by Elin Wyn
“Do I sound like I’m kidding?” Sa'lok snapped.
“I’m not leaving you here to deal with that,” I insisted.
The scientist charged again.
While Sa'lok drew it to the opposite side of the room, I grabbed a shard of glass from the floor. It wasn’t big. It certainly wouldn’t do any lasting damage, not unless I was really lucky.
I couldn’t just stand there. I had to do something.
I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave Sa'lok to deal with this by himself.
I was in a lab, for fuck’s sake.
Labs are insanely dangerous places. There had to be something I could use. I glanced around, looking for something to use as a proper weapon.
I smiled when I found just the thing.
Sa'lok
I pulled out a small stun gun and aimed it at the rabid scientist.
“You’ve had that the whole time?” Teisha shrieked.
I glanced at her.
She looked like she was reaching for something, but I couldn’t look away from the enemy long enough to figure out what it was.
“I was waiting for you to get out of the way,” I lied.
Truthfully, this little stunner only had a single shot, and Teisha was a distraction.
It was so hard to keep my focus when every instinct in my body was screaming to protect her. That was part of the reason why I’d tried to get her out of here.
Even though she was on the other side of the room and the Gorgo-infected scientist was totally fixated on me, I still felt frantic for Teisha.
I had the small stun gun ready, but I couldn’t make myself pull the trigger. I could tell Teisha was moving. I could see her from the corner of my eye. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the scientist.
Damn it, what the skrell was Teisha doing?
The scientist had no hesitations about looking away from me. Perhaps it didn’t understand that the small mechanism in my hand was, in fact, a weapon.
“Teisha!” I shouted in warning.
“I’m on it,” she called back.
“What? No, don’t get on it! Get out!” I shot back.
It was too late.
The scientist whirled on her, teeth bared like some sort of rabid animal. I took aim once more. This wasn’t the ideal shot. The scientist was far too close to Teisha.
Teisha held something in both hands. With a mighty swing, she smacked the scientist over the head. He dropped to the floor like a heavy sack of rocks.
Certain the scientist was knocked out, I looked at Teisha. She stood proudly over her victim, clutching a big microscope in her hands.
“That takes care of that,” she beamed.
She put the microscope back in its place and examined it.
“It’s a bit scratched up now,” she frowned. “Oh, well. It looks like it was his, so I can’t say I feel bad.” She gave the unconscious scientist a stern look.
“Are you insane?” I sputtered.
“You tell me,” she shrugged. “You know me better than anyone.”
“In that case, yes, you’re insane.” Her words sunk in after a moment. “Wait, you think I know you better than anyone?”
“I think so,” she said thoughtfully. “My sister knows me very well, but I keep some things from her. I don’t want her to worry.”
“I’m honored…I think,” I thought about her words a little longer. What that might mean...then brushed it away. “You’re still insane.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” she grinned. “What are we going to do about this?” She nudged the scientist with the toe of her shoe.
“I have an idea.”
I walked over to the pot where the Puppet Master was planted. The speech pad had been cracked in the scuffle, but hopefully the connection would still hold.
I knocked on the pot the way one might knock on a door.
“Excuse me, Puppet Master,” I called.
“How can I assist?” the Puppet Master replied.
“We have a situation.”
“If you’re referring to the scientist, I know.”
“Oh.” My brows shot up. “How much did you witness?”
“Everything. My apologies for not being able to assist. These tendrils were chosen more for their flexibility than their strength.”
“I see,” I nodded. “The good news is, you don’t have to sift through the hoards over in Einhiv. We have a test subject ready and waiting.” I gestured to the scientist.
“Would you like me to harvest a memory?” the Puppet Master asked.
“If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
The Puppet Master snaked a vine across the floor to the unconscious scientist.
“I don’t know if I want to know his memories,” Teisha said with a small shudder.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want to feel guilty for whacking him over the head if he turns out to be a nice guy.”
“You didn’t hit him, you hit an attacking Gorgo using him as a host,” I reminded her.
“Either way, he’s still the one who’s going to wake up with a headache,” she pointed out. “If he wakes up.”
“If he dies, it’s the Gorgo that killed him, not you.”
“A subdural hematoma likely wouldn’t help the whole staying alive thing,” she said.
“Which wouldn’t have happened if the Gorgo didn’t choose to take over the body,” I said. “Keep trying if you must, but I’m not going to let you take the blame for this.”
“Thanks,” she sighed heavily. I squeezed her shoulder.
The Puppet Master retracted his vine.
“I have a memory I believe to be suitable to our needs,” he announced.
“What is it?” Teisha asked.
“I thought you didn’t want to know,” I reminded her.
“What can I say? My curiosity won out in the end,” she shrugged.
“That wasn’t a very long battle.”
I grinned when she rolled her eyes.
“Just tell me,” she smiled at the Puppet Master. Even though the Puppet Master didn’t have a face, I swear he was giving us a judgmental look.
“I chose his mating ceremony,” the Puppet Master said.
