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Another red bar flashed against the screen, yet again the equipment was eluded, well at least it proved that the trip out here was worthwhile. She sighed, taking the tray out from under the sensor head, and replacing it to a recessed section of a sliding shelf in one of the stasis cabinets.

Everyone started her career with image that they would be ‘out there’ on the surface wading through alien species, making grand discoveries, cities in the sky, meeting new cultures, but the reality was a little less glamorous. Still it she enjoyed her work, she could have put herself in any number of different posts, but her skills were best used here. Most of the non-science crew of the Darwin thought of her as just another one of those lab-workers that hid in their darkened halls, half crazed, half human even, just another person who refused to fit into their way of thinking.

Turning to her console she took down the note of the last procedure, sure the lab equipment would be writing to a centralized lab-log, but there was nothing like your own notes, another thing people could not understand. Her gaze shifted to one of the big cabinets, a cube of clear walled material, metal rims and sensor clusters veined the outside.

Those people who thought that the lab-workers were insular, never seeing the beauty of the world outside, were wrong, the lab people had found a new beauty, beauty beyond immediate beauty, and in their machine filled halls, they took apart mysteries to show the beauty beneath. They truly knew beauty, whether it be in the processes of stars, or like herself in the structure of living things, it made them different.

The cabinet was a metre on each side, standing on a pedestal, which was practically another cube of same proportions of a much darker opaque material. The case was unimportant, what was in it was what held her fascination. There was no real need for the containment, for it contained nothing known as dangerous, but it was new, and therefore caution should always be taken, another thing the uninitiated were prepared to do without.

The clear cube contained for all intensive purposes a few plants and a rock, a thin mist took up the lower quarter of the cube, but most of the volume was clear enough to see all details. In the middle of the cube the rock that the plants perched on protruded from the mist, if it were not for the plants, it would look like a mountain stabbing through turbulent clouds. On the peak of this rock stood the plant, it deserved the ‘the’ prefix, looking half between manicured bonsai tree, and a piece of sublime mathematical geometry.

She had remembered when her little team had left the Darwin to collect samples, that was another thing the non science crew commented on, the little cliques of scientists, they had always put it down to the idea that ‘scientists can’t socialize’, and so all their ‘friends’ would consist of their work mates, it wasn’t true. When one sees beauty in their field, it is impossible trying to convey the ideas, the images to people who do not think in a same kind of way, and there is a shared joy when you are talking to someone who sees something in the same way, a kind of reassurance of what you see.

She remembered spotting the plant, its silhouette strangely prominent, amongst a landscape with knife edged sections of rock, and great rocky spires, despite its exposed position it took the spot overlooking the valley, nothing but a few moss like plants shared its desolate post. It was raining on that day as well, it was strange what memories the mind brought up, one often thinks that they will visit tropical utopias, and tan under distant alien stars, but more often than not you are up to your knees in mud trying to scrape something almost green off a rock, but you felt content nonetheless, another one of the things other people could not understand.

She looked closer into the box, little racing lightning patterns of colour rushed across what was for lack of better definitions its leaves, she brought her hand up to the diamond container wall, the leaves nearest that portion flashed blue with interference like pattern waves, ripples of colour racing across the planes, it was beautiful, and yet enigmatic, the two generally being diametrically opposed to most scientists. The known was often the beautiful, and the unknown the dark and sinister.