In the stillness of night, when the noises had settled down, the whispered conversations had come to an end, and the dormitories echoed with the regular rasping of deep and even breathing, was when Grace could most easily descend into her restless world.
She closed her eyes on the faint pall of light spilling in through the lead-lined windows from the floodlights outside and descended into herself. She had come to think of it as stepping from a room called ‘outside’ into another room called ‘inside’, a simple mental conceit that made the process of travelling from a macro universe down into a cellular one more comprehensible.
She was home again.
‘Home’ in many ways. Home in the comforting illusion she’d constructed of her bedroom back in New Jersey. Home amongst this ecosystem of entities that had come along for the ride with Grace to observe these curious humans holed-up in their fortress.
Grace liked coming to her interior world. She missed the intimacy of this micro community, with its communication that had no choice but to be honest. Communication that was more than just words; it was memories, smells, sounds, feelings, desires all conveyed at once in a rich cocktail. By contrast, in the outside world, talking felt like such a primitive and limited way to exchange ideas. Like using Morse code in an age of wifi.
It was tiring.
Here she felt relaxed, soothed.
She was home tonight for another reason, though: to comfort someone who needed her. Someone who was still very frightened and confused by her surroundings. She felt her presence nearby . . . a voice crying out in darkness. A wafting of sharp amino acids that clearly cried a frightened, ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’
‘I’m back,’ said Grace softly.
‘Grace? Grace! Is that you?’ came the reply, clearly relieved.
‘Yes, it’s me.’
She created the familiar space of the infirmary in her head. Created herself as Dr Claudia Hahn would recognize her – disfigured by burn scars. One day, maybe soon, she’d present herself as she’d once looked, so much prettier with her long hair dark and wavy, and her skin smooth and pale.
But not yet. Familiarity was important.
She placed herself on the infirmary’s gurney. Sitting upright on it, legs swinging over the side. And then she placed Claudia Hahn opposite, sitting on her examination stool.
Dr Hahn shook her head, her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, her forehead rumpled. She looked confused as she took in her surroundings. ‘My infirmary . . . ?’
‘Yes.’
‘Grace? What is this? Am I . . . dead?’
‘No, Claudia. You’re alive. Like me.’
‘But . . .’ She looked around the room. ‘But this is not real?’
‘It’s my memory of your infirmary. I think I got it mostly right.’
Hahn looked around and shook her head. ‘Not quite.’ She pointed at her desk, clear and organized. ‘I am usually less tidy than that.’
Grace smiled. Encouraged that Claudia could joke with her.
‘Can you help me to understand, Grace? I . . . am confused. I . . . The last thing I remember clearly is . . .’
‘Dr Hahn . . . Claudia, you’ve been absorbed.’
She looked at Grace. ‘You infected me?’ It was a comment that floated halfway between a question and an accusation. Grace had had this conversation with Claudia Hahn the previous night, but then she’d been less ‘there’, her consciousness not fully assembled yet . . . less ‘present’.
‘I invited you to join us.’
‘Us? Who is—’
‘I know. It’s all very difficult to deal with at first. But it gets easier, I promise.’
Hahn’s frown deepened. ‘But . . . you did infect me?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how is that possible? I am immune. I was taking the medication like everyone else.’
‘Those chemicals make it much harder for us, but it’s not impossible.’ Grace held out a hand to her. ‘And the truth is you and the others aren’t taking enough to properly stop us, just enough to slow us down.’
‘Us?’
‘Us.’ She repeated the word, her hand still held out. ‘You call us “the virus”. But we’re all family now.’
Hahn stared suspiciously at her offered hand.
‘Those pills you take do hurt us. Those chemicals in your blood killed millions of our cells, but we managed to bring you over.’
‘But . . . I am still . . . alive?’ She shook her head as if she were trying to shake off a drunken stupor. ‘Today – I think it was today, this evening, actually – was I not talking to you, to your friend Freya? I even spoke to Major Everett! Or was that all a dream?’
‘No, you spoke to him and to Freya.’
Dr Hahn was frowning again. ‘But how? If I’m infected?’ She looked utterly perplexed.
‘They are inside you now. They’re a part of you. They’re learning all about you so they can save you.’
Hahn’s eye narrowed. ‘They . . . the virus?’
‘The virus.’
Realization settled on to her face. ‘God, no. Please . . .’
‘It was exactly the same for me, Claudia. One of those small creatures “stung” me, some cells managed to survive in my bloodstream and they hung in there. Slowly they reproduced. It took weeks and weeks, but they managed to help me across to join them in the end. And all that time I was kind of confused, not sure what was real and what was not. It was like a long, weird dream.’
Grace stretched out and grasped one of the doctor’s trembling hands. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, I promise. You’re still you. You’ll always be you.’
‘I don’t want to die like this!’
‘You’re not dying!’
‘I don’t want to be –’ she shook her head, trying to find the right word, then finally settled for Grace’s – ‘absorbed!’
