Day 27
I am going to do this.
Vera shook her head and shot Lloyd a genuinely perplexed look.
“I really don’t know where you got all these crazy ideas about me,” she said. “I don’t always talk about myself and I do listen when people talk about themselves.”
“Oh do you know?” Lloyd jumped in. “That’s interesting. So, what’s my favourite food?”
Vera looked confused.
“Or my favourite colour?”
“Lloyd -”
“What did I have for breakfast this morning?”
“Like I’m really going to remember what you had for breakfast any one more.”
“You should. It’s the same thing I have for breakfast every morning. Hell, Vera, do you even know one thing about me? Anything at all?”
“Your name’s Lloyd,” Vera replied cynically.
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.”
Lloyd snorted.
“And since you can’t answer my question, you’re going to lash out and take it out on me, and refuse to admit that you’re wrong. And you wonder why I can’t deal with you any more.”
“Yeah, well, y’know what I hope? I hope that you have to separate from Mandy for a few months and home come to discover that she’s moved onto someone else and hasn’t even bothered to tell you that you’re over.”
Lloyd was silent and finally shook his head.
“And once again it’s all about you. Good bye, Vera.”
On that he turned on his heel and left. Vera watched him leave stonily, then turned back tot he view she once loved and felt the tears drip down her cheeks.
After that, Vera decided to leave. She couldn’t handle seeing Lloyd and Mandy together, let along continue to live in the same house as him. So she made arrangements to return to Terinos Lake and packed her things. On the day of the move as she carried her bags to the hovercraft site she happened to overhear a conversation in a nearby room.
“You’re not even going to say good bye to her?” she heard Helen asked.
“I already have,” was Lloyds’ sour reply. “And I don’t particularly care to continue this conversation. It’s just giving her what she wants.”
“Uhh right. And what exactly would that be?”
There was a brief silence.
“Attention. She’s an attention seeker of the worst kind.”
“Attention seeker? Where on Jessu did you get that idea? I seem to recall that the year of the epidemic when they tried to award her, she was no where to be found.”
“Yeah and then what happened? Everyone talked about her. Everyone admired how modest and humble she was and that’s the last thing she is. She an arrogant, self-centred, attention seeking brat who cares about no one by herself. She didn’t need to run away a few years back - that symbiont would never have been taken from her no matter what her mother wanted at the time. But she still did and had people looking for her and feeling sorry for her and wondering what happened to her.”
“Why didn’t she come back sooner then?”
“I don’t know, gee. But I do know this: she’s running away now, and everyone’s going to talk about her and feel sorry for her all over again.”
“Well… you really should have told her you wanted to break it off.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. And y’know what? I can admit that to anyone but her. Because she’s never wrong either.”
“Lloyd -”
“No, Mum, I’m not blowing this out of proportion. Not at all.”
After that point the voices faded and Vera threw her bags down on the ground with a resounding thump.
“I’m not an attention seeker either, Lloyd,” Vera muttered fiercely.
* * *
Vera scanned the sensor readings into the computer and studied the results. Since returning home from Farm Haven, Vera had started on a new project: trying to figure out how much of the native mineral her symbiont needed.
Her mineral levels - like everyone else - got checked at her annual check up. Some years there was none, and other times there was so little it was barely worth mentioning. This wasn’t exactly a good way of finding out what her daily requirements might be though, so with Sandy’s help Vera acquired the use of a personal mobile medical sensor from the stores at SomeNameHere.
The sensor was programmed to monitor her native mineral levels and to supplement her research, Vera made careful notes on what she ate. This got tedious quickly and many was the time where Vera skipped out on having snacks because she didn’t want to have to enter them into her notes. Nevertheless, her work was starting to show some interesting results.
When Vera wasn’t busying studying herself, she was getting involved in the Terinos Lake community again. She returned to her much loved habit of fishing in the mornings, and often went out with the hunting parties on the few occasions when they did. Terinos Lake usually traded food varieties with the nearby communities so hunting wasn’t usually necessary, but sometimes when the stores from their last trade were running out, the residents would decide that they should try restocking their red meat on their own.
Veras’ skill with bow and arrow had improved a great deal, not just in hitting her target, but also in the construction of her arrows. She had also been introduced to the art of skinning her prizes, although she decided she’d rather clean fish.
