Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54

by John Joseph Adams

  “I think maybe it wasn’t,” I said slowly. “I wasn’t ready to know this yet. I wasn’t letting myself know this yet.” I looked down at my hands. “But I was going to figure it out.” I had already figured it out, and then locked the knowledge away from myself, as if that sort of thing had ever done any good. Once the signs had been placed in front of me, they had been too easy to follow. I would have followed them again, and maybe then, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself forget. “I needed Nathan to know before I did. I needed him to have time to come to terms with it. Because if he’d left me then …”

  If Nathan had been having his own freak-out at the same time I was having mine, I don’t know how I would have gotten through finding out the truth about myself. Having him pull away from me then—even temporarily—would have devastated me. Here and now, in this lab, with Tansy missing and Sherman alive but suddenly my enemy, losing my humanity was a huge step toward the abyss. Nathan had been able to place himself between me and that long, final fall, and he’d only been able to do it because he’d already known what I was.

  Dr. Cale nodded. “I’m glad you see it that way. That’s what I was hoping for.” She paused, watching me carefully before she continued: “I know you’re in shock right now, and I know we’ve all had a difficult day, but do you think I could have that thumb drive?” She grimaced. “I hate to ask you. I hate to even be here right now. You deserve this moment. But I need that data.”

  My eyes widened. “I forgot.” I had been refusing to give her the thumb drive full of information stolen from the SymboGen computers until she gave me the answers I thought I wanted. But then I’d been distracted by the need for blood tests and MRIs and then … “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” Now the glimmer of a smile touched her lips. “You had other things on your mind.”

  The words sounded faintly unreal, like she was quoting them from a book or movie, something that showed how an ethical mad scientist would behave. I pulled away from Nathan entirely, bending to rummage through my discarded clothing until I found the thumb drive in the front pocket of my jeans. I walked over and held it out to Dr. Cale, who took it without commenting on the fact that I was still wearing nothing but an unbuttoned lab coat. Between Tansy, Adam, and … and Sherman, she must have gotten used to people whose sense of modesty was somewhat less developed than the norm.

  “Thank you, Sal,” said Dr. Cale, taking the little plastic rectangle gently from my fingers. “You have no idea how much we need this data.”

  “What is it, exactly?” I asked. “Tansy said it would explain how some of the sleepwalkers were integrating more quickly with their hosts …”

  “It’s easy to forget sometimes that Steven Banks is a genius,” said Dr. Cale, still looking at the thumb drive. There was honest regret in her voice. “He blackmailed me into working for him, but the only reason he could was because I knew I wouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting alone—he’d be there to help, and to carry it on when I couldn’t go any further. It’s easy to sit here and say, ‘I did it, it was all my fault; I am Frankenstein and this is my monster,’ but D. symbogenesis is Steven’s baby as much as it is mine. Maybe more, by this point, at least where the commercial models are concerned.”

  “Meaning what, Mother?” asked Nathan.

  “Meaning he continued the work after I left; he continued altering the genetics of the different strains and families of implant, looking for that perfect mixture of form and functionality. He didn’t toss up his hands and say, ‘Well, Shanti’s gone, better throw in the towel and stick with what we have.’ He innovated. He improved. And what we have here, on this little piece of hardware, is a collection of those innovations.” Dr. Cale raised her head, and I almost recoiled. I wasn’t human, but neither was the light burning in her eyes: bright and cold and unforgiving. “Now that we know what he’s done, we’ll know how to undo it. So thank you, Sal. Thank you both. You’re welcome to stay here for as long as you like. I recommend you consider making your residency permanent.” On this grim note, she placed the thumb drive carefully in her lap, turned herself around, and rolled out of the room. She didn’t look back once.

