Symbiont

by Mira Grant

  PATIENT 227: MITCHELL, SALLY R. STATUS: DS PROTEIN NEGATIVE.

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I could guess. According to Nathan, when I had migrated to Sally’s brain, the protein markers that would normally have indicated my presence in her body had vanished from her bloodstream. Any normal test that didn’t involve a full brain MRI would show that there was no SymboGen implant in me. It was deceitful, but looking at the little plastic band on my wrist, I couldn’t feel bad about it. My freedom might very well depend on that deception.

  Lowering my arm, I looked around the room where I had been put, only to realize that “room” was a generous description, even more generous than it had been for the little semiprivate space back at the bowling alley. I was on a medical cot, with a blanket, sheet, and thin pillow. That was all that shared the room with me. There was no other furniture, no medical equipment, no lavatory facilities… and depending on how I wanted to look at things, there were no walls. Instead, a thin plastic membrane separated me from the hall outside my room, curving gently as it rose to an exposed ventilation panel that was pumping air into the bubble. Yes: bubble. That was the best word for where I was. This was a bubble, and when I turned to either the left or right, I saw more bubbles, each with their own bed, their own occupant. A sick feeling started to coil in my stomach. I twisted around to look behind me.

  Row upon row of bubbles stretched off into the distance, creating separate, sterile environments for the people inside them. None of them seemed to have doors.

  I slid off the bed, keeping my hands on the mattress as I tested my balance. My legs seemed willing to hold me, although there was a bone-deep weariness in all my muscles, making me feel like I’d been running marathons in my sleep. I wasn’t hungry. I closed my eyes and cleared my throat, trying to focus on the subtleties of that sensation. It was a little sore, like I’d been shouting. Since I hadn’t been shouting—that I was aware of; if they’d put me under twilight sedation at some point, I could have done all sorts of things I didn’t remember—that probably meant they’d used a feeding tube on me, in addition to feeding me intravenously.

  All those things were medically necessary, under the right circumstances, but since I hadn’t agreed to any of them, I was starting to feel more and more violated. I let go of the bed and walked to the bubble wall, pressing my palms flat against it. It didn’t flex. It might look like a thin sheet of plastic, but whatever it was, it was strong enough to resist my exploratory efforts at getting it to yield. Hands still pressed against the plastic, I peered as far to the left and to the right as I could. Everything was very well lit, so it wasn’t hard to confirm that I was, for the moment, apparently unsupervised. Great. I drew back my left hand, made a fist, and punched the plastic wall as hard as I could.

  The pain was immediate and intense. Whatever that stuff was, it was like punching brick. I squealed with pain, shaking my bruised hand and dancing back from the barrier like it had done something wrong, even though I was the one who had launched an unprovoked attack against it. The plastic wasn’t even dented. I wasn’t going to get out that way.

  The drums were back, beating softly in my ears as my heart rate rose. I stopped shaking my hand and began to pace instead, looking for a seam or some other evidence of how they had managed to get me in here—whoever “they” were, wherever “here” was. There were at least five rows of bubbles, with me in the front. I couldn’t tell how many bubbles were in each row. I could see the curve of the row behind me well enough to count off eleven separate enclosures, but that didn’t get me all the way to the wall. That meant that a conservative estimate put fifty-five bubbles in this room, each of them representing a circle about twelve feet across. I wasn’t good enough at math to figure out what that meant in terms of actual space inside the bubble, beyond “a lot.” Wherever we were being held, it was massive.

  I paced three times around the edge of the room, trying to work the weakness out of my legs. More and more of the people around me were waking up and getting out of their beds. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why they were here; I saw men and women, children and senior citizens, and all of them were in exactly the same sort of setup I was: total isolation without any hint of privacy. That was a little weird, and that worried me. Psychologically, wasn’t it stressful for people to be able to see each other and not reach each other? Little private rooms would have served the same purpose in terms of keeping us apart, but it might have done a lot to keep the people in those isolated bubbles sane.

