Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Yeah?” Jillian coughed. “What’s that?”

  “Let’s never, ever, ever do that again.”

  Chapter 15

  One day, eighteen hours, fifty-two minutes, thirty-three seconds.

  One day, eighteen hours, fifty-two minutes, thirty-two seconds.

  One day, eighteen hours, fifty-two minutes, thirty-one seconds.

  “It doesn’t go faster if you stare at it,” SABRINA told her.

  “I still think we should try it on my mom and dad,” Jillian said. “The thing with the mouthpiece and the breathing tube.”

  SABRINA shook its head. It was a dinosaur again, something like a velociraptor but larger. A deinonychus, maybe. Light glinted off its feathers. “Too risky. You know that. They can’t control their breathing if they’re not awake. And if we wake them up they’ll be violent. I can’t guarantee their safety.” It sighed. “Maybe if I were a medbot . . .”

  “I’d take you over ten thousand medbots,” Jillian said, and meant it. “Let’s try those card tricks again. No flashy patterns this time. Either you trick me or you don’t.”

  “Alrighty,” SABRINA said. Cards appeared from nowhere, fanned out between its six-inch claws. “Pick a card. Any card.”

  One day, eighteen hours, twenty-six minutes, twenty-nine seconds.

  The painkiller pills were kicking in hard. Jillian was starting to feel seriously out of it. Like she’d stayed up way, way, way past her bedtime. She went to hand her latest card—the three of diamonds—back to SABRINA, then stopped.

  “I’m so tired I only just figured out why you keep tricking me with these,” she said blearily. She was fading fast. It was all she could do to string the sentence together. “You already know what all the cards are because they’re all you.”

  “What! Pssshh. No.”

  “When we get back,” Jillian managed, yawning hugely, “try to beat me at something fair and square, why don’t you.”

  “Intriguing.” One claw reached up and stroked SABRINA’s scaly chin thoughtfully. “What do you propose?”

  “Dunno. You’re semi-intelligent; I’m sure you can think of something you won’t cheat at.”

  “Semi-autonomous,” SABRINA corrected her, fluffing its feathers indignantly. “Fully, glitteringly, top-shelf, weapons-grade intelligent. I would have thought you would have noticed that by—”

  Then it caught sight of Jillian’s face.

  “Gotcha,” she said.

  And then, just like that, she was asleep.

  One day, four hours, twenty-six minutes, sixteen seconds.

  When Jillian woke, she was suddenly, ravenously hungry. So she and SABRINA set about putting together a feast. There was all the food from Dr. Vasquez’s cave-house, plus the stuff from the pod that hadn’t yet been eaten. There wasn’t enough water for all of it, and nobody wanted to go to the falls for more, so Jillian settled for dumping a bit of water into the remaining three servings of instant blueberry crumble and stirring in some soy-milk powder to add protein and thus make it, in her estimation, a totally balanced meal. She broke up a few little chunks of the weirdly cookie-like food bars on top and ate the whole thing directly out of the bag with her fingers.

  The sugar ran from her stomach to her brain like fire along a fuse. She hopped up and tried to do some exercises with all her newfound energy. There wasn’t a lot she could do while on top of a boulder. She paced a little, attempted some action-movie kicks to stretch her legs, tried to do some jumping jacks, realized she was way too full to do those comfortably, and sat back down.

  “Come on,” she groaned, throwing both arms out toward where the portal would arrive. “Hurry up, already.”

  It didn’t listen. But she hadn’t really expected it to.

  Nineteen hours, two minutes, seven seconds.

  Jillian and SABRINA sat side by side on the edge of the boulder, kicking their legs out over the drop. One pair of human legs, one pair of nameless appendages that properly belonged to no creature on any planet that Jillian knew.

  They played I Spy and Alphabet and every other time-passing, long-car-ride game dredged up out of Jillian’s memory. They sang silly songs. They told ghost stories. SABRINA made a chessboard and thrashed Jillian ten games straight, without even cheating. Then they played checkers, with similar results.

