The Phoenix Crisis (46 page)

“
I said
twenty
cubic centimeters, not
twenty-five—twenty-five is too much,” she said frantically,
ordering her medical staff about. Now that their people had
returned from the Arcane Storm, along with a new medic, they were
again fully staffed. Which meant Rain could have three other people
assisting her. Unfortunately, there seemed little anyone could
do.

She fought for the better part of an hour,
trying every idea that came to her mind to stabilize him. Praying
in her heart to any god anywhere, if there was a divine presence in
the universe, that her mind would be quickened and her hands would
be true. All the while trying not to stare into Shen’s gaunt, grey
face. Or to smell the stink of rot and death that was coming over
him.

He went into full cardiac arrest.

“
Code blue,” she said, and
her staff rushed new equipment to him. She began chest compressions
while two other medics ripped open Shen’s shirt and the third
attached the defib unit. It was crude but proven.

“
Clear,” said Rain, once
everything was set. Andrews pressed the button and a wave of
electricity shot straight to Shen’s heart.

No effect.

“
Again
,” said Rain.

Another jolt of electricity. Still
nothing.

“
Again!
” she said, practically screaming. She would
not
lose him. Andrews
pushed the button once more.

This time a very weak, very irregular
heartbeat returned. It wasn’t much, and probably would not
improve—she knew—but at least it was something. His organs were
starving for oxygen. And his brain, which needed it the most, had
to compete with all the other organs for it. The weak heartbeat had
little chance of supplying the entire body with the oxygen it
needed. But at least he had one thing going for him. In an ironic
twist his dangerously low body-temperature—which, despite all she’d
tried, Rain had not been able to elevate—had the side effect of
reducing Shen’s body’s need for oxygenated blood. The coolness of
the body reduced the metabolic demand, which gave Shen’s weak heart
a fighting chance… but not a great one.

“
He’s stable,” said Andrews,
looking at her darkly. “For
now
.”

Rain looked from him to the other medics;
they all had bleak expressions on their faces. Clearly none of them
believed Shen could be saved. No one in the universe seemed to
believe, except Rain. Rain made herself believe. But now, as she
looked over her patient, she realized that he’d faded away into
basically nothing. There was a trace of him left. And until it was
gone, she would do all she could for him—not giving a
millimeter—but a kind of realization set in and she felt her mood
change from desperate to somber.

“
Keep monitoring him,” she
said, keeping her voice even. “Begin a regimen of Xinocodone,” she
added. “To manage the pain.” Despite Shen’s lack of consciousness,
his brain still registered a tremendous amount of pain. Rain had
avoided giving him high doses of strong pain medications, knowing
such a regimen would erode Shen’s chances of recovery, but now… she
did not see the purpose in forcing him to suffer. Especially if
today was his last day…

Damn you,
Calvin
, she thought. Remembering how he’d
cautioned her. How he had asked for Shen not to suffer in vain. She
hated that he might be right. That Shen might be beyond saving. But
Rain didn’t regret fighting for Shen’s life, nor did she regret
believing in him, and his chances. No matter how small and slim,
when the life of a human being was on the line, those chances were
always worth fighting for.

“
I’ll be in the lab,” she
said. Not wanting to stay and watch Shen make the final transition
from life to … whatever came after it. “Notify me if… his condition
changes.”

“
Yes, Doctor,” said Andrews.
The others nodded. They knew what that meant. Let her know once it
was over. And Shen was gone.

She left them, feeling sick and saddened. It
wasn’t the first time a patient had been lost under her care. But
she still believed, fundamentally, that this case was one that
could have been solved. That Shen, young as he was, should have
been savable. But it seemed that the toxins that had infected him
always adapted too quickly to whatever she did. Almost as if the
virus itself was intelligent. She’d never seen anything like it.
And it troubled her to think that she might see it again, and
again, and each time she might be forced to contend with the same
outcome. The same grim results.

