Parasite p-1

by Mira Grant

  “Tansy can be a little overly enthusiastic about the wrong things sometimes; I’m sorry about that,” said the woman. I recognized her voice from the phone. This was the person we had come to meet. She was still smiling, and she wasn’t looking at me. I blinked, following her gaze to Nathan. He was staring at her. He wasn’t saying a word. He was just staring.

  “Um,” I said.

  “I would have come out to meet you myself, but I avoid open spaces these days,” said the woman. “It’s dangerous for me to go places where I might be photographed. You’ve been scanned three times since you entered the building; I know that you’re clean. If you weren’t, you would never have made it this far. I’ll give you a memory stick to attach to your GPS when you leave here. It will create a set of false routes and locations for you, so that it looks like you went to a few perfectly reasonable places today. I do appreciate your coming. I know you’ve both had a difficult morning.”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  The woman smiled, and didn’t say anything.

  But Nathan did. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead right now?”

  “It turns out ‘dead’ can be a state of mind as much as it is a state of being,” said the woman in the wheelchair, closing the door to her office. It was a proper office, too, not a makeshift space like the others we had passed in the bowling alley. This had been the bowling alley manager’s space, back when there was a bowling alley to manage. Now it was hers. “Can I get the two of you anything?”

  “I’d like some answers, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Who are you? Why did Nathan call you ‘Mom’? Are you his mother? Where have you been? Why did you contact me?”

  “Do you have grape juice?” asked Nathan.

  The woman smiled. “Always.” She wheeled her way toward the fridge. As she went, she said, “To answer your last question first, Sal, I contacted you because you seemed to want to know what was going on, and I felt it was time to begin trying to tell you. I waited this long because I needed SymboGen to trust you—no, I’m not going to ask you to play spy for me, I have better-trained people who take care of the messy aspects of the business, and frankly, you don’t meet my standards. But until they trusted you enough to let you out without a detail trailing you at all times, I couldn’t risk trying to reach out. You needed to be curious enough to take steps on your own, and free enough to keep going once you’d taken them. You needed, if it’s not too cutesy to say, to go out alone.”

  “And the rest of it? Your name? Do you have a name? Are you Nathan’s mother?”

  “I suspected it was you as soon as I saw the note,” said Nathan. “I couldn’t think of anybody else who would think to use quotes from Don’t Go Out Alone as a code.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” She opened the fridge, pulling out a bottle of grape juice. “There are glasses in the cabinet behind you, Nathan.” She glanced my way. “We use real glass. None of the dangerous chemical outgassing you can get from reusable plastic, and none of the ethically questionable waste you can get from using disposable.”

  “Mom,” said Nathan. There was a warning note in his tone. “Sal’s asking you some pretty sincere questions. Can you maybe answer them?”

  “I’m trying to work my way around to it,” she said. Then she sighed and turned, wheeling her way back to me. “I’m sorry, Sal. I really am. I’ve been thinking of this day for so long that I suppose I wasn’t ready for the way that it would make me feel. I don’t mean to be rude. I just don’t have the greatest social skills in the world. I never did, but after spending ten years underground, I’ve lost a lot of the fine edges I’d managed to develop. Forgive me?”

  “If you’ll tell me who you are,” I said.

  She smiled a little. “Ah. The biggest question of all. Well, Sal, when I lived with Nathan and his father, my name was Surrey Kim. I had a PhD in genetic engineering and parasitology, and I worked for a small medical technology firm. We were going to do great things, assuming we could ever get space and funding. There was a man I knew from school. He was very rich. He wanted to get even richer. And he had a dream. It was a big, crazy dream, one that could lead to a way of curing the ill effects of our overpurified environment. He approached me and asked if I was willing to help. It was a fascinating proposal. It was innately flawed, and it was going to make millions for him, and for his company, which he called ‘SymboGen.’ Maybe billions.

