“I understand,” he said. “The doctor took her to a hospital, along with two of her friends. Her Focus attendants. The doctors at the hospital kept the three of them alive through Sieurs’ transformation coma, and although they were puzzled about the behavior of her friends, who refused to be separated from Sieurs after they transformed, they allowed them to stay together; if they hadn’t, Sieurs would have likely died. Her doctors didn’t know they dealt with the Shakes; if they knew, and went into ‘panicky epidemic mode’, Sieurs wouldn’t have lived. Taking away a Focus’s attendants almost always kills the Focus.”
Carol didn’t say anything, but she did wave one finger at him, signaling for him to continue. Well, this wouldn’t be the first time someone used one of his lectures as a soporific.
“What I find the most amazing is what happened after Focus Sieurs woke up. She accepted the metasense at face value instead of a delusion, figured out she and her friends were Transforms, and unless she did something, her friends would turn into Monsters. She also started a journal, which I’ve found to be engrossing reading, at least the published parts, which cover her first six months as a Focus. During her first six months as a Focus she figured out how to tag her attendants, that juice existed inside all Transforms, how to take down her attendant’s juice to keep them from turning into Monsters, the benefits and limitations of the Focus metasense, that she had to do something with the juice she was collecting or she would go Monster, how to tag male Transforms, the two to one ratio between women and male Transforms, how to add more Transforms to her household by keeping to the two to one ratio, and the concept that something bad, which she called ‘bad juice’, built up in an area she and her Transforms lived in for too long. Her discoveries didn’t come easy; she went down quite a few dead ends along the way, and suffered through the deaths of several male Transforms she didn’t have enough juice to support. Unlike many of the other early Focuses, she didn’t make egregious mistakes with her juice movement; because of her incessant note-taking she found a way around the memory problems many of the other early Focuses suffered through. Her discovery of the effects of juice quantities on her Transforms’ well-being led her to the idea she could judge juice levels by watching her Transforms’ reactions. Much of our Transform terminology comes from Focus Sieurs; she developed the whole thing during her first months as a Focus, very scientifically, one test after another.”
“Okay. Wow,” Carol said. “Definitely an extraordinary woman. I take it that even early on she considered all the Transform strangeness natural and scientific?”
“Yes, for the most part. She didn’t realize the metasense possessed an electromagnetic component; instead, she thought the metasense was smell related and considered the non-smell related aspects of it miraculous.”
Carol opened her eyes and looked at him. “So, how does this tie into your work? You’re reacting like this is personal.”
Much of which he couldn’t share. “Yes, you’re right: personal and professional. The accepted viewpoint of Transform Sickness as a standard spreading infectious disease doesn’t work. The numbers are wrong, and despite the papers I wrote on the subject, I still can’t get many others to understand my point. The early numbers fit a different model: a chronic illness geographically spread by an environmental factor, more like scurvy than influenza. It wasn’t until about ’52, when the Shakes started to make the headlines, that the Shakes began to spread in a more disease-like manner.”
“Try that again, this time with a better explanation,” Carol said, putting a little Arm predator into her voice. Hank smiled. This topic even made Focus Professor Rizzari’s eyes glaze over. This bit of science was his baby, even if his discovery wasn’t world-shaking.
“The Shakes is a variety of listeriosis, a bacterial disease spread by contaminated food. In particular, the Shakes is transmitted by what we call the Listeria B and C bacteria strains, to differentiate them from what we call Listeria A, which causes ‘common listeriosis’. Listeria A effects resemble the effects of a Transformation coma…without the coma…and occurs about 5 in one million each year, striking people whose immune systems are compromised, as well as pregnant women. Listeria B and C are different, thriving in low oxygen environments where plant decay is occurring. Save for the induced transformations that accompany a Major Transform’s transformation, this form of listeriosis can’t be spread from person to person. I have never been able to pin down the exact origin point of the Shakes, but as best as I can figure, Listeria B and C got picked up somewhere in Asia by US servicemen early in WWII, and got spread world-wide by modern transportation systems long before the Shakes was identified.”
