BZRK ORIGINS (3 page)

She went on like that for a while, naming parts of the cell as if we were a high school biology class.

“She might have guessed we’d use a tissue sample,” one of the staff, Prim—Dr. Primyantha—said.

“What, I’m cheating?” Donna demanded.

“No, no, no, of course not. But Dr. Prim is right: Let’s try something else, just to confirm for skeptical minds.”

So Dr. Prim went to find something unexpected to place in the dish with Donna’s biot while the rest of us sat or perched and chatted excitedly.

“Jesus Christ!” Donna yelled suddenly, and shot up out of her chair. “Goddamn it! Prim!”

Dr. Prim returned to Donna’s office, and Donna threw the remains of a muffin at him.

“What?” he demanded.

“It’s a fly’s head,” Donna said disgustedly. “It’s as big as a goddamn house, Prim. Have you ever seen a fly face-to-face? It’s the size of a fucking whale!”

“Describe it for the record,” I said.

“I’m not looking at it,” she said.

“Wait. What do you mean, you’re not looking at it? Biot eyes are fixed forward.”

And that was how we discovered that we could do more than see through biot eyes. We could move them. In fact, we could control a biot’s movement as easily as we could move a finger.

In the next week we created two new biots. Dr. Prim had one and his graduate student, Mitch McGovern, another.

Mitch had the same experience Donna described. He had a sort of picture-in-picture view through the biot’s eyes. He could move the biot as easily as he could move his own feet.

We began to test the biot’s capabilities. Its speed and endurance. Its range.

If we had been following a normal protocol, this stage would have consumed months if not years. But I didn’t have a lot of time. Birgid’s health was failing. The cancer was metastasizing, popping up not just in her lungs now but in her esophagus and brain.

The surgeons could remove some of these new tumors, but until the monster in her lungs was killed, the cancer would just keep coming back.

Time was short.

So Mitch’s biot was placed in a human body. We were looking for ways in. Looking for ways to enter the human body safely. Eyes, ears, nose, throat, urinary tract were all suggested. But the most obvious solution was injection close to the site of the tumor.

But first, a human trial, however truncated. One of the lab techs
volunteered to be the test body, so to speak. She would have the biot injected into her bloodstream, with hopes that our biot astronaut would be able to navigate to the lungs.

Mitch’s biot was tagged with a radioactive isotope, placed in a sterile solution, and drawn up into a hypodermic needle. Mitch is a funny guy, and a voluble one, so he gave us a running commentary. It was all very strange. He sat on a high stool at one of the lab tables and described what was happening to his biot one floor down.

But very soon the witty banter got a bit strained. It was obvious that the experience was disturbing to him. A ring of sweat spread from his armpits. The description became more disjointed and repetitive.

“It’s like … Fired out of a cannon. Jesus. You feel … Okay, let me try to organize my observations a little better. What I am seeing is a … I don’t know. The context is all, I mean, it’s hard without a sense of scale.”

I didn’t want to press him. I figured he would calm down after a while and become more objective.

“It’s a billion flat little rocks, like I’m in an avalanche. Blood cells. Fuck me!”

“Can you—”

“Like pulling onto a freeway and everyone’s driving ninety.” Then, “Jesus! What is that?”

“What are you seeing?” Donna asked, becoming impatient. “Just
give—”

“It’s moving! It’s moving! I mean, under its own power. It’s like … I … It’s like some kind of monster. Hah. I know. But Jesus, if you were seeing it.”

“Mitch, you’re in no danger. Just tell us what you’re observing.”

“I am observing the hell out of something that looks like a very large wad of snot. And it’s moving. It, like, oozes out a string of snot and then starts reeling it back in, and it moves. Like a snail, but not as … Oh my God. It’s a lymphocyte.”

A white blood cell, though they aren’t strictly confined to the blood.

“It’s identified you as an invader,” I said.

“It’s going to kill me!”

“Is it fast enough to—”

“Screw you, snotwad. Hah! I’m way too fast. Something’s on me.”

“The lymphocyte?” Donna asked.

“No, it’s … Smaller stuff, like tiny little gray sponges. Much smaller. They’re like, touching me, then rolling off.”

