Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 3, June 2014

by R. Leigh Hennig

  #

  I woke up slowly, had time to think before I was plunged into battle with my body and the machines that fed it. I focused on remaining calm, subduing my natural instinct to wrest control of my body back from the medical equipment. I’d have to disconnect soon, though, or my body might give up and I’d end up dependent on the damn things.

  Something catastrophic must have happened. Those affected continued to breathe and function normally in between episodes. I’d been in a coma. Mrs. Munro had been in a coma. Why hadn’t anyone come in to check on me yet? The answer wouldn’t help me and I quelled the question.

  I took quick stock. Intravenous, empty of fluids. Heart monitor. EEG. Catheter. Jesus, I’m in a diaper. Just a precaution though. No solid food meant no solid waste. My eyes crusted, mouth dry and cracked. How long? Days? Weeks? Stop. Just stop. Breathing tube first. Relax.

  It had to be removed slowly so I wouldn’t damage anything, and I had to fight my reflexes, to try to breathe, to vomit, to constrict my throat around the tube. None of it would help. I heaved and gasped when the mucus coated tube reached my mouth, spent the next minutes hacking up the sputum settled in my lungs, retching dryly as the monitors sounded their alarms around me. My eyes teared, but it wasn’t enough to clear them of opti-gook.

  The gastric tube came out quickly, burning my throat and nose with stomach acid. Next, I tackled the intravenous, peeling tape away with clumsy fingers, pulling the needle out of the vein. I scrubbed at my eyes, working my fingers through the crusty lashes. Still couldn’t see, but it was better than before. Sensor pads took a layer of skin with them when removed and at last I reached around and fumbled for the power switch on the monitor.

  I lay exhausted, in silence. Water.

  Failing to find any within reach, I turned my attention to the diaper and the urinary catheter. Embarrassing and painful.

  “Hello,” I tried to say. “Is anybody there?” My voice sounded like I had laryngitis. No one would hear me. To hell with this. The rails of the bed wouldn’t unlock. I’d used all my strength disconnecting myself. Then, I noticed my hands, the knuckles enlarged, the flesh shrunken. My uplink had been surgically removed. No wonder I can’t see, they removed my lenses, too. It was standard practice with coma patients.

  Another, slower, accounting of my body revealed my emaciated state. It didn’t matter how weak I was, I’d have to get some proper food and water soon. I refused to die now.

  “Hello?” My voice was barely above a whisper.

  I don’t remember how long it took to climb over the rail, crawl to the bathroom, into the shower, and try to drink as the water flowed over me. I cleaned up while I was there, and after a rest, returned naked to the room and searched out my belongings.

  Once dressed, I felt marginally human, and discovered my lenses in their case, preserved in saline. At least I’d be able to see. A second small box contained my uplink. I’d need to implant it again, but it wasn’t beyond my ability. Another brief rest and a drink — from the sink this time — and I was ready to find out why I’d been left in this closet of a private room. I opened the door.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  I was in the neurology ward. There, among other patients I didn’t know, was Mrs. Munro and Sal. And Lars. They were all sitting on benches against the wall, all blue, their eyes gone black, their mouths hanging slack. If they weren’t actively spewing nonsense, they should have been unconscious, showing none of the outward symptoms of the affected.

  “Lars, it’s Meika. Can you hear me?” My voice was still thread-bare. Lars didn’t move, but he wasn’t dead either, just affected in a way I’d never seen. I had to sit, the last of my strength sapped by this defeat. Giving in wasn’t an option, though. I cleared my throat and accessed his uplink. “Medical override, Kaarju, nine nine seven zebra.”

  “We’re broken. That’s how they get in, through the bro—”

  I parsed the last entries on Lars’s uplink, but nothing else seemed pertinent until I found Lars’s report on Sal and me. They’d found us in my lab, Sal affected, and me already in a coma. I selected some juice and some soup from the hospitality station and went to Lars’s research unit, but I couldn’t find anything that might have led to his final statement. Nothing had been discovered medically wrong with any of the patients, certainly nothing that might be considered broken.