“So quarantines could have worked?” Carol asked.
“By the time the Shakes was identified it was already too late,” Hank said. “But, yes, if the authorities quarantined the leaf litter or mud the original bacterial spores came from before they spread out of their origin area, quarantine would have worked.” He paused to think. “There are several other viable theories about the origin point, including Alaska, New Guinea and Antarctica, but the origin point isn’t what’s most important. What matters is the fact Listeria B and C got carried world-wide by the WWII allies.”
“Okay, then, why do the Shakes continue to spread? Why isn’t it scurvy?”
Hank turned away for a moment. “Listeria B and C alone are one trigger, causing about 5 in a million infections a year, a constant and non-growing rate. However, Listeria B and C, interacting with juice byproducts, are another trigger, causing about 75 in a million infections a year at the present time.”
“Oh, shit,” Carol said. “You could control the disease by killing all the Transforms, couldn’t you?”
“Yes, if you did so world-wide, within a few weeks of each Transform’s transformation,” Hank said. “You would need to kill off all the Monsters as well; my evidence shows it’s primarily Monster juice byproducts which are the trigger, evidence that will likely remain unpublished…”
“Bah and bah again,” Carol said. “On that cheery note, I think I’m going to try and get some more rest.” In a moment she fell asleep again.
Hank couldn’t rest, his mind filled with the ever growing number of induced transformations, those transformations caused directly by the byproducts of juice, without any interactions with the Listeria B and C bacteria. Within a decade the number of induced transformations would pass the number of Listeria caused and triggered transformations, and then they were all severely and royally screwed.
Keaton’s Office
(Carol Hancock’s POV)
I must have gone through a thousand different scenarios for my graduation. Most I discarded, but my desperation grew with each failed attempt at Transform transportation. Today, I thought up one a little less unlikely than my other recent desperate ideas: buying an untagged Transform from whatever Focus provided Keaton with those, on occasion.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have this Focus’s name, location, or how to contact her. I needed Keaton’s contact information, which wasn’t in any place accessible. That left just one place it might be, her office, the one place Keaton forbade me to go.
This wouldn’t be easy.
From my first day here, Keaton built up her office as the ultimate taboo place with her predator effect, to where just thinking about her office made my mouth dry and my palms sweat. I didn’t understand how she had managed to attach her predator effect to her office, but she managed to do so anyway.
I had noted many things about her and her office over the months. First, she preferred to work in her office during specific times of the day. One was an ill-defined time after breakfast, another just after early lunch, and another after evening workouts. The second time was the most fixed time of the lot. If Keaton stayed in the warehouse, she stayed in her office during the hour before noon.
Second, her office turned out to be the one place in the warehouse that Keaton herself kept clean. I had seen into her office, from a distance, and th
e place was immaculate. About half of an executive’s desk was visible from the outside, polished to a high sheen and neat as a pin.
Third, her office didn’t have a normal door. The door was steel, with bricks of some obscure sort on the inside. The door opened out, not in, and over time the bricks left a fine powder residue on the floor. I got curious about the bricks several months ago, and with a little work I managed to track down the powdered residue. They were firebricks, commonly used on the insides of factory furnaces for insulation. For whatever reason, Keaton had made her office fireproof, or at least tried to.
I meditated until I quieted my nerves enough to face my worst nightmares, braved her predator effect and tried the door. Locked!
Keaton would have been proud: I didn’t stop running until I retreated into my closet. Damn! Nearly six months, and I had never noticed Keaton kept her office locked. I had certainly never seen her use a key.
She had been playing with my mind, of course, using her sleight of hand tricks. After several hours of self-recrimination, I got my courage back up and went to examine the door again. The lock turned out to be junk, standard office building office-lock quality, and trivial to pick.
