Near the very end of the project, within the last three or four months, news comes down from on high that it’s been such a success they can wrap up their work shortly and finally go home. This is a bit of a shock, especially to the ones who’ve been on since the very beginning - this project is so large in scale there’s been a lot of staff rotation over the years, from the groundskeepers on the islands to the biomedical engineers to the geneticists to the janitors. The ones who’ve been on since the beginning have, without meaning to, developed the biggest emotional investments in the babies.

Part of what the wrapping up involves is disposing of the organisms. I’m fond of the phrase “post-fetal experimental tissue cultures” but I’m pretty sure someone else owns the copyright to that…so, organisms.

Out of sixty, fifty-seven of the tentaspies end up in the ocean. A male and female from the control group, and a female from the second group, were the first ones taken in for the old examinations they’d done back when they were just figuring out how to make these organisms and make them stable, with the inspecting them from the inside-out. This is part of what drives the surviving escapees to band together despite all the differences in how they were raised and their feelings towards the scientists and the labs: it wouldn’t take much for their entire species to go extinct. Which is an extremely powerful motivator.