“Mariah, I’ve been looking for you!” Dr. Citali says. Her eyes dart around, and she adds, “Oh, yeah, this is my briar beast.”
I head over to join her. “How close to Data Haven are we?” I ask, puzzled to see her here.
“Still at least a day away,” she says, which matches up with the impression I’d gotten from Cleve, who is coming up behind me to join us. “I came looking for you. Are you feeling okay?” she asks with some urgency. Before I can answer, she moves her focus to the man behind me. “Has he been acting unusual in any way, Cleve?”
“Um…” Cleve considers a moment. “You know what, he has passed out a couple times.”
Dr. Citali lets out an aggravated sigh at this news. “Once,” I correct Cleve. “I passed out once in the last few days.”
The doctor’s arms are hanging at her sides, slapping lightly against her lab coat. “Your blood is—no. Well, it’s—” She’s flustered, which is unlike her, as far as my experience has been. There’s clearly something she wants to tell me, but she’s having trouble getting it out.
“Calm down; it’s fine,” I assure her, unconcerned about my health. I know why I passed out, and it hasn’t happened again since. “I’ll see you in your lab. You can do whatever tests you want then.” I turn to regard the briar beast. “But what is the deal with this? What is it doing? It looks like it’s dancing.”
“What?” The change of topic throws her, and it takes her a moment to switch mental gears. “I’m putting it through a training program.”
That’s amazing. “How?!”
“Oh, it’s a kind of complicated set of pheromones and biological manipulation.” She’s actually stuttering a bit. “Uh, that’s not something to worry about and…” Her voice trails off as she glances away again.
Ah, I think I know what’s going on with her. It must be the miasma blocker. Who knows who or what she’s seeing right now. That’s not a drug to be taken lightly. I give Dr. Citali my full attention, stepping right up to her and settling my hands on her upper arms to still them and help her focus on me. “If I’m the reason that you’re out here, then we should go back to Data Haven. There’s no reason for you to be risking yourself—exposing yourself to what’s out here—just on my behalf.” How long has she been out here looking for me? How many of those shots has she taken? How many clouds of miasma has she gone through?
My worry must get through to her, because she does calm down a bit, at least enough to pull her thoughts together. “No, it’s… you could die at any moment! Your miasma levels are a hundred times LD50. That’s a hundred times what would kill fifty per cent of people. Your heart is pumping poison.”
I drop my hands from her arms. That’s not what I was expecting her to say, but… “I am not as surprised to hear that as you might have thought I would be,” I admit with a weak chuckle.
“Did you know?” she asks. She searches my eyes for an answer, and she finds it. They must be sparkling purple now. One of these days I’ll see it for myself in a mirror. She lets out a long breath. “This is an advanced case…” she mutters.
“Have you seen this before?”
“No… but things like this,” she gestures up at my face, “that are unnaturally occurring in humans… that sounds like some sort of miasmic condition.” She sticks a hand into her coat pocket and pulls out a capped syringe. “I have an experimental antidote—”
“No!” I step back, hands up in protest.
Dr. Citali looks to Cleve. “You said he passed out, right?”
“Yeah, but he said no,” Cleve tells her, a note of warning in his voice. He’s been hanging back, but now he steps up, positioning himself a bit in front of me. Just like he did when we first met Yushi, actually. It’s a subtle defensive move, and I appreciate the support. “He said no, and he’s obviously still alive,” Cleve points out.
“I’m just—” Dr. Citali looks back to me, and pleads, “I don’t want you to die, Mariah!” Her voice cracks as she says it, but she presses on, “You could die at any moment. Look, you came to this planet to explore and to experience it, right? I don’t want you to have that experience cut short. There’s so much more you can learn. So much more you can see. So much more you can be!”
