Parasite p-1

by Mira Grant

  “No, Sally, we’re afraid that it would hurt everyone who trusts our brand enough to have one of our implants. The SymboGen Intestinal Bodyguard was created to mitigate the worst effects of the hygiene hypothesis. It allowed us to undo, in a single step, literally decades of excessive sterilization and reduced microbial diversity. Since then, the implants have become responsible for everything from maintaining insulin levels in diabetics to controlling issues with human brain chemistry and secreting natural birth control. They represent millions of dollars saved in pharmacological costs annually. That doesn’t even take into account the savings they naturally cause in the areas of preventative medicine and allergy control. They’ve changed the face of medicine.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “And if you take all that away, even assuming that every single host was able to survive the course of antibiotics necessary to flush both the implant and the unknown protozoa from their system, what infrastructure is going to be there to step up and take care of all these people’s medical needs? Who is going to be standing by with the pills no one is in the habit of taking anymore, the shots no one wants to give themselves? What happens to the women who live in regions where birth control is unfairly restricted, but have been getting around that by buying their implants out of state? Suddenly they’re back in the bad old position of needing to find a way to convince their doctors they’re not immoral whores just because they want to be allowed to control their own reproduction. Take away the implants, and the medical system of this country crumbles.” There was a strange new light in Dr. Banks’s eyes. He sounded appropriately solemn as he was speaking, but something about his expression was almost… proud. “That’s just America. D. symbogenesis is a global phenomenon. What do you say to the people who are finally able to control their own medical destinies? How do you convince them to throw away their miracle because they might, potentially, come into contact with another type of parasite someday, and it could hurt them?”

  “Oh.” I bit my lip, worrying it between my teeth before asking, “But how does that excuse not sharing the test with the authorities? I mean, you could tell them everything, just the way you told me, and then show them how to check for the bad parasites, and they’d be able to… I don’t know, quarantine people when they started getting sick. Maybe then, no one would get hurt just because they got too close to someone who was already going to die.” I thought of Devi, who’d only wanted to be sure that her wife was okay. Would putting Katherine under quarantine as soon as she tested positive have made any difference? Probably not. But we would never know, would we?

  “We could also trigger a panic, leading to millions of people overdosing on antiparasitics as they become convinced that D. symbogenesis is somehow connected to the outbreaks. We’re already starting to see resource hoarding in some areas where the sleepwalkers have been especially active.” Dr. Banks shook his head. “We set out to become the first name in parasites. Well, we achieved it. Now we have to be careful, or the sins of an entire biological genus will be heaped upon our heads.”

  “You mean your head,” I said.

  Dr. Banks blinked. Apparently, declarative statements were more surprising than bewildered questions. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Dr. Jablonsky is dead, and Dr. Cale is missing, so any blame is going to fall on you. Is that why you look so tired?” I tried to sound sympathetic. I wasn’t sure that it was working.

  For his part, Dr. Banks looked even more surprised than he had before. “I wasn’t aware you knew so much about SymboGen’s history.”

  “Everyone knows about SymboGen’s history,” I said. It was true: he’d made sure we couldn’t forget it. I just knew a little more than I was meant to. “I didn’t read the books, but they’re available in audio. I listened to them while I was at work. There was a lot I wanted to understand.”

  “Ah, yes, work,” said Dr. Banks, suddenly looking like he was back on familiar ground. “Will tells me that you haven’t been to the shelter in more than a week. Have you been feeling unwell?”

  SymboGen got me the job at the shelter. Of course Dr. Banks would be on a first-name basis with my boss. “I was at home,” I said. “Nathan and I got caught in an outbreak in Lafayette.”

  “Oh, yes, I heard about that,” said Dr. Banks. “Whatever were you doing out there?”

