The Wrong Country Code

The glovebox log said the gasket had been autoclaved at 121 degrees Celsius for fifteen minutes on a Tuesday, which was enough to kill everything that should have been there and not enough for the thing that was growing on it.

Dinara Orynbaeva read that entry twice because she was the only person in the building who could read both the log and the customs form, and the log was in Russian and the form was in English and the customs form asked for a country of origin and the glovebox did not have one. She sat in the curation annex’s front office, a room the size of a shipping container with a desk, a computer, and a window that faced the mountains outside Almaty. The mountains were gray in October. The computer was gray always.

The sample was a gram of Martian regolith in a sealed borosilicate tube, and it had been in the annex’s minus-eighty freezer for eleven months. Three agencies had been arguing about whose law applied to it. The European Space Agency said the sample was theirs because their lander had collected it. The Russian state corporation said the lander had launched from Baikonur, which was on their soil, which made the sample theirs. The Kazakh ministry said the sample was on their soil now, which made it theirs, and also said that the European Space Agency had not filed the correct import paperwork, which made it nobody’s.

Dinara’s contract was with the holding company that ran the annex. Her mother’s pension was tied to the contract. The contract had a clause about unauthorized biological events, and Dinara had read it three times because the pension was the reason she had taken the job and the clause was the reason she might lose it.

The tube sat in the freezer. The freezer was a Thermo Scientific TSX60086V, serial number 86V-4471-KZ, and Dinara knew the serial number because she had to write it on the monthly inventory, which she did on the first of every month, and which nobody read.

She read the glovebox log again. The gasket was silicone rubber, a standard Dow Corning 732 sealant, applied to the glovebox port during the annex’s setup in January. The log entry, handwritten in a Russian technician’s block letters, said: autoclave cycle 121 C, fifteen minutes, load: gasket, gloves, wipes. Standard cycle. Nothing unusual.

But something had grown on the sealant. A film, pinkish, salt-crystalline, in a ring around the gasket where it met the tube’s outer surface. Dinara had seen it that morning when she opened the freezer to check the temperature logger. The tube was still sealed. The sample inside was still sealed. But the outside of the tube, where the gasket had touched it during the last handling session, had a ring of something that was not silicone and not dust and not a stain.

She closed the freezer. She called Dr. Marchetti at the European Space Agency, who did not answer because it was six in the morning in Darmstadt. She called the Kazakh ministry’s sample-return desk, which rang four times and went to a voicemail in Kazakh that she listened to twice. She called the Russian corporation’s office in Almaty, which picked up on the second ring and told her they would call back.

She did not call her mother.

The film was on the outside of the tube, and the tube was sealed, and the sample was inside. Whatever was growing on the gasket had come from the gasket or from the air in the glovebox or from someone’s hands, and it had survived an autoclave cycle at 121 degrees for fifteen minutes, which meant it was either a spore-former or it was not what she thought it was.

Halophiles were salt-loving organisms, usually archaea, and they lived in places like the Dead Sea and salt flats and evaporite deposits. They were not supposed to grow on silicone sealant in a curation annex outside Almaty. But the sealant had been stored in a warehouse before installation, and warehouses had dust, and dust had microbes, and some microbes formed spores that could survive 121 degrees for fifteen minutes if the cycle was dry heat or if the load was too dense for steam to penetrate.

Dinara wrote this in her incident report. She wrote it in English because the form was in English. She wrote: “Film observed on outer surface of sample tube, at contact point with glovebox gasket. Gasket autoclaved 121 C, 15 min, standard cycle. Organism identity unknown. Possible halophilic contamination from sealant storage environment. Sample remains sealed. No breach detected.”

She printed the report. She put it in the folder marked INCIDENTS, which was a red folder in the filing cabinet next to the desk. There were three other reports in the folder, all from the last eleven months, all about the tube, all about jurisdiction. None of them mentioned biology.

Her phone rang at eleven. It was her mother.

“Did I see the news?” her mother asked.

“What news?”

“On the television. They said something about Mars. Something about Kazakhstan.”

