Parasite Eve Sephirotto Part 14

Mariko crouched in front of the toilet bowl, buried her face between her knees and cried there in the bathroom, her body convulsing in unison with her sobs.

It was not long before rejection set in.

Mariko was taken to the ICU right away. She clearly remembered Doctor Yoshizumi's expression of disbelief that day.

"Why didn't you take your medicines?" he asked, but the question fell on deaf ears.

"I did take them."

Yoshizumi was unconvinced.

"If you had, then you wouldn't be here right now."

"I took them just like you said."

"You shouldn't lie, Mariko. You're not well. Why did you do this? Didn't I tell you to take your meds every day? Didn't I warn you?"

Yoshizumi's voice was tinged with despair. He'd probably tried his best not to sound that way, but Mariko didn't miss the tone.

"We're going to have to take it out now."

After all they'd gone through, it had come to this.

Yoshizumi, Mariko, and her father discussed a plan of action, though Yoshizumi did most of the talking. He sat in front of Mariko's bed, looking at her pitifully, more, it seemed to her, for his own sake than hers. Her father reacted to each of the doctor's words with utter disbelief.

I ruined my father's kidney, Mariko thought. She was afraid to imagine what he must have been thinking, but she couldn't keep terrible guesses from running rampant in her brain.

Her father was naturally upset. His own child had rejected a most selfless sacrifice. She had been on her way to a normal life again, but had thrown away her only chance to get there, through her own negligence. Mariko was sure her father thought she was beyond saving.

Yoshizumi must have shared the sentiment. After all the hardships they faced, and despite having gone through all the necessary steps, she had repaid their diligent work with intolerable foolishness. Mariko was sure the doctor thought she was hopeless.

She was sure.

Mariko closed her eyes. The faint humming sound had faded into silence.

Hot air from outside permeated the hospital room, making it difficult for her to fall asleep. The bed creaked faintly as she turned onto her side.

She thought of school.

She had no desire to return there. The laughter of those two boys was still trapped in her ears. If she did go back, it was only a matter of time before she became an object of ridicule again. It was an unbearable thought. If this was how people were going to treat her, then living a life of dialysis was, to her, the more favorable option.

The next morning, a nurse came in carrying a white bag filled with packages of immuno-suppressants.

Mariko wondered what would happen if she didn't take them. She would only need to pretend to swallow them and hide them in the back of her mouth. Then, when the nurse was not looking, she could spit them out and stuff them under her pillow. No one would suspect a thing.

Then again, the doctor was sure to notice something eventually.

In the heat, her thoughts soon grew vague and disjointed. As she drifted between wakefulness and sleep, she imagined scenes from the near future when this transplant would end in failure.

Just then, she heard an indistinct noise.

Her ears perked up in alarm. She stopped breathing and listened for nearly a minute, but heard nothing.

Just a figment of her imagination.

She breathed a sigh of relief and looked at the window. A street fight threw jet black lines on her face mimicking the blind that was lowered between them.

She always had the same dream here of some unknown ent.i.ty walking slowly with determined footsteps, her room as its goal. She wouldn't be able to run away. Her body was always paralyzed, her heart pounding close to bursting. And then her kidney would announce itself by moving around, enthralled by the strange presence approaching her door.

The footsteps always stopped just outside the hospital room. Before long, the doork.n.o.b would begin to turn.

She always woke up just as the door was about to open.

But Mariko knew who the footsteps belonged to.

The donor.

The corpse from whom she had stolen a vital organ had come to reclaim it.

She was reminded of a strange little comic book she once read long before her kidney problems even began. A friend had bought it for her. Mariko didn't remember the author's name or the tide and could only vaguely recall the story, but she still remembered clearly the shock of reading it. It had made her afraid to even go to the bathroom alone.

The story centered around a young girl who was paralyzed after falling down a flight of stairs. All the doctors judged her dead from the fall. Even though she was fully conscious and aware of her surroundings, her total lack of bodily control hindered her from telling them that she was still alive.

The girl was brought into the operating room and designated as a heart donor. She tried desperately to make everyone notice she was alive, to no avail, and had to watch as her heart was cut out.

But after the girl was buried, her grudge became insatiable. Wanting nothing more than to take back what was rightfully hers, she resurrected herself from the grave.

