Charley shoved the napkin at him. “You want it?”
“No.”
“But shouldn’t you try and find out what it is?”
Tom clanged back his second shot, then took the napkin and folded it gingerly into his pocket.
They exchanged a loaded glance before Tom left, clutching a margarita in a plastic cup. Everybody was always “discovering” extraterrestrial life, trying to make a splash that would be felt back in the home system. Then it turned out to be a stowaway. It had gotten to the point that a credible scientist who found real extraterrestrial life would have to deny his own discovery.
Tom watched the colony rising toward him as the tube shuttled him down in absolute silence.
Tom had the culture shipped to Astrophles (Asshole Fleas) for analysis when his own Insta-Culture kits refused to reveal anything meaningful. Then he sent out dinner invitations to a few names he remembered from the Institute, and one of them, Doctor Ambrose, actually accepted.
The blue ghost of Doc Ambrose sat across the table from Tom after the regular dinner set had drifted off, smoking his pipe. Tom trusted Larry Ambrose, especially if he offered to make him co-author on the paper he vaguely hoped to get out of this. Ambrose’d had a run of bad luck and lived in another type seven dorm, so the movements of his virtual self were in harmony with Tom’s home. People projecting themselves into different layouts sometimes appeared to walk through walls or forgot to switch off and wound up taking a holographic shit in the middle of the living room.
“So it seems to be malignant,” said Ambrose. The blue smoke disappeared three inches from the tip of his cigar. “A cancer-causing spider? Is it a defense mechanism?”
“It’s a recluse spider. The toxin is necrotic, rots the skin. It doesn’t lead to cancer.”
“But the cells of the nodule are de-differentiating.”
“The Astrophles people found traces of reversine.”
Ambrose nodded slowly, smoke spuming out of his nostrils. “His skin is turning into precursor cells? A spider whose bite causes victims to devolve? Quite a defense mechanism.”
“No. It’s just a recluse spider. Earth is littered with them.”
“What else have you got?”
“Antibodies. A few electron images of sub-viral particles, prions, unidentified, just DNA fragments. Problem is, they’re everywhere out here. They’ve found fossil viruses on half these rocks.”
“A co-infection, then.” He made circles with his wrist as he spoke. “Spider bit him, weakened him, opened him up to something else. Hm. Keep me apprised. Now join me for a smoke before you power-save.”
Tom patted his pockets. “I’ve got one somewhere. Don’t switch off.”
“Where did that Nancy woman go?”
Tom harrumphed while turning over seat cushions. “Photoshaper. Probably weighs three hundred pounds in the flesh.”
Ambrose chuckled from inside a corona of phantom smoke. “Son, a pretty ghost is all I need.”
A week later, Tom went back to check on Charley. He stood on the threshold of a thick darkness that smelled of grease and hair and chaff. “Charley?” He stepped inside, grumbling, “Buy a goddam doorchime.” Scattered around the kitchen were green vitamin bottles and white Chinese takeout pails pocked with hardened rice. Deflated bags of crushed ice like used condoms lay strewn across the floor. Sink crawling with ribbons of black ants trailing to the drain. More stowaways. Their busy movement was ceaseless and totally quiet.
Tom touched nothing. He spotted a glow in the direction of the solarium and stepped out the glass doors to the rear of the ranch on the plateau side of the cliff. The ranch was all alone up here against the press of space. In the solarium, purple lights fluoroscoped tropical plants that had begun to grow wild. Condensers hummed in the walls. Seeds and leaves cushioned Tom’s steps as he moved toward the yellow glow.
Incandescent light dappled the ceiling and the walls of the next room like sunlight on a lake. Tom opened the door, and a blast of heat and moisture oppressed him immediately. Charley sat with his back to the door, submerged to the chest in a frothing bottom-lit hot tub. Bottles of booze ringed the lip of the tub.
Charley didn’t move. Tom crept closer, half suspecting he was sharing the room with a corpse. He jumped when Charley spoke.
“It doesn’t hurt so much in the water.”
“Charley?”
The dyspeptic voice seemed to come from far away. “I try to stay in the water. Here, or the pool.”
