Brain Plague Read online

  “Our own God of Mercy, amid the stars,” said Fern.

  The stars? What did that mean?

  “A great road map,” said Poppy. “We will get to know those veins well.”

  Micro people swimming through her veins—enough to chill the blood.

  “Only our own god can see her own veins,” Poppy added. “Our god sees color beyond red, beyond other gods. Ours is indeed the best and greatest of all the gods.”

  Typical priests. “If I am so great a god, why should I take you in?”

  The green one said, “We are the People of Eleutheria. When our First World came to an end, and most of us died, the Blind God promised our children a New World, in a new arachnoid where no people ever lived before. We live by the lights of Truth, Beauty, Memory,…” The letters went on at length, about the various lights of virtue; Chrys lost patience after the third or fourth.

  “Stop,” said Chrys.

  The letters ceased. That was encouraging.

  “What can you do for me?” Chrys asked. “Can you help me create great art?”

  “Our ancestors created dwellings for the gods themselves. We will create the greatest works ever seen.”

  Modesty was not their strong point. “What sort of dwellings?”

  “The Lord of Light forbade us to speak of it, but to live only for one true God.”

  She frowned. “If I am your one true God, you must tell me everything.”

  “Yes, Oh Great One,” said Fern, “but the blue angels warned—”

  “It shall be as you say!” Poppy’s letters danced. “I knew this was the New World for us.”

  “What can you do with this?” Chrys downloaded her gallery piece, the lava fountain that turned into butterflies.

  At first the volcano spurted and poured, just as it had for her fellow artists at the meeting. Then the visual began to change. The colors deepened, becoming more fantastic, until the hungry rivers swallowed themselves into abstraction. Then the abstract forms picked up the volcanic rhythms, returning in a cooler form; a volcano of ice. Chrys watched, her lips parted. All kinds of possibilities—she ached to get back to work.

  The images faded. “Today is the anniversary of our arrival,” came the green one out of the dark. “Has the God of Mercy decided our fate?”

  Chrys looked up. The doctor and the security agent were still there, waiting. The agent asked, “What do you think?”

  She drew back. “I’ll sleep on it.”

  Daeren shook his head. “They’ve already given you a whole year. They await your decision now.”

  She glared at him suspiciously.

  The worm face wiggled. “A carrier needs to make life or death decisions quickly. But it is a lifelong commitment. So, if you don’t feel comfortable, you should decline, and think it over. In the next year, we may have another culture ready.”

  That was reasonable, but what if the next culture were less creative than this one? On the other hand, what if these caused too much trouble? She thought of something. “Do these ‘people’ have…legal rights?”

  Daeren hesitated. “They ought to. I’ve spent enough hours at the Palace on their behalf.” A lobbyist after all.

  The doctor’s worms stretched thoughtfully. “Legally, Daeren, they’re the plague.”

  “They are not,” insisted Daeren. “That’s like calling all humans murderers.”

  “She asked their legal status.”

  He turned to her. “Our micros will actually protect you from the real plague. As a carrier, you’ll be safer than before.”

  “If she maintains them properly,” agreed Sartorius. “But if she ever gets in trouble with the law, the octopods can wipe her micros without a thought.”

  Chrys watched this exchange with interest. “So I could get rid of them at any clinic.”

  A fleeting darkness crossed the agent’s face, like an eclipse of the sun, a look of anger and disgust. But he quickly resumed his professional air. “As the doctor said, you can wait till you’re ready.”

  The three of them froze, waiting, as if an eternity passed. Even the doctor’s worms were still. At last Chrys let out a breath. “I’ll take them.”

  She saw the agent relax. He had a lot at stake, she realized. Being the “Lord of Light” must be a tough act for a college kid.

  The doctor came alive, each appendage finding a task. “First we need to transfer the Plan Ten nanoservos. They keep watch throughout your body.” His worms stretched into unbelievably narrow snakes that twined unnervingly. “Just turn around and watch the holostage.”

