Mira Grant - Symbiont

“That wasn’t the question.” Several of the scientists were starting to look unhappy about the way that I was talking to their boss. I didn’t really care all that much about how they felt. I kept my attention on the Colonel, trying not to think about the nights he’d spent in my doorway, keeping the nightmares away with his presence, or the times he’d done things that were more fatherly than scientific. He’d taken me out for ice cream, just the two of us, and we’d eaten dripping cones on Fisherman’s Wharf while we laughed at the tourists. Those moments had never been common, but they’d been , and it was hard not to dwell on that as I watched him stand there in his uniform, with me in a scientific prison.

“I know you’re confused, and I know you’re upset, but this is protocol right now,” he said finally, looking back to me. “You should be grateful that you were located during the early stages of the outbreak. Right now, we can afford to space you out and give you a little room to move. By the time this is all over, that’s not going to be the case.”

“What? You’re going to start a zoo for unturned humans?” I uncrossed my arms in order to gesture in both directions at once, indicating the rows of bubbles stretching out in both directions. I wasn’t lying, quite: I still hadn’t claimed to be one of those precious unturned souls. “You can’t keep us in here forever. It’s inhumane. There are laws against this sort of thing.”

“A surprising number of laws can be suspended when it’s a matter of public health.” Colonel Mitchell looked at me gravely, his eyes searching my face like he was trying to find something he no longer believed existed. “This is a quarantine situation. Individuals without any sign of a SymboGen implant are relatively rare, thanks to the corporation’s increasing market saturation over the past few years. We need to isolate people long enough to be sure that they’re genuinely clean, and not Trojan horses looking to get into our protected populations. Once someone is fully cleared, they will be released into a less restrained setting. We’ve acquired a small town in Contra Costa County, relatively isolated by both geography and design. The inhabitants have either been restrained here or relocated elsewhere. I’m sure you’ll all find it quite comfortable there.”

I stared at him, momentarily at a loss for words. Some of the scientists were exchanging glances, like they weren’t comfortable with him telling me even this much. “Wait, you really are going to put us in a zoo?”

“An isolated environment where you can be protected from the current threat,” he corrected. “There’s no way of telling whether the SymboGen implant has become transmissible, and we need to protect the few individuals who have been confirmed as unaffected.”

This wasn’t working. He was feeding me a party line—maybe a little bit more of the line than he was supposed to feed me, but that could all be excused by the fact that I wore his daughter’s face. I dropped my arms to my sides, trying to look vulnerable, and asked, “How’s Joyce?”

His face shut down. There was no other way of describing what happened. It wasn’t the muscular death of the sleepwalkers, or even the sudden loss of muscle tension that came when someone fell asleep or was knocked unconscious: this was a simultaneous tightening and smoothing out, until there was nothing left in his expression that could tell me how he felt. “She survived the course of intramuscular praziquantel that we gave her on Dr. Kim’s recommendation. There were some side effects, of course, but she’s still breathing. That’s more than I felt confident in hoping for when we began the treatment.”

The intramuscular praziquantel had been intended to target the SymboGen implant that was colonizing her brain. Nathan and I had known substantially less about the sleepwalkers when Joyce got sick. She hadn’t gone all the way into the “walking around, trying to kill people” stage, but she’d lost consciousness and been bad enough that USAMRIID had quarantined her. Dad— Colonel Mitchell , I reminded myself; he’d been Dad at the time, but that time had passed—had demanded that we help. We’d done our best, and it sounded like we’d saved her body.

It was a pity that I was pretty sure we hadn’t saved her mind.

I’ve never been good at concealing my thoughts. They played out on my face in real time, and Colonel Mitchell had had a lot of practice at reading me. “I doubt she’ll ever wake up,” he said. “The worm that chewed its way into her skull did a lot of damage in the process. The drugs did even more. She’s still on life support while we look for a miracle. Do you have a miracle for me, Sal ?” He stressed the single syllable of my name, reminding me of who I was, who we were to each other. I stared at him, mouth falling briefly open in comprehension.

He was hiding me.

He’d known what I was all along, so he had to have known who Nathan’s mother was—he would have investigated Nathan as soon as we started dating. He probably knew we’d been with Dr. Cale, and how much information I had access to. He was hiding me from the rest of USAMRIID because he really hoped I had a miracle, that I could produce some magic equation from Dr. Cale’s lab that would mysteriously allow him to bring Joyce’s mind and body together again. He was a father who had already lost one of his two daughters forever, only to see a stranger put that little girl’s body on and walk it around like a suit. He would do anything to save the daughter he had left.

He was grasping at straws.

“I’m in a bubble, Daddy,” I said. Several of the scientists paused, eyes widening. Apparently, the nature of our biological relationship hadn’t been known to his entire team. Well, if he wanted that cat to stay in the bag, he should have said something sooner. “I don’t think I can produce many miracles from in here.”

“Think harder,” he said. He didn’t say goodbye: he just turned and resumed his walk down the row of bubbles. The scientists chased after him, so many fluttering, white-winged birds trying to keep up with the leader of their flock. I stayed exactly where I was, only turning my head to watch him walking away. The occupants of the other bubbles pressed themselves against the plastic as he passed, waving their arms and shouting to get his attention. The bubbles had to be proximity-permeable somehow, because I didn’t hear any of them.

When Colonel Mitchell and his entourage had passed out of sight I walked back to the bed, crawled onto it, and stretched out on top of the covers. It was time to wait and see what happened next. I had every confidence that it was going to be something interesting.

The subject did not respond well to anesthesia. Normal doses were insufficient to induce lasting unconsciousness, and only when the feed was increased to dangerous levels did subject become fully unconscious. Subject’s vital signs were depressed and subject’s breathing was compromised. It was decided unanimously by the surgical team that further progress would need to be postponed until a viable mechanism of guaranteeing subject’s sedation was found.