by RS McCoy
“Sorry, I was helping Theo set up his tablet.”
Dasia looked at him for a brief moment. “Nice to meet you,” she said quietly as the three stepped into the elevator.
“You too.”
“Have you seen that girl Mable? She left her tablet in the auditorium. I was going to give it to her.” Sure enough, she held two tablets under her arm.
Jane’s eyebrows shot up as she gaped at Dasia. “Ew, you were going to talk to her?”
“Yeah, she seems okay.” Dasia’s gaze lowered in embarrassment.
“You know she’s an Untouchable? Nick said Dr. Arrenstein recruited her personally. Clearly he’s losing touch.” Jane flipped a bit of hair over her shoulder. They waited in silence for the elevator to arrive.
When the doors opened, the other two guys were waiting with Nick. He didn’t look surprised to see there were only three of them.
“Thank you all for being on time,” Nick started, his hands in his pockets.
“Aren’t we missing one?” Osip asked.
“Dr. Arrenstein will update Mable at a later time.” Theo was pleased to hear it. Mable was difficult, despite what Dasia thought. And Arrenstein gave him a bad feeling. Silent and brooding, Theo knew Arrenstein wasn’t someone to mess with.
“So this is it? You’re finally going to tell us?” Osip asked, chomping at the bit.
“Yes, this is your briefing on the program. Any and all information learned here is protected by the highest global security measures. Any attempt to reveal, share, expose, or in other way violate that security will result in your immediate termination. Are we clear?”
Some of the others looked nervous, but all these speeches about the high stakes made Theo’s heart beat with excitement. He might have a chance to do something important with his life after all.
“This building is the central offices and personnel housing facility for CPI, the Center for Parasitological Inquiry. All this information is available in the files on your tablet. You’ll be expected to know every detail, but for now, we’ll just give you an introduction. There’s a lot to take in.”
“Para whata?” Osip interrupted, his face scrunched at the sound of the foreign word.
“Parasitological, as in pertaining to parasites,” Jane explained, her tone short.
Nick pushed open the door at his back and walked them into a large laboratory space not all that different from some he’d seen at the Scholar Academy. They moved past rows of exam tables, testing equipment, and various odds and ends.
When at last they stopped, Theo’s stomach plummeted. On a table before them sat a single jar filled with a golden fluid and the strangest creature he’d ever seen.
Theo guessed it was some kind of arthropod, but it had two long antennae, each five or six inches. It appeared scaled, the whole body covered in tiny plates. There was no doubt in his mind: this thing was alien, foreign.
The sight of it made the hairs of his arms stand on end.
“What in the bloody hell is that?” Osip bent over and put his hands on his knees so he could lean in, his face all but pressed against the glass canister.
“This is the first one. It was found in the throat of a propulsion engineer twenty years ago.”
“Gross!” Georgie bellowed. “That was in someone’s mouth?”
“Not just someone. Dr. Grant Lilliwood, one of the premier propulsion engineers of his time. He was on the verge of a major breakthrough when he started saying odd things, asking his mentee to destroy his research.”
Nick looked around to make sure he had their attention and found all eyes glued on the strange specimen in the jar.
“When he died suddenly, his body was sent for digital autopsy and this was discovered in his throat. The antennas were positioned in the nasal cavity in such a way as to reach the cerebrum. It’s theorized that the specimen was altering his speech patterns by contacting the Broca’s Area of his brain.”
“English doc,” Osip complained.
“The bug-thing was controlling him,” Jane translated, her arms crossed as she stared.
“We don’t know the extent of its effect on him, but it was profound enough to destroy his research and set back the field another twenty years.”
“And kill him,” Osip added.
“That, too,” Nick admitted.
Theo absorbed the information as fast as he could, taking it all in, listening without interrupting. He didn’t have a background in biology, but from what he had learned in some of his early classes, parasites were quite common, using often disturbing means of gaining and keeping their hosts.
Sure, this one was particularly disturbing, the circumstances with the engineer unfortunate, but he couldn’t imagine why it would be a matter of global security. It wasn’t as if this sort of thing happened all the time.
Then he realized something Nick had said. “This was the first.”
Nick looked at him and smiled, pleased someone had figured it out. “Yes, since then there have been over a hundred.”
Osip stood up straight and Jane gasped. Georgie remained silent at the back of the group. Dasia clutched the two tablets tight to her chest.
“When this first specimen was isolated, it was sent to a lab for study. They thought maybe it was just a new species to be identified, something produced by the radiation after the war.”
That sounded a totally reasonable explanation to Theo. Radiation did all sorts of strange things to creatures, especially after prolonged exposure.
But then Nick kept talking. “The specimen’s genetic code is completely different from any other species.”
“In what way?” Jane asked.
“The molecules are a triple helix with six nucleotide pairs. The backbone is composed of arsenic with a dimolecular sugar. Biochemically speaking, they are by far the most advanced organisms in existence.”
