BY THE TIME I’ve got Sung-Soo to the medical center, Kay is ready and waiting with everything fired up and ready to go. She’s been following the stream from her lab, thankfully; otherwise her leaving the meeting at the Dome after my call would have sent the gossip dogs loose among us.
Kay has one of the best smiles on the colony, a mixture of dimples and the promise of a fantastic sense of humor. Even after all the years since we had our fling, I can still remember the feel of her body against mine and the way she blew raspberries on my stomach whenever I tried to leave her bed. Her skin is slightly lighter than my father’s was, her hair a wild afro explosion pulled back into a tight ponytail now that she’s on duty. She doesn’t hide her delight when meeting Sung-Soo and shakes his hand warmly with both of hers. That smile has a predictable effect upon him and I see him relax in moments. That’s why I took him to her instead of Dr. Lincoln.
“You look like your grandmother,” she says to him as she leads him over to a chair. “Did Ren tell you that?”
Sung-Soo shakes his head. Once seated he looks around the room at the minimalist equipment and the three empty beds. His gaze lingers over some of the covered trays next to one of them, no doubt the swabs and other things Kay will use in the tests.
“No need to be nervous,” Kay says, sitting opposite him. “All I’m going to do is take a few samples from you so we can map your secondary genome and take a look inside you to make sure everything looks tickety-boo.”
Sung-Soo’s hands slap over his stomach protectively. “Inside me?”
Kay’s glance at me reveals her brief discomfort. She’s realizing just how divorced his life has been from ours. “I don’t need to do anything invasive. There’s a scanner, over there. You’ll just lie down and relax; you’ll feel a slight tingling in your skin, that’s all.”
He nods and after a beat says, “Secondary genome? I thought Ren already did all that genetic stuff.”
“I’ll take swabs from your skin, inside your mouth, and a stool and urine sample.” Kay’s voice is light and pitched exactly right to put him at ease. “From those, I’ll be able to identify your microbiome—the bacteria that lives in and on you. We all have it—in fact that bacteria keeps us healthy—we just think yours will be different from ours because you grew up somewhere else.”
I’ve already sent the first findings to her and told her about the nuts, so she must be desperate to get started. She’s hiding it well though. Lincoln would have had him swabbed by now, not giving a shit about putting the boy at ease. After a brief stab of paranoia I check on his location and he’s at the Dome. I can’t imagine the meeting lasting much longer and wonder if he’ll already know that I’ve brought Sung-Soo to the other doctor. I’m not looking forward to the next time I see him.
“Will you stay, Ren?” Sung-Soo asks and I nod.
“Of course.”
Another look from Kay. She can see he trusts me. She doesn’t know how little I deserve that. I pull over another chair so I don’t have to hide that from my face.
She takes the swabs first and the only time Sung-Soo will let me out of his sight is when he has to go to the bathroom with a sample cup and reddening cheeks. Once the samples are loaded for processing and the extraction started, Kay has Sung-Soo lie down to start the scan.
“Does everything look okay?” he asks. “Where can I see my insides?”
“Try to keep still,” Kay replies and returns her attention to the scan.
When Sung-Soo looks to me, I smile. “Only Dr. Reed can see the scan. It’s supposed to be that way. Anything to do with your health remains confidential between the doctor and you.”
If he were chipped, Kay could share what she sees overlaid across his body, if she considered it a risk worth taking. There have been times when patients have demanded to have the scan’s results shared to their vision through the cloud, only to freak out at the sight of something perfectly normal. There aren’t any physical screens in here to show Sung-Soo what’s going on and I feel the gulf between our experiences widen. It must seem bizarre to him.
“My father could see things that weren’t there,” he says. “And a couple of the other older ones, but none of us that were born after they landed.”
“Do you want to be chipped?” I ask and he frowns. “Do you want to be able to see things like we do?” I clarify.
“I don’t know,” he says and looks at Kay. “What’s wrong?”
He’s perceptive; at first glance I would think there was only concentration on Kay’s face, but she’s concerned about something.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she replies, a beat too slow. “You’re just very interesting, that’s all.”
The words make me feel sick. Sung-Soo’s attention goes back to me and all I can do is try to smile as reassuringly as I can.
“Show Ren,” he says. “Make her see what you can. Please.”
Why does he trust me so?
“I can explain everything once the scan is done,” Kay says.
“I want Ren to see it now.”
Does he want to see my reaction? Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps he can see that Kay is harder to read than I am. She pauses the scan with a flick of her right index finger and turns to me.
“Are you comfortable with that?”
I shrug. “I don’t understand this stuff as well as Dr. Reed does,” I say to Sung-Soo. “I don’t think I’ll be much use.”
“Please,” he repeats and Kay nods.
She sends me a ping from her place on the cloud, and after I’ve followed it, passed a security check and agreed to various confidentiality clauses, her view of the scan’s live feed is overlaid across Sung-Soo’s body. As I’m trying to make sense of it I see her fingers moving in my peripheral vision. She’s using a v-keyboard and in moments a private message arrives from her.
