Wait. Chave and Beverly’s owner had been infected with the same thing. I’d seen both of them succumb, and they had followed the same pattern. “Oh my God, is this my fault?” I whispered. My lips seemed numb, like they were barely attached to my body. “Did I get Chave sick? Did I get her killed?”
“Sal, what are you talking about?”
“Did they tell you anything about what happened inside the quarantine?”
“No, just that it was some kind of lab error, and you’d been exposed.” Nathan was looking at me with blatant worry, not bothering to conceal it. “What do you mean, is this your fault?”
Suddenly, I didn’t want to be explaining this where we were; not on SymboGen property, where someone could realize that they hadn’t forbidden me to tell my boyfriend the truth about what happened. I could ignore my phone if it started ringing—or I would have been able to, if they hadn’t taken it away from me. I couldn’t ignore somebody pounding on the window nearly so easily. “Drive. Please. I’ll explain while you drive.”
“All right, honey. Just take some deep breaths, and tell me what’s going on, okay?”
“Okay,” I said… but I didn’t say anything else until the SymboGen building was one more piece of the skyline receding behind us, and there was no chance that we’d be overheard. “Okay,” I repeated.
“Sal?”
“I’m sorry, I just…” I took a breath. “It started out as a pretty normal visit to SymboGen. Lots of tests, Dr. Banks trying to convince me he had my best interests at heart, lots of people running lots of tests on me…” I closed my eyes as I continued talking, recounting the events of the day. I didn’t strictly need to tell Nathan everything—he would probably have been happy with just what happened in the cafeteria and afterward—but I wanted to ease into it, and I wanted to remember Chave and Sherman the way I’d always known them. Chave was never my friend. That didn’t mean she deserved to die the way she did.
Besides, telling him everything meant pointing out Chave’s absolute lack of any symptoms, right up until the moment where she had every symptom and lost herself in whatever strange infection had claimed her mind. There should have been something, some sign to indicate that everything was not okay. There hadn’t been anything at all.
Nathan asked occasional questions, but for the most part, he let me talk. When I came to the part about the cafeteria, he made me repeat the walk from the elevator three times. I didn’t mind. We were both looking for something that could explain what had happened, and neither of us was finding it. Then I reached the worst part of the story, and he stopped asking questions. I spoke, and he drove, and SymboGen fell farther and farther into the distance.
Finally, he said, “Sherman was showing no signs of getting sick when you saw him?”
“No, none. He looked kind of upset, but—we all did.” I opened my eyes, turning to face Nathan. “He was worried about me.”
“He was your friend. Of course he was worried about you.” Nathan tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “I would have been worried about you too, if they hadn’t left me waiting in one of the ninth-floor lobbies for an interview that never came.”
I frowned. SymboGen was the global leader in parasitology, both in research of existing species and in the lucrative development of new strains. Other companies had tried to repeat the success of the Intestinal Bodyguard, but none of them had been able to get their claws into the market. Nathan’s career was never going to move beyond a certain point if he couldn’t get a job at SymboGen—and after my recounting of the day, we both knew why he’d been called in for the interview. It had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with keeping me where Dr. Banks could see me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Nathan flashed me a very quick smile. He took one hand off the wheel, reaching over to briefly squeeze my knee. “It’s not your fault. I wouldn’t want to work there anyway, if it meant that Dr. Banks had managed to get you under his thumb full-time. I’m pretty sure punching your boss in the throat is an excellent way to get yourself fired.”
“You say the sweetest things.”
“I mean them.”
“That helps.” I sighed, sinking back into my seat. “I can’t stop thinking about Sherman. What if he’s scared? What if they haven’t told him what’s going on?” What if he was dead? But my mind shied away from that thought, refusing to fully process it. Sherman wasn’t my best friend. He wasn’t even someone I saw outside of SymboGen. But he was kind to me, and I didn’t want him to be hurt.
“Sal… it sounds like Chave had the sleeping sickness. If SymboGen has a test for it, they haven’t shared it with the local hospitals yet. I think that if they know Sherman is infected, it’s because he already started showing symptoms.” What Nathan didn’t say was that no one who developed symptoms had yet recovered, or awakened from their disconnected state. Cases were still rare, but there had been enough of them that we were starting to understand a little bit about how the sickness worked. The victims got sick. They didn’t get better.
But still. “I don’t know if SymboGen has a test or not. They didn’t draw blood or anything. Dr. Lo ran a light wand all over me, watching for some sort of reaction from my skin, but—Nathan!” He had suddenly twisted the wheel, sending us skidding into the next lane. Horns blared as he got the car back under control, and kept blaring as I screamed, trying to go fetal despite the seat belt restraining me. I curled tighter, continuing to scream.
We were going to die. We were going to crash and die, and even when I felt the car stop moving, that didn’t matter, because we were going to have an accident, and we were going to die. I was going to die again, and this time, there wouldn’t be any medical miracle to save me. We were going to die we were going to die we were going to—
“Sal!” Nathan tightened his hands on my shoulders, hauling me out of the dark pit I had suddenly fallen into. “Sal, I am so sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to do that to you. Please, come on, honey, come back to me. Breathe. You need to breathe, Sal.”