There was still a tiny part of her that had
not given up on Shen. That hoped for good news and recovery. But it
was hard to believe in that part, no matter how much she yearned
to, when she had no strategy to implement to save him. It seemed
unlikely, considering how the virus had progressed, that Shen’s own
immune system would be able to fight it off and save him. Rather,
it seemed much more the case that his body was killing itself. Like
his immune system was rejecting his organs.

Rain arrived at the lab and quickly found
herself removing the deceased replicant from the freezing unit.
There were two analysts in the lab, working on something for the
bridge—Rain couldn’t care less about what it was. So long as they
left her alone, and let her use the equipment, she was happy to
leave them alone.

Running tests on the replicant corpse had
become something of a strange hobby for Rain. She’d spent many
hours over the past several days examining and studying it. Finding
it to be a good form of stress relief. It was both relaxing and
intriguing, studying this biological marvel, and it helped her
organize her thoughts and sort through her emotions.

She’d had the computer analyze the subject’s
DNA and she’d done several tests to help her understand the
chemical and genetic makeup of the creature. Like most life in the
galaxy it depended on long chains of carbon and hydrogen, but that
seemed to be where the similarities ended. There didn’t seem to be
discrete organs, or—if there had been—they had faded away into some
kind of carbon goop. The only organ that seemed in anyway intact
was the epidermis. As a stratified squamous epithelium, it was
mostly still together and the proliferating basal and
differentiating suprabasal keratinocytes seemed to have evolved to
function very similarly to most other animals, such that Rain could
understand how the replicant body was able to not only effectively
mimic the appearance of other carbon-based life—such as humans—but
also keep out pathogens and unwanted contaminants from the internal
systems.

What fascinated her most about the replicant
body was not actually its ability to permanently take another form,
effectively cloning its appearance to match a foreign DNA code, but
rather the overall adaptability of the organism. She doubted that
much of anything could have caused it to experience a systemic
failure, the way the Xinocodone had, and the fact that she’d
stumbled upon something so effective against it had been quite the
freak occurrence.

She thought of the most aggressive virus she
could imagine—the Remorii Pathogen—and guessed that the replicant
body would actually be able to resist it. She had a frozen culture
of the virus, which she’d taken from Shen in a vain attempt to
study it in the lab, and she applied it to a sample of biological
matter that had been excised from the replicant before complete
death had set in.

There was no guarantee the two could react,
though she thought it likely. She’d noted that, among other systems
affected, Shen’s skin had been attacked by the virus and was
undergoing a subtle but noticeable change. The tissue sample she
had of the replicant was, by closest comparison, skin tissue. So
she hoped she could provoke a reaction from it with the Remorii
pathogen and observe the results. She’d tried this earlier, but had
been unable to get the intracellular parasite to attack the
replicant tissue. Or so she’d thought. This time she had a
different idea and paid attention to something else.

“
I wonder…” she said, deeply
distracted by this new experiment.

At first the pathogen seemed ineffectual,
just like before, but as she excised a sample of the affected
tissue and scanned it with the computer, what she saw was actually
rather amazing. Without relying on traditional counter-infection
methods, such as agents in the blood stream that directly tried to
fight pathogens, the replicant tissue itself adapted to the virus
and thereby rendered it ineffective. The transformative nature of
the replicant tissue cells were able to physically adapt to the
virus and, rather than become prey to the virus and turn into
spawning centers for the virus to reproduce, the cells changed to
include the virus in their natural process. The virus reproduced
and spread, but the fundamental nature of the cells changed to
allow it. Compensating for the virus rather than fighting it
directly.

“
Amazing,” she whispered.
There was no way for her to make Shen’s cells, or any human’s,
perform like this. The human body simply wasn’t designed to undergo
such sweeping transitions. But it gave her an idea.

