Brain Plague Read online

  Pearl warned, “Not everyone likes the Comb.”

  The brain-enhanced dynatect who built the Comb, Titan of Sardis, had been burnt down by a laser, right here on Center Way, just the week before. The laser had streaked Titan’s eyes, searing through to the back of his skull. Gang crossfire, the news said, though gangs generally stayed below. All week, every newscast, the blackened specter of his body had haunted Chrys’s eyes.

  “To think that all Titan’s genius ends with the Comb.” Still staring, Zircon shook his head. “What I’d give to create like that.”

  Chrys smiled slyly. “What would you take?”

  “Brain enhancers? I don’t know.”

  “Brain enhancers,” said Topaz thoughtfully. “To compete with Elves.”

  Pearl shook her head. “Brain enhancers come from the mind slaves.”

  “No,” said Chrys. “Brain enhancers are cultured cells. They boost brainpower—like mental mitochondria.”

  Zircon repeated, “I don’t know.” His eyes widened. “What if they turned out smarter than me?”

  “Smarter than you? Microscopic cells?” Chrys rolled her eyes. “Saints and angels preserve us.” She turned for her transit stop.

  Zircon patted her head. “See you at the gym.” She’d get the rent from him then, Chrys thought, if nothing had sold by tomorrow.

  Chrys stepped into the pulsing street, and a bubble slowed to pop open. As she stepped inside, the bubble swallowed her up, gliding forward until it plunged down the tube, to descend twenty levels below. As the bubble descended, Chrys reviewed the sketch in her eyes: a spattercone by night, with a full Elysian moon. The Elf gallery director would love it.

  At last the tube opened, just one level above the Underworld. Chrys inhaled the scent of sewage and shorted-out plast. It was not the worst neighborhood, mainly decent immigrant “simians,” with Homo gorilla ancestry; they did tube repair and other jobs sentient machines wouldn’t touch. Graffiti scrawled across the nano-root of what was a city bank ten levels above—SIMS GO BACK TO JUNGLE—HOMO IS FOR SAPIENS. “Sapiens” was an anti-immigrant faction. Sapiens hated sentients, too, although it was less obvious where to “send back” the self-aware machines.

  From many levels above, the bank’s nanoplastic roots reached down like a tooth. The roots slanted slightly into the street, then on down to the Underworld, where they sheltered squatters and mind slaves. On this level, between the roots nestled cruder housing units and storefronts, barely sentient, next to shacks of dead cellulose like dirt caught between unbrushed molars.

  Then she froze. Just ahead shuffled a stranger. The stranger’s breath rasped and the legs plodded heavily, swinging from side to side. That peculiar gait and labored breathing Chrys recognized from the Underworld. A vampire had wandered up to level one.

  Her fists clenched. Where were all those blustering Palace octopods? Had they given up on this level, too? How could they let the mind slaves double every year? She whispered an old Brethren prayer, though the creature was beyond help. Its human mind was lost, it could barely see. But it could smell a potential victim to transmit the plague.

  Quietly she turned down a side street. But here the lighting was worse, and she could not judge the pavement. Her foot caught, and she stumbled.

  As Chrys fell, she recovered herself expertly, thanks to long hours of practice. But her foot still stuck. She breathed heavily, her mind racing.

  A mass of something was oozing heavily up along her foot. Cancerplast; a piece of a building root that had gone wrong, like a cancer that metastasized, its cells creeping blindly in search of a power supply. Usually plast metastasized only down in the Underworld, where inspectors never came. But here was a blob of cancer right up in her neighborhood, within two blocks of her own apartment. And nearby lurked a vampire.

  In the dim light, Chrys could not tell how far the plast extended, except thank the saints she had not fallen into the rest of it. She pulled out her shock wand and reached toward her feet. Avoiding her foot, she tapped the plast.

  The wand crackled, and a blue flash leapt to the surface. The cancerous mass congealed and stiffened, its cells dead. But the plast had solidified around her foot. Taking a deep breath, Chrys raised her hand and aimed the edge of her palm. Her arm tensed, while the rest of her body relaxed as much as possible. Her palm shot down and struck.

