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            “Oh! Good God, err hello, yes hello err. Yes. Hello” Mathias managed to say after Asyra very kindly, using a discrete clearing of the throat, brought him back to the real world, after all it seemed the only way she could get out of his office, and her legs were getting tired from the standing. Mathias tried to get his composure back, tried to insert a sheet of printouts into a larger stack by just ramming it, after a while he gave up, and added “err. How long were you standing there?”

            “No time at all.” A reply whose subtleties were in fact entirely lost, as he desperately tried to tidy his bulging desk. “You seem quite engrossed” she followed.

            “Yes I was rather, sorry about that, err,” he scrabbled under the paperwork for his glasses, and then with only a minor poking of his left eye, hooked them on, he managed to draw himself into what he thought of as a more authorative position, slightly spoiled by the fact that a bright orange post-it note stuck to the side of his head where he had previously fallen asleep on his paperwork. Subconsciously Asyra was counting till how long he noticed.

            “Well I don’t suppose you know what I do here. I could show you around if you like, show you what’s been keeping me up at nights?” In spite of current evidence he continues, “it’s quite interesting you know.”

            He walks around the edge of his desk, stepping carefully over the stacks of sample cases, and occasionally ducking underneath the over-head foliage. He finally makes it over to the door where Asyra was standing, and carefully unhooks his lab coat from the peg on the door.

“Err” He looks Asyra in the eye, and then briefly tilts his head lower, “Err”, he stammers, “I think you are going to need a coat as well.”

“For hygiene?”

“Yes” he grasps the suggestion gratefully, “yes for hygiene purposes, it won’t do to contaminate the labs, yes.”

The validity of this statement was at least questionable from Asyra’s point of view, as the coat he seemed to be wearing was apparently mostly stain, not even the most generous could call it a white coat, still after some rummaging from the cupboards Mathias eventually produced a relatively clean coat, partially from the fact that it had probably been washed at some time in its history, the fit was also coincidentally good.

The crowded, dark, and in places, unusually lush office was abandoned for the cool, clean and clinical white corridor immediately outside.

“I have been working on a new project, it’s quite fascinating really, I hope to join at some level the familiar biological systems that we all know, with nuclear technology, this really could be something quite special”

Asyra nods as they slowly make it down the corridor, passing people nod to Mathias, and more often move out of his enthusiastic gestures as he tries to explain.

“The basis of this new project of mine is to make use of something we don’t consider much, for example did you know that in each tonne of granite, there is a few grams of uranium.” Unfortunately Mathias left no space for a response “And so, say in a metre cubed of granite” the volume was attempted by much waving of hands, which one unfortunate lab technician falsely interpreted as a hug, which temporarily derailed the monologue. “yes well. So something say as large as a… washing machine, if it was made of solid granite would contain say about thirty, forty grams of uranium, not to mention significant amounts of thorium, and other radioactive elements, you see there is quite a bit of potential there.”

They walked on a bit, eventually they approached a door, he fished out a swipe card on a bit of string around his neck, and pushed it into the machine on the side of the door.

“You might wonder where I am going with this, bare with me” he leaned against the side of the corridor and continued his explanation. “So imagine you had an animal that could eat its way through rock, but save the uranium and what not, pretty soon, allowing for the isotopic distribution, and few cubic metres of rock it would get enough nuclear elements to make it self a little reactor. Of course we are not so clever yet to make some rock-eating animal, but we can retrain bacteria to the job, hell the stuff we are working on carved some of the huge caves in South America, literally eating the rock away, so most of this stuff naturally exists, through this door is the worlds first biological nuclear reactor, don’t worry its completely safe.”

Asyra briefly thought of the beautiful possibilities on the other side of the door, perhaps brilliant blue light lancing out of rocks, and beautiful light. After a few key presses the door slid back, revealing well a big pond. Actually on closer inspection, the pond was in fact a deep column of water sitting inside a monumentally large block of stone, which had been lowered so its top edge was level with the floor. The rest of the room looked like a laboratory, white walls and ceiling, brilliant white over head illumination, desks, and things with tubes, but in the middle of it all a big scummy pond in a big block of rock. The second thing she noticed was the heat, the top of the pond was steaming slightly.

“I know it doesn’t look much, but I haven’t gave you the whole story yet”, remarkably as they sidled around the pond, she noticed out of all reason there was a garden bench, a brown wooden bench in a laboratory, it even smelled slightly of creosote as they sat on it.

“You know I have caught people in here using it as a sauna, I try to tell them about the radioactivity, but annoyingly its hardly radioactive. Anyway in front of you is the reactor. So I told you that bugs it the rock, they in fact using strong acid to dissolve it, as the rock dissolves they gobble up the radioactive elements, I designed the chelating agents myself” with absolutely all the smug pride he could muster “so the bugs eventually die, they fall to the bottom of the pond, and so you get a kind of uranium rich layer. Of course you know what happens if you bring too much uranium together in one place, well you get an atomic weapon, if you’ve got the right isotopes anyway, not particularly useful here I must admit” There was a silent moment of unease in the humid room. “Well fortunately that shouldn’t happen, uranium decays by emitting neutrons, which then hit other uranium atoms, make them unstable, and make them decay releasing more neutrons, and destabilising more uranium atoms. If this is balanced, and the supply of uranium continuous then a sustained reaction can be maintained” he then points to the pool “which is what is happening in there, the uranium rich sludge at the bottom is continually being fed from the dissolving rock above, and generates lots of heat” the pond steamed gently.

“Anyway I made the closure in the loop, keeping the bugs warm is a good start, and the extra warmth is lost to the environment, useful in warming Mars, this is essentially a terraforming project, but the reactor does not feed the bugs” and he looked conspirationally “and that’s the most elegant thing I did. You know plants absorb light to make energy, in fact they mostly use the red light, at oh say 680, and 700nm, but some very special bacteria can use light other than this, and believe it or not, on some ocean floors, around scolding hot vents, there are bacteria that can use infrared light, that is the light radiated by hot objects. They use heat to make their food.” Mathias was looking expectant, “And that’s exactly what I hijacked for this project, I copied out the sequences in green sulphur bacteria, they take carbon dioxide out of the water, and turn it into sugars and stuff. Which then feeds the bugs, and the whole thing continues, very neat.”

They sat in the quiet room, every now and then the water rippled, fans whined above driving some of the steamy air from the room.

“That most have been so boring, I’m sorry, Just I can see this system working anywhere in the universe, on any rock or planet, regardless of a caring sun, these bacteria generate their own warmth, their own food, and recycle their own carbon dioxide. This would work here on Earth, on Mars, or frankly anywhere. You can imagine asteroids filled with this stuff” pointing at the pond again. “Travelling between worlds, spreading life, its truly beautiful.” There was another silence. “Well I think it is, anyway this stuff, all of it is going to be shipped to Mars, at the moment it’s brass monkeys out there, they could do with the heat, and of course this thing practically churns the stuff out, it gobbles up carbon dioxide, breeds bacteria, and melts ice, does the whole shop. They reckon these system could shave another few years off turning Mars into a place more like earth, well survivable anyway.”

There was another pause, the warmth was comforting, and relaxing.

“Sorry.” He leant towards Asyra, he was disturbed by a faint rustling, he clutched the side of his head. “I don’t believe it!” He turned to share his disbelief, but alas his audience had already succumbed to the dual fronts of biotechnological science and the pleasant warmth of the room. “Good idea, good idea” he too curled up in the warmth.