“Dr. Cale does that—she uses people’s names a lot, like she’s afraid that they’re going to forget who they are. I didn’t think about the way you always used to do that to me, but you did, and you still do. Are you where she gets that? Or did you get it from her?” They were like engineered organisms themselves, weren’t they? Every human was the result of social and cultural recombination, picking up a turn of phrase here, an idea or a preconception there, the same way bacteria picked up and traded genes. Nothing was purely its own self. Nothing would ever want to be.
“I got it from her,” he said, still sounding wary, still examining the topic for signs that it was a trick. “Surrey used to have difficulty with names. She could identify a species of slime mold from a single cell, but damned if she could remember which of our TAs was Paul and which was Jeffrey. Someone told her that she could reinforce names in her head if she said them at least three times a conversation—said it would make people trust her more, too, since it came off as a personal touch. Like she actually gave a damn about them. She started doing it, and damned if it didn’t work. Everyone loved her. Sweet little Surrey, overcoming her difficulties to become the darling of the genetics department.”
“So you started doing it because you wanted them to trust you,” I said.
He grinned, showing me his teeth. I managed not to flinch. “I did, and damned if it didn’t work again. People like it when you seem to take an interest in them. All sorts of people. Powerful people. I could get anything I wanted, and all I had to do was remember names and children and anniversaries. You should have seen me in my element. You would have, eventually, if things hadn’t gotten bad on us. I was going to really enjoy showing you to the world, Sally.”
Showing me to the world, not showing the world to me: I was an experiment to him, and I always would be, no matter how much I grew or how much my understanding of the world improved. I could save the human race and I would still be nothing more than a freak of science to the man who made me.
“It might have worked on me, too, if you hadn’t messed it up,” I said. I couldn’t make this too easy. He wouldn’t believe it if it was too easy. “You’re not as good at this as you think you are.”
Dr. Banks blinked at me. He looked briefly, utterly baffled, and I would have felt bad for him if I hadn’t known him so well. He deserved a lot of things from me. None of them were my sympathy. “What do you mean?”
“My name isn’t ‘Sally.’ It’s never been Sally. She died. She was… she was like a canary in a coal mine. She died because if she hadn’t, I would never have been able to live.” Sally’s death had been as inevitable as my birth. Dr. Banks had known what I was from the beginning. He should have been sending up the alarm the day I opened my eyes. Instead, he stood by and let me make myself into an individual. Because of him, everybody applauded me, rather than recognizing me as the symptom that I was. They should have begun shoring their defenses the moment that I woke up. They should have been building dams and laying in supplies by the time I learned to walk. And they hadn’t done any of those things. Because of him.
“Now you and I both know that’s not true.” His smile had too many teeth. “Do you really think that just because you’ve shut off all the pieces of you that remember who you were, that you’re not that girl anymore? You can’t buy a used pair of shoes and announce that they’re new just because you want them to be. They’ll always be used shoes. You’ll always be a girl playing at being something different, at least until you admit who and what you are.”
I gawped at him for a few seconds, unable to formulate words, before I managed to stammer, “That—that’s not true! You know that’s not true! None of the doctors ever found any trace of Sally in my head. She flatlined, she’s gone.”
“Coma patients still hear. People in clinical brain death still wake up. The human brain is a big, complicated thing, Sally, and one day you’re going to flip the wrong switch or press the wrong button and hand the whole thing back over to the girl you used to be. When that day comes, who do you think she’s going to trust? The people who loved a tapeworm wearing her skin like a suit, or the man who kept trying to reach her—the man who kept using her name?” His smile dimmed a bit, lips closing, and I was relieved. There was only so much I could handle. “I call you Sally because it’s your name. It may not make you trust me now, but it’s going to let me own you later.”
What he was saying couldn’t be true. I had no memory of my life before the accident. Therapists and neurologists had searched for years for signs that Sally was still with me, and they hadn’t found anything, while Ronnie provided strong evidence that the implants carried memories of their own, however paper-thin and faded. I wasn’t Sally Mitchell. Sally Mitchell was dead. I was my own person. I was Sal. I was—
I was doing exactly what he wanted me to do. I took a deep breath, bared my teeth in a smile that any chimera would have recognized as an outright threat, and asked, for the second time, “Is Tansy really alive?”
“I think we’re getting off the topic here, don’t you?”
“Since the topic I came here to discuss with you was Tansy, no, we’re not. We’re getting back on the topic, and I’m not going to let you distract me again.” I glared at him, trying to look fierce and confident and like the kind of person who couldn’t be thrown off balance by accusations of surviving memory buried deep in my brain. It wasn’t easy. For someone who wanders through life pretending to belong to a species that isn’t hers, I’m a surprisingly bad actress. “Is she alive? Yes or no.”
“Surrey has been a very bad influence on you, hasn’t she? I really do wish you’d chosen to stay with me, Sally. We could have been an incredible team, you and I. Brains and beauty and a compliant little display model to convince the government to go along with the next stage of human evolution.”
“Yes or no, Dr. Banks.”
He paused, tilting his head to the side and frowning. Then he sighed, and nodded. “Yes, she’s alive. Sedated and pretty beat up, but breathing, and both parts of her are there. My Anna girl is the result of transplanting some fairly mature proglottid segments. We had to remove a lot of material to get to them, since the proglottid segments near the tail of the strobila were basically just sacks of eggs. Useful for some applications. Not for this one.”
Hearing him talk about Tansy’s anatomy—and hence my own—in such coldly clinical terms made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t quite define, only squirm away from, that horrible hot/cold slush still rocking in my belly until I felt like I was going to throw up at any moment. I forced myself to hold my ground, and demanded, “Where is she?”
He smiled again. This time he didn’t show his teeth, but somehow, that didn’t make things any better. Not when his words contained all the teeth his smile was missing.
“Haven’t you figured that out by now?” he asked. “She’s back at my office, waiting to die. And if you don’t tell me how to save Anna, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
That was it: that was where my ability to cope came to an end. I almost felt it snap. I didn’t say another word. I just turned and fled the room, leaving Dr. Banks shouting after me, unanswered.
Nathan pushed away from the wall when I came barreling into the hall, flinging myself into his arms and sobbing. He answered by closing his arms around me and holding me close, waiting for me to cry myself out. He didn’t say a word. Sometimes, words weren’t a good thing; they got in the way.