Free Insistence of Vision by David Brin

students were in a frenzy, half of them babbling in terror while the other half scurried about in a mad mania of excitement, doing what George had asked of them.
    Taking data and maintaining his chrysalis. His cocoon.
    I looked inside. Within the metal casement and its gel sustainment fluid, his skin has been exuding another protective layer, something no mammal has done since long before we grew fur or started lactating to feed our young. A cloud of fibers that tangle and self-organize to form a husk stronger than spider silk.
    I’ve sent for an ultrasound scanner. Meanwhile, I plan to sacrifice one of the rats to find out if my suspicion is correct.
    ᚖ
    Yes, George, I believe you were right, up to a point, and I was wrong. I am now convinced.
    Human beings are larvae and not adults. Congratulations.
    You and I have discovered how to re-start a process our forebears abandoned, so long ago. And yes, if the codon restoration is as good as it seems, so far, then you may be heading for conversion into that long-neglected imago phase. Something completely unknown to any of us.
    Oh, but underneath brilliance, you are, or were, such a dope. This is not how science should be done! You’ve taken a great discovery and plunged ahead recklessly like the mad scientist in some Michael Crichton movie. We are supposed to be open, patient and mature truth seekers. Scientists set an example by avoiding secrecy and haste, holding each other accountable with reciprocal criticism. We spot each others’ errors.
    If you had been patient, I would have explained something to you, George. Something that, evidently, you did not know.
    The caterpillar does not become a butterfly.
    ᚖ
    We dissected one of the rats from its chrysalis, and confirmed my fears. Something my organo-chemist partner would have known, if he ever took Bio 101.
    People think that when it weaves a cocoon around itself, the caterpillar undergoes a radical change in body shape. That its many legs transform themselves somehow into gaudy wings. That its leaf-cutting mouth adjusts and re-shapes into a nectar-sipping proboscis.
    That isn’t what happens at all.
    Instead, after weaving and sealing itself into a pupa shroud, the caterpillar dissolves! It melts into a slurry, super rich in nutrients that feed a completely different creature!
    The embryo of the butterfly – a tiny clump of cells that the caterpillar had been carrying, all along – this embryo now erupts in growth, feeding upon the former caterpillar’s liquefied substance, growing into an entirely new being. One that eventually bursts forth, unfolding its imago wings to flutter toward a destiny that no caterpillar could ever know or envision, any more than an egg grasps the life of a chicken. Any more than the caterpillar understood the compulsion to seal itself in silk, ending its own existence at the command of a biological clock.
    Two entirely distinct and separate life forms, sharing chromosomes and a cycle of life, but using separate genomes that take turns. And no shared brain or neurons or memories to connect them.
    That is how it goes for many insects. The purest form of metamorphosis.
    Of course, things are less rigid among amphibians. The tadpole does transform itself into a frog, instead of horrifically dying to feed its replacement. Or, rather, death and replacement take place piecemeal, gradually, over weeks. The frog might even remember a little of that earlier phase, wriggling and breathing watery innocence. I had hoped to find something like that, when we opened the rat chrysalis. A becoming, rather than wholesale substitution.
    But no.
    Some students gagged, retched, or fainted at the gush of noxious slurry... a rat smoothy, peppered with undissolved teeth... then quailed back in disgust from the weird thing that we found growing at the cocoon’s bottom end. Pale and leathery. Still small, tentative and hungry. Soft, but with ribbed, fetal wings and early glints of claws, plus a mouth that sucked,