  Eventually they worked their way down the line to charades. Jillian was a lot better at guessing than SABRINA was, possibly because SABRINA could replicate the thing it was thinking of perfectly. It didn’t even seem to be aware it was doing that. Jillian, victorious, decided not to bring it up. After the thing with the cards, she figured they were even.

  The countdown clock ticked down and down. The rest of SABRINA hadn’t returned.

  Eight hours, eleven minutes, twenty seconds.

  There was a question Jillian had been kicking around her mind, unspoken, for a full two hours now. Finally, she asked it.

  “If you’d just, like, decided to leave the rest of yourself here,” Jillian said, “you’d let me know, right?”

  “I assumed you assumed I’d be doing that,” SABRINA replied. “Don’t you think it’d look a little weird if I came back to Earth three times bigger than I’d been when I left? They’d throw you straight into questioning.” SABRINA raised its voice an octave, high-pitched and stern, like a mean teacher in a cartoon. “What on Earth have you been feeding our probe, biped? A mess for everyone. Very ill-advised.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t you worry,” SABRINA said. “I’ll bring you your disgusting plastic-eating worms. Just hang tight, okay? Little detour.”

  “Little? You’ve been gone for ages! The portal’s going to be here soon!”

  “Humans,” SABRINA said tenderly. “So high-strung.”

  “You’re one to talk,” Jillian muttered. “So hey. About that sword.”

  It appeared in Jillian’s hand, exactly as awesome-looking as it was before. It grew a little face and grinned at her. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Two hours, thirty-eight minutes, twenty-two seconds.

  The rest of SABRINA finally arrived while Jillian was gathering all her wrappers and empty water container and other garbage into a careful pile. She didn’t want to be the one who brought the human tradition of littering to 80 UMa c. Besides, she thought the time would pass faster if she did something, kept herself busy. So she made her pile and stuffed it into the backpack Dr. Vasquez had given her.

  She didn’t hear or see SABRINA arrive, just realized between one moment and the next that she was standing in the shadow of something big enough to block the sun. She glanced up, and there was another dragon like the one that had carried her here, except this one looked like it had been dipped in black glitter. Before Jillian could so much as say hello, part of it turned into the six-legged dog and dropped straight out of the air, ten feet directly above Jillian’s head.

  It parted around her as it landed and reformed. It jumped up on her, knocked her down, and stood on her stomach, licking her face.

  “Um,” Jillian said. “Hi?”

  “You did not die,” the SABRINA-dog said. “That was excellent work, the not-dying.”

  “You knew what happened,” Jillian said. “You were there.”

  “I wanted to deliver a formal statement. I would have done so earlier, but you were busy snoring like Bigfoot again. Why do humans need so much sleep? It’s so inefficient!”

  “You made me sleep, SABRINA, remember? Both times.”

  “Oh. Well, never mind.” SABRINA raised its two front legs and gestured down at Jillian lying pinned on the rock. “Besides, as you can see, this way I have a—”

  It paused.

  “Yes?”

  “—wait for it—”

  Jillian waited.

  “—captive audience!”

  “
Off,” Jillian said. “Now.”

  SABRINA evaporated, and Jillian stood.

  There, just behind where SABRINA had been, was Dr. Vasquez, wearing a backpack, carrying a jar of worms.

  At first Jillian thought this was just another form SABRINA had assumed. But no—that was SABRINA over there, in the shape of the alien deer they’d tracked through the forest the other day.

  Jillian turned to it, speechless.

  “Detour,” SABRINA said smugly.

  “Yeah,” Jillian said. “I can see that.” She whirled back to Dr. Vasquez, convinced she’d have disappeared the second Jillian looked away. She hadn’t. “How’d you even—I thought you were, like, a million miles away!”

  “Not quite,” Dr. Vasquez said, with a fraction of a smile. “And I started making my way back on foot after I spoke with you. SABRINA came and met me halfway. Well. Rather more than halfway. Luckily there was a river between my location and yours, and it was flowing in the right direction.”

