Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) (4 page)

“I know about Sherman,” I said, the taste of his name on my tongue setting my stomach roiling again. I was starting to feel numb all the way down to my toes. Too many revelations at once will do that to a girl, I guess. “I get what you’re saying, Adam. I’m just… I’m like the people here, a little. I’m still shaky, too.”

“You be as shaky as you want,” he said. “I’ll be here to help you when you’re done.” He smiled at me.

I smiled back. I couldn’t help it.

We had walked maybe half the length of the bowling alley while we were talking and had stopped just outside a curtain of sliced plastic, cut lengthwise, like the screen on a butterfly aviary or a grocery store produce department’s storage area.
I looked at it and swallowed hard. There was something impersonal and medicinal about those dangly strips of waxy plastic, like nothing I was on
this
side would really matter once I was on
that
side.

“The broken doors are open,” I murmured.

“That’s my favorite book,” said Adam.

“Of course it’s your favorite book,” I said.
Don’t Go Out Alone
had been written by a good friend of Dr. Cale. It had been a key part of Nathan’s childhood. It was only natural that it would be a key part of Adam’s as well. I was starting to be a little jealous. I was the only member of our family who hadn’t grown up with that book.

Adam let go of my hand. “If you’re still shaky, I think you’ll feel better talking to Mom and Nathan without me. It’ll be easier to pretend that you’re all humans, and not just all people.”

I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, and that his absence wouldn’t make anything easier at all—that no one ever made anything easier by walking away from it. I couldn’t. When I tried to form the words my lips shaped only silence, and in the end I had to force myself to smile, nod, and say, “I think that might be a good idea. I’ll come find you, though, when we’re done. I think I’m…” I faltered, and then continued, “I think I’m going to need you to teach me a lot of things about the way life is now.”

“Always,” said Adam. Before I could react, he hugged me, let me go, and trotted off into the lab, moving with a lanky sureness that somehow broadcast how comfortable he was in the shape of his own skin.

It seemed indecent, almost: he was a worm wearing a boy like a suit. Shouldn’t he have seemed awkward, or shambled like the sleepwalkers, even? Something—anything—to betray the fact that he wasn’t what he seemed to be. I hadn’t felt that way about him before. I considered the emotion for a moment, spinning it around in my head as I tried to find the angle that
would tell me where it was coming from. In the end, though, the answer was so simple that I almost missed it:

Guilt. I hadn’t been guilty when I’d seen Adam before; I hadn’t been allowing myself to understand my own origins, and so I’d assumed I was my body’s original owner. Now I was a stranger in my own skin, and if I couldn’t make myself move awkwardly or look visibly like an intruder—like a thief—I’d think those horrible things at Adam—at my brother.

“No, I won’t,” I ordered myself sternly, and stepped through the plastic sheeting, into the small, white-walled lab beyond.

It was maybe eight feet to a side, creating a space that would have been borderline claustrophobic if that sort of thing had bothered me at all. As it was, it struck me as nicely snug, which meant that it probably made most people uncomfortable. Like the majority of the lab spaces in the bowling alley, this one was isolated only in the most technical sense of the word. The walls didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling, and powerful, if quiet fans were occupied in sucking air up from the floor and spitting it over the top of those three-quarter walls, creating a sort of poor man’s negative pressure zone. It wasn’t quite enough to qualify as a “clean room,” and wouldn’t even have necessarily worked as a quarantine zone back at the shelter, but it was clearly enough for Dr. Cale to feel comfortable setting up some serious hardware. An array of computer towers occupied one wall, their constant buzz setting up a low thrumming sound that vibrated through the soles of my bare feet. Nathan and Dr. Cale were both there already, their attention focused on the same monitor.

“I’m awake,” I announced. They both turned toward me, Nathan with naked relief, Dr. Cale with clinical interest that was so closely akin to the way that Dr. Banks used to look at me that I quailed slightly, shrinking in on myself. “I mean, if it matters. I woke up,” I finished awkwardly.

“How do you feel?” asked Nathan, starting to take a step toward me.

Dr. Cale caught his arm, stopping him before he could fully commit to the motion. “I’m sure we’re both very interested in how Sal is feeling, but we need to finish this, Nathan.” She flashed me a quick, strained smile. “I’m glad to see you up and about. Do you need something to drink? You hit your head pretty hard when you fell, and you’d just given blood. Some orange juice would probably do you a lot of good. Go find Adam, he can take you to get some juice.”

I frowned. “You’re trying to avoid telling me something. You don’t normally try to get me to go away and find juice.”

