Eventually I find myself back in Dr. Citali’s office, now in one of those dreadful scratchy scrub tops. My shirt and vest are too close-fitting to wear while the newly-applied medication absorbs into my skin. I put them away in my satchel and pull out the jar that used to hold burn ointment. “Would you like to add this to your terrarium?” I ask Dr. Citali, showing her the bluebell I collected.
“Oh! Yes, I don’t have that specimen. That would be wonderful!” she takes it gratefully, holding it close to admire it. My breathing is noticeably easier, but she isn’t willing to call this a win yet. “We will want to monitor your lungs for another day or so,” she adds as she goes back behind her desk. “And we’ll keep an eye on Takuto as well to judge how his recovery is going. His lungs could collapse back to some degree.” She places the bluebell into her terrarium and then turns back to me with a smile. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
This private moment, with her in a good mood already, seems to be the best time to try to understand what exactly is going on here. And I don’t mean with my lungs. I mean with Dr. Citali and me. “So… am I just a patient? Or am I an experiment? A potential paper? Or… is there something else? Why did you risk yourself? You didn’t go fetch Takuto when his job went sideways, did you? Why did you go out after me?”
Dr. Citali sits down so that we’re on the same level and answers, “All those things can be true, Mariah. You are a patient, and while I’m not normally a medical doctor, that is one of my roles here. I don’t want to see you or anyone else die.” She taps the notes on her desk with her pen as she continues, “You also have this uncanny ability. Yes, that is interesting. I’d love to know more about this. Maybe this can help us interact with this planet.” She pauses for a moment. “And why did I go out to save you? If I had known that Takuto and Arx had gotten poisoned so badly by the miasma, yes, I would have gone out. But I didn’t. We found Takuto stumbling back into Data Haven without Arx. But I had your blood work. So I knew that—I thought that you were going to die.”
She looks at me, and I simply look back, not saying anything. Sometimes silence can prod a person more than words can. I feel like there’s still more to this than she’s said. What is driving her? “Back at the Stepdaughters of Chiron, we don’t have domes. We try to work with the local environment as best we can. Sometimes it doesn’t work out so well. I have a younger sibling—” She stops, then corrects herself. “I had a younger sibling who died of miasma poisoning. So I’m doing everything I can to try to mitigate those effects. But I’m not a computer scientist, I’m not a medical doctor… I’m not even really a chemist!”
“What are you?” I ask. The briar beast control, she said that was someone else’s research. Same with the hallucination-causing miasma blocker.
“I’m a xenobotanist. I’m more interested in cataloging and understanding all these different forms of life,” she says, gesturing at the terrarium.
“Oh, did you make this yourself?” I pull out the zine she gave me.
“Yes, I created that. I’ve been trying to pass it around here. Chloe took one, at least. So anyway, that’s why. The more people die from the environment, the more people won’t want to work with it.”
People dying from ecoterrorism are also not going to help that cause. “Then maybe your goals would be better served with an approach that better fits your skill set—which does not seem to be blowing up factories. It seems to be understanding the plants and fungus around here.” I flip my sketchbook to the page where I jotted down information I got from the computer when we returned to the network node the day after the job. “This was the installation that was hit by your virus. This xenofungicide factory is complete rubble now. It nearly took down its dome. Killing people is not how we get people to live with the environment. They need to still be alive for that.”
Dr. Citali glances at my notes. “You haven’t seen the factory. This code indicates, yes, it was definitely shut down.”
“The new reports said explosion—”
“Yes, this isn’t the first time Morgan would lie about the extent of our activities,” she says, dismissing anything I learned from Yushi.
“But the number of witnesses!”
“The reported number of witnesses, yes.”
“If a factory is rubble or not rubble, that distinction, you can’t fake that.”
“Yes, that is a binary that exists. Rubble or not rubble, I agree. But this virus was designed to overload, to damage equipment and trigger a shutdown. Not to blow something up. If the factory did blow up, if that actually happened—”
“You’re going to blame Morgan again,” I say, disappointed. This is exactly the defense she used when she talked me into doing the job to begin with!
“We designed the virus assuming he was following the Unity Project protocols for this kind of chemical production. If he’s cutting corners on this, he’s putting his people in a dangerous environment.”
“Those protocols are thirty years old,” I object.
“Yes, well, he doesn’t have better protocols, it sounds,” she counters.
“How do you know? You haven’t gathered that information.”
“Well, when we get the analysis from Roze, perhaps we’ll know what the protocols are. But it seems like these results inform us that they’re not following those protocols. That they’re putting their workers’ lives at risk everyday. Right? It’s not just what we did. Our virus was something that caused the machine to spin too fast, like a washing machine getting out of control that then shuts down. They don’t have the shutdown trigger, it seems. They just let it keep spinning until it hits something or somebody. This virus was not designed to blow up the factory. But there are a lot of things one can do with a factory that cause any number of issues with it to trigger an explosion.”
