A slight pause. “Copy, Dead Star, I’ll follow your lead.”
Sindaris is talking with Sarah’s body. This whole experience is making Sindaris feel uneasy. He could be talking to Sarah or it could be any of the others talking through her at any given time. He is too afraid to go outside the premises at all, even to have a quick peek. There could be anyone out there, and if they see him now he doesn’t believe he can outrun them. He’s so tired.
“Have you discovered anything that might be able to help me ascertain why I’m like this and so many others are not?”
“Human beings are bacterially evolved organisms. We have survived through mutation for millions of years.”
“We’re adapting?”
“Some are.”
“But the controller says we’re imperfect,” says Sindaris.
“As far as the virus is concerned. You are the evolutionary dead end of this affliction. In you it is no more an affliction.”
“Why has it done this to me?”
“We don’t know.”
“Look at me! I am seventy-six years old! There must be something!” he says, his dual pupils fluctuating slightly.
“Your age…” Sarah’s eyes roll back for a moment, “seems to be a factor. All others like you that we have identified through contaminant memories have been elderly citizens, the youngest being seventy-one.”
“Your collective mind must have some kind of idea. A theory, at least?”
Sarah tilts her head, her eyes still rolled up. “Withering tissue causes rather… gaping holes in your physical being. Elderly people have a great deal of weak and or dying tissue. There is a physician in the contaminants that tried treating several people and did some good analysis work before his own infection… re-purposed him.”
Re-purposed? “Don’t you mean turned or transformed?”
“No.”
Sindaris nods once feigning understanding. “What did he find?”
“He…” she swallows that looks more like a hiccup. Her eyes roll back down to refocus on him. “He found that the infected tissue replaces a great deal of your original matter with its own. By the marks on either side of your nose we’d say you wore glasses for most of your life.”
Sindaris had completely forgotten about that. He can see perfectly, better than he ever could. “So a youngster would have far less tissue that needs replacing? Hence less affected?”
Sarah nods. “We believe you aged backwards because the virus rewrote your genetic code to find your optimum physical median.”
“It wanted me in my prime?”
“Yes.”
Sindaris tilts his head to one side cracking his neck. “I’ve heard thoughts of a parasite that grows inside our spine… Do… do I…” he doesn’t want to finish the question, but he doesn’t have to.
“In a sense, yes. But it is different. Even in a fully obedient contaminant absorbed into the share-mind doesn’t have, what you’d officially call, a parasite. It’s a foreign organism of some kind but it doesn’t feed off of you. It’s more like organic technology grown in the central nervous system and it is that which ultimately drives your body and floods the host with the share-mind’s domination.”
Sindaris’ expression turns dark. “Sounds more like an antenna.”
“It is.”
“And I have one?”
“You can interpret the thoughts of others, yes?”
“Don’t be patronising.”
“In you it is different again. I can feel mine move from time to time, but I believe yours is far more symbiotic. The virus expends an incredible amount of energy to rebuild your decaying body and by doing so develops into something different itself. If it was a parasite the same as the others you would have no will of your own.”
Sindaris’ left leg is twitching. “Will the controller of the contaminants physically be at this conclave in Blackhaven?”
“Yes.”
Sindaris looks at the floor thinking fiercely for a moment. “Am I impervious to their control completely?”
Sarah’s gaze becomes distant for a moment. “You can feel their moods?”
“Yes.”
Sarah’s eyes lock with his. “Do you feel as they feel?”
Sindaris sees where this is going. “Yes.”
She glances away for a moment. “Hungry?”
Sindaris nods.
“You’re planning to attend this conclave?”
Sindaris’ eyebrow flickers upwards for an instant. “I am.”
“I would not recommend it.”
Sindaris feels a pulse of anger. He knows that Sarah’s converged minds don’t think he’s up to the challenge of resisting the urge of a full mass of contaminants. “I will not fall victim to those ghastly creatures.”
“You will not even be able to think such a thing if there’s enough of them around to completely override your minute desire.”
“My desires, no matter how piffling, are my own and I will keep them.”
Sarah shakes her head. “Considering your age I’d have thought you’d think into this far more than a brash young man. But perhaps this is just a side effect of having brand new hormones.”
Sindaris shifts his stance slightly. “I don’t see how this makes any difference.”
“How will you go unnoticed? They know your face.”
“They’re becoming less intelligent by the day, and recognition through facial structure is not easily done for the inept. All I have to do is make myself think I’m somewhere else.”
Sarah’s eyes are focussed on him and wide now. “You believe you can succeed where all other infected persons have failed? Husbands have killed wives, mothers have killed their children, sisters and brothers have maimed each other. Can you possibly lie to yourself enough to ignore such things? Do you think they didn’t try to resist? Can you at least comprehend the kind of power it takes to make people kill their loved ones on a whim?”
Sindaris isn’t deterred. “As long as I’ve lived all those things have happened all over the world throughout my life.”
“Not half a million times in the same city in one day.”
Sindaris closes his eyes as that comment hits home but he says nothing.
“Your willpower would have to be astronomical to remain yourself through such an encounter. In such an environment, even if you could remain undetected, you’d be overwhelmed by the share-mind. You are one person; they are nothing short of legion. You have a few new talents but you are a man, not a god.”
“I don’t need to be a god. I just need to focus. There are others like me, perhaps I can find them.”
“Two have died during your time here.”
Sindaris’ feels his ears pop at that knowledge and a nervous laugh escapes him. “A minute ago I had half a mind to enter the conclave, think of Disneyland, and shoot the controller through the head,” he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand shakily. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
Sarah nods. “You are welcome to stay here as long as you wish. We will be found sooner or later, but we have decided that dying with some dignity may not be as bad as it sounds.”
Sindaris can’t find an answer even with all his years of developing a formidable mind. He cannot believe that his life has come to this. How can he be brought back from death just to wait in a room to die again? There’s something I’m missing.
Sindaris remembers one of the contaminants feeling an overwhelming feeling of terror upon seeing a soldier called ‘Demon’ but that was, of course, Damon Kowalski the poster boy for Beta HolinMech. Though there was another wisp throughout the contaminant share-mind of someone who killed six in one sitting. A marksman. Someone near the lab.