“Magnifier strands create tiny maligned that swim in the aqueous humor of the host’s eyeballs. Once there, they expand to cover a small part of the organ, spreading a membrane that refracts light. Less evolved magnifiers are selfish, covering the entire eyeball and forcing the host to live in magnification perpetually. Thankfully, aqueous humor is easy to contain in thin sheets of glass, and the maligned can’t tell the difference.”
—Professor James Anthem to the students of MZ-102: Introduction to the Maligned at Galt Alese.
----------------------------------------
“I would wager my life on it, Second Signature. And yours, too.” The Surgeon Elder holds his chin high; he is the only one who can make a quip like that. He grips a crusted scalpel in one hand, the other wiping blood on his apron. The half-foot beak of his mask leaks a milky white cloud of neutralizing agents with each exhalation. “There is indeed a new strand inside her.”
On the other end of the two-way glass separating her from the lab, Pasha observes June-Leckie resting on a cot, eyes closed and tranquilized. On a table next to the Surgeon Elder, a blue-spotted mycorrhizal mushroom hears the man’s words and relays them to a green mycorrhizal on Pasha’s side. She sidles up to hers, the little eyes on its stalk opening at her approach.
“How long has she had it?” Pasha asks.
“Almost two months,” the mushroom responds in the Surgeon Elder’s voice. “I’m guessing she traveled as a stowaway on a transport gondola. She injected herself with inhibitor agents the whole time, meaning it hasn’t jumped. Thankfully. Our atmosphere will contain the rest, as the mix stops strands from leaving the cells—that means no replication or transmission.” The Surgeon Elder studies the woman lying before him. “I’m more impressed that she eluded her carriers while staying nourished for so long.”
“Probably didn’t have to.” The Corps love to take Thurmgeists to Hyrnlak, despite them acting ignorant and surprised when they discover the women stowed away in the holds of their transport gondolas. That practice hasn’t occurred for years and never will again.
Pasha attempts to take this all in. She had doubted what June told her at the Debut, but if it was true, then whatever attacked this woman disobeyed the Decree. Pasha won’t have to explain the ramifications of that to anyone. Why is this happening, though? More importantly, why now?
“How will it spread?” Pasha asks.
The mention perplexes the Surgeon Elder for a moment. “Under the atmosphere, injection is the only way. Ingesting or inhaling the stuff won’t work—the inhibitors will keep it in their respective cells and filter out the body.” He pauses as he consults a part of his thoughts Pasha can’t discern.
A larger question strikes her. “Is it dead?”
“Not at all, just inhibited. This may be the first time anyone has seen it.”
“Almost like first contact,” Pasha murmurs. A new strand. When was the last time we discovered one?
The Surgeon Elder chooses this time to wheel over a cart with a box on it. He opens the box to reveal a device with a funnel-shaped lens pointing outwards. Attached to its center is a series of progressively narrowing cylinders pointing down to a tray, where flat objects can be clipped on. The Surgeon Elder turns a dial on the wall, and the gas lamps extinguish, casting the room into darkness. He then ignites a small candle in the device, the resulting light refracting onto a blank wall of the lab.
Onto the device’s tray, the Surgeon Elder places a slide of a sample Pasha guesses he collected from June. “Magnifier strands are quite useful,” he says. “We would be decades in the past without them.”
The image projecting on the wall is blurry at first, but the Surgeon Elder adjusts the cylindrical lenses and refines the sight to one Pasha has seen a handful of times before. The human cell hovers there, oblong-shaped and full of organelles that she only has a cursory knowledge of. The nucleus is at its center, the mitochondria spread throughout, the endoplasmic reticulum, and the ribosomes clinging to them. Pasha ignores all of these and focuses on the smaller organisms floating inside the cell, the only ones she knows intimately: the strands. They laze around in the cytoplasm in the shapes of wheels with spokes, approximations of triangles, some wavy lines, and others long and thin like eels. Spindly fibers branch out from all of them, embedding into the other organelles and changing their fundamental structures and behavior.
“These are all of the strands in June’s body.” The Surgeon Elder sweeps his hand over the projection. “From it, I’ve mapped out the prevalence of each. She has a typical mix of strands you’d find in Emergence Corps soldiers: the Insom, a bit of the Corvidae, and the Ape as her most prominent, unsurprisingly.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Unsurprisingly.” The woman is a runt, recalcitrant to the core. Still, something about this whole diagnosis glares out at Pasha. “How is it definitive inspecting only one cell? Aren’t there dozens of types of cells in the human body?”
“There are hundreds of types of cells, Signature, but the strands cannot distinguish between them. Every strand is present in every cell in the body—no exceptions. If a strand modifies the bones—and only the bones—you will find it in the bone cells but also in fat cells, nerve cells, stem cells, sperm cells, etc. It makes it much easier to judge someone’s strandular composition.”
