My last-ditch effort to save my childhood ornamental cactus involved transplanting it into a fresh pot, only for the poor thing to die from transplant shock. Now, with my newest duty, I worried the same was about to happen to me.

Before stepping into the examination room, I glanced at my console one last time, going over the patient’s chart and medical records. Whatever changes were playing out in my mind, my now-photographic memory could remember the chart details perfectly after just a single glance. Unfortunately, neurotic habits were hard to shake.

On my PortaCon was a picture of a boy with a bright smile. Lopé Broliguez was his name; he was fifteen years old, and was having a terrible time of it. His dark hair was an argument stuck between wavy and curly, and the only reason his smile shined the way it did was because of his bulky metal braces. But, to find the worst detail, you had to look at the Notes section of his chart, where you’d see that someone had written “child prodigy”. I imagined the poor kid was torn between wanting his classmates to talk to him and wanting them to stop making jokes at his expense. Alas, nature’s character creation system was a cruel mistress.

Other than the high intelligence stat, he’d also rolled a pretty good skin stat, as well. As the child of first-generation Maikokan immigrants, the earthy, terra-cotta color of the boy’s skin helped cover up the worst of his acne, though a couple of whiteheads still managed to push their way through until they looked like bits of frosting dolloped on his face.

If only my gene pool had invested its skill points that way.

My adolescence was awkward enough without acne. But with it? It was a cruel joke, and no one laughed.

I’d never met this kid before, but I felt for him as if I’d known him for years. When it came to the stated reason for this examination, I deliberately skipped it over. I’d already seen it once, and there was no point in staring at it any further. It would only make my stomach churn even more, and I was already having enough trouble as it was, dealing with the intolerable hunger.

Stepping inside the examination room, I came into the company of two young people, one male, one female, and undoubtedly related. The boy sat on the examination table. The paper sheet separating him from the dark green plastic upholstery crinkled as he shifted. The table was currently in an upright position, making for a tall, imposing chair. It was a modern model, lozenge shaped, but with rounded corners. Being fully mechanized, it could switch from chair mode to table mode to anything in between with just a touch of a button or a console command. The girl—several years older—sat in a chair that was trying very hard not to be a chair. The yellow, spheroidal, bloated, bright object rested in the corner of the room, and was only recognizable as a chair thanks to the L-shaped indentation within it.

But I couldn’t find Lopé. For a moment, I thought I had stepped into the wrong room.

Then, an action potential ran down my spine, commanding the muscles there to twitch and stiffen as realization hit: the young man was Lopé. Or, rather, had been.

The two youths were deep enough in conversation that they hadn’t noticed me enter the room.

Lopé shook his head. “I told you, Nina, I’m perfectly fine. I shouldn’t be here. I should be at church. Brother Donovan is leading Convocation today. He’s the one I wanted you to meet.”

Meanwhile, the girl seemed to be at her wits’ end. “C’mon Lu, please,” she implored, “for the last time: you fell and went all chabita.” She waved her hands about spastically.

I plucked the stylus out from my console and scribbled some notes on the screen in shorthand.

Nina looked much like her brother—the version on my console screen. Like the picture, her dark hair was naturally messy, though she’d tamed it with several short stacks of plastic turquoise beads, in the traditional Maikokan style. I recognized the faint, floral-patterns on her white blouse. About a year ago, Jules had made a big stink about wanting to wear that exact same design to prove to her classmates—and most of all, to that bully Jessica Eigenhat—that she was, in fact, super stylish.

It wasn’t until my daughter reached adolescence that I really understood how cutthroat the world of teenage girls’ fashion was. The style turnover rate was simply ridiculous. I imagined whoever had sold the blouse to Nina had practically paid the young woman to take it off their hands. Unusually, instead of a skirt, she had a pair of denim blue-jeans, and they were hardly fresh.

“We were so scared,” Nina said. “Mama was crying!” Pathos tensed her urgent expression, visible through the translucent material of her tightly-fastened face mask.

And that was when I saw them: white motes, just like Dr. Horosha’s. They whirled around Nina’s hands, in tune with her gesticulations. Unlike Dr. Horosha’s lights, Nina’s were spastic and unwieldy, like a lawn sprinkler with a bad case of the hiccups. They spurted out of her hand, swirling around in disorder. The motes’ sizes varied, unlike Horosha’s neat, orderly lattice.

It lasted only for a moment.

Nina winced. “Puto!” she said, swearing softly. She clasped the fingers of her mote-making hand.

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A mix of feelings ran through me, something like fearcitement, drizzled with curianxiety, and marinated in unremitting hunger.

Though Andalon was currently AWOL, I didn’t need her by my side to recognize that, somehow, whatever mystery was at work in Dr. Suisei Horosha was present Nina Broliguez in one form or another. I had no idea what this meant, nor what to do with it, and yet, I don’t think I could have asked for a better opportunity to finally understand what the fudge was going on!