  Fortunately, I had a believable, if utterly frivolous excuse for what we would have been doing out in Lafayette: “There’s this ice cream company called Jeni’s? They’re from Ohio? Anyway, the only place in the Bay Area that carries most of their flavors is Diablo Foods in Lafayette. I wanted ice cream, and Nathan felt like indulging me, I guess.” I bit my lip again. “Maybe we should have just gone to Ghirardelli Square.”

  “Maybe you should have,” Dr. Banks agreed. “Sally, I am so, so sorry you had to see that.”

  There was one question I hadn’t asked yet. I sniffled again, doing my best to look pitiful, and asked, “If the sleepwalking sickness is because of a proto-whatsit, not the implants, how is it messing up everyone’s behavior? I mean. I know some parasites can get into the brain, but don’t those have to be bigger? Not so tiny that they can get through water filters?”

  Dr. Banks paused. In that momentary silence, I heard everything I needed to hear: he was testing a line of public spin on me. There were no protozoa, no black market parasite that was creating this sudden health hazard. Given sufficient time, I was sure that SymboGen could synthesize one and introduce it to the water table, thus deflecting suspicion onto whatever underground genetic labs they could find.

  Labs like Dr. Cale’s.

  Finally, he said, “We don’t know. But we’re going to find out, and as soon as we have concrete proof of our accusations, we’re going to take our findings to USAMRIID and the CDC. You have my word on that.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.” Then I sagged forward, covering my face with my hands, and wailed, “But it’ll be too late for Joyce. She’s going to die. She’s going to get sicker and sicker, and forget who she is, and then she’s going to die.”

  “Sally…” I heard Dr. Banks get out of his chair. I didn’t lift my head, but listened to the sound of his footsteps coming closer. I managed to brace myself enough so that I didn’t flinch when his heavy hand landed on my shoulder, trying to offer comfort. “I’m so sorry about your sister. There was nothing I could have done to help her. But you should never have been forced to see that. You should never have been forced to see any of this.”

  I didn’t say anything. I kept my head down, continuing to make small choking noises, like my air supply had been fatally compromised. Dr. Banks gave my shoulder an awkward pat. I bent further forward and whimpered.

  That seemed to be the missing ingredient. “Let me send someone to get you a glass of water.”

  “No,” I mumbled, just loudly enough to be heard without my needing to sit up. If I sat up, he’d see that I wasn’t really crying. At that point, he might start wondering why I’d been faking it, and then the jig would most certainly be up. “I don’t… I don’t want to see anyone else.”

  “Oh, Sally,” he sighed, and pulled his hand away. “Let me get it for you, then. I don’t mind.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered. I kept my head down as I listened to his footsteps retreating across the room, waiting for the sound of the door being opened and closed. I didn’t have much time. I still forced myself to count to five before I raised my head and risked a glance behind me.

  Dr. Banks was gone.

  Moving as fast as I could without tripping over my own feet, I slid out of the chair and dug the thumb drive out of my pocket at the same time. In five steps I was around his desk, bending to shove the thumb drive into one of the USB ports at the front of his computer. It beeped once, and the little light on top of the thumb drive came on, glowing a steady green. I didn’t know whether that was good or not. What color was a thumb drive supposed to glow? That kind of thing had never been important to me before. Here, now, it s
eemed like the most important thing in the world.

  According to Tansy, I only needed to keep the thumb drive connected for ten seconds. I dropped into Dr. Banks’s chair and dug wildly through my backpack, coming up with the one thing that could potentially explain why I had changed seats: my notebook. I flipped it open to the first empty page, grabbed a pen out of Dr. Banks’s jar, and started scribbling words almost at random. My writing was even more illegible than normal. That was a good thing.

  I counted down from ten as I wrote, trying to give the thumb drive time to do its work. I itched to pull it out, choosing safety over giving it time to finish. Quashing the urge took everything I had in me, but I did it, continuing to write as the seconds slipped by.

  The doorknob turned while I was still counting. I hunched farther down over my paper, and stayed that way as Dr. Banks stepped into the room. “Sally?” he said, sounding surprised.