“That seems quite redundant.”
“It is and comes with a distinct advantage. The non-relevant cells act as fail-safes for the relevant ones. Backups. For example, if a strand only affects one organ, but that organ is removed, and the same kind is transplanted back in, the strands in non-relevant cells will be aware of this and replicate to infect the new organ’s cells.”
Pasha shivers at the thought of millions of strands converging on a new organ. “That must be why neutralizers are so important.”
“Exactly. Neutralizers affect every cell in the body.” On the wall, the Surgeon Elder points to one strand that is shaped like a teardrop. “Creating one for this is our highest priority, I assure you.”
Pasha’s attention turns to the projection of the strand that could undo the entire truce the Decree upholds. It could make Pasha obsolete, and in a way, it has already started. How fitting its teardrop shape is, knowing that it will bring humanity nothing but pain.
The Surgeon Elder stands closer to the projection. “So, knowing all the strands in her body, I’ve mapped out the side effects of each. None of them cause memory loss, except for our new arrival.” He points to the teardrop. “We would have noticed such an effect from any other strands, for it is very significant memory loss—five of her roughly seven years in the Hyrnlak Archipelago. All gone.”
“What a Hells-damned shame.” Pasha’s eyes are on the cell projection, but her mind is on Hyrnlak. June is only the second person to have returned from the place. This Thurmgeist would have seen everything, not to mention first-hand knowledge of the Corps’ movements. For seven years, Pasha’s been relying on surface-level accounts from Flung gondola staff, whores stowed away on the gondolas who only talk for pay—and never got into the conflict anyway—and sporadic communications across mycorrhizal with the Corps itself. Those latter updates hold the same knowledge: gather reinforcements, assault Jubilee, and be driven back.
Well, that will all change soon.
Pasha sometimes wonders how much of a child’s curious nature persists in her younger physical form. With it, she looks at the man standing inside the lab and remembers, as much as he doesn’t want her to. “You were there, Elder. What was it like?”
After some delay and deliberation, the Surgeon Elder speaks. “Some of the most gruesome transformations I’ve ever seen, Signature. I was not there long, but I would never go back. I’d… rather not recall it if you please.”
Pasha frowns, nodding her apology across the glass. For a man who regularly sees death, the Surgeon Elder is more scarred by it than the ten or so she’s employed to hold the title. Then again, how would you fare in the Hyrnlak Archipelago?
“She will need constant surveillance,” the Surgeon Elder adds. “Quarantine, preferably. I don’t recommend you send her to the vats, lest this thing be born in the offspring. However, that won’t be a problem once we develop a neutralizing agent.”
“And how long will that take?” Pasha knows she’s asking the world, but it’s her duty.
“Years, and decades, even. The Bursting was 127 years ago, and we have only recently developed a neutralizer for the Ox. Tests for this one will be difficult, clinical trials even more so. We will need able subjects.” The man’s eyes flick her way at the last mention.
Now, the Surgeon Elder is asking the world in turn. Testing on Kaskit’s incubators will be akin to stepping into a firing range to gauge the effectiveness of your weapons. A single incubator death would set the city back a dozen families or more.
Pasha catches the Surgeon Elder looking down at the woman resting in front of him. “She won’t like being a lab rat,” she says. “But she deserves far worse.”
“It’s not about what she likes.”
“I agree. Thank you, Elder.”
She makes her way out of the observation chamber, dreading the conversation she will have with her officers. She is almost out of earshot when the Surgeon Elder taps on the lab’s window, holding up the tray containing a sample of the organism that’s turning Pasha’s world upside down. “You should have the honor of naming it,” he says.
The import of those words does not register immediately. Most of the hundreds of strands were named in the first decade after the Bursting when the earliest medical zoologists discovered them. Only a handful entered the academic record afterward, laying dormant all that time, perhaps hoping to elude discovery. Not knowing what could be inside you is a scary thought.
“Medical zoologists like to name them after their effects,” the Surgeon Elder says. “They’re an uncreative bunch, but to adhere to widely adapted conventions, I suggest the name have something to do with memory loss.”
Amnesia? Forgetfulness? Forgeter? Those are awful, and so Pasha thinks deeper. It is a strand like any other thing the raw ground secretes, but it could not have arrived at a worse time. It plans to burn the very foundations of the world. By turning women, by circumventing the Decree somehow, this strand intends to raise the maligned above men in one final, desperate push. It’s almost as if Pasha can sense the frustration building behind it, the emerging opportunity it sees and cannot ignore.
It seeks to incite a greater conflict that will overthrow the Decree and the delicate truce Pasha has worked hard to maintain. Incite, she thinks. Inciter.
That works.