There had been no need for Dr. Horosha to explain himself; I was a trained people-reader, and everything about the man screamed “impregnable fortress”. The same could not be said for Nina, however. She was as expressive and opinionated as they came.

Finally, somebody I could talk to!

Lopé started to frown, but stopped himself and looked down at his feet for a moment before turning to face his sister, smiling with conscientious confidence. “Please, Nina,” he said, “try and refrain from using foul language.” He nodded. “Also, at the risk of repeating myself, I would really appreciate it if you stopped calling me by my pagan name. Lopé was the old me. He’s gone, and I don’t want to ever come back. I’m a new me, Nina. I’m Paul; I’ve been reborn.”

I hadn’t even introduced myself to them, and yet, my heart was already sinking.

‘Paul’ shared certain details with the face on the console: the same skin, the same braces, the same brilliant blue eyes. But they might as well have been mementos of his former self. Everything else about him had been transfigured. He was so finely dressed, the mannequins in a men’s formal wear shop would turn away and blush in shame. His pressed, starched, blind white shirt was buttoned up to perfection. His gold and brown dress tie looked like it was fresh out of the box. Gone was his messy hair. It was refined and slick in gel, sculpted smooth, except on the front left where it was bundled into a Trueshore knot. The gel made his hair glisten beneath the fluorescent lights.

That was a bad sign.

Trueshore knots were generally worn by the more ornery folks of the eastern provinces, most of all in Trueshore itself, ever since the ancient hairstyle had been taken up as a political statement during the tail-end of the Republic. I couldn’t imagine why someone like Lopé/Paul would wear one, except…

—But I shouldn’t have been jumping to conclusions. Not yet, anyhow.

And then it got worse.

Yes, I could see the traces of whatever powers Nina had—I was certain that was what had made her hand hurt—but I didn’t know if she could see them. Worse yet, I didn’t have a good explanation for why I could see them.

Fudge.

I really, really wanted to ask her, but I didn’t know how.

I guess I’ll just have to wing it.

And, for the record, I wasn’t very keen on “winging it”.

I bowed slightly, a bit more formal of a greeting than was normal, but I wanted to stay on my toes. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Dr. Howle.”

The word shot between them and sliced their conversation in two. They both turned to face me.

“What seems to be the problem?”

The siblings responded together. “Everything,” Nina said. “Nothing,” Paul said, with a polite smile.

I chuckled nervously. “I guess that covers all the possibilities.”

Paul beamed, flashing his pearly white teeth. “Ha! That’s funny!”

He pointed his finger at me, nodding in recognition of my joke.

Age and Night!

This was bad. If I didn’t know any better, I would have said he was a child comedian putting on a parody of an eastern Neangelical.

I pointed to Nina. “You’re Nina, right?” I asked, just to be sure. “Uh, and I apologize for eavesdropping,” I added.

Nina nodded.

“His sister?” I asked.

Nina rolled her eyes and palmed her face. “Usually, but… lately?” she shook her head, “I’m not sure anymore.”

“Let’s get down to business, I’m a neuropsychiatrist—”

Nina jolted up in her seat. “—You’re a psychiatrist?”

“Yes,” I nodded, “and also a neurologist. I work with the mind in both its mental and physical aspects”

Nina flicked her eyes over to her brother and then back to me. “Please, we need your help. Ever since—”

Hunching forward, I looked the young woman directly in the eyes. They were a lovely hazel-green.

“—I’m here to help,” I said.

Disease had a thousand and one different causes, and just as many names. Viruses. Bacteria. Parasites. Plague. Pestilence. Pathogen. Infection.

Contagion.

Of them all, it was the most apt for what I was seeing.

As Brand once told me, the word “contagion” came from roots meaning “to touch together”. This was a reflection of primitive beliefs regarding the nature of disease. In the deep past, illness was seen as a form of corruption; a taint, capable of spreading with the slightest touch. This was true of conjunctivitis, but not of most diseases.

Man’s imagination is both his oldest ally and his oldest nemesis. When it rose to excess, imagination led people astray, sometimes to disastrous ends. In other respects, however, maybe the problem was that the ancients simply hadn’t been imaginative enough. Computer viruses were a kind of disease, yet they involved neither flesh nor blood—at least, not yet. But disease could be even more abstract. Ideas could be disease. Language certainly was one—and, in that respect, it was the only disease whose vaccine I would never endorse.

Even belief could be a disease.

I looked into the boy’s eyes, and then at his sister, and then back to him again.

Nina’s loss was palpable.

It was strange, in a way, despite the vast differences between my infection and Lopé's, our prognoses were the same.

Transformation.

For the first time, I felt like I might have gotten the lesser of two evils—though there was still plenty of time to convince me otherwise.