“Very interesting...i don’t think we’ve fully considered that yet.” Freyr ruminated on what the monochrome Rothian had said about a DNA-based language. She turned back to her team, who had gathered around three consoles in the bank behind her. “Pull up the files on all the Cradle specimens we captured.” She turned back to Marae. “Yank the program for me, please. I want to see what data we have.”

[hr]

“There’s hundreds more of them.” Freyr murmured in wonderment. Her overlay glasses were pulling out dozens of iterations of the same coordinates from the wreckage of the probe they’d yanked. She was very impressed that they’d collected this much, which she supposed was mostly down to the advanced Rothian tech. But what did it all mean? 

Freyr took a deep breath through her nose, massaging her bottom lip with two fingers. Her back was starting to hurt, so she stood up straight again.

“Freyr, you need to look at this.” Dr Wetherall pushed in next to her at the conference table and splayed a mess of holo-pads out. “I tried to match up some of the information connected to the coords we pulled from the probe with the sample we took from Mr Sori. There are lots of slight changes, but i can see correlation too.” Freyr held two holopads up, one in each hand. 

To her trained eye, one hand contained an atomic portrait of a Rothian. The other contained a fuzzy, indistinct, sinister looking cousin. “Do you think…?” Dr Wetherall asked, blinking at her. “Fuck, has it been staring us in the face this whole time?” Freyr asked back, staring off into the distance for a moment, lost in thought.

Then, she slid the two holo pads across the table to Marae. “We know that the Cradle captures and recreates things from outside the simulation. We also know it’s highly likely that this object had something to do with the patterns in Rothian DNA. But how did those patterns get there? We don’t know of any power these objects have to change genetics on the outside, but [i]inside[/i] their domain? It’s plausible. And I think my astute deputy may have found the origin stock.”