She didn’t make a sound throughout the entire process. She just stripped and stretched in total silence, somehow managing to even keep the bed linens from rustling.
Nathan, Dr. Cale, Daisy, and I stared at her, equally silent, although our silence was born more of shock than anything else. Then, slowly, the three of them turned to look at me. I put my hands up, as much to ward off the comparisons as to ward off the questions.
“No,” I said. “I remember everything about the period immediately after I woke up, and I was never like that. I was compliant, yes, because I wanted to please the people around me, but I was never… never…” I shuddered, unable to put the wrongness of what I’d just witnessed into words. Finally, unable to think of anything else, I repeated, “No.”
“So we’re either looking at the result of conditioning, or at something that happens naturally in…” Dr. Cale stopped. It was rare to see her silent in the middle of a sentence. Her lips moved for a few seconds, struggling for the next word, before she said, “Involuntary chimera. Oh, God. I never wanted to say those words.”
“I don’t see how you can, Mother,” said Nathan. “This is impossible. He has to be lying.”
“There’s only one way of finding out,” said Dr. Cale. Her gaze went back to Anna, and the rest of us followed it. “She has the answers. They’re locked in her blood, in the protein traces of her spinal column, in a hundred other locations on her body. Getting them out will hurt her. I wish we didn’t have to try.”
“So take him at his word,” I said, the need to protect her looming large once again.
“We can’t, Sal,” said Nathan. I glanced to him, feeling obscurely betrayed. Yes, he frequently sided with his mother in matters of science, but not when it was something like this, not when a woman’s life was on the line. He shook his head. “If she’s a chimera who converted while the original personality was still conscious and aware of her own body, that means there might be a way for sleepwalkers to integrate successfully. You were the first natural chimera, but Sally was already gone when you made the integration. She wasn’t in the body to fight you. Anna…”
“The mind resists that sort of thing, as a general rule; that’s why brainwashing and sleep-learning don’t work,” said Dr. Cale. “We become entirely different people every seven years, and our minds let it happen because it’s slow, it’s graceful, and even then, we cling to childhood pleasures and high school goals like they somehow had more relevance just because they happened earlier in our developmental cycles. Can one of my children rewire a thinking mind completely and successfully without resulting in the sort of traumatic brain damage we see in the sleepwalkers? God help me, but we need to know.”
“Why?” I asked blankly.
“Because if my children can take someone over without unconsciousness or brain damage, they can learn to make the transition almost invisible,” said Dr. Cale. “No real disruption. ‘Bob’s just tired,’ and then the other chimera remove their new brother or sister before anyone notices the change. Oh, all the memory loss will still apply, but it’ll be so much easier to relearn everything when you don’t damage the brain in the process of taking it over.”
“That’s why he brought her here,” I said. “He knew you’d study her. She’s a trap.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Cale. “I’m aware. So let’s set it off, and see what happens.”
“He’ll take everything you learn and run away with it.”
Dr. Cale’s smile was a terrible thing, and filled with teeth. “You’re assuming he’ll still have feet when we get done with him.”
Anna—who had to have heard every word we said, lying there on the bed with her eyes toward the ceiling and her nipples slowly hardening from the chill in the room—didn’t say a word or turn toward us even once. She just held herself perfectly still, a composed expression on her face, like Dr. Banks passed her off to strangers every day.
My fingers itched, and the only cure, I knew, would be grabbing hold of her and never letting go. I rubbed them together, trying to make the feeling stop. “I’m going to go find Adam,” I said. “He needs to know that this is happening, and that there’s another chimera in the building.”
“All right,” said Nathan. He bent to kiss the top of my head. I hugged him quickly, taking what pleasure I could from the contact. “We’ll be here.”
“I know,” I said, and turned to run deeper into the lab.
Adam and I were the yin and yang of Dr. Cale’s chimera research project, in more ways than one. He was created in the “traditional” way, when she introduced an immature D. symbogenesis directly into the brain of a subject in a persistent vegetative coma. The body’s original owner was already long gone, leaving an otherwise healthy habitat for the new tapeworm intelligence that would inhabit it. I was an accident, born of trauma, stress, and lucky chance. My memories began at the moment I fully integrated with Sally Mitchell’s brain, but according to Dr. Cale, the last act of my old life had been a panicked flight through her body, culminating with my burrowing into her skull and beginning the integration process. He was induced, I was natural; he was nurtured as a chimera, I “grew up” believing myself to be a human being. I had spent the last few months stumbling from one dangerous situation to another, while Dr. Cale kept Adam in the lab, as confined and protected as possible. She said that she hadn’t allowed me to spend so long outside of her care after my accident just so she could monitor our development under different types of clinical pressure, and I actually believed that she believed that.
At the end of the day, Dr. Cale loved Adam very much, and wanted him to be safe. I couldn’t blame her for that. She’d been his mother for the entirety of his life, while I was more like the child she’d helped someone else bear through egg donation: genetically connected, socially and emotionally very, very distant.
“Adam?” I slowed as I reached the edge of the lab hydroponics section, which was used mostly to grow herbs and local mushrooms. There was a large artificial bog filled with sundews, which I appreciated—Nathan and I had our collection, but he had “liberated” several more from florists and taxidermy shops when he was helping to collect hydroponic and preservation supplies. Sundews were bog plants, which made our old friend Marya’s admonition not to overwater them even funnier. She’d been trying to keep us from killing them with chlorine, of course, and the language barrier had simply been complicating her instructions.
Marya was probably dead now. She’d owned and operated a flower shop within the general footprint of San Francisco City Hospital. Even if she hadn’t had an implant of her own—and I didn’t know whether she did or not; I had never asked her, and it was too late now—there had been mobs of sleepwalkers in that area during the collapse. There was very little chance that she had survived.
I sometimes wondered how the rest of the people on Dr. Cale’s team could stand it. I had only had a few years to form connections with other people, and I could still be blindsided by the strength of how much I missed them.
But this wasn’t the time to dwell on what we’d lost. “Adam,” I called again. “It’s Sal. The duty roster says you’re supposed to be here, so where are you? Come on, Adam. I know you’re there.”