Parasite (Parasitology)

by Grant, Mira

  Maybe we had to live with it, but Devi didn’t. Neither did Chave, or Sherman, or Katherine. We could live with things forever. They were never going to live with anything else, ever again. “So how do we wake them up?” I asked.

  Dr. Cale turned toward me. Her expression was sympathetic. Somehow, that made my blood go cold. “I’m sorry, Sal. We can’t. If someone is sleepwalking, then the parasite is already in their brain. All we can do is hope that eventually, someone else gets the chance to wake up, and live.”

  The sound of drums was loud and heavy in my ears as I considered the ramifications of that. Then my eyes rolled back in my head, and I pitched over backward. I never even felt myself hit the floor.

  Right from the start, there were… surprises… in the behavior of D. symbogenesis. The first generation was larger than anyone had expected, with more healthy babies hatching, growing, and even thriving in the body we had provided for them. I’d been at the top of the lab betting pool; I was hoping for a dozen subjects. I got nearly a hundred. My star pupil was the sixth to hatch, and testing of genetic material extracted from its body showed an almost total integration of the human DNA I had pushed into the genome of the worm.

  Can you imagine? For literally centuries scientists have been looking at their invertebrate test subjects and wondering what we can learn from them next. But in my lab, when those beautiful babies hatched, I became the first scientist whose subjects had even a rudimentary capacity for looking back. Every D. symbogenesis alive today is descended, at least in part, from my darling Adam.

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 AS YET UNPUBLISHED.

  I made one last attempt to speak with Steven yesterday, to make him understand that we had lost control. The dangers I foresaw, and he and Shanti willfully ignored, are coming to pass, and I know he must have seen the signs. They are so clear, if you know what you’re looking for.

  He laughed at me. He laughed in my face, and said that it didn’t matter, because the die was cast; at this point, all we could do was try to make sure we remained as clean as possible. I asked if he’d spoken to Shanti. He stopped laughing, and told me that she was no longer a concern.

  I haven’t seen her in over a year. I thought she was simply off spreading her rumors. Now I wonder if it might be worse than I had ever feared.

  I knew that I had become a creator of monsters. I did not know, before I ran out of choices, that I had become a monster myself.

  —FROM THE SUICIDE NOTE OF DR. RICHARD JABLONSKY, CO-FOUNDER OF SYMBOGEN. DATED JULY 11, 2027.

  Chapter 13

  AUGUST 2027

  Dark.

  Always the dark, warm, hot warm, the hot warm dark, and the distant sound of drumming. Always the hot warm dark and the drums, the comforting drums, the drums that define the world. Let me stay. Let me stay let me stay let me—

  No. Calm. Heed the drums.

  Nothing has to be remembered. Nothing has to be accepted. Leave it here. Leave it in the dark until the time is right.

  Leave it.

  Go.

  The drums were still echoing in my ears, chasing away the fragments of my dreams, when I woke up on a narrow cot. Tansy loomed over me like a denim-clad gargoyle. I gasped, sitting up and scooting away from her in the same motion. The lab coat someone had spread over me to serve as a blanket fell away, pooling in my lap. For whatever reason, this made Tansy start to giggle madly. She abandoned her looming in favor of plopping down on the floor of the bowling alley, cross-legged, and clutching her own bare ankles in her hands.

  “You’re funny,” she informed me. “I hoped you’d be nice, or at least interestingly dangerous, but I didn’t expect you to be funny.”

  “Is that good?” I asked uneasily. I was trying to remember why I’d passed out, and what I’d dreamt about. After a day filled with horrible revelations, there had finally been something bad enough to make me lose consciousness. I wasn’t sure it was something I wanted to remember. I was absolutely certain that it was something I needed to remember.

  I was even more certain that I couldn’t let myself.

  Not yet.

  “It’s great!” Tansy leaned forward, murmuring conspiratorially, “I mean, not to be a tattletale or anything, but Doctor C doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about pretty much anything, and Adam’s such a mama’s boy that he doesn’t have a sense of humor about anything at all. It’s always dull, dull, dull around here. Science can be funny, you know? But nobody ever lets me blow anything up or even change the labels on things.”

