by R. Z. Held
Fuck the virus. This was her purpose.
Part III
Genevieve tried many things over the next three weeks. She’d been lying on her stomach during her recovery—she got the smallest woman turned over, but couldn’t get her to lie with her face out of the gel, and the position increased her thrashing. Or perhaps only made it easier to perceive with splattered gel. Genevieve rescued all of that she could, scraping it up carefully after returning the woman to her back. Clearly Genevieve’s position had been an artifact of having only a bed when her wings needed space. In the tanks, the Infecteds floated with room to grow.
She remembered music, laced with her dreams—she played the most soothing instrumental tracks she could find, mixed with the sound of rain, or waves. She didn’t know what sounds might remind these people of the natural world they’d left behind at home, nor what popular music to choose when she moved on to that. She tried love songs, dance songs with a driving beat. Those pressed her to greater effort, certainly, but with no project to spend it on she mostly paced.
She kept the lights low and warm, tinted like sunlight, and she talked to them—talked to them endlessly, about how everything would be all right, how she was there to help them, how they were safe. Touched them with every excuse she could find and sometimes none at all. She took to taking their pulses by hand, at their wrists, though she might as well have been shaking a rattle and imploring the gods to reveal their vitals to her, for all the real scientific use it had.
And nothing. No change. The patients had all quieted after the first few days, and now they only moaned occasionally, bodies twitching as if from pain that was no less felt for the conscious mind being unable to reach the surface. They didn’t scream, and they didn’t speak. Their vitals had stabilized, and jumped only occasionally with pain responses. She searched constantly for their systems with her own, as much as she knew how, but found no evidence of anything she could connect to.
But her own state was deteriorating, she could tell that. Probably the slow slide down to burnout, as Pyrus had predicted. She returned to her room to sleep and stepped outside to charge, but with no one else to rely on to do a thing to help the Infecteds, she spent every other moment here.
Today, she was reading out loud to them from a nanite manual. It was information that would do her good as well, and maybe it would make the process seem less strange and invasive to them. She couldn’t say her own feelings of invasion really decreased.
“So apparently you can charge regular electronics,” she told the young man she’d seated herself beside. He reminded her of her brother for some reason. She couldn’t say why, given their radically different colorings, but perhaps the shared style of beard was enough, shaped in an ultra-fashionable tendril toward his ear. “Like dumping charge so you can sleep, but you have to be more careful about the correct voltage...”
She stared at the illustration of the connector in someone’s wrist, and lost her train of thought. Why was she still allowing herself to read on a tablet instead of on her internal system? She’d told herself two weeks ago that she needed to wean herself off that. She wasn’t modeling very good behavior when it came to adapting.
Genevieve hunched over the tablet. She was so tired. She refused to give up, but she hadn’t expected things to drag on this long. Shouldn’t everyone either be recovered or dead by now? She couldn’t remember how much time she’d lost, and she’d been kicked out of her town so soon after she woke, into the Pax Romana calendar system.
Genevieve hopped off her stool and set the tablet down in her place. As long as she’d stopped reading and was wallowing, she should do some rounds. She started with the young man she’d been reading to, drawing his hand from the gel to take it as she checked his readouts.
“Oh, you’re stronger today,” she lied. She shouldn’t be lying. She should believe that he was getting stronger with every fiber of her being so she could convey it to his unconscious mind. And she supposed she did believe that—she was still here, after all, even with the looks Carex shot her across the mess. But she also doubted.
“I need this, you know,” she told the young man. She laced her fingers with his and leaned her hip against the side of his pool. “Isn’t that amazingly selfish? I’m helping people because I need a purpose to help untangle some of the mess that’s my head right now. And if that purpose can be saving people, it means it doesn’t have to be killing people.”
She smoothed the skin on the back of his hand, then dotted her fingertip down a trio of freckles. “My family must have believed I’d survive. I believe it too. I do, I promise. You want to survive, trust me. It’s more than you can stand sometimes, but sometimes it’s simply amazing, too. There’s whole new kinds of pain, of wrongness, but all the normal ones are gone. No aches, no bruises, no strains.”
Genevieve drew in a ragged breath and looked around the silent room. How long should she keep trying to believe? Would the gel keep them alive indefinitely? But she didn’t see Pyrus as someone who would pull the plug on living people. There must come a point where the nanites would burn the biological systems out, or this clinic would still be full of Infecteds from the last group.
But could she do this for another three weeks? It wasn’t working. She needed to face up to that.
Genevieve bent her head, pressed their clasped hands to her forehead. She needed to remember. Not light, not music, not even the voices of her family she thought she remembered but couldn’t be sure. Hang on, Vieve. She needed the dreams, as nonsensical as they’d been. Like the one where she’d been going fishing with her dead sister in the depths of winter, getting caught in a snow bank, or possibly sinking into cracking ice. That clearly had been something her mind had invented out of whole cloth.