“That’s not possible. Every organism has the same genetic structure. Even viruses that aren’t living have nucleic acids,” she continued, as if Nick hadn’t considered the possibility before.
“After that discovery, CPI was organized to determine exactly what it was and why it had attacked the engineer. They never imagined what it was they had. After a time, they came to call this one Sonora novella, or The Echo.”
“So this is like a real thing, a real animal?” Osip turned and stared at Nick.
“Well, not an animal. We call them bugs, but they aren’t really. We don’t know what they are for certain.”
“And you’ve had them here all this time? We’ve been in a building with these brain-eating bugs for weeks and you didn’t tell us!” He shouted up at Nick who stood a good foot above him. Osip broke into an angry spew of Russian. Theo assumed there were some not so nice things being said, but none of them could translate.
All they could do was wait for his anger to die down.
“These specimens are all dead. That’s part of our problem,” Nick replied calmly once Osip had run out of breath. “We’ve identified four species including the Echo.”
Nick walked down the aisle to another section of the lab. In canisters large and small stood a dozen bugs identical to the one in the first jar. They each had long wisping antennas that had been inserted into someone’s brain.
Theo gagged.
Jane was there in an instant, her hand around his waist as they stared at the collection, the strange morbid collection of parasitic bugs that weren’t really bugs.
“That’ll be all for now,” Nick began. “Tomorrow morning, meet here at 0800. We’ll get you acquainted with the rest.”
No one hesitated. They turned and headed for the door, a slow lifeless trudge of seven young adults who had just seen a nightmare. And there were three more to come.
SILAS
CPI-700, NEW YORK
AUGUST 10, 2232
Silas scanned his hand and waited for the click of the door lock. “The others got the tour this afternoon.”
Maggie shrugged and entered the room, st
opping inside the door when she saw the lab. “What is this?” She wrapped her hands around the crossed shoulder strap of her bag. She still wore the white shirt and pants provided after cleaning.
The sound of her screams still haunted him. He pushed the memory from his mind.
“Our research facility. We’ve been collecting parasitic insects for three decades.”
“And I’m supposed to find them and kill them?” Her features twisted as if he’d offered her a job as an exterminator.
“Well, yes, but it’s not that easy. What do you know already?”
“Nothing.”
Silas didn’t want to ask her, didn’t want to say the name, but he had to know. He couldn’t wait any longer. “What did Alex say when he commed you that day?”
Maggie snapped her gaze to him and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do. The day before you disappeared, he commed you. You talked for six minutes. I need to know what he said.”
“You’re the one with spy software on all the comms. You tell me.” She started moving around the room, her fingers skimming the surfaces of machines, tables, and exam equipment.
“He disabled it somehow. I need to know if he told you about all this, if you told anyone else about what goes on here.” It would be a security breach of the most epic proportions. He’d been able to keep it hidden, to operate with the assumption Alex hadn’t compromised the entire program. But he needed to know, to be sure.
“No, he didn’t tell me anything. Don’t bring him up again.”
“Maggie—”
She turned and stood in front of him, so close he could feel her breath against his chest. “You don’t get to talk about him. Ever.”
She might as well have pulled his heart from his chest and smashed it on the floor. He was going to have to learn to live with her hatred. He could keep her safe, help her adjust to this new life, give her everything she needed, but Maggie would never have anything but hate for him.
So he had to focus on the job.
He plucked one of the many jars from the display and handed it to her. “There are four types. This is the Echo, it modifies speech patterns in its host.”
“How?” When she asked, it was with intrigue, her eyes calculating as they examined the specimen.
“The antennas compromise the speech area of the brain. We thought it was a physical adjustment, since it’s always found in the throat. Figured it must be affecting the larynx, but it’s neural.”
“Creepy,” she said, though she obviously didn’t think so.
Silas saw his first glimmer of hope in that moment. He’d done these tours dozens of times, explained to countless teens the dark truth of the world. Over and over again, they had fussed, screamed, too shaken to maintain any kind of decorum. One had even fainted.
Not Maggie. She took the news in stride, her mind thinking through the data as if it were just another problem in need of a solution.
Silas knew she was the right one.
He pulled the jar from her grip and handed her the next. “Visus obstructus, the Gleam,” he told her as she looked at the bug’s flat body and six spindle legs.
“It sits in the eye,” she said.
Silas nodded. “Like a contact, but at the back. It interferes with the optic nerve and alters what the host perceives.”
“Can you tell, when you look at the host? Can you see there’s something in the eye?” She looked up at him for the answer, curious.
“We haven’t developed an accurate test yet. It’s not as if we can go around asking to examine people for parasitic bugs that might be in their eye.”
“Good point.” Maggie squinted into the fluid-filled jar to get a better look. “What’s this mark?”
Damn she was good.
“They both have it. This triangle with the three lines. What is that?” she continued, her eyes never leaving the container.
“We’re not really sure, but they all seem to have it.”
“You don’t know much, do you?”
“Not nearly as much as we’d like,” he admitted as he found the next specimen. “This one’s the Yield. It compromises motor abilities, fine and gross.”