  “Oh,” I said faintly. It was something about people still being aware, even if they weren’t awake…“So do you, uh, live here? In the bowling alley, I mean?”

  “What? No.” Tansy’s expression turned instantly cold, her amiable lean becoming the crouch of a wary predator as she stiffened. “Are you trying to find out where we live? Who are you working for? Did SymboGen send you?”

  “No!” I leaned away from Tansy, pulling back until I was in danger of toppling over the other side of the cot. Tansy in alert mode was a lot more terrifying than Tansy in calm mode, and that had been bad enough. “I was trying to make polite conversation! You know, the way you do when you meet somebody for the first time? I ask where you live, then you ask where I live, then we talk about hobbies and jobs and boyfriends…” Speaking of boyfriends, where the hell was mine? If Tansy broke me while Nathan was off arguing with his mother about her crimes against God, nature, and the FDA, I was going to be really unhappy with him.

  “Oh, is that all? Okay.” The menace left Tansy’s face, and she relaxed back into her previous position. That made one of us. I couldn’t relax with her looking at me like that. I was too aware of just how quickly she could turn on me. “It’s sort of silly for us to have polite conversation, though. I already know all that stuff, so it’s not like you could say anything interesting. We’d just wind up talking about stuff I’m not supposed to talk about, and then I’d have to bury your body up on Cardboard Hill. Do you like sledding?”

  The change in topics was fast enough to make me feel like I’d missed something. I blinked. Tansy beamed at me innocently, and I realized that no, I hadn’t missed anything; it’s just that she wasn’t making any sense.

  That probably should have been a relief. Given the situation, it didn’t help. “I’ve never been sledding,” I said. “What do you mean, you already know all that stuff?”

  “Oh, we’ve been monitoring you for ages and ages,” said Tansy blithely. “I know where you live and which window is yours and what route you usually take when you have to go to work. You know, the polite conversation stuff. And I can’t tell you most of what you don’t know about me, because I don’t have permission from Doctor C yet. So that means there’s no reason to bother with the polite conversation, right? Do you want to go sledding? We don’t have snow, but that’s okay. We can slide down the hill on pieces of cardboard, and the dirt is really slippery.”

  The thought of Tansy knowing not only where I lived but where I slept was enough to make my stomach do a lazy flip. “Where’s Nathan?” I asked. “I shouldn’t… he’ll probably be worried about me by now, don’t you think?” I looked around our dark little corner of the bowling alley. There were people in lab coats moving around the distant workstations, but none of them were Nathan, or his mother. “What are we doing over here?”

  “Oh, you had a simple vasovagal attack and lost consciousness following a stress-induced drop in your blood pressure,” said Tansy. Hearing the technical language from her just increased the surrealistic quality of the scene. “So Doctor C said you should probably go lay down for a little while—or is that supposed to be ‘lie down’? Why are there so many words that sound almost exactly the same only one of them is right and one of them is wrong and if you use the wrong one everyone looks at you like you’re stupid and then you need to stab somebody to make the point that there are a lot of different types of intelligence and anyway English is hard?” She crosse
d her arms and glared at me sulkily, like she was daring me to explain it all.

  “I got lost somewhere in the middle of that sentence,” I said. “Do you mean I fainted?”

  “Duh, that’s what I said. You had a simple vasovagal attack. What else could that mean?”

  I stared at Tansy. Finally, I said, “I honestly do not know how I’m supposed to respond. I mean, I have genuinely no idea what I’m supposed to say. Can you please pretend I said the right thing, and tell me where Nathan is?”

  She sighed, pushing herself to her feet. “I really hoped you’d be fun, you know,” she said. “Stay where you are. Don’t touch anything. I’ll be right back with your stupid Nathan.” Spinning on her heel, she stalked away toward the front of the bowling alley.

  I sank back on the cot, pulling the lab coat up around me like a blanket. I wasn’t cold, exactly, but I still felt like I needed the warmth.

