There is a page on enclosure failure procedure in the training manual I received during onboarding, and the good people of the Muir Institute were kind enough to use bold, red text to label the important parts. As such, my panicking mind calls the necessary detail to the forefront of my memory immediately.
Institute contracted employees have a responsibility to protect their colleagues, the wider workforce and the general public. Their first priority must always be to limit an enclosure failure to the best of their ability.
No problem. I have already sealed the 'X' testing chamber using the big lever outside the main door. Looking back, I see the way out of the compromised enclosure now doubly closed off with thick plates of reinforced metal.
Institute contracted employees are a community of intelligence. Their second priority must be to inform security personnel of the extent of the failure so that all may make informed decisions on workforce safety.
I've hit the alarm switch beside the corridor seal lever, and I know it worked because of all the klaxons and flashing lights. There's nobody else about at this hour to relay news of the emergency to. But someone upstairs must have received an alert on their console by now. So, no problem there, either.
Institute contracted employees are valuable and respected. They must make all effort possible to keep themselves safe and hidden until help can arrive.
This one is second nature. Just down the main corridor from the testing chamber but before the double doors of the elevator is a changing room. Test Subject X01 doesn't produce any of the radiation that the big suits hanging up in the changing room protect against, so I've never needed them. I dash inside the changing room knowing that someone will be along as soon as they can, once more sealing the door doubly closed with a pull of the weighty lever beside the entrance. Red light from the corridor outside spills into the dark changing room through the door's thick window panel, but the sound of the alarm is stiffly muted by the layers of titanium.
And that's all that the training manual says to do if something gets out of its enclosure. I can't tell whether these scant three steps are all that was written because failure never happens, or because Muir have a lot of faith in their security team's ability to re-contain anything that breaks its chains. The former, I think. This changing room with its tall lockers, long steel benches and curtained-off shower units has the same smell as much of the rest of this facility. A smell of fresh plastic and clinical cleaning product. A
new
smell. There hasn't been time for Muir to test its enclosure failure response process, I believe based on the scent. This one happening right here is the first of its kind. And that is deeply unsettling.
I joined the Muir Institute on one of their short-term 'Type-Five Tertiary Support contracts' as a bit of a rebellion against my ongoing, Sisyphean search for a Higher Education research post. Something that will keep my linguistics master's modern and sharp, and that will pay my way into a proper postgraduate programme down the line. But I started that journey years ago. Odd jobs here and there, mostly tutoring for younger students in the area, has allowed me to hold onto my dingy flat in Glasgow's West End, just barely. But nobody was interested in hiring someone of my unremarkable background for a long-term gig, especially not after my Uni days left me far behind. My portfolio is nothing special, nothing to brag about. Nothing to make me stand out. Another middling Scottish academic with a 2:1 in a subject that AI seems hellbent on excising from modern study.
The Muir posting was sketchy to say the least. Their writing on the recruitment site was perfectly professional, and the quoted money was very good. But their recruitment liaison made it crystal clear that I would need to sign a mountain of legal paperwork just to apply, and I would never be able to talk of what I had seen here even after I left. Muir could not be used as a reference for future employment, not even as a line on my CV. As far as the rest of the world would know, I will have spent April 2024 to March 2025 doing sweet sod all. Not great for an academic looking to build a professional reputation. But none of the big colleges were biting, and I desperately needed that money. I decided to throw caution to the wind and signed myself up. A helicopter came to pick me up later that month from the roof of the local hospital. Men in suits asked me to cover my head with a black bag so that I wouldn't see where we ended up.
And a few days after I arrived at the Institute, I met her.
A dull thud brings me back into the moment, and my eyes dart towards the sealed changing room door. It has grown darker in here because something is blocking the little window of thick glass from the outside. My heart leaps up into my chest, and I skitter backwards in a panic and tumble off the bench I had been sitting on. My glasses fall askew on my nose and render the world with an unsettling blur at the edges. I readjust them in the hope that I'd misidentified the shape on the far side of the door. But I haven't.
X01 is a tall humanoid creature with long, skinny limbs and a long, fin-lined tail. Her rubbery, alabaster skin and spined, webbed ears give her the appearance of an axolotl, but she hasn't always looked that way. When I first met her in April of this year, X01 had been a hefty white blob with big, curious blue eyes and stumpy little limbs. A bit like a three-foot-long tadpole with arms, or maybe a very large sperm. But over the months of my interaction with her, she has changed. Her limbs have stretched and she has arched out her spine, shaped her body into a feminine, athletic form. She's taller than me now, I can tell when she drifts down to the base of the tank and we compare heights. Nipple-less breasts and rounded hips appeared on her skinny frame almost overnight. A garden of snakey tendrils emerged from the crown of her head like fat strands of long hair, bobbing and floating around her shoulders in the still water of her tank. Her mouth is now wide enough to be uncanny. Her teeth are like sharp pearls and her tongue is blue to match her pretty irises. And her fingers, three on each hand plus a strange, three-knuckled thumb, are dextrous and lithe.
X01 slaps her hand onto the glass of the door's window a second time. The white flesh of her palm squashes flat on the square portal and demonstrates the alien lack of wrinkles in her opal skin. And her hand is joined by the wide, split grin of her face. Her brilliant eyes sparkle blue like the waters of a tidepool, even under the ruby lighting of the alarm. She fixes her eyes on me and smiles. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I slowly pick myself up and approach.
I am safe in here, I know that to be true. But this still feels like a strange reversal of our usual interactions. X01 is normally the one consigned to the small space behind the glass, and I the one left free to measure her responses in the testing chamber's expansive laboratory. This situation feels less as though I have sealed myself securely away from her, and more that she has trapped me into a corner. And her smile is excited, not at all phased by the locked door between us. Once I am close, X01 leans back from the door and brings her long-fingered hands up to the glass so that I can see them.
"
Door open.
"
I gulp, even as a familiar spark of pride jolts in my chest. I had begun teaching X01 British Sign Language when I saw that she was growing confident with the use of her hands, and after many fruitless attempts to get her to vocalise in English. Before my tenure as Communications Research Specialist for the X Programme, Muir's staff had been getting by with only nods and shakes of the head. I initially had X01 swim to different quadrants of her enclosure to answer my very basic questions. But once she had a foundational medium of sign language to work with, our communication really took off.
Still, I can't feel all that proud of her with cold sweat running in thick rivers down the back of my shirt. I shake my head to answer her request.
In response, X01 splays out her right hand and twists it back and forth at the wrist. This isn't BSL, but instead a sign of her own creation. It just means, '
I don't understand
.'
I pull back the sleeves of my cardigan and lift my hands so that she can see them through the glass. "
X tank out how?
" I ask.
She grins a smile of pearlescent teeth at me as she replies, "
Swim.
