Girl Minus X

Chapter 3-1

Dany cards her way into the lab. On her mind: the prison-hospice, her aunt, the Ministry of Child Services, the empty cupboards in her kitchen, the two months of rent past due, the poetry exam in English Studies on Friday, the food bank closing early today and worse, the oral presentation she has to give tomorrow, with Liz ­Greene, in spite of the fact that Dany does not ever open her mouth in class …

Dany lays her forehead against the cold locker door, lets the cool seep into her brain. Screwed. With her aunt locked up, that’s what she is. Entirely, endlessly, screwed. For half a second she thinks of Antoine – Papa, he called himself. Anger tightens her chest and Dany shuts the thought down right there.

She runs through her padlock combo, eighteen, twenty-nine, forty-seven, shoves her bag in and twirling the lock shut, heads into the lab.

Dany passes a dozen researchers without so much as a nod. She makes a beeline for Jasper. As usual, his keyboard looks like it’s about to be buried under an avalanche of research papers and old candy wrappers.

Under the fluorescent lights, she makes out the peppering of grey in his tightly coiled black hair. Then, glancing down, she sees the biologist’s hands, curled like crabs on the keyboard. His fingers dance over the keys.

Here, at this desk, everyone but Jasper fades like background noise.

In Dany’s book, Jasper is okay.

Jasper is the one who taught her how to hold a test tube properly. Now, she can grip the tube and remove its cap with the fingers of the same hand. He lent her a book about Harry Harlow and monkeys and wire-and-cloth mothers – about trauma and the human brain. And just last week, he showed her how to do Yates’s correction. Now her P values are tighter than her high school math teacher’s.

At the BioGENEius lab, variables don’t lurk in stairwells. Here, variables are neatly contained in equations and controlled. At least, all except for the virus – which nothing can contain or control.

Jasper nods at a pair of take-away cups, but doesn’t raise his eyes from the screen.

“Thanks,” Dany says and takes a sip. A half a beat later, she’s swearing. A mouthful of sugary tea sprays across the papers on his desk. Still, Dany can’t help but smile. “You want some tea with your sugar?” she asks him.

Jasper absently dabs at the papers with a tissue. “What can I say? Sweet tooth.” He glances at her. “Yours is the other one.”

Dany turns the other cup, sees her initials and takes a sip. Synth, black, just the way she likes it. Dany glances at her mentor. But today, Jasper looks different. Stress lines have settled in by the corners of his mouth. Finally, Jasper pushes his chair back from the computer. As he faces her full on, she drops her gaze.

“I’ve got good news and bad,” he tells her. “Start with the good?”

Jasper tries to catch her eye, but Dany takes in his shoes – those old beaten sneakers he wears, day after day, and that never look like they’ll last out the hour. His shoes put the faint scent of gym locker in the air. That and Lysol.

“Well, take a look,” he says, nodding at his computer screen.

Dany glances again at the screen, but what she sees is a lonely planet, suspended in a strange liquid. Only, no, this is no planet …

“So, that’s it?”

“Well, this,” Jasper says, “is in its own way both good news and bad.”

“The virus is good news?” Dany asks.

“No, not exactly,” Jasper says. “We isolated this from an outbreak at the hospice. So, what you’re seeing is a mutation in the virus, a new strain. Maybe we’ll be the ones to name it.”

Dany’s heart skips a beat and she turns to the screen once more. But the thing is tiny. A little bumpy sphere, like a meteor or a rocky moon. Jasper gives over the keyboard and Dany adjusts the image. For a second, it’s almost as if she is looking at an ovum, a human egg. Dany glances from his screen to the wet lab. There, in a glove box, she can see the digital microscope he’s hooked up. Still, the whole thing makes her nervous. As if the idea of the virus is enough to infect her.

“It’s hard to imagine,” she says. “I mean, how such a tiny creature can … unmake a person, like, unmake a world.”

But Jasper corrects her. While some argue that a virus is alive, Jasper believes that a virus is a thing, no different from a chair or rock or soup ladle. “A virus,” Jasper tells her, “is just a bunch of molecules – that’s it. It’s about as capable of acting on the world as a wooden leg. I know some scientists argue differently but –”

“Aren’t we just bunches of molecules, too?” she asks.

“Think of it this way. Unlike us, a virus is at the complete mercy of its environment.”

As far as that goes, Dany and the virus have something in common.

Dany adjusts the focus, makes the virus grow so large that it takes up most of the screen. As the image sharpens, the scope’s focus finds the sweet spot and she gets her first real look at the thing. Binding proteins blossom like tiny mushrooms on its surface. Dany feels odd. She lays her hands flat against the desk to steady her gaze. A strange vertigo overtakes her. She isn’t afraid of falling, exactly, but afraid that something in her wants to fall. Looking at the virus, she is Alice, peering down a rabbit hole. The virus sings, You’re late for tea.

