A/N: This is the shortest part in the story, I think, as well as the shortest chapter, so you get both parts of Chapter 3 today. However brief, Chapter 3 is one of the key chapters in the story, as you will see:
3.i. The Shapeless Shapes
The brouhaha finally settled, and Gerald applied his talents - biological this time, rather than mechanical - to the strange DNA he'd been presented with. He first determined that it was not human, nor any of the dokan races. It also proved to be completely unlike any animal samples he could get hold of to compare it to. He was halfway convinced it was some sort of off-world alien sample by the time he managed to induce the cells to reproduce.
The cells were very strange; the sample itself was inert and had been presented in a stasis tube. This was fortunate because every attempt to grow them in broth or plate them out for culture was a complete failure. Normal agar, blood agar, various added or subtracted nutrients, with oxygen, without, micro-oxygen levels...all simply failed. The cells died. Until - and he always wondered that it took him so long - he took the chaos emerald and set that in the midst of his latest batch of trial cultures. And they grew, the strange cells reproducing in nearly all versions of the broth, and spreading across the surface of the plates. Even more incredibly, they began to merge together in a sort of multicelled amoeba - the barest of rudimentary life, but the cells did seem to be in some sort of communication with each other, phasing from one blobby shape to another and absorbing the nutrients in the broth. Gerald began to experiment with ways of controlling the amorphous matter.
Meanwhile the cells were not the only things growing. Gerald's sons grew and graduated high school; correspondence classes, combined with science and technology training from experts that no mainland school science class could match, resulted in impressive final grades. Gerry pursued an astronomy degree and married a charming young woman. Ivan, the younger, opted for business classes while he founded a business making hoverbikes, using his father's Chaos drives for power. He could make "extreme gear" that outstripped the competitors' models both in power and lightness. Mary had switched from creating metallic machines to working with Gerald's amoebic cells. She had discovered a way to combine the mutable cells with the chaos drives to produce a free-flowing liquid form of energy. The eerily glowing fluid, now acellular but still cohesive, like a slime mold, could be channeled through either specially-made pipes or magnetic fields to transport it from place to place without the electrical loss that could occur with power lines; and if it leaked, small amounts were harmless or even beneficial to surrounding flora and fauna. Large amounts were dangerous though, and one day Gerald heard the alarms going off and ran to her lab to find disaster. Mary had been working with a large reservoir of her liquid energy, suspended in a magnetic containment field so she could observe it from all sides. An experimental weapon in an adjacent lab had malfunctioned and in the process cut off all power to Building "G". The safeties designed to prevent total power loss in case of damage in a single lab were later found to be faulty and with the loss of power, the magnetic fields in Mary's lab were lost as well. Apparently Mary had been very close to, or even under the reservoir when the containment cut out. She had had no chance to flee. Gerald returned his experiments to stasis and flew back to the mainland with Mary's body, so the family could bury her together.
After the funeral he found he couldn't return to the lab - he couldn't seem to make himself do much of anything. He kept thinking of things he needed to ask her - hearing stories he couldn't wait to repeat to her - but there was no one to tell them to anymore. He knew distantly that he needed to do something, but life had no purpose anymore, even his experiments seemed uninteresting and pointless. And then once again his life changed forever. Three months after Mary died, he met Maria.