  “She doesn’t mean to be spooky,” said an apologetic male voice from behind me. I gave a little shriek and spun around, nearly falling off the cot again. It wasn’t my best day for staying upright, apparently.

  Adam was standing in the corner, hands twitching against his thighs, a solemn expression on his face. “She can’t really help it. She knows that she upsets people, but she doesn’t know how to stop doing it. Mom says it’s because Tansy’s body’s brain was dead for too long before she could get Tansy in there, but we don’t really know for sure. It’s hard to know what’s normal for us and what isn’t. The sample size is too small.”

  “I… you… what…” I managed.

  Adam’s eyes widened. “Did I scare you? I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

  I took a deep breath, waiting for my heart to stop trying to pound its way straight out of my chest. Finally, I asked, “How long have you been standing there?”

  “I was watching you sleep, just in case you, you know. Had a bad dream or something.” Adam shrugged, looking suddenly awkward. “I have bad dreams sometimes, and it helps if I’m not alone when I wake up.”

  I blinked at him, trying to wrap my mind around what he was saying. If Dr. Cale was telling the truth about what she’d been able to do—and I had no reason to doubt her, even if Nathan wasn’t quite so sure—I was talking to a tapeworm that had been given full control of its very own human body. And that same tapeworm had been watching me sleep, just in case I had bad dreams.

  This situation was creepy on so many levels that I didn’t even know where to begin. Adam was still watching me earnestly. It was clear that he had no idea that I could construe what he’d been doing as even remotely wrong. Why should he? If Dr. Cale and Tansy were his models for normal human behavior, standing there staring at me while I was unconscious probably seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do.

  “Oh,” I said. That didn’t seem like enough. I hesitated before adding, “I have bad dreams, too, sometimes. Thank you for watching me.”

  Adam looked relieved, and smiled. “I was glad to do it. Mom and my big broth—um. Mom and Nathan are arguing right now. He wanted to leave when you fainted, but she convinced him that he should stay until you woke up at least, and listen to what she had to tell him.”

  “What was that?” I asked, feeling obscurely stung. Never mind that they were probably discussing all the scientific details of the D. symbogenesis design, and those would have been over my head anyway; we came here because I wanted answers, and I should have been included in the process of getting them.

  “Why she never contacted him after she left SymboGen.” Adam’s smile faded. “He’s really upset about that. He doesn’t believe her when she says I’m his brother, and he doesn’t believe Mom had good reasons for doing what she did.”

  “I…” I stopped. Finally, I scooted to the side, patting the cot with one hand. Feeling a little silly, I said, “Why don’t you come and sit down?” Adam wasn’t going to hurt me, and I’d be more comfortable if he wasn’t looming over me.

  “Okay,” said Adam. He obediently trotted over to sit down on the other end of the cot, beaming like he’d just been invited to his first real party.

  Having him that close was almost worse than having him looming had been. I swallowed my anxiety—I was the one who asked him to sit down, I would live with it—and said, “Family is important to Nathan. It’s so important that he told me his mother was dead right after we started dating. That’s how sad he was that she was gone from his life. So finding out she was here with you this whole time is hard for him. It hurts him.” Inspiration struck, and I added, “How would you feel if you found out your mother had gone away to live with another family for years and years, and never even called to let you know she was still alive?”

  “Sad,” said Adam, after a pause to consider his options. “But happy, too, because it would mean my mother was still alive, when I would have been worried that she wasn’t.”

  I blinked. That wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting. “It wouldn’t bother you that she’d been off doing things without letting you know that she was all right?”

  “No. Should it?” Adam asked the question with apparently honest curiosity, giving me a hopeful look at the same time, like I was somehow going to unsnarl all the mysteries of human behavior. Boy, was he going to be disappointed if he started looking at me as someone who knew what the hell she was talking about.

  “Um.” This time, I thought a little more before I opened my mouth. It didn’t help as much as I’d been hoping it would. “That depends,” I said, finally. “Don’t you like to know what your mother is doing?”