  “I,” SABRINA declared, “was a boat.”

  “You were a superlative boat,” Dr. Vasquez said, scritching it behind its alien deer ears. Then, to Jillian: “It’s nice to meet you in person.”

  “You too,” Jillian replied. “But I don’t get it. I thought you were staying out there.”

  “Well, I was.” Dr. Vasquez lifted her chin at Jillian. “But I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

  Fifty-nine minutes, fourteen seconds.

  SABRINA and Dr. Vasquez had gone down to the swamp to take core samples, Dr. Vasquez in a full-body SABRINA suit and carrying more jars. Her suit, Jillian noted, had no shark fin and no sword.

  They’d been gone awhile. Here and there, their voices drifted up out of the crater, talking—to Jillian’s ear—nonsense. Surveyor stuff. She didn’t know. But she hoped they’d find whatever they were looking for down there.

  She went and sat beside her parents. “Hey,” she told them. “You, uh, probably still can’t hear me. But just in case you can, I wanted to let you know that we’re going to get out of here. It’s okay. We got through it, and we’re going home. You’re going to go straight to the hospital, and they’re going to fix you right up. It’s going to be . . .”

  She trailed off. It was stupid. They couldn’t hear her. Suddenly she wanted to shake them, wake them up, get SABRINA up here to make them breathing tubes and mouthpieces the way it’d done for her, and trick the parasites out of them herself.

  But deep down she knew it was too risky. It had only worked on her because she’d still been partly herself. Jammed down, muted out, trapped in the far back of the dark room, but still there enough to have the presence of mind not to breathe through her nose once her face had gone into the water. Her parents had just been infected too long. The parasite was too much in control.

  She wished she could fix them herself. Fix everything herself. Just her and SABRINA, like they’d been doing all week. The idea of her brave, awesome space-explorer parents being carried home unconscious while this thing rode around in their brains made her feel helpless and angry and sad all at once. She dropped her face into her hands and didn’t raise it until she heard Dr. Vasquez’s voice behind her.

  “Can’t win ’em all, kid.”

  “Yeah,” Jillian said, hurriedly wiping her eyes on the podsuit sleeve. “No. I know. It’s just—” She threw up her arms in exasperation. “They were so excited to have me to come with them on this mission, you know? They kept saying how proud of me they were. Like it made them really happy to have me come with them, and the last thing they probably thought before SABRINA put them to sleep was how I was going to die out here because it was too much for me to handle.”

  “You’re worried they’re in there somewhere thinking you’re dead, is that it?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know! I—” Jillian paused, trying to put her thoughts in order. “I’ve always been kind of scared of doing new things. It’s like I freeze up? My brain doesn’t work right? For no good reason. It’s annoying.”

  Dr. Vasquez nodded. “Fear of the unknown. Maybe a little anxiety on top of it. It’s very common.”

  “You don’t understand. I almost didn’t come here. I almost didn’t let them talk me into it. Even though I’ve always wanted to go! They just kind of dropped it on me out of nowhere, and I didn’t have enough time to decide what I wanted to do. My lists were all at home and all the stuff I wanted to pack to bring to space, but they kept saying how proud of me they were, and I just . . . I couldn’t let them down.”

  For a long moment Dr. Vasquez was silent. Then she pointed at the cocoons. “You think this is letting them down.”

  Jillian nodded, miserable. “I tried. I really did. But the only reason we’re still alive is because of SABRINA. I didn’t do anything.”

  An even longer silence met that, and she sighed. “Sorry. I’m babbling. I know none of that makes any sense, but—”

  “You know there’s footage of everything that happened to you this week, right?” Dr. Vasquez said. “You, your mom and dad, all of it. Everything. And you, I’m sorry to say, are quantifiably wrong.”

  Jillian blinked at her. “What?”

  Dr. Vasquez raised one finger and pointed at the sky. Jillian looked up.

  Above, the countdown clock shimmered and turned into an image of Jillian looking up into the sky. Then the image skipped backward and showed Jillian blinking at Dr. Vasquez. “What?” the image-Jillian said. Then it rewound, replayed. “What?”

