Parasite

  He looked at me solemnly. Then he held up the copy of Don’t Go Out Alone that I’d left on the kitchen table the night before, and asked, “Is this the source of the signal interference in the house?”

  “I…” For a moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, I nodded, and said, “It has a scrambler in it to stop people from listening in on me. Or Nathan. It’s his book, really, but he let me borrow it because I hadn’t read it as many times as he had, and it seemed sort of important that I understand it, and—”

  “Sal.”

  “—anyway, we thought we’d be seeing each other again sooner than this. I know I scared you, but do I really deserve to be locked in like some kind of animal? You’re acting like I did something unforgivable, and all I did was get scared! And—”

  “Sal!”

  This time, I stopped talking, eyes wide as I stared at him.

  He shook his head, lowering the book—but not, I noted, handing it to me. “How sure are you that this works?”

  “How did you know it was doing anything at all?” I countered.

  “I was scanning for SymboGen bugs. I’ve been scanning for the last six days. You shouldn’t have let them into the house without notifying me.” He sighed, shoulders slumping. For the first time, I wondered if the past five days hadn’t been as hard on him as they had been on me. “All the bugs I’ve found have been nontransmitting. That meant that something had to be blocking them. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “When, exactly, would you like me to have done that? After you grounded me and sent me to my room, or during one of the times when you left me here alone to think about what I’d done?” I glared at him, barely resisting the urge to snatch the book out of his hands. “I tried to tell you. I tried to tell you a lot of things. You never gave me the opportunity. Every time I opened my mouth, you either sent me to my room or walked away. Oh, and that ‘legal guardianship’ bullshit? We are so done. I am taking you to court after this, if that’s what it takes, and I am moving out.”

  “Sal…” Dad stopped, taking a deep breath. Then he said, “I’m sorry. I overreacted. You have to understand that I was frightened. There was every chance that SymboGen had taken this opportunity to bug the house, and I couldn’t risk you saying something before we’d managed to find and deactivate all of their listening devices. It was best for everyone if I seemed to be unreasonably angry with you.”

  “Why would SymboGen be bugging our house?” I asked. “I already answer all their questions.”

  He hesitated, looking at me with an expression of such profound sadness that I rocked back a step, trying to figure out what was going through his mind. Finally, he said, “I’m going to ask a question. I need you to answer me honestly. Can you do that?”

  I nodded, not quite sure I trusted my voice at the moment.

  “Good. This book”—he held up Don’t Go Out Alone—“where did you get it?”

  “It’s Nathan’s,” I said.

  “Where did Nathan get it?”

  This line of questioning was starting to make me uncomfortable, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I frowned. “I don’t know. He had it when he was a kid.”

  “I seriously doubt it came this way, since children’s books aren’t normally equipped to block top-of-the-line surveillance devices from doing their jobs,” said my father. “I’m not playing around, Sal. Who gave you this book? It’s extremely important that I speak with them.”

  When I first got home, shaken by my experience in Lafayette and seeing Tansy’s blood-speckled face every time I closed my eyes, I would have told him about Dr. Cale and her lab without hesitation. After five days on house arrest, I just shook my head. Too much about this wasn’t adding up. “It’s Nathan’s. He said I could borrow it if I wanted to. It was really important to him when he was a kid, and I wanted to understand him better. So I borrowed it.” Before Dad could react, I leaned forward and grabbed the book out of his hand, pulling it out of his reach. “Thank you for giving it back. I remember how important it is to respect other people’s property.”

  “Sal…”

  All the anger that I’d been trying to hold back suddenly bubbled to the surface, pouring out of my lips before I had consciously decided that I was going to speak. “Why did you shut off the Internet? Why haven’t I been allowed to watch the news? What’s happening out there? You ask me questions like you think you have a right to answers, but you’re not willing to let me know what’s going on, or why you’re scared. It’s not fair, and I won’t do it. You raised me better than that.”

  “Sal, in a very real way, I didn’t raise you at all.” Dad’s words were quiet, even a little bit sad, like he was admitting something he didn’t want to say to anyone, much less to me. I stopped breathing, and didn’t start again until he continued, saying, “Your accident may have made you a better person—it did, in a lot of ways; I can’t lie to myself about that, even if that makes me feel like I’m betraying the memory of my little girl—but it also made you unpredictable, in some ways, because I don’t know what you’re going to do when the chips are down. You don’t have the training Sally had, and baby, I don’t have the time to give it to you. Sometimes, you’re just going to have to trust me, and do as I say, because there isn’t time for me to explain.”

  The sound of drums rose in my ears as I thought about what he was saying to me. Finally, with a feeling of deep regret spreading through my chest, I shook my head and said, “No.”

  My father frowned. “What?”

