Parasite (Parasitology, #1)(37)

“That’s good.” The elevator doors slid open. Sherman waited until they closed again before saying, casually, “Word is that Banks is trying to hire you on for the research department. Can’t imagine you’d be too thrilled about that.”

I stared at him. “Just how good is the rumor mill around here? We only talked about that a few hours ago.”

“Nothing happens in a vacuum, especially not when you’re talking about a company this size.” Sherman looked at me thoughtfully. “Are you going to take it? You’d be around here a good bit more. But you wouldn’t have to worry anymore about whether you’d have another emergency. It might take a bit of the edge off.”

“Yeah, and I’d be on site when I cracked from the pressure of all those eyes looking at me all the time. That would make it so much easier for them to get me into a nice padded room.” The elevator dinged, signaling our safe return to the subterranean domain of the scientists. “I’d rather worry a little now than freak out a lot later on.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” said Sherman, and stepped out of the elevator. I followed him, and together we made our way to the dressing room outside the ultrasound lab. “You get changed; I’ll go make sure the science mooks are ready for us.”

“You got it,” I said, and slipped inside.

The ultrasound machine surrounded me like a huge, comforting hand, holding just tightly enough that I didn’t need to be afraid that I would somehow lose my grip on the surface of the world—that gravity would fail or an earthquake would mysteriously flip the building upside down and send me plummeting into empty space. I could move, to a degree, crossing or uncrossing my arms and ankles, but for the most part, I was safely confined. I raised one hand to check that my rebreather was solidly in place, and closed my eyes.

Some people apparently found full-body ultrasounds invasive and claustrophobic, and would go to any lengths to avoid them. I had the opposite response. If I’d been able to trade all my other tests for additional time in the ultrasound chamber, I would happily have done so. According to Sherman, that was one more reason for the company technicians to view me as a freak of nature.

The full-body imaging department at SymboGen consisted of two different sections: the MRI room and the gel ultrasound room. I had undergone both at one time or another during my visits to SymboGen, and the gel ultrasound was definitely my favorite of the two. MRIs meant lying on my back for up to an hour while the machine took its snapshot images of my body, trying not to move as my weight seemed to press me deeper and deeper into the metal bed. There was no padding in an MRI tube; that might interfere with the readings.

People who found MRIs claustrophobic apparently freaked out completely during gel ultrasounds, which required a rebreather and that the subject’s eyes remain closed for the duration. The techs would even glue them shut for you if you asked them to, to make sure you wouldn’t give in to the urge to look around and see what was happening. After you were fully prepped and inside the tube, it was flooded with a bioresponsive plastic gel modeled off the biological structure of slime mold. It was hypoallergenic, nontoxic, and as harmless as possible.

Gel ultrasounds were infinitely more comforting than MRIs. I relaxed, slowing my breathing as I allowed myself to go totally limp.

There was a clicking noise in my left ear just before the head technician’s voice came through the side of my rebreather: “You ready for us, Sally? Clench your left hand for ‘yes.’ ”

I obediently clenched my left hand. I liked the ultrasound technicians. They were nice, although they treated me with an odd reverence. I had asked Sherman why that was once, after a particularly relaxing session in the ultrasound chamber. He’d laughed and replied, “Because, my sweet Sal, you are the only person ever to fall asleep in their gooey torture chamber. They think you’re either bloody insane, or that you’ve got balls the size of boulders.”

“What do you think?” I’d asked.

“I think it’s a little bit of both.”

I smiled around my rebreather at the memory, and allowed the last bit of tension to seep out of me as the ultrasound whirred to humming, buzzing life. My breathing slowed further once the humming began. The sound set up minute vibrations through the liquid, faint enough that they didn’t interfere with the machine’s readings, but strong enough for me to feel them eddying against my skin. It was like being at the center of my own private tide pool.

At some point, I drifted away, down into the dark, which reached up to claim me like a lover, folding itself around me and pulling me into itself. I didn’t fight. I was safe, I was surrounded and safe, and nothing was ever going to hurt me again.

I didn’t dream. Not there in the ultrasound tube, with the warm gel buoying me up and the sound of the machine lapping against my skin. Instead, I just drifted, and dozed, and let the world pass by around me.

It was gravity that brought me back: the strangely wrenching sensation of gravity reasserting itself as the gel began draining out of the ultrasound tube and my body settled down onto the hard metal bed of the machine. I managed not to start squirming, but it was hard. This was always the tricky part, keeping still until I was given the clearance to start moving again. Move too soon, and I risked either dislodging my rebreather and giving myself a lungful of plastic gel, or opening my eyes and getting an eyeful of the stuff instead. It wouldn’t actually hurt me, but it could make breathing—and seeing—remarkably uncomfortable for a short period of time.