Contaminated

by Amanda Milo

  We’re their last hope.

  Over the course of this program, Simmi and I have watched a number of infants improve. Some of them go home with their parents for the first time in their lives.

  We have also watched a number of our little fighters lose their battle.

  Those are bad, bad daycycles.

  The first daycycle Simmi arrived to this lab and had to watch an infant suffer before it expired, Simmi nearly walked out. No matter how much he hated attempting to educate hopeful pairs who came to the Ancestry Research, Testing, and Reporting Office, it’s unquantifiably worse to observe the results of those against-sanction couplings.

  But daycycle after daycycle, he came back for the same reason that I stayed here: to check on our little fighters who lived. To silently cheer them on. And Simmi threw himself into the work, trying to develop ways to help the infants so they could be as comfortable as possible before they died.

  But here’s a difficult truth: we can put all the hard effort in the world into our job; it still doesn’t make a baby’s struggles easy to watch.

  Today, as I move down the row of holographic pod cribs so realistically virtually rendered that you wouldn’t know these infants weren’t nictating up at us, smiling at us instead of at their parents in their sterile hospital rooms—I’ll find that today is about to be one of the bad, bad daycycles.

  Yahna-AFFECTED-6.8B is a beautiful little female, her features perfection, her face angelic. I’ve never wanted to tweak the tiny tail of a Genneӝt more—but of course we can’t touch her. She never even hears me say hello. But even Simmi has this ritual, a daily greeting to every child we get to know, and for some reason, this child’s charisma transmits even over hologram.

  We adore her.

  I ghost my thumb over the crown of her forecranium, and maybe her parents are doing the same, because her eyes close and she burbles in pleasure. She’s such a happy, lovely infant.

  But Yahna’s form of the disease is acute. She writhes involuntarily, and experiences near-constant, recurrent seizures. Brain damage is a common result when a patient endures seizures to the degree Yahna does. This, coupled with a poor liver function (another common struggle for Affecteds), means that we’ve known Yahna’s life expectancy is short. A mere five orbits is what most Infantile-onset Lʊʊnjaɠ babies are given for prognoses. But still—I’m not prepared for when I finish up my data collecting, and I’m about to give her cheek a virtual pat, only the lightest graze—and she smiles (her parents must be right above her, perhaps waving at her in reality like I’m always drawn to do)—and very suddenly, Yahna starts darkly seizing.

  I must make some sort of sound, because Skyto is suddenly at my side, staring down at Yahna with me.

  Skyto takes my hand fast in hers.

  I’d be more surprised, but I can’t pull my eyes from Yahna as she struggles. I hiss, snarling when her levels begin crashing, and her stats display begins to flash red.

  Dimly, I’m aware of Simmi moving into the room, but he stays back, near the door. Here for Yahna, but incapable of taking any measures to save her—because there is no way to save her.

  Yahna’s hologram abruptly cuts out.

  Skyto shrieks as the entire pod crib disappears—and with it, Yahna is lost to us forever.

  Too numb to be shocked, I don’t react when Skyto’s arm tentatively wraps around my hips.

  Simmi appears as shattered as I feel. He says nothing, but after silently closing out the requests for her autopsy results, he sighs sadly, and returns to the main room.

  CHAPTER 9

  In our department, we, like so many others whose lifework faces grim sides, turn to gallows humor. Or, we would, if Simmi had a sense of humor. There are times when it’s really more like gallows-squabbling, and after losing Yahna in the daycycle, he’s been withdrawn and prickly. “I have agreed that the subject doesn’t have to sit in the lodent enclosure during diurnal hours,” Simmi starts in measured tones, “but could you please keep her from touching my things?” he finishes, his exasperation loud even if his voice never rises.

  “First you complain that she’s staring at you so intensely that it’s deafening—”

  “I didn’t use deafening. I said her staring was clamorous in its distraction. You make me sound as if I’m overreacting.” He snatches his writing instrument right out of Skyto’s fingers.

  I hand her mine, and turn on him.

  Before we begin what will surely be a vicious verbal battle, two audible claps cause us to pause.