  Unless it was metaphorical, and then a whole new realm of possibility opened up. Psychologically, we were all broken.

  Like any disease, there were those who’d prove immune, though. I guessed I was one of those. Lucky me. I sipped and slurped slowly, wary of stomach cramping or nausea.

  The Noblesse Oblige was home to some two hundred thousand people and so far from any help that the condition might yet be the end of us. Pilots, engineers, navigators, miners, aggies. If none of the people in those essential professions were immune, it wouldn’t matter if I could figure out a root cause. I might not be able to affect a cure before we ran out of food or collided with a celestial object. Something could have malfunctioned and I’d be none the wiser.

  I had to try.

  First, I’d have to find out how many of us were immune.

  Cramming a shoulder bag with more juice, a few packets of crackers, and a still-firm apple, I headed for the surgery. First I’d re-implant my uplink, and then I’d search for survivors.

  As I worked, implanting the uplink in my hand, I sipped water and thought of what I’d say, and rehearsed. When I finished, I tested the link, noting the date. I nearly fell off my chair. Six weeks. My God.

  Comm lines, intranet, everything seemed in order. I loaded up the streams for the last six weeks, scanned for details that might tell me what had happened beyond my own little drama.

  At one point or another, sometime in the last six weeks, everybody — or so close to everybody that I couldn’t tell from the stream — had been affected. Less than twenty-five percent of the total population had recovered in some fashion, and enough in each of the critical sectors that the ark’s support system wouldn’t break down altogether.

  Fortunate, but disturbing. This disease had some kind of intelligence behind it. What else could explain its precise distribution?

  I started with the Health Science Center network.

  In the end, there were three people at each of the quadrant sites, plus two of my colleagues who’d fled the devastation of the central HSC. They weren’t happy to be recalled. We were a motley combination of doctors, researchers, and other support staff. We rallied, moved the affected into wards, and got to work.

  “We have two groups of patients,” I said. We worked in continual video conference at the HSCs. Processing samples and cultures, studying results that revealed nothing. Our virtual community kept us sane. “The first group remains as they presented, unconscious until they have an episode, followed by bouts of dysphasic rambling.”

  “The other,” said Dr. Sarah Holloway, working in quadrant two, “seems permanently cyanotic, catatonic, and for all that we can tell, practically dead.”

  As much as I hated to hear it said, Holloway was right. Breathing, pulse could hardly be detected. I thought of Lars and Sal and the echo of the sadness I felt every time I looked at them returned.

  “They never speak at all,” said Reg Tulaine, a talk therapist in quadrant four. I could almost feel his shudder. He wasn’t a doctor or a scientist, but he took direction well, and wasn’t afraid of strange possibilities.

  “Has anyone else reported hallucinations?” I asked.

  “Else?” said Holloway.

  “I meant has any—”

  “No, you quite clearly said ‘anyone else.’ Meika, did you hallucinate?”

  “Dr. Kaarju?” said Reg. “I’ll need you to be very specific, if you don’t mind.”

  So I told them about the impossible memory I had of the puppy. Neither of them had had a similar experience. We broadcasted a poll and waited to find out if I was an anomaly
. No one else reported visions, or hallucinations, or whatever it was I’d had.

  “You characterized it as an ‘impossible memory.’ Why?” This was Reg’s territory now, I guessed. He was keen with the questions, in any case.

  “It felt like a memory. It had the same texture, if that makes any sense, but I knew it was impossible because no one living on the ark has ever seen an animal outside the vids. It was too real.”

  “What are you thinking, Reg?” asked Dr. Holloway.

  “It’s crazy,” Reg said. “I can barely get my head wrapped around the idea. But Dr. Kaarju said her friend, Salif, thought that the affected might be some kind of alien possession, or ghosts?”

  “Yeah,” I said, emptying my lungs like I was preparing for a dive. Funny thought, that. We didn’t have water to spare for anything like diving. “That’s what he was about to explain to me when he succumbed.”

  “What if it was an attempt to communicate?” said Reg.

  “I don’t follow,” said Holloway.