  Nathan put his hand on my shoulder, stepping up beside me. The warmth of his body was reassuring. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I tried to answer him—I honestly did—but all that came out was a high, anxious squeal of laughter, like the sort of sound a rat might make if it was caught in a trap. Something wet was on my face. I raised my hand to touch my cheek, and found tears there, flowing freely from both eyes. My narrow window of calm had apparently passed.

  I tried again to answer him, and this time there was no sound at all. The drums were back in my ears, and they grew louder as, with a great rushing roar like water pouring over a cliff, the dark crashed down and took me away.

  One advantage to passing out repeatedly in the same place: you’re more likely to wake up somewhere familiar. I opened my eyes and found myself looking at the ceiling of Dr. Cale’s lab, lying on the same narrow cot that had served as my bed the last time I had fainted. Only one light was on, and it was behind me, casting the room into the sort of deep shadow that never happens naturally. I sat up, dimly aware that I wasn’t alone.

  “Hello? Who’s there?” I frowned into the darkness in front of me. “So you know, I’m having a really bad day, so I’d appreciate it if you could move straight to threatening me, or making weird noises, or turning out to be on the other side of some massive ideological divide that’s going to shape the future of the human race.”

  “I don’t think we have any massive ideological divides,” said Adam. He slipped out of the shadows to my left, frowning bemusedly. “Are we supposed to?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi, Adam.” The drums started up in my ears again as my heart began to hammer. Adam was one of Dr. Cale’s human-tapeworm hybrids; the first, to hear her explain the situation. He was the oldest of us in the world. Everything I was experiencing was something he had experienced before me … and also not, because he had never spent a moment thinking he was anything but what he was. When he’d opened his eyes for the first time, it had been onto a world filled with people who knew his origins, accepted them, and didn’t try to make him into something else.

  That must have been nice. I couldn’t even imagine how nice it must have been. Dr. Cale had created him intentionally, combining samples of her first-generation D. symbogenesis worm with a brain-dead boy whose parents had basically sold him to her in exchange for escaping his mounting medical bills. I didn’t know what his body’s name had been before Adam took possession. So far as I was aware, he didn’t know either. It had never really mattered. That boy was gone, and Dr. Cale had never known him. She’d raised Adam without any shadows that wore his face to follow him around and make him feel bad for existing.

  “Where’s Tansy?” He took another step toward me, the light revealing more of his features. He was skinny and pale, with the sort of face that was practically designed to blend into crowds, just conventionally attractive enough not to stand out, too essentially plain to snag in the memory. He had blue eyes and sandy brown hair, and even though we didn’t look a thing alike, something deep in my core was telling me that he was my brother: more my brother than Joyce had ever been my sister. Adam was family. And family had to stick together.

  That feeling had always been there, I realized, but it was getting stronger from the combination of proximity and understanding. I wasn’t in denial anymore. I could accept all the parts of what I was—and that included my brother.

  Adam was also frowning, confusion and dismay becoming more pronounced with every second that passed without my giving him an answer.

  “She went with you,” he said, his tone implying that I might have forgotten—like I might have been distracted, or hit my head when I fell down and hit the floor. “That’s what Mom said. She said that Tansy was going to get you out of SymboGen so that you and Nathan could both come home, and we could finall
y be a family the way that we were supposed to.”

  The pounding of the drums didn’t lessen, but it was joined by another, less pleasant sensation: my stomach, slowly converting itself into solid ice. If Adam was my brother, Tansy was my sister. Oh, God. Did my sister die to save me?

  No. Not possible. Tansy was too mean to die that way. “Tansy was … she was there, yes. She’s the reason I got out of SymboGen. I don’t think I could have escaped without her.” That wasn’t quite true. I knew that I wouldn’t have escaped without her. Tansy had been the motive force driving my escape from the building, and it was only her willingness to stay behind that had bought the time Nathan and I needed to get to the car. Without Tansy, I would have been a prisoner, or worse.

  And Tansy wasn’t here.