  We both look over at Skyto. She’s got a hand pressed on either side of her face, and her shoulders are bouncing up and down.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” I scold Simmi. “You’ve upset her.”

  “Is that what the shuddering means?” He peers at her. “I disagree. I think the chuckling vocalization she’s emitting is laughter.”

  It’s almost an inward sound, soft and half-suppressed. But Simmi might be right—the longer it goes on, the more it makes my cardiac muscle feel lighter to hear it. It’s a welcome sound, if laughing is what it is.

  We could always use more lightness and laughter here.

  After Yahna’s loss this morning, I’ve tried to force a stoic face. But I feel the empty spot in our Lʊʊnjaɠ room as if it’s a gaping hole in my cardiac muscle.

  The more I focus on Skyto, the more I believe Simmi is right and she’s ringing with mirth—I’m nearly encouraged to join her with my own version of laughter.

  Skyto sucks in a breath and wipes at her face, seeming to gain control of whatever emotion was the culprit of her reaction. She picks up the writing instrument I’ve given her to replace Simmi’s, and she goes back to what she was working on.

  And she is working. Using uniformly-cut sheets of thin, fibrous substances, she writes and scrawls. Her characters look nothing like ours, so her notes (‘scribbles,’ Simmi deemed them) aren’t something we can make out—but she’s cataloguing something. And her sketches! She renders the Morsuflos so skillfully it could be a two-dimensional reproduction on a render-tablet.

  Wondrous talent.

  She also sketched Yahna.

  That nearly broke me. When I’d cradled the render in my hands, Skyto quickly made a second sketch, and placed it on Simmi’s desk.

  Very slowly, very carefully, Simmi had taken hold of his—and stared.

  I was watching him nearly as closely as Skyto. He said nothing for so long, I realized he wasn’t going to speak.

  Instead, he retrieved a bit of ğurk (which he’s only shared with me once, and only because he didn’t want to be alone in his newfound addiction), and without a word, he set it on the corner of my desk. I knew it wasn’t for me. With a sad smile, Skyto had accepted it, and Simmi had brusquely turned back to his desk, where he arranged Yahna’s rendering in the center of his planner board. Which was a surprise in itself—Simmi is very rigid about his organization, and not even family images belong in the middle of his list of tasks.

  Something inside me heartily approves that Yahna’s memory is worth the disruption of well-ordered work.

  Skyto has kept herself occupied, appearing as drawn as we feel. She’s been quiet and respectful as we performed the rest of the quotidian minutiae of our day. Early on, I’d been offering to share my tapscreen with her, about to show her how to operate it—when she shocked Simmi and I both by procuring something very like a touchscreen input device of her own (I took an ignoble amount of enjoyment in Simmi’s disturbed panic when she peeled off her sheddable skin hump and slit it open to dig her touchscreen instrument free) and neither of us could be ignorant of her non-animal status any longer—no animal is this advanced. Her actions following this revelation were also cause for wonder: she took out her saved Morsuflos head, the bloom pressed flat from her mode of storage, and she took up our fresh daycycle’s sample of Morsuflos petals for examination, and deftly prepared one of the petals between a set of slides.

  She began to dissect the rest of the Morsuflos, pr
oving she already had an intimate knowledge of our plant—or something like it—because she was careful to avoid the stickiness of the pollen-catching pistil as she separated this section of the flower into parts, and split open the ovary for examination.

  By the time she began to adjust my microscope to examine her specimens, we were speechless.

  For the count of a cardiac muscle’s single pulsation, anyway.

  “That’s highly sensitive equipment!” Simmi had chirped in warning—but Skyto’s practiced, knowledgeable movements showed a confidence that silenced even his protests. Faintly, he mused, “She knows how to use scientific tools?”

  “Highly sensitive ones,” I added wryly.

  Skyto had snickered.

  “See!” I rapped Simmi with the back of my hand, making a hollow sound against his carapace. He jerked from the breach of contact more than the force of contact itself. “I told you she understands us!”