  “We have no idea what an alien life form might be like, how they’re structured, how they communicate,” Reg said. “What if this isn’t possession or a mass haunting? What if they’re something like a virus—”

  “We haven’t found any evidence of a virus—”

  “I get that, Dr. Holloway. I said like a virus. Something we haven’t learned how to detect yet. Hear me out. What if they don’t communicate like we do? What if memory is the closest thing we have to their form of communication?”

  “Jesus, Reg. What are you saying?”

  He couldn’t get his head around it. I sure as hell couldn’t. It felt like having a word on the tip of your tongue and not being able to say it.

  “Do we have a — what are those things called? An fMRI? Do we have one of those?”

  “We should have one at each of the sites,” I said. “But it’s useless. We have no idea when anyone is going to have an episode and it could be over by the time we get them set up.”

  “No, Dr. Kaarju. We put you in the fMRI and see if we can get you hallucinating again.”

  “I haven’t seen anything since I’ve recovered, though. Maybe I’m immune now?”

  “Do you have anything more productive to suggest, Meika?” Holloway said.

  I didn’t.

  In a few hours, Holloway and Reg made it to central and we’d called in the reinforcements to staff the quadrant HSCs. I’d relocated the fMRI in a room into which I also moved Lars and Sal, Mrs. Munro, and Joe Baker, the patient who became sick while I was taking his statement at the factory. He was still a group one affected.

  While I waited for Reg and Holloway to arrive, I’d compiled all the audio we’d captured of the patient’s speech. As I slid into the bell of the fMRI, Reg started the playback. I tried to relax — I didn’t want to feel that soft, innocent flesh part beneath the blade, hear the helpless squalling. I didn’t want to see anything like that ever again.

  I could cut a human being apart and stitch him back together, but I couldn’t bear the suffering of an animal I’d never known.

  Slice air, the life there...Running worms chew the planet...Ice reigns in a blood swatch...

  If memory was their means of communicating, I had to figure out some way to break the code. The machine whirred. I focused on my memories of Lars and Sal. Consulting with the one on brain tumors and meningitis, with the other on the possible spiritual practices of alien life forms.

  Here’s Johnny dull boy...What did you expect would rend your guts...I can see the bone...

  What did these snippets of nothing mean? Was that all that was left of my friends? Less? They didn’t speak. Hadn’t for weeks.

  “Stay still, Meika.” Holloway wouldn’t be able to get proper readings if my restlessness got the better of me, but the urge to jump up, shake Sal and Lars, make them wake, speak, was overwhelming.

  The infected’s nonsense continued to play in the background and I breathed slowly, relaxed around the ball of my agitation. Find the right memories, I thought. Find the dreams that will speak to me.

  I sighed and closed my eyes to shut in the tears. It wasn’t long before I fell into pre-slumber, the place where thought and dream collide. I was so focused on finding a solution my thoughts became bloodhounds on the trail.

  In high school, I learned how enzymes worked, binding with substrates to support chemical reactions in cells. In genetics, we discussed how the AIDS virus invaded the very T-cells that were supposed to help eliminate illness, rewriting their genetic code to become virus factories.

  I remembered — no, it wasn’t a memory; it was the same thing as the puppy hallucination — I imagined with perfect clarity something that was almost a substrate, but not, something that was nearly a virus, but not.

  It was attracted to human biology, and once locked in, like an enzyme, it couldn’t escape. Then, like a virus, it started reprogramming the gene in our cells so that they expressed different traits, but remained to outward analysis normal cells.

  Now I know how we got into this situation. How do I get us out?

  The aliens weren’t finished though. I saw a prison cell, the convicts inside fighting, killing one other. Then I saw a zipper, twisted into a spiral, the tab unzipping the sides, freeing them.

  “I know — ow!” I sat up, forgetting I was inside the fMRI, and practically knocked myself out.

  “What?” Holloway said.

  I slid out of the machine. “I know what to do. Or I knew. It’s slipping, damnit.”

  “Be still for a moment,” said Reg. “Close your eyes. Try to recapture the moment, the thought.”

