The Wyrms of &alon

It was the little things that kept me going: the stride in my children’s steps when they came home happy over how they’d one on an exam; evenings out on the town with Pel; looking forward to the latest manga or game; hand-washing my car every-other weekend; the fact that there was a spot in the WeElMed parking garage bearing a plaque with my name on it. That sort of thing. I don’t think I was built to process anything bigger than a medium-large order of happiness, and if a super-sized experience of that sort came to me, I don’t think I would know how to deal with it. On the other hand, I suppose you could say that I was made for misery. Or, better yet, that misery was made for me.

I parked my car in my reserved spot in the garage. My plaque was mounted on the mosaic mural wall. There was a frilly lion-fish up and to the right of it, and a red octopus to below and to the left. The way the mosaic tiles rendered the octopus’ arms—zigzags and chevrons—made the creature seem nervous to me. And yes, as Brand once explained to me in detail, the correct word was, in fact, arms, and not tentacles. Tentacles were the long, predatory appendages squid launched at their prey to grab them and pull them in. Apparently, certain deep-sea species of squid had hooks in the suction cups on their tentacles, hooks meant to rip and rasp at the flesh of their prey, tearing it to pieces before it even reached the mollusk’s beak.

Compared to how I felt, getting rasped to death by a ravenous deep-sea squid sounded almost pleasant.

Clutching my PortaCon under my arm, I locked my car with a swipe of my hand over the sensor by the handle. Rather than take my usual route—up the stairs and across the galleria, I made my way toward the sliding steel doors of the sub-sub basement level entrance. Bright white light streamed out the doors’ glass panels.

I wanted nothing more than to feel normal again, but there wasn’t any point in trying to recoup that sense of being. Normality was an abstract proposition; an unreachable dream. Everything was coming up uncanny. My thoughts wandered even more than they usually did—and that was saying something. And then, of course, there was Andalon. I kept stopping and doing double-takes, looking back at my car to remind myself that the conversation I’d had with her on the drive over had actually happened. I’d yet to think through and fully absorb her requests and all the implications that came with them.

She wanted me to help her regain her memories. Compared to everything else, that sounded downright reasonable. But then… then, there was the matter of her “quest”.

I save people. I won’t let them be lost.

What did that even mean?

And did I even want to know?

I shuddered.

The doors slid open as I stepped within range of their sensors. The scented sterilization chemicals used in WeElMed differed from floor to floor. For the first garage level, the smell was pungent lavender. The odor wafted through the entryway as I stepped inside. I nudged my console out of its sleep with a couple taps at its screen. After a second, the screen flashed white, and the DAISHU corporate logo popped into being, signaling that my console had hooked back up to the hospital’s wireless network. The gigacorporation’s motto appeared below, spelled out in Munine characters:

Kon'nichiwa!

Beneath that was the logo of their primary Trentonian subsidiary, Prescott Pharmaceutical.

We’ll see you in health!

Several advertisements played along the edges of the screen before my console was mine to control again. For legal reasons, I and every other employee at WeElMed was required to have a console on hand while on the premises, while a different set of legal reasons prevented us from storing patient data on our personal devices. Instead, we used the consoles and tablets the hospital provided to us.

Was it inefficient? Yes. Was there any point in complaining? Nope.

I tapped on the WeElMed app icon and logged in. Aside from its use for interpersonal communication on the premises, the app kept track of our shifts and logged our work-hours, as well as provided its users with a steady supply of wellness statement pablum. The app was also the easiest place to find Werumed-san, WeElMed’s chibi mascot. The app icon itself depicted Werumed-san standing in the courtyard in front of the hospital’s world-famous entrance. Werumed-san had big brown eyes like flower disks and a slick, sprightly sweep of shining blond hair. He wore a white doctor’s coat, khaki slacks, leather loafers, and a stethoscope, with a PortaCon in hand—the miniature console itself featuring the DAISHU logo in a tiny, almost unreadable font.

A couple finger-strokes of password-entering, and I was logged in and on the job. Werumed-san saluted me before the app shrank into the background. Our mascot was just as adorable as any of the chibi mascots that DAISHU’s elite corps of graphic designers dreamed up for its myriad subsidiaries.

DAISHU…

In the beginning, when the world was young, the Daishu Telecommunication Corporation was but a moderately successful Munine manufacturer of telephones and radios. By modern standards, it was a dark age. Cars had yet to earn their mag-lev wings. The Tchwangan government had yet to be privatized. Countries were passing civil rights legislation. And, scandalously, refrigerators didn’t have AI, and that meant there was no way for them to admonish you for having failed to adhere to the diet plan you’d programmed into the machine a week or two beforehand.

