Chimera (Parasitology) (28 page)

“It’s interesting, isn’t it, how facts fall down in the face of appearances? I’ve always been fascinated by the way people get their ideas.” Dr. Cale didn’t sound fascinated. She sounded tired.

The reason was revealed a moment later, when she looked back to Adam and Juniper and said, quietly, “We lost two sleepwalkers yesterday. Convulsions, spasms, and finally death. If it hadn’t happened during feeding time, we might have missed it.”

“What happened?” I asked, wide-eyed. “Did someone give them contaminated water?”

“Unfortunately, that would be too simple,” she said. “We think there was an infected sleepwalker in the group we initially rounded up. The implants are… tricky, for lack of a better word. If conditions aren’t ideal, they can form cysts rather than
maturing immediately into adult worms. We think the sleepwalker was underfed, and so the intruding eggs didn’t mature. Then we fed them up to a point where the cysts felt safe to hatch. If the sleepwalker died when no one was watching…”

“Then the others would have eaten the body,” I said slowly. “And they’d have eaten any eggs or remaining cysts at the same time.”

“We can’t test them all. They’d have to be sedated and removed from the enclosure one at a time. That would frighten and upset them, and it could lead to a stampede. They’re mostly calm right now. They eat, they sleep, they copulate.” She paused and laughed, seeing my expression. “They still have the instincts of their human hosts, Sal. You didn’t know what sex was when you were just a tapeworm. It was your host body that taught you about sexual response and hormonal need. Once a sleepwalker is well fed and no longer needs to search for sustenance, it can move on to other needs. Of course, sometimes they get hungry in the middle of the act and begin attacking one another, but they manage to get by. They’ve been observed masturbating and engaging in group sex, as well. It’s fascinating, from a purely biological standpoint.”

“I never thought about that,” I said honestly. Adam continued to read to Juniper, ignoring us and our topic of conversation completely. It didn’t matter to him if we wanted to talk about sex. It wouldn’t matter to her either, once she was old enough to understand it. Of all the chimera, I was the one with the most human-esque ideas about things like sex and nudity and bodily functions. One more side effect of having been raised as a member of a species that wasn’t my own.

Dr. Cale wasn’t finished. “A few of the women are pregnant. They’re early along yet, but we’re working on separating them from the rest of the mob. We want to start adding prenatal vitamins to their food, and monitor their health in general until the babies are born.”

Now I stared. “
Pregnant
?”

“Yes.” Dr. Cale looked at me levelly. “Do I need to explain how that works before you and Nathan decide to declare yourselves married? I’m happy to become a biological grandmother, but not for a while. I have things to do, and a world to save. All that gets complicated when I’m being tapped for babysitting.”

“I’d be happy to babysit,” said Adam, looking up from his book. Juniper was patting the pages, and seemed content to keep doing that for a while. “I like kids.”

“Kids and babies aren’t the same, sweetie, and besides, we’ll have plenty of babies around here when the sleepwalker women begin delivering,” said Dr. Cale. “Don’t make promises you’ll be unhappy about keeping.”

“I like kids,” said Adam again, and turned back to his book.

I worried my lip between my teeth for a moment, listening to the drums beating in the distance, before I asked the most important question of all: “Dr. Cale, will the babies be… you know, will the babies be
human
?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It depends on whether the original implant lays eggs, and how those eggs react to the fetus. They may be sleepwalkers. They may be chimera. The implants weren’t supposed to cross the placental barrier, but as the three of you will attest, the implants have learned to do a great many things that they weren’t supposed to do. If the children are human, we’ll take care of them, and find a way to deliver them to the quarantine zone for care. If the children are chimera, or God forbid, sleepwalkers, then we’ll care for them here. It’s the least we can do, considering that their parents will never be able to raise them.”

I shook my head. “It seems like we spend a lot of time looking for people to take care of kids whose parents couldn’t do it.”

“That’s not a part of the current crisis, I’m afraid,” said Dr.
Cale. “It’s always been that way. All we can do is struggle to build structures around the chaos, and hope that they will hold.”

“Yeah,” I said. There was a momentary silence, both of us looking toward Adam and Juniper, before I asked, “How’s Tansy?”

