I turn my attention to the even less likely culprits: the breeder farms.

If Taumoeba can’t escape Eridian steel, they definitely can’t get through xenonite. One centimeter of that stuff can effortlessly hold in Rocky’s 29 atmospheres of pressure! It’s harder than diamond and also somehow not brittle.

But I need to be thorough. I repeat the Astrophage slide test with all ten of the breeder farm bins. There’s no point in doing them one at a time. I pipeline the whole process. Now all ten of the farms are in sealed bins full of normal air and have an Astrophage slide inside.

It’s been a long day. It’s a good time to take a break and sleep. I’ll leave them overnight to see what happens. I bring bedding up from the dormitory to the lab. If my Taumoeba-detector alarm goes off, I want to be darn sure it wakes me up. I’m too pooped to work up a louder solution. So I’ll just bring my ears closer to the lab table and call it a night.

I drift off to sleep. It feels wrong to sleep without someone watching.

I wake up about six hours later. “Coffee.”

But the nanny-arms are downstairs in the dormitory. So of course I get no response.

“Oh, right…” I sit up and stretch.

I get up and shuffle over to the quarantine zone. Let’s see how those Taumoeba farm tests are doing.

I check the first farm’s Astrophage slide. It’s completely clear. So I move on to the next—

Wait. It’s clear?

“Uh…”

I’m still not 100 percent awake. I wipe my eyes and take another look.

It’s still clear.

Taumoeba got to the slide. It got out of the breeder farm!

I spin to the Taumoeba alarm on the lab table. It’s not beeping, but I run over to get a visual. The Astrophage slide in it is still black.

I take a deep breath and let it out.

“Okay…” I say.

I return to the quarantine zone and check the other farms. Every single one of them has a clear slide. The farms are leaking. All of them are leaking. The mini-farms are fine. They’re sitting on the lab table right next to the Taumoeba alarm.

I rub the back of my neck.

I’ve found the problem, but I don’t understand it. Taumoeba are getting out of the farms. But how? If there was a crack in the xenonite, the overpressure of nitrogen would’ve gotten inside and killed everything. All ten farms have happy, healthy Taumoeba populations. So what gives?

I climb down to the dormitory and have breakfast. I stare at the xenonite wall that once housed Rocky’s workshop. The wall is still there, but with a hole cut in it where I’d requested. I’m using the area mainly for storage.

I chew on a breakfast burrito, trying to ignore the fact that I’m one meal closer to coma slurry. I stare at the hole. I imagine I’m a Taumoeba. I’m millions of times larger than a nitrogen atom. But I can get through a hole the nitrogen atom can’t. How? And where did the hole come from?