Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Those other kids we saw upstairs,” she said as the doors shut and the elevator started to move. “Do they get to go to space?”

  Both her parents shook their heads. “Only Materials Acquisitions people go to space,” her mom said. “Those kids’ parents are in other departments. I know at least one of them worked on that documentary you saw. Maybe her kid will learn about that today.”

  The elevator stopped, the doors whisking open. Where they were looked nothing like where they’d come from. It was a basement, all right. It looked like the basement of her school. Utility closets. A water fountain. A restroom. Where was the space stuff?

  The hall funneled them through a security checkpoint, where Jillian’s wristband and her parents’ chips got scanned yet again—this time by a pair of armed guards. “Just an extra little check-in for the downstairs stuff,” Jillian’s mom told her as they continued down the hallway. “Like at the airport!”

  Just when Jillian was beginning to think her whole day was going to be nothing but walking from one scanner to the next, her parents stopped at a door with a plaque beside it reading, ROOM 121: MATERIALS ACQUISITIONS.

  In the doorway she paused, suddenly nervous again for no real reason except that this, all of this, was new. The fact that she’d wanted it—desperately—made no difference to her sweaty palms, her hammering pulse. She almost blurted out: Is it dangerous in there?, even though nobody had told her that it would be. But she didn’t think space explorers would ask that kind of question, so she bit it back. What she heard herself say instead was, “So there’s no other kids here?”

  “Nope,” her dad said. “Other departments.”

  “Which isn’t to say you won’t make new friends here,” her mom said mysteriously. “You never know.”

  Room 121 was clean and white and smaller than Jillian had expected. Maybe the size of three or four classrooms stuck together. One whole side of it was a glass wall like a giant window, separating the main part of the room from a darkened area Jillian couldn’t see into. In front of that were a bunch of chairs facing wide, flat screens. A man in a white coat like a doctor’s coat was sitting in front of one. Things changed on the screen as he blinked at them.

  From across the room Jillian couldn’t see what was displayed on the screen. Columns of numbers scrolling past, it looked like. Some complicated-looking diagrams. A woman in an identical white coat came over and blinked at a few of the diagrams herself, nodded, and walked off. Then the diagrams vanished and were replaced by an image that looked like the framed landscape photos in the lobby upstairs.

  A lot like Earth, but . . . not. The sky was too green, the dirt too orange. Spiky black rocks and strange plants like piles of purple feathers. Along the top edge of the image was a string of letters and numbers: 80 UMa c / 191.43 N / 27.88 W.

  80 UMa c. That’s where her parents were going.

  And it wasn’t a photo. It was a video. As Jillian watched, a breeze rustled one of the feather-plants, making it stretch out long violet fingers. They looked like they were reaching for something.

  Jillian took a step forward to get a closer look. In an hour her parents might be standing in that frame. In a few years it might be her.

  Her mom intercepted her. “Over here.”

  “Is that—”

  “You’ll see,” her mom said, with the kind of voice she got when she had a really great surprise up her sleeve. “Come on.”

  Jillian gave the screen one more wistful glance. Then she followed her mom to a corner that looked weirdly like it had been stolen from some gym’s locker room, shower stalls and all. Each stall was totally enclosed, with its own private changing area. Jillian’s mom handed her a folded blue jumpsuit. She nodded toward the stall closest to the wall. “That one’s you.”

  Jillian made a face. “I took a shower this morning.”

  “Not like this one. This one’s for decontamination. We’re covered in Earth microbes. Germs. You wouldn’t believe the trouble they cause when they get off-world.”

  At off-world, Jillian’s hope spiked, but settled back down when she realized this was just another safety precaution. For the same reason you had to cover your mouth when you sneezed, or wash your hands after using the bathroom, she had to take a fancy shower. Even if she wasn’t the one going to space.

  It didn’t seem fair. Not even a little bit. But she’d promised herself she wouldn’t complain. She’d take a hundred fancy showers if that was what real StellaTech materials acquisitions people did.

