of personal items set aside for diving. It was something that he'd used on multiple occasions while running experiments with Nixie that required them to both be underwater for long periods of time. He also grabbed a flashlight, and a knife, just in case. He left it in its sheath for now, but strapped it to his right leg. It was mostly used to trim the seaweed in Nixie's tank, but was certainly sharp enough for other tasks.
"Well, I thought it was a little strange that when I arrived, she wasn't at your window like always. Not the first time, but usually as soon as I arrived, she'd go back. I noticed that she didn't do it this time. I waited and waited, about five or ten minutes? But then I checked the monitors. I didn't notice her on any of them, but there was somethin' strange on the edge of monitor 5. It's about the only place that the cameras don't completely reach, like she knew there was a blindspot there," the man explained, wringing his hands nervously. "I'm not in trouble, am I?"
Rylan gave the night watchman an odd look, but then shook his head. "What? No. You're fine. You did your job. Head downstairs and stand watch for anyone else coming in. The rest of the team will probably be here in a minute or two, I want you to tell them what you told me."
"Y-yes, sir," the night watchman nodded, jogging past him to head downstairs.
For a moment, Rylan glanced back to watch him disappear, then looked back to the water. He finished his ensemble with some goggles, since the salt water of the tank had a tendency to irritate his eyes and make it difficult to see, and then dove in. Normally, the moment he hit the water, Nixie was already at his side, or playfully headbutting him. When this didn't happen, he looked for any sign of her bioluminescence, and found none. He refreshed himself on where the cameras were and what monitors they corresponded with as he swam downward.
He hadn't noticed it until now, but many of the seaweed-like flora had been replanted to the area about around where the blind spot was for added coverage. The flora itself, the sort that grew up to about fifteen or twenty feet at full growth, was purposely selected to give Nixie a place to have some privacy if she wanted it. At some point during the nights, while everyone was asleep and without anyone noticing, she'd dug up and replanted them to the new area one by one. There was no movement of the water, so they only lightly swayed in response to any movement, and he spotted the anomaly that was mentioned when he swam closer. He couldn't see it well with all the flora in the way, so he carefully approached it, grabbing the seaweed and pushing it away to get a better look at it.
It seemed like an egg, or a cocoon of some sort, or even some strange mix of both. It was glossy in a biological sort of way, and he just had nothing to really compare it to, except perhaps a pearl. He ran bare hands along it to feel it, and it was perfectly smooth. Any attempt to apply pressure to it, however, caused him to slip off of it as if it were slick. There was no mucus, as far as he could tell, just perfectly smooth in an alien way that he just couldn't put his finger on, literally and figuratively. He looked around the edges of it, noting that wide, thin, fibrous extensions were attached to the metal wall of the tank in several places, no doubt to keep the cocoon firmly in place.
He'd decided to refer to it as a cocoon for now because it was clear that Nixie was inside of it, seeing as there was no sign of her outside of it, and there was nowhere else for her to go. For the sake of experiment, he shone the flashlight he had on it, but wasn't able to see anything inside of it, no silhouette or anything. Just a pure white cocoon with biological anchors. As a final attempt, he dared using the knife on the anchors, but no matter how he attempted to cut them - stabbing, slashing, cutting - nothing would last for long. If not for the fact that this could mean bad news, he'd have been fascinated at the fact that it healed up quicker than he could do any meaningful damage to it.
Not wanting to exhaust himself, he placed the knife back into his sheath, took a few pictures with his tablet (mercifully waterproof), and swam all the way back up to the surface of the tank. As he grabbed the ladder leading up, he spotted Evelyn, as well as the usual small army of her HR drones, all looking exhausted and annoyed to be there. His research team was there as well, looking understandably nervous as all hell.
"Welcome back. Can you tell us what's going on?" Evelyn asked with no small amount of impatience in her voice. He couldn't remember hearing that from her before, and to her benefit, he chalked it up to her having been awoken as well for an 'emergency'.
Rylan removed his rebreather and goggles, setting them into his own little personal stash of gear. "Nixie has apparently cocooned herself."
Evelyn stared at him incredulously. "Cocooned?"