  Chrys turned. A white beach stretched to the horizon, a gentle surf rolling in, palms bobbing in the wind. She tried not to think of what the worms were doing behind her neck.

  “Oh Great One, have you forgotten us?”

  “We anxiously await your reply.”

  She sighed. That’s what you got for feeding stray cats. “You’re sure all this is covered? Who pays for it?”

  Daeren said, “The Committee pays for Plan Ten, until you’re established. Most of us don’t notice the cost.”

  Her mouth fell open, then she closed it. No wonder the agent looked so young; he could be a hundred for all she knew. He could be a college athlete all his life, while her own brother grew paler every year, waiting for mitochondria. She swallowed hard. “Is there a family plan?”

  “If you have dependents—”

  “Never mind.” As soon as she earned some money, she would get her brother covered, long enough to get new mitochondria. “I’ve decided,” she told the two anxious micros. “You are my people. Just remember one rule: If you have to preach, do it outside my eyes.”

  THREE

  The Eleutherians tumbled out of the microneedles into capillaries of an untouched world. Their rotary filaments propelled them swiftly to the brain, where they tunneled through the arterial walls into the arachnoid. For shelter, they strung dendrimers, long chainlike molecules, back and forth across the branches of fibroblast cells.

  “Only the cross-branches,” warned Fern. “Never touch the lining on either side.” The arachnoid, with its cross-branches of fibroblast cells, stretched forever between the two outer linings of the brain. A breach of either lining would attract hungry white cells, or deadly microglia, the brain’s special defenders. Microglia normally stayed within the central nervous tissue, their long arms tangled amongst the neurons; but the taste of suspicious molecules from the immigrants would activate them.

  “We’ll be careful,” flashed Poppy, secreting the dendrimers and weaving them in expert patterns across the branches. Already she and other elders were laying out plans for homes and schools, and chambers for breeding. They tapped the capillaries to harvest vitamins and minerals. “We need to help the children feel at home, as soon as possible. If it doesn’t taste right, they won’t breed.”

  With the fifth wave of immigrants came the children and the young breeders; just three hundred precious vessels of the genes to seed their race and repopulate their world. Three hundred children for ten thousand adults, the most the gods allowed Eleutherians in their new world.

  The Lord of Light’s blue angels were a conventional lot; they mainly showed blue or violet. But the children of Eleutheria flashed anything from violet to red, and beyond. Poppy watched the precious little rings tumbling out of the silicon vessels that had carried them safely through the bloodstream, eager to taste the New World. “Our children come in colors that even the gods can’t see,” she flashed proudly.

  “Watch yourself,” warned Fern. “Our new god could see you well enough.” The children worried her; their journey took too long. “They’re getting depressed and philosophical. They’ll all turn into elders before they breed.”

  “They’ll soon feel better,” flashed Poppy, “now that they’re away from the blue angels.” The blue angels secreted a developmental hormone that made a third of all children turn into elders without breeding; this had kept the Eleutherian numbers small. “We’ll cheer them up w
ith new things to taste. We’ll build nightclubs.”

  The rest of the micros were transferred in the patch of microneedles, just like the first two. It took several passes to transfer them, ten thousand in all. Ten thousand microscopic rings that claimed to be people.

  “Oh Great One,” the letters flashed green. “Our growing children need arsenic.”

  “Arsenic?” Chrys looked up. “Isn’t that what the slaves kill for?” On the street they called it “ace.”

  Doctor Sartorius extended an appendage. A claw snapped open, revealing a white pill. “Micros evolved on a planet full of arsenic. They need it as an essential mineral.”

  “But ace is poison.”

  “It’s a controlled substance,” the doctor admitted. “But our dietary supplement traps the arsenic in special cagelike molecules that keep it out of your own cells. Only the micros can extract it.”

  Chrys eyed the pill distastefully. “People will think I’m a slave.”