Dinara looked at the window. The mountains were still gray. “It is not about me, Mama.”

“You always say that.”

“Because it is always true.”

Her mother made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “The pension. Is it safe?”

“The pension is fine.”

“And you? Are you safe?”

“I am in an annex outside Almaty. Nothing happens here.”

Her mother said something about a neighbor’s son who had gotten a job at the spaceport and was now making three times what Dinara made, and Dinara listened and said “mm” at the right places and did not tell her about the pink film on the tube or the red folder or the three agencies that could not decide whose law it was. She said goodbye and hung up and sat at the desk for a while.

The journalist came the next day. Dinara did not know he was a journalist when he arrived. He said he was a researcher from a university in Berlin, and he asked to see the annex’s inventory records, and Dinara said no, and he said he had a right to see them under the treaty’s transparency provisions, and Dinara said she would check, and she checked, and the treaty did not have transparency provisions but it did have a clause about public access to sample-return documentation that nobody had ever invoked because nobody had ever cared about a gram of regolith in a freezer outside Almaty.

He came back the day after that with a copy of the shipping manifest. The manifest listed the freezer’s serial number. He had gotten it from a customs broker in Frankfurt who had processed the original import. Dinara read the manifest and saw that it listed the freezer as “laboratory equipment, used, value 12,400 euros” and that the country of origin field said “Germany” and the destination field said “Kazakhstan” and there was no field for “whose law applies to the thing inside it.”

The journalist’s name was Tomas. He was tall and patient and he asked questions in a way that made Dinara want to answer them, which she suspected was how he got answers. He asked about the sample. She said it was a gram of Martian regolith. He asked about the freezer. She said it was a minus-eighty unit. He asked how long the sample had been there. She said eleven months. He asked why. She said jurisdiction.

“Jurisdiction over what?” he asked.

“Over the sample.”

“But it is just rock.”

“It is rock that came from Mars. Under the treaty, Martian material is subject to planetary protection protocols. Nobody can open it without authorization from the country of origin, and nobody can agree on which country that is.”

“And the freezer?”

“The freezer is German equipment in a Kazakh building operated by a holding company registered in Cyprus. The freezer is fine. The freezer is the only thing in this building that is fine.”

He wrote this down. He asked if there was anything else. She said no. He left.

That night Dinara sat in the annex and looked at the tube through the freezer’s glass door. The pink film was still there. It had not grown much. It was a ring about two millimeters wide, following the curve of the gasket’s contact point. It looked like a sunset in miniature.

She called her mother again. Her mother asked about the news. Dinara said there was no news. Her mother said the television said something about a sample. Dinara said the television did not know what it was talking about. Her mother said the pension was safe. Dinara said she did not know. Her mother was quiet for a long time.

“Then make it safe,” her mother said.

The inspector arrived on a Thursday. His name was Kessler, and he was from the treaty body, which was based in Vienna and which had a form for everything. The form he brought had a line for “suspected extraterrestrial biological material” and a line for “confirmed extraterrestrial biological material” and a line for “suspected terrestrial biological material of unknown origin” and a line for “confirmed terrestrial biological material of unknown origin” and no line for “probably salt-loving Earth contamination from a glovebox gasket that survived an autoclave cycle because the cycle was fifteen minutes and the spore was lucky.”

Kessler was not wrong about anything. He was a precise man with a clipboard and a pen and a way of reading forms that made Dinara feel like the forms were reading her. He read the incident report. He looked at the tube through the freezer glass. He asked about the autoclave cycle.

“121 degrees, fifteen minutes,” Dinara said.

“Standard cycle?”

“Standard cycle.”

“And the gasket was included in the load?”

“Yes.”

“And the film appeared after the gasket was installed?”

“Yes.”

“And the sample has not been opened?”

“The sample has not been opened.”

Kessler wrote something on his clipboard. He asked about the journalist. Dinara said the journalist had been here and had left. Kessler asked if the journalist had a copy of the shipping manifest. Dinara said yes. Kessler wrote something else.