“His what, now?” Teisha sputtered, going red in the cheeks.
“The ceremony where he stands on an altar with his mate,” the Puppet Master said. “They spoke vows and exchanged affections before their families.”
“Oh!” Teisha laughed. “His wedding.”
Her smile fell. She looked at the scientist.
“Wedding,” she repeated. “He has a wife.”
“Don’t think about it,” I told her. “We might be able to flush the Gorgo out of him.” I eyed the limp form. “But you’re right. Even with the Gorgo in him, he’s still a human. Let’s make him more comfortable.”
Sedated, restrained and hooked to a small device to monitor his vital signs, we’d done our best for the possessed scientist.
“Right,” Teisha nodded as she stood from checking his restraints. “Let’s get cracking. What do we need to do?”
“That’s the tricky part,” I winced. “Somehow, I have to get the stored memory out of the Puppet Master and into a vial.”
“Any ideas?” she asked.
“One,” I replied. “It’s a long shot.”
“Tell me,” she urged.
I didn’t speak right away. Yes, I had an idea, but putting it into words that made sense was another matter entirely.
“Puppet Master?” I said.
“Yes?”
“The memories you’re able to harvest, are they complete memories or are they snapshots?” I asked.
“It depends on the mind I take the memories from,” the Puppet Master replied. “If the subject has an excellent memory and the event is of great significance, I can pull a complete memory. If the subject has a poor memory, or the event happened in the past, I can only get bits and pieces.”
“What’
s the wedding memory look like?” I asked.
Before I could say anything else, the Puppet Master brought a vine to my forehead.
Suddenly, I stood on a rooftop. I recognized the city of Nyheim, though it didn’t look the same as it did now. This memory must be from before the Xathi invasion.
I stared at the human woman across from me as if I was looking at her with my own two eyes. In reality, I was looking through someone else’s. The memory played out as if it was really happening to me. I felt faint sensations of joy, excitement, and even a touch of fear.
Just before the woman kissed me, the Puppet Master ended the memory.
“There is more than that,” he said. “I simply wanted to give you an idea.”
“What did you see?” Teisha asked. “You look a little pale.”
“It’s odd seeing something as if it’s happening to you, when it’s not,” I explained. “Was I meant to feel emotional?”
“I do not know,” the Puppet Master replied.
“Did you?” Teisha prompted.
“I felt shadows of emotions,” I said. “I could tell the original owner of the memory felt happy, but I didn’t feel it in full.”
“Probably because you didn’t know the woman standing across from you,” Teisha said. “She’s a stranger, so you felt indifferent.”
“This lends credence to Alyssa’s theory.” I tapped my chin and started pacing around the room. “We can’t pull a single memory and apply it to everyone.”
“So, we need to pull a memory from every single person?” Teisha sighed. “That will take far too long. There must be another way.”
“I’m sure there is,” I said. “I’d rather focus on making the antidote first. If it’s viable, we can turn our attention to streamlining the process. Thoughts?”
“That sounds reasonable to me,” Teisha said. “I’ll keep reading the Urai notes in case there’s something we missed.”
“Thank you,” I smiled at her. “In the meantime, I believe the memory was strong enough for my implants to track the levels of chemicals excreted in the brain during the moment this memory took place.” I tapped the screen of my datapad. “I’ve been working with our lead chemist, Dr. Leena, for weeks now. Between her brilliance and my implants - and a bit of brilliance of my own, we should be able to crack this. Memories can’t be bottled, but chemicals can.”
“Yes, but those chemicals correlate to feelings and emotions, not images,” Teisha pointed out.
She was right. At best, all I could do was make something that mimicked the feelings brought on by the memory.
Maybe that was enough.
“What if I don’t need to recreate the memory, just the feeling of the memory? The human brain might recognize the sensations and call up the memory of its own volition,” I suggested.
“If you give him a concentrated dose of the exact chemicals his brain secreted during his wedding, that might be enough for him to fight past the mental grip of the Gorgo,” Teisha smiled.
“Exactly.”
“That doesn’t sound too hard,” Teisha shrugged.
“You say that now,” I shook my head. “But if it doesn’t work, I don’t have a backup plan.”
“You better hope this works then.” She grinned over her shoulder as she settled back into a corner of the lab with her datapad. “I’ll let you know if I think of any alternate interpretations.”
“Much obliged,” I replied.
I turned to the Puppet Master, arms folded across my chest.
“Now, let’s see about getting that memory out of you.”
Teisha
When Sa'lok told me he was going to be working with chemical memory processes, I never thought I’d end up connecting electrical sensors to a bunch of vine tendrils.
But there I was, wearing a white coat and hooking up tiny green tendrils to a brain scanner. It was a weird turn of events, but I no longer questioned the weirdness of it all.
After all, I lived in a world where aliens existed, ancient races were possessing human bodies, and plants had become self-aware.
Weird was the new normal.
