All these things he studied and mastered, yet he was unsettled in mind because he also knew that of all the inhabitants of the Nursery who were on the Verge, he alone was unable to settle on a career, to choose a life work.

Around him, his childhood companions made their choices and were content as the time grew near. This one to be a chemist, that one a janitorial engineer, the one on the cradle across from Ryo to become a public Servitor, another opting for food-processing management.

Only he could not decide, would not decide, did not want to decide. He wanted only to learn more, to study more.

Then there was no more time for study. There was only time for a sudden upwelling of fear. His body had been changing for months, subtle tremors and quivers jostling him internally. He’d felt his insides shift, felt skin and self tingling with a peculiar tension. An urge was upon him, a powerful desire to turn inward and explode outward.

The Nurses tried to prepare him for it as best they could, soothing, explaining, showing him again the chips he’d studied over and over. Yet the sight of it recorded on screen was clinical and distant, hard to relate to what was occurring inside his own body. All the chips, all the information in the world could not prepare one for the reality.

Worse were the rumors that passed from Nurserymate to Nurserymate in the dark, during sleeping time, when the adults were not listening. Horrible stories of gross deformities, of monstrosities put out of their misery before they had a chance to see themselves in a mirror, which others said were allowed to survive for a life of miserable study as scientific subjects, never to be permitted out in society.

The rumors grew and multiplied as fast as the changes in his own body. The Nurses and special doctors came and went and monitored him intensively. Around it all, encapsulating all the mystery and terror and wonder and hope, was a single word.

Metamorphosis.

The process was something you could not avoid, like death. The genes insisted and the body obeyed. The larva could not delay it.

He had studied it repeatedly with a fervor he had never applied to anything else. He watched the recordings, marveled at the transformation. What if the cocoon was wrongly spun? What if he matured too soon and burst from the cocoon only half formed or, worse yet, waited too long and smothered?

The Nurses were reassuring. Yes, all those terrible things had happened once upon a time, but now trained doctors and metamorphic engineers stood by at all times. Modern medicine would compensate for any mistake the body might make.

The day came and he hadn’t slept for four days before it. His body felt nervous and ready to burst. Incomprehensible feelings possessed him. He and the others who were ready were taken from the Nursery. Befuddled younger larvae watched them go, some filling their wake with cries of farewell.