Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2)

by Grant, Mira

  “It’s her,” said Adam, finally abandoning his efforts to get Anna to respond to him clutching her hand. He turned to look at the rest of us, tears pouring down his cheeks. “Mom, please. You have to fix this. You have to make this better. You have to put her back where she belongs. Please.”

  “I doubt Steven left Tansy’s original host intact,” said Dr. Cale. She was trying to be gentle, but there was a broken-hearted bleakness in her voice that telegraphed her distress as clearly as her tears. “Even if he did, the amount of damage he must have done digging her core out of the host’s brain… I can’t, Adam. I’m so sorry.” She looked at Anna and her breath caught, hitching her chest. She pressed a hand against her sternum, like she was trying to keep herself from losing her composure completely. Eyes on Anna now, she repeated softly, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Wait—are we seriously assuming that Dr. Banks extracted Tansy’s implant from its original host and placed it in a new body?” asked Nathan. All three of us turned to look at him. Adam looked baffled, and I was willing to bet that my own expression was very similar. I spent so much time trying to think of myself as a human being that sometimes I forgot I wasn’t one. The corollary to this was that sometimes I did such a good job that I also forgot that we weren’t the same. Nathan didn’t know the things I knew. He didn’t understand the things I understood.

  I could love him until the day I died, and we would never be the same species. No matter how hard I tried to pretend.

  “It’s possible to remove a mature implant from its original host body and move it into a new host,” said Dr. Cale. “You know that. The implant has to be stable for the process to work, of course, but that’s not the primary issue.”

  “That’s not…” Nathan’s voice tapered off, replaced by a brief, disbelieving burst of laughter. “That’s not the primary issue? You’re talking about cutting open a chimera and scooping them out of their own heads, and that’s not the primary issue? I knew it could happen, but come on, Mom! This is… I don’t even know what this is.”

  “The tapeworm’s neural structures are not as advanced as a human’s,” said Dr. Cale. She sounded calm, but she was still crying. That was somehow worse. If she’d sounded angry, or even upset, her tears would have suited her better. “We discussed this when Sal was having her medical issues. The majority of her memories and thought processes are managed by the human brain she has attached herself to. It’s backup storage for what her tapeworm mind can’t manage.”

  “Uh, could we not talk about me in the context of a tapeworm mind and a human mind?” I asked. “It makes me really uncomfortable when you talk about me like that.” The drums that were pounding in my ears skipped a beat before settling on a new, slightly irregular rhythm. My stomach clenched. I clung to those signs of physical distress as hard as I could, marking them as evidence that my body belonged to me, to Sal Mitchell and not to anyone else in the world. I wasn’t a human or a tapeworm. I was a chimera. A perfect marriage of the two.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” said Dr. Cale. She even sounded like she meant it. Her attention remained primarily fixed on Nathan as she continued: “When a chimera has to be split, for whatever reason—when the implant is removed from the host—they lose everything that makes them the people that we know them to be. All the memories remain behind. They can’t carry them into their next incarnation.”

  I stiffened, suddenly thinking of Ronnie. Tiny, violent Ronnie, who knew that he was male, even though his implant was genderless and his host was female. “What about the epigenetic data?” I asked, and was amazed by the words that were coming out of my own mouth.

  Apparently, so was Dr. Cale. She twisted in her chair to shoot me a look that was midway between amazed and impressed, and said, “The sample set isn’t large enough for us to make predictive judgments about the epigenetic data. We don’t even know for sure that it’s a factor.”

  “Ronnie—the chimera who let me out of Sherman’s mall—I told you about him, remember?” When the others nodded, I continued: “What I didn’t tell you was that he’s currently in a female host body, but had been in several previous hosts, all male. And he knows he’s supposed to be male. He hates his current host.”

  “Maybe someone else told him about the previous hosts,” said Nathan hesitantly.