  “I can’t always,” he said. “Sometimes she has to go away for days, and I can’t go with her, because it’s not safe.”

  “It’s not safe?” I echoed, and frowned. “Why not?” Adam looked perfectly normal. As long as he didn’t start talking about being a tapeworm in a human suit, he wasn’t likely to run into anything terribly dangerous—and even if he did, it wasn’t like that was illegal or anything. Anyone who heard him would just assume he was crazy. Heck, I had scientists with diagrams trying to make me understand how he could be a tapeworm in a human suit, and I still kind of thought he might be crazy.

  Adam shrugged. “Sometimes it’s not safe because she’s going places that aren’t safe. Like South America. And Africa, once. She took Tansy when she went to Africa, because she said it wasn’t safe for her, but having Tansy with her would make da—darn sure that it wasn’t safe for anyone else, either.”

  His hastily edited “damn” struck me as oddly charming. It was like talking to one of the kids who came into the shelter to look at the kittens and puppies. “But you couldn’t go with her, because it wasn’t safe.”

  “Yeah.” Adam nodded earnestly. “Tansy makes it a little safer by being dangerous at people, so they back off being dangerous at Mom. But I don’t do that, because I’m not dangerous at anyone. I’d just be something else for them to be dangerous at. Anyway, I do okay with helping in the lab, but I can’t help too much in the field. I just get in the way and drop things that aren’t supposed to be dropped.”

  “He dropped a jarful of leeches once,” announced Tansy blithely as she walked back out of the shadows. I managed not to jump. Barely. “It exploded, ker-smash, and then there were leeches everywhere. It was like Leech-a-palooza in the lab that day. This one tech got a leech inside her nose.”

  “By ‘got’ do you mean you put it there?” I asked.

  Tansy grinned. “You’re starting to catch on. So, like, can you walk and stuff? Because Doctor C says if you can walk, I should bring you over to her private lab. That’s where she’s got Nathan. She’s showing him a bunch of old slides and stuff, totally boring. I said you might want to go sledding with me instead.” She gave me a hopeful look.

  Sledding on a dirt hill with the resident socially maladjusted possibly-a-tapeworm? I could think of a lot of things I’d rather do, including making a return trip to SymboGen. “I really need to talk to Nathan,” I said, standing.

  “Whateve
r. Suit yourself.” Tansy rolled her eyes in exaggerated disgust. “Adam, Doctor C says to tell you it’s time for your pills, and you need to go to your room so you can take them.”

  “Yes, Tansy,” said Adam. He looked at me shyly as he stood. “It’s really nice to finally meet you, Sal. I hope you like it here enough that you’ll come back sometime. I think Mom would like that, too.” He turned before I could say anything, walking quickly into the shadows.

  “I guess he’s sweet on you, too,” said Tansy. She sounded faintly disgusted. “Like you’re all that just because you’re all living in the world, doing stuff without supervision. Whatever. Like that’s so impressive. Come on, I’ll take you to Doctor C.”

  “Thank you,” I said—both because it was the right thing to say and because I was a little bit afraid that if Tansy thought I was being rude to her, she’d stab me with a scalpel. She seemed like the kind of girl who regularly carried scalpels around just for stabbing people. “I’m sorry I’m taking up so much of your time.”

  “Whatever,” she said, for the third time in as many minutes. “It’s not like I’d be doing anything important if you weren’t here.”

  “Sure you would,” I said. “You’d be sledding.”

  Tansy blinked at that. Then, slowly, she grinned. She never seemed to smile; it was always grinning with her, big, wide grins that showed off all her teeth at once. “Hey, that’s right. I’d totally be sledding if you weren’t here. You’re pretty smart to have figured that out, you know?”

  “If you say so,” I hedged.

  “That, or I told you, and you’re trying to play smart.” Her expression turned suspicious. “Are you trying to mess with me?”

  “Honestly, I just want to get to Nathan.” Before you stab me with something, I added silently. Of all the unnerving things I’d encountered since arriving at Dr. Cale’s lab, Tansy was definitely the most upsetting.