"Yes. She's surrounded herself in some sort of slippery, hard biological substance and anchored herself to the wall at the very bottom. I tried cutting into it, but my knife simply wasn't strong enough for it. Oh, and over the past several weeks, she'd managed to move a lot of her seaweed closer to the blind spot from our cameras she'd discovered. I figure she managed to cocoon herself completely in less than the five hours I'd been asleep and the team gone." He reached a hand up to try to force some of the salt water out of his hair.
"I see. Any hypotheses?" She asked, lifting her own tablet to tap some notes into it, rapid fire.
"She can't evolve under constant supervision," Rylan replied after a moment's hesitation. "She hasn't made many changes while she's been here. I take a picture of her from all sides, every day, and I haven't seen any notable changes beyond some light, general growth. Nothing crazy like what she was able to accomplish back at the research platform. So I guess the only way she could evolve the way she wanted was to cocoon herself."
She sighed heavily. "All right. Any guesses on what might come out of there?"
"I have a few," he admitted. "But it's probably not a good idea to say them here."
"Fine. It's clear that this has now become a waiting game. I want 24/7 supervision on Nixie's 'cocoon' and I want to be notified the second that thing so much as twitches. I also want a report from someone as to how her moving her tank's seaweed was missed despite cleanings and constant supervision. Understood?" Evelyn spoke directly to Rylan, but he could tell that it also extended to his research team. "Mr. Larsen, I want some written hypotheses on my desk for the CEO within three hours of waking up. Thank you." She wheeled around without so much as a smile or a glance, and she quickly left the room.
Rylan stared quietly after her, then descended to where most of his team was. "Good morning, everyone. If you wanted breakfast, a shower, or both, you're welcome to do so, but I want at least half the team here at all times. Decide amongst yourselves who's going to stay and go, and then switch off. It's going to be a long day." With that, he excused himself back to his room to shower the salt off of himself and get dressed in a fresh uniform. He had time to go back to sleep if he wanted, but he knew that probably wouldn't happen even if he tried.
So instead, he wrote up the hypotheses on what might come out of the cocoon when the time came, how long he predicted it could remain, and even though he didn't need to, the sort of threat level they could expect from Nixie when she did come out of there. Then, he sent it to Evelyn and his team, before getting up to tend to his duties early. Not that there was much to do, when the specimen was predisposed and showing no signs of leaving.
A week went by, and eventually, his team began to relax some. Gone was the anxious anticipation of Nixie leaving her cocoon, replaced instead with some manner of impatience. Understandable, he thought, because there just wasn't much to do. The best they'd come up with was to attach anything they could think of to the cocoon to monitor biosigns. They'd managed to find a way to detect her heartbeat, but not much else bore fruit. Except for a time when they'd made some modifications to an EEG and attached it where they thought Nixie's head might be. It lasted about five minutes before shorting out, and they decided that it wasn't worth the trouble for a potential second attempt.
By the end of the second week, Rylan received a brief message: "Come up to my room." From Evelyn, of course. He'd been up there on two separate occasions, so he was at least somewhat familiar with her living quarters. It was more like an actual apartment than a room, with genuine walls built over the stone and fake windows broadcasting scenes from various cameras attached to floating cities. When Rylan stepped in, he noted the city in question today was Sea Fortress, but situated above the clouds, with an enormous hurricane roaring far beneath it. Probably chosen for the lack of water. It was a nice change of pace.
Situated on the couch in the middle of the room, purposely facing the door, was Evelyn. Rylan stepped inside, and the door shut slowly behind him. "Hey. Everything okay?"
She looked up at him, nodding. "Just stressed. All of this stuff with Nixie has a lot of people on edge, because they just don't know what to expect. We have response teams on call pretty much every hour of every day, and that's not only very expensive, but also not great for morale." She motioned for him to sit in the chair across from her, and he did, relaxing for the first time in a while. At the very least, he felt like he could relax with Evelyn when they were in private. "Do you want anything to drink?"
"You wouldn't happen to have some tea, would you?" He asked, and before she could even respond, a humanoid robot appeared from her bedroom, disappeared into the kitchen, and began to make him tea. He watched the entire time, slightly unnerved. "I'll never get used to that."