“I think we’re good to go,” I muttered as I double-checked my work. I wasn’t exactly a specialist when it came to all those biotech procedures, but I was fairly confident I could hook up a bunch of sensors without screwing up.
There were other scientists in the building that could’ve assisted Sa'lok with this, but none of them were around this late at night.
Instead of waiting till morning, he had decided to start working right away, and enlisted me as his assistant. “Are you sure this is going to work?”
“Yes,” a disembodied voice whispered inside my mind, and only then did I notice that a tiny vine had coiled itself around my ankle, its soft surface brushing against my skin. “I can mimic the way the human brain works. Your machines should be able to read the electric signals coming from me, just as well as they’d read the ones coming from a real human brain.”
“The Puppet Master’s right,” Sa'lok added. He was sitting in the corner, hunched over a large holographic screen.
It was an unusual sight; far taller and more muscular than a regular human man, Sa'lok had a scientist’s brain trapped inside a warrior’s body.
It was far easier to imagine him carrying a high-powered rifle and mowing down a horde of Xathi than it was to see him here, quietly trying to make sense of a mountain of data.
“All we need to do is register the electric signals attached to the specific memories we want, and then extrapolate the specific chemical levels in the brain.”
“How about you try that again, as if you wanted me to follow it.”
Swiveling his chair around so that he was facing me, Sa'lok leaned back and draped his arms over the armrests.
“Think of the brain as a gigantic computer made up of neurons and synapses. That’s what we use to create and store new information, and we activate those neurons and synapses through a mixture of chemicals and electricity. If we can pinpoint the electric signals that elicit a specific response, we might be able to deduce the chemicals involved in the process.”
“I’m going to pretend that I understood it all,” I laughed. I was far more comfortable with ancient runes than with brain chemistry, no doubt about it. “You’re saying that, if we manage to get a correct readout, you’ll be able to create a chemical cocktail that’ll be able to elicit that guy’s wedding memory on command?”
“That’s the plan,” he replied, turning back toward his screen and typing something on his keyboard. Without looking at me, he continued. “The Puppet Master will help us create a memory blueprint, and from there...well, I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be able to do, but we gotta start somewhere.”
“How the hell do you know so much about the human brain?” I asked him. The Vengeance hadn’t landed here that long ago, but Sa'lok’s knowledge seemed to rival that of the top scientists working in the field. “I mean, I know you’re a chemical engineer and all that, but the human brain is something else entirely.”
“I was curious about you,” he shrugged. “Not you specifically,” he quickly added, and I could almost swear there was a note of embarrassment in his voice. “I’ve been curious about your species ever since I landed here. I didn’t have much time to research during the war against the Xathi, but once that was done, I made sure to visit the library in Nyheim and—”
“Oh my God,” I muttered, cupping my mouth with one hand while I feigned shock. “You’re such a nerd.”
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t completely a compliment, you know?” I laughed. Even though he seemed to have researched humans extensively, some of our little speech nuances and slang still seemed to elude him.
I actually found that quite charming.
He was better now, though; the first time we met, he’d taken everything I said at face value, no matter how silly it was.
“Alright, we’re ready,” I announced again, this time completely
sure I had hooked the Puppet Master to the scanner correctly.
“Perfect.” Jumping up from his seat, he walked across the lab toward the main computer terminal.
I joined him and watched as his fingers flew over the keyboard, quickly turning the machine on and initiating the scanning procedure.
I didn’t say a word as a bunch of data started marching across the holographic screen in front of us, myriad data showing up faster than I could process it.
It all seemed like random nonsense to me anyway, but the expression of pure concentration on Sa'lok’s face was enough for me to know the procedure was working as intended. Even if, instead of a human brain, we had to work with a plant.
“Not just a plant,” the Puppet Master said, and I was startled in place.
The cracked speech pad had finally failed, and I still hadn’t gotten used to the way he could read my mind.
I was a transparent kind of girl, and I always spoke my mind, but to have someone know what I was thinking before I could say it out loud was slightly unsettling. “Don’t worry, everyone thinks the same at first.” I smiled at that.
Even though it would take some time before I got used to it, I didn’t feel like the Puppet Master was an intruder. His presence felt friendly and reassuring, like warm gloves on a cold winter morning.
“I think I got it,” Sa'lok announced after a couple of minutes of staring at the screen. “As I thought, dopamine holds the key when it comes to positive memories. I’m also going to need oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins.”
“What about salt and pepper?”
“What?” he asked, confusion clouding his eyes. Then, as if he suddenly got that I was making a joke, he opened up into a smile. “I see, a joke. Good one. You’re actually right—even though I won’t need salt and pepper, this is going to be a lot like cooking.”
“And are you a good cook? Because I’m a disaster.”
“I’ll teach you one of these days,” he laughed, his eyes locked on mine, and I felt blood warm my cheeks.
As friendly as we were, we mostly just hung around because of work.
We had never spent time together on a personal basis, and to think of that happening...well, I didn’t know what to make of it, but I sure liked the thought of it.
