“Two of you,” he said. “Doctor Zelickson will be thrilled.”
They entered through the metal door, and the guard shut it behind them, leaving them in darkness. He brushed past them and opened another door to reveal a brightly lit corridor.
Resh played his part and crumpled to his knees just inside the atrium, and Thursday let out a surprisingly high-pitched yelp as he was dropped.
“Hold on, hold on. I’m gonna grab some wheelchairs,” the guard said and took off at a sprint down the hallway.
Ignoring Thursday’s resentful glare, Resh watched the man run. His eyes widened. One entire wall of the corridor, down which the man ran, was made entirely of metal plates that had been fused together. It looked uncannily similar to the exterior of the Museum of Pop Culture in City Center. This was the least shocking of the sights, however. Resh gaped at the rows and rows of bright fluorescent lights.
They had electricity. It was hard not to be outraged. There was such a stigma around the use of technology that once someone activated it, they were as likely to be killed by fellow clansmen faster than the nanoswarms that would descend.
Thursday noticed the lights just seconds after he had.
“The walls. They must prevent the swarm from detecting the electricity.”
Awestruck as they were, they didn’t notice the guard returning with a man in a white coat until they were almost beside them. Each pushed a wheelchair.
“I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see for myself,” said the newcomer. He looked old enough to have been alive before the invasion. “I’m Doctor Zelickson. Please, come with us. I’m sure you both have a lot of questions.”
Resh allowed the doctor to help him up and into the wheelchair, and before long, he and Thursday were being pushed down the hall. At first, Resh had thought it would be nice to be pushed in a wheelchair, but soon realized the truth. Being unable go where he willed and be in the power of a man he barely knew was disconcerting. This must have been how Thursday felt the past two days.
“Can I ask, why the logo of the tree on the shield?” Thursday asked their hosts.
“It’s not…” the doctor began, and then sighed. “It’s not a tree, it’s a neuron. You know, a brain cell.”
“Ohh,” Thursday said. “Of course.”
Resh had no idea any cell could look like that.
“Synapse is in our name. That should have been your clue.”
He had no idea what that was either.
Halfway down the hall, the first man they’d seen reached out and pressed a button on the wall, and it glowed with an orange light. A chime sounded, and two metal doors slid apart. An actual, working elevator.
Resh schooled his expression, not wanting to give the men the satisfaction of seeing his surprise.
They went up a single floor and through the first door in another long hallway. Down the hall, he caught sight of other people in whitecoats and several more guards holding guns.
They were wheeled into a laboratory. Resh has seen many in his day, Seattle had buildings full of them. This one did not show any signs of having been looted. There were no shattered amber bottles on the floor, not identifiable white powders dusting the benchtops, or makeshift distilling apparatuses for a vagrant in need of alcohol. This lab was clean, orderly, and smelled like formaldehyde.
They had electricity in these rooms too, and a similar mosaic of metal plates obscured the windows.
Five clear tanks, each no more than twenty gallons, sat in a row along a benchtop. Wires and tubes threaded in and out of each of them, leading to computers and other instruments Resh couldn’t identify. Everything was powered on, and the hum of instruments sounded eerily like a nanoswarm.
“What did you mean back there, when you said we were one of you,” Thursday asked the guard when they came to a halt.
The guard adjusted the assault rifle on his shoulder and leaned against a bench.
“We are soldiers in the same war.”
“A clan war?” Resh asked, because what other war was there?
“The war against the alien invaders,” the doctor said. He was slipping on a pair of light blue, elastic gloves.
Resh and Thursday looked at each other.
“That war is over. All the aliens died,” Thursday said.
“Yes, well, one of them died. The other is very much alive and currently winning the war. The invasion never ended.”
“What other aliens? Why haven’t we seen them?”
“They are very hard to see, I will give them that,” the doctor said. “In fact, there are some in this very room.” He gestured at the tanks. Each was filled with water and had a very slight haziness to it.
“So, they are microscopic?” Thursday hazarded.
“Yes. Most of the time anyway. Would you like to see one?”
Resh glanced at a microscope at the end of the benchtop but the doctor made no move toward it. Instead, he went to a cabinet on the opposite side of the room and returned with a jar filled with an amber fluid. Suspended within the solution was a small brain.
“The alien in question is a parasite, an amoeboid if I had to choose an Earth equivalent, but it is like nothing on this Earth. It is sentient when it’s grown large enough.” He opened the jar, extracted the brain with tongs, and dropped it in one of the tanks.
Resh leaned forward, expecting some invisible creature to begin tearing it apart. Instead, the haze in the water faded, and at the same moment, a denser, semi-opaque mass condensed along the surface of the brain. Tendrils as thin as a hair prodded the brain tissue.
“Each cell in nearly identical, but their receptors are more complicated than anything we’ve ever seen. It’s like its own language. Each cell within the tank knows exactly where it’s supposed to be in relation to the others once it integrates into the larger mass. In this way it functions like our brains with its billions of unique connections and pathways. This one is a mature adult, and when it is whole, it is sentient. But you need more than a brain to be a functioning organism. This parasite has no sensory organs, so it identifies the sensory inputs of its host’s brain and taps into them. It is mostly passive, in fact, most of the people infected have no idea it’s there. Its ability to manipulate the structure of its receptors is similar to our immune cells and also serves as its immune system. They make antibodies more specific to pathogens than our bodies can. Almost all hosts notice a preternatural resistance to illness. We’ve been using this one here to make vaccines for all sorts of diseases.”
