Really, they are all my subordinates. This is my lab. I worked hard and long to build it. It was my life. It was my whole life.
They tell me that everything is happening as I had thought it would. They say the values in my blood are returning to normal, as I had predicted before this all happened. They’ve isolated a novel protozoa in the samples they took from me, and they are culturing it. They don’t know more yet. How it moves through the body, what kinds of cells it invades, whether it releases a previously unknown compound.
These are the questions I once cared about.
I asked for more information about what they’re discovering about my condition, and they’ve brought me a computer with which I can access all of the lab’s results. I recall my old passwords. I can move familiarly and fluidly through the data and manipulate images and other findings. This feels as much like an instinct as a learned skill to me now.
I see the values that represent my condition, and I understand that the organism has almost been cleared from my system. It was at 52 ppm when I was taken from the commune. It’s now under 3.