“What doesn’t hurt?” Tom picked his way around the tub until he had a clear view. He stopped on the far side.
Charley raised his right arm.
Ambrose looked troubled. Skeptical, in fact. “Re-differentiating?”
“There was an arm. And a hand.” Tom swilled a glass of cheapass hydroponic cabernet and drank it too fast. “Maybe a shoulder. I could barely look at it.”
Ambrose said nothing.
“I gave him a full shock of antibiotics, and acyclovir in case it’s a virus. I think it’s a virus. I sent more samples to a pathologist on Crank, but it won’t be quick.”
Ambrose sketched a flow chart in the air with his cigar. “He gets bitten, infected. The tissue rots, except for the bud. Something starts producing reversine. It de-differentiates, like a cancer. But it redifferentiates.”
“It isn’t cancer.”
“Uncontrolled differentiated cell growth,” mused Ambrose.
“They’re his cells. They’re Charles Elliot III, genetically,” Tom said.
“But the cells briefly returned to a precursor state. Pluripotent, ready to become anything.”
“His twin.”
Tom took a drink, wishing it was something stronger.
Ambrose puffed. “His son.”
“Wait a minute.” Tom frowned into his wine glass. “If it’s not just an infection of Tom’s cells…are we talking about a separate entity?”
Tom found Ambrose looking hard at him now. “Tom, is there any chance that you’re maybe—“
“No. Thanks a lot for the confidence, Doc.”
Ambrose studied him coolly for another moment, then flapped his hand. “A retrovirus, then. His DNA, but it’s added something. Can you keep him under observation?”
“I don’t have the facilities.”
“Ship him.”
“He won’t go. He’s a cowboy. Says this is his rock and they can come to him. And they sure as hell won’t.”
Ambrose hesitated, then said, “Even if they had the whole story?”
Tom looked away. “We can handle it. The two of us.”
“This is going to get ugly. Mark my words, son.”
II. Immortal
Tom went back to check on Charley in the middle of the week. He squatted by the edge of the pool in the dark. The Lucite dome showed the edge of the twinkling gas cloud and several stars not blotted out by the asteroid’s reflective glow. Shadows of tropical plants leaned together in the corners of the pool house. Charley floated a few feet away, unmoving.
“I need you to understand this, Charley.” Charley’s shape was ambiguous in the low light. It might have been the water, but he looked nearly as wide as he was tall. “It isn’t going away. Whatever it is, the cells don’t apoptose. They don’t die.”
“But it isn’t cancer.”
“I don’t know what it is, Charley. It actually seems to be preventing cancer.”
Charley spoke like someone with a bad stomachache. “Why would it need to do that?”
“Normal human cells commit suicide when there’s a genetic abnormality, or they’re destroyed by the immune system. That isn’t happening here. It’s a runaway growth. It’s immortal like cancer, but it’s…it started with a piece of you, but it’s making something else. A complex life form.” Tom’s fingers dangled between his knees. “I don’t know.”
“It is or it isn’t, Tom.”
“It is. Somehow it is.”
In a voice so low Tom thought he imagined it, Charl
ey whispered, “My child.”
“Anyway, I’m putting up some cameras so I can keep an eye on you up here. Consider them disclosed.”
“Anything you say, Doc.”
“How do you feel?”
Charley shifted suddenly in the water, rippling the pool. The moving water played with the eerily long shape of him. “Fine.” He sounded like he was smiling.
“Fine?”
“You’re starting to sound like a doctor again, Tom. I’m buying you a drink.”
“I have to get going.”
Charley snorted. “Tits or legs?”
Three days later, Tom woke up early and began watching the feeds from the loop cameras around the ranch. He sat in front of the console with an Irish coffee, watching the split screen while a dark-haired flight college girl, a regular, snored daintily in the bed behind him. Between Tom’s liquor and the sleeping pill behind his zipper, they’d slept through the night.
From the first moment of the feed, what he saw and heard of life on the ranch made his scalp tighten.
Charley had fallen asleep on a couch in camera 3, the upper right quadrant. The long stalk of a tropical plant waved in front of an air vent on the other side of him. He’d set the lights at a steakhouse low. A large brown lump jutted from his side.
