Mira Grant - Symbiont

The drive to John Muir could have taken thirty seconds or thirty years: I wouldn’t have noticed either way. A few times I was pulled back toward wakefulness by a sudden turn, but those disruptions were brief and quickly obscured by the simple comforts of the dark. My pulse seemed to be radiating from the points of my body, feet, hands, head, and crotch, bouncing in to the center of me and then flowing outward like a wave. It didn’t make a sound, exactly, but I thought that if it did, the sound would have been meditative and sweet, so I tried to listen for it, focusing as best I could through the pounding of the drums and the thumping of my heart.

I don’t like this , thought the small corner of my mind that was still clear and unaffected by whatever Dr. Cale had put in my IV. I want this to be over now. Can this be over now? Please?

My silent pleas didn’t do any good. The tidal motion of my pulse continued, and the darkness deepened, if anything, becoming absolute.

The gurney was lifted down from the ambulance. The wheels thumped hard against the concrete in the hospital parking lot. That did register with me, breaking through the haze for a few seconds. I tried to convince my eyes to open. They didn’t listen, remaining stubbornly closed, and the darkness closed in again.

Motion. The gurney was being pushed somewhere, and I was going with it, helpless to do anything to control my destination. This was what it was like to be just a part of Sally , said the clear corner of my mind, and the part of me that was aware suddenly flooded with both terror and relief. Terror at the accuracy of that comparison, and relief that this wasn’t my existence anymore. This had been me, once, but it wasn’t me now. I was just visiting the land of people who could neither move nor speak. I didn’t have to live there.

Dr. Cale had said the implants weren’t sapient until they integrated with a human brain, that they did all the things they did based on instinct and the desire to control their environments. I was glad for them. Nothing capable of thought should ever be trapped like this, helpless and marooned in the dark. Although I did wonder, just a little, whether she was right: whether they really were just reacting until they latched on to a human mind. Because if they had any shred of intelligence, they were taking over their hosts for two reasons she hadn’t considered: because they were desperate, and because they wanted revenge on the creatures that had given them life and then locked them in the dark.

Something moaned. A voice shouted—Nathan—and then the gurney was moving faster, pushed ahead of some unseen attacker. I struggled to control my body, and failed again. Terror lanced through me, cold and sharp as a razor blade. I didn’t mind going along with the people around me; they often knew more than I did, and I was all too aware that I was still learning to be a person. But the thought of being helpless with a sleepwalker closing in was enough to make my skin grow tight with involuntary terror.

The gurney moved faster. The sound of moaning dropped away, replaced by silence and the rattle of wheels. My sense of time seemed broken by the isolation. Finally, voices drifted through the gloom, unfamiliar ones first, and then Nathan and a woman I thought might be Daisy answering them in calm, professional tones. The motion had stopped. I tried again to pull myself out of the darkness, and succeeded only in driving myself further down. The voices went away.

Motion, and then no motion, and then motion again. A door slamming. The sound of voices. Pressure receding as the straps that held me to the gurney were undone. Hands moving me to a new surface. Something being fitted over my face, covering my nose and mouth, like the rebreather I used to wear for the gel MRIs. Maybe I was having a gel MRI. Maybe I was back at SymboGen, and everything that had happened since my last checkup was a dream, and when they flushed the tank and let me breathe again, Sherman would be there, and he wouldn’t be a tapeworm, and he wouldn’t be the enemy, and everything would be all right. I could go home. My parents would be my parents, because I would be their daughter, and they would love me, and everything would be fine forever and ever.

“—start the feed—”

“—all data has been—”

“—careful, the risk of compromising her structural integrity—”

The voices were only ghosts; they came and went without making any impact on the world. The mask that covered my mouth and nose began to emit a strange-smelling gas. I breathed it in anyway. There was nothing else I could have done. So I just breathed, until even the ghosts went away, and there was nothing. I was nothing.

I was alone.

When I was born, I was the size of a pinhead: an egg, expressed from the corpse of a tapeworm that had been intended as nothing but a breeder for more tapeworms. It had been my biological mother, and my biological father had been a syringe full of DNA and modified instructions for my growth. The actual process was probably more complicated than that, but I didn’t understand the science: when I tried to hold on to it, I just kept seeing a loop of film from an old cartoon about talking rats. The rats were normal rats until the scientists came along and poked them with needles. Then they got bigger, and stronger, and smarter, and started wanting more for themselves than cages and captivity. They started wanting to be free.

Dr. Banks and his team could have learned a lot from watching The Secret of NIMH a few times. Maybe it would have convinced them that modifying the genetic code of living organisms wasn’t as much fun as they thought it was. But Dr. Banks had wanted to make a lot of money, and he’d succeeded, hadn’t he? Whatever else my siblings and I might have done, we’d managed to make him a lot of money. He was probably still making money, even as the foundations started giving way beneath him.

Memories flickered against the edges of my mind. Waking up in the hospital with Sally’s grieving family standing next to my bed, staring up at the ceiling and not knowing what it was, or who I was, or what I was doing there. I’d been so eager to believe them when they called me their daughter, and why shouldn’t I have been? They were offering me an identity. They were offering me a home . I’d never had either of those things before. So I took them, because I was still a tapeworm at heart, still greedy for whatever I could grab, and I kept them, and when they stopped being enough for me, I’d gone looking for more.

This was all my fault.

No, no, no , I scolded myself, trying to swim through the black that had taken me, trying to pull all the splintered pieces of my mind back together. It’s not your fault. You didn’t do this. You didn’t make this. You’re just here, but you didn’t do anything .

If you really believe that, why are we having this argument? The question came from another corner of my mind, and I didn’t have an answer for it. So I did what felt right, and let it fall away from me as I sank deeper down into the dark. The dark didn’t demand that I do anything but exist. I could do that. I could do that very well.

So I did.

There was only one thing I really remembered from the operation after it was over: light. Bright white light that hurt my eyes so much it was almost like someone had stabbed me, lancing down from above and searing me. But my eyes were closed; the light had to be getting in through some other channel. It didn’t make any sense at the time. It was one more mystery piled onto the endless heap of them that had been coming together since I’d seen myself in the MRI film.

It was thinking of the film that gave me my answer. The light hadn’t been hurting my eyes, because I didn’t have eyes where the light was shining: it had been hurting my body, shining in through the opening in my skull and lancing through the waxy, ghost-white skin of my true, segmented form. I would have screamed if I could have, both from the pain and from the realization. But I had no voice, and so all I could do was sink back into the dark, away from awareness, away from sapience, and wait for it to be over.