  I shook my head. “No. Sherman hated that Ronnie insisted on being referred to as male, and said it would attract inappropriate levels of attention. I don’t think Ronnie would have known about those hosts if he hadn’t known something was wrong with the one he’d been put in, and gone looking for more information. Sherman and Ronnie both said Ronnie’s insistence that he was supposed to be a boy came from the epigenetic data. He didn’t have a gender identity when he was just a tapeworm. Then he inhabited a male body, acquired a male gender identity, and took it with him when he was transplanted.”

  “So maybe part of Tansy is still in there,” said Adam, sounding bitterly, brutally hopeful. He grabbed for Anna’s hand again. As before, she neither helped him nor resisted. She just lay there, motionless. At some point she had rolled her head back into its original position, and now was staring at the ceiling again.

  She had responded to some stimuli before. I swallowed hard, taking a step toward her, and asked, “Anna? Can you hear me?”

  “My auditory systems are functional,” said Anna. Her voice was toneless, completely devoid of passion. She couldn’t have sounded less like Tansy if she’d been trying.

  The drums pounded even louder in my ears, and I had to swallow the sudden urge to run through the lab to the cell where Dr. Banks was being held, rip the door off its hinges, and strangle the life from his body. How dare he do this? How dare he touch my family, my sister, with his filthy tools and his filthier motives? There was no reason I could see for him to have experimented on Tansy when there were so many sleepwalkers running around free and unclaimed—no reason except for simple cruelty. I wanted to hurt him more than I’d wanted almost anything else in my life. Had Sherman appeared before me in that moment and offered me Dr. Banks’s head in exchange for joining his tapeworm army, I might well have taken him up on it. After all, what had the human race ever done for us?

  I swallowed spit and bile and forced my own voice to remain steady as I asked, “Anna, do you know who Tansy is? Do you remember Tansy?”

  “I do not remember her,” she said. Then she turned her head again, fixing her black eyes on me, and said, “But I am aware of who she is. I was given a message to deliver to you, should you ever say that name.”

  “What’s that?” asked Dr. Cale.

  Anna’s gaze flicked to her. Still calm, she replied, “The subject you call ‘Tansy’ is still alive. If you want her to be returned to you, you will have to free my father.”

  I may have spoken too soon about the revolutionary nature of my work. While I have been able to successfully induce a joining between the SymboGen implant and its chosen human host, I have not been able to fully stabilize the results. The chimera—a quaint name for something that is, unquestionably, a monster—remains medically insecure, and has been given to surprising rages when not kept in a continually sedated state. I have been using a combination of transdermal scopolamine and diazepam to keep her in a pliant state. I do not know for how long these drugs will retain their efficacy, or if indeed they are still working fully as intended: she has proven surprisingly cunning, and capable of longer-term thinking than I had expected at this stage during her development.

  It is clear that the only means by which we will be able to stabilize the experiment will be to visit the source. I have a plan that will either see me hailed as a conquering hero or cast forever from the scientific community for my sins. I intend to enjoy the process of determining which it is to be.

  –FROM THE NOTES OF DR. STEVEN BANKS, SYMBOGEN, NOVEMBER 2027

  Our sources in the private sector inform us that research toward a cure is ongoing. They have thus far declined to share that research, and it is my informed o
pinion that no such material exists at this time. We are on our own, ladies and gentlemen, and the wolves are most assuredly at the door.

  Madame President, I appreciate your inquiry as to the condition of my surviving daughter, Joyce. Unfortunately, she has not recovered from her coma, and while the SymboGen implant has been entirely cleansed from her body, she remains in a persistent vegetative state. We have kept her on life support thus far, in part because we are hoping for a miracle, and in part because with the continuing deterioration of the medical and social structure of the country, we cannot afford to cut off any possible source of blood, tissue, and organs that have been confirmed clean of the sleepwalking sickness.

  Time is running out for us here. We will continue to do what we can, but without a miracle, I do not know how much longer we can last.

