Category: Sean McMullen

The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen

The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen (Analog, September-October 2020)1 has as its protagonist a lab technician called Lucian, and who gets a request from a psychologist called Alice Marshall to make a wearable device for Leo Hawker, one of her patients: Hawker apparently sees a naked water nymph whenever he goes near bodies of water. Lucian subsequently constructs a portable electroencephalograph for Hawker to wear but, against Marshall’s express wishes, he also includes a concealed camera to record what Hawker sees when he is having his hallucinations.
The next part of the story details a test run of the device and also gives us more information about the three characters. Then, when Lucian and Marshall are out for dinner one night, Lucian gets a notification that Hawker has gone out on one of his regular runs. Lucian leaves Marshall and goes back to his lab to watch the camera, and subsequently hears Hawker talk to someone who isn’t visible on the video feed. Lucian then sees Marshall fall face first into the pool and rushes to the location to save him, whereupon he briefly sees a woman dressed in a lab coat standing waist deep in the water. Later, when Lucian examines the ECG and the film, he sees no sign of a woman, and realises that what he saw does not match what Hawker has described seeing.
Four weeks after his near-drowning Hawker resigns from his job, sets up an investment consultancy, and starts associating with a more glamourous set of people; he also refuses Marshall’s requests for further brain scans. This change in Hawker’s behaviour (spoiler) prompts Lucian to speculate that there was another personality lying dormant within Hawker—one that revealed itself by the nymph hallucinations, and which was born during the period of oxygen starvation. This prompts Lucian go back to the pond to meet his own lab-coat dressed “nymph,” which he believes will birth, as it did with Hawker, the dormant chrysalis within him. However, Lucian turns away at the last moment, and nevertheless becomes successful anyway.
The problem with this story is that Lucian’s speculation about the chrysalis idea isn’t convincing, it is introduced too late, and ends up essentially unrelated to his concluding personal development (although there is a note of ambiguity at the end). That said, Lucian—a sly, unethical, and slightly chippy character—makes for an interesting narrator. So, in conclusion, a well told story based on an unlikely and/or unconvincingly framed idea.
** (Average). 6,450 words.

1. Rather surprisingly this story won the 2020 Analog Readers’ Poll (Analytical Laboratory) for Best Short Story. Or maybe not a surprise, given SF readers’ penchant for latent supermen stories (Slan, etc.)