  Jillian lifted one shoulder of the jumpsuit experimentally. The fabric felt slithery and oddly cold.

  “Part of the StellaTech experience,” her dad called out, emerging from one of the stalls in a blue jumpsuit of his own. “Start your workday clean.”

  “What do I do with my old clothes?”

  “There’s a vacuum-seal bag in the changing stall. Put them in there before you hit the shower. They’re just as full of germs as you are. Don’t worry, you can grab them after we get back.”

  Back? We?

  She must have frozen. There it was again, that stupid hope, slamming her heart like a punching bag. He meant back from the tour. They’d promised her a tour of their lab. At the end of it they’d leave: Jillian to Aunt Alex’s, her parents to space. From this moment until then was her one and only chance to make a good impression.

  She looked at the showers. Then she looked back over her shoulder. More of the panels were lit up now, more people in white coats sitting in those chairs, and someone had turned on power to whatever was in that glassed-in area beyond. The lights were still out beyond the glass, but something back there was humming rather loudly. It didn’t sound like any kind of machine she knew. It sounded more like a swarm of bees. A really, really big swarm of bees. She was terrified of bees.

  Jillian narrowed her eyes at it. “What’s making that—”

  “Shower first,” her mom said. “Questions after. I don’t mean to rush you, but we’re kind of on the clock here.”

  Responsible, Jillian reminded herself. Like a space explorer. She decided not to let that bee sound make her nervous. They wouldn’t let actual bees into a space lab. It had to be something else. She’d find out in a minute. But first she had to get clean. Responsible space explorers didn’t bring germs to other planets. Rule number two.

  Turned out her mom was right. It was nothing like the shower at home. Even calling it a shower seemed like a bit of a stretch. For one thing, there was no soap or shampoo. For another thing, there was no water. Jillian stood under what she thought was a showerhead until it started misting her with something chemical-smelling and invisible. She counted to ten, then opened her mouth to ask when she was supposed to come out, but before she got the words out, the mist stopped.

  Even getting dressed was weirder than back home. The jumpsuit fit her all wrong. Too tight, too loose, too short, too long. “It’s the wrong size,” she yelled through the curtain.

  “Touch the sensor,” her mom called back from outside the stall.

  “The what?”

  “Button thing at the front of the neckline.”

  Jillian located it. It looked like no button she’d ever seen. It was more like a patch of silver fabric sewn onto the blue. She poked it with a fingertip. With a whispery sound, the jumpsuit began reshaping itself to fit her. The sleeves shortened, the pant legs widened, the torso elongated.

  “Mom, the suit is moving.”

  “Yeah, they do that. Cool, huh?”

  Jillian had seen smart clothes before, of course, but she’d never worn any. “Really cool,” she said, watching the fabric finish tailoring itself. “I want my next jacket to be made out of this stuff.”

  “Sure, right after we win the lottery. That suit probably cost more than our car, so enjoy it while you can. Anyway, when you’re done, come on out. We haven’t even gotten to the good part.
”

  When it was done resizing itself, the jumpsuit felt like a comfortable pair of pajamas. Jillian stretched out her arms and legs for inspection. “Huh,” she said.

  But something else was catching her attention. Without the spray noise of the shower, the beehive sound was—louder? Closer? Both? Whatever it was, it was puzzling. Jillian liked puzzles. She stood there for a second, trying to decide if it sounded more like bees or like machinery. At last she settled on neither.

  But she had no idea what it did sound like. She gave herself a second, like it was a riddle she was trying to figure out on her own. But her parents were waiting for her, the whole mission was waiting for her, and making them late was, like, the exact opposite of being responsible.

  She pushed the curtain open and froze.

  The area behind the glass wall was lit up now, and in it she could see the silver ring of the portal. It hadn’t been turned on yet, so it just sat there, twice her height, shining and still. Like it would open any second and fix on her, some sleeping monster’s eye.

