She examined each one thoughtfully, each of the specimens, all 3019 of them. She was out of time, and had to return home. She had spent all of her grant money and had no other income to fund her work. The foundation that had awarded her the grant had taken a chance with her, given that she had just graduated and had no track record. They would be expecting a report, a report that did not exist. She felt discouraged, with so little to show for six months of research. The grant came with specific questions that were to be answered. Answers she didn’t have. Failing to fulfil the grant requirements could end her career before it had even started.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have any data. She had carefully measured more than a hundred different parameters on each of the 3019 specimens. She could tell you their weight, color, mass, density, volume, temperatures. She had studied their biology, including internal organs, their respiratory systems, and their peculiar cellular structure (if you could call them cells as they were unlike any cells she had ever seen.) She sequenced their DNA looking for unusual base pairs. The covalent bonds linking the sugar groups were 6.3 percent stronger than she had seen in other species, but this was just marginally outside of the normal range and didn’t explain their unique existence. Nothing did.
She took scrupulous notes on the behavior, including what they ate, when they slept, how they responded to various stimuli, and how they mated. The mating observations were particularly difficult. They apparently don’t like to mate in captivity.
She looked over her collection again. Each of the 3019 specimens was carefully preserved and pinned to a board. Each was assigned a unique ID that referenced her data notes on that specimen.
She decided to run the numbers one last time. She adjusted the program to look for correlations between lipid composition and mating behavior. She knew what she would find before she even hit the enter key. “No Correlations Found.” The same answer she had seen hundreds of times before.
She couldn’t put off the return trip any longer. She double checked the fuel requirements. The extra weight of the 3019 specimens, each an average of 79.4 kilograms, would require a lot more fuel for the return trip. But she had planned for this. She hit the engage button, and watched the planet they call Earth quickly fade into the distance. Good riddance, she thought.
Spiritual questions:
- What makes humans, humans?
- What makes a person, a person?
- What makes you, you?
June 10, 2021 - This was written with the Roundhouse Writing Group in Santa Cruz, Guatemala, remotely from Guanajuato, Mexico. The writing prompt for the session was: She examined each one thoughtfully.
This is one of my Parables for the Spiritual but not Religious Series.
The photograph is by jmp88 and made available through Flickr and Creative Commons, some rights may be reserved.
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