About 08:00, Orba Organics research centre, somewhere in the Pacific, Thursday the 15th of April, 2055.

About 08:00, Orba Organics research centre, somewhere in the Pacific, Thursday the 15th of April, 2055.

Yuki comes in for breakfast while I'm having mine and joins me at the table. After we exchange some small talk, conversation turns to our situation here on the island. It quickly becomes clear that neither of us really knows how to proceed. I only hope that Orba Organics can come up with something given the picture I sent them earlier this morning, or from the results of the autopsy Yuki performed yesterday.

The others show up for breakfast as me and Yuki are finishing ours. We talk about what we might do, but none of them really knows either. Yuki says our best hope is to work on this as a group rather than dividing our efforts, but Shen finishes stuffing his face with his breakfast and buggers off by himself anyway.

After breakfast I contact Sheila to find out if she can shed any light on the creature we captured on camera last night. Unfortunately, she says that she does not recognise it and it is not connected to any Orba Organics projects that she is aware of. Of course, she may not be telling me the truth, but I've no way of knowing.

Meanwhile Yuki has been planning on finding the thing. She's set about making some transponders to tag the chimps with and some transceivers to track them with. The idea is that if we're following a creature, for example by following a trail, we can quickly rule out whether it is one of the chimps we're following or whether it is something else. She makes enough transponders to give one to all the people on the island too.

Now we've got the transponders we just have to get them on the chimps. Maureen says the best way is to use doped food and then shoot the rest with tranq guns. It takes us a while to get them all, but eventually we're happy we've got all the chimps tagged.

Yuki's still scheming though. Now I find myself watching her back while she buries some wire around the outskirts of the chimp enclosure. She says it'll form something like an induction coil and be sensitive enough to pick up something chimp or human sized crossing it. Effectively it's a high-tech tripwire that doesn't need to be touched to trip. I don't understand how it'll work, but I've got faith in Yuki's abilities and besides, I've got no ideas of my own about how to proceed.

By the time we've finished burying the wire and gotten something to eat it's almost 22:00. Having not had much sleep last night I find a quiet corner, put my feet up and get some much needed sleep.

I get woken about 07:30 in the morning. There's another chimp dead in the enclosure. Yuki's tripwire hasn't been tripped and she insists it is working, so was the creature in the enclosure yesterday before the tripwire was there and is it still in there now? Unfortunately, there's only one way to find out.

After much discussion, I, along with Yuki, Sykes and Crash enter the chimp enclosure. Roland and the maintenance techs are all keeping watch on the perimeter. Shen is up at his volcano again. Maybe it'll be today that he gets to witness a small eruption from close by. Real close by. An intimate experience with magma, sulphurous gases or superheated steam would do him the world of good!

Using Yuki's transceivers we can see that all the chimps have formed a group up in the trees. There's obviously nothing to be seen, other than a dead chimp, in the grassy area, so we head under the trees' canopy.

It's still quite early and the sun hasn't risen far. Its slanted rays break through the canopy above us in only a few places and arrow down through what remains of the morning's mist, whose tendrils still glide silently amongst the trunks that stand around us like dispassionate observers.

We've gone 15 or perhaps 20 metres into the trees when Yuki screams. I turn quickly to see the creature bearing down on Sykes. He turns and begins to raise his gun. But he's unable to react quickly enough. The creature grabs his head and Sykes' gun discharges harmlessly into the undergrowth. Sykes goes down, apparently unconscious and for a moment I swear the creature is looking at Sykes' helmet with a bemused look on its face.

It begins to stand and I fire a round into its chest. Crash, a little way off to the side, fires his shotgun and manages to hit its leg. It hardly seems to notice though, other than to begin moving towards me.

I put my faith in firepower and decide to stand my ground. I squeeze off another round and hit its other leg, but still it keeps coming. Crash gets a lucky hit with his shotgun and with the diminished range manages to sever its left arm.

It springs at me, but is perhaps unbalanced and falls a little short. Yuki fires the tranq gun she's carrying, but misses the creature. Fortunately she also misses me, but by a smaller margin.

It stands again and reaches for me. I stretch forward as it does. It almost impales itself on my gun and with the barrel pressed firmly against its sternum, I pull the trigger. It hits me at the same time and knocks me backwards to the ground, but it doesn't get a grip.

Crash hits it with another cartridge and it looks like that last failed grab will really be its last. Yuki comes running over and fires a couple of tranq rounds into its body from close range. "Tranq'ed your arse that time!" she says.

Looking at her she's clearly relieved it's over for now. As my own adrenalin subsides and my brain starts to make sense of all that has just happened, I realise that the look I saw on Yuki's face, barely a minute ago when I turned around after she screamed, showed that right at that moment she was just a scared little girl.

After all, she's only nineteen and she can't have finished her medical training all that long ago. It always surprises me how, when you work and fight alongside someone, you can lose sight of the person within them. It's these brief moments that remind you of someone's human side in a world where we all wear masks.

I blink to re-focus on the world and Yuki is back to being the confident young woman we've all grown used to depending on. I'll always look at her in a slightly different way now though.

She can see I look okay and she turns away and goes back to see how Sykes is. I get back to my feet and Crash is poking hesitantly at the creature with the barrel of his shotgun. It seems to be still alive, just, but the surprising thing is how little blood it seems to have lost from its wounds.

Yuki calls over that Sykes will be fine as he's just a bit stunned. As she helps him to his feet the radio crackles into life. The orbital station has picked up an AV-4 inbound from the West at high speed.

I help Yuki support Sykes and we start to make our way out of the trees. Crash grabs the creature's one remaining arm and starts dragging it behind him as he follows us. By the time we've got to the exit of the enclosure the creature is dead and we're getting the 'hurry up' from the maintenance techs who are eager to see everyone inside the shelter of the buildings. So we leave the creature's body where it now lies and run inside...