Symbiont

  How long had she been waiting for this very moment? How many years had she spent dreaming of the day when Steven Banks would be captive before her, stripped of power and position, unable to stop her from doing anything she wanted?

  I suspected that it was far, far too many, and I was afraid.

  “Dr. Banks, why did you come here?” My voice sounded thin and unsure, even to me. Maybe that was a good thing. He had always wanted to be a father figure to me, and little girls often sounded unsure when they spoke to their fathers. I swallowed and pressed on: “You knew this would happen. You had to know this would happen. So why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t know everything that would happen,” he said, and finally turned, his eyes focusing on me. “I thought it would take you a bit longer to figure out where I got the materials for my new girl. She took a lot of work, you know. You should be impressed.”

  My stomach gave a lurch. Nathan squeezed my hand, lending what strength he could. I took a deep breath to stop my head from spinning, and said, “I am impressed. I don’t know many people who could do something like that.” Sherman and his army of chimera; Dr. Cale and her assistants. I knew way too many people who could do exactly what he’d done. “That still doesn’t explain why you came. It’s dangerous for you to be here.”

  Dr. Banks laughed. It was a brief, sharp sound, and it made me flinch, because he shouldn’t have been laughing. Laughter was dangerous with Dr. Cale sitting right there, doing a slow burn as she watched the conversation slip away from her. Please, trust me, I begged silently, wishing she shared the pheromone connection I had with Adam. He would have understood, somehow. He would have picked up on my silent, primitive prayers. He’ll tell me, but he’ll never tell you, not even when you’re taking parts of him away. Dr. Banks was the monster, and would remain the monster no matter what was done to him.

  The trick was not becoming monsters in the process of learning what we needed to know.

  Maybe Dr. Cale had some connection to us through our shared DNA—or maybe she was just learning to trust me. Either way, she didn’t say anything as I kept staring at Dr. Banks, willing him to speak, willing him to believe that I was still the innocent, sheltered creature he’d worked so hard to create.

  “It’s dangerous to be anywhere right now, honeybunch,” he said finally. “There’s sleepwalkers all over the Bay Area, all over the state, all over the country. We’re losing ground faster than we can take it back. Pleasant Hill is completely deserted, except for a nest of sleepwalkers that we can’t quite seem to nail down. USAMRIID’s had to completely close off the city. You’re lucky you’re on the other side of the water. I might not have been able to reach you if you’d been near the compromised area.”

  Pleasant Hill must have been the location of Sherman’s mall. I worried my lower lip between my teeth before saying, “It doesn’t seem very dangerous here.”

  “You’re standing next to a woman who was just threatening to take my limbs off with a hacksaw,” said Dr. Banks. “I think your definition of ‘dangerous’ may need to be reconsidered.”

  “I would never use a hacksaw on you, Steven,” said Dr. Cale sweetly. “Too much chance you’d bleed out, and I wouldn’t want that. It would be over too fast.”

  “If Dr. Cale isn’t mad at you, it’s not dangerous here,” I said hurriedly. “Why did you come? Why did you bring A… Anna here if you knew it was dangerous?” I had to force myself to say the name of his pet chimera. I wanted to call her “Tansy.” I didn’t want to call her anything at all.

  “Anna’s why I came here,” he said, his gaze swinging back to Dr. Cale. “She’s not doing so good. We need your help.”

  “You hurt my daughter—you may have killed her,” said Dr. Cale coldly. “Why should I help you?”

  “You should help Anna because part of your ‘daughter’ ”—he scowled in obvious distaste—“lives inside her. If you really care about your little science experiment, you’ll keep my girl alive. And if that’s not enough for you, well…” Slowly, he began to smile. He didn’t bother keeping his lips closed, and both Adam and I flinched away from the glossy white display of his teeth. “I’m assuming Anna passed my message along, or you wouldn’t have come to see me so quickly. You want the girl back. I understand that. You put a lot of work into her, and it would be a shame to lose it like this. I can help you. I can get you into SymboGen. I can make sure you walk away with everything your heart desires, and all you have to do is help me.”

