LOVE
TWENTY
"Captain Harkness… Captain Harkness… Wake up."
Jack slowly segued into wakefulness. He opened his eyes and tried to look around, but he seemed to have problems focusing. He pressed his eyelids together tightly and pictured his hand… ordered his hand to rise up to them and rub.
But nothing happened.
"Captain Harkness, look at me please."
Once again and with some reluctance and tremendous effort Jack opened his eyes. He couldn't deny things were not right. Not only was his vision fuzzy, but his entire body felt fuzzy, and his mind was fuzzy, too. He couldn't remember anything, couldn't grasp where he was, what he was doing. He couldn't grasp the position of his body. Or where his body was in three-dimensional space. He could barely grasp who he was…
And who was that speaking to him?
He looked around, noticed a sort of large, gray man-like shape moving in front of him.
"Very good, Captain Harkness. Do you recognize me? Can you see who I am? I'm the doctor, Captain Harkness…"
Jack tried to nod his head. But wait! Doctor? The Doctor? No… that was wrong. That wasn't The Doctor. The voice was all wrong. The outline, the shape… were also wrong. Jack tried to speak; he couldn't feel his mouth, his tongue, his teeth. He gasped a ragged breath, could hardly feel the air enter his body, his lungs.
"Captain Harkness, please, you must try to relax. Listen to me; listen to the sound of my voice. Concentrate on what I am saying, Captain Harkness. Hear my words. During the procedure I was performing on you – do you remember? Do you remember talking about it? Discussing it? The brain biopsy? How important it is? During the procedure there was a problem. You had a stroke, Captain Harkness. A brain hemorrhage. But you are very strong, you survived."
Something suddenly changed. Something moved. Then Jack realized it was he who moved – he seemed to be sitting up in some sort of portable device, a sort of high-tech wheelchair, perhaps. It was the only logical explanation for the strange sense of motion and the doctor… no… not The Doctor he remembered… there was another name… there was some other name he couldn't quite recall. But this man… this man who wasn't his Doctor was shifting him around. A stark wave of nausea came and went and then came again, stronger still.
"The average thirty-day survival figures for subarachnoid hemorrhage are around six-tenths, Captain. But I already am quite certain you are going to beat those odds. You are recovering very quickly… It's quite impressive actually. I believe you've already come through the main danger period, but your chances of full recovery… well, they are still in question. However, I am very hopeful for you. I am more optimistic than I was even an hour ago, my dear Captain. Here, look at this…"
Jack blinked several times and noticed his vision was beginning to clear. His chair had been rolled in front of a gigantic tube monitor. The man… no the monster – Jack suddenly remembered the monster's name was Iserliss – the monster was messing with something that looked like the bastard offspring of a computer mouse and a joystick. Jack was having a hard time making out what he was supposed to look at on the display. It was in shades of gray, somehow messy and biological looking.
"Captain, you are currently paralyzed on your left side, and your speech is impaired. It has been difficult to evaluate your mental functioning, but I believe you are already recovering many of your faculties." Jack watched as the form of Iserliss turned briefly to peer at him before turning back again to the enormous screen. "I believe you will get your full mobility back, but only time will tell. We will need to be patient.
"But I'm certain what you're really interested in is what I'm learning. Is that not so? And I believe I can now start sharing with you some extraordinary data, data which show how absolutely remarkable you truly are." The image on the monitor vanished, to be replaced by different one. It sort of looked like blobs with tangled fibers converging on them. "This is an M-type gangliocyte that I took from the white matter deep within your brain. As you can see, it has lots of dendrites going into it. Everything seems pretty normal, pretty typical, until we look inside of it."
The picture changed again. There were lots of weird loops and whorls, and something else Jack couldn't begin to make out. Something that didn't look organic.
"Cytology, my dear Captain. Cytology is everything. These unusual, disturbing-looking structures are in every central nervous system tissue sample I've retrieved from you. They are also in your peripheral tissues, albeit in smaller quantities. Screening isolated some extremely strange DNA sequences in these structures and very large fullerene macromolecules doped with traces of heavy elements such as iridium and thorium…"
While the monotonous voice droned on and on Jack began to feel increasingly sick, dizzy, as words like "buckeyballs" and "carbon-sixty molecules" and "inner lipid walls" and "quantum dots" made brief, perplexing appearances in the monster's endless soliloquy. It was getting harder and harder to concentrate and follow what was being said but the Captain forced himself to remain conscious even though he knew, eventually, it would be a losing battle. He redoubled his efforts.
"Your cells are full of repurposed mitochondria. In other words, your mitrochondrial DNA has been edited, Captain Harkness – over two hundred enzymes no one has ever seen before have been added. They are artificial – but they are as far beyond nanotechnology as astrophysics is beyond astrology. This is outside of any technology anyone has ever dreamt of, much less seen in this galaxy, in this universe.
"I've been able to construct tissue cultures using cells I've harvested from your brain matter, and I've been able to keep those cells alive in vitro and perform various tests on them. What I'm finding is evidence of extremely advanced bioengineering on a microcellular level. I'm finding artificial organelles that are hyper-complex. And mechanosomes which combine with quantized charge units created by those unique enzymes of yours that, as near as I can tell Captain Harkness, won't ever let you die. Yes, the key to immortality, my dear Captain, is in your DNA. Your mitrochondrial DNA."
Once again Iserliss, his eyes eerily incandescent, turned his head and looked at Jack. "Oh, we've only just started our journey together, and I'm going to need you healthy so I can obtain more samples. Unfortunately the extracted cells don't last very long once you start working with them – they die after about thirty minutes – and…" he reached out and rolled the wheelchair slightly to Jack's right, in order to give the Captain a better view of what was behind the monitor and off to the physician's left. Iserliss pivoted around and looked along with him. "Unfortunately our first test subject did not survive my initial attempt to introduce your genes directly by inserting them into her cells and tissues via a retrovirus. Granted it was a long shot, but it was worth trying."
Jack blinked and was able to make out the shape of a body laid out on a hospital bed.
"Yes, Vatia will be missed, but science, you know, science must always come first…"
It felt like a curtain was coming down over Jack's vision. He tried to speak, but only managed to gurgle.
Iserliss turned back to face him, "Unfortunately my dear Captain I am not able to understand you, but if I were to guess, I believe what you might be wondering is whether or not you are human. It's certainly what I would ask if I were in your place; if I were confronted by such knowledge. And it is a most excellent question, Captain Harkness. Are you still human or are you something else? I cannot begin to say, but again I believe that time will tell… Your secrets will most assuredly be revealed."
No you're wrong, Jack thought as the world around him went slowly, quietly black. That's not even close to I wanted to say. But let me tell you this – if there's someone in this room who isn't human, I promise you it's not me…
-00-
"Kiss me and you will see stars; love me and I will give them to you."
Unknown