“Morton,” Noelle said, “let’s just step outside, please.”
There was some shoving for a moment, some protestation. The chimpanzee seemed to be indicating that he had lots more yet to say, but by the time this was clear, he was already well out of the bedroom. Down the hall, or even downstairs.
“Guy’s a talker,” Jean-Paul murmured.
“He seems to be very tense, and he’s not terribly effective when he’s tense,” the elder Koo said. “But we believe he can give us insight into this situation, so that we can contain it more quickly. Here, use this pad.”
Jean-Paul’s handwriting had declined, just as his speaking voice had, and where he once had the handwriting of an architect, perfect little capital letters that could fit into the graph paper squares, now there were trembly smudges.
AM I GOING TO MAKE IT?
“Son… it’s true that we don’t know enough about this disease yet, but it is bacterial, and most bacteria on Earth respond to various courses of antibiotics, and this intravenous drip we’re going to hook up — Dr. Lecompte is preparing it — will at the very least slow the accelerated course of the symptoms, and it’s more than possible it will wipe out the infection entirely.”
WHAT ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE?
“Those who have come in contact with the arm?”
OR IN CONTACT WITH ME.
Some of the government types were already making their way to the door. Checking their implanted communications devices, typing out messages.
“We aren’t aware of all the mechanisms of the contagion, whether there is a specific point when the bacteria is communicable, and so it’s possible that some people are spared, or have resistance for reasons that are so far unclear. Which doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly dangerous, as in your own case. I wish the news were better. But I am very hopeful nonetheless. We need to find the arm first, and to move from there to quarantine persons who have been in contact with those who had contact with it. But, son, these things need not concern you now. You just need to get well.”
Jean-Paul could fucking tell that they had put something into the drip along with the antibiotic. A fucking antibiotic, he wasn’t stupid, he was anything but stupid, he knew that an antibiotic like that could have a powerful effect on the body, could render the body sick with its poisons, and he could almost feel himself turning green, but that wasn’t the half of it. Because he recognized now that there was also some sedative in the cocktail. His mind, free of his body, ran through a list of antipsychotic medications. Some drug company (or the CDC) had promoted the antipsychotic family of medications, he knew, more reliable for anxiety, less habit-forming, and when there was a danger that a sick person might go into a, you know, reverse-phylogenetic rage and begin strangling his family, before or after his limbs began detaching from his fucking body, then it was probably a reasonable prescription, Zebulite, fewer fucking side effects, like it might correct the nausea and diarrhea from the antibiotic; Zebulite didn’t cause the dyskinesia so common from the excess use of the fucking antipsychotic family, until you would even fucking see on some job applications No antipsychotic-related speech defects or tremors, please, you could tell, you could fucking tell sometimes, like the fucking telemarketer would call at a certain hour, like the dinner hour, and you’d be trying to have dinner with your ridiculously hot girlfriend, a video message would appear on your implanted personal messaging device, and up would pop this grainy video, and you could see the fat, unhappy woman in the message, trying to get you to deposit what little money you had left in a Chinese bank, and this unhappy woman would have the massive weight gain associated with antipsychotics; the woman would also have her tongue lolling around in her mouth, and between her Mandarin accent and the antipsychotic-related speech defects, you couldn’t understand one fucking thing that she was fucking trying to say, and on top of that, her arm seemed to be spontaneously reaching up and scratching her head, and he fucking didn’t want to buy whatever it was she was trying to sell, and it seemed fucking unpatriotic, if you asked Jean-Paul, when an American company was somehow subcontracting to bring you fucking sales pitches from Chinese nationals, especially Chinese nationals on antipsychotic medication, who were probably suffering from some complex related to the fact that they were plundering the fucking globe of its remaining wealth and creating two-thirds of its fucking carbon emissions, and Jean-Paul could feel that his interior tirade about the antipsychotics in the intravenous drip was beginning to occlude his ability to interact with the remaining humans in the room, and he took up the pad, and he attempted to write a note to Vienna Roberts, and couldn’t focus enough on the pad in order to remind her that she was fucking ridiculously hot, and he was so glad she wasn’t sick, and he was grateful to her for sticking around when everyone else was leaving, and fucking leaving him here until his limbs started detaching, like if his leg fell off of his body and started trying to escape across the room, tiptoeing out of the room, think about it: the leg could maybe get around pretty well, hopping or what have you, but the fucking leg couldn’t do anything. It would just kind of lie there trying to kick things, and maybe it could kick someone in the balls or something, but that would be about it, but once he was fucking deprived of the leg, then he was deprived of it and it could go anywhere, and he was trying to get some of this down on the pad, and he could, in the haze of antipsychotic medication, before asking for some food, like maybe they could bring him some carbs, some cannoli, and from the haze, he could hear his father’s voice asking if he had any advice on where to look for the arm, and he tried to tell him the bad news, which was that he had no idea, because, you know, he’d been quarantined since the thing fell out of the van; his father always made the mistake of presuming that young people had some kind of fucking telepathic communication, like morphic fucking resonance, like they could just communicate without even using their implanted communications devices, but if they were asking his opinion, which he was happy to give, the place to look for the arm was among the nomads, and the problem with fucking looking among the nomads was that the nomads couldn’t be trusted to stay in one place, and lots of them were missing limbs anyhow, or were carrying withered skulls or old leathery limbs from various places, things that looked like limbs, because the nomads, he thought in his antipsychotic haze, had fucking trashed the human body and no longer needed any bilateral arrangement of limbs. The nomads could make devices and fuse themselves to these devices, and mopeds, and motor scooters, and they could make their way from shady spot to shady spot, slathered in sunblock or lead-free exterior white paint, which had become the cut-rate sunblock of choice among nomads, and to them the arm would be just another totem, interesting for how it coincided with their system of beliefs but not much more than that, and for that reason, no one was liable to keep the fucking arm for very long, especially when it was trying to pinch people, harass their pets, or maybe trying to molest them or whatever; they weren’t going to sit still for the fucking arm, and they were going to try to trade it with someone, and so it just wasn’t going to be easy to chase it into the world of the nomads; Jean-Paul could see it all before him, just how hard it was going to be, and he tried to write some of this down on the pad, but despite his best intentions, this is what Vienna Roberts found on the pad when she tried to read it out to those who remained behind in the sick chamber: