Chapter Text
Kane has not been himself lately. Kane is not himself as I knew him and I do not know how well I want to know this creature called Kane. Kane is a new self.
I think I’ve gone through several new selves.
I can’t be sure of anything so I don’t linger on the unknowns. I am a biologist. At one time I would have been disgusted by my own apathy, by my willful turning of a blind eye in the face of life’s complexities. The mystery now bores me. It’s grown stale. I’m tired of always picking at threads and then being left with nothing when I’ve unspooled the world.
Whatever Kane is, it’s solid. I can work with that.
Still, the scientist in me can’t be completely laid to rest, so I find myself idly studying him during the week and a half or so we've been here, taking notes in my mind. He has a rudimentary vocabulary and at times his pronunciation and syntax is odd, but he is almost always comprehensible. I believe he shares many of my husband’s memories but they are fragmented and sometimes confuse him terribly so there is no knowing the breadth of them; maybe he keeps quiet when he doesn’t understand a recollection. Maybe he doubts them. I don’t have enough data. He seems to have some passive desire to be near me though his affect is rather flat so sometimes it’s difficult to gauge his emotions; despite his apparent albeit somewhat muted enjoyment of my company, he is very reticent. Shy, one could say. I’m not sure if he thinks I may do him harm. I will need to gain his confidence; I already have his trust, or so I think, given he walked through that place to find me, and is even more reclusive when I’m not around. Nobody else can get any more out of him.
I try not to feel smug about that. I can claim no real possession of this being, no matter whose face he wears.
I think he does not know who he is. It must be confusing, being the involuntary, accidental clone of a dead man who gave no directions other than to find me, and what a disappointment I’ve been; I haven’t any answers for him. He is a split, contradictory being. On the one hand I get the sense he has a very real idea of who Kane was, in a superficial sense at least, and what a human is. On the other hand he has undeniably alien characteristics. This might all be well and good, but it is apparent that the duality disturbs him.
It’s his self-repulsion I find most human. Had he shown no disgust for his existence I may not have had the strength to find the bitter kernel of empathy I’ve managed to dig up. I think he frightens himself. He doesn’t know even what he is, and no one can help.
Sometimes I am cruel with him. Sometimes I don’t realize I’ve been cruel until much later, when he does something to remind me he’s some significant percent human-like. Kane-like.
Though his vitals are stable and he is not, according to the team of specialists who daily studies him, contaminating any living matter around him, he continues to undergo occasional mutation. He reverts back to what I’ve come to think of as the default, that is, Kane, eventually, but it sometimes takes days. I have theories about this but it can’t be proven. They are based on my own experience with my double. Perhaps these doppelgangers undergo a kind of external gestation period where they learn not only the hardware; that is, the parent’s DNA sequencing, but the software too, that is, the cultural, social aspects of humanity. The language, the gestures, the expressions — all those little, crucial details. I think that Kane’s double spent enough time around the original to be able to survive their separation, but only just; he was not done gestating. And now he can never finish. He will always be a half-formed thing and his very genetic makeup rails against that, strives for change, completion, mastery. Utter subsumption of the parent, or model.
This is all speculative. All I know is what I observe.
Today what I hear when I knock on his door is shuffling and dry-heaving. This is not uncommon. We have small, separate bedrooms right next to each other. We are being quarantined. I am not so naive as to believe either of us will ever leave this place. I don’t care as much as I thought I would, as much as I would have before.
“Kane,” I say. I rap my knuckles sharply on the door. I don’t have much patience for him. “Open the door.”
Behind me stand two doctors. Their fields do not yet have names as they specialize in the very specific phenomenon that is Area X. Every morning we check on him. I insist on being present, and though at first they begrudged the intrusion, now they appreciate what little calming effect I have on him. What little control I command.
We hear a moan. More retching. “Now?” he calls. He sounds pitiful.
“Yes, right now,” I say. “It’s time for your check-up. Let’s see if we can help you.”
We hear the toilet flush and then the sink runs for a second. Good. That means he threw whatever it was up into the toilet, at least. It was larvae, once. He was pale and shocked to the point of paralysis all day. Stared at walls for hours, shaking, mumbling. Nothing consoled him.
He has a very insistent delusion that his insides are rotting.