Some things might have been based in reality, though. Like the dream figments that had told her to “fight it,” over and over from every direction in every situation until she’d screamed at them to shut up. Is that what she should be urging these patients, motivating them through frustration and anger? Those remembered emotions snapped into focus for her abruptly, making her sure that was exactly the wrong thing to do. Fight what? Fight herself?
“Steer into the skid,” she said suddenly, out loud, thoughts linking back to a strong memory in such a huge jump it bypassed mere logic. Steer into the skid. Her sister had said it in the dream of the winter accident, in their old hulk of a truck.
Genevieve straightened with sudden excitement racing through her body, down into the hand she clasped over the young man’s. She drew herself in until they touched along the lengths of their forearms. “Steer into the skid! To get any control back, you have to go where the nanites are taking you. More than that, you have to help them. You can’t fight them.” Could he hear her? Had someone told her that, while she laid suffering and dreaming, and her mind had translated it into the nearest voice in her dream? Or had she discovered it for herself, inside a closed system, which meant there was nothing she could do to introduce it to these patients?
She repeated it to him again, expanded upon the theme. She finally had to leave for a meal, but she picked it up again on her return, focusing down on this one, single person. If only she could reach this young man, guide him to what he needed to do. The more she repeated it, the more certain she became that was what had made the difference for her. Steer into the skid.
As her throat grew scratchy and the patient’s readouts didn’t change, Genevieve’s excitement drained away, leaving her hollow. She pillowed her forehead on her arms on the edge of the pool. She’d think of a next thing to try, and a next. She had to. Just a few moments, to gather herself.
A beep jerked her out of a doze. Unless she’d imagined it. A beep from where?
“Fuck,” the young man said distinctly in Lingua. “My back hurts.” His voice was rougher than her brother’s, older somehow. He lifted a hand to swipe at his eyes in an uncoordinated movement.
Genevieve stared at him. Was he—or was this just another s
tage like the ranting? She whirled to the control panel and tried to find the menu with brainwaves. It was flashing some kind of alert at her—unlabeled, very helpful, thanks—which must have been the source of the beep. “Can you hear me? How are you feeling?”
“Like being dead would be more comfortable,” he said, and tipped his head her way. His eyes focused on her, and confusion painted his face when he didn’t recognize her. “Where the fuck am I?” He got his other hand out of the gel and clutched at the edge of the pool, but got no closer to sitting up, if that’s what he was considering.
“Tsuga Security,” Genevieve said. She finally found the menu she wanted on the panel—not that it wasn’t obvious by now that his conscious mind was up and running and he was tracking—and belatedly realized that answer probably didn’t mean anything to him. “You’re being cared for, that’s the important part. We’ll explain everything as soon as we can.”
Forget explaining, what was she supposed to do now? Pyrus had mentioned a whole process, for Installs, one she’d missed completely. Memories of her own experience and stubbornness may have gotten her this far, but anything else she definitely needed help with. Pyrus’s location wasn’t currently public, but she opened a private channel to him anyway. Hopefully he wasn’t on shift. Or in a meeting with Carex.
“I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m still pretty sure I don’t know you,” the young man said, plaintive, and Genevieve had to choke down hysterical laughter. He wouldn’t understand what was funny. She wasn’t sure she did either.
The laughter didn’t want to stay down, though, so after telling the young man to relax and that someone would be in to help him in a moment, Genevieve let herself into the hallway by the elevators. When the door shut, she let the laughter free, a bark from her belly, then giggles that brought her near to tears. She’d succeeded. She’d succeeded. Now she should go back and start working with the others, but she couldn’t quite breathe just yet.
Pyrus spared her a confused glance when he arrived from the elevator, but she waved him away. “I needed to...” she said, then wasn’t sure what she’d been going to say, so she left it. Fortunately, he didn’t stop to demand she explain.
He left the door open, so she listened to his soothing voice, and the young man answering. She probably should have been paying attention, to get the benefit of the latter part of the installation process she’d missed, but she got caught up instead in the up and down of his tone.
After a while, she got comfortable while she waited for him, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall beside the door. Under her fingertips, the floor felt decidedly odd, as the composite polymer that gave it its slight springiness while still being easy to clean was neither carpet nor boards, the sensations she was used to.
When Pyrus reappeared, she started to get to her feet, but he waved her down. “He’s sleeping,” he said, before she could ask, and joined her on the floor, wrists slung over knees. He drew a thumb along the line of his beard, like he was thinking hard, and Genevieve started to wonder what he was afraid to tell her. Was this a false recovery? Did Infecteds sometimes become lucid before the very end?
“I’m so sorry I doubted you, Genevieve.” A laugh of Pyrus’s own burst free, to match the strength of his emerging grin. “I could kiss you.”
Genevieve tipped her head to face him. “You have my permission,” she said lightly, plausibly deniable as teasing. She didn’t know what she was going to say until she did, but she found she didn’t want to take it back.
Pyrus stared back at her for a beat, silent, apparently utterly taken off guard. She offered him a smile, small and apologetic, and in the lull created when her emotions turned, the exhaustion of the last weeks crashed in all at once.
