The marine biology department kept the tank in the basement long after the grant supporting it expired. Its occupants were eleven pale snails collected years earlier from a vent field that subsequent expeditions failed to relocate. Nobody wanted responsibility for destroying them, relocating them, or explaining why organisms gathered at enormous expense had become an unlabeled aquarium beside the custodial sink.
A graduate student discovered the counting problem while inventorying neglected specimens. Eleven snails appeared on Monday. Fourteen appeared Tuesday. Thursday there were nine. The shells bore identical markings in every count, which made identifying individuals impossible. Numbers changed only while the tank was unattended. The instant someone entered the room, the population settled.
She installed a camera.
The footage created worse problems. A recording that showed twelve snails during playback might show fifteen when reopened. Pausing on a single frame changed the count depending on how many times she examined it. Exported still images disagreed with their originals. When three researchers watched the same monitor simultaneously, each recorded a different number.
Eventually she placed a chair before the tank and watched for six hours without leaving. The snails moved slowly across the glass while the room acquired a peculiar instability around them. Reflections appeared fractionally delayed. The timer light switched on twice without switching off between events. She became aware of several possible positions for her own hands resting in her lap and could not immediately decide which pair belonged to her.
She began feeding the colony herself after that.
Her thesis changed subjects without formal approval. She filled notebooks with observations about populations that seemed distributed across slightly different versions of the tank. She theorized that direct attention forced some temporary agreement among them. The snails themselves appeared increasingly reluctant to cooperate. Their numbers took longer to stabilize when she entered. Once, she counted seventeen for almost ten seconds before the colony dropped abruptly to eleven.
The department finally ordered the tank removed during renovations. When movers arrived, the basement contained no aquarium. Staff records showed conflicting room numbers, conflicting collection dates, and three different versions of the original grant.
The graduate student still comes in every morning carrying food. She disappears downstairs for twenty minutes and returns with wet hands, though the basement has been converted into offices.
She says the colony is doing well. She has also stopped giving exact numbers, explaining that counting them too confidently seems to make certain possibilities feel excluded, and lately the snails have become surprisingly sensitive about being told how many of them are allowed to exist.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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