The Protocol

written by VELVET ISHTAR.

It was now the third day and the bite had started to fester. No one believed Lisa when she claimed that a bat had swooped down from the darkness in the cave at the back of the estate. No one believed it was a bat and not a snake. Bats do not exist in this part of the world, they said, especially not ones that contain rabies.

She was beginning to shiver in her sleep. She dreamt of drowning, and when she woke she went the whole day without a glass of water and finally collapsed in the middle of trimming the rose bushes.

The Madame had always loved Lisa. She was the one who knew the garden best. Lisa was not like the other gardeners. One by one over the years they had all left, claiming this or that reason. The garden was too vast, the pathways too winding, and always claiming to have seen or felt an otherworldly presence that made them shiver. It was just Lisa now, the one who spoke not just to the hedges and the shrubs but also to the snails and the caterpillars, Lisa who would take the time to cut around a spider’s web and who would give every creature the time it deserved. Lisa, the one who also spoke to ghosts.

And now here she was, body splayed out over the rose bushes with the thorns ripping through her clothes and the skin on her face, spasming and seizing and foaming at the mouth.

They airlifted her to Mount Zrafa Hospital, the only place in the region that could treat a case of rabies that had progressed this far. The Madame accompanied her, upset the entire time that her favorite gardener could no longer return to work, upset that if word got out about Lisa’s case of rabies that her entire wonderful project would come tumbling down. Lisa’s son was also there, a measly boy of nine years old who could barely comprehend what was going on.

The doctors suggested The Protocol, an experimental treatment that could hypothetically save a human being once rabies had reached the brain. They placed Lisa in a coma, pumped her body up with all the necessary drugs, and began to wait. The Madame retreated into a private room, one of the luxury suites usually reserved for wealthy patients, and spent the entirety of the treatment time smoking tobacco out of her ivory pipe.

The boy was left unattended, and began to roam the hospital.

The first person he spoke to was Dr. Brezhnova, who was in the middle of booking train tickets in the cafeteria. The snows were coming, and if the planet was going to be covered in ice for the entire season, she would rather be at home with family than here with dying slaves and the sick freaks who walk around talking like they own human beings. The boy had no idea what place he was in, and had no idea that his mother’s experience would amount to anything more than a quick nap to get better from a case of the common cold.

Brezhnova hated children. She was now stuck in the company of one, and so pulled up the only defense she knew: storytelling.

She told the boy of the man Tarar, who carried messages for the Francinians in the war two hundred years ago. He did this by swallowing hundreds of letters, keeping them in his belly as he walked across enemy lines, and then regurgitating them once he had reached the recipient. The man was afflicted with a special disease, one that would have been so trivial to treat today, a simple surgery to nip a little gland and all would have been well with him. However, he was not born in a time with brain scanners and diamond tipped scalpels. The man Tarar was born in a time when surgeons did not wash hands, and blood letting was the go to solution for every case of putrefying flesh.

And Tarar’s flesh did putrefy. His affliction was one of endless consumption. He would not stop eating, could not stop eating. The hunger never faded. Sometimes, the food spilled out of his belly and filled up his throat so that you could see his last meal in the back of his mouth when you spoke to him. His eyes yellowed, and he always smelled of rot. After the military, he spent time in the circus, and then in a hospital, where he was finally driven out after the nurses began to suspect that he had started eating newborns.

Decades later, the doctor who was once responsible for Tarar received a letter from a nurse at the far end of the country, where the rain never stops. Tarar was dying, they said, and was begging to be saved. If there was anyone who could save the man with endless hunger, it was this doctor.

The doctor knew no way to save Tarar, but travelled to see him anyways. All he could do was hold the man’s hand as he lay there sputtering and crying, convinced of his own eternal status in the annals of history as a monstrous beast that lost control of his vast and disgusting body, which had begun to rot from the inside out. Tarar died weeping tears that smelled of decaying flesh, longing for a life where he never needed to eat at all.

Dr. Brezhnova told Lisa’s boy that all that Tarar would have needed today was maybe simple surgery, maybe even just a round of pills and his life would have never gone down that wretched path. She said that it was simply sad and pathetic that he was born in an age when medical science was still in its infancy. Then she paid for her train tickets and left the boy at the hospital.