  “Why do you make a face like it’s bad when you call Tansy my sister, but let Anna call you her father?” asked Adam. He was scowling, an uncharacteristically fierce look on his face. “It’s the same thing.”

  “No, it’s not, you little abomination,” said Dr. Banks. His tone didn’t change at all, remaining calm and even somewhat smug, like he thought he had somehow managed to get the upper hand on all of us. “I let Anna call me her father because it’s easier to control something that thinks it belongs to you. Surrey calls you her children because she’s sick in the head.” His gaze flickered to Nathan. “If I was her biological child, I think I’d be pretty damn disgusted by that, personally.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you’re not my brother,” said Nathan coldly.

  Dr. Banks looked briefly surprised. He covered it quickly, but the flicker of confusion had been evident to all of us. When he came here, he hadn’t been expecting to find us working together in relative harmony. Whatever information USAMRIID had on the place, it wasn’t enough to give him a full picture. That was a good thing. We might still have a chance.

  “Why would I want her body back?” asked Dr. Cale.

  “Because she’s brain dead but on life support, and I know how much you love your vegetables,” said Dr. Banks. “Maybe you could cultivate yourself a replacement.”

  I balled my free hand into a slow fist. I had hated people before—had even hated him before—but until that moment, I hadn’t known what it was to hate someone so much that I wanted to scratch their eyes out just for the pleasure of watching them stumble blindly through the rest of their life.

  Luckily, Dr. Cale had more experience than I did at talking through her hate. She snapped her finger. Fang seemed to materialize out of the shadows behind her. He was carrying a portable, battery-operated bone saw, and it said something about how good a job Dr. Banks was doing of upsetting me that I didn’t bat an eye. If Dr. Cale wanted a bone saw, well. The only person she was likely to use it on definitely deserved it.

  Dr. Banks did not share my serenity. He jumped to his feet, pressing himself against the wall of his cell like he thought it was going to do him any good at all. “Now Surrey—”

  “Two questions, Steven,” she said, sounding absolutely calm. I suppose she had reason to be. After all, she was the one who controlled the man holding the bone saw. “If you answer them both honestly and to my satisfaction, I promise not to cut off any of your fingers, or the hands those fingers are attached to. Lie to me, withhold information from me, and that promise goes away. Do you understand?”

  Dr. Banks hesitated. Nathan sighed.

  “My mother, whatever you want to call her, doesn’t fuck around,” he said. “She doesn’t make threats, because threats are meaningless. She makes promises, if you’ll forgive the cliché. Please, either tell her what she wants to know or tell her that you’re not going to, so that I can take Sal out of here before the fingers start flying.”

  “Still protecting that girl’s delicate sensibilities? You’re going to have to stop one day.” There was no venom left in Dr. Banks’s voice: he sounded like a man who had looked into the depths of his own soul and found nothing there but dark inevitability. His gaze slithered back to Dr. Cale. He squared his shoulders, sitting up a little straighter, as if posture alone could somehow turn him into a noble, tragic figure. “What do you want to know?”

  “What’s the plan that required you to make a chimera of your own? You can’t sell them. We don’t have enough people on li
fe support to make them a viable consumer product, and it’s not like anyone is going to be buying anything from you in the near future anyway. The country’s on the verge of collapse.”

  “It’s not as far gone as you might think, thanks to some fast thinking in the Midwest and on the East Coast. They dumped antiparasitics in the water, did some surgical interventions—fun times. It wasn’t enough. It could never have been enough. The country is falling to pieces. It’s just slow, and it’s leaving smart men with resources the time to regroup, pull back, stay standing. Maybe we’ll bring America back someday, maybe not, but for now, the fall of this nation is not an issue and won’t cause us any problems,” said Dr. Banks. A thin runnel of satisfaction laced his smile. “Best of all, we’ve managed to convince the remaining government that the original implant design would never have done this. We have years of data to support our claim.”

