You find life on the moon.

 Now, you are not the one on the moon when you find it. That would be the rover, which your team built. It located and harvested the chunk of ice, but that's not the headline the news runs. They say you did it: took the first step, at least. But you know it's not over. You have to keep going.

 You stay in the lab, watching the ice. Your team rotates in and out, in shifts. You are always there, hour after hour. You take the time that was never given to anyone else. You scan every micron for anything. You find a few anythings. They're everything, these six shapes that have been frozen for who knows how long. You will know, you realize. You're not done.

 You break the news to the world the next week, when it's ready. Your press release is short. Then there's the documents, for anyone who's interested. Few are. You don't expect the interviews. But people like to put a face to the discovery. Now, every few seconds of the interview they do cut away to a video of a still image, the unmoving block of ice, but it's nice, your mother texts you, that they're at least showing your face. She asks you if you have time to call and you say that you're stuck in the lab.

 You stick yourself in the lab, mostly. Unfortunately you still do need to eat. You heat up your dwindling stashes of ramen in the mess hall. Your coworkers come in, congratulate you, and a pit develops in your stomach from all the compliments. This doesn't really help the eating. You dismiss your compatriots with a few waves of your hand and pretend to be very interested in the ramen you wolf down. You think about the aliens and you worry that someone else will solve them first. You realize maybe you like being first. That's terrible, you think. You should be happy with the discovery. You should be back in the lab. Why are you eating? You begin to hate yourself and you open the internet instead of talking to anyone — that's generally when that happens.

 They're trending. #aliens#aliensfromthemoon They're boring hashtags, but at least they're descriptive. There are some other things trending, some musicians with poor timing who decided to release their albums the same day you decided to show pictures of frozen microbes to your world. You click and are met with images and captions. People think they're clever. They think the aliens look like faces, especially AA37-54 and AA37-57. They don't call them that. You poke around and it doesn't look like anyone's named the anythings anything yet. The internet sticks words next to 54 and 57 like they're talking to each other. You see the game last night? one says. Debonair. You're not sure why they've decided 57 is an aristocrat, but you keep seeing that line again. It's not very funny, but people fall in love. Corporate gets a hold of it. Two for one breadsticks.Debonair. They don't credit your staff photographer on their ad. You spend a second longer thinking about breadsticks than you wanted to.

 You scroll further. There's a darker side to it. You watch a thirty second video of a face with the background poorly green screened out, now hovering in front of the block of ice. The floating head decrees that the government is lying about everything. These microbes and full bodies and something called a gargantua have been hidden in areas 51 and otherwise since the early 60s. The government just doesn't want the people to know. They say ‘the people' like it's a battle cry. The floating head promises that they'll find evidence of the gargantua and get back to us later. You feel responsible somehow. People are scared. Should you have taken more time before the announcement? There are a lot of people who turn to their religions and ask questions. This leads some to denying the aliens. Others read the texts they have been reading forever ever so slightly differently, to account for the error in their understanding. Some people close their books, crying or smiling. You're not sure what to believe on this aspect of your discovery so you just keep scrolling.

 You see people have made art. You see the shapes of the microbes become more than just solids, frozen. They turn into colors and characters outside of just the simple faces. They are marine and magenta and echoing out in space time, cascading lines painted in rings, mashing against one another, the ice fading into psychedelics. They take these things and make them more than you ever could, you think. You push away your lunch/breakfast/dinner/meal and decide to get back to the lab. You ignore the missed calls on your phone.

 You're back in the lab and you get that feeling that you never actually left. You've fallen asleep at your desk nine nights in a row. It's not entirely comfortable, but you tell everyone who asks you're fine. You wake up to an increase in funding and a new round of interviews. It's not the news this time, nor the people, of rallying cry fame. It's the FBI and the CIA and other organizations that have acronyms no one knows. They ask what comes next and you tell them your plans and your boss backs you up because he knows you and everyone is worried because now you have to study them. The world has had its circus and now the second round comes in. You need to watch and wait and witness them as they are.

 You begin to turn up the heat.

 They'll survive. You've figured this out, through constant scrawling. If they can survive however long they have had to survive out there, they can survive the dethawing. They had to move around at one point, their make-up makes you believe. You think of all the aliens you read about in stories and how they talked and looked vaguely human with limbs and languages and you look at these guys and you think it's silly that you would call them guys at all. They're like tardigrades, survivors against the onslaught of the eons. The six shapes are numbers and not even that. One does not think that anything the other has to say is debonair.

You keep them in the highest tech room anyone has ever seen and you watch them instead of sleeping. They swim in the water. They dance. They touch each other and absorb each other and split off again. They are one and they are many. They don't eat or breathe but they're existing here, even against every odd. They are six shapes and they are one whole and they are alive, simply moving.

 You call your mother.

 "Darling! How's my little xenobiologist doing?"

 "I'm okay, Mom."

 "You're okay? Oh my lordy, with everything happening you're just okay?"

 "I've been working."

 "You're just like your father. You know he didn't take a single sick day, vacation day, anything the last five years of his life? Drove me mad. Drove him six feet under! Ha!" You let out a sad smile. She continues. "Just don't do that, honey. It's not just that he worked himself to death, it's that he didn't actually take the time with it. He could've done good work. Your father was a smart fella. Like me. Sometimes you just have to wait. Like my friend Delores. Oh my lord, when I tell you about the trouble Delores got herself in the other day..." You let her go on for some time. You're never quite sure how Delores' story connects.

 You spend the evening in the lab, watching the shapes through the window. They keep swimming, after however many millenia sitting there, dormant. Were those years wasted? Mabe your mother and these shapes are right. You head home and get some sleep and everything is still there in the morning.