There’s an organism living in his gut. Don’t freak out when you look at it. It’s indigenous and I’m not sure if it’s parasitic or symbiotic yet—that’s what I’m trying to work out.
Like a tapeworm?
I’ll be able to tell you more soon. Keep him calm.
“We’re trying to work out how you can eat those nuts,” I tell him, aware of his scrutiny. “It’s a hard puzzle, but nothing to worry about.”
“I feel fine,” he says to Kay. “I walked here. I’m fit, just tired.”
“How long did it take you?”
“About two months.”
Kay looks at me. She opens her v-keyboard. Did he have a map we could follow back?
No sign of anything like that. He says he pieced together some clues from what he’d heard his father say about the Pathfinder’s visions and used the pod’s computer to work out the direction from the first scans we did of the surface.
While the analysis is crunching I’ll take a look at his brain. I had no idea there was anything between Lois and Hak-Kun.
I don’t reply to that. The scan is complete. We take longer to examine the results than it takes to create them. I watch as she zooms in on his brain and enlarges it, identifying major structures and exploding them out like a construction blueprint. I know most of them, but not everything about what they do and how they interact with one another.
Huge hippocampus! she types to me. His spatial memory must be phenomenal.
“Do you mind if I ask you some questions?” she asks him. When he shakes his head, she begins to quiz him on how they lived, from what they ate to where they built and what they used.
I can feel the need to leave increasing. I haven’t had a chance to take this in properly. It’s all happened too fast. I need to be by myself and fit a better lid on the huge, bubbling pot of emotions boiling inside me.
He answers all the questions without giving any sense of feeling invaded by her curiosity. Why is she fussing about this and not the thing living in his gut? I can’t help but think about the awful stories Dad used to tell me about what his grandparents dealt with as frontline medical care providers. What was it called . . . the worm that came out of the blister? A guinea worm! I had nightmares for weeks after he told me about that and refused to drink water from anything other than our house supply, which I knew was off-grid and filtered multiple times, even though we were living in France by then. I can hear his laughter when he realized I refused to drink the water from the table jug at one of the most expensive restaurants in Paris because I feared it contained larvae.
“Renata—” My dad’s laugh made the people at the tables around us smile; it was the warmest, happiest sound of my childhood. “They eradicated the disease years ago. There haven’t been any reported cases for over two decades and even when it was widespread, they didn’t get it in Paris.”
I must have been nine or ten. My feet only just touched the floor when seated in those restaurant chairs. He and my mother had split up by then.
“But what if someone kept a worm in a jar and forgot about it and tipped it down the toilet and then spread the eggs over the city and—”
“We don’t drink the same water we flush down the toilet. You know that. This is just a worry-thought, Ren. Remember what we said about worry-thoughts the other night?”
I’m filled with a wrenching need to speak to him again, to hear his gentle voice. He knew just what to say to make me feel safe, not only from the external but also my internal world. That scared me more than anything, sometimes; the noise of my thoughts, the sense that even the space inside myself wasn’t safe.
“Ren?” Kay asks. “Are you okay?”
I blink and realize there’s unread text in our chat window.
Nomadic, as I thought, her message reads. You see this kind of hippocampal enlargement in people who have to remember details across large geographical areas.
“Sorry, I was miles away there.” I feel stupid. Kay is frowning at me, confused by my lack of interest. Usually I devour anything she sends my way.
I realize that Sung-Soo’s hand is resting on mine. He’s looking up at me with the strangest expression and I have no idea what he’s thinking. “You’re missing someone,” he says.
I pull away and shut down the shared scan results. “I need the . . . I won’t be a minute.”
Once I’m locked in the bathroom, I put the lid of the toilet down and sit, hunched over, wrapping my arms about my body. Of course he knows how to recognize that. His father must have looked like I did, every fucking day.
I pull up my sleeve and pinch my forearm, focusing on the pain from that until the urge to cry subsides. I will not lose control again today. I will not think of anything except making sure Sung-Soo is okay and that whatever is inside him isn’t a long-term threat to his health or anything that could cause a problem for us.
I take a deep breath and flush the toilet for effect. I wash my hands for the same reason, but it also calms me. Then I go back to them.
“Could you take a look at the first results through from the analyzer?” Kay asks and I nod. “Ren is faster than I am,” she explains to Sung-Soo.
“Are you okay, Ren?” he asks and I nod, tired of the question.
“I’m fine. Let me take a look at this stuff. I’ll just be sitting here, right next to you, okay?”
I work on the data from his stool and urine samples first, concerned about whatever it is inside him. Between the data from the bacteria within it, the actual content of the stool itself, and the traces of indigenous DNA woven in with his blood sample, I manage to ascertain that, whatever it is, it’s not putting anything like eggs or anything reproductive into what he excretes. That could change, of course, but I’m still relieved nonetheless. It’s putting something into his blood though. I look at the scan and see the thing nestled in his digestive tract, in the same kind of place a tapeworm would be happy—another parasite that haunted my childhood nightmares once I learned of it. It looks a bit like a grub and isn’t big enough for him to be able to feel it.