  Nathan lunged forward, slapping his hands against the clear plastic wall of Dr. Banks’s enclosure. Everyone jumped except for Dr. Cale. She just turned her face sadly away, her expression conveying her utter lack of surprise. She’d been expecting this.

  “You bastard. How dare you,” snarled Nathan. “This is your fault. You took my mother away from me for money, and now you’re using her—”

  “Kiddo, I’ve been using her since day one.” Dr. Banks sounded utterly unrepentant, and somehow that was the worst thing of all, the worst thing in a sea of terrible things. He wasn’t sorry. He might beg and plead for his freedom, and he might need us to help him, but he wasn’t sorry.

  I’d been assuming Sherman and his people were the inhuman side of our conflict. They weren’t human, any more than I was. But they hadn’t started this fight, and now that it was happening, they were just trying to survive. Dr. Banks… I didn’t even know what he was hoping to accomplish anymore, aside from coming out on top of whatever world rose from the ashes of this one.

  I also wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. I looked toward Dr. Cale, hoping she would explain. She met my eyes and sighed.

  “He’s blaming this all on me,” she said. “I’m the one who put the human DNA in the plan for D. symbogenesis, remember? I’m the one who handed it the key to the human immune system.”

  “I thought that was the toxoplasmosis,” I said.

  Dr. Cale laughed. It was a brilliant, broken sound, like light glinting off a shattered window. “See, right there, you’ve shown yourself more capable of critical thinking than most of the human race. Yes, Sal, it was the toxoplasmosis that made the implants capable of migrating through the body and successfully colonizing the brain. But that’s not going to make sense to most people. They want quick, easy answers. They want sound bites.”

  “ ‘Discredited geneticist inserted time bomb in essential medical supplies,’ ” said Dr. Banks, practically purring. “The Intestinal Bodyguard isn’t finished, Surrey. It can’t be. Add the world’s dependence on the drugs our implants provide to the collapse of so many supply chains, and there’s just no way to take it out of the equation. We just need to repackage it to make sure that we retain our market share.”

  Dr. Cale’s head swung back around. I quailed, taking a step backward. If she had ever looked at me like that, I would have run screaming from the room. “You know, Steven,” she said, voice low and dangerous, “I’d been wondering who I should be helping in all of this. My children or the human race. I can only save one side of the equation. You’re making it much easier for me to make my choice.”

  “He hasn’t answered the question,” said Adam suddenly. We all turned to look at him. He didn’t take his eyes off Dr. Banks. “He’s trying to distract us. Didn’t you notice? He’s saying everything he can to keep from actually answering the question Mom asked him. Make him answer the question.”

  “Yes, Steven.” Dr. Cale looked back to her former colleague, who looked suddenly dispirited, like his last chance at getting out of this alive had been taken away from him. “Answer the question. That was the agreement, was it not? Honest answers win you limbs that work.”

  “You always were a liar, Surrey,” spat Dr. Banks, his eyes fixed on her legs, just in case she missed his point. Once again, I balled my hands into fists, yearning for a free shot at his smug, terrible face. “I created my own chimera because I needed to understand how they worked. How the chemical bonds between the implant and the human host were formed, and how they could be disrupted—or encouraged to form more efficiently.”

  Dr. Banks paused and sighed, shaking his head before he continued. “The chimera are perfect for certain jobs, Surrey. I’d say I was amazed that you hadn’t thought of it, but honestly, I’d be more surprised if you had. You would have to be able to step back and see the big picture. Imagine a world where the death penalty is carried out, not by lethal injection, but by termination of higher brain functions. The body would remain intact, ready to be put to work for the good of society. There are all sorts of functions that robots can’t perform yet. But a walking, thinking human body can accomplish all sorts of things.”

  “You’re going to send my children to war,” said Dr. Cale.

  Dr. Banks sighed again, deeper this time, like she just wasn’t getting the point. “They’re already at war. I’m just going to make it profitable.”

