“I understand,” said Batya, eyelashes still fluttering against her cheeks like the wings of captive birds. She was beautiful, when she wasn’t wrapped up in her own righteousness. It was truly a pity that she spent so much time in that state.
I wished, not for the first time, that I had time enough to work on her properly, to condition her to the point where her interests and mine would more perfectly align. Alas, that sort of time was a luxury we would not have for a while yet, if ever. Conquering a world was so much more work than I had ever anticipated.
“Tell my mother that I will be coming to her soon,” I murmured, and brushed my lips across Batya’s brow. She shivered at the touch. I let her go, smiling beatifically as she stepped back, out of my grasp, but never out of my reach.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Everything is going to be fine.”
STAGE III: MICROEVOLUTION
I categorically deny the accusations that I have betrayed the human race.
—DR. STEVEN BANKS
Children grow up. You have to let them, even if you don’t like the people they become. That’s what life is about.
—SAL MITCHELL
My “brother” has ordered us to start unstitching the genetic code of his waterborne creations, looking for the switches allowing them to thrive in a body that already has an implant. We’re supposed to turn them off, so his precious cousins will stop infecting his people. I’ve tried pointing out that this won’t clean the waterways that are already contaminated—adding a new strain of tapeworm to the water not only won’t remove the old one, it will double the number of infectious agents in any given sample. As there is no outward method of distinguishing tapeworm eggs from two different strains, this will just result in the water being more dangerous for everyone.
Sherman doesn’t care. Sherman is planning to become King of the World, even if he has to destroy everything to accomplish it. According to Mom, Sherman is reading these notes. I wouldn’t expect anything else. I know he’s only keeping me alive for as long as he thinks it helps him keep Mom under control; I know that as soon as she comes fully over to his side, I’m finished.
He never did forgive me for being the son that came before him. I am afraid for myself. I am afraid for Sal, and for my mother, and for everyone I love. But most of all, I am afraid for Adam.
—FROM THE NOTES OF DR. NATHAN CALE, JANUARY 2028
Sally—she likes to be called “Sal” now, I have to remember that—is awake. She’s starting to talk again, and her physical therapists say she’s not going to have any motor deficiencies. If she doesn’t have permanent brain damage (and how are they supposed to measure that? I know there was scarring, there’s always scarring when the accident is that bad), then she’ll probably be able to resume a normal life. She won’t even have a limp.
That’s all great. I mean, I’m really, really happy to know that she’s going to be okay. I never wished for her to die, although I guess if I’m being honest, I wished for her to get hurt a few times. Just so she’d understand what it was like to not get everything you wanted. Just so she’d learn to be kinder. But.
But this woman, Sal, she isn’t Sally. She looks like Sally, she has Sally’s face and Sally’s smile and sometimes she moves like Sally used to… and I think that’s all muscle memory, because those flashes of similarity are fading as Sal figures out how she wants to move. It’s like my sister suddenly has a twin.
I don’t think Sally woke up. I think… I think someone else did.
—FROM THE DIARY OF JOYCE MITCHELL, JUNE 2022
Chapter 16
JANUARY 2028
We weren’t prisoners, and we weren’t guests: we were enemy combatants facing the concept of an uneasy alliance, and that discomfort wrapped around all three of us like a rough blanket as we paced around the small room where we’d been asked to wait. “For our safety,” according to Colonel Mitchell, whose people were overseeing the transfer of Joyce’s body—Joyce, who would be Tansy when she woke up, please, please, she would wake up, and please, please, she would be Tansy—to a room where she could recuperate. I wasn’t happy knowing that she would wake up without us.
Fang was even less happy. “They had best give me access to my patient,” he muttered darkly, pacing back and forth across the room. At least he had stopped kicking the chairs. “If she experiences any medical distress, I’m her best chance. She needs to make a successful integration. If she doesn’t, we could lose them both.”
