Everything in the Spoonful

"It's done," said Uncle Petros, and then his phone rang and he walked out of the garage with it pressed to his ear, leaving the laptop glowing on the workbench between Maya and Soren.

The screen was filling up. Not with pictures. With names.

"How many is that already," said Maya.

Soren scrolled. "It keeps going."

"From one spoon of dirt."

"Half a spoon. He only used half."

Maya leaned in until her nose nearly touched the screen. The list scrolled on its own as the machine kept reading, each line a different living thing the dirt had been hiding.

"Wait," she said. "He didn't grow anything. There's no jars. No little dishes with fuzzy stuff."

"He said you don't have to." Soren found the page in the manual, the one with the corner already soft from being opened. "Most of these can't be grown. Like, ever. Nobody knows how to feed them. They die in a dish."

"Then how is it reading them."

"It's not reading them. It's reading their DNA. You don't need the thing alive. You just need a piece of its instructions, and the machine matches the piece to a name."

Maya sat back. "So a dead one and a live one look the same to it."

"A live one, a dead one, a piece of one." Soren ran his finger down the screen. "It can't tell. It just sees the letters and says, that's this, that's that."

They watched the count climb. Eight hundred. Then past a thousand.

"Soren," Maya said slowly. "For a hundred years, people grew germs in dishes. That's how they found out what lived places."

"Yeah."

"So if most of these die in a dish." She stopped. She was doing the thing where she got to the end before she had the middle. "Then for a hundred years, every time somebody looked at dirt, the only ones that showed up were the ones easy to grow."

Soren's pen stopped over the page. "The picky ones never showed."

"They were there. The whole time. Nobody could see them because they wouldn't sit in a dish."

Neither of them said anything for a second. The machine kept naming things into the quiet.

"That's most of them," Soren said finally, and he flipped back two pages and found the sentence and read it out loud, careful. "It says here that more than ninety nine out of a hundred kinds of microbe have never been grown in a lab."

"Ninety nine." Maya said it like she was tasting it. "So everything we ever knew about what lives in dirt was the one out of a hundred that liked us."

"That liked the dish."

"The dish is us. We made the dish."

Soren wrote that down. He didn't say why. He just wrote it, the pen pressing hard.

Maya stood up and walked to the open garage door and looked at the yard. Plain backyard. A patchy lawn. A hose. The flower bed where Uncle Petros had crouched and dug out half a spoon of nothing.

"It all looks empty," she said.

"It looked empty to everybody," said Soren. "For most of history. People thought dirt was just dirt with a few worms in it."

"And it's this." She turned around. "It's a whole city in half a spoon and we just found out the names of the people because we finally stopped trying to invite them to dinner."

Soren laughed, surprised. "That's actually it, though. That's exactly it. The growing part was the invitation. And the rude ones, the shy ones, the ones who don't eat what we put out, they just never came. So we said they didn't exist."

"How many do you think still don't have names." Maya came back and put both hands flat on the bench. "Like, the machine matches the letters to a name. But what if the letters don't match anything."

Soren went very quiet, and then he scrolled, looking, and there it was, near the bottom, over and over.

"Unclassified," he read. "Unclassified. Unclassified."

"What's that mean."

"It means the machine read the DNA fine. It just doesn't know whose it is." He looked up. "It's somebody. It's alive, or it was. The instructions are real. There's just no name in the book yet."

Maya stared at the word repeating down the screen.

"So those are new," she said.

"Those are nobody-knows."

"From the backyard." Her voice had gone small and fast. "Not the rainforest. Not the bottom of the ocean. The backyard. The flower bed. Past the hose."

"They could be anywhere," said Soren. "They're probably everywhere. They're probably on us." He looked at his own hands. "They're probably on this pen."

Maya pulled out the chair and sat down right in front of the screen, close, watching the unclassified lines pile up under all the named ones.

"Soren," she said. "Half a spoon. He only used half."

They both turned and looked at the little tube on the bench, capped, ordinary, with the other half of the dirt still in it.

Uncle Petros came back in, still half on the phone, and saw their faces, and stopped. "What. What did it find."

"How many of these have names," Maya asked, without looking away from the tube.

"Most of the common ones, sure." He shrugged, the phone against his shoulder. "The rest you just log. Somebody might figure out what they are someday."

"Someday," Maya repeated.

"It's just dirt," Uncle Petros said, and went back to his call.

Soren slid the capped tube across the bench until it sat exactly between them, and Maya put one finger on the cap, and neither of them picked it up yet.

The screen kept scrolling. Unclassified. Unclassified. Unclassified.