I crawled into my makeshift microscope closet and looked at the light box I’d used for the CO⁠₂ spectral emission.

Astrophage are only 10 microns across. No chance I’d see something so small with the camera (or with my eyes, for that matter). But my little aliens are very hot, and they stay hot. So, if they’re not moving, they will have spent the last six hours or so slowly heating up their surroundings. That was the hope.

It panned out. I immediately saw a circle of light on one of the plastic light filters.

“Oh thank God,” I gasped.

It was very faint but it was there. The spot was about 3 millimeters across and grew fainter and colder away from the center. The little fella had been heating up the plastic for hours. I scanned back and forth across the two plastic squares. I quickly found a second spot.

My experiment worked way better than I expected. They saw what they thought was Venus and beelined for it. When they hit the light filters, they couldn’t go any farther. They probably kept pushing until I turned off the light.

Anyway, if I could just confirm that all three Astrophage were present, I could bag the filters, then spend however long I needed to find and harvest the boys from them with a microscope and pipette.

And there it was. The third Astrophage.

“The gang’s all here!” I said. I reached into my pocket for a sample bag and got ready to very carefully pull the filter off the light box. That’s when I saw the fourth Astrophage.

Just… minding its own business. A fourth cell. It was right in the same general cluster as the first three, on the filters.

“Holy…”

I’d been staring at these guys for a week. There’s no way I would have missed one. There could only be one explanation: One of the Astrophage divided. I’d accidentally made the Astrophage reproduce.

I stared at that fourth spot of light for a full minute, taking in the magnitude of what had just happened. Breeding Astrophage meant we would have an unlimited supply for study. Kill them, poke them, take them apart, do whatever we wanted. This was a game changer.

“Hello, Shemp,” I said.

I spent the next two days obsessively studying this new behavior. I didn’t even go home—I just slept in the lab.

Steve the army guy brought me breakfast. Great guy.

I should have shared all my findings with the rest of the science community, but I wanted to be sure. Peer review may have fallen by the wayside, but at least I could self-review. Better than nothing.

The first thing that bothered me: CO⁠₂ spectral emissions are 4.26 and 18.31 microns. But Astrophage are only 10 microns across, so it couldn’t really interact with light that had a larger wavelength. How could it even see the 18.31 micron band?

I repeated my earlier spectral experiment with just the 18.31 micron filter and got a result I didn’t expect. Strange things happened.