I had to stop screaming before I could breathe in. That felt like one of the hardest things I had ever done. Raising my head was even harder. The drums were pounding in my ears again, louder than they’d ever been before. “The car,” I whispered, staring at Nathan’s pale, drawn face.
“I know, Sal, and I am so sorry. Please believe me, I didn’t think, and I’m sorry. Are you okay? Are you going to be okay if I start driving again?”
No. No, I won’t be okay; let’s leave the car here and walk wherever it is we need to go. We can walk forever if we have to. Just don’t start the car. Numbly, I bit my lip and nodded. I didn’t want to stay here forever, and I knew that we couldn’t walk home. But oh, I wanted to.
“Okay. Good. I am so sorry.” Nathan hesitated before saying, “I hate to ask you this, Sal, but is it all right if we don’t go straight back to your house? I think I need to stop at the hospital.”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand as I forced myself to sit up. “Okay,” I said, in a small voice.
Nathan started the car and pulled away from the side of the road. We drove on.
The industrial gray San Francisco City Hospital wasn’t built to look imposing or inviting: it was built to house a hospital. It was simultaneously less comforting and more welcoming than SymboGen. Nathan parked in his assigned space beneath the building, gesturing for me to come as he got out of the car and walked briskly toward the employee entrance. I followed. As I did, I realized that I felt oddly unclothed without my shoulder bag, like I was forgetting something essential.
If SymboGen didn’t return my things, I could always replace them and send Dr. Banks the bill. Dwelling on that bitter thought kept me from thinking too hard about where we were going as Nathan led me through the maze of corridors and hallways inside the hospital.
Once we were inside the service elevator bound for the fifth floor, Nathan turned to me and said, “I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but I need to
know whether SymboGen has information that they’re not sharing with the rest of us.”
“By ‘doing this,’ you really mean taking me with you, don’t you?”
“I do,” Nathan admitted. The elevator stopped, and he led me to a changing room. “You’re already in scrubs; that’s good. Put on a lab coat and we should be fine.”
I frowned at him. “You’re really serious. You’re not supposed to be doing this.”
“No, I’m not, but I want you with me; you’re the one who saw what Dr. Lo did.” He opened a locker and passed me a lab coat. “Don’t worry. You won’t get in any trouble if we’re caught.”
“I’m not the one I’m worried about here, Nathan.”
He waved off my concern, a grim expression on his face. I usually only saw him looking that serious when someone had died. “I have a clean record, and this problem has been bothering everyone. The worst I’m going to get is a slap on the wrist.”
Somehow, I doubted that his punishment would be quite as light as that, but there was no sense in arguing with him; we’d been dating long enough for me to know when his mind was made up. I shrugged on the lab coat he’d handed me, rolling up the sleeves to keep them from engulfing my hands completely. Nathan smiled.
“You know, there’s nothing in the world hotter than a cute girl in a lab coat,” he said.
I blinked. “With that attitude, I would have expected you to be dating my sister.”
“What can I say? I like what I like. Now come on. We have some protocols to break.”
Nathan led me down the hall, pausing only once, when he ducked into a supply room and emerged with a wand that looked like a more primitive cousin of the one Dr. Lo had used to examine me. He tucked it under his arm, and we started walking again.
At the end of the hall was a large door marked INFECTIOUS MATERIALS: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. There was a large biohazard symbol beneath the sign, in case people didn’t get the point. Nathan ignored it as he pushed the door open and kept walking. I trusted Nathan. I followed him.
The hallway on the other side looked just like every other hall in the hospital… except that there were no people here. The usual mix of doctors, nurses, and orderlies was gone, replaced by the hum of the fluorescent lights, which seemed extremely loud without all the sounds of humanity to muffle them.
“Here,” Nathan said. He turned, walking into a small room, where a heavy green curtain shielded the occupant from view. He pushed the curtain aside, revealing Beverly’s owner. I gasped. I couldn’t stop myself.
Machines surrounded the sleeping man, connected to him by a variety of tubes and wires. A clear plastic tube snaked out from under the covers; they’d catheterized him at some point, probably when they realized that he wasn’t going to wake up enough to take care of his bodily needs. I recognized most of those tubes and wires from my own stay in the hospital after my accident. I’d been wired up just like that when I first woke up. But this man was behind warning signs, in a room all by himself. They didn’t expect him to wake up, ever.
Nathan walked grimly toward the sleeping man’s bedside. “He’s been asleep for the past twenty-four hours,” he said. “He was still moving up until then, but now he seems to have gone into the next stage of the disease, whatever that means. There’s no response to stimuli of any type. His family wants to disconnect life support; the hospital is paying all medical costs from this point on, for the sake of being allowed to keep working with him.”
“But… why?” I asked. “If his family’s ready to let him go…” I felt like a hypocrite even as the words left my mouth. My family had been ready to let go. If I hadn’t regained consciousness when I did, I would have died.