Maggie’s eyes took in the largest bug, almost three inches long. With eight legs, a pair of kite-shaped wings and an iridescent shimmer, the Yield was by far the most impressive.
“Do they know? Can the host tell their body isn’t responding to them anymore?”
“There’s no way to know. It crawls in the ear and wraps the legs around the medulla at the base of the neck. At some point, it terminates the host by severing the spinal cord.”
“The host dies.”
“Yes, we’ve never known anyone with the Yield to survive. There have been reports of the bugs controlling the host after they’ve died. Not for long, just a few minutes, while the cells are still responsive.”
“So this one is the worst.” She set the jar back on the table.
“Many would tell you that it is.”
“And what do you say?” Silas didn’t miss the importance of that question, the first time she’d asked him his opinion on anything, big or small, since he’d recruited her a few days ago. The bugs might just be new ground for the both of them.
Silas found one of the few jars with the fourth specimen. “I would say this one is the worst.”
“Why?”
“This one is the Slight.”
“Okay…” She lifted the jar to see the smallest bug, the one with a three pointed crown, bulbous black body and a long tail with hooks on the end. Its flesh looked not unlike that of a leech.
“The Slight settles in the space between the medulla and cerebellum. It causes difficulty controlling emotions, insomnia, and eventually the host will stop breathing.”
“How is that worse that the Yield?”
Silas sighed. God he wanted to tell her, to get it off his chest. But he couldn’t. He was just starting to win her over, if only a little. Instead, he offered the clinical answer, “The Slight modifies the memories of the host. As far as we can tell, it eats the connections between nerve cells. It literally steals your memories.”
“Still, it doesn’t always kill the host right?”
“No. It usually terminates the host, but not always. Only one survived.” Silas couldn’t tell her, couldn’t utter those words.
He was the worst kind of coward.
“Oh,” she said with a quiet voice as she set the jar back on the table. They spent several minutes in considerate silence. Silas knew it was a profound quantity of information, and the recruits, even Maggie, would need time to absorb it all. If time was what she needed, then time was what she would get. He wanted nothing more in the world than to keep her safe, to give her the opportunity to be happy.
Minutes later, her considerate mind finished processing the mountain of information he’d thrown at her. But there were still things she wanted to know. “How many?” she asked, as he knew she would.
Too inquisitive for her own damn good.
Silas tried to fight back his grief so he could answer her. “One hundred and fourteen.”
“Infected or dead?”
Why couldn’t she take it easy on him?
He didn’t want to think about all the times he’d failed. “Infected. Fifty four dead.” It came out as more of a whisper. Then he added the part that really killed him. “That we know of.”
“No wonder you don’t want the world to know.”
She stared at the display, the shelf upon shelf of bugs in gold fluid before she straightened her shoulders and asked, “How am I supposed to kill them?”
“We don’t know.”
She spun and glared at him. “Is this a joke? You have dozens of dead ones and you don’t know how to kill them?” Her brows furrowed as her demeanor quickly shifted from intrigue to anger.
“These were found with the host. In the brief period after the host dies but the bug is still alive, they
can be captured, but the capture kills them. We don’t know how to keep them alive, even study them.”
“But you have so many.”
Silas picked up the nearest jar, an Echo, and showed her. “The fluid keeps them in this condition. It’s nitrogen-based fluid. We don’t know why it works.” He picked at the sticky tape seal and pulled it off. With a twist, he removed the screw-on cap and set the jar back onto the table.
Exposed to air, the bug cracked like a piece of wood in a fire despite the fluid. The cracks spread until a web of them covered the entire specimen. In an instant, the bug disintegrated, its remains nothing but a fine sand that drifted to the bottom of the jar.
Maggie bent over and looked at the place where the bug had once been.
“I thought you said this was going to be hard. Looks like they’re pretty easy to kill.”
“Outside a host, yes. They are exceptionally fragile. Inside a host, there’s nothing we’ve found that will kill the bug while allowing the host to live. The only method we’ve been able to use is an extraction.”
“And what does that involve?”
“Usually a clamp. Or a pair of forceps.”
Maggie’s lip curled as she fully processed what that meant.
“Trust me, it’s much worse than it sounds.” Silas had performed dozens of extractions, but it was an experience he was quick to avoid. Each one had scarred him.
When she continued to stare, lost in thought and probably horror, he told her exactly what he wanted. “I need you to figure out how to keep the bugs alive, and then figure out how to kill them.”
MICHAEL
LRF-RB-C
AUGUST 11, 2232
Michael sat at the conference table in the Robotics lab for his usual quarterly meeting. With his background in astrobiology, he had interest in many of the departments, though Robotics certainly wasn’t one of them.
Astrobotanicals had unique discoveries now and then. A corn that could grow in a sandy loam was one of his favorites. Aeronautics would always have some new fuel or design they were working on. Planetary systems would show him potential homeworlds, which at least gave him a little hope for the human race.