  When she started drawing a cell chart, we gave up all pretense of doing anything but staring over her shoulders.

  ***

  To my pleasure and Simmi’s initial dismay, when he and I finally wandered back to our usual stations to begin working in earnest, Skyto turned the lab tables on us (figuratively speaking) and looked over our shoulders. Well, around our arms, since she’s far too challenged in stature to see over either of us. After collecting a fresh sample of the monstrously enlarged Morsuflos, Simmi thaws considerably when Skyto begins assisting him with his preparations for amino acid extraction. She does it so well, he’s quite shocked. “How does she comprehend this?” he asks in wonder.

  Skyto stabs him with my writing instrument.

  “Geh!” Simmi almost falls out of his chair. The jab couldn’t possibly have punctured his chitin, but he’s quite surprised by the small alien’s daring. He straightens and his eyes narrow. “What I mean is: how is it you understand our specific scientific processes?”

  I flick my tail in exasperation. “You’ve accepted that she must have arrived here by some extreme air-travel method, and yet you question if a basic laboratory process will be outside the scope of her alien understanding? For all we know, her kind once traded with our kind. Perhaps they taught us everything they know, and we’ve really learned to see our world through their borrowed scientific principles. Now stop treating her as if she’s soft-headed.” I move to stand beside Skyto, and begin to run my claws through her oddly attractive, haired scalp.

  Skyto’s cheek pits flash with her smile and we return to work.

  ***

  “Did you finish tabulating those findings?” I murmur. When there’s no answer, I raise my head and glance around, confused. “Simmi, what are you doing?”

  Simmi doesn’t glance up from where he’s bent over his tail. He’s coated it with some sort of polymeric substance; when he shifts, the coating does too, appearing somewhat elastic. “Hmm, yes,” he confirms. “I tabulated my half of the findings half the cycle ago.” He swipes a disinfecting cloth over his workstation around the outline of his tail. “And just look at this! I’ve developed a solution for keeping one’s tail clean from debris if one’s tail brushes the floor.” He looks up, and waves to indicate his spare limb. “A tail sheath.”

  “Eets ay ji-ant kahndom,” Nancy sputters.

  Simmi’s head tips as he studies her expression. Then he looks to me. “Did you know I’ve been swabbing the end vertebrae of my tail plating each rotation, and on average, I’ve found we can carry thirty-two hundred bacteria from one hundred and twenty distinctly different species on our extending appendage?” He raises his prophylactic measure. “But with this, now we’ll remain freer from germs.”

  “I’m impressed,” I tell him honestly.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  I nod. “I didn’t know your obsession with cleanliness could become more acute.”

  Simmi sniffs and sprays disinfectant on his work station where his tail made surface contact. “Well, now you know not to underestimate my neurosis and the lengths I’ll go to defeat germs.”

  Flicking my dorsal tubes at him and his neurosis, I turn back to my work station.

  “Are we to continue keeping her as a secret then?” Simmi inquires, his voice deceptively easy or truly unworried. I hope it’s the latter.

  Reaching for the latest medical journal, I make a point to slide it within viewing range of Simmi as incentive. Only the most breakthrough findings in our industry get recognition in this publication. “Just look at the way she’ll benefit our careers. Her biological matter made the Morsuflos blossom like we’ve never seen. Do you really want to hand her over to an unknown body of authorities?”

  Simmi gives me a droll look. “I can’t believe you’re attempting to use our career advancement in your appeal. You should know that with such impressive results, I no longer disapprove. But let us not stand on pretense about why you’re reluctant to hand her off to our authorities. You like her.”

  Stung, I fire back, “Of course I like her! She’s very… likeable.” Shaking off my defensiveness, I stand. “I need to make a Comm.”

  “What for?” he asks.

  I glance at Skyto, who has kept herself occupied, working diligently with the Morsuflos bloom for purposes only known to her. “I need to put in a request for supplies.”

  Simmi scoffs. “Good luck with that.”

  “Nancy?” I call, and her head raises, her eyes’ lid-coverings sweeping rapidly up and down as if to clear away her deep thoughts. “Sorry to interrupt your work,” I tell her. “But I need to hide you.”