Charley moaned. He slung one arm around the protuberance and crooned, as if speaking to a baby. He moaned again in a deeper voice. Then moan and croon came at the same time, two discordant voices, and Tom spilled a line of boiling hot coffee down his wrist.
The splash of dark hair on Tom’s bed rolled and pulled the sheets up over her head.
On screen, Charley stirred and sat halfway up, the witchlight of the gas cloud on the side of his face. He reached up with his right hand and stroked the huge lump sticking out of his side. “It’s okay, poor baby,” he said. “It’s just a dream. Just a bad dream.”
Charley didn’t appear fully awake himself. He became still again as if a switch had been flicked.
Then a thick, huge, moronic sound came out of the microphone. A babyish sound. Tom jumped, and the girl behind him made a small, sticky noise of annoyance. The moronic sounds carried on throughout Charley’s night, which Tom watched at ten-times speed, the great lump on Charley’s side swaying in an invisible gale as it cried, Charley sometimes switching on to comfort it or bubbling angrily—and more naturally—out of sleep to tell it to shut up, shut up cocksucker.
Tom’s mouth was open.
“The hell?” said the girl, sitting up.
When he didn’t respond, she reached for a drink on the nightstand.
Tom caught up on the feed again after clinic hours. He made a pair of martinis (no olives to be had), set them on the desk beside the console, and put his feet up to watch and listen. What he saw soon caused his body to coil up in front of the desk, knees together, arms folded. Charley seemed to have forgotten the cameras. He swaggered nude around the house, carrying a bulk in his side that bent his spine. He chose routes that let him lean against the walls. He tore apart his refrigerator making strange feasts. Pickles and vanilla ice cream, Tabasco and chocolate, daiquiri popsicles dipped in real butter. He’d begin eating and drinking at the counter, then haul the rest to the pool or the hot tub.
Tom’s hand crept up to cover the lower half of his face as he watched.
At one point, Charley’s tray of foods scraped over the edge of the pool into the water, where it floated in a spreading film. Rather than get out or ignore it, Charley swam around it, occasionally breaching his greatly expanded shape under the steakhouse lights to swoop down on the flotilla with his mouth open like a filter-feeding whale.
III. Intent
Ambrose watched with him this time. They’d just finished their dinners, and the rest of the usual dinner ghosts—mostly people who lived alone in the space-age version of suburban vacuity—had left.
Charley was addressing the camera directly. He held it between his palms, pointed at his face. Now and then a third hand wandered into view, pawing stupidly at the camera, and Charley either pulled or slapped it away.
“Hi Tom, hi galaxy,” said Charley, grinning. He had a bright red bulb of a nose and eyes puffed almost entirely shut from some neurological distress. “I hope this is really happening, my friends, because sometimes I can’t tell anymore when I’m dreaming or awake. It takes reality away from me, sometimes. It’s not human, you know.”
But a human-looking hand wavered into view and touched Charley’s eye, and he batted it away with a curse. “Sometimes it has bad dreams, and I think I wake up and comfort it, but then I can’t remember in the morning. It’s like a child.” A loud, repetitive tidal noise made it difficult to hear. Then Tom realized it was Charley’s labored mouth-breathing.
“It sort of looked like me for a while, but now it’s starting to change again. Maybe—“ Charlie leaned in close, whispering, “maybe it figured I wouldn’t hurt it as long as it looked like that.”
Ambrose held up a finger, and Tom paused the feed. “That’s likely, actually. Charley was mined for raw materials, probably for filling gaps in DNA. Now the growth has become its own machine.”
“The results from Crank suggest a retrovirus. The cells still contain Charley’s whole genome, but they’re a few sequences heavy.” Tom stopped to sip cold coffee. “More than a few.”
He began the feed again. Charley’s grinning face glistened and seemed ready to burst in front of the camera. “I get this feeling lately. It’s a sick feeling like I—love—this thing sticking out of me. I do. I love it.” Then he seemed to burp up acid. “But I hate it, too. Sometimes I sit here and try to figure out the love-hate, but I can’t. It toys with me. I wonder if…if I’m still a man.” He sprouted a huge grin. “That reminds me. There’s a silver lining to all this. I have tits.”
