Adrift

by W. Michael Gear

  “All right,” Michaela agreed. “It’s too late today. We’re looking at flying little Toni into PA tomorrow morning at the earliest. If we’re out of here at first light, can you have someone meet us at the shore landing pad at around ten tomorrow?”

  “Roger that. That gives us time to prepare an isolation unit here. If the child is contagious with something new, we’re going to want to treat it as a potential public health hazard.”

  “Roger that. We’ll take precautions on our end, too.”

  “Director, we can only assume the worst. Chances are that this will turn out to be a novel virus. The fact that none of the adults has come down with it suggests that it’s going to have a simple explanation and cure.” A pause. “Nevertheless, I’d like to limit the risk. Only bring the one little boy. Maybe I can figure out his coma at the same time and send him back with a vaccine or procedure that would cure the rest of the children.”

  Michaela glanced sidelong at Dik Dharman. The man just shrugged his shoulders, looking worried. She said, “Doctor, before I commit to this let us all discuss this. These are other people’s children. It’s bigger than just my decision.”

  Dharman looked even more worried, if that were possible. Hell, they all looked worried anymore.

  “All right. My preference, for quarantine purposes, is one child, but if you and your people feel differently, we can deal with it on this end.”

  “I really appreciate it, Doctor.”

  “You’ve got it. Call if you need anything. I’ll have someone monitoring your special frequency all night.”

  “I suspect we’ll see you tomorrow. And, from all of us, thank you.”

  “That’s my job. And Director, one thing we never forget is that the children are all of our future on Donovan.”

  Michaela exhaled wearily.

  “Instead of Toni, have you thought about sending Felix? People might sleep better. Word is, he’s got the sore throat, too.” As he spoke, Dharman tried to keep his expression neutral.

  “Hell no.” She met the man’s eyes. Years back, Dharman and Kevina had had a fling back on Ashanti. But then, Kevina—the hot, Russian blond—had had a lot of flings. The way Michaela figured it, most of the men still carried a torch for her, even if it was mostly charred and only faintly smoldering these days.

  To Dharman she confided, “Listen, my heart goes out to Kevina. She’s lost her husband, and now her son turns out to have murdered Bill, of all people, and cut him into pieces. Kevina is torturing herself every second of the day, asking if it’s her fault somehow. But, rationally, there’s no way it can be. Nothing any of us could have foreseen would have saved Yee. And as to Felix? He belonged to all of us. Was a son to all of us, but I never saw this coming.”

  “Doesn’t mean Kev isn’t blaming herself.”

  “Yeah. Well, we’ll do what we can for her. All of us.”

  “Right, I—”

  Iso Suzuki stuck her head into the com center, worry shining from her dark eyes. “Michaela? You seen Bryan? Give him something to do since he went down to the UB? He’s late. I’ve been all over the Pod. Even went down to the Underwater Bay, but the hatch isn’t functioning.”

  “What do you mean, not functioning? And no. Last I saw of him was when Casey said Tobi didn’t show up for lunch, so I sent Bryan down to check. That was around one.”

  Dharman bent over the com, asking, “Underwater Bay, check in please. Tobi? Bryan? Respond, please.” He ran his fingers over the screen, adding, “Got visual coming up now.”

  Each of the com center monitors flashed on to show the UB from a different angle.

  “What the hell?” Michaela tried to make sense of what she was seeing.

  If she didn’t know the UB, she’d have never recognized this. The familiar benches, the cabinets, equipment bins, the lines of UUVs, and the single remaining sub on its cradle, were at least familiar, but the entire floor pulsed in blue-green. Tendrils of the stuff were creeping up to cover the sub, UUVs, and other equipment.

  The hatch door gaped open, a flood of green spilling over the threshold into the pressure hatch. No wonder it wouldn’t open from the tube side. Until someone closed it from the UB, the hatch couldn’t pressurize.

  An odd, hump-shaped form could be seen midway between the hatch and the sub. Whatever it was, the blue-green goo covered it in a thick blanket.

  “That’s algae!” Dharman muttered. “But where the hell did it all come from?”