  I didn’t close my eyes, though. I sat staring straight ahead, at Sal and Lars, into their singularity eyes. My mind wrapped itself back around the idea. “Shoestring — blood clot —” No. Word salad. How could I tell them we needed to engineer a retrovirus?

  “She’s speaking like she’s affected,” Holloway said. “But she’s not showing any other symptoms.”

  I stamped my foot, pointed to my eyes, then the floor. I’m standing right here.

  “Sorry, Dr. Kaarju,” Reg said. “We’re just—”

  “Freaking out,” Holloway said.

  I tried to think. How could I show them what I’d discovered? Do what you do. Get to work.

  I went to the supply chest, grabbed a needle. What would I sample that I hadn’t before? Where would the highest concentration of the alien life form be?

  “Meika?” Holloway didn’t trust my semi-affected self.

  I held up my hand. Please. Then I turned back to Sal.

  It had to be the eyes. Though they didn’t look like they were there, I had to trust that it was some kind of light refraction, an illusion. I could so easily be wrong, or insert the needle into the ocular nerve, pierce the lens or pupil by accident. You won’t mind being blind in one eye if you have your life back, will you, Sal?

  I guided the needle into Sal’s eye, feeling the slightest bit of pressure as I did. My breath left me in a grateful sigh and I thanked everything and everyone I could think of for the simple grace of it.

  I drew back the plunger, and the vitreous filled the syringe, not creamy white, but dingy gray. I withdrew the needle and kissed Sal quickly on his blue-gray temple.

  Holloway and Reg had already moved the fMRI out of the way and I sat at the incubator unit to prepare my samples. Feeding the first into the electron microscope, I switched the viewer to the wall screen. Even at maximum resolution, it was hard to see, but there, nestled within the vitreous cells was something else. Something we’d never seen before. Something that didn’t belong.

  “Pith me gently.” I couldn’t stop the words from escaping, but they were oddly appropriate.

  “Um, yeah,” said Reg.

  “Are those the aliens?” Holloway couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her voice.

  I nodded and flipped my wrist up, finally realizing that I could type what I want
ed to say into my uplink and activate the voice module. “They function partly like a substrate locking into an enzyme, and partly like a virus. We need to engineer a retrovirus to unzip them from the infected.”

  I was a terrible typist and gave over, grabbing three more syringes and motioning, first to the three other affected in the room, then to the lab station, and finally out the door of the room.

  “That’s brilliant, Meika. If we set samples in lab stations throughout the HSC, they can all be working simultaneously toward a cure.”

  “But,” said Reg, “does anyone know how to engineer a retrovirus?”

  “That’s what the lab stations are for,” Holloway said. “We just have to find the right protocol and program.”

  #

  In the end, we worked samples from different group one and group two patients in all the HSCs in all the lab units we could spare. I even asked Holloway to take a sample from me.

  We needed it all. Three quarters of our collective attempts failed. When we finally found a working protocol, it turned out that the retrovirus had to be individually engineered for each patient. Then the real work started. Hundreds of patients died waiting for their cures.

  Our first successful test of the retrovirus was in quadrant three. We thought we’d failed again, but the cure took hold within a day.

  “What happened to the aliens?” Sal asked after I administered his cure.

  “We don’t know. I’m just glad they’re gone.”

  Lars, Holloway, and I have co-authored a paper on the discovery and sent the information streaming back to our colonies. Future generations will need to know about the existence of these microscopic aliens, how we attract each other, break each other. They’ll need to know how to mend the broken places.

  ###

  Melanie Marttila has been writing since the age of seven, when she submitted her first short story to the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's Pencil Box. Since then, she has become a published poet, won prizes for her short stories, and will, by the end of this year, have three professional sales under her writerly belt, all for science fiction stories. She is currently working on the first two novels in an epic fantasy series, the first novel of a YA fantasy series, and the first novel of an MG fantasy series. She lives where she always has, in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, on the street that bears her family name and in the humble house where three generations of her family have lived. She shares her home with her spouse, A.K.A. Mr. Science, and their health-problem-plagued dog-ter, Nuala.