Talae Vethrin, PhD Candidate, Planetary Entomology Institute, Belt Station Agastya Theta
Set Two Report: Spiral Five, Cycle 742
I turned 27 today. That means I’ve now spent four years in the doctoral programme and am exactly 365 days away from professional disgrace and having my credentials quietly revoked in a humiliating end-of-cycle formality they call ‘declassification’. It’s not a euphemism. If I don’t find a new insect species by this time next year, I don’t get a PhD. I get a polite ejection from the Galactic Consortium of Insect Scientists (GCIS) and maybe a commemorative keychain.
The GCIS — venerable, bureaucratic and with all the warmth of cryogenic fog — was very clear in our orientation: discovery must occur within four to five Earth-standard years. No ifs, no bugs, no degree. It’s all written in some charter older than half the member planets, filled with flowery declarations about scientific value and intersystemal knowledge equity. The charter calls it a time-bound discovery mandate. I call it the Bug Rule.
Back when I applied, I thought, please, how hard can it be? Insects make up 93% of documented animal life in the habitable Universe. They evolve faster than rumours, hitch rides on cargo freighters and colonize anything that’s even vaguely damp and not currently on fire. I assumed I’d stub my toe on a new species just walking to the dorm kitchen.
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Instead, I’ve become the department’s leading authority on not finding things. My thesis so far: Things That Weren’t New Insects, Volume 3.
My catalogue includes a long list of things that weren’t new insects: larval Terran micro beetles in borrowed shells; a ‘glider fly’ that turned out to be corrupted sensor feedback; and my personal favourite, a Martian ash-louse misidentified by a colleague as a nova-strain. The GCIS slapped them with a two-year publication ban and repossessed their lab footwear — they now study fungal drift on Europa. Barefoot. Metaphorically, but still.
The consortium used to care about taxonomy for taxonomy’s sake. Now it’s all triage and panic. With ecological systems collapsing across six planets and protein shortages spiralling, any insect with metabolic flexibility might save a biosphere, or at least feed a few billion desperate people. They don’t care if it’s beautiful or horrifying. If it breeds in pressure-variable conditions and doesn’t murder the host species? Into the database it goes.
But the requirements remain annoyingly intact. The insect must be isolated, fully sequenced, confirmed independently by two peer reviewers who aren’t legally dead, and are, of course, sentient-neutral. That last clause destroyed my best lead: a hive-minded crustwing from Proxima Centauri b that could mimic human speech. The GCIS deemed it a “biolinguistic contamination vector” and had it flash-incinerated. I still hear it humming in my dreams.
Some nights I wake up with the taste of copper in my mouth and the faint impression I’ve just signed a contract.
Anyway.
Here’s my current situation. Still on Belt Station Agastya Theta, stationed on Deck 12, the biowaste reprocessing ring. It handles gut fauna from 63 livestock species and turns them into protein gel. The air smells like sanitized dung and melted ozone seals. But I’ve found a vent behind the centrifugal filter unit that isn’t in the schematics. Perfect heat signature. Subtle airflow. Unregistered by maintenance bots. Something lives in there.
I’ve seen it. Not clearly, but enough. A flicker in still air. Once, a fragment of wing. Translucent, vibrating faintly, like it was humming in a frequency I couldn’t hear.
Every day for the past fortnight, I’ve left bait outside the crevice. Synthfruit rind, pheromone droplets, even powdered Terran wasp resin. Something takes it. Not all at once. Not messily. Deliberately. With intent.
I’ve named it the Ghost Ant. Not because it looks like an ant. I still haven’t seen the body. I just like the drama. Better than Provisional Record KX-5/Delta or Biological Trace Entity 19a-Rho.
My adviser, Dr Juno, thinks I’m hallucinating under deadline pressure. She calls my current progress “theoretical optimism” and has suggested I pivot to fungal symbiosis, which, in academic terms, is the equivalent of being told to go swab mould and reflect on my choices. The implication wasn’t subtle.
Still, I check the vent each morning. I don’t scan. That could spook it. I just crouch beside the unit, hold my breath, and look for changes. Yesterday, I found a shard of exoshell. About the size of a thumbnail, folded over itself five times, shimmering like compressed oil film.
I haven’t reported it to the GCIS.
Not because I’m trying to hoard glory. I just need to be sure. I need to know it’s mine. The last doctoral candidate who submitted too early had their discovery reassigned to a senior researcher who had “guided their thinking”. That student now teaches Introduction to Bioforms on a Class-2 moon school for children with partial language cortices.
I want more than that.
I want to name something no one else has seen. I want the Ghost Ant to be the insect that justifies this past exhausting year.
