Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  I blinked at him dumbly. He sighed.

  “I was designed for a long-haul trucker, according to the records Sherman got from SymboGen. I secrete stimulants and energy boosters. I also decrease acid buildup in soft tissues. They made worms like me for athletes too, although that was illegal. That’s never stopped anybody, you know?”

  I didn’t know, but I didn’t think that interrupting him to explain that would be a very good idea. I just nodded.

  “Baseline human DNA in the implants is about three percent, or was before Sherman started getting to the lab rats. I was tailored, so I started with five percent, some of it taken directly from my host. It was supposed to keep his immune system from identifying me as an irritant and taking me over. Instead, it caused total immune collapse. Not fun for either one of us. I don’t really remember much about being him. I know I migrated to his brain during the shutdown, but he didn’t survive the process. We got hospitalized—this was in the early stages of the outbreak, back when there were only one or two of us at a time.” He was switching pronouns with dizzying speed, making it difficult for me to know exactly who “us” meant—him and his trucker, or sleepwalkers in general? “He died.”

  I blinked. “Who died?”

  “My trucker.” Ronnie shook his head. “He crashed and he died and that should have been the end of me, but SymboGen was collecting all the dead sleepwalkers for analysis, in case they could figure out what was going on. Anything to protect the profit margin, right?”

  I sort of suspected it was more about “anything to protect the public health,” but I kept that observation to myself, in part because I didn’t want Ronnie to stop talking, and in part because there was a good chance that I was being overly optimistic again. Dr. Banks had never shown any indication of caring about the health of the world, except when it could put money in his pockets. Keeping the sleepwalkers from eating his entire customer base had probably seemed like a pretty good idea, at least as far as the bank was concerned.

  Ronnie took my silence as agreement, because he continued, saying, “Sherman found me in my trucker’s head. I was still alive, and he removed as much of me as he could. I don’t remember any of this—I mean, I didn’t have a brain to plug into at that point, so I wasn’t much of a deep thinker—but I’ve seen my medical records, and I believe things happened the way he explained them. He managed to get me out of the building, and he implanted me in my first stable host. His name was Francisco, and he was a mountain.” A little smile played across Ronnie’s lips. “Six and a half feet of solid muscle—damn. I couldn’t have asked for a better host, you know? I guess I should have known that it couldn’t last.”

  “What happened?”

  “Rejection.” Ronnie shrugged. “Same thing we’ve been telling you happens to a lot of us. My host’s body recognized me as an infection, and fought me off. I had to be moved to a new body. That’s where I got the name ‘Ron.’ Another big guy. I liked being Ron. He was strong. Too strong, I guess, since his immune system figured out I was new in the neighborhood and beat me off with a stick. That’s how I wound up in here.” He spread his arms, indicating his thin, immature, biologically female body with a bob of his chin. “And we don’t have bodies to spare, so until this one breaks or we come into a sudden wealth of unwanted humans, this is where I’m staying.”

  “But… if we become who we are because we’re tapping into human brains, and they can process more information than we can handle with our little tapeworm brains, how can you remember being anyone before you were who you are right now? How can you be…” I stopped, not sure how I could possibly finish that sentence.

  Ronnie finished it for me. “How can I be so sure that I’m supposed to be male? I don’t remember a lot about my first three hosts. No one who’s been through rejection remembers much. But there are little bits and pieces. It’s like… it’s like some of the traits of my original hosts got written into me. Sherman says it’s epigenetics at work, and that we’re all going to wind up mosaic individuals, hopping from body to body, bringing just these little pieces of who we’ve been onward with us.”

  I blinked at him. Ronnie shrugged.

  “Sherman says we’re going to live forever, once we figure out how to keep our hosts from rejecting us. We’ll have to learn a lot of shit new every time, but our core personalities will stay the same. We’ll stay the same. Humans have had stories about reincarnation and the afterlife for millennia. We’re finally going to prove it.” Ronnie stood. “Anyway, that’s how I know I’m a guy, no matter what this stupid body says, and since I want a new host sooner rather than later, it’s time for you to come with me.” He grabbed my arm.