  Maybe that just meant we weren’t going to be kept here for long. But that didn’t make sense either, since a place like this, well… it couldn’t have been cheap to construct, and it couldn’t have gone up overnight. So they’d taken us, drugged us until we passed out, and then kept us drugged long enough to get this room ready for our arrival. Why? It didn’t make any sense, unless there was some plan that I wasn’t seeing.

  Worst of all, I didn’t even know who had me anymore. It wasn’t Dr. Cale—this was way outside of her budget and available resources, unless things had changed a lot more dramatically than I suspected. Dr. Huff had identified herself as USAMRIID, and Sherman had been wearing a lab coat with a USAMRIID logo on it, but that didn’t mean they were actually the people controlling this facility. Things could change really quickly when you had traitors in your midst, and I couldn’t make myself think of Sherman as anything other than a traitor. Not at this point. Not after the things that he had done.

  I was still pacing when I saw movement down the hall to my left. Actual, outside-the-bubble movement, not the milling aimlessness of my fellow prisoners. I ran to what I couldn’t help thinking of as the front of my bubble, pressing my face against the plastic and straining to get a better look.

  A tall, weary-looking man in military uniform was walking toward my private prison, surrounded by a flock of people in lab coats. They surged around him like the sea, moving forward to present touchscreens or clipboards, and then falling back as another wave of scientists took their place. I stepped back from the plastic wall, letting my hands fall to my sides. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how else to react.

  The man in the uniform—the man I’d never been expecting to see again—was Colonel Alfred Mitchell. My—I mean, Sally Mitchell’s father. He was where she got her pale skin and middling brown hair. I looked at him and saw the jaw that greeted me every time I looked in a mirror. He was tall, broad in the shoulders and thick in the waist, and he walked like he knew that any obstacle he encountered would be clever enough to get out of his way. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been standing in front of USAMRIID’s San Francisco facility, watching me get into Nathan’s car and drive away. That was when we’d said what I’d thought would be our last goodbyes. What I’d hoped would be our last goodbyes, because I didn’t know how to talk to him anymore.

  When I thought I was Sally reborn, memories lost to pay for my recovery, he’d been my father. When I started becoming Sal in thought and action—a new person, not the daughter that he’d lost—he’d still been my father, just a little distant, a little strained, like he didn’t know how to deal with me anymore. And then I’d started learning what I really was, who I really was, and it hadn’t been a surprise to him, because he’d known all along. He’d never been under any misconceptions about my nature. I’d been an in-home science project for him, something to study while he waited to figure out how to get rid of me and my entire species.

  Alfred Mitchell had let me think that he loved me, and I didn’t know whether I was ever going to be capable of forgiving him for that. Seeing him again made me realize that I also didn’t know whether I was ever going to be able to stop myself from loving him. He was my daddy. Whatever else he was… he was always, always going to be my daddy.

  He stopped outside my bubble, and his swirling array of scientists stopped with him, all of them turning in my direction. One of them read from her touchscreen, “Mitchell, Sally Rae. No traces of the prote
in that would indicate the presence of Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis were found in her bloodstream, and she came up negative on antigen tests. She’s clean.”

  “She was recovered from the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek,” said another scientist, apparently eager to feel like he was contributing to the conversation. “A large mob of infected individuals was in pursuit when she was sedated and taken for further study.”

  “General health is good, but it’s unclear what she was doing at the hospital, and her arms showed bruises and recent puncture wounds, in addition to a stitched-up human bite wound,” said the first scientist, slanting a glare at her competition.

  I wanted to scream at both of them. I didn’t make a sound. Instead, I folded my arms and just watched them through the thin plastic wall, waiting for Colonel Mitchell to say or do something. At least I’d learned two things for sure: I was being held by USAMRIID, and sound could pass through these bubbles. I still didn’t know what they were made of, but every bit of information was going to be helpful if I was going to figure out a way out of here.