I believe her. And I believe that she thinks what she’s doing is justified. But Morgan’s sloppiness isn’t license for ours. “Now that you understand this, now that you understand that you can’t rely upon those protocols, will you not make any more of these virus attacks on these facilities? You’ve just admitted that you can’t be sure what will happen. You said that you were willing to do whatever it takes to get people to live with Chiron. Maybe whatever it takes is not just what you can accomplish by sitting in this vault here. It includes converting people’s hearts and minds, and not just mine. Other people need to see this stuff.” I brandish her zine in support of my position. “For people to understand that xenofungus is not the enemy, you need to talk to them. Or not you, but somebody who understands needs to talk to them. It might not be as fast as blowing something up, but it will be more lasting. You need…” I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but it’s true. “You need a PR person.”
“Maybe… maybe you’re right,” she allows. “Maybe we would win over some more people with an information campaign… a virus that spreads this zine. We don’t have the facilities at the Stepdaughters of Chiron to mass produce this…”
“No, but injecting data into Morgan’s systems,” I suggest.
“Oh yes, injecting data. They’re going to love that in Data Haven, putting together this virus.”
“Delivery is not going to be as easy, though,” I point out. “They definitely know that we did a lot of stuff at that network node.”
“You’re right. You’ll need to be inside a dome at a communications hub with the right physical access to inject this.” She smiles and nods her head slowly. “That’s a great idea, Mariah. I think there might just be a home for you with the Stepdaughters of Chiron. We need new ideas like this. We try not to be just a group of scientists, but for better or worse, most of the decisions are made by scientists. Which doesn’t always work out.”
“How are the Stepdaughters of Chiron set up?” I ask, trying to understand how someone like me could fit in there. “Here there are ‘datajacks’ but somehow nobody is in charge. Morgan Industries has a board of some kind, but Morgan himself seems to have some sort of personal power, as well. Are the Stepdaughters of Chiron made up of people all across the spectrum, from all different walks of life?”
“We do have a variety of people. It’s all people who care about the environment of Chiron and working with it. A lot of those people are environmental scientists of one flavor or another, right? For example, Dr. Skye, our mutual friend—”
“Deirdre,” I correct her. I haven’t addressed Deirdre by her title since… ever. And starting to do so now would only emphasize the difference in our educational backgrounds.
“Deirdre, yes. She’s currently the director. She’s been in charge for some time, and she’s been reasonably effective at getting people to work together to make progress on these goals. So much of what we have to do is developing new technology. That’s why so many scientists have so much clout. But there are a number of people who are a little bit more like you. Activists, you might say, who are trying to convince others that these things are a good idea. The problem is, it’s hard to get from point A to point B in order to find new people to convince. Sometimes, they all just end up in other spaces simply arguing with each other. We could use a great way to direct their energy. By having them put together more zines like this, but in a format we can get digitally here in Data Haven to inject into the Morgan domes, we can reach a lot more people.”
Dr. Citali’s eyes drift off to stare at a wall, and it’s clear wheels are turning behind them. She yanks herself back to the thread of conversation. “There are also plenty of people who fabricate things, work on things. There are people—not unlike Cleve, actually—who go out into the wilderness. But it’s difficult, right, because of how toxic it is long term. But you’re right. A, as you say, PR person spreading this information would be valuable. We have a limited amount of computing ability at the Stepdaughters of Chiron. Data Haven has the most computing capability of all the places we’re familiar with, I think. Possibly not as much as the University.”
That’s a lot of information, way more than I had before. And more importantly, that she’s open to a new approach makes me trust her more. “Okay, well, maybe once we’ve recovered my medical data from my cryopod, I’ll be able to help you in more ways than just being able to talk to people,” I offer.
“Yes. We do need that. Getting that baseline of your blood chemistry will be extremely valuable for understanding your condition. We can’t really do any more advanced tests here until we get that.” It sounds like there’s a barrage of tests and tissue samples in my future. I guess I’ll be spending more of my time in the medical center after this next job. Maybe it could use a mural. “If we had you back at the Stepdaughters of Chiron, it would be different. We have a more advanced chemical lab set up there.”
“How far away is that?” I ask. “You said it’s through the Monsoon Jungle. Is that a couple days? A week?”
“It’s a longer journey. Closer to a week or two unless you have a faster way to do it. But no one is going to build a road through there any time soon. It can be dangerous.”
Memories cloud her eyes, and I figure I should take my leave rather than risk treading on anything delicate with further questions. I should probably go rest for a while until all this medicine is absorbed. I stand up. “All right, well, thanks for helping with my lungs, Dr. Citali, and—”
“Please, call me Marina.”