  Waiting in front of it was the quadpod, shiny and new, as if it had fallen out of the documentary to land there. Part spacecraft, part habitation, part storage container, part research lab, just big enough to fit her parents and enough gear to see them through a week off-world—and whatever they’d found on that world worth bringing back.

  It sat there like a bright orange egg ten feet across. Lights played across its surface, responding to the blinks and midair gesturing of another white-coated worker. It flashed blue in one place, swirled red in another, then began to glow gently as some unseen mechanism inside it spun up. The worker nodded, spoke briefly into her wrist implant, and moved on to inspect the portal, which Jillian noticed was now set with tiny red lights, softly blinking on and off.

  But it was nothing beside the thing that was hovering at eye level not five long steps away, almost invisible but not quite.

  A shape on the air like a shifting, floating glob of water. The million-bees sound was coming from it.

  Whatever it was, it was absolutely the weirdest thing Jillian had ever seen. She couldn’t tell whether it was actually bees or some kind of machine that somehow looked like bees, but she knew, suddenly, certainly, that whatever it was, this thing was watching her. Like it was waiting to see what she would do.

  “That isn’t really bees. Is it? Please tell me it’s not really bees.”

  The next thing she knew, her mom was beside her, one arm around her shoulders, grinning like she’d just single-handedly pulled off the greatest surprise party in the history of the known universe.

  “That,” her mom said, “is the good part.”

  As if in response, the hovering thing turned iridescent, rainbowy and slick as an oil spill. Then it broke into five pieces. Each piece changed color and somehow shaped itself into a ball, and the balls began to juggle themselves—red, blue, green, yellow, orange—faster and faster until they blurred into a ring. Then the ring flipped over on its side and slowly stopped spinning. When it came to rest, it was a rainbowy pancake, and it was purring—purring?—like the world’s weirdest cat.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to say this,” her mom said. “Jillian, I’d like you to meet SABRINA.”

  Chapter 2

  Jillian blinked hard, like that would help her eyes see something different. Something that didn’t hurt her brain to look at. It was like the nastiest optical illusion ever invented, and her vision went swimmy trying to bring the thing into focus and keep it there. It wouldn’t stay still long enough for her mind to land on it properly. It was going from pancake to ring to snake to spikes to cloud to star faster than her eyes could even track. The thing’s purring was so low-pitched that Jillian didn’t so much hear it as feel it, itching in her spine and teeth, her belly, and the backs of her hands. “But—”

  “Semi-Autonomous Bio-Reconnoitering Intelligent Nanobot Array,” her dad said helpfully. Like the name of the thing was the problem. “SABRINA.”

  “No. That? It—” Jillian’s mouth had forgotten how to make sentences.

  “Like on the t-shirt we got you,” her mom said. “Remember?”

  But that was exactly the problem. Jillian did remember. SABRINA was practically the StellaTech mascot. It was in their ads, their merchandising, wearing the company logo on its side like a tattoo. But that SABRINA looked harmless. Cuddly. A little bit adorably dumb. Like what alien kids might keep as pets instead of puppies. You could picture that SABRINA chasing a ball or curling up with you on the couch while you watched cartoons. Stealing your snacks. This thing looked like it fell out of the kind of scary movie Aunt Alex wouldn’t let Jillian see.

  “I didn’t know all the letters stood for something,” she said at last. “I thought it was just, like, a name.”

  “That’s called an acronym,” her dad said.

  “I know,” Jillian replied distantly. Too many conflicting emotions were barreling through her, all at once, and if someone had asked her right this second if she was okay, she wasn’t sure what the answer would be.

  SABRINA—the real one, not the mascot in the logo—was classified technology. Nobody but StellaTech people got to see it. It wasn’t even in the documentary. And here it was in front of her. It was beyond a doubt the absolute coolest thing Jillian had ever set eyes on. It was like something out of a movie, in the strangest and best possible way.