  The scientists stopped speaking, leaving me and Colonel Mitchell to stare silently at each other. Even if my file didn’t say Sally was his daughter, there was no way anyone could look at him and then at me without seeing the traces of his paternity. Joyce—his other daughter, Sally’s sister—looked like her mother, and Sally looked like her father.

  Finally, Colonel Mitchell said, “Hello, Sally.”

  “Hi.” I didn’t call him “Dad,” because he wasn’t my dad, no matter how much part of me still wanted him to be, and I didn’t call him “Colonel,” because I didn’t want the scientists to figure out what I was, if they didn’t know already. They probably did. They might have picked me up thinking I was just another refugee, but he knew, and they worked for him. So they probably knew by now. Still, anything that could keep me off the dissection table for a little bit longer seemed like a good idea.

  “You’re looking well.” He sounded uncomfortable. That was good. I didn’t want him to be happy and relaxed, not when I was being held captive in a giant plastic bubble and he was free to walk away at any time.

  “I’ve had better days.”

  He nodded, like that was an understandable answer. “Where have you been for the last week?”

  “Has it been a week?” I didn’t have to feign confusion. As far as my memory was concerned, it had only been about two days since I last saw him. The other five days, if they existed, were missing, replaced by nothingness. “How long was I unconscious?”

  “All healthy individuals recovered from Contra Costa County were kept sedated for a five-day period,” said one of the scientists, apparently relieved to have something that she could contribute to the conversation. “It allowed us to be sure you were as clean as you appeared to be.”

  “The implants have shown the ability to go temporarily quiescent,” said Colonel Mitchell, shooting a warning look at the scientist. She flushed red, looking away. He returned his attention to me. “Someone who tests clean today can start showing protein markers tomorrow. Several of us have required multiple courses of antiparasitic drugs before we could be genuinely sure of being uncontaminated.”

  Antiparasitics that couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier wouldn’t touch a sleepwalker, or a chimera. Antiparasitics that could cross the barrier would either be metabolized or cause anaphylactic shock, severe illness, and potentially, if the drugs weren’t discontinued quickly enough, death. It wasn’t a fun way to go, at least if my own brushes with antiparasitic reaction were anything to go by. “Congratulations,” I said. “It must be nice to not be scared anymore.”

  Colonel Mitchell winced for some reason. I frowned at him with his daughter’s face, arms still folded. He looked away.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “A secure holding facility,” he said, without looking at me. “You’re safe here.”

  “That wasn’t the question.” Several of the scientists were starting to look unhappy about the way that I was talking to their boss. I didn’t really care all that much about how they felt. I kept my attention on the Colonel, trying not to think about the nights he’d spent in my doorway, keeping the nightmares away with his presence, or the times he’d done things that were more fatherly than scientific. He’d taken me out for ice cream, just the two of us, and we’d eaten dripping cones on Fisherman’s Wharf while we laughed at the tourists. Those moments had never been common, but they’d been, and it was hard not to dwell on that as I watched him stand there in his uniform, with me in a scientific prison.

  “I know you’re confused, and I know you’re upset, but this is protocol right now,” he said finally, looking back to me. “You should be grateful that you were located during the early stages of the outbreak. Right now, we can afford to space you out and give you a little room to move. By the time this is all over, that’s not going to be the case.”

  “What? You’re going to start a zoo for unturned humans?” I uncrossed my arms in order to gesture in both directions at once, indicating the rows of bubbles stretching out in both directions. I wasn’t lying, quite: I still hadn’t claimed to be one of those precious unturned souls. “You can’t keep us in here forever. It’s inhumane. There are laws against this sort of thing.”