She was suddenly crying. She hadn’t thought crying was a “suddenly” sort of thing, without any warning, such as a tightening down of her throat as she tried to hold it back. But she was suddenly crying now, without warning, great, helpless, sawing breaths. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried, she’d had too much reason for great emotion since her infection so she hadn’t given even small emotions that much latitude. Otherwise, they might have run away with her.
Pyrus hugged her. Sideways, awkward, because they were both sitting, but tight. He didn’t say anything, which was the only thing that let her not die from embarrassment. They could forget she’d cried, forget she’d said anything before that either, as they’d forgotten what Pyrus had said in the mess hall.
She pulled away quickly once she had some kind of control over herself, and tried to do what repair of her appearance she could with cuffs, pulled over the sides of her hands. “I’d better not leave the others alone.” She got to her feet, but Pyrus rose as well and blocked her path back inside.
“You’re worn to the bone. There’s no way you should be caring for eight people at once, all alone. I’ll take over.” He settled his hands on her shoulders.
Genevieve rolled her shoulders under his touch, then stopped when muscles moving unexpectedly against the wing foundations proved disquieting. “I have to show you what to do, at least. And it’s not like you can do it very well for eight people all at once either. We should at least halve it.” And she wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything else, knowing she wasn’t here. “I’ll be fine.” By sheer force of will if necessary.
“I haven’t been throwing myself into this for the past three weeks, that’s the difference.” Pyrus dropped his hands away, and hesitated over his next words. “Once you’ve shown me what you were doing, will you promise to step back and let me do it myself?”
“Why don’t we get more help?” The moment the idea occurred to Genevieve, it seized hold of her completely. She’d been around long enough to know that no one’s shift load was exactly onerous. The planet only had so many warehouses, so many ships in dock. But with enough help, they could save all eight of the other Infecteds. Just the thought of that energized her again.
“If you can convince Carex.” Pyrus sounded dubious, but his attention went distracted for a moment, then he tipped his head to the elevator. “In his office.”
The trip there was short enough that Genevieve’s excitement didn’t have time to turn into worry, but Carex’s dark expression accomplished that all at once. She almost rocked back on her heels in his doorway, but she forced herself to keep going, following Pyrus in.
Carex ignored her as he rose behind his desk. “One had to survive eventually, I suppose,” he said. “And I assume you’re merrily overgeneralizing from that single result as we speak.”
Pyrus scrubbed his thumb along the line of his beard. “Amsterdam’s methods—”
Carex rolled his eyes. “What, holding their hands and singing songs? Bullshit. I think you two have had more than enough time for your little experiment. Amsterdam needs to go back on the front desk.”
Like hell. Genevieve surged forward. Maybe she wouldn’t get the help Pyrus had talked her into after all, but did she really need it? She had to try, even if it was by herself. “Why does it matter if we try? It’s not like I’ve been leaving a hole in the guard schedule you didn’t even want to put me on.”
Carex regarded her for a long moment, then spoke with exaggerated patience, like he was doing her a favor. “Those are Pax
Romana enemies, Amsterdam. Pyrus may have trapped us into caring for them, but it’s not our job to coddle them.”
“Civilians,” Genevieve spat at him. “They’re probably civilians and you know it, except inasmuch as anyone on a planet the Pax Romana sets its sights on is forced into some kind of combatant role.”
“And what are we going to do with a bunch of civilians if they all survive?” Carex prowled around to stand in front of her.
Genevieve pushed right up to him in return. “You think they’ll want to stay? Don’t flatter yourself.”
“You think they get a choice?” Carex threw a section of text from some kind of contract at her system. “If you’re not fighting and you’re an Install, you’re here. So says the Board. I get to be the guy on the ground trying to force or cajole everyone into doing it without them realizing.”
Genevieve’s stomach knotted with betrayal, but when she glanced at Pyrus, angry words starting to coalesce on her lips, he looked just as surprised as she felt. So perhaps he hadn’t lied to her. He sputtered into speech first. “That can’t be true. The surveillance…”
“You think they have the personnel to keep that up long-term for even a handful of Installs? It’s designed to irritate people into coming back when they run, so they can have the illusion of freedom.” Carex’s lip curled. “First-gens especially, they didn’t want to make us feel cornered, but someone had to know to enforce it. So don’t you dare start judging me from your pedestal of blissful ignorance.”
Anger vibrated through Genevieve’s muscles until she had to suppress it or she would have snapped her wings out. Did he think he deserved her sympathy? Pyrus’s civility was faster than her ability to dredge up words, though. “We’ve put ex-soldiers’ ‘deaths’ on the records before, Carex,” he said, inexorably. “Given the statistics, nothing could be easier in this case.”
Carex snorted and turned aside from Genevieve to pace, managing to make it seem like he was dismissing her rather than conceding. “That was for Pax Romana citizens. Besides, I’m not going to agree to a hypothetical when all you have is one survivor and a pretty narrative. Infecteds die. You know this, Pyrus, better than anyone.”