Chimera (Parasitology) (38 page)

W
e 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 ceded 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.