“That’s a fight for another day,” I said. “Right now, we just want to clean up the water and stop Sherman before he does any more damage.”
“Don’t forget our personal Frankenstein,” said Fishy. “You can’t work with Banks. He’ll promise you the moon and stars, and then he’ll cut every corner in the galaxy. Fuck the black holes that follow him to your doorstep. He just cares about making delivery and getting paid.”
“We’re people,” I said. It was starting to feel like a mantra. “You can’t let him turn us into slaves because you need to rebuild and you’re convinced that we’re not real. That leads us right back here in another generation—and next time, you won’t have people like us showing up to try to find a way we can all live together. Next time, the center doesn’t hold.”
“She’s right,” said Fang. “This is your chance to save your people and protect your future. Are you going to take it? Or are you going to risk everything because you need to be the dominant species?”
“One-time offer,” said Fishy. “No refunds or returns.”
“Please?” I whispered.
Colonel Mitchell closed his eyes. “All right,” he said. “What is it that you want us to do?”
The lab facilities at USAMRIID had always been top of the line, filled with gleaming equipment I didn’t understand and packed with some of the nation’s best and brightest. That wasn’t the case anymore. Just like Dr. Cale—just like all of us—the military scientists had been forced out of their comfortable, familiar surroundings when everything started to fall apart, and were living in a world of makeshift facilities and jury-rigged systems. They had been able to move most of their gleaming equipment, and it looked out of place in the middle of the Coliseum lobby, like they were preparing for a play. But the scientists who moved around that gleaming equipment were all deadly serious. Their lab coats were still pristine, thanks to having access to industrial-strength laundry facilities, and their hands were occupied with tablet computers instead of clipboards and pencils.
Fang moved among them like he belonged there. It was sometimes difficult to remember that he had spent a significant amount of time working for Dr. Banks at Dr. Cale’s request, trying to learn what her rival was doing to the genetically engineered tapeworms she had created. Looking at him now, calm, confident, and utterly undisturbed by the complexity of the setup around him, belief became easy again. This was his element, more than the bowling alley or the candy factory had ever been. He was supposed to be in labs like this one, doing great work, changing the world.
Fishy stepped up next to me and said, in his usual calm, amiable tone, “Three exits, all guarded. They only have two guards on the one behind the men’s bathroom, though, so I figure we could punch our way out if we needed to.”
I glanced at him, startled. He smiled. There was more understanding in that smile than I had ever seen from him before.
“They held you prisoner here, right? Twice. So I figured you might be more comfortable if you knew how to get away. Not that we’re going to need to. Captain Protocol over there,” he gestured toward Fang, “has them all eating out of his hand. It’s amazing what a little confidence and a lot of scientific bullshit will get you, isn’t it? Things are going to be okay.”
“This isn’t going to fix anything except what Sherman did.” And even that wouldn’t bring back the dead. Not the dead humans, and not the dead sleepwalkers. How many had he killed, between the quarantine zone and the pockets of survivors hiding around the state? How many of his own cousins had he driven out of their stolen bodies? The death toll had to be in the thousands, if not the millions. Everyone needed water. It was the best weapon he could have used against us.
“I know.” Fishy looked at me soberly. “A human created your kind. Another human released you into the world without checking to make sure that it was safe. But this time, you attacked the humans. Not you in specific—I know you’re not that kind of person—but your species. It was the first time you intentionally raised a hand against your creators. Colonel Mitchell and his big brains may work with us now, because they want a solution more than they want to hold a grudge, but you need to be careful. You need to watch for exits. Because once this is done, they’re going to want someone to blame.”
“You think it’s going to be me?” The thought was appalling. All I had ever done was stay alive. That wasn’t supposed to be a crime.
“I think you’re a perfect figurehead for either a revolution or a war crimes tribunal,” said Fishy. “I know you, okay? I’ve watched you walk your dogs and burn your toast. I know you’re not some evil mastermind of a conqueror race. But look at you from the outside. You’re the first natural chimera. You just happened to take over the body of the daughter of the senior officer of our local USAMRIID branch, and you just happened to start dating the son of the woman who created you in the first place, all while visiting the man who released you into the wild. You got hands on all three sides of this conflict, all without seeming to do anything but smile and walk blithely on. So do I think some people are going to look at you and see an evil mastermind? Yeah, I do. If I were programming this game, you’d be either the protagonist or the villain, and at this stage, I’m still not sure which way I’d go with you.”
“Um,” I said. “I’m not a bad guy.”
“Which is exactly what a bad guy would say,” said Fishy.
My dismay must have been easy to read on my face, because his own face fell.
“Aw, Sal, no,” he said. “I don’t think you’re a bad guy. I’m just saying what other people might think, once they get their feet under themselves and need to start looking for someone they can blame. You know how humans are. We love having people we can blame. Maybe that’s the real reason we made you. We got tired of blaming ourselves.”
