I’m on a suicide mission. John, Paul, George, and Ringo get to go home, but my long and winding road ends here. I must have known all this when I volunteered. But to my amnesia-riddled brain this is new information. I’m going to die out here. And I’m going to die alone.

I glared at the Astrophage. “Why the heck do you go to Venus?”

The microscope view was displayed on the big wall-mounted monitor. Each of the three little cells were a foot across at this magnification. I watched for any clues to their motivations, but Larry, Curly, and Moe offered no answer.

I’d named them, of course. It’s a teacher thing.

“What’s so special about Venus? And how do you even find it?” I crossed my arms. If Astrophage understood body language, they’d know I wasn’t messing around. “It takes a room full of really smart people at NASA to work out how to get to Venus. And you do it as a single-celled organism with no brain.”

It had been two days since Stratt left me alone with the lab. The army guys were still at the doors. One was named Steve. Friendly guy. The other never spoke to me.

I ran my hands through my greasy hair (I’d neglected to shower that morning). At least I didn’t have to wear the hazmat suit anymore. Scientists in Nairobi had taken a chance with one of their Astrophage and exposed it to Earth atmosphere to see what happened. It was unaffected. So, thanks to them, labs all over the world could breathe a sigh of relief and stop working in argon-filled rooms.

I glanced at the pile of papers on a desk. The scientific community had moved into overdrive in a very unscientific way. Gone were the days of careful peer review and published articles. Astrophage research was a free-for-all where researchers posted their findings immediately and without proof. It led to misunderstandings and mistakes, but we just didn’t have time to do things the right way.

Stratt kept me in the loop on most stuff. Not everything, I was sure. Who knows what other weird things she was up to. She seemed to have authority everywhere.

A Belgian research team was able to prove that Astrophage reacts to magnetic fields, but only sometimes. Other times, it seems to ignore magnetic fields entirely, no matter how powerful. Still, the Belgians were able to (very inconsistently) steer Astrophage around by putting it in a magnetic field and changing the field’s orientation. Was that useful? No idea. At this point the world was just collecting data.

A researcher in Paraguay showed that ants will get disoriented when they’re within a few centimeters of Astrophage. Was that useful? Okay, that one probably wasn’t useful. But it was interesting.

Most notably, a group in Perth sacrificed one of their Astrophage and did a detailed analysis on all the organelles inside. They found DNA and mitochondria. In any other situation, this would have been the most important discovery of the century. Alien life—indisputably alien—had DNA and mitochondria!