After that, Mariko remembered only that at the end of the story, the zombie girl tracked down the recipient and gouged out her heart.

The girl was drawn with horrifying features and the image had always stuck in the back of Mariko's mind. When she'd first heard about the kidney donation, the comic was the first thing that had come to her mind.

She still had no idea what kind of person her donor had been. Though she asked the nurse about it repeatedly, she was always given the same indirect answer.

Maybe her donor actually wasn't dead. Maybe she was still conscious like the girl in the comic and wanted somehow to let Mariko know she was alive. Doctor Yoshizumi had gone ahead with the operation in spite of her terrible helplessness, and had taken the kidney, leaving the donor no choice but to wander in search of vengeance.

The footsteps in her dream could belong to no one else. Sooner or later, the zombie would come to seize its kidney from Mariko's body. It would tear open a hole in her side and run away with the prize in its hands and malicious words upon its lips. Someday, the door would open.

Then she would die a horrible, b.l.o.o.d.y death on that very bed.

13.

The hot days pressed on, but Toshiaki continued to work without pause. The ventilation system in his office left something to be desired, while the air conditioning in the cultivation and machinery rooms gave him new reason to be conducting experiments. It certainly beat out lazing away in his sauna-like apartment.

Eve 1's replication had gone on uninhibited. Since adding clofibrate, a peroxisome proliferator, the speed of division had risen.

Eve 1 had clearly taken well to the induction. Even so, Toshiaki's curiosity was far from satisfied. Clofibrate was just one peroxisome proliferator, and other variants could yield an even higher rate of division.

Toshiaki took out all the available peroxisome proliferators from the refrigerator and added a sample of Eve 1 to each. He also tried adding retinoic acid and various other growth factors. An article had linked the induction of beta enzymes in mitochondria by peroxisome to the fact that peroxisome attached to retinoid receptors, a DNA-binding protein that also perhaps coded enzymes.

Toshiaki gauged the intake of tritium-labelled thymidine to measure any potential increase in Eve 1's propagative capacity.

The results surpa.s.sed his expectations. Multiplication was exponentially higher with a simultaneous medication of retinoic acid and peroxisome. The printout showed figures beyond anything Toshiaki had ever seen before.

"Um, doctor..." came a voice unexpectedly from behind him. He looked up from the data on his desk to see Asakura standing there.

"What is it?" he answered, at last remembering she was still there.

Asakura hid her face a little, seemingly at a loss for words. She was not her usual confident self. After being urged a few times, she finally got to the point.

"I thought I might work on preparing for my speech."

"Oh...of course."

"And so I was thinking I'd like to take a break from Eve 1, for a little while at least, and resume with the experiments I was working on before..."

Toshiaki was so engrossed in Eve 1 that he had forgotten all about her presentation.

The j.a.panese Biochemical Society met once every year. It was a large-scale event that allowed j.a.pan's biochemists and molecular biologists to gather under one roof and share the fruits of their research. This time it was being held in September near the university. It was customary for a few people from their seminar course to make an appearance every year and talk about biofunctional pharmaceuticals. One objective of the program was to have every master's student give a speech at least once while still enrolled. Doctoral students had ample opportunity to write articles and present at conferences, but the only chance for undergraduate and master's students to give any sort of scholarly presentation in front of a crowd was at graduation. An academic conference was therefore the perfect opportunity to give them such experience. In addition, it trained them to form logical ideas and to learn how to convey them to others. It undoubtedly felt good for the students to share the knowledge they had worked so hard to attain, but it was also a stressful event that they were often never completely primed for.

This was to be Asakura's first conference and she wanted to be ready, yet she still did not know which slides to use or how to structure her presentation. Toshiaki should have been more attentive, but he'd neglected her for his own obsessions.

"Yes...of course. I'm sorry, let's interrupt the Eve 1 a.n.a.lysis for a while."

At those words, an expression of relief came to Asakura's face.

Toshiaki checked to see that her slide data were all in order. She would need to include blotting graphs, so he arranged to teach her the following day how to use the scanner.

That night, just before he was about to leave for home, Toshiaki checked on Eve 1.

Asakura was conducting an absorbency test in the mechanical room.