  “But there were problems. The plan would require early and aggressive human testing, and there was a good chance we could all go to jail for the rest of our lives if things went wrong. My family needed the money. I needed to do the work. It’s hard to explain that in a way that doesn’t sound crazy, but it’s true—once I heard what he was doing, I needed to be part of it. It was all my work, all my theories, wrapped up in one big, beautiful possibility. So I agreed, as long as SymboGen could guarantee my family wouldn’t be hurt by my actions.” She smiled sadly, glancing toward Nathan, who was pouring himself a glass of grape juice. “Surrey Kim died in a boating accident that same year. Her body was never recovered. I had six months with my family while they got my new identity in order, planted the publications, created the academic credits. I have to give them this much. They knew what they were doing. No one ever questioned my validity.”

  I stared at her. A blonde woman who worked in parasitology and genetic engineering, talking about working with SymboGen when it was still a small company, who worried about them finding her… there was only one person she could possibly be. “Dr. Cale?” I whispered.

  “At the moment, yes.” Her smile broadened. “It truly is lovely to meet you, Sal. I’ve been waiting for a very long time. And yes, I am really Nathan’s mother. Can’t you see the resemblance?”

  I frowned at her. She had wavy blonde hair, blue eyes, and a roundish face, with no hard lines or sharp angles. Nathan, on the other hand, had dark hair and eyes—both inherited from his father—and strong features. They couldn’t have looked less alike. And yet, when she turned her head, I could see something of him in the way she held herself, buried in the expectant half-lift of her eyebrow and the curl of her lips.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I can see it. But how…?”

  “I had been a bit wild in my youth,” said Dr. Cale, as calmly as she had offered us something to drink. “I didn’t always follow lab protocols, I didn’t always check my math before I moved forward, and some people got hurt. I thought that all of that was behind me, but when SymboGen wanted me on board for the D. symbogenesis project, I found out my tracks hadn’t been covered quite as well as I always assumed.”

  My eyes widened and I glanced to Nathan, alarmed. How would he be taking this?

  With absolute calm, apparently. He was leaning against the counter, sipping his tumbler of grape juice. He smiled a little when he caught my look, a wry twist to his lips. “I knew she wasn’t dead,” he said. “I even knew she was Shanti Cale, and that she’d disappeared after leaving SymboGen. When she didn’t get into contact with either me or Dad, I figured it was because she knew something we didn’t.”

  “I knew it still wasn’t safe,” said Dr. Cale. “I always wanted to reach out to you, but there wasn’t a way to do it without endangering you.”

  “Aren’t you endangering him now?” I asked, looking back to her. “And me? If being around you endangers people, aren’t you endangering me?”

  “You’re part of what made it so dangerous to contact Nathan,” said Dr. Cale. “SymboGen was watching you, and that meant I couldn’t reach out to him until I knew whether you could be trusted. And before you ask the next question, no. No, Nathan didn’t know I was watching you; no, he didn’t get involved with you because I asked him to. He did it because he is a man, and you’re a very pretty girl. I like you. I’ve seen a great deal of security footage, and I approve of the way you treat my son.”

  There was a clank behind me. I turned to see that Nathan had set his tumbler on the counter and was covering his face with his
hand. “Mom,” he said, sounding embarrassed.

  “What? I’m still your mother. I get to pass judgment on your dates. I admit, getting involved with an amnesiac is a little unorthodox, but your father was a teaching assistant in one of my math classes while I was in school, so I suppose being a little unorthodox runs in the family.” Dr. Cale’s resemblance to Nathan was much more pronounced when she grinned.

  “Can we get back to the point, please?” asked Nathan, sounding put-upon.

  “Where were we? Oh, yes—SymboGen was blackmailing me to get me to join their big secret project. More precisely, Steven was blackmailing me, and if I’m being entirely honest, he didn’t have to blackmail very hard. I loved my husband very much. I loved my son. But they were offering me the chance to do the research I’d been dreaming of for my entire life, and in the end, I wasn’t strong enough to refuse. Maybe that makes me a bad person. It certainly made me a bad mother. But I was always the woman who said, ‘Yes, I’ll go.’ I was always the one who went out alone, no matter how many warnings I got. No matter how many people reminded me that I couldn’t necessarily go back again.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “This is all really interesting, and sort of weird, since we’re in an old bowling alley in the middle of nowhere and everything, but what does this have to do with you calling me here? What is it you know that we need to know?”