I bit my lip and didn’t say anything. Fang was worried about his patients. I was worried about my sisters. I wanted them to live. I wanted them to thrive, as much as they could with half of themselves missing. Colonel Mitchell wanted his daughters back, and would probably always want that, no matter how much he came to accept that it was never going to happen. Fang wanted Tansy back—whether it was because he missed her or because he was trying to make Dr. Cale happy didn’t really matter so much. I was the only one who wanted them both, combined and perfect and capable of being happy.
Fishy was sitting atop the table that had been in the middle of the room when we arrived. He had promptly shoved it into the corner, creating more room for Fang to pace and making the whole space seem less like an interrogation room and more like a lobby. I was leaning in the corner, out of the way but still ready to move if I had to. I was never going to be comfortable here. Not even now, when we were present voluntarily. This was where I had been held against my will, and I was not going to forget that, or allow myself to trust them any more than I had to.
The doorknob turned. Fang stopped pacing. All three of us turned to watch, with varying degrees of nervousness. I shrank back into my corner, letting the smallness of it reassure me. Fishy leaned back on his hands, seeming utterly relaxed.
Colonel Mitchell stepped into the room.
Fang stepped forward. “I need to see my patient,” he said, without giving the colonel a chance to catch his breath. “Her condition will be very delicate at this stage; any disruption could prevent proper integration, and then we risk losing both of them. It’s essential that she undergo the correct monitoring, and that—”
“She’s asleep, and her vital signs are stable,” said Colonel Mitchell, speaking calmly over him. “Three of my people are with her, adjusting her life support and hooking up the IVs you requested. I needed you here, because I need to talk to you. Once we’re done, you can go back to Joyce.”
“Tansy,” I said.
Colonel Mitchell turned to look at me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
But I did. “Her name is Tansy now.” I pushed away from the wall, moving into the middle of the floor. “Joyce was an organ donor. I’m going to miss her a lot. She shouldn’t have died. That doesn’t change the fact that she did die, and now we’re using the parts she left behind to save my sister.”
He winced at the word “sister.” “I think you’re being a little too literal.”
“No, I think I’m protecting both of them,” I said. “I’m protecting Tansy, because she needs to not have you confuse her into thinking she’s Joyce—the way you confused me into thinking I was Sally. You made me think I didn’t know how to be myself, when the problem was that I didn’t know how to be somebody I’d never met. I’m protecting Joyce, too, because she deserves better than to have you dress a stranger up in her clothes and pretend that nothing has changed. Didn’t I teach you that? Love your daughter. Mourn your daughter. Let your daughter go.”
“Sally…”
“That’s not my name, and you know it.”
Colonel Mitchell went very still. So did I. It was possible that I’d gone too far, pushing him past the point where we could converse like normal people. But it was important that we start this conversation from a place of equality, or as close to equality as we were going to be able to get. He needed to remember that he was not my father, and that while he might have more power than I did, that didn’t mean that he was in charge—and more, he needed to remember that he had c
eded his claim on Joyce as soon as he’d allowed us to place Tansy in her head. She was my sister now, and she was going with us when we were done here, if we had to fight every uninfected human in the place to set her free.
Finally, he nodded. “My apologies, Sal. Old habits can be difficult to break.”
“I know,” I said, offering him the thinnest scraping of a smile. “I’m just getting to the point where I can ride in a car without hyperventilating. I have to remember that the fear doesn’t belong to me.” It had been a gift from Dr. Banks, in the interest of keeping me convinced that I was Sally. I couldn’t give it back to him, but I could take everything else he had away. That was enough.
“I’m glad to hear that.” He looked back to Fang. “I promise that you will have full access to your patient. I don’t want to do anything that might hinder her recovery. I just wanted to speak to you before things went any farther. Your arrival here was… dramatic, to say the least, and it didn’t leave us much time to really set terms.”