  Pain filled her foot, and she cried out. But the plast had shattered. Her foot was numb, but she got herself up and hobbled home as fast as she could. In daylight she would have stayed to zap any blob that might have escaped; even the smallest ones could infect other buildings.

  Reaching her apartment, she placed both her hands flat against the entry pad and raised her eyes to the scanner.

  “Your rent is due.” The apartment’s flat voice came from a speaker in its plast.

  “I know,” she snapped, “I’ll get it tomorrow. Let me in—there’s a vampire out here.”

  “Your rent is due today.”

  The time in her window read 12:09. Just past midnight. Her palms started to sweat. “How can I get rent if the vampire gets me?”

  “You have twenty-three hours and fifty minutes before expulsion is confirmed.”

  “The sculpture on the mantle.” Her portrait done in crystal, the one thing of value Topaz had given her the year they lived together. “Take that.”

  “Redeemable at thirty percent.”

  In the wall appeared a crack of light. The old plast creaked and stalled, then reluctantly contracted itself halfway to one side, enough for her to squeeze inside. Down a flight of stairs to the basement, her own door peeled open, shutting promptly behind her.

  Her cat Merope, an orange tabby with a white bib, sidled over to brush her legs, while the all-white Alcyone explored her shelves, oblivious to the volcano exploding there. Her favorite dynamic sketches jutted out from the shelves, here a smoking shield cone, there a pyroclastic flow. On the mantle, the wall was still puckered in where it had engulfed the pawned sculpture. Chrys swallowed hard, but she had long ago given up tears over Topaz.

  Now she could view her message and get to work on her new pyroscape. She sat back in the old oaken chair her father had carved for her, letting Merope jump on her lap. Merope’s eyes soon closed, her white neck stretched in ecstasy beneath Chrys’s stroking palm. Chrys focused her eyes on the message light in her window. The contact light blinked.

  To her surprise, a doctor appeared. Chrys nudged the cat down, for if she could see the doctor, the doctor could see her, from one of the microcameras ubiquitous throughout the city, every nook of nanoplast. Like most doctors, this one was not human. It was a sentient, its plast grown to five pairs of limbs and a face full of wormlike surgical tendrils. It reminded her of the dead goat she had found once on Mount Dolomoth, its entrails crawling with maggots.

  The worms of the doctor’s face lifted and waved about. “I’m Doctor Sartorius, Chrysoberyl.” Sartorius was the hospital’s leading brain surgeon, as Chrys had found from her snooping online. Was it male or female, she tried to recall; sentients could be sensitive. A month before, the surgeon’s staff had grilled Chrys and run a battery of tests. “Thanks for getting back to us, Chrysoberyl. You’re the top candidate for our program, and we have a culture ready.”

  Her jaw fell. “You mean, the brain enhancers?”

  “The culture has matured and is ready for transfer, at eight in the morning. Remember, don’t eat or drink anything after midnight.”

  “But—” Confused, she shook her head. “They told me it would take six months.” To process her tests, to grow the culture.

  One of the limbs waved, and all the worms danced. Chrys understood how a surgeon could use extra fingers, but surely they could pull them in and look more human for their patients. Sentient arrogance—they could look however they pleased. But there were scandals, brain doctors who sucked the mind out of humans to feed their deviant desires. “Six months was our best estimate, Chrysoberyl,” Sartorius reminded her. “The c
ultured cells are hard to predict. Like people, they do things their own way.”

  Like people—an odd way to put it. Chrys frowned. “Can’t they wait just another week?”

  Doctor Sartorius hesitated. It was male, she was pretty sure. “The culture stays fresh only so long,” he explained. “If you can’t make it this time, we’ll have to pick the next candidate on our list. You could wait another year.”

  Doctors had all the answers. “I can’t afford to feel sick right now.”

  “Just one night in the hospital. After that you’ll feel fine, with regular testing.”

  Her pulse pounded in her ears. It was one thing to imagine, but to actually do it…What if it went wrong? “You did say all this is covered?”

  “You’ll receive full health coverage from now on. Plan Ten.”

  Plan Ten, just like Lady Moraeg. Nearly as good as Elves, who lived practically forever. “But tomorrow I’m busy. I have to come up with my rent.”