“Holding in there. Her primary segment is still intact, and it isn’t losing viability. I’d always assumed that an implant could live indefinitely in a healthy growth medium, and she’s got that.” Upon seeing my bewildered look, Dr. Cale sighed and said, “When you lived in Sally Mitchell’s digestive system, you fed on whatever she ate. Since most people got more cavalier about their diets after their implants were in place, you probably had a high-fat, high-protein diet. Once you migrated to her brain, you switched over to a blood-based meal plan.”

“Blood’s not that nutritious,” I said.

“No, but it’s nutritious enough to keep you healthy, happy, and physically connected to your host’s brain, without ever letting you get so hungry that you start eating the tissue around you—not that there’s ever been a case of a chimera doing that,” Dr. Cale hastened to add. “You would have to be starving, and the blood supply to the brain would have to be interrupted for long enough to cause a second brain death. Right now, Tansy still has access to the veins that provide the bulk of her nutrition. When she starts looking distressed, we’ve been adding fluids via IV to the brain itself. That isn’t normally a good idea—tissue damage and the like—but that butcher did so much damage to the host when he cracked its skull open that it isn’t going to make any difference. Not to Tansy. Not now.”

It was interesting the way she insisted on gendering Tansy—who was technically genderless in her original form, as were all tapeworms—while reducing the host to something neutral and undefined. It was a way of distancing herself from the non-
person in this equation… and I didn’t have to be a genius to know that the non-person was the human being. Tansy was all that mattered to her. Tansy was all that ever
would
matter, at least where those two lives were concerned.

The host body had been broken by Dr. Banks. There was still a chance that Tansy could be saved.

“How hard is it going to be to find another host for Tansy? How long can the current one hold out on life support?”

Dr. Cale looked at me wearily. “It took me years, with access to the entire hospital system and a working Internet, to find the subjects I used for my work. Only three of them were able to successfully integrate with their implants and become chimera: Adam, Tansy, and Sherman. Tissue type matters, as do a whole host of other factors. Given the dysphoria you described in your friend Ronnie, we need to hold out until we can find a female host, which is just going to take longer.”

I worried my lip between my teeth again before asking, “What about the sleepwalkers?” It felt like a betrayal. I was suggesting taking perfectly good bodies away from the cousins who had them and giving them to Tansy, all because she was my sister. Why did she deserve a body any more than they did? She wasn’t even a natural chimera like Juniper or me: She had acquired her first body through surgical means, when Dr. Cale had implanted her directly into an unoccupied brain.

I didn’t want to feel like I was somehow “better” than Adam or Tansy just because I’d managed to accomplish what they’d never had the chance to do. At the same time, it was hard to reconcile the desire to take care of the cousins with the suggestion that we crack out of them open and scrape it out of its original host so that Tansy could come back to us.

It was all about survival. Sometimes, when I thought about the survival of the people I cared about versus the survival of the rest of the world, it was hard not to wonder just how different we really were from the humans.

To my relief and shame, Dr. Cale shook her head. “It would take more effort than it’s worth to round up all the possible candidates, do tissue typing, and then attempt to flush their systems of any protein fragments, eggs, or other traces of infection. Even then, there’d be no guarantee. We need a clean host body if we’re going to transplant her safely.”

I paused again. The answer was obvious. Terrible, but obvious. “Have you ever done tissue typing on me?”

“Of course I have. I had your full workup before we ever met, thanks to Chave.”

Chave had been one of my handlers at SymboGen, an icy, professional woman who just happened to have been a double agent the whole time I’d known her. She had been reporting back to Dr. Cale about the things Dr. Banks was doing, and that had included full details on my care.

Too bad she hadn’t realized how much human DNA he was putting into his newest generation of implants. Too bad she hadn’t known that Sherman was a tapeworm.

Too bad she had died.

“Am I compatible with Tansy?”