Though he told her he would stop a.n.a.lyzing Eve 1, Toshiaki secretly decided to continue with it on his own. For the time being, he wanted to see what exactly he had accomplished by adding peroxisome proliferators and retinoic acids.

He plucked a culture flask from the incubator and placed it under the microscope. As he adjusted the lenses and peered through, the shapes of lively cells came into focus.

For the time being, the miracle shown in Eve 1 was far more important to him than anything being announced at any academic gathering. Toshiaki was also on the bill, but the data he was presenting was already six months old, a far cry from his Eve 1 findings.

Generally, the application deadline to partic.i.p.ate in the meeting was about half a year before the day it was held. The theme of one's speech needed to be sent along with the form, and no matter how much viable data arose afterwards, one was not allowed to include them in the presentation unless they had a direct bearing on the submitted theme. A last-minute change was out of the question. However, Toshiaki was now driven by a strong impulse to report this year on Eve 1. If he were to reveal the information he had gathered over the past weeks, there was no telling how dramatic the response would be.

This was first-rate material. It would be a blast of a wake-up call to all mitochondrial researchers. Research inst.i.tutes from all around the world would request that samples of Eve 1 be provided to them. Kiyomi's cells would live on everywhere. Just the thought of it made him ecstatic.

At the base of the flask, Eve 1 had formed numerous colonies. This despite the fact that he had taken care to leave only a thin layer the night before. His eyes widened at the unbelievable rate of propagation. He had to put the proliferation regimen at that of cancer cells or even lower, or else Eve 1 would fill a flask in just a day. Thankfully, he'd started out with a small sample and there had been no adverse effects, unless this was just another sign of the cells' strength. Toshiaki looked at the colony in the center.

At that moment, he heard a sound.

At first, he thought it was a fly buzzing around. It sounded like it was coming from overhead, but he also felt it beneath the floor.

Before long, it increased in volume. Surprised, Toshiaki removed his eyes from the microscope and looked around him. The drone grew even louder, and he knew it was coming from somewhere nearby. There was a definite power in it. It rose, then softened, inscribing waves into the air. His body began to resonate. It was as if the very electrons inside of him were being stimulated.

He gazed at the flask on the microscope stage. The cultivation liquid was rippling inside the flask. Where the microscope's light illuminated it, orange-colored rings welled up, spread out, then diffused. Toshiaki gulped. The noise became louder still. Ripples. .h.i.t the walls of the flask and formed complex crest patterns, one after another.

It's Eve 1, he shouted in his heart, Eve 1 is breathing!

He put his eyes back to the lenses.

The colony was pulsating.

With a thump, its surface rose and fell. It was swelling and contracting, like a heart.

It was as though the colony had become a collective life form. In the short while he'd taken his eyes off, it had even grown, the cells multiplying and spreading out so that the entire lens field was now filled by the colony. With every writhing thump, the field vibrated.

It was a little while before Toshiaki could accept the fact that the cells were causing the waves in the cultivation field and were also responsible for the sound.

He was enchanted by the display. He had never seen anything like it before. It was like looking at a new life form.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Toshiaki gulped down his breath. The colony was rising up in the center like a mountain. Two rounded areas began to cave in on either side a little above this peak. Further down, a single horizontal crack appeared. The cells on the upper end of the colony started changing form rapidly, becoming thin like fibroblasts. They started lining up in one direction.

"Holy..."Toshiaki moaned.

What was appearing there was a human face.

The entire colony was working together to form a face. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and then hair were rendered. The cells were not done yet. They continued to divide and multiply, and the face progressed from a roughhewn image to one with a mannequin-like delicacy.

There was no mistaking it, a human face that Toshiaki had seen before was emerging in fine relief.

"What the..."

Kiyomi.

It was Kiyomi's face. And it was looking directly at him. The cells had revived every detail, down to her pupils and fleshy lips, nothing changed from when she was alive.

The cells ceased, leaving a perfect replica of her face at the bottom of the flask.

Toshiaki gazed fixedly upon it. His throat was dry.

The mouth moved.

Kiyomi's lips and tongue moved to form four distinct syllables in succession.

A much different sound echoed from the flask. No. Toshiaki was unsure if he had actually heard it or not. Perhaps it had resonated inside of him. Either way, he understood.