So I did. However, I kept dropping the picks. I meditated some more and picked the lock, and paused to gather myself once again before I slowly opened the door toward me. The hinges creaked, which they never did when Keaton opened the damned thing. Once in, I slowly moused my way around the room, and practically jumped out of my shadow in fear every time a car rumbled by a half mile away. I took the risk. My freedom might be here.
I studied the office for several minutes, before I understood what I saw.
Keaton had her entire office lined with firebrick. The firebrick on the inside and the standard brick on the outside were not enough to explain the thickness of the walls, and I deduced additional fire retardant material lay between them. Enough to make the room soundproof even to my ears.
Keaton’s executive desk stayed clean and shiny because she likely used it only occasionally (and because she kept the room dusted and vacuumed, it appeared). Her primary work area was a drafting table not visible from the doorway, and this drafting table showed ample wear. I found several maps of New York City on the drafting table. Not Mobile gas station maps, but official-looking City of New York road maintenance maps and Army Corp of Engineers maps of the boroughs.
New York City was Keaton’s primary hunting territory. She hunted Philadelphia as well, but, despite Philly’s size, not enough transformations occurred here to keep her close to satisfied.
Next to her drafting table was a large – no, huge – safe of a kind and shape I had never seen before, bolted to the concrete floor with two inch wide steel bolts. Years later, I would finally identify this as a surveyor’s safe, common to land developers, land offices of oil companies, and architects. I didn’t have the know-how or tools to crack a safe of this quality. I found a note on the safe, though, in Keaton’s immaculate handwriting: “Took you long enough, Skag. Touch the safe and you die.”
I almost peed on the floor.
Beyond the drafting table I found a television, and next to the television, a man’s leather-upholstered recliner, on rollers. The arrangement confused me for a few moments, as the recliner faced the wall. However, close examination of the concrete floor revealed a minute set of worn-in grooves. Keaton often rolled out her recliner…to in front of her desk?
Oh. Right where someone would be able to watch the television in comfort.
Keaton never watched television. She thought television rotted the brain. She didn’t allow me a television in my own private space or put one out in our common area.
It didn’t take me long to figure out when Keaton watched television. At eleven in the morning, I rolled the recliner back and turned on the television. At last, Keaton’s secret would be revealed. Her safe held her hunting maps and hunting records, worth more to Keaton than my life, certainly, but also certainly worthless to me as any sort of leverage on Keaton. She kept her contact information locked inside the safe as well, or on her body, because I couldn’t find the information anywhere else in her office. Which shot down my entire reason for this breaking and entering, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Yes, I did think of taking the safe, escaping, and selling it back to her for my freedom…for about five seconds. A normal might think that might work, and holding the safe for ransom might work on a normal. Doing so wouldn’t work on an Arm. I knew my own regard for my hunt-related possessions. If I took her safe, or the safe’s contents, she wouldn’t rest until she killed me, no matter what interim agreements she might make with me to get the contents back. Just plain running would be a lot safer. So, whatever Keaton hid from me had something to do with what she watched on the television.
I turned on the television and learned.
Keaton laughed that night when she smelled my sweat on her leather recliner. Laughed and laughed and laughed. I had spent the rest of the day slinking around the warehouse, hoping she would spend a few days longer out hunting, and be successful, just to give me a chance to recover. Instead, she turned up for dinner, which I had to conjure out of nowhere for her royal, juice-stoned ass. I earlier decided that if she punished me for going into her office, her punishment wouldn’t be too harsh, because I had left the safe alone. From an Arm’s perspective, her safe was the only true valuable in the office. I had forgotten about my sweat.
Keaton had a sick sense of humor. I was the butt of it, of course. Did she set her office up from the start just to humiliate me? Perhaps. Considering the build-up she gave it? Almost certainly.
When I had turned on the television at eleven that morning, the show turned out to be an idiot soap opera, Dark Shadows. How fitting that Keaton was addicted to a vampire soap opera.