I don’t want to risk taking a biopsy and have it release something toxic, and I don’t want to put Sung-Soo through a procedure, no matter how painless it would be. I can’t see anything that indicates something that would be poisonous to us through contact or ingestion, even without the same microbiome as he has. I have enough genetic data to begin modeling the interaction between his body and the organism and decide that’s the best course of action for now.
I only realize how long I’ve been working when I hear a gentle snore. Sung-Soo is asleep where he was lying, a blanket now drawn over him. There’s an IV bag hung up next to him, probably to get his electrolytes sorted out. Kay is sitting on the other side of the room working away. I check on the meeting stream and see that it finished over an hour ago. There were no objections to Sung-Soo being accepted into the colony.
A message from Mack—mercifully without an “urgent” tag—asks if everything is okay and I shoot off a quick message giving him an update before going over to Kay. I don’t give any details, mindful of confidentiality.
“I don’t think that thing inside him is a risk to anyone else,” I say in a whisper.
“Agreed. I think it’s a symbiotic relationship,” she whispers back. “My theory is that it provides him with the immune system benefits that kept him alive when lots of the others born in their camp died. He probably ingested an egg or larva and it stayed, taking a portion of nutrients from his food, including the proteins from those nuts. I saw something like this in an animal I dissected last year. That’s where the genome data on the server came from.”
“What shall we tell Sung-Soo?”
She rubs her forehead. “Nothing until we have a comprehensive picture of what it does. I want to be certain it doesn’t have any other effects on him that haven’t been picked up in the initial scan. I’m going to keep him here for a few more tests, okay? I’ve seen the model you started. I’ll put any more data I get into it, okay?”
I hesitate, feeling like she’s taking over. But this is within her remit more than mine. She has to make sure he’s not a threat to the colony’s health and she’ll have a better idea about how his microbiome will interact with ours.
“I’ll keep you posted, Ren,” she says, brushing my arm with her hand. “The moment anything comes up, I’ll ping you.”
“Okay,” I say, thinking of the vase I abandoned some hours ago. For a moment I consider going to get it, but it’s too risky at this time of day. “Let me know when he wakes up,” I add as I head for the door.
“Ren—” She hurries over as I reach for the touch pad. “Don’t feel guilty.”
I tense, thinking she’s overheard something, or somehow—
“Because we all looked for them as best we could. It’s not your fault.”
I look away, unable to manage the relief that she’s just as clueless as everyone else. “Thanks.”
“Come over for a drink when you can,” she adds, knowing better than to wait for an invitation to my place. “Anytime you want. It’s been a while.”
There’s a change in the way she’s looking at me, the way her hand rests on my shoulder. But there’s no room inside me for anything like that now. “I’ll try,” I say. “But I reckon things will be busy for a while.”
She nods and kisses my cheek. “See you soon, Ren.”
When I step outside, I feel the breeze cool the skin where she kissed me. Lots of people are outside, chattering to one another excitedly, in person and in the streams. I check for any trouble brewing but there is none; they just want to see Sung-Soo and they’ve realized he’s inside.
Now they’re all looking at me.
“Is he in there?” Zara calls from the rapidly gathering crowd.
I don’t know what to do. Will they all try to go in to see him? I hear a little beep from the other side of the door. Kay has noticed the crowd and locked the door. A second later, a message arrives from her.
Tell them he’s here for tests and recovery and that he’s doing fine. No visitors yet though.
“He’s being cared for by Dr. Reed,” I begin and watch the worry spread. “He’s absolutely fine. Really. No visitors yet.”
“We’re going to hold a welcome party,” Nick says, coming closer. “Can I just pass on the invite?”
“No,” I say too quickly. “Send it to Dr. Reed and she’ll pass it on. He’s asleep at the moment and he might not be up for it.”
Poor man. If I’d walked all that way, the last thing I’d want was a party thrown in my honor.
“It’s an open invite,” Nick adds. “We’d love to see you there, Renata.”
“Are you free for a drink now?” Zara asks and Nick scowls at her.
Oh shit, they want to milk me for information. “Not right now,” I say. “And thanks for the invite,” I say to Nick. “I’ll . . . do my best to be there.”
Before I even finish the sentence, the envelope icon is flashing again as private messages pour in. I shut it down and try to think of a decent enough excuse for getting away from them as soon as possible.
There’s a ping with a “maintenance” tag attached. As Nick strides over, pushing his way past others to reach me, I open it. Carmen’s printer has broken down. There’s a personal note attached. You can hide in here if you want.
Her house is mere meters away and I can see her at the window. She raises a hand when she sees me look over and then mimes having a drink. Hers is not the port of choice, but there’s a storm brewing here and she’s offering the closest sanctuary.
“Carmen’s printer has broken,” I say. “I need to fix it. See you all at the party, maybe.”