  “The stuff that’s been building up on the pilings and bottom of the Pod?” Iso asked. “What’s it doing in the UB? And where are Bryan and Tobi?”

  Dharman accessed his com. “Bryan? Tobi? Report to the com center. Bryan? Tobi? Report immediately.”

  Michaela struggled for breath as the seconds passed, the speakers silent.

  “I don’t understand,” Iso cried. “Where’s my husband?”

  Dharman started playing with the Pod’s cameras, checking inside and out as he flashed through different rooms and corridors, the landing pad, the seatruck deck.

  Michaela, a wooden feeling in her breast, said, “They never left the UB.”

  “How do you know?” Dharman asked.

  “The hatch is open.” She swallowed hard, seeing the panic in Iso’s eyes. “Go back to the UB cameras. We’ll check the records to prove it, but think it through. Tobi hasn’t checked in, missed his lunch. Doesn’t answer com. Bryan goes down to check on him, cycles the hatch, and steps in. He sees the algae, something happens. He doesn’t make it back to close and dog the UB side.”

  “Then where is he?” Iso demanded. “Where is my husband?”

  “Dik,” Michaela heard herself ask from someplace distant, “Can you get a close up of that hump between the sub and hatch? Yes. Right there, where that . . .”

  She didn’t need to finish. As the camera zoomed in, she could see the shape was humanoid, and that despite the thick covering of biomass, a protrusion had the distinct shape of a skeletal human hand. Whoever was under that lump was being devoured.

  70

  Eight of us are dead. The words kept repeating in Michaela’s head as she took her place in the front of the cafeteria. Everyone was present with the exception of Gabarron, who remained upstairs to keep an eye on little Toni and the other sick infants and children, and to ensure that Felix didn’t somehow escape from his room. Though, given that a code was necessary to open and close the door to his makeshift prison, that was a long shot.

  Michaela had motioned her people forward, asked them to sit at the front tables. The sight of the empty chairs in their usual spots was too much to bear. Seeing only ten of her adults with the empty tables behind them was bad enough.

  “We’ve lost the UB to the algae,” Michaela told them dully. “As to how? Dik and I have reviewed the recordings. The algae, as we all know, has been building up on the underside of the Pod and Underwater Bay. Tobi had been hosing it back into the water as it crept up and onto the bay floor. None of us thought much of it. But, in the wake of Bill Martin’s death, no one went down to wash it back into the sea. It managed to gain a foothold in the UB, and like a giant organism, it flowed down from the bottom of the Pod, down the pilings and tube, around the UB and into the bay itself.”

  She took a breath, willing herself to get through this. Trying to be cold and rational as a Director should. “When Tobi got back to the UB this morning, the algae was in the process of covering the bay floor. It had crept up onto the UUVs and sub. The hose wouldn’t dislodge it. The stuff was thick. It . . .” She swallowed. “It sort of . . . I mean . . . Listen. He got stuck in the biomass, panicked. Fell . . .”

  Every expression in the room had gone to flint. Casey Stoner’s lips were trembling, tears welling in her eyes. Jym Odinga had wrapped his arm around her, his own demeanor on the verge of breaking.

  “When Tobi didn’t check in, Bryan went dow
n to see if he was all right. When he stepped out of the hatch, he was so surprised, that he forgot to close it behind him. The slime was better this time, more efficient, as if it had learned from Tobi. It trapped him before he could get a body length from the hatch.”

  Iso was sobbing softly. Eyes down.

  “So now what?” Yosh asked, his brown eyes casting from face to face. “I think we had better face it. We’re running out of options here. Unless one of us swims down, braves the slime, and closes that hatch door, we’ve lost the Underwater Bay, the sub, the UUVs, and the equipment there. All we have left are two seatrucks and the launch.”

  “What if something happens to them?” Kel asked. “If it does, we’re stuck here.”

  “The Supervisor can pull out us with her A-7,” Michaela replied. “Wouldn’t matter if the extraction damaged the landing pad in the process, not if we’re abandoning the Pod.”

  “Scary,” Kevina said from where she sat, partially isolated at the end of the table. “We’d have to rope the kids together with that down blast. Even then, I watched that day, it’s a miracle the Supervisor wasn’t blown off the pad.”

