Doctor Guest sat and drummed his gloved fingers on the clear Perspex table of the interview room. His seat creaked underneath his as he shifted his weight around, the biohazard suit uncomfortable and hot. It all seemed so unnecessary, but there were still some people who doubted his abilities. Mostly, there were people who sold medicine.
Or at least, they used to sell medicine. Their reign was now long past.
The guard had said he’d be ten minutes, long enough for Doctor Guest to “get ready”. The truth was that Guest didn’t time to get ready. Getting ready would imply that, in some way, his ability could be switched on or switched off, that he somehow could stop hearing all the tiny little voices that had been his constant companions since he was a child. The tiny little voices that he had learnt secrets from, the tiny little voices that he had betrayed.
Sometimes, he wished that he did need to “get ready”. But he didn’t. And even now, two miles above The Dungeon, he could hear them. They knew he was here. And they were angry.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” said Guest, trying once more to straighten himself out and get comfortable in his seat.
The guard opened the door slowly, his own biohazard suit making his movements awkward. He lumbered in, holding a sealed petri dish gingerly in the thick, rubber clad fingers of both hands. He was nervous. It had been years since anything came out of the dungeon, and the pale young man behind the greasy visor of the hazmat suit had probably never heard of half the things that were prisoners here. He had probably never been ill a single day in his adult life either, and all because of Guest and what he had done.
“Put it on the table,” said Guest. The suit made his voice echo. He would be glad when he didn’t need to use his voice to talk. He hated the way that he sounded using human words.
The guard gingerly put down the petri dish. “Shall I … shall I open it?”
“No, probably best not to,” Guest replied, with what should have been an inaudible sigh rattling around inside the hazmat suit’s cork-shaped helmet. “I’ll do it once you’re outside.”
“Outside?” asked the guard, his voice trembling just a little. Guest guessed that was the first VIP the guard had ever dealt with. “That’s not the protocol, Sir, I …”
Guest clasped the petri dish in his own gauntlet clad fingers.
“Son,” he replied, “I wrote that protocol. I also wrote the protocol on how often these hazmat suits need to be tested. It got rewritten a few months later, to cut costs. So, if you’re happy that the accountants know more than me about how to deal with this stuff, stick around. If on the other hand …”
Guest left the sentence hanging in the air as the guard scuttled, crab like, out of the room, closing the door behind him. Guest counted to sixty, just in case the guard recovered his courage and returned, but he didn’t.
“Thank God for that,” muttered Guest, pulling off the thick hazmat gloves before releasing the neck clips on the helmet. There was a hiss as the filtered air escaped. Guest took a few deep breaths, tasting the stale air of the interview room. He felt nervous. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible, he started to convince himself that their voices, the tiny voices, had gotten louder without the helmet.
Gripping the lid of the petri dish, Guest twisted, and let diphtheria loose into the air for the first time in almost a decade.
He waited. There were no words, but with whatever passed for body language in the microbiological world, Guest could sense the diphtheria stretching out, filling the space, like a long haul traveler finally arriving at their destination.
Finally, it spoke.
“Are we alone?”
Diphtheria’s voice rattled around in Guest’s head like pennies in a tin. It was so much louder, close up. He had forgotten, as impossible as it should have been, he had forgotten. Parts of his brain that had been dormant for years awoke with a start, and all the tiny voices grew louder in an instant. Guest focused, remembering instinctively all the old techniques. Remembering how to control it, how to marshal his thoughts above the cacophony of the microscopic world.
“Yes,” he replied, his own voice booming in his head. “This is a clean room, there’s just us here.”
“I can hear the others,” replied the germ cloud. It tickled the edge of the only door, bumping against it like a fly against a pane of glass. Guest couldn’t see it, but some other set of senses told him where it was and what it was doing. It was its very nature, the inescapable purpose of the thing. It wanted to spread, to breath, breed, consume, and grow. He envied the germ its simple honesty.
“Yes, we can hear them, but they can’t hear us. I used a room just like this, back in the beginning. It’s safe, you can trust me.”
Diphtheria drifted back across the room, settling back around its dish. Somehow, Guest knew that the germ was sulking.
“The others don’t sound like us,” said the cloud. Germs always referred to themselves in the collective. There was no I, no me. There was only us, and by contrast, only them. Another beautifully simple conceit that Guest envied. He had never found his own place either in the world of men or the world of germs. He was an alien in both, a singular I, a singular me, who could never be anything else. Guest had never been “we”.
“No,” replied Guest, “That’s because you are the last. You’re the last diphtheria in the world.”
“We don’t understand,” replied the germ cloud. “Where are the others?”
“Cured,” replied Guest. “Gone.”
He waited. Mortality, worse extinction, was not a concept easily communicated across the gulf between man and microbe.
“You?” asked the cloud. The tiny myriad particles had settled back down inside the dish now.
“No,” replied Guest. “Not me, but people who used my research, my discoveries, my medicines. People who used me.”
The cloud said nothing in response, at least not in words or microscopic actions that Guest’s strange, wild talent could translate into human thoughts, human words, human concepts. It was moments like this when Guest still found his power frightening, when he had to face that reality that for all his vaunted ability to speak to germs and microbes and virii, there were words, concepts, for which there was no human equivalent.
“Your … fault.” said the cloud. Guest could feel a pressure behind his eyes, a familiar migraine as he brain slowly cooked in his skull. It felt like coming home, and he indulgently wished that he could sneeze, or cough, or feel the damp rattle of mucus on his chest.
“Yes,” he answered. “My fault. I was a fool. I wanted to create a harmony, a world where man did not fear illness, where we understood …” he began to blather, his talent breaking down as he fought to translate his thoughts.
Eventually, Guest’s guilt found its voice. The story did not need to be told, the explanations did not need to be made. Guest felt himself move into the collective mind of the germ cloud, to a place beyond his so human concept of right and wrong. To a place where there was only life, only growth, and all other things were not the purpose of “we”. All other things, guilt and betrayal and sadness included, were something only “they” experienced.
“I am sorry,” said Guest, breaking the link. He realized he had been holding his breath. “Can you forgive me?”
“We must grow,” was the only reply.
Guest smiled. “Yes,” was his simple reply.
Taking the petri dish in his hands, he lifted it to his mouth. There was a think mucus spread inside it, the meager food given to the dungeon’s microscopic prisoners. Guest breathed deep, and felt the diptheria hit his lungs immediately.
It felt like an embrace.
