Thomas Hoover: Syndrome

"Come," she said to Nina, "these can save you."

"Ally, I'm too old now. I don't want to be saved. There comes a moment in your life when you've done everything you feel you needed to do. You've had the good times and now all that's left is the slow deterioration of what's left of your body. It robs the joy out of living."

"No, Mom, this is different," she said plucking one of the white mushrooms and holding it out. "This prevents you from growing any older. You'll stay just the way you are. You can have a miracle."

“'To never escape this vale of tears? To watch everyone you love grow old and wither and die? Is that the 'miracle' you want me to have?" Then she looked up at the flawless blue sky and held out her arms as though to embrace the sun. "My mind Ally. You've given me back my mind. Now I can live out whatever more life God will see fit to give me and actually know who I am and where I am. That's miracle enough for me."

As she said it, a beam of white light came directly from the sun and enveloped her. Then the meadow around them faded away and all she could see was Karl Van de Vliet, who was bending over her and lifting back her eyelids.

"Alexa, I can't tell you what you're about to feel, because no one has ever been where you're about to be. God help us, but we're on the high wire without a net here. But any new cell configurations should immediately form tissue that's a facsimile of what's already there. That's what the simulations show."

She was listening to him, not sure if he was real or a dream. Then she heard Bartlett's voice.

"Why are you talking to her, Karl? She can't hear you."

"We don't actually know whether she can or not. At some level I think she's aware of her surroundings. In a way we should hope that she is. If there are going to be impacts on her consciousness, I'd rather she be alert and able to remember what it was like."

Then the voices drifted away, but she was sure she had no control over anything. The white mushrooms. She was thinking about them again. Only now they were above her and growing toward the sky and then she realized she was underground, buried and looking up from her own grave.

What happened next was a journey through time-somewhere in the far-distant future. She seemed to be watching it through a large window, unable to interact with what was happening on the other side.

Time .

She felt a sensation at the back of her neck and the images faded away.

"This damned well better be right" came a voice. "There's not going to be another chance."

"I did an activity simulation for a range of antibodies, just to make sure she wouldn't automatically reject the enzyme because of the earlier injection." The voice belonged to Karl Van de Vliet Her mind was clearing and she recognized it "But all the results indicate that the effect of the antibodies is essentially washed out at this concentration of active enzyme. Have the good grace to let me try to get this right."

She was listening and trying to understand what was going on. Her mind had been drifting through time and space, but now she was aware that something new was happening. The hallucinations, the conversations around her, all were beginning to focus in, to build in intensity.

But that was not what was really happening; it was merely a mask over something that had entered the laboratory, some kind of force.

Then her vision began to work in a strange way that felt more like a sixth sense. She was "seeing" what was going on in the room, even though her eyes were shut. Or perhaps they weren't. She didn't know and she was still strapped to the gurney, so she had no way to check.

"Kristy," Winston Bartlett said dismay in his voice, "you shouldn't be in here. You should be resting."

"What the hell are you doing down here?" Van de Vliet demanded. The pitch of his voice had noticeably gone up.

Who? Ally wondered. Who's he talking to?

There are definitely new people in the room.

"Come on, Ally," said a voice in her ear, urgent. This time she knew who it was. It was Stone. "Damn them all. I'm getting you out of here. Now ."

Friday, April 10

10:07p.m.

She felt the straps on the gurney loosening and then she started prying her eyes open. She thought, hoped, it was Stone, but she couldn't see well enough to be absolutely sure. Her mind and her vision were still overflowing with horrifying nightmares of time gone awry. What did all those bizarre dreams mean?

She was groggy but was coming alert. Perhaps it was the sense of electricity in the room, but something very unscheduled was going on.

When she finally got her eyes open and focused, what greeted her was a blinding row of white lights directly overhead that seemed to isolate her. But there was tumult all around her in the lab, a cacophony of alarmed voices echoing off the hard surfaces of glass and steel. She squinted into the light as she felt Stone slip his arm around her shoulders and raise her up.

Thank God, he's here , she thought.

"Come on," he was saying. "She's not interested in you. She just wants Kristen out of here. This is the only way."

"Who. .?" She was startled by the sound of her own voice, mildly surprised to discover she was even capable of speech.

She gazed around, trying to find her when. . Jesus!

Katherine Starr was standing next to Kristen. She was moving in a surreal way, gripping Kristen's hand and pulling her along.

Stone had found her. He had understood . Katherine Starr appeared to be wearing a blue bathrobe under a gray mackintosh, but the part that got Ally's attention was the knife she was holding, glistening like a.

No, it was a scalpel, shiny and sharp as a razor.

Tough luck, guys. No pistol this time, but she still managed to come up with a convincing substitute.

She didn't look any saner than she did the last time. Now, though, she finally had what she'd come for. She had her daughter. Could it be that Kristen was about to be liberated? Had the world come full circle?

"No." The voice belonged to Winston Bartlett. "I want her with me."

" You‘re the prick responsible for this." Katherine whirled on him, brandishing the scalpel.

"Mrs. Starr," Van de Vliet interjected, eyeing the sharp metal, "you can't take Kristen away now. She's at a very delicate stage of her procedure."

"I seem to be doing a lot of things I can't," she declared turning back. "I'm not supposed to be out of my room, but I am. And now I'm getting us both out of here. We're going through that air lock and onto the elevator. So whose throat do I need to cut to do it?"

Winston Bartlett was edging away, and his eyes betrayed he was more concerned than he wished to appear.

"Look at her," Katherine Starr continued shoving Kristen- who was completely disoriented her eyes blinking in confusion-in front of Van de Vliet. "She doesn't know me; she doesn't know anything. She's acting like a baby. What in hell have you done to her?"

"She had the procedure she wanted. At the time I warned there might be side effects we couldn't anticipate."

"She's lost her mind. That's what you call a side effect ?”

All this time Kristen was just standing and staring blankly into space, but there were growing storm clouds welling in her eyes. It caused Ally to wonder what was really going on with her. Had this troubled girl been made permanently childlike, or was there a split personality at work? Did she have a new mind now, or a parallel mind?

"We're still trying to stabilize her condition," Van de Vliet said in a soothing tone. "We just need a little more time."

That was when Kristen wrenched free of her mother's grasp. Her eyes had just gone critical, traveling into pure madness. She strode over and seized a glass jar containing a clear solvent.