Believe it or not, this story doesn't begin in the secret laboratory of a mad scientist, rife with terrifying inventions and contraptions, or in a heavily guarded government facility, filled with alien creatures and classified secrets. No, it begins in the single suite dorm room of one curious, and rather resourceful, young black woman: one Nia Jones.
Nia Jones was a pretty beautiful person, her melanated skin a dark shade of brown, her stature tallish and rather curvy, her eyes a deep cocoa in color, and her frizzy poof of loose curls so dusky that it's brown was almost black, but she never really made a point of noticing it. She was kind of a shut-in, to be frank, preferring to keep to herself in most cases, and focusing on doing what she loved: experimenting.
Ever since Nia was a little girl, she'd loved science: an interest that was strong enough to get her through school and into university, which was fully paid for by a STEM major scholarship and a presidential award. With the freedom to study whatever she wished, so long as she kept up her grades, Nia chose the two branches of science that interested her the most: Microbiology, with a chosen minor in General Chemistry. Given access to a lab, a whole new world opened up for Nia. Now, she could experiment in a safe, sanitized environment, the likes of which had the tools and gear she needed to make everything run without catastrophic failure! It was a dream come true!
The current project she'd been working on was based off of an idea she'd had back in high school, one based off of the Comamonadaceae bacterium "Ideonella sakaiensis": a nifty little organism capable of breaking down PET as an energy source. A creature that could do something like that was amazing, even if it was too small for a human eye to see, but Nia's idea was a bit more out there. What if she could cultivate an organism that could do the exact opposite, one that, when given organic material, produced plastics as a byproduct? Not one to dawdle about pondering if her idea was possible, Nia set to work in her university's lab as soon as possible, breeding generation after generation of bacterium until, a few months into her experiment, she'd finally cultivated a colony capable of producing a chain of polyethylene: the simplest plastic by structure. Spurred onwards by her success, Nia didn't stop there, working to grow her colony and force them to evolve new processes.
By the time her experiment reached its conclusion, Nia was working with... mixed results, shall we say. She most certainly managed to make her colony of plastic-producing bacteria evolve, but, well, she couldn't quite call them bacteria anymore. Some time in the past few months, the colony had grown a bit too large and had started to collapse, too large to sustain itself on the sample Nia had been feeding it. In a last ditch effort to survive, a few of the bacterium had, well, fused together, consolidating into a single cell to better share resources, and before long, more and more members of the colony started following suit. By the end of the month, each and every cell within the colony had consolidated into a single cell, one the size of an entire colony. Now, normally, one would call something like this an amoeba, but that didn't quite fit in Nia's eyes.
Thus, Nia had taken to calling it a slime, due to its large size, round shape, and shiny surface. With the mass of the whole colony inside of it, this slime was about the size of a tennis ball, every inch of its bubble-like form dedicated to finding and absorbing material. and, despite her integrity as a noble scientist, Nia couldn't help but call it cute. As such, she kept it in a terrarium in her dorm's bedroom, taking care to keep it moist, fed, and safely contained.
Or so she thought.
One night, Nia decided to stay in the lab a few hours later than normal, just to finish up some schoolwork she was a little behind on. Of course, that meant leaving her slime alone for a few more hours than she normally did, but she made sure its membrane was moist before she left, so it should be fine.
The slime was not fine, in fact. It was hungry and confused. As far back as it could tell, food always arrived at a certain time, and that time had long since passed. Meandering aimlessly around its terrarium as it usually did had turned up nothing but the lumps of plastic it could not break down. It had to find food soon, or it would begin to diminish. To that end, the slime began to get agitated, its form shivering, then bumping against the edge of its terrarium with a steady rhythm, each push a bit stronger than the last. Before long, the slime's pushes managed to move its terrarium, slowly but surely nudging the container to the edge of its table. One final shove toppled the terrarium to the floor, and with a wet splat, the slime bounced out of its familiar environment and into the open space of Nia's room.
Still hungry, the slime forged forwards, ponderously rolling its form across the ground until it found another barrier: Nia's bedroom door. Now, the slime might not have had conventional sense, but it could more or less tell where it could find sustenance, and its receptors were telling it that such material could be found on the other side of its obstruction. The slime wasted little time, flattening its shape until it was small enough to slip under the crack, then sliding out of Nia's room and into the rest of the dorm's suite, invigorated by the scent of sustenance.