As I said: a dark age.

Then, the Daishu Telecommunication Corporation said, “LET TELEVISION BE,” and all was light.

Although authoritarian regimes generally made for good bedfellows with large industries, the pieties of the Trentonian Prelatory had a sufficiently predatory bent to them that many of our home-grown business interests preferred to cut their losses and moved across the sea to Mu and its more liberal economic environment. They couldn’t have known that they were swimming directly into the mouth of the beast. The DAISHU leviathan swallowed them one by one. The film industry fell first. Given that some eighty percent of the Trentonian film industry had expatriated itself, this was hardly surprising. The electronics companies were the next to fall, but no one batted an eye. DAISHU was just diversifying its portfolio. A line was crossed, however, when they came for the publishing houses, and the steady trickle turned into an unstoppable torrent. It sucked down the railroads and the airports, and from there to the manufacturers that filled them: trains, planes, automobiles. Then came the arms manufacturers, and the leviathan spun itself a cocoon of military contracts and subcontracts. Not long after that, the all-consuming monopoly emerged from its pupa and donned its final form.

On paper DAISHU was just an insurance company. In practice, however, it was only a handful of buy-outs short of godhood in corporate form. DAISHU had ruled supreme over the world since my grandparents’ day, excepting those places the company considered too poor or dark-skinned to be worth ruling over. They were in the food we ate, the air we breathed, and the entertainment we loved. They were in the secrets we whispered to one another in the dark of night, when we thought no one was listening.

DAISHU was the eschaton of our age. Its logo was omnipresent. It was on the stem-cell-grown organs printed for transplant recipients. It was present at the nano-scale in the nucleotides of patented bovine gene-lines—engineered to secrete chocolate milk, so as to outcompete the Maikokan cocoa industry. The DAISHU logo was inscribed on fiber-optic cables’ protective sheaths. It gleamed proudly on the trellises of our mag-lev highways and municipal monorail stations. It was sewed in a tiny font on the undersides of your bedsheets, and it was engraved at the foot of your coffin, barely noticeable, but there all the same.

Life would have been simpler if DAISHU was just another all-powerful, amoral corporate juggernaut, making calculi out of peoples’ lives in its wanton pursuit of new markets and higher profit margins. But it wasn’t. They built their products to last. They put additives into the water that supplied iodine and fluorine, and kept most forms of cancers from metastasizing. Their researchers had figured out how to make room temperature superconductors when I was still in diapers, and they would probably come out with cold fusion any day now. They wielded guilt and cuteness like a pair of +6 anarchic daggers with bleed enchantments in such a way that the populace had no choice but to act responsibly toward the environment. They did a huge amount of good, and they did it with panache, and hardly a day went by where I wasn’t thankful all the way to my bones that, at the very least, our all-powerful corporate overlords weren’t Trentonian.

They could also copyright your genome and have you arrested for trying to spread it without their consent. They had arms deals with every government, insurgency, and paranoid uncle in the world. Every job or home or school or surgery you ever had, you had only because DAISHU chose to permit it. They’d solved the puzzle of the human soul. They had an algorithm for it, now. They knew you before you knew yourself. Through data aggregates such as shopping habits, your media posts, and the reviews you left for books that you only sort-of liked, they deduced your secrets and scried your fantasies. They sketched out your future, and then adjusted their models accordingly. And I should know; I did a research project on it in college. It was part of a course on Moral Philosophy in the Age of DAISHU.

They also assassinated people.

So it goes.

While I stood in the hallway lost in thought, a warning message popped onto my console’s screen. Had my console not beeped in the process, I might not have noticed it.

All personnel are expected to wear face masks. Dispensers have been placed by the entrances. If you do not already have an F-99 or better mask on hand, please take one for yourself by scanning your chip.

I stared at the message and scratched my head, feeling lightheaded as my focus returned to my surroundings. Someone bumped into me from behind, and the impact knocked my console out of my hands, though I managed to grab it before it hit the ground.

For a second, I froze, and then I scuttled away and pushed myself up against the corridor wall as flushly as I could manage. I looked around, trying to find who’d collided with me, but I couldn’t tell.

There were just so many people.

I was in a lavender-scented war-zone, or, perhaps, a music video gone wrong. Level B2 was crawling with activity. Ordinarily, you’d see a couple people idling here or there, maybe talking to a friend or doing something on their console. But the situation before me was completely different. Everything was in motion. It was like the Dressfeldt shooting all over again.