After several moments of engrossed silence, the doctor approached the tank again with a dropper bottle and added a single drop. The pseudopods retracted and the creature disintegrated before their eyes. The doctor plucked the brain from the tank and returned it to its jar.
“When an adult parasite needs to leave a host, it disperses and its cells escape the host, through the sinuses in most cases. All it takes is for one cell to find its way into another host, and it will start to grow. I can take many dozens of years for it to divide enough times to achieve sentience and make new memories. As I said. The invasion is ongoing. Slow, but ongoing.”
Thursday gripped his head in shaking hands.
“So you infected me—us with a disease, just so you could make sure we didn’t have a parasite?”
“Yes. If you were infected, its immunity would have granted you protection. The fact that you are sick means you are one of us. We apologize you had to come so far, but we had nowhere to recruit soldiers. Almost all of Seattle is infected. We think it’s due to the ship that crashed into Lake Union. The parasites dispersed in the water and eventually people drank it. We conducted an experiment a few years ago with a variant of Parvovirus B19. It caused Fifth disease in children and adults, giving people red cheeks and hands. Only ten percent of the population experienced significant symptoms, the rest had at least a small parasite inside them. The balloons were meant to leave the city and bring new soldiers to us. We couldn’t just infect people with Fifth d
isease if we weren’t there to observe symptoms, so we isolated one of the genetic sequences of the parasite, a sequence that allows it to detect human nerves. Putting that sequence in the virus and infecting people with it, made the subjects present with symptoms similar to Guillain-Barré syndrome, an ascending paralysis. Without this threat of death, nobody would have come in search of the cure.”
“But you have the cure?”
“Of course. Our parasites can produce the serum for the B19 virus and you’ll be better within days.”
Thursday sagged in relief. Resh wondered what else he would do for a cure. Just about anything, he suspected.
“Why make us soldiers?” Resh asked. “Why should we fight it at all? You just said it was making people healthier.”
“As far as we can tell, once the parasites have fully matured, they are passive observers, but they do have the capacity to control their host. They do this by manipulating their desires. The most common symptoms being curiosity and wanderlust, making the host want to explore and learn. But in rare cases, when the host or the parasite itself is in danger, it can take control of the host, tap into the motor cortex. As I said, the invasion is still happening, and even if it takes a hundred more years for the parasites to infect everyone and achieve sentience, it will happen eventually if we don’t stop it.”
A chill prickled along Resh’s skin, and icy terror tightened every muscle in his body.
Thursday was speaking, but Resh could barely here anything beyond the pulsing of blood in his ears. Could one of these things be in his head right now? Is that why he’d felt so compelled to leave the city these past few months. He imagined that he could feel it there, a semi-transparent mass sharing his skull, prodding his brain with its gelatinous appendages.
“…knew a headsman with this,” Resh heard Thursday say, and his awareness snapped back to the conversation. Was Thursday about to rat him out? “Oliver Lawrence in Louisville. He had a huge travel network and helped me get here. He tasked me with putting together a travelogue?”
The guard was looking at him, and Resh made a conscious effort to relax his grip on the armrest of the wheelchair.
“He must have been infected with a mature parasite from one of the aliens.”
“Or maybe he ate one of his pigs,” Thursday mused. “He trained them to be carnivores, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he fed alien carcasses to them.”
“So these parasites were inside the other aliens?” Resh asked.
“Well of course. That’s why the other aliens died. Their parasites abandoned them and they no longer had a defense against the viruses, bacteria, and fungi of our world. I don’t know why they left, perhaps because they were tired of constantly defending them for microorganisms. They came out of their original alien hosts and found new ones, ones that had evolved on Earth and had the necessary immunological defenses. We think it’s the wanderlust caused by the parasite that made them want to explore the universe. So, in a way, this parasite is responsible for bringing them here and for the destruction of our civilization.”
“How do you fight them? How do you kill them without killing the host?” Thursday asked.
Doctor Zelickson lifted the dropper bottle he had used to disperse the parasite. The liquid inside was faintly blue in color.
“We’ve isolated the chemical the parasite uses to signal for its cells to disperse. Unfortunately, the small molecule is made by a complex network of enzymes, so we can’t fit the requisite DNA in a viral vector. We need people, people like you, people we can trust to inject those you suspect of having sentient parasites. Once the parasite disperses, you destroy it. Set the effluent on fire, pour bleach on it, I don’t really care. But we can’t allow any of its cells to find another host.”
If there had been any doubt he was imagining the parasite inside his head, a pulse of intense pain in his skull confirmed it. Resh let out an involuntary yelp and fell from his wheelchair and onto the cold floor. The parasite was moving. Over the intense pain, he could hear it wriggling around.
