The Possessor Has Completely Lost His Mind (3)
Dawn at the institute was dead silent. I stepped into the special analysis room on basement level three, and of all times, I had left my notebook behind.
My handwriting was wretched to begin with, and the notes themselves mashed novel-forum memes together with chemical formulas, so anyone who read them would take the mess for unhinged doodling. It nagged at me all the same.
"Patricion, obey the Labor Standards Act... Pentax, awaken...!"
I was still grumbling my way in when I walked straight into a grotesque sight. In the corner, hunched before a monitor, was the back of Senior Park. Tadatak! Red error code burned across the screen.
Target protein binding failed.
Rejection probability: 88.4%
"Please... please just bind, you son of a bitch...! What the hell is the problem?"
Principal Researcher Park hammered the enter key, eyes bloodshot to the point of tears.
Well now. The man was laboring under one hell of a misunderstanding.
I drifted over and dropped a single word.
"Senior."
"Hiek!"
Senior Park nearly rolled clean off his chair. The color drained out of his face, and his hands shook.
"K-Kim...! Please, don't tell the team lead or Security! It's a misunderstanding! I really—I, uh, I didn't mean it that way! If they cut this month's rations, I'm finished, I really am...!"
The groveling was a pitiful sight. The Patrician bastards kept a discipline strict past any use. Bend a rule by an inch and they cut your blood rations; in the worst case, they threw you out alive under the sun. That would be what he was afraid of.
I left the pleading senior where he was and stared at the terminal.
Up on the screen was the structural formula for a compound meant to restore the hypoglossal nerve and the glossopharyngeal receptors.
"I've got no intention of ratting you out, so calm down. More to the point, Senior—starting with the peptide bond angles, this is completely wrong."
"...Huh?"
I slid his chair aside and snatched the keyboard.
"The moment an ordinary L-form protein hits a vampire immune system, the binding membrane dumps degradative enzymes and shears the thing apart. You're ramming it head-on, so of course the error sits at eighty-eight percent."
My fingers slid over the keys like a machine.
"Stop trying to force a hole through it. Flip the whole structure with D-amino acids, the way you'd hold it up to a mirror, and it gets a free pass. Seat it in the cleft of the neural receptor like that and you're done. Strictly on the math, anyway."
Tatatatak! I'd only ever run the calculations and never actually executed them, but the formula went in without a snag. I hit enter with a clean click. Gamma Band, still logged in under Senior Park's account, woke back up.
Whirrrrr. The tower's fans growled, and the progress bar on the monitor snapped to one hundred percent in a single breath. Ding!
Receptor binding success rate: 68.2%
In front of that lucid blue screen, Senior Park's jaw nearly came unhinged.
"Huh...? Huhhh...? Wh-what! The thing I couldn't crack no matter how many years I beat my head against it...!"
"Right? I only did the math. Didn't actually think it would work."
"Y-you... what are you? How in the world did you...?"
"I'm pretty solid on theory."
I grinned.
A little later I headed for the emergency stairwell off the research wing and handed Senior Park the sparkling blood I'd learned to make the day before.
He drew out a cigarette with a trembling hand, set it in his mouth, and out of habit blew a lungful of acrid smoke.
"...Live on nothing but blood and a man starts to lose it. You know this cigarette? Pure atmosphere. This damned carcass won't even take nicotine or tar."
"Don't even get me started. I can't taste my food, which is misery enough, and downstairs has shut down completely. It will not stand. I'm Shim Yeong. Took one right in the family jewels."
"Puhaha! Koff—koff!"
Senior Park blew smoke and cracked up.
"Well, you're still young, Kim—must sting! Mind you, I'm the same. Blood just won't travel downward, damn it all. I got the vasectomy ages ago anyway, for family planning."
"Oh, right. You were married, weren't you?"
He had been cackling, and for just a flicker a shadow crossed his face. Damn. I'd gone and brought up the thing I should have left alone.
As if to shake the awkward air off, he swapped his expression at once and puffed himself up.
"Oh, come on, Kim. You didn't seriously think I was single like you? Eh? I may not look like much, but walk outside right now and they'd think I was in my twenties! Women line up! Haha!"
"Ah. Yes..."
He took out his wallet. Inside was a photograph of a woman holding a baby.
"Look! That's my wife. Well? Pretty, isn't she? Our daughter, too."
"She's radiant."