There was a knock on the door and Vera looked up as her mother tentatively entered the room.
“Hi honey,” she said softly. “Have you decided whether to come to the anniversary celebrations or not yet?”
Vera shook her head.
“I don’t really want to see Lloyd.”
“You might not. There will be thousands of people there. You’ll probably miss each other quite easily.”
“Maybe.”
There was silence for a time.
“Cory’ll probably be there.”
“Probably.”
Susanne looked at her daughter hopefully. Vera caught the look and shrugged.
“I talk to him all the time.”
“Over the comm system,” Susanne pointed out. “It not the same in person.”
“Yeah, but it’ll be so crowded.”
“We haven’t have the chance to meet him yet, either.”
Vera smiled.
“I think I’d rather stay at home.”
Susanne sighed.
“Okay, sweetheart,” she said. “But you still have plenty of time to chance your mind.”
“I know.”
Susanne started for the door, then turned back to say one last thing:
“You can’t hide away from the world forever, honey.”
Vera looked up, but her mother had left and shut the door behind her.
The night of the Day of Mourning was very quiet at Terinos Lake. Vera sat on the end of the jetty at the community centre and looked out onto the water.
Very quiet.
Even when she got up early in the morning, long before everyone else, it never seemed this quiet. Or perhaps it was only her imagination because everyone was at the celebrations.
She had hoped that coming home to Terinos Lake everything would go back to normal. But it hadn’t. Lloyds’ word seemed to haunt her, especially in conversation with others. At first she denied that she only talked about herself, that she was arrogant and an attention seeker. But now every time she delved into conversation with others she found herself talking about herself.
Unwilling to conceed that maybe Lloyd was right, Vera made a conscious point of asking everyone she spoke to about themselves, what they had done that day, things like that. But she found she wasn’t really interested in their answers and quickly got bored listening to their replies.
This alarmed her even more.
Now she was finding herself in the awkward position of wondering if she really was arrogant, self centred and condescending. She found that she couldn’t - or wouldn’t - answer the question.
“So now what?” Vera muttered to herself.
She didn’t know.
* * *
“You’re doing what now?” Vera exploded.
Cory pulled a face at her.
“Just what I said,” he replied. “I’m doing an experiment to find out how long the symbiont can last without nourishment, how the symbiont reacts, and how long and how much of the native mineral is needed to replenish it.”
Vera shook her head violently.
“You can’t do that!” she insisted. “You have no idea how it will affect it.”
“That would be the point of it being called an experiment, Vera.”
“Yes but... Hell Cory, you wouldn’t starve yourself of food or your animals just to see how long you could last before you starved to death.”
“Well, of course not,” Cory replied. “We already know those answers.”
“And if your verasite does starve to death there a good chance it’ll take you with it.”
“Well, we have this theory I’ll slip into a sleep state again.”
“Oh wow a theory,” Vera scorned. “This is the stupidest idea I have ever heard in my life! And what’s more, even if you do manage to survive this... this idiocy, there’s no telling what side-effect may come of native mineral deprivation. You could be making yourself sussceptable to any kind of virus or,or, or I don’t know. Other bad stuff.”
“Aww, I didn’t know you cared,” Cory joked. “Don’t worry so much, Vera. I’ll be fine. I’ve got a personal moblie medical sensor on me all the time -”
“You mean you’ve already started?”
“I’m being monitored all the time, the family knows what’s going on. It’ll be fine, really. In some ways it’s actually an extension of your own reasearch.”
“It most certainly is not! I’m not trying to starve my symbiont!”
“No, but you are trying to find the line between what’s enough and what’s too much native mineral, aren’t you? Well, we’re trying to find out the line between what’s enough and what’s too little. I’m gradually decreasing how much of the native mineral I put into my system each week. So far, no problems.”
Vera snorted.
“Your symbiont is probably already used to small portions, the way you consume native mineral rich foods. I bet this experiment is a real stretch of your eating habits.”
“Funny. Your symbiont is probably over fed and gotten fat. Obesity is unhealthy too y’know.”
“Like anyone on this planet has the chance to become obsese.”
“I’m sure we’d be surprised.”
“This is a stupid thing to do, Cory.”
“But neccesary,” Cory replied. “We know how to deal with further joinings - and there will be more of them. Now we need to expand upon that knowledge and learn everything we can so we can improve the situation for future generations. What we learn now is merely building blocks. And its important. I’m willing to take the risk.”