I can’t blame him, given the things that sometimes come out of him.
Kane opens the door. I’ve tried to think up a new name for him but it was my husband’s last name anyway so it already feels impersonal enough. I don’t have the sensibilities for that kind of sentimentality. Until he indicates otherwise, I’ll call him Kane.
I entertained the notion of dubbing him Abel, but it was really the other way around, wasn’t it?
He’s glowing with sickness. Actually glowing a little, a greenish-white pallor. It looks ghastly. His hair is matted down with sweat and he won’t meet our eyes, just stands hunched in the doorway with his arms wrapped around his middle, wincing. He’s shivering.
“What’s the matter?” I say. The two doctors let me lead the introductions. They haven’t worked out how best to engage him.
Kane moves his head slowly back and forth like a blind cow. “Don’t feel good,” he mutters.
“I can tell that much,” I say. “What specifically.”
“Belly…’s moving.”
“Were you throwing up?” I asked.
He nods shamefacedly as if I’m going to scold him. I’m not, I never have. If he can feel my disgust, it’s nothing compared to his own, he’ll have to live with it. And mine diminishes all the time. More and more I pity, if I feel at all. Mostly I’m just null.
“Gasoline,” he mutters.
“What?”
“‘M throwing up g...gasoline,” he says, covering his mouth as he hiccups. His face blanches. I reach out and touch the sleeve on his shoulder just barely, with my fingertips, and he responds as though pushed, stumbling back into the room. I step inside and pick up the bucket that sits beside his twin bed. It’s a permanent fixture. I hand it to him.
Kane turns away and vomits, his shoulders shaking. I smell petrol.
The two doctors follow us. They wear hazmat suits and carry bags of instruments I don’t presume to know the exact function of.
“Kane,” I say. “Sit on the bed.”
Kane sits, which forces him to face us. God, he looks miserable. I step forward and peer into the bucket.
“Yes, that looks like gasoline alright.” I turn to the doctors. “Go on. I expect you’ll be wanting to study the invalid’s puke? I know that’s what really gets you guys going. Myself, I like a cup of coffee at least, before I’m elbows deep in vomit, but to each their own.”
One of them actually snorts and covers it with a cough. The other glares. She doesn’t appreciate my attitude but I feel somewhat entitled to it and I think most of the employees here agree as I am left mostly to my own devices, so long as I cooperate and help with Kane.
The woman’s name is Moira. The man is Dan. Dan the man. Dr. Dan. He’s the one that snorted.
Dan comes forward and sits on the chair beside Kane’s tiny desk and starts rooting through his bag. He pulls out a vial and takes a sample of the vomit. Kane whimpers. His skin is getting pebbly, breaking out in smooth, scaly bumps. This is not going to be one of his good days.
“Do something,” Moira mutters.
“Kane,” I snap. “Be good.”
Finally he looks up at me with baleful eyes. I see the iris is jagged, spindling out into the sclera like broken egg-yolks. “Lena,” he says, like it means something.
I sigh and sit on the bed beside him and keep a couple inches between us. I’d rather not; he smells like a petrol station. But there is an unspoken rule that I don’t get breakfast until Kane’s morning check-up is through. He’s dressed in socks, sweatpants, short-sleeved t-shirt over a long-sleeved undershirt. All grey cotton. Same as me.
“Kane,” I murmur, softening my voice. He and I have developed a primitive language with two primary words, our names, spoken with different inflections. “If you tell me and the doctors what’s happening, we might be able to help you feel better. No one’s angry with you. This has happened before. And didn’t everything turn out alright? Weren’t you alright afterwards, those other times?”
He nods. “I can feel things moving,” he whispers, and shudders. “I’m cold. I don’t know why.”
“Well, if you be good we’ll maybe get another step closer to knowing,” I say.
“Get him to lift up his shirt,” Moira says. She’s holding a sort of three-pronged stethoscope-like instrument with round metal ends that you just know will feel freezing against your skin. I sigh again. He is notoriously stubborn about staying covered up.
“Kane,” I say, cajoling. “Could you lift your shirt for just a minute, for Dr. Moira?”
He gives a reaction none of us are expecting given the shock on all our faces when he jerks back from me, panic on his face. “Don’t cut me,” he says. “Don’t cut me, Lena, don’t let them cut me open. It’s fine.”