Nathan glanced back toward me, grimacing a little as he saw my discomfort. “This isn’t like what happened with you, Sal. You had an accident. We knew what caused your coma, and no matter how much research we did, we were never going to find a cure for car crashes. This is different. This is something infectious, and we need to find a way to stop the spread.”
A new discomfort curled in my stomach. “Should we be wearing masks or something if we’re going to be in here?”
“No. Whatever causes this isn’t airborne. We’ve run every test we could think of, and there’s nothing.” Nathan bent forward, folding back the blanket that covered Beverly’s owner. “It’s baffling our best people. It’s baffling me.”
“Why are you involved? Shouldn’t this be an infectious disease case?”
“I’m involved because everyone in the hospital is involved. No one gets to sit out an epidemic.” Nathan produced a pair of blue plastic gloves from his lab coat pocket, pulling them on over his hands. I was relieved to realize that he wouldn’t be touching the sleeping man’s skin. “How far above your skin did she hold the light?”
“About an inch and a half,” I said. “She was especially careful with the undersides of my arms and the insides of my thighs.”
“All right,” said Nathan. He clicked on the wand. It buzzed slightly, lighting up with the same purplish glow as Dr. Lo’s wand. Then he lifted the man’s left arm. It came without resistance, utterly limp, and remained limp as Nathan ran the wand along it. Like Dr. Lo, he checked the outside first, and then switched to examining the inside of the man’s arm, where it would have been closest to his body.
Just between the elbow and armpit, Nathan stopped. “Sal,” he said, a sick fascination in his voice. “Come and have a look at this.”
I didn’t want to have a look at anything. I went anyway. It’s always better to understand than it is to be left sitting in the dark; it’s always better to have answers, even when those answers lead to fresh questions.
This answer definitely led to fresh questions. The light from Nathan’s wand made most of the skin beneath it glow a pale purple, unremarkable because it was so consistent. But at the middle of the light, in the center of the man’s arm, was a system of what looked almost like roots that glowed a bright, painful white instead of matching the purple around them. I stared.
The roots moved.
It was just a twitch, barely movement at all, but it was enough to startle us both. I let out a small shriek, dancing backward, away from the man in the bed. Nathan dropped his arm, taking a long, somewhat more dignified step away from him.
“What is that?” I demanded.
“It’s a parasitic infection—I don’t know what type. Whatever it is, it fluoresces under ultraviolet light,” said Nathan. He sounded astonished and sickened at the same time, like he’d been suspicious, but had never wanted to have his suspicions confirmed. “These people don’t have a disease. They have a parasite, and it’s taking them over.” He turned to look at me, eyes wide. “Why is SymboGen hiding this?”
“I have a better question,” I said. “What happens when they find out we know?”
Naturally, there were concerns about the Intestinal Bodyguard™ when we started human trials. Shanti was worried about the worms. She was always very maternally inclined toward them, and she wasn’t sure they’d been tested enough to be placed in human hosts. Richard, he was on the other extreme. He was worried about our human volunteers, and whether the Intestinal Bodyguard™ might somehow damage their immune systems permanently when it was only trying to help. I was the moderating influence on both of them. That was my job most of the time when we were together. Shanti built castles in the air, Richard talked about how they were going to collapse, and I built foundations underneath them.
We didn’t need to worry, as it turned out. Human and implant fit together like they’d been designed for one another. In a very real way, they had been.
—FROM “KING OF THE WORMS,” AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. STEVEN BANKS, CO-FOUNDER OF SYMBOGEN. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ROLLING STONE, FEBRUARY 2027.
You know what’s funny? In the official literature, Steve tries to claim that D. symbogenesis was my idea, and that I somehow managed to sell everyone else on the idea that this was a line of research worth pursuing. If you
check the actual publications, however, you’ll see that my timeline matches up a little better with reality: I was brought into the project six years into the development cycle. I had to work fast and dirty to make up the ground that had already been frittered away on dead ends and useless research channels.
I made D. symbogenesis. I have no qualms about admitting that. It is my baby. But I’m not the one responsible for cutting out most of the potential quality-control time. That award is reserved solely for Dr. Steven Banks. I’ll take the credit—and the blame—for what I actually did. I won’t take the rest of it, and he can’t make me.
—FROM CAN OF WORMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SHANTI CALE, PHD. AS YET UNPUBLISHED.
Chapter 9
AUGUST 2027
Someone knocked on my bedroom door, coaxing me out of an uneasy sleep. I opened my eyes but didn’t lift my head from my pillow. Maybe if I stayed where I was, they’d go away and leave me alone.
The knocking continued. Beverly lifted her own head and turned toward the door, ears cocked at an inquisitive angle. Then she turned and looked at me, the question clear in her puzzled brown eyes. Why was I, the one with the thumbs, not getting up and answering the door? Was something wrong with the world?
Yes. Something was wrong with the world. SymboGen was withholding information about what was becoming a national health crisis, at least according to Nathan. He’d produced reports from hospitals around the country the night before, stacking them up in front of me like silent accusations. I’d picked up the first one, flipping it open to the list of cases. Twenty-seven affected so far in Cleveland, Ohio, and the surrounding cities. “Why hasn’t this been on the news?” I’d asked.