Parasite

  “There’s a chance my memory could come back someday,” I said, hating how weak my voice sounded, even under the steady pounding of the drums.

  “And if it does, you’ll have the first Sally’s memories on top of the second Sally’s memories, and you’ll become a new person all over again. For you, recall would be a form of suicide. Maybe not if it had happened right away—then, all this would have just been a strange gap in the memory of the girl you used to be—but it’s been long enough, and you’ve lived a different enough life, that you would die if she reclaimed herself. Would that Sally have loved Dr. Kim? Would she have worked at the shelter for so long?” His gaze sharpened. “Would she have been willing to go through the broken doors at the behest of a woman she’d never met?”

  “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I didn’t have to feign my shock.

  Dr. Banks smiled. “Don’t you?”

  I gaped at him, not sure what else I could say. As I did, I realized that by putting myself behind the desk, I might have gotten access to his computer, but I had done so at the expense of my access to the door. Dr. Banks was between me and the only exit. The windows weren’t the kind that were intended to be opened. Even if I could somehow smash them before he stopped me, all that would do was allow me to plummet to my death more than twenty stories below.

  “Did you really think that I wasn’t keeping a close eye on you? I’m fond of you, Sally, but you represent a huge investment in research hours and medical costs. I’m not going to let you run around willy-nilly without making sure that I have some idea of where you’re going. The shower trick was a good one, I’ll grant you that. Unfortunately for you, I’ve had that shelter bugged since the day you applied there. We got everything. Including a few key words that only one person I’ve ever known would think constituted a cypher.” Dr. Banks leaned forward in his seat, expression sharpening. “I hoped you’d lead us to her. You didn’t. And so I’m asking you: where is she, Sally?

  “Where is Dr. Shanti Cale?”

  The number of keystrokes that have been wasted discussing my relationship with Dr. Steven Banks is frankly appalling. There were much better things the world could have been doing with its collective time, including researching the supposed genetic structure of D. symbogenesis, the little worm without which the private lives of two scientists would never have been up for scrutiny. We were a smokescreen, one that I didn’t realize he was intentionally casting until it was too late for me to get out of the line of fire.

  Were we lovers? Yes, we were. I was married at the time—I’m still married now, as far as I’m concerned—but my husband and I both knew our careers might sometimes take us down less than savory paths. Steven was a bright, ambitious man who was willing to promise me the world. I would have been a fool to deny him whatever he asked from me.

  As it turns out, I was a fool anyway, but not quite in the way most people wanted to believe. I was a fool for listening to the promises he made when we weren’t in the bedroom. Those may have been the only true words he ever whispered in my ear.

  —FROM CAN OF WORMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SHANTI CALE, PHD. AS YET UNPUBLISHED.

  I always knew that this grand experiment would eventually reach a tipping point, a stage at which our only choices were evolve or die. Unfortunately, there is no way of predicting which choice we are going to make before it is made. No one can tell you which way the singularity can go.

  For the sake of my children—all my children—I pray that we can make the right decision. The only problem is, I’m not sure any single decision will be right for all them. No matter which way this goes, I am terribly afraid that half of the people I love are doomed.

  —FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. SHANTI CALE, SEPTEMBER 5, 2027.

  Chapter 19

  SEPTEMBER 2027

  I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said. My voice was level and calm. I was proud of myself for that. Really, I wanted to throw up.

  “I think you do, Sally; after all, you mentioned her yourself not all that long ago,” said Dr. Banks. “Think hard. Blonde woman, curvy, fondness for lab coats and genetic engineering? Oh, and she’s your boyfriend’s mother, mustn’t forget that. Do you think he knows where she is, if you’re insisting you don’t? Do you think he’d tell me if we asked him?”

  “Leave Nathan out of this,” I said, finding more strength now that I had something to defend. I sat straighter in my pilfered chair, trying to glare at him. It wasn’t working as well as I wanted it to. I was too terrified for that. “He has nothing to do with whatever you want from me.”