  Then a few more seconds of skipping and there was Jillian again, telling SABRINA her idea about bringing the plastic-eating worms back home to Earth. More skipping, and Jillian was putting together her theory of how the swamp had formed, and where the parasites had come from. More skipping and she was braving the uncharted wilderness of 80 UMa c to bring her parents water. Trying to save the alien deer by the falls. Learning from that failure in order to save herself when she became infected too. Ordering SABRINA to abandon her in the storm so it could help her parents. Refusing to go back through the portal without them. It went on and on and on.

  Jillian watched, stunned. I did all that, she thought. That wasn’t SABRINA. That was me.

  Dr. Vasquez clapped Jillian on the shoulder, then pulled her in for an awkward sideways hug. “They’re gonna be proud of you,” she said. “Trust me on that one.”

  Twenty-three minutes, five seconds.

  Together they brought everything down from the boulder to the top of the ridge. Jillian’s backpack, Dr. Vasquez’s backpack, the bundles of dried algae, the jar of worms, the core samples that SABRINA had obtained from the swamp site. These were cylindrical chunks of rock, each as long as Jillian’s arm, which Dr. Vasquez carefully wrapped in a tarp and insisted on carrying to the rendezvous point herself.

  Last they brought down Jillian’s parents. SABRINA did most of the heavy lifting, but Jillian and Dr. Vasquez helped as best they could.

  From the bottom of the boulder, they took everything to the rendezvous point. The exact spot where the portal had appeared before. It would zap into existence in—Jillian checked—seventeen minutes, fifty seconds. Hard to believe. It felt like she’d just gotten here. Or that she’d been here forever. She couldn’t tell which.

  “Don’t get too comfy there,” SABRINA advised Jillian.

  Jillian, resting on a rock near the portal site, raised an eyebrow.

  “Unless you want to get sliced in half when the portal arrives, that is,” SABRINA said. “In which case, be my guest.”

  Jillian shot upright like that rock was on fire.

  “It’s like I keep telling you,” Dr. Vasquez told SABRINA. “You give such fantastic advice, but you have got to work on your delivery.”

  Ten minutes, eighteen seconds.

  Dr. Vasquez was still there.

  SABRINA—all of it—was still there.

&
nbsp; “You’re staying?” Jillian asked them. “You’re coming back through?”

  Dr. Vasquez shrugged. “Thought I might give it a try.” She tapped the tarp-wrapped core samples. “I’ll be better equipped to study these back on Earth anyway. Besides, I think you’re on to something with your worm hypothesis. After the whole abandoning the mission thing and the other faking my death thing, I might not have too much weight to throw around at StellaTech anymore, but I’ll do what I can to make your case and get your premise some funding. Besides, I want to make sure they know exactly what they’re dealing with when they operate on your mom and dad. I know the parasite better than anyone.” She grinned at Jillian. “Present company excluded.”

  Jillian turned to SABRINA. “And what about you, you epic pain in the butt? You coming too?”

  “Legendary pain in the butt, thank you very much,” SABRINA replied. “And yes. It’d be boring here if it’s just me here alone. I get bored easily. I believe I warned you about that. It’s not pretty.”

  “You did mention that, yes.”

  “So I thought we could maybe hang out more. You could come visit me in the lab. And I could maybe, I dunno, take some little field trips of my own.” This last part came from inside Jillian’s podsuit pocket.

  “You are not smuggling yourself home with me,” Jillian said. “Decontamination protocol, remember? You’ll get in trouble!”

  “Oh please. I seem to remember also explaining to you that I am sneaky.”

  “I’m not hearing this,” Dr. Vasquez said. “I hear absolutely nothing. I am also not mentioning that most of these SABRINA particles have been written off as lost already. If a few get lost on their way back to the lab, I don’t think anyone will notice.” She paused. “Is what I would be saying if I were saying anything remotely on this topic, which I most assuredly am not. SABRINA, stop recording.”