“Untrue: I gave you juice the very first time you came here,” Dr. Cale replied. “And it’s not like you’ve spent that much time with me. Maybe all of my personal relationships are heavily dependent on juice consumption.”

“You gave me juice that was in the room where we were, and there’s a mini fridge in the corner over there, so if you were that dependent on juice for normal social interaction, you’d be telling me to go and get myself a glass, not telling me to go find Adam.” I folded my arms. “I may not be a human being, but I’m not stupid either. What’s going on? Why do you want me to leave?”

“I told you,” said Nathan, clearly directing his words at Dr. Cale. He was smiling slightly when he turned to face me, although the expression died quickly, replaced by solemnity. Looking at them both, I was struck again by just how much he resembled his mother sometimes. Genetics mattered. “Sal, we’ve been going over the data that you were able to recover from SymboGen. Thank you again for doing that. I didn’t want you to, but I’m coming to understand just how necessary it was.”

I worried my lower lip between my teeth before asking, “How bad?”

“I don’t know. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s there—it’s only been a few hours.” He shrugged, his arms flopping limply, like they belonged to a doll and not to a man. “How does the end of the human race sound to you?”

“Oh,” I said, and looked to Dr. Cale. She nodded. That was all it took: one little nod to confirm the end of humanity. “That’s bad,” I said.

T
he worms being distributed by SymboGen were definitely Dr. Cale’s work: her fingerprints were all over their baseline genetic code, at least according to Nathan, who understood that kind of thing. It looked like a long list of amino acids and DNA chains to me, all of them scrolling by so fast that I wouldn’t have been able to follow them across the screen even if I hadn’t been dyslexic. Still, I had no reason to doubt him when he said that no one but Dr. Cale could have done the core work.

“My original specimens had a very limited amount of human DNA at their disposal, and it was specifically DNA coded to the human immune system,” said Dr. Cale. “It lessened immune response, which made it more likely that the body would view the worm as a friendly guest, and not a hostile interloper. It allowed for a better bond. It was intended to make things…
I don’t know. Easier. Better. Between that and toxoplasmosis, there was a very good chance that nothing would be rejected.”

I frowned. “I know all this. Why are you telling me things I already know?”

“Because she doesn’t want to think about the things that you don’t know yet,” said Nathan. “Dr. Banks has been a busy boy.”

“We don’t know that it was Steven,” said Dr. Cale sharply. She turned a glare on Nathan. “The lab protocols at SymboGen have been lax ever since he decided that he’d rather play rock star than stay chained to a desk doing science. There have been a lot of opportunities for unethical people to tamper with our work.”

“And what, Mother? It’s somehow worse if the man who blackmailed you into deserting your family is the one who made the changes to the genome? Is that the piece that finally proves you made the wrong choice? Because I think you of all people should be willing to accept how unethical he is.” Nathan matched her glare for glare before turning his back on her, focusing on me and saying, “The amount of human DNA in the newest generation of worms has more than doubled, and there have been some changes to the toxoplasmosis samples as well, although we haven’t had time to figure out exactly what those changes will mean.”

“It’s worse if this was him, because he knew better,” said Dr. Cale. “Out of everyone in the world, he knew better.”

This felt like the sort of circular conversation that could go on for hours. I interrupted, saying, “We already knew there was human DNA in the tapeworms.”

“Yes, but it was a small enough amount that it should still have been possible to use most common antiparasitics without killing the human host.” Nathan grimaced before continuing, “That’s why you reacted so strongly to the antiparasitics, even though you didn’t die from them. The implants were tailored to
break down anthelmintics, to prevent them from being killed by normal medical intervention. If they hadn’t been, the antiparasitics could have…” He trailed off.

“They could have killed me,” I concluded. “But my body—Sally’s body, I mean, not the actual me—that would have been fine, right?” It was a surprisingly easy sentence to make myself utter. I was adapting. That, or I was still in shock. I hoped for the former, but I’d take either one if it kept me calm and capable of being an active part of my own future.

“Not necessarily. The brain controls the body to a very large degree, and your distress sent the body into anaphylactic shock when you were given antiparasitics. If they had been continued and mixed with enough epinephrine, yes, they could have killed you without killing your human half, but they would have damaged it severely.” Nathan looked almost ashamed of what he was saying. “On one of the newer generation of worms… there’s no guarantee the antiparasitics would work even that well. They’re too human. Doctors trying for treatment would have to move on to chemicals that can be dangerous to the human body, as well as to the invading parasites.”