Tom paused the feed again. He got up and began putting on his jacket. “I’m going over there.”
Ambrose smoked mechanically across the table.
Tom stopped when he saw his eyes. “What?”
“Just wait,” Ambrose said. “Let him finish.”
Tom shrugged on his jacket and licked his fingers and ran them through his shaggy hair. “It’s weirder than you think, Doc. The cytopathology lab on Crank says the control tissue—Charley’s healthy skin around the growth—isn’t recycling. It isn’t aging.”
Ambrose’s eyebrows went up.
“And something’s protecting him against uncontrolled growth. He’s lost his first line of defense against cancer, but something’s keeping order in there.”
“Are they sure?”
“It’s an adenovirus. First a retrovirus takes some of Charley’s DNA to make to make supercells for itself, then turns around and makes super-Charley cells by giving birth to an adenovirus. The virus enters a cell and replicates, reinscribes the membrane. It strengthens the DNA and protects the code but doesn’t make permanent changes.”
Ambrose seemed to make a connection. His flyspeck eyes twitched in their orbits. “So the second virus makes his tissues immortal, but he can’t produce it himself.”
“Only the first virus can do that.”
Ambrose stubbed out his cigar. “Tom, this thing is engineered.”
“The Institute will love that. Not only did we discover life, we found a product of genetic engineering we won’t be able to touch for hundreds of years.”
“You can’t control their response. All you can do is tell them. And you have to tell them.”
“Right now, the only one I need to tell is Charley. If he keeps the growth, he could live forever, right? If the adenovirus is spreading through his system?”
Ambrose thought about it a long time. Twice he went to smoke his cigar and realized he’d put it out. Tom was in the doorway when he pointed the cigar at the computer. “New events in the feed. Shouldn’t you see them before you go out there?”
IV. Dominance
The system scanned forward until a threshold event kicked on the viewing software. T
om sat down to watch with Ambrose looking over his shoulder.
Charley’s steakhouse ranch wavered with the fronds of tropical plants grown out of control and spangled with the aurora of the gas cloud. Charley shuffled up and down the halls at super speed, holding his lower back and clutching at the walls.
Regular play resumed at a moment when Charley had been about to shuffle down the hallway from his bedroom to the big open kitchen, as usual. Then he stopped suddenly as if shot or stabbed, squealed to the heavens, and hugged the wall. “Shit! Owww! No…” His hands sought his lower back, pressing and kneading. Two fully grown arms and dwarfish legs stuck out both sides of his trunk, a perpendicular twin spliced into the man. The weight of this pregnancy seemed to have strained Charley’s back.
Tom pushed his chair back from the desk and half-rose. “Oh, God.” He should head out, he thought, but he wanted to see what happened next.
Charley sagged. Suddenly the feed skipped ahead to another decibel-threshold event. Charley was throwing himself around the living room, screaming with his fists raised to the air in rage and fear. He ran across the room, set his hands on the white marble bar, and began slamming his head against it incredibly hard, his wailing going up and down the Doppler as his head derricked to and from the blood-stippled counter.
Ambrose said, “Jesus, Tom! Go!”
Tom jumped up. “All right,” he said, backing toward the door while he watched. “All right.”
Charley ran around the bar into the kitchen, still screaming and growling, ripped open a cutlery drawer, and yanked out a long, serrated bread knife.
Too late, thought Tom.
Charley put the knife to the root of his twin where it joined his body. For a moment he shouted at nothing, psyching himself up but not moving at all. Then, with a twist of his whole body, he began jacksawing at the growth with huge grunts and clenched teeth. The grunts rose with each sawing motion, rose, and culminated in a withering scream. He dropped the knife and dropped to the floor in a spreading fan of blue blood.
“Go, Tom!” said Ambrose.
Tom couldn’t move.
Another camera angle suddenly suspended them over the table. According to the time stamp, it was less than a minute later.
Pressure Suite - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3 Page 16