  “A surprising number of laws can be suspended when it’s a matter of public health.” Colonel Mitchell looked at me gravely, his eyes searching my face like he was trying to find something he no longer believed existed. “This is a quarantine situation. Individuals without any sign of a SymboGen implant are relatively rare, thanks to the corporation’s increasing market saturation over the past few years. We need to isolate people long enough to be sure that they’re genuinely clean, and not Trojan horses looking to get into our protected populations. Once someone is fully cleared, they will be released into a less restrained setting. We’ve acquired a small town in Contra Costa County, relatively isolated by both geography and design. The inhabitants have either been restrained here or relocated elsewhere. I’m sure you’ll all find it quite comfortable there.”

  I stared at him, momentarily at a loss for words. Some of the scientists were exchanging glances, like they weren’t comfortable with him telling me even this much. “Wait, you really are going to put us in a zoo?”

  “An isolated environment where you can be protected from the current threat,” he corrected. “There’s no way of telling whether the SymboGen implant has become transmissible, and we need to protect the few individuals who have been confirmed as unaffected.”

  This wasn’t working. He was feeding me a party line—maybe a little bit more of the line than he was supposed to feed me, but that could all be excused by the fact that I wore his daughter’s face. I dropped my arms to my sides, trying to look vulnerable, and asked, “How’s Joyce?”

  His face shut down. There was no other way of describing what happened. It wasn’t the muscular death of the sleepwalkers, or even the sudden loss of muscle tension that came when someone fell asleep or was knocked unconscious: this was a simultaneous tightening and smoothing out, until there was nothing left in his expression that could tell me how he felt. “She survived the course of intramuscular praziquantel that we gave her on Dr. Kim’s recommendation. There were some side effects, of course, but she’s still breathing. That’s more than I felt confident in hoping for when we began the treatment.”

  The intramuscular praziquantel had been intended to target the SymboGen implant that was colonizing her brain. Nathan and I had known substantially less about the sleepwalkers when Joyce got sick. She hadn’t gone all the way into the “walking around, trying to kill people” stage, but she’d lost consciousness and been bad enough that USAMRIID had quarantined her. Dad—Colonel Mitchell, I reminded myself; he’d been Dad at the time, but that time had passed—had demanded that we help. We’d done our best, and it sounded like we’d saved her body.

  It was a pity that I was pretty sure we hadn’t saved her mind.<
br />
  I’ve never been good at concealing my thoughts. They played out on my face in real time, and Colonel Mitchell had had a lot of practice at reading me. “I doubt she’ll ever wake up,” he said. “The worm that chewed its way into her skull did a lot of damage in the process. The drugs did even more. She’s still on life support while we look for a miracle. Do you have a miracle for me, Sal?” He stressed the single syllable of my name, reminding me of who I was, who we were to each other. I stared at him, mouth falling briefly open in comprehension.

  He was hiding me.

  He’d known what I was all along, so he had to have known who Nathan’s mother was—he would have investigated Nathan as soon as we started dating. He probably knew we’d been with Dr. Cale, and how much information I had access to. He was hiding me from the rest of USAMRIID because he really hoped I had a miracle, that I could produce some magic equation from Dr. Cale’s lab that would mysteriously allow him to bring Joyce’s mind and body together again. He was a father who had already lost one of his two daughters forever, only to see a stranger put that little girl’s body on and walk it around like a suit. He would do anything to save the daughter he had left.

  He was grasping at straws.

  “I’m in a bubble, Daddy,” I said. Several of the scientists paused, eyes widening. Apparently, the nature of our biological relationship hadn’t been known to his entire team. Well, if he wanted that cat to stay in the bag, he should have said something sooner. “I don’t think I can produce many miracles from in here.”

  “Think harder,” he said. He didn’t say goodbye: he just turned and resumed his walk down the row of bubbles. The scientists chased after him, so many fluttering, white-winged birds trying to keep up with the leader of their flock. I stayed exactly where I was, only turning my head to watch him walking away. The occupants of the other bubbles pressed themselves against the plastic as he passed, waving their arms and shouting to get his attention. The bubbles had to be proximity-permeable somehow, because I didn’t hear any of them.