every chance she gets she tries to send out a call for help, stretching it as far as she can each time, learning to reach through the very earth itself. eventually she finds him and calls for him to come get her out.

She stood in the shower for hours each day, probing the sterile water for any hint of life. An occasional microbe would swim her way, small enough to make it through the filters. But its connection to the other creatures on earth was so faint and tenuous after so many generations breeding in a tank it was like trying to follow a strand of cotton candy back to the stick.

"Please...please...please!" she whispered desperately into the water, now cold from running so long.

For weeks she tried to call out through the water. Finally, exhausted, she stared up at the ceiling, so desperate to reach anything, anyone, she thought she'd take a chance with the mad idea of "god." It had been a few weeks since anyone had come to clean the showers. The past few years had seen funding to the facility reduced, and cleaning crews were becoming less thorough. Faint, ashy flecks of mildew were huddled in the corners of the bright white ceiling.

Suddenly, she saw in her mind the tiny spores that had settled there, floating on a breeze, finding their way through the ducts into the facility. She tried desperately, futilely, to scale the smooth shower walls, only the faint chalky veil of lime to offer any sort of traction. Defeated, she fell against the wall and stood there dripping and alone, that last speck of hope out of reach. When she opened her eyes, resigned, the smallest, faintest constellation of young mildew stains came into focus on the wall beside her. She touched one weak finger to a black spot, no bigger than a flea, and felt the familiar warmth all living things share.

A small, frail flicker of the creature's life too short to follow came and went like a dying child's heartbeat. Hungry for the connection, she pressed her finger against the other dots of mold and brought them to her tongue. She tasted the whole of every relative of this organism, every cell in its lineage, the chain of primitive memories stretching out into the dusty lot outside, the crumbling streets, and weedy old ruins of factories nearby.

It wasn't enough, but it was a start. Energized and suddenly aware of how much time had passed, she shut the water off and returned to her room, a plan finally beginning to bloom. Over the next several weeks she kept probing further through the mildew on the walls, finding it easier as the black spots grew darker and more numerous. Soon, she was drifting through the streets in town, settling on the tops of trees, the folds of an empty milk carton, a towel left out in the rain too long. She just needed to push a little further, a little harder, and she knew she could do more than simply see these memories.

Her skin was raw and cracking, but she could feel nothing else but the dirt, the safe, delicious crevices of the old book in the old woman's basement, the delightfully prickly cucumber leaves. She would work her way back again, through the town, the sewers, the pipes. Through the halls of the building she was trapped inside. But the connections were still spotty. So she took to nurturing those stains, lifting them from the grout and painting streaks of them along the walls in inconspicuous places, just hoping for some breakthrough.

Finally, after weeks of probing, she felt the push back.