  “Hey, wait,” Michaela told them. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We haven’t lost the seatrucks yet. Haven’t even seen anything that threatens them. If we pull the plug on the Pod, we can still evacuate. Even if it means flying to the beach pad, recharging for a day, and then flying on to either PA or Corporate Mine.”

  “Don’t be too sure about Port Authority,” Dik announced. “I was on the radio, too. Remember? Dr. Turnienko wasn’t wild about us bringing a bunch of sick kids to PA while they had a communicable disease. Will they even allow any of us to land if we’re infected with whatever’s got the kids sick?”

  “I don’t know,” Michaela told them. “And we might get the same answer if we tried for Corporate Mine. Supervisor Aguila might deny us the right to land or insist that we go into quarantine.”

  “We don’t know that whatever is wrong with the kids is communicable,” Yosh said. “None of the adults are sick, and we’re sleeping in the same room with the kids, eating with them, touching the same surfaces. If they’re infectious, why haven’t any of us gotten it?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that, and neither does Anna.” Michaela turned her attention to Vik Lawrence. “Do you have any idea?”

  “No.” Vik ran nervous fingers through her hair. “When this all started to go sideways this afternoon, I got a sample of the organism. If it’s an organism. That’s as good a name as any, I guess. We’ve had it logged in the system for weeks now. It’s the same stuff that Kevina and Felix brought back from that first trip out to place that buoy. At its most basic, we’re dealing with a single prokaryotic and photosynthesizing cell. Now that I have had time to really look at it, it’s the same cell we recovered from all the children’s blood and tissues. I cannot tell you why it’s presenting as a disease in the kids and not the adults. It’s present in the blood and tissues of everyone on this station.”

  “All of us?” Yosh demanded as everyone shifted uncomfortably, worried looks shooting back and forth.

  “Everyone,” Vik said in a hollow voice. “I don’t know why it is worse in the children. I don’t know why it started to cling to the Pod. I do know that when it starts attaching itself to other cells, it shares information. Slips TriNA back and forth, and maybe transferRNA, microRNAs, and some other molecules as well. Molecular intelligence.”

  “What does that mean?” Michaela asked.

  Vik gestured her discomfort. “This stuff thinks. If I had to coin a name for it, I’d call it the ultimate intelligent organism. In one state it lives as independent cells that float around on the ocean. It is both omnivorous and photosynthetic, so it can live in a lot of different environments. When something stimulates it, the cells concentrate, form a sheet, that then forms a tube, which in turn allows it to grow as it accumulates additional cells. As it does, it begins adding other tubes, which allows it to form complex shapes. My take, in the wildest flight of imagination, is that while we’re sitting here, it is studying the Underwater Bay, trying to figure out what we are, and why we are in its ocean.”

  Michaela winced. “But you said the same kind of cells are inside us, as well.”

  Vik nodded. “That’s right. So far I’ve just isolated individual cells. I haven’t seen any sign that they’re joining together or accreting like they did in Toni’s blood. But, that said, I can think of nothing that would stop them from coming together and forming an organism inside us. And if that doesn’t frighten you right down to your bones, I don’t know what will.”

  “You said it’s in Toni?” Yosh asked.

  “I think the algae is what’s making him sick. Causing his paralysis.” Vik crossed her arms.

  Michaela’s mouth had gone dry. Her whole body seemed to tingle. How the hell had the cells gotten inside her? How would she know if they started to accrete, grow, take over her heart, lungs, or liver? And the things were intelligent? Living inside her veins and arteries?

  Are they in my brain as well? Listening? Observing?

  Casey craned her neck so that she could better see Vik. “What did it do to Tobi? When it pulled him down and covered him? I saw. There was a lump after it sucked him in. Now, on the latest videos, there’s nothing but his coveralls left.”

  That had been on the latest recording. Just Tobi’s clothing, wadded, empty, and laying to one side.

  Vik’s gaze hardened. She pursed her lips. “There is no easy way to say this, Casey. I think the stuff digested him. Bryan, too. It’s a giant living organism. It needs sustenance when it’s not in direct light and able to photosynthesize.”