I hold my palms out and cast a sharp glance at both doctors to stop them from getting too gung-ho with the sedatives.
I can’t stop my voice from being chilly when I say, “What made you think we’d do a thing like that?”
His eyes are wide and round like a cornered animal. He swallows. I don’t know why he thinks we’re going to punish him for this, but it seems he does. “I don’t know,” he says. It’s very obvious when he lies. He gets sulky.
My husband was a better liar, though still not a very good one.
“I think you do,” I say. “I think you know why.”
“I remember,” he says. “I remember me...him...inside was all wrong,” he says.
“He remembers Kane cutting open another crew member,” I tell the doctors. That video hasn’t been recovered, but I’d told them about it. They like to keep track of this sort of thing. It’s unclear right now by what mechanism he got memories, and whether he can access any more or if he’s stuck with half a jigsaw.
“No one’s cutting you,” I say. “You weren’t there, when that happened. Did Kane tell you, or do you remember? How do you know about that?”
He shrugs miserably. “I don’t know. Don’t be mad.”
“Alright, it’s fine. No one’s mad. Just please let the doctors examine you.”
He finally concedes, lying back and lifting his shirt up to his chest. The pale skin on his stomach is...softly, gently shifting. Something inside him is pressing faintly against the skin, moving.
It’s sickening.
It’s not the worst thing we’ve seen.
Moira presses the three prongs to his chest, then moves them down his stomach, listening, prodding.
“Mutation predominant in lower abdomen,” she says to Dan, who taps a note out on a tablet. “Does it hurt when I do this?” She asks, then presses down hard with the leftmost prong, over his appendix.
Kane somehow goes even more bloodless. He sucks in a breath and makes a choking sound, moans. He tries to curl in on himself but Moira presses down on his shoulder with her gloved hand. He responds like she’s shoved him. I think he did not learn much about physical contact from his originator.
“Yes,” he says, “that hurt.”
Moira retrieves a clear paste and hands it to me. “Smear this on his stomach,” she says. Next she takes out a wand attached to a handheld screen device, like a portable ultrasound with multiple dials and meters for measuring god knows what.
“This will probably feel cold,” I say to Kane. “But it won’t hurt.” I gingerly smear the paste onto him. I try to only use my fingertips.
Moira runs the wand over him, squints at her screen. “Stomach is epicenter of mutation. Characteristics inconclusive until further analysis of the sample. It appears engorged and noduled. These growths are producing a visible effect on exterior. Interior is inflamed. Mutated organ is putting pressure on the rest. Subjects malleable DNA may be forming new digestive tract though it does not perfectly mirror any found on earth in any one species. Concern about auto-cannibalism.”
“What?” I say, turning towards her. “He’s digesting himself?”
“It’s a potential risk,” says Moira. “We should keep him under observation today.”
Kane sits up and fumbles for the bucket before throwing up again.
“Does it hurt very much?” I ask.
My husband was a soldier. He had been stoic. This creature with its flat affect perhaps learned a thing or two about that from him but it doesn’t have the same ideas about masculinity to really enforce some kind of macho bravado. “Yes,” it says.
“You’ll give him something for that?” I say, spearing Moira with a cold gaze.
“The drug cocktail administered last time kept his vitals stable,” she says. “His life isn’t at risk, this is just the nature of what he’s made of, this mutation. It’s just a matter of symptom mitigation. Comfort.”
“And you will do that?”
I have plenty of reasons to suspect that they prioritize findings over Kane’s comfort, that what is considered permissible levels of pain and distress for him is far higher than what they’d accept in anyone else. I'm not sure I necessarily disagree. Only I am so tired and sick from all the grief and killing.
“We'll do what we can, but of course his anatomy is beyond us,” says Moira. That means science possesses him. I understand this. It has been this way always.
“Antihistamines…” Dan mutters for no clear reason, tapping away on the tablet.
I have breakfast by myself while they take Kane to the medical bay where he will lie on a cot with needles going in and out of him all day and people in masks standing over him. I’m not sure if this is more or less disturbing for a creature whose only other lived experience has been the Shimmer than it would be for you or I. Perhaps everything is alien to him.