  “No, Dad. You say I’m not Sally: fine. I don’t remember being her, I don’t remember the things you say you taught her, I’m not her. You say I don’t have her training: fine. If I’m not her, I can’t have the things that only ever belonged to her, and that means I can’t have the things she learned before I was here. But you don’t get to tell me that my not having her training means you can’t trust me. It goes against every other conversation we’ve ever had. You told me I was more dependable than she was. She was wild and she broke rules to show you that she could. Me disappearing the other day was the first thing I’ve ever done that was ‘wrong,’ and I had pretty good reasons for doing it! You don’t get to tell me to trust you and not give me a good reason to do it.”

  My father looked at me without saying anything. I glared defiantly back, clutching Don’t Go Out Alone against my chest and trying to look like I wasn’t going to pass out. The drums were louder than ever, and my head felt completely empty, so light that it might float away. So this is what adrenaline and anger feel like when you put them together, I thought, and kept glaring.

  He was the first to look away. “I reacted so poorly—and your mother went along with me—because this wasn’t the first report of sleepwalkers accosting someone in their home.”

  “So?” I asked, abandoning my glare in favor of a puzzled frown. “I don’t understand why that would make you freak out the way you did. If it’s happened before…”

  “At least, we believe that it’s happened before,” he said. “There were no survivors, but all signs indicated that the homes had been entered by one or more sleepwalkers.”

  I said nothing.

  “In some cases, bodies have been recovered. In others, the residents of those homes have been retrieved later when they, along with the original sleepwalkers, have been found wandering as much as five miles from the site of the attack. Somehow, the sleepwalkers are either inducing or speeding infection in asymptomatic individuals. If they had touched you…”

  “SymboGen says I’m clean,” I said. I realized how empty the words were even as I was speaking them. SymboGen knew that the implants contained genetic material that had never been disclosed to the public. SymboGen knew that there was a danger of the host becoming compromised. Dr. Cale might have been their Dr. Frankenstein miracle worker, but the scientists she left behind weren’t stupid. They understood what the early-generation D. symbogenesis could mean. They knew about the risk of Adam. So how c
ould I believe that anything they told me was the unadulterated truth?

  I couldn’t.

  “So the sleepwalkers would just have killed you, rather than turning you,” said my father grimly. “I’m sorry, Sal, but I’m not really seeing that as an improvement.”

  I frowned. “Is that why you blocked the news channels and the Internet? Because you didn’t want me getting upset about things you couldn’t explain while the house was bugged?” Something else occurred to me. I hugged my book a little tighter. “Why was the house bugged? You still haven’t told me why. You never said I couldn’t let SymboGen security inside. If this was such a big risk, couldn’t you have told me that before it happened?”

  “Just… let me work through this at my own pace, all right?” He turned and walked back toward the dining room table. Puzzled, I followed him, and when he sat, I took the seat across from his. It seemed oddly ordinary to be looking at him across the table, like this was nothing but a friendly chat about chores or what we were going to do over the weekend. The solemnity in his eyes refused to let me forget that this was so brutally much more.

  He took a breath, and said, “We decided to block the news channels and the Internet because we didn’t know how much of the house was bugged, and we had no way to prevent you from asking questions when you saw what wasn’t on the news.”

  “What?” I frowned again, utterly puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “The GPS in your phone was blocked by that book”—he nodded toward Don’t Go Out Alone—“but from the condition of Nathan’s car when you got home, I’m assuming you somehow wound up in the Lafayette exclusion zone. Is that correct?”

  I bit my lip and nodded, not saying anything.

  “Well, if you had been watching the news, you might wonder why there was no mention of whatever you saw there. Or of the incident you had here at home, with the sleepwalkers in the yard. That should have raised a great many flags, don’t you think? Armed SymboGen security guards removing sick people from private property isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence, and yet it’s nowhere on the news. It’s not even on the Internet, so far as I can tell.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I protested. “You can’t keep things off the Internet.” There were dozens, if not hundreds, of embarrassing blog posts and “articles” written about me during the brief window of pseudocelebrity that followed my accident. Most of them were accompanied by incredibly unflattering pictures of me in hospital gowns or freshly stained pajamas—it took me a while to develop the fine motor control needed to feed myself without wearing my meals, and it took me even longer to learn that I should change my clothes when they got food on them—and they talked about aspects of my recovery that I didn’t think were anybody’s business but my own. And yet people wrote those posts, and other people read them, and they were popular enough that they didn’t die down until I stopped doing anything that they would think of as “interesting.” Censoring the Internet was impossible.

  “No, Sal,” said my father tiredly. “I can’t keep things off the Internet. You can’t keep things off the Internet. Given enough incidents, even SymboGen won’t be able to keep things off the Internet. But right now, with things still as contained as they are, it’s possible for a large enough corporation with a focused enough security department to do quite a few things that aren’t supposed to be possible. The government could even be, potentially, helping them along to the best of our ability; right now, their goals and our goals overlap enough to be worth supporting.”

  I blinked at him. “Why would the government be helping SymboGen suppress information about what’s really going on?”

