Chapter Text
“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
– Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
“From the perspective of the virus, the human being is irrelevant. What matters is the system that allows it to function. Skin cells, nerve cells, the right home for the right disease. Within our Afterlife capsule, the system that is Hannah Geist's body has been perpetuated, even expanded beyond what existed during her lifetime.”
– Mira Tesser, Antiviral
Breath. That’s how Hannah meets Syd March.
A knock at the door – a greeting too muffled to catch – then footsteps, approaching the bed. A dip in the mattress at her side as he sits down. And breath.
She cannot see him, with the mask over her eyes. She didn’t think she would want to. She told Ms Harvey she would be sleeping through the appointment today, having grown weary of making polite small talk with Mr Derek Lessing, Here On Behalf of the Lucas Clinic. But this isn’t Derek Lessing.
The new man doesn’t attempt to wake her and engage her in conversation. He understands the signal of the eye mask – perhaps respects it – although of course, he could just be a voyeur who likes watching women sleep. She's as good as a doll, like this, lying supine without eyesight in her nightgown as he ties the tourniquet to draw her blood.
He moves quickly. Her hand is in a fist, so he takes it between his – bare, not gloved yet – and pries her fingers loose. His skin is warm, nails short, fingertips soft. He must know, from the resistance he faces when he moves her, that she’s awake, but still he says nothing. She wonders what he looks like but doesn’t want to lift the mask, doesn’t want to ruin the magic of not knowing. His breath is her only clue.
For two minutes, they sit there together, breathing in the same tulip-sweetened air. She stays very still, playacting unconsciousness, even when the needle slips in without warning. The dull ache of its tip under her skin is familiar by now.
Derek would sometimes caress her inner elbow, afterwards. A little gratification, stolen when he ought to have been focused on securing the gauze over her leaking vein. Syd March does not caress her inner elbow. But nor is he professionally gentle. He rushes the gauze, sticks the tape down crooked. Like he can’t wait to be out of there.
Then he’s gone, and that’s the last she thinks she’ll hear of him.
Ms Harvey tells her afterwards that Derek was off sick, which comes as no surprise. He always looks like he’s getting over some infection when he comes to see her. She guessed long ago that he must be a client as well as a salesman. Sometimes, she wonders whether any of the diseases he spends his weekends sweating through are hers.
Fans are peculiar people. They all have their favourites, the ones they align themselves with. You do get collectors who like a bit of everyone, of course – Dr Abendroth among them, with the skin grafts in a neat row on his arm – but those are rarer. Generally speaking, to purchase someone’s biology, their sickness, they must mean a lot to you.
Hannah knows this is a compliment, though it doesn’t always feel like one. Not when people like Lessing stroke her skin. Perhaps that’s ungrateful of her, the exclusive face of the Lucas Clinic, but there it is.
Ms Harvey also tells her Syd’s name, once he’s left. Hannah asks before she knows she’s going to. She didn’t hear it from his own mouth – just the low murmur of his voice from the next room before they entered – and now that he’s gone, she’s curious.
His name is Syd March, Ms Harvey tells her. He looked to be of a similar height to Derek, dressed in the same crisp black suit. His hair is lighter, though, and longer, tied at the nape of his neck. His eyes are blue. And he’s young, she says. Very young. Most definitely younger than Hannah.
Her condition worsens, once her blood’s been drawn, and it becomes rapidly apparent that this virus may never go to market. Hannah lies in bed and listens to the conversations happening in the room next door – the room with all the flowers sent by her devotees – wondering who all the voices belong to. Everyone is worried about their investments. Their reputations. Their, their, their.
Ms Harvey comes in and touches up her lipstick now and then. Just in case anyone else from the clinic comes by, perhaps to take a swab. It wouldn’t do for them to see her bare mouth.
Distantly, Hannah wonders if her boyfriend might visit, though she doubts it. Their relationship was more of a PR stunt than anything else. No doubt he’ll be milking it now, crying crocodile tears for the cameras, stirring her fans into a frenzy. He texts, once or twice, to say how brave she’s being and how he hopes she’s being taken good care of. Again later to ask if she received his flowers. She says yes, assuming they’re out in the other room somewhere.