“Don’t you blame us?” A tapeworm very much like me had been responsible for the death of Fishy’s wife. Even if her body was still out there somewhere—and it might have been; no one had ever told me differently—the woman who’d originally owned it was gone, wiped away by the invader that had taken her body. It would have been easy for him to blame us.
“Nope,” said Fishy. He somehow managed to sound cheerful and sad at the same time, like the two emotions weren’t contradictory. Maybe for him, they weren’t. “You never asked Sally Mitchell to swallow you and give you access to her tempting brain. She did that all on her own, and then you did what came naturally. Blaming you would be like… like blaming a baby when its mother dies in childbirth. The baby didn’t do anything wrong. No one gets to do anything wrong until after they’ve been born, you know? That’s where morality and culpability begin. With birth. You just wanted to live, like anybody else, and I can’t fault you for that.”
I noticed that he hadn’t addressed the question of his wife at all, and I decided not to push it. He deserved to have whatever peace he’d been able to hold on to through all of this.
As I watched Fang walk Colonel Mitchell’s people through the process of making a poison that was tailored to kill me and my tiny, involuntary clones, I wished that I could find a little distance. It might have made things easier.
“They’re going to turn on us,” I said. “We’re teaching them how to be better killers of our kind, and they’re going to use it against us.”
“Maybe,” said Fishy. “You’re sort of lucky that you got to be human for a while. Not because being human is better than being what you really are—it’s always best to be what you really are, when you can manage it—but because it meant you got to see the world when it wasn’t at war. Your brother Adam and this Sherman dude, they’ve always been at war. They never saw the world when it wasn’t through oppressed eyes. But you’re sort of unlucky, too. You’re going to understand what it means that you’re never going to live in another time of peace.”
I understood what he was saying. The war against the implants—and the subsequent war against the chimera—was going to last beyond my lifetime. Even if we could s
omehow convince Colonel Mitchell and his people that we meant no harm, we had still done a lot of harm. That was what most people would see. They wouldn’t be able to forgive us. They would never be able to forgive us. But we couldn’t survive without them. Take away our human hosts and we would become nothing more than mindless parasites, eating and existing, but never really living.
The thought of going back to what I didn’t truly remember being was a terrifying one. It would be so easy to disconnect me from my host. Sherman and Fang—working under orders from Dr. Cale—had both had the opportunity to do exactly that. It was the genetic sampling Fang had done that was now allowing him to show Colonel Mitchell how to kill me more efficiently. It was targeted at my cousin-clones, but it would still work on me; poisons didn’t have morality or compassion, they just had chemical structures and a job to do. A merciless, fatal job.
No one was ever going to get inside my skull again. Not unless they had come to kill me, and I was sure they would succeed. I wasn’t going back. I couldn’t.
“We’ll find a way,” I said, and my voice was a useless protest against a world founded on the principles of unfairness and survival above all else. The humans wanted to survive. Maybe they wanted it even more than we did.
Maybe there was only room for one.
Colonel Mitchell turned away from Fang and walked toward us, moving with the slow, unhurried stride that had always meant his work was going well. I swallowed and stood straighter, watching him approach.
“Sal,” he said once he was close enough that he didn’t need to raise his voice. “Dr. Dockrey.” This was directed at Fishy, and I realized with a start that I had never learnt his real name: I had never even asked. He was always just “Fishy,” and if that was enough for the people he worked with, it was enough for me. Asking for more would have seemed unfair.
“Evening, military man,” said Fishy cheerfully. “How go the WMDs?” He sounded less rational than he had only a moment before. I wondered how much of that was a routine, him using the public fact of his neurological atypicality to keep people from taking him too seriously. It was… useful, the way people looked right through him sometimes.
“The antiparasitics are coming along nicely, and once we have a batch that works, we’ll be able to synthesize enough to start treating the local waterways and reservoirs,” said Colonel Mitchell. “We’re expecting some die-off in smaller organisms, and we may disrupt the local food chain past repairing, but we’ll be able to drink the water again. That matters more than a few small snails and worms.”
The snails and worms would probably have thought differently. Telling him that wasn’t going to make a difference, so I swallowed the thought and asked, “Will it hurt people?” People. Not humans, not chimera: people.
Colonel Mitchell looked at me, and I knew from the lines around his eyes that he understood my meaning. He had raised me, after all. No one knew me better than he did. “It will hurt the invading parasites,” he said. “In the case of fully infected humans, it may damage them when the parasites are killed. We’ve had very little luck with surgical intervention after a certain point.”
“You mean it’s going to kill all the sleepwalkers who have worms genetically close to me,” I said. “They’re going to seize and die when they drink the water.”
For a moment, I thought Colonel Mitchell was going to lie to me. Then he nodded, and said, “Yes. They are.”
“But humans who haven’t been fully infected yet, they’ll be okay,” I said. “It’ll just clean out the eggs and cysts.”
“Yes.”
“What about chimera who are within the genetic target zone? Do you have a way of putting up signs to warn them?”