  I raised my head, hoping he would read my borderline panic as misery, and said, “I needed to write, and I couldn’t get my notebook to balance on my knees. Dr. Morrison says I should write whenever I feel like I need to. You don’t mind, do you?” The drums were suddenly hammering in my ears. I swallowed and forced myself to keep looking at Dr. Banks, reading his expression for any sign that he knew I was lying to him.

  Instead, his face softened, and he said, “I don’t mind at all, Sally. You should absolutely do what your therapist recommends. Dr. Morrison is a good man, and I have the utmost faith in his methods.”

  “I’m glad you’re not mad,” I said, and sniffled again, wiping my nose on the back of my hand before I went back to writing. Dr. Banks walked over to the desk, putting the paper cup of water he’d gone to fetch down next to me, and lingered just a little too long, clearly trying to make some sense out of the messy loops and swirls of my writing. The joke was on him. While I could write legibly when I tried, I wasn’t trying, and even I wouldn’t have been able to decode some of what I’d written. Dr. Morrison always yelled at me when I did that. I didn’t care.

  “What are you writing about, Sally?” he finally asked.

  “Joyce. How scared I am about what might happen to her. How much I hope she gets better. How guilty I feel for moving out of my parents’ house.” I looked up, meeting his eyes as I said, “I moved in with Nathan last night.”

  “Is your family not reacting well?” He paused, frowning. “Did they release the medical custodianship?”

  “Not quite. I don’t care. I couldn’t stay there anymore.” I sniffled, ducking my head to check the thumb drive as I did. The light on top had changed from green to yellow. I hoped that meant it was done, and not that something had gone wrong with the file transfer process. I wasn’t going to be able to do this again.

  I hoisted my backpack onto the desk with one hand, using the motion to cover the fact that I was extracting the thumb drive with my other hand. I shoved it into my pocket as I pushed my notebook carefully back into the bag, hoping that Dr. Banks would be too distracted by the hand he could see to wonder what the hand under the desk was doing.

  “They didn’t say anything,” I said. I closed my bag and tugged it back into my lap, “but they were looking at me like… like this was my fault somehow. Like if they hadn’t spent so much time and energy looking out for my health, Joyce’s health wouldn’t have been at risk. Mom even said that I wasn’t her daughter anymore. I was a stranger they’d been playing pretend with. That their real… that Sally died when she had the accident, and I’m just some other girl who took her body as my own. It wasn’t anything I haven’t thought before, when I was having a bad night. But it just hurt so much hearing it from her. It hurt so much.”

  “She was right.”

  My head snapped up without my willing it to, and I felt my eyes going wide with a strange combination of shock, anger, and raw terror. “What did you say?”

  “I said, she was right.” Dr. Banks sat down in the chair that I had abandoned, looking at me gravely. “Sally, you have to know you are not the person you were before your accident. We are each of us the sum total of our experiences. We are shaped by our memories and by the moments we live through, and no two people are exactly the same, ever, because no two people experience exactly the same lives. Sally Mitchell died when her brain activity ceased. Sally Mitchell was born when her brain activity resumed. Maybe if the memory centers of your brain hadn’t been so profoundly damaged, you’d still be her, but they were damaged, and so you’re not her, no matter how much you might like to pretend you are. You’re someone entirely new, free of her sins and successes and emotional baggage.”

  “There’s a chance my memory could come back someday,” I said, hating how weak my voice sounded, even under the steady pounding of the drums.

  “And if it does, you’ll have the first Sally’s memories on top of the second Sally’s memories, and you’ll become a new person all over again. For you, recall would be a form of suicide. Maybe not if it had happened right away—then, all this would have just been a strange gap in the memory of the girl you used to be—but it’s been long enough, and you’ve lived a different enough life, that you would die if she reclaimed herself. Would that Sally have loved Dr. Kim? Would she have worked at the shelter for so long?” His gaze sharpened. “Would she have been willing to go through the broken doors at the behest of a woman she’d never met?”