‘They’re just inside you, that’s all. Today you really have been walking around, talking, being a doctor. No different from normal.’
‘But am I still . . . a human? Not a—’
‘A copy?’ Grace shook her head. ‘No. You’re still you.’ She nodded towards the door to the infirmary. ‘Outside, in the Big World, you’re asleep in that cot right next to mine. Right now, out there as well, I’m holding your hand.’
Hahn pulled back from her, then stared down at both her hands, touching them lightly together, fingertips tracing across her palm. ‘This feels so real. Here, I feel real. But this is a hallucination?’
‘It is what they call an abstract, but in some ways its more real than outside.’
‘I do not understand this. Where are we right now? Where is this?’ She looked around the not-quite-right infirmary. ‘Am I in your . . . your mind? Or are you inside mine?’
‘We’re joined. So I guess you could say we’re somewhere in between,’ Grace replied. ‘We’re in the stream.’
‘Stream?’
‘That’s what I call it.’
‘In . . . you mean bloodstream? We’re in your blood?’
‘Our blood. We’re joined. Our hands are joined, melded. I’ve entered your stream.’
Hahn shook her head again. ‘This is hard. Am I just . . . cells? Just cells floating in what? In plasma?’
‘Uh-huh. I suppose.’ Grace smiled. ‘It’s weird at first.’
‘But how can I think? How can I talk? This is not possible. My mind is billions, trillions of cells linked together in a very specific way. Surely who I am is that! The structure of those cells!’
Grace shrugged. ‘They understand which part of our mind is who we are, and which part of our brain is just, like, storage. Like how part of a computer is a processor, but another part is the hard drive.’
Hahn shook her head. ‘I don’t like this! I don’t want this!’
‘Give it time. It’s weird, I know, but it does get easier. Then, soon, you realize it’s the only way to be.’ Grace smiled. ‘It’s wonderful.’
Hahn began to sob. ‘Why? Why did you do this to me? Why did you infect me?’
‘Because you were so kind to me. You cared for me. I like you, Claudia. It’s my gift.’
‘This?’ She spread her hands at the illusion. ‘This is a kindness?’
‘You’ll see that it is. Soon. You really will.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘And I had to do it, Claudia. I had no choice.’
‘Why?’
‘The blood test. Do you remember what happened?’
Hahn shook her head. ‘No . . . I . . .’ She narrowed her eyes.
‘That’s OK, not all of your memory is assembled here. You did that salt test on my blood.’ Grace shrugged. ‘Obviously, I was never going to pass that test.’
Hahn screwed up her face, narrowed her eyes. ‘No. Hold on. I remember . . . remember . . .’
Grace cut her short. Hahn’s memory was going to be horrible. Grace sensed Hahn’s cluster sending out chemical feelers for it, rummaging around for it like an absent-minded old lady in kitchen drawers full of junk mail and red-headed bills.
Grace enveloped the feeler and blocked it.
‘It’s OK. It’s OK,’ Grace cooed softly. ‘It’s been nearly a week now. You didn’t tell anyone I failed. It’s our secret.’
‘My God, this is crazy. This is—’
‘And we really can’t tell the others, Claudia. We can’t tell them about us.’ She leaned forward and rested a hand on one of her shoulders. ‘They’ll burn us. They’ll set fire to both of us if we do.’
‘What about all the others?’ Hahn stared at her. ‘What is going to happen to the others?’
Grace hunched her shoulders. ‘We’re trying to decide what’s for the best. That’s what this is all about . . . what’s best for them.’
Hahn shook her head vigorously. ‘I will tell them. I am going to tell them!’
‘Please don’t.’
‘You . . . you . . . They . . . can’t do this to us! I can’t let you infect them all!’
‘Please!’ Grace leaned her face closer to the doctor’s until their noses were almost touching. ‘Please?’
‘This is not right. I have to tell them . . . I will tell them!’
‘You know they are listening to us, don’t you?’
Hahn looked around the illusion of the room. Her eyes darted manically.
‘We’re not alone – no one’s ever truly alone in the stream,’ said Grace.
‘Grace, listen to me,’ Hahn hissed, her voice lowered. ‘Those people do not deserve to die.’
‘I don’t want to kill them. I want to save them. Don’t you see?’ A tear leaked from Grace’s left eye and streaked down the scarred tissue of her cheek. Not for show. Genuine. ‘Especially Leon . . . Freya. I love them. I miss them so much.’
‘If you loved them, Grace, you wouldn’t infect them!’
‘Please?’ Grace whispered. ‘Say you won’t tell anyone. Say it out loud. Say it and you have to mean it. You really have to mean it.’
‘I cannot do that.’
Grace loosened her grip on the woman’s shoulder. She sat back on the gurney and sighed deeply. ‘OK . . . then we’ll have to do the other thing.’
‘Other thing? Grace . . . what is that?’
She shook her head. ‘We’ll talk again soon.’