A second later, he was staring up at the bright fluorescent lights of the ceiling, and the guard’s head swung into view. He knelt beside Resh and put a hand on his chest as if to hold him down.
Resh was shaking, seizing. Somehow, he knew the parasite was testing all of its connections to his brain.
There was shouting, and concerned voices, but they immediately stilled when he did.
Resh blinked.
“Are you okay?” the guard asked.
Resh was about to respond that no, he was not okay, that there was a parasite latched to his brain, and he wanted it out. The words did not make it past his lips before a knife slammed into the guard’s throat and a cascade of blood splattered against him.
He recognized the knife and the hand holding it. They were his.
Resh rolled and came to his feet, but this too was not of his doing.
He tried to freeze his muscles, lock them tight, but a pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced radiated across every inch of him. When his vision cleared, he was surprised not to be on fire, so intense had been the pain. His body had not ceased its moving while he’d been blinded by the agony. He was racing across the lab, between benchtops and desk chairs toward one of the walls.
“Guards! Breach, breach, we have a breach!” screamed the doctor behind him.
“Resh!” came Thursday’s plea.
Resh did not dare resist the parasite again. Like a dream, he stared through his own eyes, not in control of his own senseless actions. Wake up, he willed himself, but like a dream, he could not.
He slammed into the metal plating of the wall, and it shuddered at the impact. His fingers pried at the welds, and Resh internally cringed as one of his fingernails split down to the quick.
What was he doing?
“Hurry, it’s trying to call the swarm,” Dr. Zelickson shouted, answering his question. “Someone shut off the generator.”
He set his knife into a gap between plates, at a place where the welds looked weak, and chipped, sawed, and pried at it.
“Stop,” he croaked out, and then the parasite seized control of his voice too.
The sound that emerged from his throat next was a series of grunts and rasps as the parasite tested his vocal cords. Then, strangest of all sensations yet, his tongue moved in his mouth, brushing up against his teeth, curling, and forcing itself this way and that, like a worm trapped in a fist. His facial muscles spasmed painfully, and his tongue pressed hard against the roof of his mouth.
“NNNooooo,” came the strained word.
Footfalls impacted the vinyl flooring behind him, and Resh spun. Five guards stood at the end of the row of lab benches. Each carried a gun.
“Don’t shoot him,” yelled the doctor. “You’ll kill us all if your hit the wall.”
The men looked at each other and then one by one they laid down their weapons. Two drew knives from sheaths and the other three pulled syringes from pouches at their belts. They were filled with the same blue fluid the doctor had used to disperse the parasite.
“The parasite is mature. Bring it to me alive,” Doctor Zelickson said, a cruel smile twisting his mouth.
The guards took up a fighting stance. If they could only stick him with the syringe, not the knives, and drive this parasite out, this mad dream would end.
Resh watched helplessly as his hand reached out, snatched a glass beaker, and flung it at the closest man.
In the middle of the man’s duck, Resh stepped in with a speed he hadn’t realized he had and drove his knife through the bone of the man’s temple. His eyes went wide and he crumpled, taking the knife with him.
Another guard nearly ended it with a thrust forward with a syringe, but Resh brought up his forearm, and the needle bent in half when it struck the thick leather band around his wrist. A gift from Kyli. That same arm batted the man in the side of the head, sending him tumbling back.
Two more guards went down with perfectly aimed kicks to th
e chin and knee cap.
This was, Resh realized, the very thing that had happened to him on the elevator. He did not remember stabbing his attacker in the eye because he hadn’t. The parasite had taken over even as he was losing consciousness. He’d been too terrified to remember the knife, but the parasite hadn’t forgotten.
The last guard landed a foot in Resh’s gut, but Resh folded with the blow in time to avoid the slash of a knife. The guard was down in moments, his leg broken by a swift wrenching of the captured limb.
The doctor stood at the end of the row of lab benches, staring at him with a slack jaw. Thursday was right next to him, blood streaking the wheels of the wheelchair where he’d grasped.
Resh turned his back to them and assaulted the metal paneling once more. After another few attempts to break through, the last succeeded. He heaved, and the heavy metal panel clattered to the floor. Lake Union was visible through the hole. Far out on the lake floated the last burning remains of the riverboat.
“What have you done,” the doctor breathed.
The voice came from his mouth again, low and rasping.
“My k-kind meeeaaan nnooo harm. Wee arrre as youu said: Passsivvve Observvers. S-symbiotic.”
“Then what do you call this?” The doctor said after he had recovered from the shock of hearing the strange voice. He gestured to the dead and fallen guards between them.
“We intervveene only wwwhen our s-survivvval is at stake.”
The doctor asked no more questions, but grew stiff as he looked past Resh’s shoulder.
He turned and saw a ribbon of black stretching across the sky. Like a flock of birds, the black haze moved as one, single-minded in its destination. The nanoswarm was coming.
The doctor turned and ran, his white coat flapping behind him like a white flag of surrender.
Resh looked down from the window to see a narrow gap between the sidewalk and the wall of the building. Between them and a dozen feet below, water sloshed up against the old steam plant.
Resh wheeled around and ran at Thursday. His look of terror reminded Resh how young the man really was.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Seattle Page 5