  Daeren shook his head. “Chrys, if people think that, they’ll think it no matter what.” His voice was low. “I told you, you’ll face prejudice. We all do.”

  The worm face warned, “There’s a black market in arsenic. Never, ever let your micros give up their arsenic, for any reason.”

  “The Plan supplies you once a month,” said Daeren. “If ever you fall short, you could be accused of selling it. You’d end up in jail, and your people wiped out.”

  “Please, Great One—have mercy. Our children will starve without arsenic.”

  Reluctantly Chrys swallowed the pill.

  The doctor’s appendage retracted unnervingly into his cylindrical body. “Your nanoservos report no problems—no meningeal inflammation, no invasion of central nervous tissue. Daeren, can you stay? I’m on call.” All his arms retracted and disappeared. Rearing backward, he twisted his body around and left.

  Chrys sat back, and her hands sketched a moon in the air, itching to get back to her painting stage. “Where are the micros?” she asked. “They don’t answer anymore.”

  “They’re busy building their city,” said Daeren.

  “God of Mercy, is all well?” The green letters returned. “Such a beautiful, untouched wilderness for our children to settle.”

  “Fern’s back.” Untouched wilderness indeed.

  “All right.” Daeren came over and sat in front of her, his eyes level with hers. “May I check your eyes, just a minute?” Blue rings flashed again.

  “Of course, we stayed out of the gray cortex,” Fern insisted.

  “Not a taste,” added Poppy. “The blue angels are so strict. They never trust us.”

  “They sure talk fast,” Chrys observed.

  “A thousand times faster than humans. They’re very social; when you meet another carrier, you’ll always know.”

  “Well, I have no time to socialize. I have to put up my show. Can I go home now?”

  “You signed an agreement to stay overnight, at least. Another day would be better, especially if you lack help at home.”

  “Saints and angels,” she whispered. “When will I get to my work?” The turquoise moon was barely begun.

  Daeren leaned closer. “You’d better pay attention to what’s going on beneath your skull. Besides building a whole new city overnight, the ten thousand of them want to expand their population as soon as possible. At first, they have only three hundred juveniles to breed; the rest, all elders, cannot produce offspring.”

  “All elders? What is this, a retirement community?”

  “A common population structure, for microbes,” he said. “Only a few reproduce, while the others stay active enough to maintain the environment—‘viable but non-culturable.’”

  “These sound like they have plenty of culture.”

  “Like medieval monks, they store all the history of their people. They ‘write’ it in their chromosomes.”

  Monks—even worse than priests.

  “Most of the time,” Daeren said, “they keep just a few breeders to gradually replace those who die. But to found a new colony, they need to increase their number a thousand-fold, as quickly as possible.” Above the stage appeared an S-shaped curve.

  “The population will rise steeply for the next two weeks, then taper off by the end of the month at about a million. But at two weeks, you reach a critical point where nearly half the population are children.”

  Chrys looked up. “What’s wrong with that?”

  Daeren leaned back, chin in his hand. “It’s like a feudal society before the plagues set in. Too many youngsters, lacking in judgment; they can get into trouble.”

  Microbial juvenile delinquents. “Like, they start gang wars?”

  “They could invade the central brain tissue. That’s how plague micros take over the dopamine center.”

  The holostage whined. Above the stage flashed a molecule, a hexagon of atoms with two claws and a tail. “Dopamine,” repeated Daeren with emphasis. “The central molecule of reward. Dopamine enters the neurons to create pleasure. Everything humans do—loving, dying, killing—they do for dopamine.”

  Chrys regarded the molecule curiously. “Even enjoying art?”

  “Even art,” he said. “But the plague micros trap the dopamine in your synapses, until you’re good for nothing else. Like cocaine—smart cocaine.”

  Chrys stared again at the molecule; it looked like a scorpion. A normal part of the brain; and yet…“These micros could turn into plague.”

  “Your elders will keep things in hand,” he assured her. “Once you get past the second week, elders outnumber children again, and the population stabilizes at a million. Then they have nothing to do but help your work.”