  I was bigger than he was, and stronger than he was, but I went without protest.

  Sherman was waiting for us in the store that had been converted into his private office, a former photo studio now packed with lab equipment and computer monitors. He was sitting on a wooden stool that had probably come with the studio, peering through a microscope into a Petri dish. He looked up when he heard our footsteps, a wide smile spreading across his face.

  “Sal! I’m so delighted that you were able to join me.” He slid down off the stool, stretching as he did. “Ronnie, thank you for passing my invitation along. You can go now; your services are no longer required.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think they would be.” Ronnie let go of my arm. “Later, toots. Try not to piss him off too bad today, okay? I don’t want to have to clean this place up again.”

  I blinked. I hadn’t heard anything about needing to clean Sherman’s office. The claim was apparently true, however; Sherman glared at him as he turned and walked away.

  “She’s getting ideas above her station,” he said mildly. “I think she likes you. I also think it might be a good idea if I didn’t let you spend any time with her alone for a little while, since you seem bound and determined to play the Disney Princess of this scenario.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Friend to all living things, my sweet Sal; friend to all living things. But what you fail to comprehend is that I don’t want you to be a friend to all living things. I want you to be a friend to me and me alone.” Sherman reached out and tweaked a lock of hair that had fallen in my face. “We need to get you a haircut. Something short and tidy and easy to care for. You’re starting to look a little unkempt, my dear, and we both know how little tolerance I have for that.”

  I fought the urge to bat his hand away. He wasn’t touching my skin, which meant that the drums wouldn’t synchronize to his heartbeat, but having him touch any part of me felt like a violation. “I like my hair the way it is.”

  “Ah, but appearances must be maintained. You know that. It’s how we fit into the world, snug as a needle fitting into an injection site. Nothing that attracts attention of the wrong sort.” Sherman delivered this little sermon with the pious air of a man who was preaching to the heathens, but knew they would catch on sooner or later. As always, it made me want to scratch his eyes right out of his head.

  There was a time when I’d found his little life lessons endearing, attractive even. That was before I knew he was a tapeworm, and before I knew he was on the “kill all humans” side of the program, and most of all, before he was keeping me captive in an abandoned mall, with no way of reaching the people I loved most in all the world. “The only attention I’m attracting here is from you,” I countered. “All the attention I get from you is the wrong kind of attention, now that I know what you are.”

  “You still don’t understand, do you?” He grabbed my arm. It was a swift motion: I had no opportunity to dodge or defend myself. Fingers sinking into my skin, he continued: “My attention is the only attention you will ever need. My approval is the only approval you should ever crave. I am your perfect other half, Sal, and the sooner you come to terms with that idea and begin making yourself over in my image, the sooner we’ll be able to move on to the next phase of our relationship.”

  “Let me go!” I str
uggled against his grasp, but he held firm. The drums were pounding in my ears, slowing bit by bit to fall into synch with his pulse. As always, the feeling left me dizzy and confused, like someone was messing with my inner ear. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to… to…” The sentence seemed to slip away from me. I wobbled.

  Sherman tightened his hand a little more. It was starting to hurt, and I would probably have a bruise the next day, something to commemorate our little encounter. “I do have to do this, because you make me do this,” he said apologetically. “Besides, anesthesia is expensive, and you’re so much more pliant when you’ve started seeing things my way. It’s truly a pity that it never seems to last.”

  Still holding my wrist tight, he half dragged me across the room to a chair that looked like it had been stolen from a dentist’s office. I made one last feeble attempt to struggle. I knew that chair. It had started to feature prominently in my nightmares, swelling to hellish proportions with every new appearance. The real chair was smaller than the one in my dreams, made of plain green vinyl instead of burning human leather, but their meanings were exactly the same. They both meant pain.