  Compared to the SABRINA on her t-shirt, though, or the plush SABRINA that used to protect her from nightmares when she was little, the real one was a lot to get used to.

  “SABRINA’s extremely cutting-edge,” Jillian’s mom said. “We know how much you wanted to learn all about this place, and it’s one of the coolest toys we have here. You’re the first nonemployee to get a personal introduction.”

  “Not to mention the first kid,” her dad said.

  “Ever?” Jillian asked.

  “Ever.”

  Her mom’s arms were still around her shoulders, but Jillian wasn’t quite ready to step away. She stayed where she was, examining SABRINA. It had settled into a kind of nonthreatening blobby shape, like a water balloon that had just rolled down a hill and come to rest. It was very, very still. It looked like the thing was listening to her speak.

  “It stopped moving.”

  “It’s trying not to freak you out. It knows it can be a bit much to take in. Say hi if you want. It’s okay.”

  Jillian opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Because all at once, too fast to track, SABRINA had changed again. Now it looked exactly like it did as toys and plushies. In the ads. Printed on the t-shirt Jillian had slept in just last night. This version of SABRINA was pudgy and round, with a little swish of a tail and pointy ears like a fox. It was flame-colored, shading from blue through white-yellow to orange and red. Even there, on its side, in silvery white, the company logo: sixteen stars in a circle with an arrow shooting through.

  SABRINA stood on six fat little legs for exactly three seconds, then plopped back on its butt and tilted its head at her like a dog waiting for a treat. Even its face was the same. The same huge, cartoony eyes, the same contented smile.

  It was completely adorable. But Jillian wasn’t quite ready to trust it just yet. She remembered the bee-swarm shape too clearly. Which one was its true form, the puppy or the swarm? Or something else she hadn’t seen yet? Did it even have a true form?

  “Is it . . . alive?” she asked. “Or a machine, or . . . ?”

  “Neither, exactly,” her mom said. “And also a bit of both. Think of, like, a swarm of very tiny robots, each one smaller than a grain of sand. But they all share a mind. SABRINA’s patterned off of hive minds in the animal kingdom here on Earth. Ant colonies. Bee colonies. Flocks of birds. Schools of fish. That sort of thing. Except unlike with bees or ants, there’s no part of SABRINA that corresponds to a queen. No one part gives the com
mands. No centralized brain. The mind is dispersed through the array. Like if every part of you could think, from the ends of your hair to the soles of your feet. And every part had the same thoughts at the same time.”

  Looking at SABRINA, Jillian could easily believe that. The way it changed shape effortlessly, gathering and scattering, made her think of a gag she’d seen in clips from retro cartoons. Where an angry swarm of bees, chasing a character, would communicate by making shapes. A question mark for where’d he go? An arrow for that way! and maybe an exclamation point for good measure.

  SABRINA was all that and much more. Watching it, even in a stable shape like it was now, was mesmerizing. Like staring into a fire.

  “—back, please,” one of the workers in white coats was saying.

  Jillian pried her attention off SABRINA and drew the worker into focus. “Wha—?”

  The woman smiled tightly. “Step back, please.”

  Jillian looked down. Somehow she had taken several steps away from her mom and toward SABRINA without knowing, and was reaching one hand out like she wanted to touch it.

  She jumped back like she’d seen a snake in her path. “Sorry,” she muttered, embarrassed.

  “This is Dr. Park,” her mom said, putting her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “She’s SABRINA’s handler. We asked her to take a few minutes out of her day to give you a personal demonstration of what SABRINA could do. We’ll be right over there going over some last-minute paperwork while you hang out here with her. That okay?”

  Jillian swallowed. She glanced at SABRINA, then at Dr. Park. Weird as SABRINA clearly was, it had made no move to hurt her.

  “Sure,” she said. She smiled at Dr. Park. “Nice to meet you.”