GALE KOSS's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Gale Koss tried to file herself as a specimen, and the tool refused. She stood inside the Sunken Species Archive, a hall of wet stone and rusted metal, its walls carved with fish and coral no one funded anymore. Her jumpsuit hung faded on her frame, patched at the shoulder with woven alien fiber. She held her Archive tool to her own chest and pressed record. The screen asked for a name. She gave hers. Then it asked for a species. There she stopped. The fiber patch was not decoration. Under it, her skin had changed. A month ago it began to harden into pale plates, like the shell of the moss-crawler she once named. She had stopped filing reports for the Archive. Now she wanted one report only: her own entry, logged as a new organism. But the tool held names and records. It could catalog a creature someone brought her. It could not read a body that was still becoming something. She scrolled its fields. Origin world. Collection date. Habitat. Every field wanted a finished thing. None wanted a woman halfway between two forms. She typed "unknown" into the species field. The tool blanked the entry and returned to the start. She tried again. Blank again. Her hands, part shell now, knocked against the casing. Zyleth found her there, still trying. The purple alien crossed the hall in three quick steps, her lizard riding her shoulder. Zyleth had walked the deep levels of Nautilus with Gale, and she trusted Gale's tool with her own people's records. She looked at the blank screen, then at the plates spreading up Gale's neck. "You are filing yourself," Zyleth said. Not a question. "It won't take me," Gale said. "It only records what's done growing." Zyleth took the tool. She did not soften it. "Then do not file a species. File observations. Date. What the skin does. Measure. Log again next week." She tapped a field meant for specimen notes and turned it into a running log. "A record is not one entry. It is many, over time." Gale stared. She had built her whole trade on final names. One creature, one file, closed. She had never logged a thing that kept changing under her hand. She took the tool back. In the notes field she wrote the date. She wrote: skin hardening, shoulder to jaw, twenty days. She measured a plate with her thumb and logged the width. She pressed save. The entry held. It did not blank. Her name sat at the top of an open file now, with one line under it and room for more. She was no longer a blank. She was a record in progress. "It stayed," Gale said. "It stayed," Zyleth agreed. "Now you must keep coming back. The entry is not finished. Neither are you."