  “Oh, no, believe me, he does. It was a stroke of amazing luck when you met up with him. I knew all along that he was Shanti’s son. She always forgot that I was the one who had recruited her in the first place—just one more blind spot in a series stretching all the way back to the lab. It’s a good thing she’s so brilliant. If she weren’t, her tendency to focus on the science at the expense of the human element would have gotten her killed years ago. We’ve been trying to hire Dr. Kim for years. If he would just consent to an implant… we couldn’t change the rules without tipping him off. Ah, well. Water under the bridge. Where is she?”

  “Couldn’t you just have changed the rules if you wanted him that bad?” I asked, dodging the question.

  Dr. Banks laughed. “Oh, Sally. I do love your sense of humor. Rules are rules. If I’d changed them, everyone would have known something was up. But oh, I’ve wanted to know what my old friend was doing, and that meant keeping tabs on her son. There was always the chance that she might decide to make contact sometime in the future—which she did, through you. You’re apparently more important to her than her own son. Interesting implications, don’t you think?” He tried that old paternal smile again. It wasn’t working as well as it usually did. “His interest in you was something we couldn’t have predicted, but I’ll admit, we did nothing to discourage it. Keeping the two of you in one place—a package deal, so to speak—made surveillance so much easier.”

  I stared at him. “But why…?”

  “Your father is the head of USAMRIID’s San Francisco office. We needed a way to watch him without it being suspicious. You were the perfect entry into his home.” Dr. Banks looked briefly apologetic. “We’re sorry to have disrupted your life as much as we did. If it makes you feel any better, we wouldn’t have done it if there had been any other way.”

  “But…” I shook my head. “You couldn’t have planned this. I had an accident.” An accident I remembered absolutely nothing about. I’d never even spoken to any of the witnesses. By the time I was out of recovery and able to really wonder about what had happened to me, they had already put the incident behind them, vanishing into the general population without a thought for the girl whose car kissed a bus.

  “I admit, Sally, I’d hoped we could convince you to join our SymboGen family,” said Dr. Banks. “I wanted to be able to protect you. You’re a special girl, and you deserve better than the world outside these doors. But if we’d accomplished that, Shanti probably wouldn’t have contacted you. She’s always been canny. While she might have smelled ‘trap’ on your skin, she was willing to take the risk, and I doubt that would have been the case if you’d been on the payroll.”

  “I had an accident,” I repeated, with less certainty.

  “I was also a little disappointed when you decided to shut us out, rather than coming to me and asking who this woman was, slipping notes into your things and trying to lure you into the path of danger. She’s the real reason you were in Lafayette, isn’t she? That’s why you nearly got hurt in that mob of sleepwalkers. Because Shanti was careless with the lives of others once again.”

  I looked at him solemnly, seeing the entire situation play out from that single-pointed comment. Dr. Banks was looking for a scapegoat. Whether it was nonexistent protozoa or the woman who’d helped to design the Intestinal Bodyguard didn’t matter: all he needed was someone or something to pin the sleepwalking sickness
on, and he and SymboGen could walk away scot-free. All it would take was a story that people would believe—and which was more attractive, really? The idea that a trusted corporation responsible for the health and happiness of millions had made a huge research error, or the idea that one woman, embittered over her own relative obscurity, had done something to change that company’s good works?

  He would turn Dr. Cale into a criminal. I might not object to that as stridently as he’d expect me to—she was Nathan’s mother, and she meant well, but she’d created the implants and she valued the well-being of tapeworms as much as, if not more than, she valued the well-being of humans. I’d still object. If this was SymboGen’s fault, then SymboGen needed to pay for it. And that included the man who’d turned Dr. Surrey Kim into Dr. Shanti Cale in the first place.

  “We went for ice cream.” My voice didn’t shake at all. I sounded utterly reasonable to my own ears. I hugged my backpack against my chest, still staring at him. “Nathan knew I was upset about that weird phone call from that… that woman, and so we went for ice cream. She never told me her name.”