  “Mm.” Dr. Cale’s tone was noncommittal, but her expression promised murder. “So that’s why you took my little girl. That’s why you took her apart. Because you wanted to learn how to build a better weapon. Well, Steven, your lesson has apparently been learned. What was so important that you had to bring her here? I know you like to gloat, but this is frankly irresponsible.”

  “I’m here because I really do need your help.” He actually seemed to mean it this time. “I was able to transplant the worm from its original host into the body I had prepared, but I haven’t been able to fully stabilize it in its new environment. She’s not… she’s not doing well.”

  “Rejection,” said Dr. Cale. She could have been smug in that moment, seeing her former coworker run up against an obstacle she had already overcome. Instead, she just sounded tired. “Did you do tissue typing before you sliced my girl open? Did you try a reaction panel, to see whether the new host’s immune system would even recognize an implant that hadn’t been tailored to it as something that could be potentially helpful? Or did you barrel full speed ahead and figure that the universe would give you whatever you wanted because you were Dr. Steven Banks, and you deserved it?”

  “I hardly think you’re one to lecture me about proper medical technique,” said Dr. Banks. His tone was stiff, and his gaze flicked to her legs again, making sure she knew what he was implying. “I did my tissue typing. I did the things I’ve always done when preparing an implant for its new host. As for anything else, I didn’t know what tests were necessary. It’s not as if you ever sent me anything detailing your research.”

  “You kept trying to kill me. Forgive me if I didn’t feel much like sharing with you.”

  I frowned slowly. “Rejection means Tansy’s new host doesn’t want to accept her, right? What does that mean for her? Is she going to be okay?”

  “It means that the host is experiencing some fairly severe immune responses,” said Dr. Banks. As I had hoped, he once again fell into the gently parental “I am teaching you things you need to know, and you should listen, because I am smarter than you are” tone he had used with me so many times before. “The most distressing is swelling of the brain, and clouding of the spinal fluid. There’s a protein buildup going on there that I can’t quite source. It’s inflaming her nerves. She’s been in a lot of pain, almost constantly.”

  “You mean she’s drugged?” I asked. “You made her walk across Vallejo drugged, while her brain was swelling? She could have collapsed! She would have been helpless!” The image of Tansy as she had been rose unbidden in my mind—the wild grin, the mismatched eyes, the casual willingness to throw herself into the path of danger, because she knew that whatever happened to her, it would be in
teresting. Anna had none of those traits. Anna was a flat surface on which nothing had been painted. The drugs would explain at least a little of that, and I felt a traitorous worm of relief uncurl in my belly. Maybe Anna was more like Tansy than we thought she was. Maybe there were epigenetic tags for violence and randomness and sliding down hills on pieces of cardboard, just like Ronnie had the epigenetic tag for knowing that he was really supposed to be a boy, and when the drugs worked their way out of Anna’s system, she’d still be somehow Tansy. Just a little bit. Just enough that we could love her.

  “Well, Sally, it was that or deal with her having seizures every hundred yards, and that would have been more of a problem.” Dr. Banks returned his attention to Dr. Cale. “Here’s my proposal, Surrey, and you’ll want to listen nice and close, because I’m only going to make it once: you help me stabilize my Anna so that I can take her back to the United States government as proof of concept. I give her to them, and they see that the chimera can be useful things—they already know they can be taught, thanks to Sally here, but now they’ll know they can be controlled. That we can have our useful biological machines without giving up anything that hasn’t already been lost. And I tell them you were able to get the drop on me after we’d finished stabilizing her, and you run off to safer pastures.”

  “What’s to stop you from double-crossing us? Or me from killing you?” asked Dr. Cale.

  “Nothing.” Dr. Banks spread his hands. “You trust me, I trust you, and we see who’s making the bigger mistake.”

  Dr. Cale looked at him silently for a moment. Then she turned to Nathan and said, “Push me out of here.”

  Nathan blinked. “What?”

  “We’re leaving. Push me out of here.” She folded her hands in her lap, leaning back in her chair.