Chapter 52: Life Within Life

 

That morning on Mars, Marika woke before the alarm.

She did not know why.

There had been no dream she could remember. No sound had disturbed the colony. Outside the walls, Mars remained silent beneath its red sky, indifferent as ever.

She made coffee and sat beside the small window of her workshop.

On the table lay a piece of cloth.

She had carried it from Earth.

It was nothing special. A small square of cotton, worn at the edges, with an almost invisible seam running through its middle.

Marika picked it up.

She had always found something comforting in fabric.

Fibers.

One beside another.

Almost invisible on their own.

And yet, from those tiny fibers, an entire garment could be made.

A body could disappear inside it.

A body could be protected.

A body could be recognized.

“Everything is made of small things,” she whispered.

She did not yet know how literally that thought would prove to be true.

 

There was a microscope in the biological monitoring laboratory of the colony that Marika had never used.

It was not part of her work.

She was a seamstress.

She understood fabrics, threads, needles, patterns and bodies.

She did not understand cells.

At least, that was what she believed.

That morning, however, without knowing exactly why, she sat in front of the microscope.

The image appeared on the screen.

And Marika saw a world.

Not a small world.

A whole world.

Transparent shapes. Irregular circles. Structures moving inside them. Some looked like bubbles. Others resembled tiny organs. Others looked like nothing she had ever seen.

She leaned closer.

“Are you serious?”

The cell did not answer.

It continued to move.

Then she noticed them.

Small, elongated structures.

Like grains.

Like tiny beans.

They moved slowly through the cell.

Marika read the label.

MITOCHONDRIA.

She repeated the word quietly.

“Mitochondria.”

She opened the information panel.

Energy production.

ATP.

Cellular respiration.

Metabolism.

Life.

Marika remained still.

Energy.

That was it.

Not simply an organelle that existed.

A tiny factory.

A space within a space.

Something that worked continuously so that everything else could continue to exist.

She looked at the image again.

It was impossibly small.

And yet, without it, the cell could not function.

“An entire factory inside a house,” she said.

And suddenly she thought of her sewing machine.

 

Her sewing machine was in the adjoining room.

It was old.

She had brought it with her when she came to the colony.

It was not the same machine she had owned on Earth. That one had remained behind, in her house.

But this one carried something of it.

The same sound.

The same slight vibration when it started.

The same rhythm.

Click-click-click-click.

Marika sat down and pressed the pedal.

The needle moved up and down.

The fabric advanced.

The thread passed through it.

A seam appeared.

Click-click-click.

Then Marika smiled.

Her sewing machine did something simple.

It took small movements and transformed them into something larger.

The mitochondrion did something far stranger.

It transformed nutrients and oxygen into energy.

And from that energy, a cell could live.

A body could move.

A heart could beat.

A hand could hold a needle.

Marika stopped the machine.

She looked at her fingers.

For the first time, she thought about how even the movement of her hand had begun somewhere much deeper.

Much smaller.

Perhaps inside a mitochondrion no human eye had ever seen.

 

That afternoon she walked through the central corridor of the colony.

People passed her.

Someone carried tools.

A woman was speaking to a child.

A technician hurried toward the energy station.

Behind the transparent walls, pipes, cables and ventilation systems formed a complicated network.

Marika stopped.

She looked at everything differently.

The pipes.

The corridors.

The chambers.

The people.

The machines.

The energy.

The colony.

Suddenly, it all reminded her of something she had already seen.

Not on Mars.

Inside herself.

A cell.

An organism.

A body.

The colony had a membrane.

It had an interior.

It had transport systems.

It had sources of energy.

It had communication networks.

It had mechanisms for repair.

And it had human beings functioning like tiny parts of a much larger system.

The thought made her shiver.

She could not decide whether it was beautiful or frightening.

Perhaps it was both.

 

That evening she returned to the laboratory.

She opened the image of the cell again.

The mitochondria moved inside it.

Silently.

Continuously.

Without knowing anything about the whole they belonged to.

A mitochondrion did not know there was a human being.

A cell did not know there was a colony.

And perhaps a human being could never know whether the colony itself belonged to something much larger.

Marika moved closer to the screen.

“What if…”

She stopped.

She did not finish the thought.

She did not want to.

Because for the first time since arriving on Mars, she felt that perhaps they were not simply living on a planet.

Perhaps they were living inside something.

Something they could not yet see.

Something that, like a cell, continued to function without asking for their permission.

She looked down at the old piece of fabric lying on the table.

One fiber.

One thread.

One seam.

One cell.

One human being.

One colony.

One planet.

Marika took her needle and passed the thread through its eye.

For a moment, it seemed to her that she was not sewing fabric.

She was sewing a world.

And somewhere, deep inside it, a tiny mitochondrion continued its work.

Silently.

As if it knew something she had only just begun to suspect.\

To be continued…