  “Because starting a panic does no one any good, and we still don’t know for sure why these are the things that SymboGen is choosing to suppress—or when it started. Did the sleepwalkers begin appearing before we heard about them? Was SymboGen editing the news from the start? There’s so much we don’t know, both about the science, and about the motives of the people who stand to benefit. Oh, some people know what’s going on—you can’t censor gossip—but other than some small runs on bottled water and canned goods, it’s had very little impact.”

  I blinked again, going very still. Even the distant sound of drums had faded, leaving me with only the sound of my own breath. Beverly went trotting by on her way to the kitchen, looking for scraps that might have been dropped during breakfast. In the silence, her claws clacking against the linoleum seemed louder than slamming doors. Things were starting to come together. My vision was unfocusing the way it did when I tried to read for too long in a single setting, casting blurry little halos of color and light around everything.

  Finally, I said, “I am done asking questions. I need you to tell me, in very small, very simple words, what’s going on. And then I need you to give me my phone back. I will make the decision of what I do next based on what you say.”

  “Sal—”

  “Remember how you don’t get to say ‘just trust me’ and have it stick anymore? Well, you also don’t get to decide what’s best for me. I may not remember as many years as I should, but I can manage myself pretty well.” I didn’t mention that if I left, I’d be calling Nathan to come get me and Beverly from the corner. Saying “I’ll call my boyfriend to pick me up” felt like it undermined my overall argument a bit too much.

  Dad paused. Then he smiled, and said, “You know, you’re more like your mother now than you were before the accident. It’s strange, and it ought to be impossible, but it’s true. And as for what’s going on that I was trying to protect you from… SymboGen is hiding things. We’ve known that for some time, and you and I have talked about it before. But there is a reasonable chance that they were so happy to be involved in your care in part because I work for USAMRIID, and if they were able to bug our home, they would then be able to find out what the government knew about the more questionable aspects of their business practices.”

  Aspects like splicing Toxoplasma into the implants, which would make them—which had made them—more flexible and resilient than anyone imagined. Questionable aspects like the entire structure of D. symbogenesis. The parasite that had been approved by the FDA wasn’t the one being implanted in people. That couldn’t possibly be a good thing.

  Questionable aspects like an unshared test for the sleeping sickness, which wasn’t a sickness at all, but the result of the D. symbogenesis parasite trying for a hostile takeover of its host.

  I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded minutely, and waited for him to keep going.

  “SymboGen never reported the people in our yard to the authorities. I made inquiries—discreetly—and no similar incidents have been formally reported. We know about it only because we’ve been monitoring patient intake at SymboGen, and because a few groups have been picked up wandering in areas that allowed the police to back-trace to the invaded homes. We suspect that SymboGen is illegally detaining the afflicted, although we have no proof yet.”

  My head was starting to spin. I frowned at him. “And Lafayette?”

  “We think it was another home invasion scenario. This one involving multiple houses in the hills, and spilling down onto the freeway once the sleepwalkers could find no one else who appealed to them. What’s most interesting is that several of the cars in the traffic jam were accosted by sleepwalkers, and some of the drivers joined the gang.”

  “How is that interesting?” I demanded, staring at him. “That’s horrible.”

  “Yes, it is, but Sal, even more cars weren’t accosted by sleepwalkers.” Dad shook his head. “They’re choosing who they go after. They’re choosing very carefully. What we don’t know is what they’re basing those decisions on. The sleepwalkers don’t seem to do anything consciously.”

  I was terribly afraid that I knew what the sleepwalkers were basing their decisions on: they were going for the people whose implants had infiltrated the largest possible percentage of their brains and nervous systems, making it easy for them to encourage the implant into taking the
final steps toward autonomy. How they were managing that encouragement was something I didn’t know yet.

  “They went after our car,” I said quietly.

  “I know,” said my father. “The fact that you and Nathan are both okay is a bigger relief to me than I can properly express.”

  Were we really?

  On the other hand, I felt totally normal, and Nathan didn’t have an implant for the sleepwalkers to activate. Maybe they’d come for us because they could sense Tansy, and thought that she was inside the car. It was as good an explanation as any, and one that might allow me to sleep again. I allowed my shoulders to unlock a little.

  Dad was watching me carefully. “Sal, the last time we really talked, before the sleepwalkers came here to the house, you said something.”

  “Did I?” I asked, blinking at him.

  “Yes. You said SymboGen had a test for infection. Were you telling the truth about that? Do they really have a way of knowing whether someone is about to get sick?”

  Any sting that he thought I might be lying to him was dulled by the realization that even after all this, he still didn’t know. “Yes,” I said. “They have a test. They used it on me, after I was exposed, and then Nathan tested some confirmed patients after I described what happened. It’s real.”

  “And they aren’t sharing.” Dad shook his head. “Some people need to learn that the public health matters more than their profit margins.”

  “Can you make them share?”

  “No.” Sudden hope lit his eyes. “But you can tell me what they did. I need you to tell me everything, Sal. You may be able to save a lot of lives. A reliable test is the first step toward developing a treatment.”