Because the virus was not being targeted by
any kind of immune response, there was no inflammation in the
tissue sample or other complications. The tissue simply seemed to
be unaffected. She excised a smaller piece of it—from where she had
first injected the contaminant—and had the computer scan it She
expected to see that the virus had taken up residence in all or
most of the tissue cells. But what she saw shocked her.

The virus was gone.

“
What?
”

She studied it more. And discovered that,
after the replicant tissue had adapted to include the pathogen in
its natural process, it was able to build a counter-pathogen to
sweep the cells. A microorganism that seemed to attack the very
specific, and very rare, kind of protein that acted as the
armor-coating for the Remorii pathogen. Without that protein
shield, an immune response was possible and the virus had been
eliminated. Though the significance of the discovery would not be
evident to most people, to Rain it was perhaps the most amazing
thing she’d ever witnessed.

She checked the rest of the tissue sample
and found that it too had begun creating the counter-pathogen which
had resulted in the total destruction of the Remorii Pathogen. The
virus she’d injected seemed completely purged from the tissue
sample.

“
It
is
possible,” she whispered. The
Remorii Virus could be beaten. A complex organism could implement
an effective defense against the pathogen. “I knew it.” The next
question was, could she make Shen’s body apply the
strategy?

There was no way to know for sure, not by
simply looking at it. And for that matter, if she introduced the
counter-pathogen into Shen’s system, it might be as harmful to him
as the Remorii Pathogen it was designed to target. As far as Rain
could tell, it wouldn’t attack the protein configurations that made
up human tissues and ligaments, but she couldn’t know for sure.

She felt a rush of hope
return to her and she immediately began planning one final strategy
to try to save Shen.
Perhaps if I suppress
his immune response, and then introduce the counter-pathogen system
by system, I can eliminate the virus
… There
was no guarantee it would work. Aside from the fact that the
counter pathogen might be dangerous to Shen, there was also the
consideration that the infection had spread much further and much
deeper throughout Shen’s body, threatening a complete systemic
failure. But she had to try. She would
not
give up.

She collected samples of the
counter-pathogen, taking as much as she could, and then she bolted
for the door. Hoping she wouldn’t arrive too late.

Chapter 31

The pain was gone. It had
been there, ever-present and ever-throbbing. Like an unyielding
hell that both forced him to suffer and forced him to cling to
life. A life-line with jagged edges of sharpened glass, piercing
into him and tearing at him. It was the only thing he could feel
anymore. The only thing he knew. And then, like a candle in a
storm, it was gone. Creating a void. A vacuum. An emptiness.
Was this death?
He
wondered.

And then the pain returned. Fierce and
unforgiving. Shen felt it. It was the only thing he could feel. An
ache that throbbed and twisted and squeezed. And he wondered if
he’d ever stopped feeling the pain. The relief he’d felt, that
brief glimmer of peace, had it ever truly been? And, if it had, had
it lasted a year, a day, or merely an instant? It felt like a
lifetime, and yet shorter than a quickened breath.

“…
twenty cc’s
pentacytate…”
he heard a woman’s voice. It
came like a rushing wave, crashing against the beach, firm and
swift. Elevated. Panicked, yet in control. Shen imagined himself
floating in the water. The taste of salt in his mouth. Rising and
falling with the tides. It was a pleasant dream. Despite the pain
he felt. It was a strange thing, to feel so numb and yet so
wounded. But somehow, in the flowing tides, he let himself go.
Slipping away.

“…
losing him. Apply
the—”

The voice came and went. Sometimes he could
hear the words. Sometimes not. It didn’t matter though. He felt the
buoyant current under him, carrying him, and tried to embrace the
peaceful feeling it offered him. But, every time he was about to
reach the shore, something grabbed him and hurled him back. Far out
into the ocean. Filling him with panic, and nausea, and confusion.
He felt as if he were drowning out in the great frigid depths. But,
before he was to the waves, the current would always find him
again, and carry him once more toward the golden beach just beyond
the horizon.