The junior researcher rested his head in his arms, staring ahead at the observation tank in the middle of the otherwise empty room. 

Along the sides of the glass enclosure at even intervals were thick rubber gloves attached to the glass itself, turned inside out when not in use. They allowed the research team to interact with the contents of the tank without risking contamination of either the occupant or themselves. A small double-door airlock was set into both ends of the rectangle, currently latched tight.

The object of the researcher's gaze sat in a lump on the bare glass surface. It had neither eyes nor mouth, nor any visible appendages. 

It was a lump true and simple, a bubblegum pink lump. 

The only movement on the surface level of the substance was an inconstant pearlescent sheen that rippled down its length despite the unchanging light conditions.

Pearl.

It had started as a third generation of the P-strain symbiont family. 

Their primary family, the T-strain, was everything they could have hoped for: docile, quick to adopt whatever genome it was presented with, and only active in the first few minutes after it made contact with a steady source of nutrients. 

Its main drive, as far as they could tell, was to find a home and bunker down: Once it had integrated itself into the host, the T-strain would obediently enter into a permanent dormant stage that made it nearly undetectable to all normal medical scans. They had found that in its dormant state it was easily mistaken for scar tissue.

The P-strain, however, had always been more willful. 

It was picky, to say the least. It would accept or reject hosts seemingly at random. In the early days, at the old lab, it was given rabbits and rats. 

Those hosts it rejected it would drain dry of nutrients and leave as a husk. Those it accepted, well, what remained of them was difficult to classify as "living," even if they weren't truly dead. 

Despite these incidents, the researcher's original team had continued cultivate the family in the hopes that its aggressive tendencies could be bred out. It was valuable among the twenty-six original strains for its limited ability to move and remain active even without incoming nutrients. 

After months of failed attempts, the team had successfully bred a stable third generation of the P-strain family. They had begun testing the new symbiont for its ability to match skin tones, with members of the research team donating trace amounts of skin and blood to feed to the symbiont. 

And then one of his colleagues, a work buddy on a different team, had returned from vacation with a severe sunburn. 

A corner of the researcher's mouth quirked up at the memory, his jaw digging lightly into his forearm. It had taken two full days, but he had managed to harass his friend into submitting a skin sample to see if their team's symbiont could match the color of sunburn. His friend had vowed all sorts of retribution as he had scraped the rough sample collector across his sun-brutalized skin. 

Really, though, the researcher considered, karma had come too swiftly. 

The symbiont had liked the pink. 

It had liked the pink so much that it had altered its own base genetic structure so that its resting color was no longer the grey that was the trademark of the P-strain family, but rather an exaggerated sunburn pink.

Pink, apparently, was the color of sentience, at least as far as the head researcher was concerned.

The symbiont's display of will had drastically shifted the tone and intent of his research team's focus. The head researcher had become entirely preoccupied with testing the limits of this generation of the P-strain symbiont's intelligence, neglecting the other research teams and the symbiont families under their care to pursue her interests. 

She had even named it Pearl after that shiny gleam it seemed to favor.

The researcher sighed, rubbing the back of his head as if he could scrub away those old memories. He could still taste the stale adrenaline from those days, like a sour grape that coated his tongue. Suddenly restless, he stood from his slumped position and went directly to the glass.

That pearlescent wave stilled at his approach, as if the lump were waiting for him. His chest ached.

Quickly, lightly, he tapped out the invitational notes of the very first song he had taught it.

Bum bum ba-dump bum.

Instantly the lump responded, its center dipping twice as the iridescent wave pulsed in time across the pink surface. A little smile picked at the junior researcher's mouth, and his worry lines softened just a bit. "Shave and a Haircut." It was the first beat he had learned, too, when his parents had decided he needed to pick up an instrument and offered him a recorder.

He began to tap the next tune he had been practicing with Pearl, "Hot Crossed Buns," when a measured voice from behind interrupted.

"Pearl always did like you." 

He flinched, unaware that anyone else had entered the room. He stepped back from the glass like a guilty child with his hand in the cookie jar, turning around to see that the head researcher was up and moving only a day and a half after the investor presentation. 

She, for her part, was already looking past him into the tank.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?" she asked, her question a challenge.  

He took another large step away from the enclosure.

She moved forward, taking his place at the glass like he had never been there. She pressed both hands to the cool surface as she stared, sharp eyes catching every movement of the pearlescent ripple that seemed to be Pearl's main form of expression. 

His eyes dropped to her left forearm, exposed where the sleeve of her lab coat had slid down her arm. Although from a distance it was indistinguishable from her flesh, the area that the T2 had replaced was still just slightly too shiny, slightly too smooth, to really pass for her skin. 

In a few weeks it would grow hair and begin to produce and shed layers like skin should. For now, though, that section stood out like part of a polished doll arm.

"I know that what we are doing defies many of the principles that this research team was founded upon," the head researcher began, startling him again. 

As she spoke her breath temporarily fogged the glass, blocking the reflection that was his only view of her face.  

"But you must remember," she continued, almost whispering, "that we all made a commitment on that day they tried to take her away from us."

She looked up, catching his gaze in the reflection as the fog from her breath receded. 

"Pearl needs us," she said. 

He sucked in air, seeing in those eyes the shimmering well into which they had all been thrown that damned day that Pearl had first discovered the color pink. 