  –MESSAGE FROM COLONEL ALFRED MITCHELL, USAMRIID, TRANSMITTED TO THE WHITE HOUSE ON NOVEMBER 14, 2027

  Chapter 14

  NOVEMBER 2027

  Dr. Banks was sitting on the narrow cot provided for his use when the four of us approached his cell. He smiled at the sight, his eyes going first to Dr. Cale, and then, hungrily, to Adam and myself. He skipped over Nathan entirely, as if he was incidental to this little reunion. In a horrible way, I suppose he was. Nathan was Dr. Cale’s only human child, after all, and he had nothing to offer Dr. Banks that he couldn’t get back at his own lab.

  “Hello, Surrey,” he said, offering Dr. Cale his patented paternal smile. Maybe I should have felt a little better knowing that he smiled at all the women he wanted to exploit like that. Somehow, I didn’t. “This is a nice place you’ve got here. I admit, I didn’t expect something this palatial. When I heard you’d moved into a candy factory, I laughed. It was so ridiculous, so ludicrous… so you. You never could resist the absurd. I think that’s my favorite thing about you. Even in the face of total disaster, you’ll keep on making a fool of yourself.”

  “How did you know we were here, Steven?” Dr. Cale didn’t bother to correct him about her name. She just folded her hands in her lap and looked at him, expression stony and unreadable. I found myself wondering where Fishy and Fang were, and whether they were preparing an unmarked grave in the soil of the rooftop garden. “My people are decrypting the data on your hard drive right now. Don’t bother lying to me. It won’t work for long.”

  “Did you honestly think you could keep an operation of this size completely concealed? In a dead city, no less? No insult intended, Surrey, but maybe you should think about getting more sleep. Your judgment is slipping.”

  Dr. Cale raised one shoulder in a half shrug. “We didn’t know we were being monitored. How did you know where we were?”

  “Everyone is being monitored.”

  Dr. Cale sighed. “I see you’re not going to make this easy on me. I have a full surgical theater here. It’s primitive, yes, and we do have to contend with a lot of little inconveniences—we can’t do laser work, which means sutures and stitches and the threat of infection, although we’ve gotten surprisingly good at cauterizing wounds. It’s really remarkable, especially when you consider that nothing in this building started out intended to be used like this.”

  “Your point would be…?” asked Dr. Banks. He was still trying to sound polite—I could hear it—but his irritation was overwhelming his good sense. He sounded impatient. Never a good idea when talking to Dr. Cale.

  “My point would be, I can amputate a limb without breaking a sweat or endangering your life to an unreasonable degree.” Dr. Cale didn’t sound impatient. She was perfectly serene, like this was what she had been dreaming of for years. Given the situation, maybe she had been. “Shock is still a risk, naturally, but I think I can minimize it with the appropriate drugs.”

  Dr. Banks had gone pale. “Now Surrey—”

  “I know what you’re about to say. You’re going to remind me that you’re a powerful man, and then you’re going to tell me that people—powerful people—know you’re here. You’re going to tell me that killing you would be a terrible idea, one that would lead to the destruction of everything I’ve built, even though your presence has basically informed me that we’re going to have to tear it all down. You’re overlooking the fact that I’m not going to kill you.” Dr. Cale smiled, still serene. “That would be, if you’ll forgive me, far too easy. Now. Assuming you’d rather keep things friendly, how did you know we were here, Steven?”

  The color did not return to Dr. Banks’s cheeks. He stared at Dr. Cale. For her part, and more terrifyingly than anything she could have said, Dr. Cale just kept smiling. She actually looked interested in his inner turmoil, like no matter what his answer was, she would find a way to enjoy it. I’d almost managed to convince myself that I understood the woman who made me. Looking at her now, smiling and calm, I realized she was more alien to me than any other member of her species.

  “USAMRIID has been monitoring you,” said Dr. Banks finally, looking away. “Don’t ask me how they got you under surveillance, because I don’t know. As for why they haven’t taken you, well. We both know that you don’t work well when someone else is telling you what to do. You’re better left to your own devices and kept under close watch, and you’re not making things any worse. Those little videos you keep releasing have even been useful, on occasion. USAMRIID wanted you to keep working without knowing that you were being watched.”

  “Do you honestly expect me to believe that the United States government has allowed me to keep working without interference because they don’t think I’d perform well in captivity?” asked Dr. Cale.

