A faint shriek broke the silence, like birds chirping far in the distance. Sparks flew between the metal rods and away.
The suspended dust ripped in place.
Nothing else seemed to happen for a while, not even that I could see through my lens array. Curse this world for its lack of electron microscopes.
I dragged a chair over and sat down just outside the circle of rails that my amplification lens array was mounted on. Watched the spectacle before me, the lights and shadows dancing all over me and the floor and the walls top to bottom.
I wonder how Primordial Earth looked like, when it was all like this. What I'd done was improvise the Earth as it was back before life began, when the planet was enveloped in electric storms that caused ionized gases to form in the atmosphere.
Even as I watched, the arc of electricity between the two electrodes looked more and more like a miniature lightning strike, increasingly so as the concentration of ions and electrons raised around the positively charged electrode.
Then, suddenly, something happened like what I imagined a nova looked like, and there was a little sphere of light floating there.
I got to my feet and cautiously approached, hoping I wasn't imagining things.
I wasn't. It really was there.
Just floating-
The sphere moved. It was about the size of a pinhead, but it was bright.
Clear. Somehow I could see it moving in place.
I quickly drove the lens array along the rails around the medium for a better look. I hadn't imagined it, the sphere was moving under its own power.
I almost called it its own orbit, but then the thing moved the other way as if-
No, not as if, I nearly missed it with how fast it happened, but it literally moved out of the way of second cell that appeared. I tried to tell myself it was just the effect of the moving gas, but then the sphere wandered off, avoided a couple more of its kind, phased through dust particles without issue, absorbed a few stray sparks, and then passed through the inactive Tesla coil as if it wasn't even there.
Collisionless plasma. It wasn't the gas.
The thing had moved of its own accord. Survival instinct.
I forced myself to breathe. Be still my pounding heart.
The positive electrode birthed another sphere. And another.
And a fourth. And more.
I could only stand there goggling at them through the lenses. I could almost imagine the plasma particles beading together to form string-like filaments.
Filaments twisting into helical strands not unlike DNA. The electrically charged strands of 'not-DNA' being attracted to each other into helical structures functionally and visually the same as biomolecules.
DNA, RNA, proteins. Their energy-based counterparts at least.
But alas, if any of that was happening, it was at a very small scale, too small for even my oversized setup of three huge lenses chained together to see. If I squinted, though, I could almost swear I could glimpse the aftereffects of those structures coming together and apart, like swarms.
It was ten minutes before I shook myself out of my astonishment and began furiously taking notes, then more notes for over an hour as tiny specks of ball lightning came to life and went wandering out of the way of the dust to move about. Fade.
Brighten. Disperse.
Merge together, even. Eat.
I stared at the life I had created. I had absolutely no words.
Two cells suddenly merged. Then three.
Then ten. It seemed to have happened by chance because they just happened to ride the currents of gas to the same vague point, but I wasn't completely sure.
Suddenly I didn't need my ridiculously low-tech alternative to the microscope to see what was happening in there. There was a plasma sphere larger than all the others wandering around the place.
As it did, it avoided, touched and ate the sparks and argon particles and even a dust mote until it became, quite literally, gigantic. The largest human cell was the ovum, which could reach 0.
2 mm in diameter and could only barely be seen with the naked eye. The plasma cell before me right was now as large as a mustard seed.
And it was still moving. Behaving in an increasingly complex fashion.
Moving around to avoid some charged dust flakes and pass through others, hovering near crafted steel as if curious about it – no, don't you project now, Hanzo – and then, out of nowhere, the thing wandered over to the very edge of the glass and began rolling along the inside like a ball.
I hastened to drag my magnifying array over and spent the next half an hour absolutely mesmerised by its increasingly unique behaviour when, suddenly, it split.
In half.
Like a cell.
I gaped, utterly spellbound.
Mitosis!
I speechlessly stared at the whirling spectacle in front of me.
Fact: primordial earth had a highly ionized atmosphere. Fact: LUCA was the last universal common ancestor.
Fact: In my last life, my predecessors theorised that maybe a plasma form of life emerged on the primordial Earth. Fact: Ancient mythology described the world as being made from a gigantic eldritch creature.
Kronos, Brahma, Pangu, the cosmic egg, of Ymir's flesh was fashioned the earth, the mountains from his bones, the ocean from his blood, and the sky… The sky from the big primordial's skull. And by sky they meant all the sky, the firmament, the starry darkness way up high, the oral traditions of the oldest humans weren't talking about blueshifted air, they meant the heliosheath.
… Tentative Inference: if plasma life forms acted as the template for the more familiar organic molecules of carbon-based life, then…
"Did I just discover the first universal common ancestor?" The acronym formed itself in my mind without my input. "Wait, no! I am not calling it FUCA.
"
Then my heart almost jumped in my throat as one of the now two biggest cells tried to pass through the glass and died.
I winced, though I was also surprised. Collisionless plasma should have passed through just fine, what happened?
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