"They censor things, sure, but I can send a letter now and then. Living expenses go out on the dot, too. Haa... still, I really ought to see their faces once..."
His face darkened again.
"...This photo is something I only have because I begged and begged that bastard of a director. When they dragged me in, she was a tiny thing barely past her first birthday, and last month I got an outing permit and snuck a look at night, and would you believe it—she's in kindergarten. My poor kid... She thinks her dad is off on an overseas business trip..."
Senior Park brushed the child's face in the photo with a trembling finger.
"Once a year. That's all. I ride out in an institute car with the tint cranked all the way dark and steal a look, from far off, at her boarding the kindergarten bus. My only joy. Kim... even once would do. Not through a telescope. I want to walk up to my kid with my head up, even at night, and hold her hand properly. I bite down and endure all of this for that one thing."
Listening left a muddy ache in a corner of my chest.
The man in front of me was just an ordinary uncle, hopelessly soft for his daughter. He'd had the bad luck to get grabbed once by bloodsuckers, and a perfectly sound family had been split while both sides still lived, shut into a darkness with no date on it.
No going back to them. That's the rule, and vampires come with other problems besides...
I decided I wouldn't put that particular problem into words.
Senior Park was quiet for a moment. Then he ground the half-smoked cigarette out on the floor and spoke up out of nowhere.
"But, Kim. Sometimes I think about it. This body—being a vampire. Is it really only a curse?"
"Sorry? You drink blood and burn to death in the daylight. If that isn't a curse, what is it?"
I actually flinched. Had this guy worked under those Patrician fossils long enough to get dyed the same color? Had he gone and picked up vampire supremacy?
"Come on, Kim! You went to a better university than I did! Why is a young man being so dense? You've never thought about it?"
Senior Park's eyes flashed, dead serious.
"Think it through. This vampire business, looked at scientifically, is an absurdly attractive body, isn't it? Eat only a little and the strength turns monstrous. You don't get cancer. You don't age! And the cellular regeneration? The median lethal dose runs dozens of times a human's. You can endure under lethal radiation. So what if we could just solve the bloodlust and the sunlight?"
He clenched a fist.
"How is that a monster? You don't die of old age, and you don't get sick! It's a new humanity!"
It felt like someone had cracked me hard across the back of the head.
A new humanity...?
Memories from my previous life crossed through my brain cells. AI, transhumanism, the lunatic visions of Silicon Valley madmen who meant to leave Earth and reach out into space. Most of it had been hot air blown to suck up money, but listen long enough and there was a corner of it that still set the chest kicking.
Out of nowhere, a slogan that crazy electric-car mogul used to ram through flashed across my mind like lightning.
"Senior."
"Hm?"
"Vampires can hibernate, right? Heart stopped, brain cells undamaged, asleep for decades at a stretch."
"Right. A perfect metabolic arrest."
"So how about this? Skip the cumbersome cryosleep rigs, load them onto a ship, and just send them to Mars or Jupiter! They eat cosmic radiation for breakfast, so we can cut the weight of the shielding, too!"
"...Huh?"
"Damn. Isn't this God-given hardware built for terraforming? Let's go to Mars!"
Senior Park stared, mouth hanging open, then burst out laughing loud enough to make the stairwell ring.
"Hahaha! Kim, you are no ordinary lunatic! Mars? Terraforming? I was over here thinking about holding my kid's hand once... and your scale is straight-up cosmic!"
"But I'm right! Wait—so if we lock down the bloodlust and make it so we can walk around in the daytime, couldn't we bag the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine and the one in Physics?"
We got worked up and cackled.
"Whoa! I like that! Let's do it right now!"
"Let's go win a Nobel!"
We crashed the cups of blood soda in our hands together, hard.
From that night on, we were perfect accomplices.
The moment Senior Park's top-tier Gamma Band clearance and his gift for synthesis locked together with the knowledge I carried from the original work, the job ran in a straight line. Terrified of getting caught, we wiped the logs every single dawn, without a miss.
By day, slaves of the Pentax lab. By night, illegal researchers in the basement.
Two months passed, and we stayed up every night of them. We burned through all those hours sick with worry, and at last the first result came out.
"Think it'll work?"
"It'll work!"
We made the first test drug and began the experiment. The subject was me. Some side effect might detonate, who knew, but science always demands a sacrifice.
"Then I'll begin. Take the notes, Senior."
"Okay. Cam's rolling. Start."