“Cory -”
“We have no way of experimenting on the symbiont directly - not that I think I would. This is really the only way we have right now.”
“I’m sorry, Cory, but even playing the ‘foundation of knowledge for the future of the colony’ card is not going to convince me.”
Cory shrugged.
“To each his own, I guess.”
Towards the end of winter Vera found out to her unhappy satisfaction that Cory had in fact fallen into a sleep state much like his orginal coma. Danny was now providing him with a certain amount of refined native mineral in his IV brace cartridge mix in an effort to see how long it would take for him to wake up again. It took three weeks, and Vera was horrified to find out that Cory intended to repeat the experiment near year - giving his symbiont a year to recover from the ordeal.
“You’re an idiot!” she proclaimed. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”
Cory responded with what Vera complained was a lame line about the pursuit of science.
Then spring arrived and there were reports of not one, but two new comas from seperate livestock farming communities, one being Farm Haven itself: a young man named Kevin. The two were given different but generous amounts of native mineral in their IV braces, and it was noted that Kevin took only a week to wake, while the other, a girl named Sarah, took two. A mineral content test done before they were given the braces showed that Kevin had a high mineral content while Sarahs’ was merely average.
Those involved in the symbiont research project seriously considered recommending to doctors not to remove all the native mineral at annual checkups, believing that the quanitity already in the hosts’ system when the verasite entered could seriously help or hinder the process.
Vera ended up moving to Panorama Hills, a community that had a half-and-half livestock and crops farming community. They provided food for themselves and for the nearby industrial plants. Now that the colony had more people, they were able to impliment some of the things they needed to maintain their preferred level of technology.
The Panorama Hills had instigated the haringberry technique for repelling growlers, however they had a greater problem with laconas. When asked, Vera had to admit she didn’t have a convienent way of keeping them away so the residents stuck with their usual method of hunting.
Panorama Hills was the home of Sarah, and this was whom Vera moved in with. Sarah worked on a livestock farm with her husband and two small boys. Additionally, three months after she came out of her sleep state, she revealed that she was pregnant.
Naturally as a female host it was expected that her child would likely become a host when it was born, this was of great interest to the symbiont studying community. Sarah made it very clear, however, that her child was not to be experimented on, whatsoever. Vera staunchly supported her decision.
Panorama Hills, Vera observed, was named for the amazing panoramic view that it had from the top of the highest hill on which the community centre had been built. That said, Vera thought that there was a view much nicer, and his name was Zeke.
Zeke was a dark-haired farm boy who lived and worked with his family on one of the crop farms. He had a very, very nice set of muscles from all that hard work which Vera admired a great deal. Unfortunately, Vera was not the only young woman in the community who thought so and was put off from pursuing her interest not only because of the other girls, but also because of Lloyd.
Even now she still felt haunted and hindered by his words. She didn’t want to repeat the experience. And she didn’t want Zeke to aquire the same opinion of her either.
Vera shook her head and shot Lloyd a genuinely perplexed look.
“I really don’t know where you got all these crazy ideas about me,” she said. “I don’t always talk about myself and I do listen when people talk about themselves.”
“Oh do you know?” Lloyd jumped in. “That’s interesting. So, what’s my favourite food?”
Vera looked confused.
“Or my favourite colour?”
“Lloyd -”
“What did I have for breakfast this morning?”
“Like I’m really going to remember what you had for breakfast any one more.”
“You should. It’s the same thing I have for breakfast every morning. Hell, Vera, do you even know one thing about me? Anything at all?”
“Your name’s Lloyd,” Vera replied cynically.
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.”
Lloyd snorted.
“And since you can’t answer my question, you’re going to lash out and take it out on me, and refuse to admit that you’re wrong. And you wonder why I can’t deal with you any more.”
“Yeah, well, y’know what I hope? I hope that you have to separate from Mandy for a few months and home come to discover that she’s moved onto someone else and hasn’t even bothered to tell you that you’re over.”
Lloyd was silent and finally shook his head.
“And once again it’s all about you. Good bye, Vera.”
On that he turned on his heel and left. Vera watched him leave stonily, then turned back tot he view she once loved and felt the tears drip down her cheeks.