Dr. Cale went very still. Then, in a tight voice, she said, “I don’t think Nathan would be very happy if I extracted you from your host so I could try to bring Tansy back, Sal, and you know as well as I do that the two of you can’t coexist.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “If Tansy is compatible with my tissue type, then isn’t there a good chance she’d also be compatible with my
sister’s
tissue type? Joyce’s body is on life support back at USAMRIID, but Joyce is gone. She’s never coming back.” Just like Sally was never coming back. The Mitchells had sacrificed both their daughters on the altar of this war, and they had never even known that they were signing up to fight.

Dr. Cale blinked slowly. Then she gripped the wheels of her
chair and started rolling toward the door. “I’ll get back to you,” she said.

Adam looked up as she rolled past him. “Bye, Mom.”

“Bye,” said Juniper.

“I’ll see you soon,” said Dr. Cale, and then she was gone, rolling away across the parking lot with the sort of speed that came from long familiarity with the places where the pavement dipped, the spots she could use to her advantage. She rarely needed anyone to help her get around when she was on familiar ground, and the bicycle gloves she wore to keep her palms from getting shredded were so familiar that I barely even registered them anymore. They were just a part of her hands, as ineluctable as her fingernails, which were always cropped short and buffed clean, like part of her remembered that manicures were essential, to be taken seriously in a male-dominated workplace.

I’d never had a manicure in my life. The thought of sitting still for an hour while a stranger played with my hands was disturbing, and I had no interest in finding out whether the reality would be any different.

Sally had probably gone for a lot of manicures. We were never going to be the same person.

A hand tugged on my shirt. I looked down, and there was Juniper, eyes bright, mouth curved downward in the dour semi-scowl that was her neutral expression. She only smiled in response to other people, or when she was too excited to fight the muscle memory of her inherited face. Smiling was a human trait, and while it was one that we were able to learn, it was never going to be one that came completely naturally.

“Up,” she said.

“Up what?” I asked.

“Up now,” she said. Then she paused, clearly reviewing her sentence for missing pieces, and amended, “Up now,
Sal
.”

“She’s managing to remember that she needs to specify parts of her request,” said Adam, walking over as I boosted Juniper
into my arms. “She hasn’t quite grasped the purpose of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ yet, but Mom says those took me a while, too.”

“Why should she?” I asked. “She knows we’ll do anything she asks.” I looked over my shoulder toward the Kmart. It seemed like a fortress, impermeable and safe. The Oakland Coliseum had seemed like a fortress too, but I’d been able to escape from it twice, and only once had I had outside help.

Things were delicately balanced, but they were good. They were… they were
functional
. Even with the sick sleepwalkers and Carrie in her cell, they were
working
. I stood there, Juniper on my hip and Adam by my side, and wished that there were any way in hell I could believe that this was going to last. It felt like the calm before the storm, and we were not prepared.

January 2028: Sherman

T
he assault on the Costco had gone better than expected: We’d come away with no losses, but had gained a decent stock of bottled water and nonperishable foodstuffs. Between the supplies from the Costco stockrooms and the food we’d been growing ourselves, we were well positioned to move into the coming year. As long as our chickens continued to lay and our hydroponics continued to yield good fruit, we’d have no issues with our nutritional needs, and would even be able to continue feeding our stock.

That was the greatest victory of our raid on the Costco: the
humans
. We had captured twenty-nine of them, all implant-free and defiantly alive, filled with the burning anger of an apex species that could see its hold on the world eroding from beneath its feet. They were healthy, alert, and presented an excellent cross-section of races, genders, and ages, making them perfect for our purposes.

One of them—a Latina woman in her early twenties, who had fought and screamed like a banshee when we came for her—was stretched out on my operating table, tubes running from her arms to the IVs that kept her sedated. This worked better if the subject wasn’t awake and fighting the whole time.
My mother—what a loaded word that was, even if it was accurate in all the ways that mattered—used to insist on using subjects who had experienced clinical brain death, “vacating the premises” as it were. I understood the reasons for her squeamishness. She was human, after all, and could be forgiven for not wanting to evict her own kind from their bodies. But Maria needed this body more than the woman on my table ever would… and I needed Maria.

