“Uh-oh,” White Coat says. “Careful.” Eyeing the monitor as my heart rate kicks up a notch.
“Don’t be afraid,” Vosch says. “It won’t harm you.” Claire gives him a startled look. He shrugs. “Well. We ran tests.” He flicks his finger at her: Get on with it.
I weigh ten million tons. My bones are iron; the rest is stone. I don’t feel the needle slide into my arm. Claire says, “Mark,” and White Coat clicks the stopwatch. The world is a clock.
“The dead have their reward,” Vosch says. “It is the living—you and I—who still have work to do. Call it what you like, fate, luck, providence. You have been delivered into my hands to be my instrument.”
“Appending to the cerebral cortex.” From Claire. Her voice sounds muffled, as if my ears have been stuffed with cotton. I roll my head toward her. A thousand years go by.
“You’ve seen one before,” Vosch says, a thousand miles away. “In the testing room, on the day you arrived at Camp Haven. We told you it was an infestation of an alien life-form attached to the human brain. That was a lie.”
I can hear Razor breathing, loud, like a diver’s breath through a regulator.
“It is actually a microscopic command hub affixed to the prefrontal lobe of your brain,” Vosch says. “A CPU, if you will.”
“Booting up,” Claire says. “Looking good.”
“Not to control you . . . ,” Vosch says.
“Introducing first array.” Needle glinting in fluorescent light. Black specks suspended in amber fluid. I feel nothing as she injects it into my vein.
“But to coordinate the forty thousand or so mechanized guests to which you will play host.”
“Temp ninety-nine point six,” White Coat says.
Razor beside me breathing.
“It took the prehistoric rats millions of years and a thousand generations to reach the current stage in human evolution,” Vosch says. “It will take you days to achieve the next.”
“Link with the first array complete,” Claire says, bending over me again. Bitter almond breath. “Introducing second array.”
The room is furnace-hot. I’m drenched in sweat. White Coat announces that my temperature is one hundred and two.
“It’s a messy business, evolution,” Vosch says. “Many false starts and blind alleys. Some candidates aren’t suitable hosts. Their immune systems crash or they suffer from permanent cognitive dissonance. In layman’s terms, they go mad.”
I’m burning. My veins are filled with fire. Water flows from my eyes, trickles down my temples, pools in my ears. I see Vosch’s face leaning over the surface of the undulating sea of my tears.
“But I have faith in you, Marika. You did not come through fire and blood only to fall now. You will be the bridge that connects what-was to what-will-be.”
“We’re losing her,” White Coat calls out, tremble-voiced.
“No,” Vosch murmurs, cool hand on my wet cheek. “We have saved her.”
58
THERE IS NO DAY or night anymore, only the sterile glow of the fluorescent lights, and those lights never go out. I measure the hours by Razor’s visits, three times a day to deliver meals I can’t keep down.
They can’t control my fever. Can’t stabilize my blood pressure. Can’t subdue my nausea. My body is rejecting the eleven arrays designed to augment each of my biological systems, each array consisting of four thousand units, which makes a total of forty-four thousand microscopic robotic invaders coursing through my bloodstream.
I feel like shit.
After every breakfast, Claire comes in to examine me, tinker with my meds, and make cryptic remarks like, You better start feeling better. The window of opportunity is closing. Or snide ones like, I’m starting to think the whole very-big-rock idea was the right way to go. She seems to resent that I’ve reacted badly to her pumping me full of forty thousand alien mechanisms.
“It’s not like there’s anything you can do about it,” she told me once. “The procedure is irreversible.”
“There is one thing.”
“What? Oh. Sure. Ringer the irreplaceable.” She pulled the kill switch device from her lab coat pocket and held it up. “Got you keyed in. I’ll push the button. Go ahead. Tell me to push the button.” Smirking.
“Push the button.”
She laughed softly. “It’s amazing. Whenever I start wondering what he sees in you, you say something like that.”
“Who? Vosch?”
Her smile faded. Her eyes went shark-eyed blank. “We will terminate the upgrade if you can’t adjust.”
Terminate the upgrade.