  “Down you go,” said Sherman, releasing my wrist as he shoved me into the chair. I tumbled helplessly, unable to resist the pull of my slowed, muddled pulse. Sherman immediately started strapping me down, putting restraints across my wrists, ankles, and chest. He stopped short of making it hard to breathe, but only barely; as long as he didn’t kill me, my comfort was not his concern.

  “Still don’t know… how you do that,” I mumbled. My lips felt like they were made of lead, too heavy to operate properly and only technically grafted onto my body.

  “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams,” he replied, before leaning down to give me a peck on the forehead. “If I tell you how much I am your superior, will you finally cease this pointless attempt to rail against me?”

  I couldn’t answer. I just looked at him.

  Apparently, Sherman took silence as agreement—that, or he’d been waiting for the chance to tell me all about his brilliance for a while now, and this was enough of an opening that he couldn’t resist. He picked up a drill, giving its trigger an experimental pull. And then, after the sound had passed, he told me.

  “We were all engineered for different things, you know. We each have different mechanisms of supporting and enhancing the human body.” His hands worked as he spoke, clever hands holding clever needles and making them do clever things. My throat ached to scream, but the numbing effect of my slowed pulse and confused flesh kept me from doing anything more extreme than whimpering. Any time it seemed like I was going to break loose, he would press a hand down against the exposed skin of my upper arm and yank me back down into the darkness, where my needs and desires mattered not at all. “I know you spoke with Ronnie about her enhancements. It’s why she can stay awake for so long, and move so fast, and have such a terribly bad temper without slipping over into Tansy territory. Tansy was designed to secrete antipsychotic medication, if you can believe that. Maybe she still does. That would explain why that damaged brain of hers doesn’t kick her out entirely. It will one day. Won’t that be something to see?”

  He finished with the veins in my arm and moved on to the veins in my thighs. There was nothing sexual about it, for all that he was so fond of posturing and propositioning. I knew that Sherman would have taken me up on any offer I chose to make—taken me up on it enthusiastically and without hesitation. He’d said as much, and I remembered his assignations with the scientists back at SymboGen, back when our relationship consisted of more than needles and captivity.

  “You, I haven’t quite figured out. No one has an exact genetic profile on you, which is odd, since I know you were of SymboGen design. Nothing off-market or back alley about you, Sal my girl, and still I don’t know what your chimeric interface has blessed or cursed you with. You’ll sort it out one day, probably when you least want to, and you’ll forgive me if I very much want to be standing by to point and laugh. Discovery is almost always traumatic for someone. That’s what discovery is for. If only they hadn’t hidden your files from me. I looked. I looked so hard. But alas. They had to make me do things the hard way.”

  He put the syringe he’d been using aside, and I had time to breathe a sigh of disoriented relief before he picked up a scalpel, raising it high to be certain that I would see it.

  “I was designed to regulate the heartbeat of a captain of industry, a man who did so love his indulgences. They might as well have called him Old King Cole for the way he carried on. He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl and he called for his fiddlers three, and when those proved to be too much for his feeble mammalian body, he called for his faithful tapeworm jester to come and bear the brunt of everything he’d ever done to himself. I’m a biological pacemaker. Can’t do much to humans, I’m afraid, and I can only slow a sleepwalker down if I can get them to stop biting me long enough to notice that they’ve been calmed past all reason, but give me a chimera and ah, you’ve given me the world.”

  He brought the scalpel down. I think I surprised us both when I found another scrap of strength in my damaged throat and began to scream.