“Immunoglobulin,” I said. “Antibodies. The immune system is attacking the biot.”

“Okay, now I’m seeing a different tissue. The walls are narrower around me, like a smaller tunnel, like, whoa. Whoa.”

I glanced at the monitor that showed the radioactive tag of the biot against a schematic of the human body.

“You should be approaching the lungs. You’ll be seeing the oxygen exchange. Amazing opportunity.” That from Donna. She was jealous.

But Mitch wasn’t listening. “One of them has me. I didn’t see it. It’s got me. Tendrils like snakes. I … I think it has me good. Shit, here’s another one.”

I bent lower and looked right into his eyes and said, “Hey. Don’t worry about it. We should have expected an immune response.”

“How do I make it stop?” he asked.

I laughed. “I think our human subject has a nice, robust immune system. I’m not sure we would want to stop it. Come on, let it go.”

Let it go.

I was a fool.

“How?” Mitch asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t turn it off, Dr. McLure. I can’t stop seeing. I can’t …”

A cold chill crawled up my spine.

“You’ll just have to discipline yourself not to notice,” I said, knowing it was the wrong answer.

“The lymphocytes may kill the biot, which would solve your problem,” Donna remarked.

That was about three o’clock in the afternoon.

At four the next morning Mitch McGovern leapt from the fifth-floor window of his apartment building in Brooklyn.

The EMTs found him still alive. His last words, as best they could make them out, were cryptic.

“Ripped me apart,” he said. “Oh, God.”

While that was happening, though, I was holding Birgid’s head as she choked over the toilet bowl. She was wracked by violent coughing. The water in the bowl was red.

The noise, or perhaps just some instinct, woke Sadie. She came in wearing a nightgown.

“Go to bed, sweetheart,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

There were tears streaming down my cheeks. I didn’t want her to see me cry. I didn’t want her to see her mother spraying blood like some horror-movie victim.

She ignored me. Sadie did that, back then. Nowadays, too. Instead of leaving she found a scrunchie and used it to gather her mother’s hair into a ponytail.

Then I left Sadie to hold her mother’s head. I went to my library and poured a drink and swallowed it.

Time was running out.

“Mommy is going to die soon,” Sadie said.

She had come to me in my library. She sat on my lap. I drank whiskey, moving my arm around her, and couldn’t help but bring the glass close to her face.

I wanted her to leave me alone. I was stressed. I thought I was as stressed as I could be without having a stroke. But at that point I didn’t even know that Mitch had killed himself.

“I’m doing my best, Sadie,” I said.

“I know,” she said. And she wanted more from me, some comfort, some sentiment. Some … She wanted me to tell her it wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t do that. Worse, I didn’t want to because I was suffering, and some dark part of me wanted everyone to suffer along with me.

These are not good things for me to remember. I don’t like the man who sat there drinking whiskey and barely paying attention to his distraught daughter. Ever since then I have tried to make up for that moment and others like it.

I think Sadie has forgiven me. I have not forgiven myself.

“Okay, Birgid, we’re going to give you twilight sedation. You’ll be conscious, though you may fall asleep.”

We did it in my lab. Donna and me, with Marty and Prim helping out. We needed to know if we could reach the tumor. Then we could figure out what to do about it. But step one was to see if we could reach it without being thwarted by the body’s immune response.

“I fall asleep a lot,” Birgid said. “But I’m interested, so … I’ll proba …” The drug hit her, and her eyes fluttered. She tried to say something but ended up just smiling a beautiful, bashful smile.

It tore a hole in me, that smile. I loved her. I didn’t want to live if she couldn’t.

“Did anyone ever hear from Mitch?” I asked.

“He hasn’t picked up,” Dr. Prim said. “He missed football night.”

“You mean soccer,” I said.

“Football,” Dr. Prim insisted. “It is properly called football in the civilized world.” It was an old joke between us.

“Let me send at least one of my biots with you,” Donna insisted.

“You shouldn’t even have biots,” I said, not angry, just making the point that she had gone outside of protocol. So had I, but I was the boss.

I saw through my biot’s eyes. But all I had seen so far was the glass and plastic of the crèche.

“Intubate,” I told Prim.