  Adam looked at me, frown deepening into something sharp. “That’s what Tansy does,” he said. “She doesn’t think much before she helps other people. Or hurts them, sometimes. She says it’s because of the parts in her brain that aren’t functioning optimally. I think she’s trying to get hurt badly enough that Mom will transplant her into a new host, but I don’t want that to happen. She wouldn’t be Tansy anymore if that happened. She’d be someone else.”

  I blinked. “Wait—that’s a thing that Dr. Cale can do? She could just scoop you out of the body you’re in and put you into a different one?”

  “Sort of,” said Adam. “She says it becomes a question of nature and nurture, because memories don’t carry over, just core personality and epigenetic data, and—wait. Are you trying to distract me? Where’s Tansy, Sal? Why didn’t she come back here with you?”

  I took a deep breath, which barely warmed the ball of ice sitting in my stomach, and said, “She stayed behind, Adam. There were a bunch of sleepwalkers—more than I’ve ever seen in one place—and they were going to hurt me, and Nathan. So Tansy stayed behind to fight them. She bought us the time that we needed to get away.” She’d gone down under a wall of bodies, all of them biting and clawing at her like the fact that she was only developmentally one step removed from the sleepwalkers didn’t matter—and maybe it didn’t. I didn’t feel any kinship to them, and never had, but with every minute that passed, I was feeling more as if she and Adam were, and had always been, family.

  I really should have seen it sooner. Neither he nor Tansy had ever upset me the way the sleepwalkers did, even though they should have. Especially Tansy, whose methods of communication were brusque at best, and dangerous at worst. I’d already known on some level that we were the same, and it was easier to be forgiving of family. That’s what family was for. I didn’t know how I knew that. I probably shouldn’t have, given my experiences with Sally’s family. But I knew.

  “Why didn’t you stay and help her?” asked Adam blankly.

  “I couldn’t. I don’t know how to fight, and the information I had … I had the information Dr. Cale needed. If I’d stayed to help Tansy, the information would have been lost, and then Dr. Cale wouldn’t have been able to continue her work.” The knot of ice in my stomach seemed to be loosening a little.

  “Oh.” Adam mulled this over for a few moments, looking even younger while he did. Maybe that was one of the functions of the tapeworm-to-human interface. I had perceived a certain childishness about Tansy, and my parents—Sally’s parents—used to comment on the fact that I looked young and lost when I was thinking. It was one more thing I didn’t share with their original daughter, who had never been much for stopping to think about things, and certainly wouldn’t have looked lost while she was doing it.

  It hurt a little to realize that I didn’t entirely think of them as my parents anymore; not the same way I had only a few weeks before. They would always be a part of who I was, but I no longer felt the need to try to make them love me, and that felt like the sort of bond that should have taken longer to break. Maybe it was different when the bond had never fully formed. They’d always be important to me, but they hadn’t made me.

  “Well, I guess she’ll tell me what happened when she gets back,” said Adam finally, and walked over to sit down on the edge of the cot, looking at me with wide, guileless eyes. “Are you feeling better? You sure do faint a lot.”

  “I get startled a lot,” I said, smiling despite myself. “What about you? You’ve never fainted? Not even once?”

  “A few times, when I first woke up,” he said. “Mom says it’s because some of the blood vessels feeding into my brain were compromised during my surgery, and they needed time to recover.”

  I wondered absently if I might be dealing with something similar. It didn’t seem likely. Any weak blood vessels would have been found and fixed by SymboGen years ago. I was just dealing with plain, old-fashioned shock, and that was actually a little reassuring: at least something about me was plain and old-fashioned.

  “Oh,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Adam, can I ask you something sort of personal?”

  Adam sat up a little straighter, going still. “Yes,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “You can ask me anything.”

  “I …” I stopped. I didn’t know how to frame the question that came next. I didn’t even know how to start. “Did you know I wasn’t human?” seemed too accusatory, and “Have you noticed anything strange about me?” felt almost, well, coy. I finally settled for “Do you like being you?”