“And now you have a hostage to fortune, in the form of our colleague, slumbering in your daughter’s body,” said Fang coolly. “The last time this situation arose, things didn’t go so well for us.”
“No, but I’m hoping it can be different now,” said Colonel Mitchell. “Forgive me for asking this so bluntly, but are you a human?”
“My body is,” said Fang. “Does it matter what’s inside my skull? I’m a thinking individual regardless of my origins, and I deserve to be treated as such.”
Fang wasn’t a chimera. He worked for Dr. Cale because he believed in what she was doing, not because he viewed her as his creator. Even as I thought that, I realized what he was doing. He was making it easier for us to separate the Colonel from Dr. Banks, whose promise of chimera for military and cleanup use depended on us being so “other” that we didn’t have to be treated as the people that we were. It was easier to abuse things that weren’t your equal. I knew that from my time at the animal shelter.
“I’m human,” volunteered Fishy. I glanced at him, startled by his apparent failure to realize what Fang was doing, and had to swallow a smile as he continued, “I’m also suffering from severe disassociation and can’t tell fiction from reality most of the time. Of the people in this room—one a tapeworm in a human body, one not saying, and me—I’m the last one you should listen to. Humanity isn’t the final deciding factor in whether or not a person is worth trusting. There’s so much more that you’re just not looking at, and all of it matters.”
Colonel Mitchell looked nonplussed. Then he turned back to Fang, and said, “I need to know what I’m dealing with, son. My superiors are going to want to know.”
“I’m a scientist,” said Fang. “Moreover, I’m the scientist who currently stands the best chance of saving the human race, if you decide to listen to us and do what we ask of you. Does anything else matter at this stage?”
“Sherman’s going to kill everyone,” I said. “You, the rest of the uninfected humans, even me, because I didn’t go with him. He’s the worst of what the world has left to offer, and we can help you stop him. But you can’t act like you’re better than me just because you were born in your body, and you can’t pretend that what Dr. Banks wants to do with the chimera is right. We’re people too.”
“You’re thieves,” said Colonel Mitchell. “You stole the bodies you’re standing in, and now you act like you have some divine right to them. Sally—Sal—I love you. I wish I didn’t. It would have been so much easier to get the help we needed here if my superiors hadn’t been asking whether I’d been compromised—whether my love for you had compromised me. But that doesn’t make you my daughter. You took what you needed, and you never considered what it would do to the rest of us.”
“I wasn’t a person then,” I protested. “That’s like saying that when a baby is conceived, it’s stealing the womb from all the other babies that could have grown there. I didn’t make Sally swallow the implant. I didn’t make her have the accident, either. And what about Tansy? She didn’t steal Joyce’s body. We put her inside it to save her life, because otherwise they were both going to die. She’s not a bad person just because of where she comes from. Saying that she is isn’t fair. Sherman is a bad person. He got access to a human brain, and all the wonderful things it can do, and he decided that the appropriate thing to do would be to act against the species that had created him. The rest of us just want a chance to survive. You made us, and then as soon as we started wanting more than you were happy to provide, you started hating us.”
“The sleepwalkers are a problem,” said Fang. “But we don’t want to round them up and slaughter them any more than you do—and the fact that they still exist in the Bay Area tells me that you don’t want to go in for wholesale slaughter.”
“It’s hard to get people to sign on for shooting their own kind,” said Colonel Mitchell. “Whatever’s happened to those poor souls, they still look like human beings.”
“There was a huge upswing in zombie media in the teens,” said Fishy abruptly. “Lots of really classic movies and books and video games came out of like a ten-year span. Defined the genre. And the government looked at that as an excuse. They generated a bunch of hokey ‘zombie-preparedness plans’ that everybody laughed at, but that were actually blueprints for mowing down mobs of unarmed American citizens if it ever became necessary. Pretty good smokescreening, if you stop and think about it. Which most people didn’t. They just laughed at the idea that the government knew about zombies, even as a fictional device.”