  “ ‘If you ask the questions…’” quoted Dr. Cale, a warning note in her voice.

  “We want to know,” said Nathan.

  She nodded. “All right. If you’re sure. Follow me, both of you.” She gripped the wheels of her chair, turning herself around before rolling toward the door. We followed Dr. Cale out of the office and back into the makeshift lab filling the bowling alley.

  She talked as we made our way across the main room, explaining what the various lab stations were for and what the various lab-coated people were doing there. Some were technicians, working to keep other people’s research from collapsing in their absence. Others were doing research of their own, so caught up in their little worlds that they barely noticed us passing. One woman was milking a large brown snake into a jar, cooing sweet nothings at it as she pressed down on the top of its triangular head.

  Dr. Cale caught me looking at the snake handler and said, “That’s Dr. Hoffman. She’s a herpetologist, specializing in reptile parasites. She’s been with me for about seven years now. The snake’s name is Kyle. He’s an Australian coastal taipan. She’s been doing some really remarkable things with his venom recently…” She began rambling again, talking about the neurotoxic properties of taipan venom and its effects on various types of tapeworms. I didn’t tune her out—I was listening as hard as I could—but it was like the days right after I first woke up in the hospital, when everyone around me was talking, and I couldn’t understand a word.

  Dr. Cale led us to the far lane, where a light box the length of the wall had been set up, allowing for the display of a variety of X-ray films. She stopped near the middle of the lane. There was nowhere for Nathan and me to sit, so we stood, looking at her expectantly.

  “I was, in a very real way, the reason the Intestinal Bodyguard was able to succeed. Steven was smart and ambitious, but he was looking in the wrong direction. The official literature says that he started work on Diphyllobothrium yonagoensis, a species of tapeworm that preferentially parasitizes fish.”

  “But the Intestinal Bodyguard is based off… what you just said,” I protested. I recognized the name from the lectures I’d been forced to sit through, even if I couldn’t pronounce it correctly. “They used a fish tapeworm.”

  “No, dear,” said Dr. Cale, almost gently. “I used a fish tapeworm. They used Taenia solium, the pork tapeworm. I was able to keep very little of their research once I came on board, because they’d been using an inherently dangerous parasite. Not that any parasites are completely safe—the one we eventually went with had its dangers even before we started tinkering with the building blocks of its DNA. I think you’ll find that very little about the official history of D. symbogenesis is actually true. Most of it is pretty fictions and lies that can’t be disproven this late in the game. The Intestinal Bodyguard worked the way that it was supposed to, Steven Banks became a hero, and the rest of the development team became… expendable. We were a liability. Richard was consumed with guilt over what we’d done, and I was considered too likely to talk. By that point, you see, Steven had created this whole backstory for us. We met in college, we were the best of friends, and so on, and so on. So if he did anything to hurt my family, I could discredit him by revealing his lies. It was the nuclear option, for both of us. We quietly agreed that I would fade into the background.” She pursed her lips, looking unhappy. “Not that I intended for it to be quite such a long absence, but life does have its way of throwing you little curveballs when you let yourself get too cocky.”

  “Is this leading into why you’re in the wheelchair now?” asked Nathan.

  Dr. Cale smiled. “I was wondering if you’d noticed that I was suddenly shorter. Then again, you’re a lot taller. Maybe you just thought this was what happened to all mothers as their sons grew up.”

  “I’m a doctor, Mom,” Nathan said. “I understand human anatomy.”

  “And have I told you yet how proud I am of you?” Dr. Cale rolled herself closer to the wall, pressing a button on the base of the light box. The nearest piece of wall began to glow a steady white, backlighting the four X-ray films displayed there. All four showed a human spine, from different angles—front, back, left side, and right side. I thought it might be the same spine, although I didn’t know enough about anatomy to be sure.

