Mira Grant - Parasite

“Just because people don’t want to consider the risks inherent in their food choices—”

“Nathan, what’s wrong ? You don’t usually try to change the subject twice in one meal.”

He paused before sighing heavily. “If I say you really don’t want to know, Sal, will you believe me?”

“Yes, but I won’t stop asking.” I poked him with my fork again. This time the action earned me a brief smile. “I would be a terrible girlfriend if I didn’t make you tell me what was on your mind. You listen to me whine about dealing with SymboGen enough. I can listen to you.”

“It’s about what happened last night.”

The words were simple, but still sent a thread of unease into my guts, where it curled and twisted like a parasite in its own right. Last night he’d been dealing with an accident. I hated hearing about accidents… but this was Nathan, and he deserved better than me shutting him out because I was uncomfortable. “I’m a big girl,” I said. “I can handle it.”

He sighed again. This time he took off his glasses, polishing them on the tail of his shirt as he said, “It was a nine-car pile-up on the Bay Bridge. The people who made it as far as the hospital said they had no warning at all. One minute, traffic was moving normally. The next, a big rig was jackknifing to block all four lanes of traffic, and cars were slamming into it before they had a chance to realize what was about to happen to them. Eleven people died before emergency services could even get to the scene.”

“That’s horrible,” I breathed, feeling the unease twist harder in my stomach. It was horrible, yes, and it involved a car crash, which was normally enough to make Nathan reluctant to discuss his work with me. But was it horrible enough for him to be this reluctant?

I didn’t think so.

Nathan heard my confusion. He looked up, putting his glasses back on, and said, “You said you were going to the mall with your sister yesterday. In San Bruno. Where those people started sleepwalking.”

“Yes. Joyce and I were both there. But what does that have to do with anything?”

“The driver of the big rig survived. So did the driver of the bus that capped off the accident. His passengers—the ones who lived—said he hit the gas when he came around the curve on the bridge and saw the wreckage. Not the brakes. The gas.”

The similarity to my own accident made me go cold. “What are you—”

“Both drivers are showing the same symptoms as the people from the mall. They’re walking in their sleep. And apparently, causing multi-car pile-ups in their sleep, too. The trucker had no passengers, but the people on the bus said that their driver was perfectly normal when they first got on. He took their fares, said hello, asked about their families… some of them had been riding with that driver for years. They said he seemed perfectly normal, right up until he stopped responding to questions. The accident happened a little bit after that.”

I didn’t know what to say, and so I didn’t say anything at all. I just stared at him, trying to formulate the words that came next. I couldn’t find them.

Nathan nodded, seeming to understand my silence. “More than half the people who were in the accident didn’t make it out of the ER. Some of the others will never be the same. That doesn’t even go into the ones who won’t wake up.”

“There’s more than just the drivers?” The question came out in a whisper.

“Two from the bus, a few passengers from the cars—it’s hard to tell ‘sleepwalking, won’t wake up’ from ‘genuine coma’ right now. You were in a coma. You came out of it.” Nathan paused, wincing. “Oh, hell. Sal, I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s okay. I asked, remember? And I know my coma didn’t end the way the original Sally might have wanted. I wanted to be supportive.” My stomach was still rolling. I pressed my hand flat against the skin above my navel, grimacing. “Maybe I was a little too supportive. I’ll have to remember that for next time.”

“Thank you for trying.” He reached across the table to take my free hand. “Even a little supportive is good enough for me.”

“Don’t say that. I’m still learning social norms, remember? You tell me I don’t have to support you to the best of my ability, next thing you know, I’m not showing up for dates anymore, and I keep asking you to do my laundry.”

A small smile creased the corners of his mouth. “I think that’s kids coming home from college.”

“Or working as biotech interns. I have just described my sister, only substitute ‘dinner’ for ‘dates.’”

“Good, because I don’t want to date your sister, and I don’t want to think about you dating your sister, either.”

I burst out laughing, earning myself a startled glance from the people at the next table over. “Now that would definitely be going against social norms.”

“Very true.” Nathan released my hand and looked at the remains of our lunch. Neither of us had cleaned our plates. “Are you going to eat anything else?”

With how upset my stomach was, I wasn’t sure I was going to keep down what I’d already eaten. “No,” I said. “Can we go for a walk?”

“Sure,” he said, and signaled for the check.

I leaned back in my chair and tried to smile, despite the fact that I really felt like I was going to throw up at any moment. The check came quickly, and Nathan paid. Pushing the feeling of roiling unease aside, I took Nathan’s hand, and we walked together out into the early afternoon sun.

Every six months or so, some conspiracy nut starts in with “what they aren’t telling you” and “these are the things they don’t want you to know,” and you know what? Not one of them has produced verifiable scientific evidence that the Intestinal Bodyguard™ is harmful in humans. Not one! Don’t you think that if there were some kind of negative side effect, we’d have seen it by now? I don’t mean to sound like I’m claiming nothing can ever go wrong—we’re all human at SymboGen, we make mistakes—but even if you’re into conspiracy theories, you’ve got to admit that it’s pretty far-fetched to believe that we could somehow suppress every possible bad effect of the Intestinal Bodyguard™. Millions of people have our implants. Millions. That’s not a small number, and those people talk. We couldn’t keep them all quiet if we wanted to.

And why would we want to? Look at the blogs, look at the social media updates! No more allergies, no more missed medication—heck, some people even claim their Intestinal Bodyguards™ guard against hangovers. Now, that’s not a feature that we were necessarily aiming for, and it’s not in the brochure, but if your implant wants to help you have a little more fun, I say go right ahead. What’s the harm?

Steve’s initial proposal was as fascinating as it was flawed. He wanted to take D. yonagoensis —a type of tapeworm that parasitizes fish in its natural environment, using small crustaceans as a secondary host—and use it to design a sort of “super tapeworm,” a specially crafted hybrid that would enhance the human immune system, protect against allergies and autoimmune conditions, and die every two years. That way, it would be the perfect pharmaceutical tool, but it wouldn’t put the entire pharmaceutical industry out of business. I won’t pretend that he wasn’t thinking about the profits. We all were. Money makes the world go ’round.

It’s a pity, really, that the design for his D. yonagoensis was never going to be viable. He used too many genetic strains, blending them without a cohesive core. The entire plan was flawed from the start. It couldn’t have worked.