“It’s weird when you say things that make sense,” I said.
Fishy beamed. “I am the living incarnation of the Konami Code.”
“And the making sense is over.” I turned back to Colonel Mitchell. “We’re people. You have to understand that by now. I’ve caused you too much trouble to not be a person, and when Tansy wakes up, both your daughters are going to be walking around being different people. Being us.”
“Why is this so important to you?” asked Colonel Mitchell. “I let you into my facility. I allowed you to have what you… what you asked me for, even knowing what it would cost. Sal, you lived with me. You know what Joyce’s mother is going to do when she finds out. But I did it anyway, because you were right, and because I am trying to treat you fairly.”
I knew what I wanted to say. I didn’t know how to begin. The words were too big, and the stakes were too high. I looked toward Fang, silently pleading.
He cleared his throat, and said, “Because we’re about to give you the keys to the kingdom, and we need to believe that you’re not going to try to use them against us.”
“What do you mean?” asked Colonel Mitchell.
“The tapeworm eggs in the water were derived from a sample taken from my original, tapeworm body,” I said. “Sherman Lewis, an early experiment of Dr. Cale’s who has turned against us all—he infiltrated SymboGen, he infiltrated you—cultured them, and scrubbed the epigenetic data that might have enabled them to retain some sense of humanity.” Better not to go into that in detail: better to keep moving on, and hope he wouldn’t put too much value on that statement. “He used those eggs, and my genetic material, because of the antiseizure medication I was created to secrete. They have a higher chance of successfully bonding with a human host, because they can prevent seizures that would disrupt the bonding process.”
“Still mostly fatal,” said Fishy. “I mean, we’re monkeys, and monkeys don’t like to share. Especially not with squishy brain worms that want to drive us all around like happy meat-cars. No offense, Sal.”
“Some offense taken,” I said. I kept my eyes on the Colonel, watching to see how he would react to all this.
He was frowning. Slowly, he asked, “Why is this relevant? The worms are still in the water, and from what you’re saying, we have to worry about more of you people cropping up because of them. That doesn’t seem like the kind of good news that would drive you into the arms of the enemy.”
“We
have a full copy of the invasive eggs’ genetic code,” said Fang. “We can create a tailored antiparasitic drug that, once introduced into the waterways, will kill off a large percentage of the eggs.”
“We may never be able to completely scrub the water, because water is complicated,” added Fishy. “It’s hard to reliably model, and it’s a pretty common spawn point for new enemies. But we can make it so a glass of water isn’t an automatic death sentence.”
Now, for the first time, Colonel Mitchell was starting to look genuinely interested. “You can do this.”
“Yes,” said Fishy.
“We could be putting antiparasitics in the water without hurting people—human people.”
I could see where this was going. I put my hand out, shaking my head, and said, “Stop. This is going to be a tailored antiparasitic. The only reason it’ll be safe for people to drink is because it’s going to be targeting a specific genetic line. Even then, drinking too much water without filtering it could make your precious ‘human people’ sick. Putting something more broad spectrum into the water would mean killing everyone. I know you’re upset about all the deaths. So am I. But are humans really so petty that you’d wipe out everyone in order to say that you died as the dominant species on the planet?”
I wasn’t as confident about the science as I was trying to sound. I was still a layman in a world of specialists, and I was always going to be, since that wasn’t where my head was. I glanced to Fang, who nodded very slightly, confirming that I had the right shape, if not the right details. That was a relief. I didn’t want to lie to the man who had been the only father I’d ever known. It would have been one betrayal too far.
Colonel Mitchell seemed to wilt. “You seem awfully confident that humanity is going to lose,” he said. “It isn’t as bad everywhere as it is here in America. We’re the only ones who’ve had the water contamination, at least so far. There have been outbreaks in Europe, Africa, South America—even Asia and Australia—but they’re holding up better than we are here. If the tapeworms take the North American continent, we’ll be avenged.”