  “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I didn’t have to feign my shock.

  Dr. Banks smiled. “Don’t you?”

  I gaped at him, not sure what else I could say. As I did, I realized that by putting myself behind the desk, I might have gotten access to his computer, but I had done so at the expense of my access to the door. Dr. Banks was between me and the only exit. The windows weren’t the kind that were intended to be opened. Even if I could somehow smash them before he stopped me, all that would do was allow me to plummet to my death more than twenty stories below.

  “Did you really think that I wasn’t keeping a close eye on you? I’m fond of you, Sally, but you represent a huge investment in research hours and medical costs. I’m not going to let you run around willy-nilly without making sure that I have some idea of where you’re going. The shower trick was a good one, I’ll grant you that. Unfortunately for you, I’ve had that shelter bugged since the day you applied there. We got everything. Including a few key words that only one person I’ve ever known would think constituted a cypher.” Dr. Banks leaned forward in his seat, expression sharpening. “I hoped you’d lead us to her. You didn’t. And so I’m asking you: where is she, Sally?

  “Where is Dr. Shanti Cale?”

  -

  The number of keystrokes that have been wasted discussing my relationship with Dr. Steven Banks is frankly appalling. There were much better things the world could have been doing with its collective time, including researching the supposed genetic structure of D. symbogenesis, the little worm without which the private lives of two scientists would never have been up for scrutiny. We were a smokescreen, one that I didn’t realize he was intentionally casting until it was too late for me to get out of the line of fire.

  Were we lovers? Yes, we were. I was married at the time—I’m still married now, as far as I’m concerned—but my husband and I both knew our careers might sometimes take us down less than savory paths. Steven was a bright, ambitious man who was willing to promise me the world. I would have been a fool to deny him whatever he asked from me.

  As it turns out, I was a fool anyway, but not quite in the way most people wanted to believe. I was a fool for listening to the promises he made when we weren’t in the bedroom. Those may have been the only true words he ever whispered in my ear.

  —FROM CAN OF WORMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SHANTI CALE, PHD. AS YET UNPUBLISHED.

  I always knew that this grand experiment would eventually reach a tipping point, a stage at which our only choices were evolve or die. Unfortunately, there is no way of predicting which choice we are going to make before it is ma
de. No one can tell you which way the singularity can go.

  For the sake of my children—all my children—I pray that we can make the right decision. The only problem is, I’m not sure any single decision will be right for all them. No matter which way this goes, I am terribly afraid that half of the people I love are doomed.

  —FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. SHANTI CALE, SEPTEMBER 5, 2027.

  Chapter 19

  AUGUST 2027

  I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said. My voice was level and calm. I was proud of myself for that. Really, I wanted to throw up.

  “I think you do, Sally; after all, you mentioned her yourself not all that long ago,” said Dr. Banks. “Think hard. Blonde woman, curvy, fondness for lab coats and genetic engineering? Oh, and she’s your boyfriend’s mother, mustn’t forget that. Do you think he knows where she is, if you’re insisting you don’t? Do you think he’d tell me if we asked him?”

  “Leave Nathan out of this,” I said, finding more strength now that I had something to defend. I sat straighter in my pilfered chair, trying to glare at him. It wasn’t working as well as I wanted it to. I was too terrified for that. “He has nothing to do with whatever you want from me.”

  “Oh, no, believe me, he does. It was a stroke of amazing luck when you met up with him. I knew all along that he was Shanti’s son. She always forgot that I was the one who had recruited her in the first place—just one more blind spot in a series stretching all the way back to the lab. It’s a good thing she’s so brilliant. If she weren’t, her tendency to focus on the science at the expense of the human element would have gotten her killed years ago. We’ve been trying to hire Dr. Kim for years. If he would just consent to an implant… we couldn’t change the rules without tipping him off. Ah, well. Water under the bridge. Where is she?”

  “Couldn’t you just have changed the rules if you wanted him that bad?” I asked, dodging the question.