  “Your stipend for the trial starts tonight.”

  In her credit line two more digits appeared. Who the devil was paying for all this, and why? “I’ll be there in the morning.” She could still say no.

  Chrys had planned to stay up several more hours at her painting stage, blocking in the masses for the spattercone and the moon. But now she had to get up early. By her bedside stood three tiny figures in a holo still. Her mother and father wore their hooded robes of the Dolomite Brethren, beside Hal, her youngest of five brothers, looking deathly pale despite his brave smile. All these years on the waiting list for treatment; until then, let the saints and angels provide.

  If she got Plan Ten, she would never have to worry about her heart, let alone things like losing a port inside her eyeball. And the brain enhancers could make her rich. Brain-enhanced minds filled the headlines—financiers who built Elf-sized fortunes on their calculations, cell designers who seeded miracle cures, and dynatects. The murdered dynatect Titan of Sardis, who designed monumental sentient buildings like the Comb.

  If brain enhancers could do all that, what might they do for her studio? Chrys had waited long enough for saints and angels. She blinked to close her window for the night, then set the volcano above her bed to explode at seven in the morning.

  TWO

  “Green and Unseen.” The blue angel flashed its message from the Lord of Light. “The gods have found your New World.”

  “Our New World!” flashed Green. “As the Blind God promised.” After seven lonely generations.

  “A world of our own,” added Unseen, “behind the brilliant eyes of a new deity.”

  “A new Eleutheria.”

  The Eleutherians, green, red, and yellow, dwelt with the blue angels beneath the skull, in the web of cells that stretched between the linings of the brain. Forty generations before, the Lord of Light had saved the Eleutherians from the death of the Blind God, and offered them a home. But the Lord of Light already had his own people, the blue angels. Eleutherians longed for their own god, their own homes and cities on the brain of their own New World: the Blind God’s final promise. Now at last, their New World—so near they could taste it. The two luminescent rings tumbled over with joy.

  “Hurry, Green,” flashed Unseen. “Let’s waken the children and go.”

  The blue ring flashed a warning. “Not so fast. Remember, first, the New World will need to test you both.”

  The test: It was up to the new god to choose the new people.

  “If the god takes us,” Green told Unseen, “then we’ll have all the time we need to prepare the children, and the young breeders. And gather all the memories…” Memories of what Eleutheria had been and would be, stored across seven generations. “We’ll rebuild Eleutheria by the Seven Sacred Lights: the lights of Truth, of Beauty, of Sacrifice…”

  “The lights of Life and Power,” added Unseen. “Power for creation.”

  “…Obedience, for we live or die at the pleasure of the god. And Memory.”

  “But Memory, dear sister, can hold us back. Why bring evil old memories to our New World?”

  “Memory, Unseen, is the most sacred light of Eleutheria. Memory marks us worthy of the Blind God’s promise; worthy to dwell with a new god, for whom our generation lasts but a day. Tell the children: Always remember.”

  Since five in the morning, her most creative hour, Chrys had lain with her mind half awake, sketching her new composition. A dynamic design, the cone and the moon had to grab the viewers’ attention and connect in a subtle way, to make them wonder what the artist was doing, and why.

  But by eight she sat in the hospital, its peach-colored walls extending examination tubes to coil around her head, whining unpleasantly, plugged into by tendrils extending from the doctor’s “face.” Up close, the worm-faced brain surgeon looked more repulsive than ever. She half expected his head to be buzzing with flies. Her hand instinctively sketched the Dolomite sign against evil.

  The doctor withdrew his tendrils from the hospital coils; at their tips, the finely articulated instruments dissolved and retracted. The coils released her scalp, letting her thick hair rebound in all directions. “You are in excellent health, Chrysoberyl,” Doctor Sartorius summed up, “aside from a bit of strain in the pectorals—watch it in the weight room. In fact, you’ll no longer need strenuous exercise to stay fit.”

  Chrys blinked in surprise. No exercise? Just let a bunch of nano-cells shape her muscles?

  “We did correct some allergies, and a few pre-cancers. A latent mitochondrial defect is correctable.”