The boy continued to wander and finally met with Dr. Braun, who he found tallying up vast amounts of lab data by hand in a dimly lit room in a forgotten part of the hospital. She found the boy to be amusing, and a little charming, the way his eyes shown with a mix of awe and fear, delight and confusion. He walked in and asked Dr. Braun what the funny numbers and symbols on her papers were about. She closed up her documents and began to tell the child a story about an automaton that fought in a war.

The automaton was built by Francinians, and sent to fight humans in the gutter zones. He was blown to bits, and the pieces were scraped back together and given to a mechanic. The mechanic only needed to do a few simple repairs and the automaton whirred back to life, its clockwork brain and its clockwork eyes slowly clicking back to life.

The automaton locked eyes with the mechanic, and began to weep tears made of oil. It wept and wept, and then it began to scream. And then it began to trash around wildly, ripping at itself until all of its parts came undone, and it was dead again.

The Francinian guards would not believe the mechanic’s story. They made her put the machine back together a hundred times, and a hundred times it would scream in agony and disassemble itself. Eventually, they threw the mechanic out of the camp, and told her to make the long walk back to the civilian settlement. What they did with the automaton afterwards, she does not know. No one has seen an automaton like that since. Years later, as she lay dying, she began to weep uncontrollably, not for any of her lost loves or her children, but for the automaton, because she finally recognized that what the machine was doing was not malfunction. It was feeling total and complete agony, total anguish at the prospect of being kept alive for the reasons that it was being kept alive.

All this talk of machines reminded Dr. Braun of the immense task laid out before her, and she shooed the boy away and got back to her vast complex of numbers.

The boy continued to wander, until he finally came across Dr. Xahir, reading at the library. Expecting a pattern by now, the boy went straight up to the doctor and asked to be told a story. Dr. Xahir put down her book, looked at the boy, and found a golden opportunity for expiatory communication.

“Of course I can tell you a story. Let me tell you about a doctor that tried to help a little girl. A little girl that ended up with, um, let’s say, a parasite. A little parasite in her body that would grow and grow until it burst out of her, killing her in the process, and spilling a lot of blood. Lots and lots of blood. She did not want the parasite. Someone put it there, well against her will and her wishes. This girl lived in a part of the world where little girls like her are only good to society if they are either meat or dolls. She was both. Her poor mother came running to a doctor in a far away city, crying and wailing, telling me about how no clinic would remove the parasite. This doctor had an idea, a way to trick the officials and the bureaucrats. She would sign the little girl up for experimental gene therapy, and in the process somehow save the little girl’s life and remove the parasite and keep it all secret.”

Dr. Xahir sighed. “It didn’t go well.”

The boy just stared.

“Where are your parents?”

The boy didn’t say a thing.

“Why are you here? Don’t you want to go back home?”

“Mommy is a patient here.”

“Oh. Here?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a shame. A real shame. What does she have?”

“They told me it’s rabies.”

“Hmm. Rabies.”

“Do you play any games?”

“I can play chess.”

“Can we play chess?”

Dr. Xahir smiled. “Sure, sure.”

She got up and walked over to the other side of the library, and began looking for the chess board amongst the pile of other games.

The boy picked up Dr. Xahir’s book, a massive green tome with a title embossed in gold.

The boy couldn’t read well, but made out the words THE THREE THINGS.

At that moment, The Madame entered the library. She walked up to the boy, told him to put the book down, and informed him that his mother had just died.

Dr. Xahir heard this, and walked over slowly, chessboard in hand, keeping a distance.

The boy did not know what to feel.

“Can we still play chess? I want to play chess, please. I want to play games with Dr. Xahir. I like her. She makes me happy.”

The Madame looked at Dr. Xahir, and then back at the boy.

“Sure. Go ahead. Play. We go back tomorrow. You will need to learn how to tend to the garden.”

The Madame left.

Dr. Xahir simply smiled. “Are you ready to play?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Let’s play.”

THE END.