Nearly everyone I saw who was in medical dress had their eyes hopping back and forth between the flow of the personnel around them and the details on their devices and the. Nurses in skirts—or scrubs, if they were men—guided dollies and wheeled refrigerators down the halls like container ships making their way through the bay. They were filled to the brim with what could only be described as weapons for a coming war. Water, saline, corticosteroids, analgesics, vasopressors, antibiotics for opportunistic secondary infections, synthetic interferon, and so much more. Urgency and anxiety were thick in the air. I could see it in people’s faces. It was like the barometric pressure had suddenly spiked.

A storm was coming. Maybe even a siege.

Then, there was also the fact that B2 was primarily a laboratory level. Though it wasn’t entirely bereft of patients—especially of the kind that was scheduled for a diagnostic test or radiological therapy—B2 was, for the most part, the stomping grounds of our pathology and chemistry departments.

I nearly had a panic attack right then and there, but I managed to stop myself. Panic attacks tended to cause hyperventilation, and, being infected, the last thing I wanted to do was go around breathing potentially infectious breaths like a toxic old locomotive.

Fudge.

I was so scared, I was scared of being scared.

Maybe it was just the initial wave of disbelief wearing off, but I realized that, once again, in trying to make things better, I’d made them worse.

Even though I was pretty sure that I’d gotten infected when Aicken had spat at me, I still didn’t know how this disease spread. For everyone’s safety, it was best that I assumed the worst and acted as if it was airborne, in which case…

Dread hollowed out the bottom of my stomach.

…every single person around me was potentially at risk.

My instincts tore me in two different directions. Part of me wanted to run out and lock myself in my car. But the more I thought about it, the worse the that decision seemed. I’d go stir crazy. My worries about Merritt alone would be enough to whip me into a frenzy. I’d probably start calling everyone on my contacts list and start ranting about everything that I’d seen and how I was scared out of my mind, and then I’d get them worried about me (and probably everything else) and they’d try to come get me and—

—I shuddered.

And there’d be no hope of finding any answers.

I can’t believe I’m even considering this…

If I was at work, at least here I could be useful; maybe, I could even start to understand what was happening to me. And, as long as I could get a darn good face mask—or two, or twelve—and as long as I kept my distance from others, there was a chance I wouldn’t pose a risk to them.

Or maybe I was just lying to myself.

Ugh.

When this was over, I was going to need to talk to have a long conversation with our priest.

Looking around, I immediately noticed the mask dispenser that now stood by the door. The dispenser was a tall column of gray plastic, spanned by a vertical window that let you see how much remained of the densely packed stack of face-masks within. Signs on either side of the dispenser indicated the masks were for hospital personnel only (and were mandatory for them). A colorful diagram on the dispenser showed Werumed-san demonstrating how to properly don one, step by step. As with everything else nowadays, it only worked after I waved my hand over the chip-scanner within it.

Out popped my mask. It was a step above the usual flimsy blue masks worn by most of our personnel. This thing was high quality. Except for a thin strip of gray running around the periphery of where the mask met the face, the mask was almost perfectly see-through. Pale wisps covered its translucent surface where a handful of stray strands broke free from the rest of the weave. The material felt fibrous to the touch. It must have been a synthetic compound of some sort. The letters “F-99” were printed in black letters on the gray strip, and there were two very-much-not-see-through pairs of straps for securing it to the head. The mask had an unusual smell to it, though not an unpleasant one. It was almost… savory.

And it wasn’t good enough.

I wanted two, just to be safe.

I swept my hand over the dispenser’s scanner, but a light flashed red.

An automated voice spoke: “You already have a mask. Please conserve masks so that others may get one.”

“Fudge!”

I tried again, but the result was the same: “You already have a mask. Please conserve masks so that others may get one.”

Stupid machine!

Behind me, a voice snapped: “Hey, buddy, move outta the way!”

With a startled yelp, I stepped away from the dispenser as quickly as I could. Stashing my personal console into my coat pocket, I darted over to the nearest console dispensary, waved my chip over the scanner, picked up a work console, and logged into its copy of the WeElMed app. Werumed-san eagerly marched in place as the app updated my case-load and patient status list. As I waited, my thoughts wandered once again—this time, to Andalon’s words.

I can keep people from being destroyed. That’s why you saw that bad man last night. He was gonna get eated by the darkness, but… I saved him.

And I remembered what she’d said after my response:

I put him inside you.

Call it macabre curiosity, or call it a desperate plea for something—anything—to anchor my unreal experiences to concrete reality, but… I had to check on Aicken.

Another item to add to my to-do list.

Clearing my throat nervously—might I be spreading the Nalfar’s?—I entered the stairwell and began to climb. Obviously, the situation was only going to get worse as I got closer to the ground floor, because that’s where the primary intake was located. The real question was: just how much worse is it going to get?

I guess I’ll find out soon enough…