With Ronnie sacrificed to bring about our glorious future, and Kristoph killed by the unexpected side effects of the same act, I needed Maria. My people respected her as one of their leaders. They would listen when she spoke. True, she wouldn’t be saying much for a while—even epigenetic data couldn’t save her the long, slow process of learning how to be a person again, after she had been so abruptly reduced back to her original state—but having her by my side would change things. It would make my people more willing to listen to me, and more willing to believe me when I said that I was working for the good of all.

Batya moved around the body, a shallow dish in her hands. She was looking at it with something like reverence, her eyes shining so brightly with unshed tears that I could see the gleam even through the goggles she wore. The dish was filled with jellied growth medium, engineered from human brain tissue, and in its center writhed an off-white worm, segmented and capped with a mouth like a beautiful flower.

There are those who would call us “ugly” outside the human shells we wear. I think it’s only when the lumps and imperfections of the human body are stripped away that our true beauty is revealed. Symmetrical; simple. A perfect form, unchanged by centuries upon this Earth. Even when my mother and her research team split us open and reworked our DNA in a thousand new directions, our form remained essentially the same, because it was already, unquestionably, perfect.

“Bone saw,” I said, and one of the assistants handed it to me,
pressing it carefully into my hands. I started the machine, listening to the reassuring whir for a moment before lowering it to the sleeping woman’s scalp.

She probably had a name once,
I thought, apropos of nothing, as I began to cut. I batted the thought away like the meaningless noise it was. Her name didn’t matter: Whatever it had been, that was done. She was Maria now, and would be Maria forevermore.

I was just glad we’d been able to find a Latina woman in such excellent condition. As Ronnie had demonstrated, putting one of my people into a body that was too radically different from their epigenetic self-image could have negative repercussions, and I didn’t feel like dealing with that again. It might make for an interesting study somewhere along the line, and it would definitely be a topic to keep in mind as we began setting up the breeding camps for the surviving humans, but for now, it was best that each transplant involve a new host as similar to the old host as possible.

The woman’s scalp peeled away under the clever fingers of my assistants, and I finished removing the piece of bone that we would be replacing in a few minutes, after Maria had been properly introduced to her new home.

It took my first forays into neurosurgery to really understand what a feat of scientific engineering my mother had accomplished when she made me. The brain was well supplied by veins and concealed arteries, and was contained by the rigid dome of the skull. Even opening a panel large enough to grant access ran the risk of compromising the entire delicate structure.

Cut in the wrong place and the whole thing would become useless, compromised, and unable to support the developing tapeworm’s needs. Place Maria against the wrong vein and she would be unable to connect herself to her host, leaving her trapped in a living corpse until we reopened the skull and pulled her back out into the unforgiving light. Truly, whatever
hand engineered the human mind was more interested in laying traps for whoever might come along than they were in making the system efficient and safe to use.

It was no surprise that most of the sleepwalkers were profoundly damaged. The worms, driven by instinct to seek control, had chewed their way through the brains of their hosts without concern for the system as a whole. If anything, it was a surprise that so many of the sleepwalkers lived.

Bit by bit, I worked my way through the tissue, peeling back layers and clamping off veins when necessary, until I reached the spot we had identified as optimal for the integration process. “Batya, the dish,” I said.

Solemnly, my last remaining lieutenant handed me the dish containing her sister. I removed Maria with a pair of sterile tongs, lifting her as gently as I could. She writhed and squirmed against the metal, twisting fiercely. She was still a fighter. Even here, stripped of her body and her agency, she was a fighter.

The assistants held the tissue aside as I introduced Maria to her new host, tucking her between the folds of the brain. She continued to writhe as I withdrew the tongs, beating her soft, fragile body against the soft, fragile tissue that surrounded her. She wasn’t chewing; she couldn’t hurt anything as she was. We all held our breaths, waiting to see what she was going to do. Would she settle? Or would she begin to chew at her surroundings, tearing through the brain and ruining it for all future purposes?

The writhing slowed; stopped. Maria pressed her head against the vein, which pulsed, blue and tender, in the tissue. Then, with a small wiggle, she latched on and began to feed. She was integrating.

“Close her up,” I said, amazed by the strength of the relief that washed over me. We had navigated this small thing safely.

We had so much ahead of us.