After that, Vera decided to leave. She couldn’t handle seeing Lloyd and Mandy together, let along continue to live in the same house as him. So she made arrangements to return to Terinos Lake and packed her things. On the day of the move as she carried her bags to the hovercraft site she happened to overhear a conversation in a nearby room.
“You’re not even going to say good bye to her?” she heard Helen asked.
“I already have,” was Lloyds’ sour reply. “And I don’t particularly care to continue this conversation. It’s just giving her what she wants.”
“Uhh right. And what exactly would that be?”
There was a brief silence.
“Attention. She’s an attention seeker of the worst kind.”
“Attention seeker? Where on Jessu did you get that idea? I seem to recall that the year of the epidemic when they tried to award her, she was no where to be found.”
“Yeah and then what happened? Everyone talked about her. Everyone admired how modest and humble she was and that’s the last thing she is. She an arrogant, self-centred, attention seeking brat who cares about no one by herself. She didn’t need to run away a few years back - that symbiont would never have been taken from her no matter what her mother wanted at the time. But she still did and had people looking for her and feeling sorry for her and wondering what happened to her.”
“Why didn’t she come back sooner then?”
“I don’t know, gee. But I do know this: she’s running away now, and everyone’s going to talk about her and feel sorry for her all over again.”
“Well… you really should have told her you wanted to break it off.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. And y’know what? I can admit that to anyone but her. Because she’s never wrong either.”
“Lloyd -”
“No, Mum, I’m not blowing this out of proportion. Not at all.”
After that point the voices faded and Vera threw her bags down on the ground with a resounding thump.
“I’m not an attention seeker either, Lloyd,” Vera muttered fiercely.
* * *
Vera scanned the sensor readings into the computer and studied the results. Since returning home from Farm Haven, Vera had started on a new project: trying to figure out how much of the native mineral her symbiont needed.
Her mineral levels - like everyone else - got checked at her annual check up. Some years there was none, and other times there was so little it was barely worth mentioning. This wasn’t exactly a good way of finding out what her daily requirements might be though, so with Sandy’s help Vera acquired the use of a personal mobile medical sensor from the stores at SomeNameHere.
The sensor was programmed to monitor her native mineral levels and to supplement her research, Vera made careful notes on what she ate. This got tedious quickly and many was the time where Vera skipped out on having snacks because she didn’t want to have to enter them into her notes. Nevertheless, her work was starting to show some interesting results.
When Vera wasn’t busying studying herself, she was getting involved in the Terinos Lake community again. She returned to her much loved habit of fishing in the mornings, and often went out with the hunting parties on the few occasions when they did. Terinos Lake usually traded food varieties with the nearby communities so hunting wasn’t usually necessary, but sometimes when the stores from their last trade were running out, the residents would decide that they should try restocking their red meat on their own.
Veras’ skill with bow and arrow had improved a great deal, not just in hitting her target, but also in the construction of her arrows. She had also been introduced to the art of skinning her prizes, although she decided she’d rather clean fish.
There was a knock on the door and Vera looked up as her mother tentatively entered the room.
“Hi honey,” she said softly. “Have you decided whether to come to the anniversary celebrations or not yet?”
Vera shook her head.
“I don’t really want to see Lloyd.”
“You might not. There will be thousands of people there. You’ll probably miss each other quite easily.”
“Maybe.”
There was silence for a time.
“Cory’ll probably be there.”
“Probably.”
Susanne looked at her daughter hopefully. Vera caught the look and shrugged.
“I talk to him all the time.”
“Over the comm system,” Susanne pointed out. “It not the same in person.”
“Yeah, but it’ll be so crowded.”
“We haven’t have the chance to meet him yet, either.”
Vera smiled.
“I think I’d rather stay at home.”
Susanne sighed.
“Okay, sweetheart,” she said. “But you still have plenty of time to chance your mind.”
“I know.”
Susanne started for the door, then turned back to say one last thing:
“You can’t hide away from the world forever, honey.”
Vera looked up, but her mother had left and shut the door behind her.
The night of the Day of Mourning was very quiet at Terinos Lake. Vera sat on the end of the jetty at the community centre and looked out onto the water.
Very quiet.
Even when she got up early in the morning, long before everyone else, it never seemed this quiet. Or perhaps it was only her imagination because everyone was at the celebrations.