  Her eyes go wide in alarm.

  “Only for a short period of time,” I assure her quickly. Then I glance around the lab. “Now where to stow you…”

  “Could put her back outside,” Simmi mutters.

  Skyto reaches over and pats his back, right next to his longest dorsal tube.

  Simmi shudders and erupts out of his chair, shaking her touch off as if she’s attempting to spread something communicable instead of simply sharing a kind touch.

  My sternum juts as I inhale sharply, strangely inclined to attack Simmi for the slight against her—but I get no further in my aggression, because Skyto stuns me by sauntering in front of my chair—and dropping to her knees at my feet.

  I stare down at her, not a thought left in my neurocranium—when Skyto closes one of her eyes, so that for a moment, she’s watching me out of a single eye, the other scrunched shut in some sort of... odd, one-side nictation—before she slides under my desk.

  When her body brushes against my legs, I shoot to my feet, shocked at the contact. Taking a step back, I clear my throat. “Ingenious,” I praise her. “N-no one will think to look there.” I clear my throat and try to collect myself. I’ve never felt so far from balanced in all my lifespan.

  Skyto easily remains out of the holoview as I take up position in front of her, standing with my hands folded behind my back, my desktop in perfect order, while Skyto’s occupancy below my waist is something I’m all too aware of. Her body is so warm-blooded that I can feel her heat radiating against my legs. Her alien smell is also distinct, but I… I find I rather like it.

  She’s vaguely comforting—and oddly, quite exciting. Her nearness is almost a buzz on my chitin. Forcing myself to my task, I connect to the Allocator at the Resources Department for my dorm quadrant.

  When our quadrant representative comes into view, I greet, “Greetings, this is ErreckMXL7-GeneStatus: CARRIER, and I’d like to put in an order for a companion creature’s resting pad.”

  Here I pause, letting the officious, thin-featured man look down his considerable nose at me through the holograph. Somehow, each and every Allocator I’ve had the misfortune to contact has shown a great deal of the same apathetic disdain. It must be some unwritten requirement in order to secure the position: only Genneӝt with outstandingly wretched comportments need apply. It’s difficult to imagine that the position is so unbearably awful that it turns every officiate into an unmitigated wretch. />
  Said wretch glances at what I assume is my personal data screen, where he spends all of a nanotap before sighing an ill-tempered, “Denied.”

  I take a moment to breathe through my flaring nares. I was expecting resistance, I remind myself. “Might I inquire as to why? On what basis are there grounds for denial of such a simple request?”

  The man’s own nares flare and his brow flattens threateningly. “You aren’t registered as being approved for a companion creature.”

  Squinting at him, I start slowly. “Yes, well—you see, I’d like to become approved. It seemed to me that a responsible first step would be to obtain the necessary supplies so that I’m prepared for a pet’s arrival.”

  His eyes nictate sharply, one twitching up as he sniffs. “Denied.”

  Baffled, I stare at his holo. “I beg your pardon, could you explain?”

  “I told you,” Simmi sing-songs just low enough not to be picked up on the officiate’s end.

  The man raises his tail to indicate my data. An unnecessarily rude gesture, alongside being dismissive, considered so because as Simmi pointed out, tails are somewhat unclean. “It would be a foolish waste of resources; your docket states you aren’t on a ground floor-level dorm. Therefore, you won’t qualify for companion creature ownership status and therefore, you need no companion creature resting pad.”

  He raises a knobby finger with a meticulously-groomed claw to stab wherever on his side of the viewer will sever our transmission, but Simmi quickly cuts in. “My request to move to a ground-level dorm was finally approved last solar—and it’s now at ground level that I reside. May I qualify for greenery lifeforms now? File SimmiQRO1-GeneStatus: CARRIER.”

  The man sighs irritably and taps his screens until he has Simmi’s data before him. But with the barest of glances, he coldly states, “Your ground-level dorm does not have a window, and is therefore not considered greenery lifeform-humane. Request denied. Good day.”