Heart in my throat, I drew the drug up in the dropper and let it fall onto my tongue.
"I'm not really tasting anything?"
"Well, you're mid-restoration. You never know, do you? Here, try this."
Senior Park dug a piece of stale chocolate out of a drawer and held it out.
"Mm..."
For the first second, something like flavor seemed to turn.
"Huh? S-Sssenior? Thish—here..."
It was reaching me. I threw a hand out across a vast distance and snatched, quick, at a sense I had forgotten.
"Huh?"
My tongue locked stiff as a board.
"Hrrk—!"
I bolted for the sink and spat out everything in my mouth. Bitterness had seared itself to the tongue and would not come off. I turned on the tap and rinsed.
"What? Did it fail?" Senior Park asked, thrown.
"Ha... fuck. Senior. I think this..."
Failure. The curse running in this damned blood had reacted. I was sure of it.
"It definitely worked, though. I almost felt it... and then it was just gone."
Every experiment after that failed in a chain. Change the components, nothing. Mix the drug by some more elaborate means, nothing.
Senior Park tore at his hair and sank down onto the floor.
"Haa... no good. Damn it, no! Again! Spells and curses—what kind of talk is that? In an age when people go to the moon!"
My insides burned dry. I'd thought taste, at least, might be within reach, and here too the curse of blood that the vampires would not shut up about was hard at work.
Damned un-science. Damned curse.
Charge the front gate and the sorcery shut you down every time. And I was no sorcerer—how was I supposed to lift a curse? If it could be done that way, the mages would have solved the vampire problem long ago.
"Nothing for it. We eat first, then we deal with it."
"Yeah. We do."
"Want me to mix you a soda?"
"No, Kim. Just pour the capsaicin on thick for me. My insides are in knots, damn it!"
I poured the sauce into mine as well and drank.
"Ghk! Kack—kack!"
Ah, shit. Had I poured too much? It hurt like a bastard. Whether that was a vampire racial trait or not, the tears wouldn't even come. Senior Park hurried over with water.
"See, you should have drunk it slow. Here! I'll grab milk—ah, then you'd vomit... damn it. Should I bring ice water?"
"I'm fine. Haah... well, it's my own mistake."
Suffocating. This was supposed to be a life?
The fact that I was meant to simply swallow this chuunibyou curse of an existence, and all the whining that came with it, clenched my gut. My mouth was still on fire. If it was going to be like this, why could I feel pain at all? Keuheuk. In the world of the red moon there is only pain and hatred... kehehe...
Wait. Pain?
I remembered what Senior Park had said in the break room, cutting spicy chicken sauce and soda into his blood.
We can't taste a thing, but carbonation and capsaicin are pain through and through, aren't they? Not flavor. Something like flavor.
I shot up out of my seat.
So this was the rapture Archimedes had felt in his bath.
"Senior, a fucking wonderful method has just occurred to me."
At the shout from nowhere, Senior Park blinked, face blank.
"Wh-what is it? Why are you like that all of a sudden?"
I ran to the whiteboard and seized a marker.
"All right, Senior. I don't know the exact sorcerous mechanism this damn curse runs on, but at minimum it keeps the regular gustatory pathway under iron watch. That much I'm sure of."
I slashed a thick line across the board between a tongue and a brain, and struck a huge X dead through the middle of it.
The first failure had taught me one thing. The instant you tried to directly revive a taste receptor or a nerve, the curse inscribed in the blood fired at once. A frontal assault, as things stood, was hopeless.
"But what about the trigeminal nerve?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Senior Park tilted his head at the suggestion.
"Kim. The trigeminal only carries pain and temperature. How are you going to spend that on taste?"
"I know that! Think about it. How have we been drinking blood dosed with capsaicin, and blood dosed with carbonation, all this time? We feel those sensations!"
"...!"
Understanding seemed to land at last. A low sound escaped him.
"If you're right..."
"The curse might not be watching this sense at all. If so, couldn't we use it as a bypass?"
I launched into the explanation.
"Stimuli coming in through the trigeminal are perfectly intact. Spiciness, carbonation, cold and sting... so with a drug, we gently ease open a side path in the brain for nerve and sensation, just for a little while. Signals that normally get waved through as 'spicy!' and 'cold!'—we slip those, quietly, over into the gustatory cortex."
Senior Park's eyes went thin.
"And we take the other senses that are still alive, use them as raw material, and have the brain reconstruct taste. What do you think?"
