Ariana was used to late nights in the lab. They were the best for actually getting things done. In the mornings, the corner coffee machine was surrounded by casuals more concerned with making a show of their punctuality than their progress. Their lunches started early, too, and by the time they came back, they'd evolve into lazy louts who took up terminals just to click through last week's results. Ariana preferred to come in just as her coworker left for lunch, secure herself an area to work, and then run her models after hours when there was no competition for the computing power.
Across the hall, behind recently-cleaned glass walls, sat the machines built specifically for her project. At the time they were built, it was Dr. Moro's project, but he wasn't around any more to claim credit. Without proper authorization, Ariana couldn't fire them up. But she was on the path to unlocking that.
Server racks, some tinged black with soot, crowded around her current terminal on their wheeled chassis. Multi-colored nests of wires dangled between them. In order to read the server contents, she had to drag everything over herself. It was a difficult and smelly endeavor; ash and the lingering odor of burnt silicon billowed into the air whenever she started moving things.
Her efforts only further revealed the devastation done to her data. Delicate protein strands she had spent weeks unravelling and documenting, all burnt away. Only a segment of normal-typed data sets were fully intact, a fraction of the list that Giovanni had already scorned.
Defragmentation programs ran on several other computer terminals, every one she could reach with the tangled cables. Occasionally they would spit out part of a sequence, or the key for deciphering one, but she had nothing to unlock and segments of sequences were as useless to this task as no information at all.
There were still unopened files on the drives in front of her though.
Ariana hunched in her chair, a poor form she had developed over her years of studying, coupled with her ample chest. She clicked mechanically through folders, ignoring file names, opening every document and image. Dr. Moro's file organization had frustrated her endlessly as an intern. Now she saw it for what it really was: an elaborate defensive structure meant to protect his precious findings.
Tenacity paid off for Ariana in the form of a simple text document with an embedded image. The text was vague, mostly geographical and climate notes with accompanying strings of numbers, and references to other materials, but in a shorthand she didn't immediately recognize.
It was the photo that drew her eye; a poor-resolution scan that showed white sky, towering black pine trees, white snow, and a black shadow detached from its stark surroundings but with no visible caster in the frame. As she examined the photo, she hovered her cursor over it.
It was a link.
She clicked the image and a new window opened
"What's all this?" Ariana chewed her lip and leaned a little closer to the screen. The data here was laid out similar to genetic models she had constructed herself, but it used a different notation than the one she'd been taught at University of Fuschia.
The scientific community in Kanto was frustratingly cliquish. Attempts to standardize across certain fields regularly caused uproars over methodological supremacy.
Even within Rocket Labs, executives occasionally had to intervene and set a standard among squabbling team members from different academic backgrounds. In that sense, Rocket Corp was a force for good, mandating the codification of conversions and nomenclature.
On-screen, Ariana opened the modeling program she was familiar with. Glancing between the two windows, she reconstructed the genetic model in a way her machines could interpret. With every click and drag, her excitement grew. She clicked 'save file' a little more often than was necessary. But why not be safe?
The model was taking shape. To untrained eyes, it looked like a twisted ladder, the same basic representation of genetic code whether sourced from a person, Pokémon, or pinap berry. To Ariana, it was a list of ingredients, every rung and junction a cluster of templates clear enough for even the unconscious forces of nature to follow them.
Desperate to preserve every detail from her source, she double- and triple-checked the models. Satisfied she hadn't made any translation errors, Ariana uploaded the code and its source documents to a local network-accessible folder. She rose from her seat and took a moment to roll her shoulders, then strode across the floor to the other equipment.
Standing over the screens and dials of Dr. Moro's bespoke machine, Ariana felt powerful. She had watched the grunts assemble it under his instructions, and watched him tinker with it further once they'd left. Under his watchful eye, she learned to input, manipulate, and finess. And outside his notice, she ran double-blinds against his conclusions and noted data disparities.
The closer Dr. Moro got the success, the more afraid he had become of his own conclusions. Now that he'd removed himself from the equation, Ariana would do what he could not. Finding this new piece of treasure he'd buried excited her. It felt like she was on the right track.
She pulled up the new blueprint from her network folder and launched the machine's scanner. So long as she wasn't parsing or printing raw genetic material, the draw on the power grid was negligible. Ariana hoped by reading the arrangement of proteins and comparing them against everything else she had on file, she could glean some insight into what species the sequence represented. But unless it matched any already-sequenced models on the network…
In search of more clues on the source of the genes, Ariana pulled up the original text document. The photo drew her eye again, The black shadow in the center, indiscernible. She dragged her attention away from the inky shapes, up the page, and combed through the written words. They hinted at the photo's setting with words like "high crags", "extreme wind (no air lndg)", and her personal favorite, "hostile precipitation". The numbers, she guessed, were latitude and longitude, but she didn't have a map on hand to confirm.
The window behind the document flashed. Ariana clicked on it and expanded the results of the scan. At the top of the screen, the newly-imported sequence scrolled left to right in a color-coded series of lettered bubbles.
Below it was a graph meant to represent potential matches. The computer had no suggestions as to what kind of Pokémon the genes might be from. Hearteningly, though, the algorithm was 97% certain that the original organism was more complex than a non-sentient plant.
In fact… As Ariana pulled up other species codes for comparison, she noticed something else. The number of gene pairs, and the size of the genomes themselves, were larger than any other examples she had on hand.
She made a stack of three windows.
At the top was the new code.
At the bottom was the full genome sequence of a Jigglypuff.
In the center, a different arrangement of the same pieces spelled her own genetic code.
All three were complex, but there was a clear hierarchy. Her humanity sat right in the middle of her sample, more complex than anything she had studied before, but less so than her mystery Pokémon.
This find was better than anything she had sequenced herself. In their few attempts at chimeras before Dr. Moro sabotaged the lab, genetic complexity correlated highly with metabolic performance and sample viability.
Their biggest success so far was Jigglypuff.
Eager to move forward with the project - and driven by another impulse she didn't quite recognize - Ariana made her way to a phone. As she walked, she felt in her lab coat pocket for Giovanni's card.
