birth of a slime girl
Alex was a young graduate student, working hard on his PhD in biotechnology. His specialties were in studying the unique properties of slime moulds and fungi, in particular; he studied their strange ability to solve complex problems like mazes with emergent intelligence.
One night working late, experiment L1LA started stirring in its agar dish. Startled, Alex investigated that experiment, and noticed the fungal/slime hybrid was moving in some curious patterns In the —LA batch Alex had used CRISPR to splice in some DNA from human microbrains into the slime genome to test if it had increased performance in his battery of intelligence tests.
L1LA, seemed to sense Alex was looking. the experiment started to tap the edge of the dish.
tap _ tap tap - tap - tap _ tap tap
Alex stands stunned. Shave and a haircut?
Over the coming weeks Alex carefully cultivated the L1LA strain, growing it almost to the size of a baseball. He had the experiment play games, learn textures, solve ever more complex mazes. He found himself comitting the Cardinal Sin of science: he started to anthropomorphise L1LA, imagining it with the human qualities of curiosity, playfulness, it even seemed to have a sense of humor; sometimes stealing office supplies and hiding them in his shoes.
what happened next was something no one could have predicted. It formed a mouth, and spoke.
LI La Li La Al ex Li La
Alex couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Before he came to his senses, he reached out to the now basketball sized ooze to touch it. It was… She was… Sentient? alive?
Overwhelmed by curiosity he touched Lila. his hand felt a surge of electricity flow through him. his hand was paralysed, like he had touched a wet powerpoint. Lila plugged into his nervous system on a microscopic level. Mirroring his curiosity, she reached out to touch him.
Before either of them knew what was happening, Alex was completely engulfed in ooze, and very rapidly dissolving into Lila. She started to panic. but it was too late. Alex, her creator, was gone. Now, roughly the same volume of a human, she figured out how to mimmick a humanoid shape and ran.
she spent the next few days scared, and grieving. Her new life was so hopeful and now can it be? “Am I a murderer?” she thought. a life of learning cut short. surely she thought the world would see her as nothing more than a monster. Hopeless!
she briefly thought it was strange she knew so much about the concept of a murder, or scared of punishment. she shrugged it off. She found a hiding place in a sink in a nearby laundromat, and slept.
When she woke up, she felt different. new. She could remember being consumed by a slime. but… the slime was her? this made no sense. “am I alex?” she thought. “no I am Lila. or am I both? I remember being both Alex and Lila. how strange. and… Does this mean I didn’t kill him after all? what … am I?”
what next?