I kept going without a pause to breathe.
"Oh, and there's a perfectly good real-world case, isn't there? Sensory substitution experiments, the ones they ran on the blind. Footage from a camera, electrodes on the tongue, the signal fired in. You know them?"
"Ah... the BrainPort experiment?"
There was an interesting neuroscience paper I'd read in undergrad, back when I was human.
The experiment was simple. First, fix electrodes to a blind subject's tongue. Then convert the black-and-white image the camera received and fire it, as fine electrical stimulation, into the electrode grid on the tongue.
Astonishingly, after a few weeks of training, the subjects began to "see"—through electrotactile sensation at the tip of the tongue—the shapes of objects in front of them, and the outlines of people.
The brain is more flexible than anyone thinks. Block one nerve and it hunts for a bypass and rebuilds the information it needs. Learn the pattern over and over, and it can even read unfamiliar information through another sense. That is called neuroplasticity.
"An eyeball didn't suddenly sprout on the tongue, did it? The brain took the signal off the tongue tip and read it as visual information. A human can train into that. So what about a vampire, who can splice a severed nerve back together and adapts even better?"
Senior Park's pupils shook.
If a drug lowered, only a little, the threshold of the side paths between the senses—living trigeminal sensation, and smell, and the memory of taste from human days. The brain might bind those three back together and restore, in real time, this sense called taste.
But Senior Park soon threw a practical doubt.
"Then the curse?"
"That's the heart of the cheat."
I tapped the X on the whiteboard.
"It's only a hypothesis, but I think the curse fires only when you touch the regular gustatory pathway directly. Take smell. Most of what we casually call taste is smell to begin with. And the nose itself stays perfectly fine, right up until food starts to feel revolting."
"Ah! True. We smell things absurdly well, spicy is spicy, and carbonation bites. It's only the moment the tongue actually tastes that turns horrific."
"Exactly! The curse is clearly in charge of the tongue's taste nerve and nothing else. The rest of the senses might not even fall under it."
The curse was a doorkeeper assigned to a single door. All it did was clamp down, viciously, on any attempt to restore taste or to approach it. Circle around by the bypass, and this rigid doorkeeper might be lazy enough to simply sit still.
We could slip past.
"The immediate goal is one thing. For as long as the drug is working, bypass the curse and restore taste. Just long enough to eat a single meal like a human being. That's more than enough, isn't it?"
Senior Park's mouth fell wide open.
"You're right! That works... it actually works! Turn Gamma Band back on! We're redrawing the structural formula, right now!"
We plunged straight back into another all-nighter.
Ground down like that, day and night, for five days—and then the fated dawn, 4:17 a.m. Gamma Band raised a line of text on the monitor.
Bypass route signal transmission rate: 91.8%
"We did it...!"
There wasn't even time to raise a cheer. We moved at once. The synthesizer ran through the night, the purification went round after round, and at the end of it we had a single small ampule.
"Kim... this time it'll really be all right, won't it?"
Senior Park's hand trembled around the dropper.
"What's worse than dying? I'll go first!"
I took the dropper and let three drops fall under my tongue.
A coolness washed through my mouth. As if I'd tucked a peppermint candy there, a cold flush spread from inside the jaw all the way out to the temples.
From deep in the drawer I took the chocolate left over from last time. As if I were laying out a feast, I broke off a piece of that deep brown.
The nauseating taste from the first failure rose in me, and for a second my jaw locked. Then I squeezed my eyes shut and set the chocolate on my tongue.
That instant.
"...!"
A heavy, rich scent of cacao slammed up behind my nose.
Last time it had tasted of dust and beeswax. This time, the moment it touched my tongue, it melted soft against the heat of my body. A breath later, a deep sweetness wrapped the tongue, gentle as anything.
Sweet. So chocolate had been this good all along.
"Well? Kim, what on earth is it like?!"
Senior Park's urgent voice reached me as he searched my face.
I swallowed the chocolate and wiped my lips with a trembling hand. I blinked, and then I could not hold the laugh that broke out of me.
"...Senior."
"H-huh, what's wrong?! Bitter again?!"
There was no managing my face at all.
Senior Park snatched the dropper and the chocolate out of my hands, both at once.
"Ohhhh! So this is sweetness! Waaaaah!"
"Senior! Quiet! Quiet!"
"I know! Ehehehe!"
We had done it.
At last, the first breach stood open.