  A wide smile spread across Adam’s face, tight-lipped, so that his teeth were concealed. I realized with a start that he’d never shown his teeth when he smiled at me. That was a mammalian gesture, and the part of him—the part of me—that drove those reactions wasn’t mammalian. “I love it,” he said. “I have hands, and feet, and fingers, and eyes, and it’s wonderful, Sal, it’s just wonderful. There’s so much world. I could live a hundred years and never see all of the world that there is to see. Mom gave it to me. You know? Mom made it so I could walk and dance and sing and run bacteriological cultures for her and it’s just wonderful. You know that, right? That life is wonderful.” His smile faded, replaced by a look of grave concern.

  I cocked my head, studying him. “You knew as soon as you met me that I was like you, didn’t you?” I asked. “That’s why you’re trying so hard to convince me that life is wonderful. Because you want me to love it the way you do.”

  “You already do,” he said earnestly. “You wouldn’t have come looking for the broken doors if you didn’t love life. Curiosity is what it looks like when you’re in love with the world.”

  “Did Dr. Cale teach you that?” I asked.

  Adam nodded. “Mom says you know someone is getting tired of living when they stop asking questions.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I know.” He looked down at his hands. “I knew before you came here. Mom told me and Tansy all about you—Tansy so she’d know who she was supposed to be keeping track of, and me because she wanted me to know about both my—” Adam cut himself off midsentence, glancing up almost guiltily.

  I offered him a wan smile. “Both your sisters,” I said. “She wanted you to know about both your sisters.”

  “Yeah.” Adam’s relief was palpable. “She said you’d come find us one day, because you were her daughter, and her daughters were always going to be curious. It’s in the way we’re made.”

  “I guess I have a lot to learn. You’re going to have to teach me, you know. I don’t really know much.”

  Adam abruptly spread his arms and lunged forward, moving so fast that I didn’t have a chance to react before he was hugging me hard, his head resting on my shoulder and his arms locked around my chest. I stiffened until I realized what was going on, and then I relaxed, bit by bit, and even raised my own hands to return the hug as best I could.

  “I’m going to be the best brother, you’ll see,” he said. “I’m going to teach you everything, and we’ll both be here when Tansy comes home, and then she’ll like you, because you’ll be with us, not living all by yourself. We’ve both been so worried about you!”

  The funny
thing was, I believed him … and I wanted him to be the best brother. I wanted a family, a family that was mine, not Sally’s castoffs and hand-me-downs. I breathed in and he breathed out, until bit by bit our breathing synchronized, and the pounding of the drums in my ears quieted, becoming nothing but the distant thudding of my heart. Adam let go, sitting back on his haunches. I dropped my hands back to the cot, just looking at him. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it; there were no words.

  “Are you okay?” he asked solemnly.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This morning, I thought I was a human being, and I thought my friend Sherman was dead, and I thought … I thought a lot of things. Now everything is changing, and it’s changing so fast that I can’t really keep up. So I don’t know if I’m okay.” I paused. “But I think I’m going to be.”

  Adam nodded. “Going to be is almost as good as is,” he said. “I’ll be here. I’ll help as much as I can.”

  I smiled. “See, that right there makes me closer to okay. I’m glad I don’t have to do this alone.”

  “Me, too.” He climbed off the cot, bare feet slapping the tile floor. “I need to go tell Mom you’re awake—she asked me to let her know as soon as you woke up, but I thought it was more important that we talk a little bit first. That was right, wasn’t it?”

  “Right as rain,” I assured him. I peeled back the blanket, finding that I was as barefoot as Adam, although someone had dressed me in my shirt and jeans while I was unconscious. I stuck the fingers of one hand under my waistband, and decided that Nathan had dressed me. I couldn’t see Dr. Cale remembering to tell her interns to put my underwear back on. “Why don’t I come with you?”

  This time Adam’s smile was almost bright enough to light the room.