Giulia stood outside the door leading into her lab and yet she hesitated. She used hated leaving it, now she dreaded going in. What would she find in there today? With a deep breath, she readied herself to go in.

Where once she had almost a dozen tanks holding various specimens in the center of the room, there now stood just one, incredibly large tank. The tank sat flush against the floor and extended upwards, nearly touching the ceiling. There was just enough of a gap between the tank and the ceiling that Giulia could access the specimen within. Even still, the gap was sealed with a heavy grate and locked. Inside the tank, obscured by the dark green fluids that served as both a means of suspending the specimen as well as providing nutrients to it, was the specimen. Giulia used to turn the lights on full so that she could better see the specimen’s silhouette. These days, she tended to leave the lights down low.

This day was no different. As Giulia made her way into her lab she intended to leave the lights down low and interact with the specimen as little as possible. However, as she opened the door, light flooded out and a familiar voice drifted out.

“…should be going soon,” Marisol was saying, “but I’ll be back tonight.”

Giulia stood still in the doorway, unable to fully comprehend what she was seeing. Marisol was climbing down from the ladder that Giulia used to access the tank. What was more, Marisol was wearing a wet suit and had a scuba tank on her back. As Giulia watched, Marisol turned and then froze as their eyes locked.

“Giulia!” Marisol gasped. “I thought you…um…good morning.”

Marisol picked up a towel from beside the tank and began to dry off, avoiding Giulia’s eyes.

“What are you doing?” Giulia asked, looking from Marisol to the tank and then back to Marisol.

“Oh, uh, I just wanted to check on your progress.”

“By climbing into the tank with the specimen?”

“Well, he’s getting too large to lift out anymore,” Marisol said casually. “And you’ve been so busy keeping up with all of his new developments that I thought this would be a better way for me to keep up with everything going on.”

“You were talking to it,” Giulia stated flatly. She wasn’t sure what Marisol was doing, but she didn’t believe she was just checking on her progress.

Marisol didn’t say anything to that and settled on a shrug. She finished drying off and began making her way to the door.

“I’ll see you this evening?” Giulia asked.

“Hmm? What?” Marisol looked at her, confusion and concern on her face.

“You said you’d be back tonight,” Giulia said. “Though you were obviously talking to the specimen when you said that so maybe you’re intending to come back after I’m gone.”

Marisol pursed her lips and eyed Giulia for a moment before finally speaking.

“You’re doing good work,” she said, and then added, “keep it up.”

Marisol left Giulia alone in the lab. Giulia made her way uncertainly over to the tank and looked at the vague shape she could make out through the murky liquid. It had most of its spine developed now as well as its upper arms. She expected the ribs and pelvis to begin growing soon.

“She called you ‘him’,” Giulia said.

It worried her how much Marisol was humanizing the specimen. Ever since the stem cell graft had begun to regenerate the specimen’s missing parts, Marisol had started to become more and more attached to it and this morning was just the most recent and worrying change she’d seen.

“How long has she been coming to see you?” Giulia asked aloud while watching the specimen.

Every day the specimen was becoming more and more active. With its growing arms it was beginning to gain the ability to control its movements more in the tank. There had been a few times Giulia caught it looking at her, its face pressed up against the glass of the tank but it usually turned away whenever she returned its gaze.

At the moment the specimen wasn’t overly active and it was keeping away from the tank walls for which Giulia was grateful.

She busied herself with going over the various vital readings her instruments gathered from the specimen. Before too much longer she’d need to remove the mechanical graft since the specimen was beginning to grow its own heart, lungs, and digestive system. Removing the mechanical graft all at once, however, would kill the specimen. She needed to develop intermediate grafts that could share the work with the specimen as it developed its own capabilities. That was what most of her days were focused on now. The mechanical grafts weren’t what she had wanted to work on when she first came to work for Marisol but they were what had gotten her hired. She’d hoped to transition more into organic grafts, and the stem cell graft had been among her first attempts to convince Marisol of their value. It had worked, sort of. Now Marisol wanted to see how far the stem cell graft would carry the specimen towards full regeneration and that meant Giulia had to stop all her other research into organics in order to maintain this one specimen.

“I don’t even know if you’re worth the trouble,” Giulia grumbled while she looked over her most recent designs for the next iteration of mechanical grafts. “I can only imagine what the Ethics Review Board would say if they knew about you. Probably shut us down.”

THUMP

Giulia jumped at the sound and turned to look at the tank. The specimen was pressed up against the glass, the nubs of its arms moving like fins to keep it in place as it looked out at her. It mouthed wordlessly at her as it sometimes did and then let itself drift back into the depths of the tank.

She sometimes wondered how much it could hear. She didn’t like to think about whether or not it could understand her. With Marisol apparently coming to visit the specimen and…swim with it…there was a very real possibility that it could be learning to understand. It was, in many ways, much like a developing child, learning to understand its surroundings.

“Pretty soon Marisol’s going to want me to let you out of there,” Giulia sighed. “What then? She’s not likely going to be alright having you sedated, or strapped down. We could build a room for you, but she might see that as a prison.”

She ran her fingers through her hair and shut her eyes. What was Marisol’s aim in all of this? They knew the graft worked, knew it held incredible potential, and yet she insisted on continuing this one experiment. And now she was swimming with it, and talking to it. What would they do once it was fully grown?

Whatever was going on between Marisol and the specimen, it wasn’t good. Giulia was certain of that. She needed a way to end this experiment without getting fired. Perhaps she could sabotage the specimen some how, maybe slow down her development of the mechanical grafts and see if the newly developing organs would compete too strongly with the mechanical graft and overwhelm the specimen. Maybe she could just break or disconnect a couple of the life support lines running into the tank. She could make it look like natural wear and tear from the specimen moving around.

Giulia looked up from her workstation to where the bundle of tubes and cables ran up and into the tank. Disconnecting any of those would kill the specimen. She was out of her chair and her hands were on the bundle before she knew what she was doing. There were so many little tubes and wires she could break. She could pinch it or give it a small snip with her scissors, and that would be the end of it. She could claim ignorance when Marisol asked what had happened. Spend a day examining the specimen, perform an autopsy, and eventually ‘find’ the broken wire or tube. She could blame it on the additional movement of the specimen, wearing down the material against some sharp edge or something.

Giulia looked over to the tank. The specimen was looking at her again, its expression almost one of curiosity and her hand trembled as she wavered.

Would it be murder? It was certainly alive and gaining awareness, but could it really be considered human?

Giulia stood there a long time looking at the specimen and for the first time it didn’t look away from her.