He asked about the chain of custody. The chain of custody was a form that tracked who had touched the sample and when and where. It had been started when the sample arrived and it had not been updated since because nobody could agree on who was authorized to update it. Kessler said the chain of custody needed to be updated before he could proceed. He said the update required a country code.

“What country code?” Dinara asked.

“The country of jurisdiction. The country that is responsible for the sample.”

“Which country is that?”

Kessler looked at his form. “That is what we are here to determine.”

Dinara looked at the form. The form had a field for “country of jurisdiction (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2)” and a dropdown list of countries and a note that said “if jurisdiction is disputed, enter ‘XX’ and attach Form 7-B.” Form 7-B was the dispute form. The dispute form required signatures from all three agencies. The three agencies had not signed anything in eleven months.

“What happens if I enter a country code?” Dinara asked.

“Then the sample is transferred to that country’s jurisdiction under the treaty.”

“And if I enter a country code that is not on the list?”

Kessler looked at her. “The form only accepts codes from the list.”

“What if the list is wrong?”

“The list is maintained by the United Nations. It is not wrong.”

“What if the country is not on the list because it does not exist?”

Kessler put his pen down. “Why would you enter a country that does not exist?”

Dinara did not answer. She looked at the form. The form had a dropdown with 249 countries. It did not have a field for “no country.” It did not have a field for “the country that is responsible for a gram of rock that nobody can open because three agencies cannot agree on whose law it is.”

Kessler said he would be back tomorrow with Form 7-B. He said the journalist was still in Almaty. He said the European Space Agency had sent a letter. He said the Russian corporation had sent a different letter. He said the Kazakh ministry had not sent a letter but had sent a phone call, which was not the same thing.

Dinara signed the chain-of-custody form that evening. She signed it in the field marked “transferring officer.” She entered the country code. She entered “XX” because the form accepted it, because “XX” was the code for “not assigned,” and because the treaty body’s own manual said that “XX” could be used for samples of unknown jurisdiction pending resolution.

But then she changed it. She changed it to a code that was not on the list. She changed it to “ZZ,” which was not a country code. It was a code that the form’s validation system did not recognize, and the form’s validation system, which was an old system running on an old computer in a room in Vienna, did not reject it because the system had been updated in 2019 and the list of invalid codes had not been updated since 2017, and “ZZ” was not on the invalid list because nobody had ever tried to use it.

The form accepted the code. The form printed a confirmation. The confirmation said: “Sample transferred to jurisdiction: ZZ. Status: pending verification. No further action required until verification complete.”

Dinara printed the confirmation. She put it in the red folder. She closed the folder. She put the folder in the filing cabinet.

Then she went to the freezer. She opened it. The tube was there, in its rack, with the pink ring on its sealant. She did not touch it. She closed the freezer. She locked it with the key that hung on a hook next to the desk.

She walked out of the annex. The door locked behind her. The mountains were dark. The air smelled like autumn and dust and the exhaust from the highway.

The tube stayed in the freezer. The freezer stayed in the annex. The annex was in Kazakhstan, or in Cyprus, or in Germany, depending on which form you read. The tube was in jurisdiction ZZ, which was not a country, which meant it was in no country, which meant that under the treaty it could not be opened by anyone because the treaty said a sample of uncertain origin may not be opened, and the sample’s origin was now, on paper, uncertain in a way that no one had anticipated.

The halophile sat on the sealant. It was alive. It was salt-loving and patient and it did not know about the treaty or the form or the country code or the journalist or the inspector or the mother or the pension. It knew about salt and warmth and the slow chemistry of silicone, and it went on knowing those things in the dark of a freezer that was, on paper, in no country at all.

The customs stamp on the confirmation form was in Kazakh. Nobody at the treaty body could read it. Nobody at the European Space Agency could read it. Nobody at the Russian corporation could read it. Dinara could read it, but Dinara was not there, and the form was in a filing cabinet in an annex outside Almaty, and the filing cabinet was in a room that was, on paper, in jurisdiction ZZ, and the room did not have a key for that.