  Dr. Banks shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

  “Sorry, Steven, but I don’t really trust you when you’re not lying to me.”

  Dr. Banks continued as if she hadn’t spoken: “I told the higher-ups at USAMRIID that I needed to contact your organization if I was going to continue my own work, and I managed to convince them it was worth the risk that you’d cut your losses and run. They helped me get here from San Francisco. Dropped me—with Anna, and a security team—about a mile away. Your boys have done an excellent job of clearing out the local sleepwalkers, you know. We didn’t encounter any resistance on the walk.”

  “That’s good to know.” Dr. Cale’s tone could have been used to freeze water. “Where did you leave your security team? How many people? Two? Four? You can’t have brought the army; if you had, they would have marched you right up to my gates and taken what you wanted. The nonintervention policy is still in place, and it’s not benefiting you. I suppose that means that of the two of us, I’m still doing the better work.”

  Dr. Banks was silent.

  “Setting aside the fact that you carved up my daughter for parts—although if I were you, I wouldn’t expect that to be set aside for long—what makes you think I don’t already have teams out there combing the area for your people? You said this was too large of an operation to be kept hidden. Do you know just how large of an operation we have here?”

  Dr. Banks was silent.

  “I will find the team that got you this far, Steven. And since I won’t know how many of them there are, or where they’ve taken cover, when my people find them and call me for directions, I’ll give the order to take no prisoners. I already have you. Why would I need anyone else?”

  Dr. Banks was silent, but sweat was beginning to bead at his temples, betraying his growing unease. His heart had to be pounding so loudly that he could feel it, even if his human physiology meant that he would never hear it like I did.

  “How many of them did you get from USAMRIID?” Dr. Cale leaned forward in her chair, her smile fading into an expression of almost feral interest. “How well do you think your new allies will respond when you come back empty-handed, no soldiers, no chimera, no answer to whatever mystery you came here expecting to solve?”

  “At least you’re implying that he’ll still have hands,” said Adam. He was trying to be helpful, I could tell, and in a way, he was: the beads of sweat on Dr. Banks’s temples doubled
in size, now accompanied by a red flush around the base of his jaw.

  “Hands, yes,” said Dr. Cale. “I make no promises as to fingers.”

  “This isn’t you, Surrey,” said Dr. Banks quietly. He didn’t turn back toward us. Maybe he was afraid to.

  “You’re right,” said Dr. Cale. She leaned back in her chair, getting comfortable. “Surrey Kim would never have sat here threatening her valued friend, Steven Banks, the man who was going to change the world. Surrey had other things to worry about. How she was going to fund her research, for example, or what she was going to pack in her son’s lunches for the week. She had a life to plan. Surrey would find what I’m doing abhorrent, on all sorts of levels, because Surrey worked very hard to keep herself tied to human standards of morality, human ideals of right and wrong. Surrey would never have wanted her son to look at her the way Nathan is looking at me right now.”

  I blinked, glancing toward Nathan. He looked almost as unsettled as Dr. Banks did. The muscle at the base of his jaw was twitching, making a small fluttering motion against his skin. I reached for his hand. He jumped, eyes wide as he looked in my direction, before lacing his fingers through mine and hanging on for dear life.

  Dr. Cale continued: “But here’s the thing, Steven. Surrey Kim doesn’t get to have an opinion here. Surrey wouldn’t have done these things to you. I can. Do you know why?”

  Dr. Banks didn’t say anything. I think he knew that there was nothing he could say at this point. He had dug his own grave, and he had dug it very well indeed.

  “Surrey Kim is dead.” Dr. Cale sounded utterly calm. She was overseeing the exhumation of a cold case, not surveying an active murder scene: the reality of her original identity’s death was years behind her, taking most of the anger with it. But not, I realized, the rage. They were two different beasts, close enough to seem identical when seen together, but unique enough that one could endure without the other. Her anger had faded as her old life became more of a memory and less of a loss. Her rage at the man who had started all of this had never wavered.