  In all four images, a white mass obscured the lower part of the spine, just above the pelvis. It looked like someone had taken correction fluid and scribbled on the negative, wiping away large parts of the spine.

  Nathan frowned, stepping closer to the light box. “Is this a tumor?” he asked, indicating the white mass.

  “Not quite,” said Dr. Cale. She sighed. “Human testing was a priority at SymboGen. We weren’t supposed to test on ourselves, naturally, and I didn’t. I might be fond of cutting corners, but I wasn’t a fan of risking my own life when I had volunteers perfectly willing to risk theirs.”

  “Are you telling me this is a tapeworm?”

  “Let me get there, Nathan. I know you. If I don’t give you the background now, you’ll go racing off and never give me the chance to explain. I need to take things at my own pace. Can you let me do that?”

  Nathan frowned at her, the light flashing off his glasses obscuring his eyes so completely that I couldn’t tell whether or not he was annoyed. I answered for both of us, saying, “We can be patient.”

  “That remains to be seen.” Dr. Cale settled back in her chair, folding her hands in her lap. “The Intestinal Bodyguard went through several generations, with a wide variety of different genetic makeups. The generation that eventually went on the market was less… robust… than some of the early worms had been, and that was good, because those early worms had a tendency to grow more than they were supposed to. Because they grew so fast, they demonstrated the potential dangers of the Intestinal Bodyguard—primarily, that the tapeworm could endanger the host if it reached a certain size. The growth of D. symbogenesis was retarded to guarantee that it would reach that size only after more than two years had passed, creating a ‘safety margin’ where balance could be maintained between parasite and host.”

  “That’s why the two-year replacement requirement,” said Nathan. “That never made sense to me. Nature doesn’t work on such a tidy schedule.”

  “Exactly. They don’t die after two years. They never did. The antiparasitic drugs take care of the old tapeworm, and a new one is put in place without anyone realizing that there was ever a risk.” Dr. Cale shook her head. “If it had ever gotten out, it would have been the end of SymboGen.”

  “And a lot of people would have been hurt,” I said.

  D
r. Cale seemed to wave my concerns away, continuing, “Everyone was meant to forget about the early generations, even though the final product was heavily influenced by their design. When Steven sent the word that the IPO was coming, I saw the writing on the wall. Eventually, there’d be so much money in the picture that everyone who had been there in the early stages would be in danger. We’d know too much. Well, I knew I’d need some kind of insurance if I was going to guarantee my safety—and by extension, yours, Nathan. Since I didn’t participate in the human testing, I was a suitable host.”

  The Intestinal Bodyguard was fiercely territorial, and wouldn’t tolerate the presence of another worm in the body. Supposedly, this meant that a second tapeworm introduced into the body would just fail to thrive, and would eventually starve to death. According to some of the stories Nathan had told me, the first tapeworm would actually attack and devour the second. I wasn’t clear on how that happened, since tapeworms weren’t supposed to be that intelligent. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

  Nathan, on the other hand, did want to know. “What did you do, Mom?” he almost whispered.

  “I went back into my lab and got one of the early versions of D. symbogenesis out of cold storage. And then I implanted it in myself, so that I could carry it out of the building without anyone the wiser. Most of the employees already had Intestinal Bodyguards by that point, so testing for parasites wouldn’t give me away, and I suppose Steven just assumed I knew better than to risk ingesting an early-generation worm. He didn’t count on the power of sentiment.” Dr. Cale smiled wistfully. “That was my Adam. He was my first, and greatest, creation. You know, Nathan, he had just as much of my genetic material in him as you did? He was virtually your brother.”

  “I don’t know whether I should be flattered or feel sick,” said Nathan. He looked like he was leaning toward the second option. I stepped closer to him, trying to lend support through proximity. He smiled at me a little, looking strained, and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t really anything to say.