  Chrys shuddered. “Well, let’s hope Fern keeps the kids in line.”

  The poppy-colored letters returned. “Oh Great One, do our people please you?”

  “Yes, I am…pleased.”

  “Then please, send us a sign of your mercy.”

  Chrys looked up. “They want a ‘sign.’ What do I do, raise the dead?”

  Daeren took a look at the medical monitor. “The nanos say they’re doing okay, keeping their kids out of the cortex. They deserve a reward.” Daeren took out a packet of small blue wafers. He handed one to Chrys. “Here, take this. Hold it on your tongue for a moment, then swallow it.”

  Chrys eyed the blue wafer suspiciously. “What’s in it?”

  “Azetidine acid.” The holostage showed a new molecule: a simpler structure, only seven atoms. A group of four with a tail of three, like the seven stars.

  “A—what?”

  “Azetidine, AZ for short. An amino acid, common in plants. It does for micros what dopamine does for us.”

  Microbial cocaine? “It doesn’t sound right. Why should I drug them?”

  “If you don’t rule them, they’ll rule you.” Daeren smiled. “It’s just a low concentration. It gives them a buzz, like champagne with chocolates.”

  “I don’t drink. You made a big point of it.”

  “They’re different. They live fast.”

  Chrys put the wafer in her mouth. It tasted like a potato chip.

  “Thanks for your blessing, Oh Great One! We will make wise use of your world, and sing your praises forever.” A starburst of red and lava.

  Fern added, “It is good to please our God of Mercy, for we live or die at your pleasure.”

  Chrys thought, even priests like good food and drink.

  As the micros multiplied, the holostage listed their growing population. On the first day the total did not increase much, but the ‘children’ doubled, and none became elders. Every hour or so the elders asked for a “sign.” It always sent them into raptures, like catnip. Then Fern hurried off to keep the kids out of trouble, but Poppy at least could be persuaded to stay a bit and play with colors. Colors of mountains, sky, and ocean; at Chrys’s suggestion, Poppy sprayed them out, from the green gold of meadows to the gray violet of distant hills. Familiar vistas turned strange, as if by the light of
a foreign sun.

  The hourly newsbreak jarred her teeth. Titan’s corpse, for the hundredth time—still no leads. If micros were people, then Titan’s murder was more than a hate crime; it was genocide. Meanwhile, slaves had snatched another ship, in Elysian space. No Elves were ever taken, though, only a “mortal” Valan.

  In her window the Protector pounded his fist, demanding the Elves help locate the Slave World. The Elf Prime Guardian did not deign to reply, but his Guardian of Peace, Guardian Arion, appeared in his butterfly train. Guardian Arion stood straight as a caryatid, his face marble white. “The brain plague and other addictions need not trouble our advanced society,” the Elf purred. His bearing and diction underlined the superiority of a world without crime. As opposed to inferior Valedon.

  Chrys lay back in the hospital bed. “Poppy, no more news for me. I’m closing the window.”

  “But what if we need you, Oh Great One?”

  “If I see that corpse once more, I’ll go mad.”

  “Change the setting.”

  That took her by surprise. “What setting?”

  “Advanced Options, function nine; Social Setting, alternate six; Alert Status, key three…”

  Following each step, Chrys focused on the hovering keypad. The Plan One clinic never told her about this.

  “The gods are not omniscient,” Poppy observed. “They can learn from us.”

  Chrys smiled. “Yes, we can learn from you.”

  That evening Daeren stopped in. For a moment he froze; his brows wrinkled and his eyes scanned, as if reading bad news in the window. Then he looked at her and smiled. “Time for an eye check.”

  Chrys had been sketching a shield cone on a windless day, a wisp of smoke rising. She blinked it away and focused on the agent’s eyes as they flashed blue. A minute or so passed before her own flashed in response.

  “They should always keep someone on watch,” he told her. “Remind them. And remember to set your alarm at night, every two hours.”