  “This is crazy,” Jym cried passionately. “You’re saying that stuff ate Tobi? And Bryan, too?”

  “’Fraid so.” Vik stared down at her hands. “And here’s the kicker: They both had slime cells living in their bodies. Now those same cells are back with the organism, sharing everything they learned about what it’s like to live inside a human host. That creature living down in the Underwater Bay, and inside us and our children, has the mathematical probability to be a whole lot smarter than we are, and it’s considering what to do with us at this very moment.”

  71

  What Anna Gabarron was seeing made no sense. Not that much of anything made sense now. Prior to the last couple of days, Anna would had told anyone who bothered to ask that it would be chemically impossible for two as distinctly different life forms as terrestrial humans and Donovanian algae to coexist within the same body. The human immune system functioned as a highly tuned early-warning and search-and-destroy identification system for foreign antigens. Such foreign “enemy” proteins caused a host of reactions throughout the body, stimulating B- and T-cells, white blood cells, titers, antibodies, you name it.

  Now she stared through a small binocular scope at the skin sample she’d taken from Toni. When she’d walked into the clinic that morning to check on the boy, she’d been horrified to see that he’d turned a not-so-appealing shade of green. The first impulse had been that someone had painted the kid. But looking closely, she was seeing skin cells with a slight sheen. Definitely not normal, but certainly not painted or stained with any pigment.

  Using a probe, she’d reached into the isolation tent and taken a scraping from the still-comatose boy’s stomach. He continued to lay supine, locked away in that board-stiff paralysis that defied her ability to cure.

  Placing her sample under the scope and dialing up the magnification, Anna saw the impossible: human skin cells living in a matrix with Donovanian prokaryotic “algae” cells. The prokaryotes had adapted, flattened, to interlock with Toni’s skin cells at the molecular level. Like they were supposed to be there. Nor was the distribution of prokaryotes random or chaotic, but alternately patterned and uniform, as if by design.

  She shouldn’t be seeing this. Couldn’t be seeing
this. Somehow Toni’s immune system seemed to recognize the proteins and polysaccharides in the algae cell walls as “friendly.” She wasn’t observing any immune response from the host cells: no inflammation, phagocytes, or antibody response to algae antigens. The only explanation for that had to be that the algae had somehow reprogrammed the little boy’s immune system at the genetic level.

  “How can it do that?”

  Anna sat back, frowning. It had taken human medicine thousands of years to learn how to manipulate immunogenetics and the use of quantum cubit computers to do it. And now they were expected to believe that a bunch of solitary Donovanian prokaryotes had infected and completely reengineered little Toni’s immune system within a week?

  Apparently it had. She needed only to turn from the scope, look with her own eyes, and see the boy. Fact: He had turned green because photosynthesizing algae cells now made up about forty percent of his integument. And it did so without inciting any kind of host response. Nor was it a random hodgepodge of infection, but well-orchestrated, as if by plan. And all of it smacked of the impossible.

  So what was Toni? A hybrid? A chimera? A monster? Or just a little boy with an infection that had left him a vegetable?

  Anna rubbed her temple and looked around her clinic with dull eyes. If she was seeing this in the boy’s skin, what was happening inside? To his internal organs, his brain? If forty percent of the boy’s integument was algae, then his brain might be just as compromised. And if it was? Skin was a pretty straightforward tissue. But the intricacy of the human brain? Compromised by all that infection?

  She experienced a moment of sympathy for the kid. “Hell, Toni, your brain might be a total write-off. The miracle is that you still have autonomous functioning.”

  But if Toni was this compromised? What about the other kids?

  And it hit her.

  So much made sense now. The arms and legs “learning.” Even Felix’s inexplicable implication in Bill Martin’s murder. It wasn’t just immune systems that the algae was playing with. The stuff was trying to figure out the children’s brains. All of which changed the entire equation when it came to Felix and his claims that he “wasn’t there” when Bill was murdered. If the algae could rewrite a body’s immune system to recognize its cells as friendly instead of foreign, what was to stop it from doing the same with the brain?