Colonel Mitchell sighed. “There are people—even now, there are people—who would see a warning and think that the government was trying to poison them. They believed Big Pharma was such a threat that they advocated for moving a living drug delivery system through FDA approval, all to avoid pills and vaccinations. If USAMRIID puts up a sign saying ‘if you are a fully integrated tapeworm-human hybrid, do not drink the water,’ then they won’t drink the water either. They’ll think the water is a trap. We won’t be able to save them.”
Losing a few humans who couldn’t put down their paranoia long enough to save their own lives seemed less important than saving what might be half or more of the world’s chimera community. I didn’t say it. I couldn’t say it. Here and now, I needed these people to stay on my side. “And it’s staying narrow spectrum, right? You’re not going to try to poison us all?”
“What do you want me to say, Sal? That humanity is going to be best friends with you now? You walked in and stole our bodies. You’ve killed millions. Do you understand how bad this problem is?”
“No,” I said flatly. “The news stopped airing, and the Internet went down, so I know it’s pretty bad, but I wasn’t exactly invited to come and sit at the table and talk it over with the big boys. All I know is what people tell me.”
“Well, then, I’m telling you, it’s bad. The SymboGen implants were shipped all over the world. No one has been left unscathed.”
“You said North America was hit worst.”
“There’s a difference between ‘not hit as badly’ and ‘not hit at all,’” he said. “If the American government agrees to offer your people sanctuary, there are those who will view it as us consorting with terrorists. So no, Sal, we’re not using a broad-spectrum antiparasitic in the water, because it would kill things we need to keep alive. It would disrupt California’s ability to recover, and more, the rest of the country’s ability to do the same, since the water contamination has spread. But that doesn’t mean we’re prepared to work with your people, or that we’re going to come to some sort of peaceful accord.”
“You’re working with us,” I said.
“I am not the United States government. We can have a temporary truce without my actually committing the President to anything.”
This was an aspect that hadn’t occurred to me. I glanced at Fishy, who nodded marginally. He had been aware that this might come up, which meant Fang had been aware as well. Hopefully, the knowledge that coexistence was not going to be possible extended all the way up the line to Dr. Cale. She would have a plan, if we could get her back.
“We’ve traded you a service for a service at this point,” said Colonel Mitchell. “We provided you with a new home for your colleague, and you provided us with a means of clearing the waterways. I appreciate that you were willing to put the survival of the human race ahead of your own agenda. I’m afraid that we don’t have anything else to offer each other.”
“Uh, hold up, big guy,” said Fishy, sounding suddenly concerned. “We can’t move Tansy. She’s just had brain surgery. I don’t know if you know this, being a big bad virologist and not a neurosurgeon and all, but people who’ve just had brain surgery aren’t the most mobile. Also, Tansy’s going to need full reeducation now that she’s in a new host. She’ll catch on quick, but quick isn’t the same as ‘snap your fingers, there’s our girl.’”
“If you would like to remain here in our custody, I’m sure something could be worked out,” said Colonel Mitchell politely. “Please understand, I could have you seized and imprisoned for crimes against the human race right now.”
Treason on a genealogical scale. The drums were hammering hard in my ears now, providing an ominous backbeat to everything around me. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth before saying, “We still need your help.”
“Sal, I am already breaking every rule I know just to give you the option to walk out that door,” said Colonel Mitchell. “You may have been my daughter for a time, but that doesn’t mean the rules don’t apply to you. My career is going to be over for giving you as much as I have.”
“You’re worried about your career?” I asked. “What about the world?”
He looked at me levelly. “I have lost my children and will soon lose my wife. My career is all that I have le
ft.”
“Oh, come off it,” snapped Fishy. “You kick us out now, you get to keep Tansy, because she can’t be moved. So you wind up with a functional, properly integrated chimera, no real risk of rejection, to study and take apart at your leisure. Add that to having a solution for the water contamination, and your career isn’t over. Hell, you’ve just become a hero of the revolution. Of the institution? Hero of the institution. We’re the heroes of the revolution, and we’re doing a piss-poor job of choosing our allies.”
“Sherman dropped those worms in the water, and he has our people,” I said heatedly. “We told you that when we got here. You said you’d help. Was that just a way to get us to tell you what you needed to know? We didn’t bring you all that research because we needed a body. We could have found a body somewhere else.”
“But it wouldn’t have had Joyce’s face,” snapped Colonel Mitchell. “There’s more of Sally in you than you want to think there is, Sal, and there’s more in you that’s human than I care to contemplate. You’re not impassive plants from space or quiet, passionless invaders. You’re us. We made you to be us, and you want your sister with you. Tansy is your sister in biology, and Joyce is your sister in paternity, and you saw the chance to combine those two things. What I gave you was worth more than you want to admit.”
“And now you’re trying to take it back!” I glared at him. He glared at me.
“Alfred?”
We both froze before turning to face the pale, hollow-cheeked woman who had given birth to my host body. She was standing in the doorway, holding a knitted wrap around her shoulders, and staring at the two of us like we were some sort of impossible mirage, something that couldn’t exist outside of fiction.