“So everybody dies, or everybody lives,” I concluded. “Why would that seem like a good idea? Aren’t the antiparasitics supposed to, um, clear out the old worms so SymboGen can keep selling new ones to people?” The idea was suddenly repellent to me. Every time I’d discussed antiparasitics in the past—even demanded them, only a few hours before—it had been with the idea that they would improve the quality of a person’s life. As I was forced to reconsider what made a person, they suddenly looked like murder.

You’re adjusting to this too fast
, murmured my thoughts.

But I wasn’t adjusting too fast: not really. I had known the truth for a while, allowing it to integrate itself with my deeper thinking, like it was a second tapeworm writhing and knotting
its way through the first. I had invaded Sally Mitchell’s mind, and the truth of my origins had invaded mine. Fair was only fair.

“It
doesn’t
seem like a good idea,” said Dr. Cale. “If Steven did this, it’s because he was trying to orchestrate the current crisis. I just… I can’t…” Her face fell, allowing honest dismay to leak briefly through her so carefully constructed mask. “It’s bad for stock prices,” she said finally. “It’s going to destroy SymboGen. There’s no way he can recover from this. As soon as people realize that the implants are responsible, he’ll be finished, he’ll be lucky to walk away a free man—and even then, he’ll need to keep his eyes open for the rest of his life, or the family of one of the sleepwalkers will bring that life to a short and brutal end. It doesn’t make sense for Steven to have done this.”

I frowned. “Is surgery an option? Couldn’t they, you know…” I made a snipping motion with one hand, like it was a pair of scissors. “That’s how you got Adam out of you, right? You had your assistants cut you open.”

“We don’t have the facilities or the personnel for that sort of mass surgical intervention,” said Dr. Cale. “That also assumes the worms have not yet started to migrate. You’re so integrated with Sally Mitchell’s brain tissue at this point that we couldn’t remove you even if we wanted to. There’s a point past which there is no going back.”

“That means that all the sleepwalkers are past saving, surgically or otherwise,” added Nathan. “That ship has sailed.”

“Oh,” I said quietly. “So, um. How much time would it take for someone to modify the design on the implants? I know I’m… I mean my implant was… I mean
I’m
one of the older generations. I probably don’t have that much human DNA in me.”

“Given the generational cycle of
D. symbogenesis
—it’s compacted down to a matter of months when you’re working in a
lab environment, outside of a human host—you could increase the human DNA to this level in two years, give or take a few quality control tests. Maybe a little longer, if you wanted to be absolutely sure of stability. Maybe a little less time, if you weren’t worried about side effects,” said Dr. Cale.

“Side effects like growing through the muscle tissue of your host and eventually trying to take them over?” I ventured. “I mean, apparently I did that too, but not until after Sally had her accident, when it was all a matter of survival. If I hadn’t taken over, we would both have died.”

“Yes, those would be considered side effects,” said Dr. Cale.

“So, um, how long ago did Sherman go all AWOL on you?” I frowned a little. “He’s been at SymboGen for as long as I can remember, and he had friends in the science department—Dr. Sanjiv and Dr. McGillis at the very least. Um, they used to do my MRIs, so I know they knew what I was, and Dr. Sanjiv was also I think in the genetics department? And Dr. McGillis was all about internal medicine, and anyway, I think he could probably have done it.”

“Sherman?” asked Nathan.

“You remember how I had those two handlers at SymboGen? The really pretty, really chilly lady and the tall dude who always had a tan even though he mostly worked underground?”

Nathan nodded. “Yes. He… ah, well, he tried to convince me to go out to dinner with him once.” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “This was after I had told him I was there to pick you up, mind. He seemed to think that my having dinner with him would make me a better boyfriend for you. Fortunately, you showed up about that time, and he didn’t have the chance to press the issue.”

“That sounds like Sherman,” said Dr. Cale. There was a bleak note in her voice, like she was making light commentary to keep herself from starting to scream. “He used to say that gender was a construct of the body and the mind, and that since
his mind was a hermaphroditic worm dreaming of being a gendered biped, he felt no reason to restrict himself any further.”

“But when did he leave here?” I pressed. I vaguely remembered Tansy saying something about him disappearing from the lab six months before I had—before Sally had—before the accident, but I wanted to be
sure
. So much had happened during my brief visit to SymboGen that I no longer completely trusted my recollections. “Tansy said something about my accident…”

“Yes,” said Dr. Cale wearily. “He left here about six months before Sally Mitchell lost control of her car. I had just finished doing my monthly check on the chimera—”

“The what?” interrupted Nathan.

