She Walks in Shadows(57)
“Professor Jacobsen,” the woman introduces herself. “I really enjoyed your speech. I just wanted to let you know that you should not care about Max. SAXS is a complete waste of time.”
Before Anna has a chance to reply, Max the SAXS guy materializes from thin air. His affect is chilly and he neither introduces himself nor waits for Anna to. He clearly knows Professor Jacobsen from before and the argument is on with full force. Anna nods politely, though she hardly understands a word. When a third scientist comes to congratulate her on the presentation, she gratefully bows out of the conversation.
The coffee break is almost over when professor Jacobsen finds Anna anew. She apologizes and tells Anna she would love to have her visit her laboratory. Anna thanks her and brushes it off as ordinary politeness. She is genuinely shocked, a week later, when the renewed invitation appears in her inbox.
Anna feels out of place at Lise Kj?r Jacobsen’s laboratory. Most people speak Danish to each other and though they always switch to English when they feel she should be included, she finds herself often hanging on the outskirts of the group, guessing whether it would be rude of her to remind them she is present.
When they do remember her, though, they are warm and welcoming. They ask her to join them for after-work beers, make sure she has something to do on the first weekend, and offer to take her sightseeing. They seem genuinely invested in making her enjoy her few weeks in Copenhagen. Especially the young postdoc, Bianca, wants to spend time with Anna.
Bianca is a bubbly personality, but her English skills are obscured by her thick French accent, which makes parsing the sentences hard work. She carries around a bag of crisps and eats them everywhere except in the wetlab. “Ee like ze salt. Like cthul’u.” she laughs. She is also fascinated with Anna’s samples, and goes on and on about her love for supernatural things. Anna nods politely.
Anna feels slightly bad whenever she is irritated at Bianca’s accent. She knows her own English makes it very clear her native language neither uses intonation nor manages to teach it well to schoolchildren.
Professor Jacobsen is as cheerful and as oddly dressed as at the conference. She has tons of ideas that she flings in rapid meetings, expecting her underlings to catch them all, weed out the impossible ones and do the rest within a day. Anna works long days in the wetlab, testing the growth of little cthulhu in different environments.
Max the SAXS guy turns out to be a close colleague of Professor Jacobsen. He always remembers to switch the conversation to English, which is only one of the qualities that make him a highly likeable guy despite his hammer-like qualities. When he asks for samples, Anna sees no reason to say no. “What would Professor Jacobsen say?” she asks jokingly.
“Lise has many good qualities,” Max answers with a wink, “but understanding my technique is not one of them. How I waste my time is not her business.”
Anna feels unnerved by the Archaea. They seem to be thriving in all sorts of conditions, as long as lethal amounts of salt are present, and looking in the microscope is puzzling every time. The edge of the biofilm looks the same regardless of the magnification, with the nested patterns present in all size scales.
When the critters are thriving, they easily grow into colonies that cover the whole petri dish. The edges of the colony are frayed, but one end (the top, Anna calls it, even though it makes little sense in the context of the edge of a horizontal pattern) being smooth and the bottom growing in tail-like appendages.
If Anna puts a sample in the microscope and zooms in, the edge has little tentacles. Zoom into the edge of a tentacle, and it is covered in smaller tentacles. She repeats this until the microscope runs out of resolving power. Electron microscopy shows the same. It is unsettling having to check the size bar of images to know what the scale is.
“How do they do that?” she asks Max rhetorically.
“How do they do this?” Max asks back, showing her graphs that make little sense. Max explains that the fractal structure goes down as far as he can see, down to nanometers.
“We could see that from electron microscopy,” Professor Jacobsen points out sharply.
“Can you quantify it from your precious microscopy? Can you get out a number? Standard deviation?” retorts Max, but no one is interested in the fractal dimension he has so meticulously calculated. No one except Max seems to even know what a fractal dimension is — except Bianca, who exhausts Anna with a discussion Anna has little to say in, seeing as she neither understands the underlying mathematics nor the crucial words due to Bianca’s pronunciation.
When Anna disrupts the centimeter-sized, ghost-shaped colonies and scoops parts of the gel to new petri dishes, they regenerate their shape. No matter which way she slices the thing, it repairs itself to a new ghostly image. “Zey know which way zey are growing,” Bianca says. Max comments that perhaps the shape of the Archeon favors packing in a certain direction. There is talk of an article in the air.
“It is going to sound like a joke paper,” says Anna. “‘H. cthulhu grows in its own image’ — who would publish that?”
“Who wouldn’t want to publish that? We just have to figure out why this happens. Have some faith. Don’t be so depressing.” Max smiles.
“I’m Finnish,” Anna retorts. “We don’t do optimism.” Everyone laughs.
The stay in Copenhagen takes its toll. Anna sleeps badly and often startles awake in the middle of the night, damp with cold sweat. She doesn’t remember her dreams, but the unnerved feeling she wakes up to stays with her until early afternoon.