Rover’s Graduation
They waited by the beach at Mystic Lakes, where remnants of the day still littered the sand. A few candy wrappers, an empty Coke bottle, potato chip crumbs. The Indian Summer had driven temperatures up into the seventies, enough to attract a few courageous swimmers to the icy waters. The park closed at sunset, though, and Robert Sellers enjoyed the crisp coolness rolling in with the night. Beside him, Master Occum grumbled under his breath about slow, inconsiderate Transforms who couldn’t be bothered to arrive on time.
They had arranged to meet at midnight. It was 11:45. Sellers metasensed the cluster of Transforms approaching in vehicles, and he suspected Master Occum had metasensed them minutes before.
“Alright,” Master Occum said, shaking his head, “we’re going to actually go through with this, but remember the Rules. You got the Rules?” Sellers nodded. “Remember the Rules. Especially the one about ‘Don’t kill Household Transforms’. You got that?”
Sellers nodded again. “‘Don’t kill Household Transforms’.” His low voice rumbled through the whispering trees. He attempted not to get caught up in Master Occum’s nervousness.
“We shouldn’t be doing this. I know we shouldn’t be doing this. You just go with them, don’t make a fiasco out of this, and get back. If you can do that, we can try again later, even if you don’t succeed. You don’t have to be in such a hurry. Hurry makes you stupid.”
“You said if I come back with the Monster, you’ll make me a knight.” Knighthood was Sellers’ own idea. Hoskins had been right when he made Sellers give up his old Rover name and pick a human name. Now, Sellers wanted to take things further. Naming was important. A world of magic dogs and quests and an obvious aristocracy needed nobility and a code of chivalry. Master Occum had rolled his eyes and Hoskins called Sellers a fucking idiot, though, when Sellers first asked to become a knight.
Hoskins could be damned irritating on occasion.
Sellers needed something to prove his worth. He had been no good to anyone for as long as he could remember. So, he insisted, and insisted, until Master Occum came up with a quest. Getting the quest quieted Hoskins.
When Hoskins got quiet, though
, he often got to thinking. Hoskins, despite his annoyances, was creative, and sometimes he did some things very right. He had killed Shere Khan, for one.
Shere Khan had been another of Master Occum’s Chimeras, and something had been wrong with Shere Khan, some bad twist in his mind, some gap where responsibility should have lived. Sellers had wanted to kill Shere Khan the first time he met him, but Master Occum insisted no, and Sellers hadn’t been willing to risk Master Occum’s anger and the chance Master Occum might throw him out into the wilds again. Hoskins took the risk. Sellers would endure a lot of irritation in payment for Hoskins’ one deed.
“You be careful,” Master Occum said. “Just be careful. The world is dangerous out there.”
The chug of multiple engines came closer, three cars, two pickup trucks, and a VW van. They turned into the parking lot 30 feet away.
“Do you see him?” A male voice.
“I can’t see a damned thing in this dark. You want to turn the headlights off so our eyes can adjust?” A female voice this time, followed by a different male voice.
“What’s he supposed to look like? I couldn’t make a damned bit of sense out of the messages we got.”
Sellers let them chatter in the distance, and turned to Occum. “I’ll be careful,” he said, kneeling down to Master Occum’s eye level. “I give you my word.” Occum clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s time for you to go,” Sellers said.
Master Occum nodded and withdrew through the trees, away from the parking lot and the cluster of cars and Transforms. “Just remember the Rules! And don’t screw it up!”
Sellers nodded, knowing Master Occum would sense the motion. He stepped out of the trees into the parking lot and the view of the still shining headlights.
“Shit,” someone said, in a whisper. “He must be eight feet tall.”
No one said a word for several long seconds. Sellers examined his new companions. Eleven Transforms, of which six were female and five male, and two normals, both male. No Focus. The idea of including a Focus in the expedition had made Sellers uneasy and Master Occum agreed. ‘Too much potential for trouble.’
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Three Page 8