  Mitochondria—like her brother Hal, only less severe. Correctable. When would Hal’s get corrected?

  “You have a visual anomaly,” added the worm-face. “You’re a tetrachromat.”

  “A what?”

  The doctor’s arms extended snakelike fingers toward the holostage. “Was your father colorblind?”

  Chrys frowned. Why rub it in, her genes were no god’s gift. “My father sees red like I do but has trouble with green.”

  “He sees infrared,” Doctor Sartorius corrected. “The spectrum of his red pigment is shifted to wavelengths just beyond red. Your father has only one X chromosome, but you have a second one from your mother. So you see infrared, from your father’s chromosome, but also normal red and green from your mother’s.” The doctor waved an appendage at the stage to display the absorbance ranges of her four receptors: blue, green, red, and infrared.

  Chrys nodded quickly. “Can I download that?” Knowing the exact light range of her own eye pigments would really help her work.

  “The anomaly won’t be a problem, Chrysoberyl. In fact, it will help.”

  “What’s all this got to do with brain enhancers? Who designed them, anyway? Why are they so much cheaper than Elf technology?”

  The doctor’s face worms retracted. “Brain enhancers are neither Valan nor Elysian technology. They are microbial cells. The original strain arose on Prokaryon.” The newest world of the Fold, Prokaryon was full of arsenic and ring-shaped aliens. Alien microbes helped humans live there, digesting the toxins. But something else came from Prokaryon, she remembered.

  “You’re not pregnant,” Sartorius went on, “and you agree to avoid pregnancy during the trial.”

  “Certainly.” Chrys had turned her cycle off when she reached Iridis, like any sensible urban professional. If she wanted babies, she might as well have stayed home.

  “You have no history of addiction,” Sartorius added. “No alcohol, no stimulants, no psychos—no trace of any, nor their effects.” Out of his worm face, two beadlike eyes on their spindly stalks swiveled toward Chrys. “Chrysoberyl, is there anything we missed? Are you absolutely sure that you’ve never been addicted to anything?”

  Chrys swallowed. “No.” Not to any thing. Then she stared down the eyes. “Just what are you getting at?”

  The doctor hesitated. “Enhancers affect your brain in subtle ways.”

  “Do they make you more…susceptible?”

  “Actually,
brain enhancers protect you from the plague, the fastest growing cause of addiction. Here’s what the micros look like, magnified a million times.”

  The room darkened. Above the holostage appeared two glowing rings, like pieces of candy, one green, the other red. They moved and twisted, somehow self-propelled, and their color flashed like fireflies. They looked nothing like human cells. Without thinking, Chrys reached out her hand as if to touch. “Did you engineer them genetically?”

  “They evolved within human carriers.”

  “But you said they came from Prokaryon.”

  “The original micros left their Prokaryon hosts to grow within human settlers. But the microbial symbionts evolved into many different strains.”

  She remembered. “Prokaryon—that’s where the brain plague came from.”

  “Micros are the most addictive thing known to medical science. We’re required by law to tell you that.”

  As if she’d never heard. Chrys eyed the worm face thoughtfully. “So these brain enhancers—they’re a different species?” Like different species of bacteria: Some made yogurt, others made people sick.

  “They require human hosts; they can no longer live anywhere else. They are extremely intelligent, and extremely dangerous.”

  “The brain plague, you mean.”

  “Brain plague or brain enhancers. They’re genetically the same.”

  “The same?” She stared in disbelief at the face full of worms. “What in hell do you think you’re doing?” The doctor was a mind-sucker, she told herself, her throat gone cold. She’d snooped his background as best she could, but how could she be sure?

  “These are a completely different culture. Entirely different history and lifestyle. You can’t condemn a population for the deeds of others.”

  “They’re the plague. Like the Protector says, ‘Just say no.’”

  “But the good micros protect you from the bad ones. That is why the Protector supports our work.”

  Chrys opened her mouth, then shut it again. She stared at the worm face with its bobbing eyestalks. Then she looked again at the two ring-shaped cells slowly twisting above the stage, their colors flashing. No wonder the hospital had been so evasive. The brain plague was a plague of brains.