Prim was the only one with the medical background to perform the procedure. It’s the kind of thing done in emergency rooms all the time, but I was still nervous. It involves using a laryngoscope, a tool specifically designed to guide a plastic tube through the mouth, down the throat and trachea, to the top of the lungs.

Birgid moved restlessly. Normally a person being intubated would be completely out, but that’s a riskier thing. We were not a hospital.

“Relax, sweetheart. Relax, let it happen. You’ve had it done before. Just relax into it.”

She calmed then, and I took her hand and squeezed it.

We secured the tube and began the transfer of my biot to a long flexible probe. We pushed the probe down as far as we dared. An inch is a long way for a biot.

“Can you see anything?” Donna asked me eagerly.

“Just the plastic wall around me.” There wasn’t much of interest in that. I managed the short hop from probe to the tube wall. “Okay, I’m clear.”

I kept my hold on Birgid’s hand as my intrepid biot began to walk toward the lung.

Her breathing was slowed, but it was still a powerful breeze. The biot is low to the ground so doesn’t provide much wind resistance, but still I worried that I’d be picked up like a kitten in a tornado. The wind would be in my “face.” Then it would pause and change
direction. I learned to hold on tight when the wind was against me, then race along with it at my back.

I saw the opening ahead.

The very first thing that came to mind was Willy Wonka. I was stepping out of what felt to me like a huge, long tunnel, into an eerie wonderland. We had no color capacity in those early days, so everything I saw was in shades of gray or sepia. But still …

The cells were densely packed, both hairy cells—those with waving cilia like something you might see on a coral reef—and fat round secreting cells that oozed with mucus. There were strands of mucus stretched out like Silly String.

Trapped in the mucus were all manner of exotic particles: dust, pollen, and yes, bacteria, no bigger to my biot eyes than tennis balls.

It was stunning.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh … wow.” Not an original thing to say, but it was beyond words.

Yet I could take thousands and thousands of words to describe the bizarre, disturbing trip I took down the endless black canyons of Birgid’s lungs. The trip from entry point to the tumor was no more than four centimeters, yet it took hours. There were many blind alleys. There was much reversing of course as Donna and Marty carefully mapped my progress. We had realized from the start that getting back out could be a problem. The lung is like a sponge, a mass of air sacs, each expanding and shrinking as breath came and went.

But in truth I can barely summon up images of all the strange wonders. Because my memory is so filled with what happened next.

I found the tumor.

I felt it before I found it. I realize that sounds unscientific, there’s no explanation for the growing sense of menace that filled me with dread as I approached it.

The first sign was a single tendril reaching down one of the vents. It was like a fat, black slug pulsating beneath my feet.

I knew immediately what it was. I knew I had at last seen the enemy.

I followed that tendril. It soon became more than a single tendril. It seemed to spread around all sides of the tunnel, as if I were walking into a snake pit. Soon I could no longer avoid stepping on it.

I became aware then of the capillaries feeding blood to it, fresh, oxygenated blood, the Frisbee-shaped cells pushing their way through translucent tubes to feed the monster.

For monster it was.

I reached a place then where the air sac and tunnel architecture became disturbed and irregular. It looked as if some beast had torn at it. Mucus oozed over ripped edges.

Individual cancer cells, oh, how innocuous they seemed, just lying there. They reminded me of the dried blowfish you find in a cheap seaside tourist shop. They looked almost like toys. Lymphocytes slithered slowly, launching pointless attacks on the loose cells,
the cells that wanted to spread throughout the rest of Birgid’s lungs and body.

As I watched I would see them sometimes rise on the eternal breeze, be blown a few feet (micrometers, in reality.) I saw a cell explode under pressure from a lymphocyte. But there were a million more.

I traveled across the ravaged landscape and felt the pulse of a great artery shaking my biot legs, causing the pictures in my head to wobble.

The tumor was wrapped around that artery, and now, suddenly, looking up through strangely open space, I saw it.

“What do you see, Dr. McLure? What do you see?” Donna pressed.

I had stopped narrating. I don’t know how long I was silent. They told me later it was minutes. It might have been hours for all I knew.

“What do you see, Doctor?”