The resurrected blowfly was about the size of an unshelled peanut.
The body plan was recognizably a blowfly’s — same basic geometry, same wing structure — but the proboscis had transformed. Where a normal fly’s mouthpart was soft and sponge-like, designed for dissolving and absorbing, this one had hardened into something closer to a needle: thick, rigid, visibly pointed. An Activity core, unmistakably, in the place the mutation had chosen to concentrate.
He dropped a small piece of Activity-rich meat into the vial.
The fly went at it immediately, the needle proboscis working back and forth across the surface with a rapid, mechanical precision that reminded him of something industrial. The abdomen pumped steadily as it fed and evacuated simultaneously — the fly’s characteristically efficient digestive cycling, unchanged by the mutation.
Three minutes. The meat fragment was gone. A scatter of dark deposits on the glass remained.
The fly’s size hadn’t increased noticeably. What had increased was the intensity of its movement — the collisions against the glass had more force behind them than before.
He watched it for a while, thinking.
The fly had shown all the signs of death: cessation of movement, no visible respiration, twenty-three seconds of complete stillness. By any reasonable measure, the first experiment had concluded with a dead fly. Then, some hours later, a living and measurably changed fly had been bouncing around the vial.
Three possible explanations:
The peach toxin hadn’t been lethal — the fly had been temporarily incapacitated, not killed. But the stillness had been complete, and a blowfly incapacitated but alive would typically show some response to disturbance.
The fly’s constitution had been sufficient to process the toxin and survive it. Possible, but the speed of the apparent death argued against simple constitution.
The Activity in the toxin had done something other than kill. The peach was lethally dangerous to the animals that had died under the tree — that was strongly evidenced. But a blowfly’s biology was nothing like a mammal’s. Maybe the toxin mechanism that killed large mutated animals interacted differently with insect physiology.
I need to repeat the experiment and watch the whole process this time.
He set up a second vial. One fly, one small fragment of peach flesh. The fly died on the same schedule as the first — seven seconds of feeding, collapse, twenty-three seconds to apparent death.
This time he didn’t put it aside. He kept it in his field of view.
The evening’s main work was equipment maintenance. The water damage from the flood had left a long list of electronic components that needed attention, and Vajra’s Activity system could handle some of what a conventional repair kit couldn’t — guiding the Activity’s restructuring property to restore function in components where the physical damage was too fine for his hands to address. It required him to cross-reference repair procedures from the electronics files on his drives while working, which made the process slow but educational.
In the margins of that work, he kept his eye on the vial.
What he saw over the following three and a half hours was the clearest observation of Activity mutation he’d managed yet.
The fly didn’t simply revive. It transformed.
He could feel it through his extended perception — faint, but present — a pattern of Activity radiation inside the tiny body that was actively oscillating, cycling through frequencies without settling. The fly’s tissue was responding to the Activity in the peach, the energy from the toxin apparently serving as a mutation catalyst rather than a pure poison. As the hours passed, the oscillation gradually slowed and clarified. The frequencies narrowed, stabilized, and finally locked into a single fixed signature.
The needle proboscis began forming as the frequency locked — starting as a barely visible thickening and extending over the course of the transformation into the distinct Activity core it was when the process completed.
At 10:30 PM, the fly moved. Leg twitch first, then full body. It stood up unsteadily, oriented toward the peach fragment remaining in the vial, and consumed it within a minute.
2nd Variant, mutation complete.
He recorded the full video, titled the file, and saved it with a hyperlink in the research log. Then, partly out of curiosity and partly because the documentation was more interesting with a control condition, he transferred both variants into a single vial with a meat fragment between them.
Test: will two variants of the same species compete for food, or share it?
He set the laptop camera on the vial and started the third experiment of the evening.
He cut a large section of peach flesh and dropped it in front of the Spine-cat.
The cat ate it in three bites.
Twenty-five seconds later, it fell over.
Shen Cong checked breathing and found it — slow, regular, the rhythm of deep unconsciousness rather than death. Body temperature unchanged. No cooling at the extremities.
Not dead. Asleep.
He looked at the body on the floor and revised his entire experimental conclusion from the previous day.
The peach flesh hadn’t killed the fly. The peach flesh hadn’t killed the cat. Whatever had happened to the animals decomposing under the tree, it hadn’t been simple poisoning — or if it had, the mechanism was more complicated than he’d initially concluded.
He sat with the contradictions.
If the peach isn’t lethal, why are there animal carcasses under the tree?
Several possibilities assembled themselves. The animals might have fought over the peaches and killed each other. The sleep effect might be prolonged enough that something else killed them while they were unconscious. There might be a dose-dependent effect — small amounts producing the transformation response, large amounts producing something different. Or the peach might interact differently with different species.
He’d get his answer when the cat woke up.
At 1:30 AM, it did.
The wounds from the falls and the spine removal had been progressing steadily throughout the unconscious period — he watched the last of the scabbing flake away, leaving clean healed tissue underneath. More significantly, the stumps of the two spines he’d cut off had been regenerating during the sleep. They’d extended approximately fifteen centimeters back toward their original length.
The cat woke up, discovered its chains, and immediately made its feelings about this known.
The peach isn’t toxic. It induces the mutation-sleep.
If the peach induced the same transformation process he’d observed in the fly — Activity oscillation, mutation completion, revival — then the animals under the tree hadn’t been killed by the peaches. They’d been transformed by them, or they’d died from something else while incapacitated, or the tree’s root system had extracted enough Activity from them while they slept to tip the balance toward death.
The root filaments threading into every carcass.
He thought about that.
The tree drains them while they sleep. The peach doesn’t kill — it paralyzes and mutates. The roots do the rest, harvesting whatever Activity is available from the altered biology.
He didn’t have the evidence to be certain. But it fit.
He chained the cat to a exterior mounting point — he wasn’t comfortable sleeping with it loose in the cargo section, chains or no chains — and went to bed.
Sleep came slowly. The day had produced too many open questions. He lay in the dark and turned them over, half-dreaming, his conscious reasoning blending into something less structured as exhaustion finally won.
When the alarm woke him, his head ached slightly from the inadequate sleep.
He lay still for a moment, trying to reconstruct what he’d been working through in the dream-adjacent thinking of the past few hours. Most of it was gone — the experience of having thought hard about something without retaining the specific content, the mental equivalent of reading a page and realizing none of it had stuck.
But one fragment remained.
Clear enough to feel significant. Something that, if it held up to examination, would explain exactly how those animal carcasses had ended up under the peach tree.
He sat up. He needed to verify it.
(End of Chapter 32)