But Moss did exist there, on the other side. But Moss did see Chen, observed Chen. Knew Chen’s equations helped stabilize and rationalize horrors. That Chen’s equations even rationalized horrors Charlie X perpetrated upon her. In the way mosses experience the world, could “see” or “hear” or “know.”

So, in time, Moss knew that there were Chens who could not cope with what they had been asked to do, when Grayson asked her for conscripts or volunteers who might help their cause.

People who might turn into monsters briefly, but must become human again, no matter what the cost.

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss’s experience, but a kind of demon.

Chen, volunteer, donned the gloves and special clothes to inspect the biotech contained in the wall of globes. The wall was where he spent most of his time. The wall was what, in the end, broke Grayson’s Chen. Broke more than him. And why not? There was no weakness in that. You looked into a face unlike yours that was still too familiar. A face destined for and destroyed by servitude or entertainment at best, and might now serve a lower task still: As protein for some other creature made for servitude or entertainment that had failed the test and waited in the holding ponds.

At one point, indoctrinated, it must have seemed a good job, a noble task. Something beautiful to take such raw material and make it purposeful. But this faded soon enough.

Chen learned to recognize the glint behind the dull sheen of eyes: the understanding and resentment that fate, that chance, had placed their particular form of consciousness in such a context.

Whether housed in the brilliant red-and-white spines of an animal like a lionfish but made to walk on land, lemur eyes staring from the body of a coiled green lizard, or the amorphous quiver of a converted sea anemone strobing green and purple.

How did any Chen endure it past the first days to pass the boundary of a week, a month, one year, five years. To don the gloves, to push hands through the viscous membrane of a particular globe lodged in the wall, to palpitate and push, to knead, and to judge while applying the sensors. Perhaps to find the false richness of sickness, which so often manifested as a brightness or even, initially, an augmented talent, an intelligence beyond the required parameters or a skill that had never been intended for this particular product.