“I’m experiencing it right now,” I tell her. “And in a way that nobody else is.” I don’t disagree that I need medical monitoring. I’m fine right now, but maybe whatever’s happening hasn’t fully blossomed yet and really could be dangerous. I’ve felt the pain. I get that there are risks, and Dr. Citali is well positioned to understand them better than I do. “I’ve already told you I’m happy to go back to your lab with you. But you have to understand, I’m experiencing things that are new. And that are worth the risk. I can feel things, and I can manipulate things, and I can see things that other people don’t. I’m not willing to give that up without a fight. If I’m still up and walking with this lethal amount in me, maybe people can do this.”
I’m not just fighting her reasoning and her Hippocratic Oath, but also the hallucinogen in her system. My words seem to be getting through though. “Ah, that’s a good point…” she says. Then she turns to Cleve, apparently wanting a second opinion. “He’s been seeming fully engaged this whole time—other than the one time he passed out?”
“Well, there was the time when we were running, too,” Cleve says, throwing me under the bus. “But he said it’s from his leg injury.”
“Interesting,” Dr. Citali murmurs.
“We’d just run through a pass full of miasma, and I could barely breathe. None of us could breathe!” I say in my defense.
Dr. Citali nods. “Okay, so there might be side effects.”
“But I’m not having hallucinations the way your drugs are causing them,” I point out.
“A side effect I’m willing to live with,” she acknowledges. “And maybe yours is a side effect other people could manage as well…”
“But he generally seems okay,” Cleve reports. “Except for the whole overtaxing thing.”
“Thank you,” I tell him, glad to have some back up on this.
“So if we could analyze what’s in your blood… What would really help is if we had a baseline of your blood to compare to, from before planetfall.”
“The cryopods,” I murmur.
“I think what would help is if you put that needle away,” Cleve says pointedly.
“Oh! Right!” Cleve relaxes a bit when Dr. Citali returns it to her pocket; I’m sure he was considering it a weapon. She pulls some gum out from her other pocket and starts chewing that. It seems to help with the level of distraction she’s experiencing. I wonder what it is she’s hooked on; surely it has some side effects that she’s willing to endure for the sake of how it soothes her.
“The cryobed that I was in would have all sorts of data on me, a hundred and thirty years’ worth of monitoring my systems,” I point out.
“Yes, that would be perfect! If you could get the harddrive, Data Haven could read that.”
“I think that’s going to be tricky beyond just the ground that has collapsed in on it,” I caution her. “Morgan Industries was interested in mining work in that area, and they may have already started.” At least, that’s the impression Chiron has given me. “But, it’s certainly something we can attempt after we complete our current job.”
“Yeah, we still need to find Cor and get her back,” Cleve agrees.
“You didn’t cross paths with her, did you? Her and a couple robots?” I ask.
Dr. Citali’s eyes go wide. “Those robots were real? I thought those were just some… creatures.” They must have still been covered with quite a bit of foliage, and the hallucinogen she’s taking certainly didn’t help. She lets out another long breath. “I’m glad you’re doing well, Mariah. I just… I needed to get to you as soon as possible once your blood results came back. That was…” She shakes her head. It must have been quite a shock. “You should be dead.”
“Well, what happens at that point?” Cleve asks, ever practical. “How would you know if you had those kinds of levels? What happens before you die?”
“The symptoms of high-grade miasma poisoning? Extremely labored breathing, lowered energy levels, inability to recover from even minor wounds. People would be bedridden—like Takuto. He’s taken some pretty severe miasma poisoning. He’s young and he’ll recover some, but he’ll never be at full athletic capacity. His life is probably twenty years shorter. But he had full exposure for a long period without even a filter mask.”
“Well, that’s another reason to let me be,” I tell her. “There might be treatments that can be worked up for other people from however my system has adjusted.”
“Maybe,” she allows. “You certainly seem a lot more stable than the preventative measure that we currently have.”
“My cryopod was potentially compromised,” I remind her. “Who knows at what point that happened in the thirty years that I was asleep on this planet. But I was in a cryobed that whole time, hooked up to things whose sole purpose was to keep me alive.”
“Hmm… maybe some kind of long-term exposure therapy can normalize the physiology…” Dr. Citali starts theorizing.
Crisis averted. We can all return to Data Haven now.