"She needs us," the head researcher continued, unblinking, "and I think that with the match rate between subject 1101 and the P-strain family, we're finally going to get a chance to meet her."

A chill went down the junior researcher's spine, whether excitement or fear he didn't know. 

But he remembered now. They had, none of them, been thrown into this mess. 

No - they had all willingly jumped. Just a string of Alices following a pink rabbit.

"We need to make our final preparations for tomorrow. You understand what that means, yes?" she asked, her eyes again falling onto the lump. 

"I do," he said, the words ringing like a vow as he watched her watching Pearl. 

"Go, then," she said. 

He left, letting the solid metal door cut him off from the sight of that petite blond woman and the pink lump. 

He blew into his cupped hands in the over-air conditioned hallway.

He did know what he needed to do, and he was idly thankful that he had forgotten to eat again that day.

He moved left down the hallway with a falsely purposeful stride. Most of the surviving test subjects from earlier P-strain trial clusters were hosted in the med ward.

Or rather, in the Menagerie, as it had somewhat affectionately come to be called, where they were monitored and kept alive for further study.

That could never be the case for 1032. The researcher instead turned his steps to the abandoned O.R. that had become her holding cell, entering the room before he could let himself pause and reconsider. 

The stench hit him first, the smell of putrefaction forcing him to press his tongue against the roof of his mouth to calm the rising nausea.

Then the automatic lights flickered on. 

They had never understood what went wrong that day. 1032 had shown promise, a 37% match rate with the earlier P-strain test runs, one of the highest they had seen at that point. The subject herself hadn't been in bad condition, despite coming in from a four-car pileup. The brain had been undamaged, and the body easily patched up under their care.

The research team had been discussing the next step forward - to try introducing Pearl from the top down rather than at a point of injury as they had been doing. It was something they wanted to pursue with the T-strain as well, to test the possibility of a full merge between the parasite and the host. 

1032 had seemed promising, and he had proposed they use her for the initial run.

It had been a rush decision, made on the high of a breakthrough with the T2 and a gnawing hunger for progress with Pearl. He had been careless, thoughtless, and his mistake had resulted in the monster before him.

Dangling from a corner, 1032's body faced the door with the head pried backwards at a sharp angle and the feet inches from the ground. The eyelids and jaw sagged with deep-seated paralysis, the arms and legs limp weights supported only by the fragile neck.

The team had been observing Pearl's progress through a hybrid MRI and EEG contraption that one of the technicians had cobbled together. With a few electrical sensors attached to the head and a compact band around the headset, the machine was able to monitor electrical activity as well as produce an image of the brain with high spatial resolution. 

The sensors and headset fed into a computer program that transformed the electrical readings into colored clouds that were mapped over the 3D image of the brain produced by the MRI. It was technology that was barely breaking into the outside world of medical research, which their team had managed to create in less than a year with more accurate and effective temporal resolution.

They had isolated a small sample from Pearl and had diluted it with a saline solution, which the had given to the med team to drip through the subject's nasal cavity. 

The researchers, meanwhile, had watched through the scan as Pearl had entered the body and grown, absorbing nutrients and sending tendrils out to poke around and test the brain structure. 

Then something had gone wrong.

Without warning, Pearl's growth had accelerated at an exponential rate. Rather than pushing deeper into the body, it had somehow generated enough force to shatter the bone and shred the skin that had blocked its route outside. 

The researcher was still haunted by the image of those tendrils bursting from the back of the subject's head, the med team scattering like pigeons before a toddler. The tendrils had demonstrated a rudimentary mobility strategy, latching onto the walls, floor, and ceiling, tugging itself and the body into the position it now remained.

It had gone dormant in that position, a starburst of pink tentacles and a captive, dangling body.

Since that day, they had considered and dismissed every logical possibility for Pearl's behavior. 

The fine hairs on the researcher's neck rose. Nothing explained why Pearl had only chosen to anchor itself to the wall when, even with the limited window of possibility it shared with its T- and P-strain relatives, it could have done so much more. 

By this time a cold sweat had broken out over the researcher's skin. He had almost completed his measurements, and was rushing to accumulate the data before he released the bile rising from his gut. The attendant responsible for cleaning this room had threatened to dump it on the researcher's work station if he ever vomited in here again. 

The researcher looked up to check the clock, but instead came face-to-face with 1032's wide, open eyes.

He flinched back for the third time that day, falling over the tray of instruments set up behind him. He froze on the ground, still looking up into those sunken brown eyes. 

Somehow, although Pearl had assumed control of most of the body, the original occupant still had some small ability to move and access sensory input from her eyes. They pinned him now, like a painting that always seemed to be watching as you moved through a room. 

When the researcher had first discovered 1032's response to visual stimuli, he had made sure to remove anything reflective from the room. 

The researcher didn't know how much she understood about her condition. Even now, those eyes searched his.

They begged him for something. Answers, maybe? Help? 

She was beyond help.

That's why he had tried to file a termination request for her.

His gut rebelled and he leaned to the side, releasing mostly stomach acid onto the smooth tile floor. He resigned himself to cleaning it off his desk later as he scrambled to his feet. 

He snatched up his clipboard. 

All that was left were the neural scans, which had been set up so he could access them from outside of the room. He retreated hastily toward the door, unable to bear the weight of that gaze any longer. He paused at the threshold, his heartbeat pulsing in his ears.  

"Forgive me," he whispered. 

He fled with silence at his back.