  For the first time, Dr. Banks looked unsure. “You knew Dr. Cale was Nathan’s mother.”

  “Because you told me she was.” I shook my head. “I’m here because I didn’t know where else to go. The last time I was here, Chave tried to kill me, and you locked me in a little room in the basement with people who wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Do you really think I’d be here now if there was someplace else? I’m so uncomfortable right now.” I didn’t have to force tears to well up in my eyes. The churning panic in my gut brought them leaping to the surface. “I didn’t come here so you could accuse me of working against you. I had an accident, and now you’re acting like you’ve only been nice to me all this time because you thought you could use me. I thought you were different from my family, Dr. Banks. I thought you cared.”

  That last part was a lie, but it came close enough on the heels of the truth that he didn’t appear to notice the difference. His face fell, and he rose from his chair, already reaching for me. “Sally, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Please, I never wanted you to think of yourself as just a tool…”

  I shied away from his hands, putting my head down on my backpack and sobbing in earnest. It seemed easier than trying to talk to him. I didn’t know what else there was to say, and his words were still careening madly around the inside of my skull, looking for things to knock loose. I had an accident. Sally Mitchell had an accident. Or did she? After all, the girl she left behind was never going to tell anyone any different. The girl she left behind wasn’t going to tell anyone anything at all about the last minutes of Sally’s life. That girl didn’t know.

  I had forgotten something in Dr. Cale’s lab, hadn’t I? Something I wasn’t ready to remember yet…

  “Sally, please.”

  I kept crying. Joyce was sick. My mother didn’t want me anymore. My father was willing to lie to me if he thought it would help him learn more about the sleepwalking sickness. Even Dr. Banks was saying it had never been about me and my recovery at all: it had been about using me to get to the secrets he thought he might be able to weasel out of my father.

  “Sally, I’m sorry.”

  He sounded sincere. I raised my head, wiping away my tears as I looked at him. He looked back, hands spread in surrender.

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked. “You know nothing is ever as simple as you want it to be. SymboGen is not the enemy here, but you were willing to let us be if it meant you didn’t have to trust people who weren’t always as comfortable as the ones you’d chosen to surround yourself with. No one has only your best interests at heart. Not me, not your parents… and not Dr. Cale. Whether you’ve met her or not, you should keep that in mind for when she does manage to catch up to you—and she is going to find you, Sally. She’s not the good to my evil. She’s not going to solve all of your problems with a wave of her hand and a cup of hot cocoa. You’re smart enough to know better than that. People like us… we don’t get easy answers like that.”

  “Did you cause my accident?” I asked in a very small voice.

  “No, Sally. SymboGen has never caused you to have an accident.” Dr. Banks sighed. “What can I do to convince you that we’re on the same side?”

  The thumb drive with the stolen data Dr. Cale needed was safe in my pocket, pressed in a solid, reassuring line against my hip. “Can I… this is silly, I know, but can I have an ultrasound?”

  Now it was Dr. Banks’s turn to look confused. “You want an ultrasound?”

  “Sometimes… I have trouble going to sleep. I haven’t slept much since I found out Joyce was sick. I can’t. But I always sleep in the gel ultrasound chamber. I know it’s a big thing to ask, but…”

  Confusion melted into relief as Dr. Banks grasped what I was asking. “No, it’s no trouble at all. I’ll call down to Dr. Sanjiv and Dr. McGillis, and let them know they’re needed at the lab. It won’t hurt anything for us to have more data on your progress, and if it means that you get to rest for a little while, that’s even better.”

  “Thank you.” I wiped my face again. “I hate to impose.”

  “After the week you’ve had, I think a little imposition is completely justified.” Dr. Banks straightened, back on familiar ground: I was going to submit to medical tests, and he was going to pay for them. The fact that my things would be entirely unguarded during the process was just a bonus, something to be taken advantage of only if necessary.