  “Really, Sal,” chided Sherman, once he had his composure back—and he did not, I noted, look happy about having lost it in the first place. Sherman was not a man who liked looking foolish, no matter how good his reasons had been. “Flesh is an illusion, human flesh doubly so. You should be grateful that I’m teaching you that now, rather than your needing to learn it the way that Ronnie did.” He continued slicing small chunks of my underarm off. Every time he raised the scalpel, it was a little redder, as were his fingers. I could hear my blood dripping into the pan he’d positioned for just that purpose. I pictured a basin overflowing with pieces of me, things I had never agreed to give away or let him steal. How many pieces could I lose before I could never be put back together again? How many pieces did he want?

  “You’ve been very good so far today, but it’s time you pull your little mental rabbit hole trick, because this next bit is going to be quite painful.” Sherman’s jovial tone was all the warning I really needed. I gathered my consciousness into a tight knot and plummeted down, down, down through the layers of self until I reached the hot warm dark, where everything was safe and warm and red, and no men with scalpels or inscrutable designs could touch or take me.

  It was becoming increasingly easy to separate myself—my actual self, the part of me that was Sal, and had never been Sally Mitchell—from the human body that had always defined me. It was something I’d always been able to do when I was sleeping, whether I intended to or not, but since Sherman had started putting his hands on me, it had become a waking refuge as well, a place where I could know that my inner core would not be violated in any way. I didn’t know why I could do it, just like Sherman didn’t know why he couldn’t. I just knew that when I really needed to escape, everything except the hot warm dark and the sound of distant drums would go away.

  Maybe that’s what they built into me, I thought, floating formless in the void that was the core of my self. Silence and meditation, instead of messing with people’s hearts or never being still. I had only heard the word “epigenetic” once before I was brought here. I still wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I wondered if Dr. Cale would know. I wondered whether I would ever have the chance to ask her.

  He’s never going to let you go, murmured one of the under-voices that lurked in the dark, more and more often these days, giving voice to things I knew but didn’t want to know. I felt fractured, fragmented, like I was splitting myself into pieces in my effort to remain whole.

  I know, I answered myself miserably, and stopped trying to think about anything at all, letting myself fall deeper down into the perfect timelessness of the only place that had always been meant to belong to me.

  I woke up with the worst headache I had ever had in my life. I sat up slowly, forcing down the nausea that threate
ned to rise up in my throat and overwhelm me. A lock of hair fell in my face and I jumped before reaching up with shaky fingers and pulling it in front of my eyes.

  “That bastard,” I breathed. It was easier to focus on my hair than on my aching head, or on the bandages wrapped around my wrists and inner elbows. My formerly long hair had been cut into a bob, long enough to get in my mouth and eyes, too short to pull back in anything more elaborate than a ponytail. To add insult to injury, it was also about three shades darker and redder than my original chestnut brown, filled with auburn highlights that made it look like it belonged on someone else’s head. I dropped the lock of hair.

  “I’m going to kill him,” I said. Hearing the words made me feel a little better, and so I raised my voice and called, “Do you hear me, Sherman? I’m going to kill you. You can use my body for your fucked-up experiments, but you had no right to cut my hair. It’s not yours.”

  “See, he thinks everything about us is his, and that means everything about you, and that means he had every right,” said Ronnie, from off to my left.

  I flinched away from the sound of his voice. That was a bad decision. “Ow!” I yelped, clapping my hands over the back of my head. They hit a thick gauze pad, covering the same spot as the incision Nathan and the others had used to repair my faulty arteries. My head spun, filled with a pain so profound that it seemed to be coming from inside and outside at the same exact time. I wanted to throw up. I was afraid my skull would explode if I did.

  “Ow,” I repeated, this time almost in a whimper, and collapsed backward onto the mattress, pulling myself into a fetal ball. The pain didn’t subside. I had awoken it, and it was going to have its say before it left me in peace.

  Footsteps to my left signaled Ronnie’s approach. There was a small clicking sound as he put something down on the display nightstand next to my current bed. “I brought painkillers and antibiotics,” he said. “Sherman’s proud of his surgical theater, but that doesn’t make it completely sterile. You need to take these pills to make sure you don’t wind up with an infection.”