“’Fraid so.” Vik stared down at her hands. “And here’s the kicker: They both had slime cells living in their bodies. Now those same cells are back with the organism, sharing everything they learned about what it’s like to live inside a human host. That creature living down in the Underwater Bay, and inside us and our children, has the mathematical probability to be a whole lot smarter than we are, and it’s considering what to do with us at this very moment.”

71

What Anna Gabarron was seeing made no sense. Not that much of anything made sense now. Prior to the last couple of days, Anna would had told anyone who bothered to ask that it would be chemically impossible for two as distinctly different life forms as terrestrial humans and Donovanian algae to coexist within the same body. The human immune system functioned as a highly tuned early-warning and search-and-destroy identification system for foreign antigens. Such foreign “enemy” proteins caused a host of reactions throughout the body, stimulating B- and T-cells, white blood cells, titers, antibodies, you name it.

Now she stared through a small binocular scope at the skin sample she’d taken from Toni. When she’d walked into the clinic that morning to check on the boy, she’d been horrified to see that he’d turned a not-so-appealing shade of green. The first impulse had been that someone had painted the kid. But looking closely, she was seeing skin cells with a slight sheen. Definitely not normal, but certainly not painted or stained with any pigment.

Using a probe, she’d reached into the isolation tent and taken a scraping from the still-comatose boy’s stomach. He continued to lay supine, locked away in that board-stiff paralysis that defied her ability to cure.

Placing her sample under the scope and dialing up the magnification, Anna saw the impossible: human skin cells living in a matrix with Donovanian prokaryotic “algae” cells. The prokaryotes had adapted, flattened, to interlock with Toni’s skin cells at the molecular level. Like they were supposed to be there. Nor was the distribution of prokaryotes random or chaotic, but alternately patterned and uniform, as if by design.

She shouldn’t be seeing this. Couldn’t be seeing this. Somehow Toni’s immune system seemed to recognize the proteins and polysaccharides in the algae cell walls as “friendly.” She wasn’t observing any immune response from the host cells: no inflammation, phagocytes, or antibody response to algae antigens. The only explanation for that had to be that the algae had somehow reprogrammed the little boy’s immune system at the genetic level.

“How can it do that?”