  He was probably going to find it necessary. I would have been worried about that, if I’d had any intention of actually getting into the ultrasound machine.

  “Thank you,” I repeated, standing. I hugged my backpack against my chest as it moved, forcing myself to shelter it, and not my pocket, from any casual study. Don’t think about the thumb drive, I thought sternly. Focus on the backpack.

  It seemed to be working, or maybe Dr. Banks was just eager to get his hands on my notebook again. His eyes, when they weren’t on my face, went to the backpack, tracking its motion across the office. “Do you mind if I walk you down?” he asked. “I don’t have a new personal assistant yet, and I’d hate to think of you getting lost on your way to the lab.”

  Even with as many times as I had been down there, it was a reasonable concern: I’d never made the trip without Sherman, Chave, or both of them escorting me. “Not at all,” I said, and managed to muster a wavering smile. “I’d appreciate the company.”

  “I’m glad,” said Dr. Banks, and led me to the office door.

  He talked while we were in the elevator going down, the usual easy, meaningless chatter about stock prices, recent news reports, and the weather. He seemed to realize I wasn’t really listening, but that didn’t stop him; it was like he needed to be doing something with his mouth to keep from saying anything that would break our fragile, temporary peace right down the middle. We could both feel how frail it was, stitched together with my silence and his willingness to back off when he saw that he had pushed me too far.

  The really sad thing was, as I listened to him babble about anything and everything but the sleepwalkers, I realized that Dr. Banks genuinely seemed to care about what happened to me—even more than my own parents did. He didn’t have a very good grasp of how to show it, and he was almost certainly still telling me lies, but he wanted me to be happy. I could tell that much from the way he kept glancing in my direction, seeking approval from the lines of my face. He wanted me to be happy. Whether or not that was possible was irrelevant. We all want things that can never happen, and even when we know they’re not going to become reality, we keep on wanting them.

  Dr. Sanjiv was waiting in front of the elevator bank when the doors finally opened on the underground lab level. Her normally impeccable bun was slightly less well tied than usual, resulting in a few flyaway hairs around her face; like Dr. Banks, she looked just a little unfinished, overwound, and tired. “Sir,” she said, offering Dr. Banks a polite nod bef
ore turning her attention to me. “Hello, Sally. How are you feeling today?”

  “Okay, I guess,” I lied. I didn’t feel like getting into it with her. “How are you?”

  “Busy.” She paused, realizing her mistake, and amended, “But always happy to see my favorite patient. Marvin is getting the ultrasound gel prepared for you.”

  “I hope you understand the importance of Miss Mitchell’s comfort,” said Dr. Banks, with a note of warning in his voice that was enough to make me feel uneasy.

  It was worse for Dr. Sanjiv; she worked for him, after all. “Yes, sir,” she said, straightening until it looked like someone had manually locked her spine into place. “I promise the utmost care will be taken in the procedure. You can ask Sally yourself, if you’d like. Dr. McGillis and I have done this multiple times, and she’s never had any complications.”

  “They’re some of my favorite techs here,” I said, picking up my cue. It was the truth, and even more, I didn’t want anyone to get in any more trouble than was absolutely necessary. I was, after all, planning to disappear on their watch. It might go a little better for them if they weren’t already in trouble when that happened.

  “If you’re positive,” said Dr. Banks. He looked to me, brows furrowing as he searched my face. I had no idea what he was looking for. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to know. “Sally, you know you can tell me anything, don’t you? I’m sorry about before, in the office. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I apologize.”

  “That’s okay, Dr. Banks,” I said, fighting the urge to squirm. Dr. Sanjiv was looking away, her face schooled into an expression of careful neutrality. The way he was phrasing things, it sounded almost like he’d made a pass at me. One that had been rebuffed. I was glad of that much, at least. I wasn’t going to have to deal with the entire staff of the lab thinking I’d been sleeping with their boss. “We’ve all had a hard week. It’s why I asked if I could have an ultrasound.”