“Adam, Tansy, and Sherman: my chimera,” said Dr. Cale. “People—and they
are
people, anything that can think and communicate and tell you what it prefers to be called is a person, regardless of species or origin—who were created by combining multiple organisms. It’s a medical term, usually, for beings that have multiple distinct types of DNA in their bodies. It’s frequently used for people who absorbed their twins while they were in the womb, to give a common example. In mythology, a chimera is a creature made up from bits and pieces of different animals. I use it for the hybrids. It sounds less… judgmental than ‘parasite’ or even ‘symbiont.’ ”

“So that means me too, now,” I said quietly. Dr. Cale glanced at me, looking almost guilty. I shrugged. “It’s okay. I like it. And you’re right—it’s a better word than ‘hybrid,’ or ‘freak,’ and those were really the only things that I was coming up with. What kind of check were you doing?”

“Making sure there was no tissue rejection or complication, that their human immune systems hadn’t suddenly started attacking their tapeworm bodies as invaders, that there was no mismatch between the neural network and the activity coming from the worm—all fairly standard.” Dr. Cale must have read the dawning disgust in my expression, because she hastened
to add, “Dr. Banks was performing very similar tests on you. Chave confirmed it for me, starting when you were brought back to SymboGen for neural mapping. I would have intervened much sooner if I thought that you were in any danger of rejection.”

I wanted to believe her, I really did—I was her tapeworm “daughter,” after all, and I’d been dating her biological son for several years. She had every reason to want to help me stay healthy and psychologically intact. But she wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I had to ask myself whether she’d been viewing me as a true control group: something not to be touched or interfered with, because that would have spoiled her data.

“So Sherman left right after you gave him a clean bill of health,” I said slowly, trying to select the words to make what I was saying both inoffensive and clear. “Did you say anything like ‘this means you’re stable’ or ‘this proves the interface can sustain itself in the long term’ or ‘yay, you’re not going to melt’?”

Dr. Cale frowned. “Maybe…”

Sometimes smart people can be a special kind of stupid. The kind where they know so many facts and are so good at saying “no one would ever do
that
” that they somehow manage to convince themselves the world is going to care about what they think. It’s like they believe that intelligence alone defines the universe. “So what if he saw that as permission?” I asked. “He left, and he knew what he was, and that humans had created him, and that maybe there was a way to make more like him. And then I happened, and he realized that it could happen naturally. You knew what the signs looked like. So did Dr. Banks. Why wouldn’t Sherman?”

“You think he went to SymboGen specifically to begin engineering the downfall of the human race.” It wasn’t a question, and Dr. Cale didn’t sound horrified when she said it. If anything, she sounded… impressed. Like this was something
any parent would absolutely want their son and protégé to think of doing.

I looked to Nathan, too baffled by her tone to know what to say. Thankfully, he wasn’t siding with her on this one. Expression hardening, he looked at her and asked, “Mom, do you think that what Sal is suggesting is possible?”

“Possible, yes,” said Dr. Cale. “Probable, given the rest of what we know… oh, yes. Sherman never went to college, for obvious reasons, but all of my chimera children have helped me in the lab as part of their chores. He understands genetics at least as well as your average lab assistant, and probably better than the majority of them. He knew that we were going to have issues when the human population figured out that their implants had the potential to become sapient; he knew there was a chance that the chimera and human races would wind up competing for ownership of the planet. He could very easily have decided this was the appropriate way to approach the problem, and simply put his plans into action once he managed to find a sympathetic ear.”

“I don’t understand how anyone could think handing their bodies—and their world—over to a different species was a good idea,” I said.

“Humans have done a lot to damage this world, Sal,” said Dr. Cale. “The idea of keeping our human bodies, which are useful things for manipulating the environment, but replacing their brains with something that might be a little kinder…”

I stared at her. “We’re
tapeworms
,” I said. “We’re
parasites
.”

“Yes. You don’t kill your hosts on purpose, although you’re more than happy to rewire them to suit your needs. Humans, on the other hand, have a long tradition of killing our hosts. It’s almost a genetic imperative with us.”

“But we kill the original personality,” I protested.

“Biology doesn’t care. The genes are still there; the body is still alive,” said Dr. Cale. “I’m not saying Sherman had the
right idea by encouraging his people to increase the amount of human DNA in the implants—if it
was
Sherman; I’ll be able to tell whether he asked them to use any of my research techniques once I’ve had the chance to cross-check this data against the recent specimens that Tansy brought back from Lafayette—but I am saying I understand how he could have talked other people into going along with him.”