“Viruses are amazing,” Jasper says. “Tiny microscopic miracles.” And he tells her that the human placenta evolved from a virus. “Imagine that, the placenta, a two-pound viral envelope.”

“Um, yeah, I’d rather not,” Dany says, and flicks her gaze from the microscope feed to his shirt, the one peeking out from the folds of his lab coat. IX IN AI, she reads, but his coat obscures the rest of it.

“Don’t get me wrong. The brain is amazing, too,” Jasper tells her. “All of it, imagine – all feelings, all trauma, all memory – the work of tiny electric pulses. All of you, heart and soul, just a bunch of flickering light bulbs. Amazing, right?”

Dany doesn’t need to look at the feed to see it. Her mind has taken a perfect, precise photograph. As she looks at Jasper’s hands, she calls up the image of the broken light bulb in the stairwell. She sees the prison’s red rope, like a skinned snake. But then her mind leaps to this new thing, this new idea about the brain.

“I sing the body electric,” Dany says. A line from the poem she is supposed to write about in her English Studies exam on Friday. Does it help to know this thing about the brain? Does it? Does it help to know that all of her bad memories are just a bunch of electrical pulses? That all of her memories, like her night terrors, are really just flickering light bulbs?

Yeah, no, it doesn’t.

She tunes out Jasper then. Peering at the computer, she nods in understanding. There, in the perfectly detailed image, she finds the knowledge she’s come here for. Each person’s mind possesses an off switch, a fatal breaker. A just-in-case. And this virus – which has as much right to call itself a creature as she does – knows the trick of it. “So, can I go into the hospice?” Dany asks, her eyes on the virus. “Like, to be part of the field study with you?”

She’s been working up to this question for weeks. But yesterday, when she saw the sick prisoner at the hospice, the question became urgent. She has to get in. She has to. Soon.

The study will take her inside of the prison-hospice. Jasper doesn’t know about her aunt, imprisoned there. So he has no reason to say no. If she gets in, she can find a way to talk to Aunt ­Norah. Together, they can make a plan.

But Jasper only sighs.

She feels his eyes on her. Though her eyes are on his lab coat, she can see the subtle shake of his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, not under the best of conditions,” he tells her. “Sure, it’s a hospice, but it’s a prison-­hospice, Dany.” He shakes his head and stress lines reappear around his mouth.

Still, that isn’t a no.

But Jasper pauses, looks at her.

She senses it, there’s something more – something he doesn’t want to tell her. Dany narrows her eyes and looks at the research papers strewn on the desk, sips at her synthetic coffee. “I can handle jail,” she says with a shrug. This won’t be her first prison visit. Not by a long shot. She’s grown up visiting prisons – Antoine’s made sure of that. “I’m cleared,” she tells him. “I got myself put on the visitor list.”

Jasper turns to her sharply, and Dany studies the stubble on his chin.

She shrugs again. “It’s just paperwork.”

“Look, even if Isobel did say yes,” he says and holds up a hand, “which she won’t, the prison admin would never allow it – not now. There’s an outbreak at the hospice. It hasn’t affected the patients, the ones who have the original strain, but it’s been burning through the staff. It’s too dangerous. So, no. Not now.”

Dany looks at Jasper, the tiny frown lines around his mouth. He looks … more than worried. He looks afraid. And that makes Dany afraid, too. She doesn’t want to think about her aunt being stuck in a place so dangerous that Jasper is scared to go there. Dany pictures the prisoner she saw the day before, the one thrashing on the ground. Infected. The prone prisoner was infected with the new strain.

Version 2.0.

“Okay,” Dany says slowly, her mind ticking over. “I can’t come with you. But I can ask questions, right? I can read field reports?”

Jasper nods.

“So, is this the bad news?” she asks. Dany takes in Jasper’s mouth. The tight lines. On his forehead, a little vein throbs.

“Not quite,” Jasper says. His seat rotates, and he takes Dany in. “There’s been a small change with the timing of your experiment,” he tells her. “We’ve had to reschedule.”

“You promised,” she says flatly. “Today. We’re going to do it today.”

Jasper holds up his hands. “It’s just temporary. That’s all. Just a small delay. We’ll be moving the new virus over to the BSL-4 lab soon, really soon. That virus needs to be in a better wet lab. Honestly, if we’d had any idea, we’d have never brought the sample here … But until then? I’m sorry, no wet lab access.”

She looks from that throbbing vein to the virus. It’s easier to hear him when she’s looking away from him, focusing on a screen.

“We’ll still practise,” Jasper tells her. “We’ll get you in the blue suit and do a dry run. We can use the rat house.”

“So,” she says, “no wet lab, no hospice. But even if I can’t go in, I can ask questions, right?”