Dr Abendroth is delayed, Ms Harvey tells her. He will get to her as soon as he can.
When she starts coughing blood, they give up on the lipstick and move her out of the Mayerson, to a large and private manor where she can convalesce in secret. Hannah doesn’t remember the transfer. It happens during a spell of delirium, when she’s slipping between worlds, her hair a sweaty tangle, her skin burning white-hot and radiant like the star she is.
She wakes in the new room with nobody to greet her. She wants water but has no phone, no bell to summon help. And getting up makes the world tilt.
Eventually, Ms Harvey comes.
That’s when she learns that Hannah Geist™ is dead. A protective measure, against what they think must have been a synthetic virus, engineered in an attempt on her life. She takes the news placidly. It’s no surprise to her that somebody would want this. She knows about the AI models, designed to look like her using archival footage from past shoots. The ones that have her voice and beg and plead for clients’ pleasure; the ones they sell to fans who want her as their captive, scared, alone. When people are obsessed with you, Ms Harvey says, they like to prod your soft spots, revel in your vulnerabilities. Maybe for the virus engineer, a simulation wasn’t quite enough: maybe he wanted her dead for real, at his hand.
(“Why he?” she asks Ms Harvey. “Why not a she?”
“Because, dear, it’s always the men who want these things.”)
She takes the news placidly, which is good, because it’s not the only news.
This morning – the morning she learns Hannah Geist™ is dead – is also when she learns the truth about Syd March.
When she finds out what he did.
Her first thought isn’t, why?
Because she already knows why. As is the way with any exclusive product, her diseases thrive on the black market. In the nineteen-fifties, people would attend Christian Dior’s fashion shows – she read this in his autobiography – with the sole motive of copying his designs and manufacturing dupes. But a duped disease that produces the same set of symptoms won’t do for her fans: not when you can clone the original. The whole point of selling a sickness is that it’s a gift passed from her body to the next. That’s why everything that infects her is copy-protected. That’s why Syd took the risk.
No – her first thought, when they explain, isn’t why?
It’s, we must have the same blood type.
He can’t have given himself the virus any other way, says Dr Abendroth. The blood sample arrived at the Lucas Clinic corrupted, unusable due to a damaged seal; it would have been worthless to them even before they had to turn it over to the board. They had been going to send a technician – possibly Derek; possibly Syd again – to collect another, but then her people staged her death and all that went away. Dr Abendroth wagers that Syd must have injected himself in the bathroom first, before he left the building. His theory is proven right when they bring him in for a chat.
Hannah is no doctor, but she knows her immunology. In her line of work, it’s hard not to. She knows how antigens and antibodies work; knows that transfusing the wrong blood type can kill. And Syd March would have known that too. As a technician with the Lucas Clinic, he would have had access to her relevant medical files. He would have seen her blood type and it must have matched his own.
Now her blood is in him, and it feels… different, than knowing there are people out there with her second-hand pathogens inside them. The pathogens aren’t her – not really. She’s never thought of them that way. They’re just guests in her body, made impotent by copy protection, looking for some way to latch onto a new host. Though a part of her contract stipulates that she must encourage the parasocial promise of the Lucas Clinic – that sharing viruses equates to some sort of biological communion – she has never really felt like she’s in communion with her fans.
This, though. Her own blood, drawn straight from her arm and injected into his before it had the chance to cool. Her own blood, wreaking havoc in a stranger’s veins.
She’s never known such intimacy in her life.
She remembers the warmth of his hands. The pointed way he said nothing – had it been pointed? Yes, she thinks so – and the pinch of the tourniquet he tied a bit too tight. The skip of his breath as her blood filled the vial.
She needs to put a face to the name.
“I want to meet him,” she decides.
Ms Harvey tells her, absolutely not.
But Dr Abendroth sees no harm in it, and he gets the final say.