“There was an old experiment where scientists constructed large petri dishes with varying concentration bands of antibiotics to see how well bacteria would grow. It started with a band with no antibiotics, then a little in the next band, just enough so that the bacteria wouldn’t survive. Then ten times as much in the next. A hundred times. A thousand times, and so on.

“The bacteria spread until it reached the first band and then stopped until a mutant developed. That mutant then went on to compete with other mutants to the next boundary. They paused again until they developed new mutations that allow them to progress to the next band of concentration. This series of mutations only took eleven days to mutate to survive in a thousand-times concentration of antibiotics.”

“Accumulating successive mutations to evolve extreme resistance in a short period of time.” Bek allowed a thin smile to cross his lips. “Genetic manipulation via natural selection. Before we learn how to directly tinker with genes.”

“Natural adaptation,” Paki corrected. “Your assignment is to do the same thing. Each of you have been assigned an environmental condition: high acidity, high temperature, methane, sulfur, radiation, ammonia as liquid solvent. You are to create a terrestrial model of that environment and adapt your cyanobacteria strain to survive in your assigned condition.”

The students scattered with excitement, heading to various labs throughout the Cypher to begin construction of their respective environmental chambers. The composer units would be busy later today. Paki watched them depart, a sheepdog watching his flock be penned for the night before wandering over to her.

“Quite a stiff assignment.” She clasped his wrist, then her own in salute.

“Good. Modifying cyanobacteria to respirate sulfur for oxygen could go a long way in our terraforming efforts. Besides, if these students aren’t challenged, they get bored. When they get bored, they find ways to amuse themselves. The last time they amused themselves, they used Maya to find a way to gain access to our protein synthesizers. You remember what we were eating for a week?”

“I’ve tried to forget.” Stacia shuddered at the memory. She’d always joked that she could eat any meat if it had been grilled or baked in a good enough sauce. But chewing the flesh of fish with wings or beef striated such that it made a noise similar to weeping when cut into almost turned her vegetarian.

“Boredom has its hazards. Besides, they learn by doing, and we can use all the bright minds and capable hands at our disposal. May I brief you?” Paki held his hands behind his back, imitating a HOVA at parade rest. The more formal he acted, the more it meant he had an agenda he pursued.

With a slight uptick of her chin, Stacia directed him to her briefing room. Inside, she sat at the large circular table carved of wood but smoothed to a marble sheen, a smaller version of the Ijo table.