She had hoped that coming home to Terinos Lake everything would go back to normal. But it hadn’t. Lloyds’ word seemed to haunt her, especially in conversation with others. At first she denied that she only talked about herself, that she was arrogant and an attention seeker. But now every time she delved into conversation with others she found herself talking about herself.
Unwilling to conceed that maybe Lloyd was right, Vera made a conscious point of asking everyone she spoke to about themselves, what they had done that day, things like that. But she found she wasn’t really interested in their answers and quickly got bored listening to their replies.
This alarmed her even more.
Now she was finding herself in the awkward position of wondering if she really was arrogant, self centred and condescending. She found that she couldn’t - or wouldn’t - answer the question.
“So now what?” Vera muttered to herself.
She didn’t know.
* * *
“You’re doing what now?” Vera exploded.
Cory pulled a face at her.
“Just what I said,” he replied. “I’m doing an experiment to find out how long the symbiont can last without nourishment, how the symbiont reacts, and how long and how much of the native mineral is needed to replenish it.”
Vera shook her head violently.
“You can’t do that!” she insisted. “You have no idea how it will affect it.”
“That would be the point of it being called an experiment, Vera.”
“Yes but... Hell Cory, you wouldn’t starve yourself of food or your animals just to see how long you could last before you starved to death.”
“Well, of course not,” Cory replied. “We already know those answers.”
“And if your verasite does starve to death there a good chance it’ll take you with it.”
“Well, we have this theory I’ll slip into a sleep state again.”
“Oh wow a theory,” Vera scorned. “This is the stupidest idea I have ever heard in my life! And what’s more, even if you do manage to survive this... this idiocy, there’s no telling what side-effect may come of native mineral deprivation. You could be making yourself sussceptable to any kind of virus or,or, or I don’t know. Other bad stuff.”
“Aww, I didn’t know you cared,” Cory joked. “Don’t worry so much, Vera. I’ll be fine. I’ve got a personal moblie medical sensor on me all the time -”
“You mean you’ve already started?”
“I’m being monitored all the time, the family knows what’s going on. It’ll be fine, really. In some ways it’s actually an extension of your own reasearch.”
“It most certainly is not! I’m not trying to starve my symbiont!”
“No, but you are trying to find the line between what’s enough and what’s too much native mineral, aren’t you? Well, we’re trying to find out the line between what’s enough and what’s too little. I’m gradually decreasing how much of the native mineral I put into my system each week. So far, no problems.”
Vera snorted.
“Your symbiont is probably already used to small portions, the way you consume native mineral rich foods. I bet this experiment is a real stretch of your eating habits.”
“Funny. Your symbiont is probably over fed and gotten fat. Obesity is unhealthy too y’know.”
“Like anyone on this planet has the chance to become obsese.”
“I’m sure we’d be surprised.”
“This is a stupid thing to do, Cory.”
“But neccesary,” Cory replied. “We know how to deal with further joinings - and there will be more of them. Now we need to expand upon that knowledge and learn everything we can so we can improve the situation for future generations. What we learn now is merely building blocks. And its important. I’m willing to take the risk.”
“Cory -”
“We have no way of experimenting on the symbiont directly - not that I think I would. This is really the only way we have right now.”
“I’m sorry, Cory, but even playing the ‘foundation of knowledge for the future of the colony’ card is not going to convince me.”
Cory shrugged.
“To each his own, I guess.”
Towards the end of winter Vera found out to her unhappy satisfaction that Cory had in fact fallen into a sleep state much like his orginal coma. Danny was now providing him with a certain amount of refined native mineral in his IV brace cartridge mix in an effort to see how long it would take for him to wake up again. It took three weeks, and Vera was horrified to find out that Cory intended to repeat the experiment near year - giving his symbiont a year to recover from the ordeal.
“You’re an idiot!” she proclaimed. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”
Cory responded with what Vera complained was a lame line about the pursuit of science.
Then spring arrived and there were reports of not one, but two new comas from seperate livestock farming communities, one being Farm Haven itself: a young man named Kevin. The two were given different but generous amounts of native mineral in their IV braces, and it was noted that Kevin took only a week to wake, while the other, a girl named Sarah, took two. A mineral content test done before they were given the braces showed that Kevin had a high mineral content while Sarahs’ was merely average.
Those involved in the symbiont research project seriously considered recommending to doctors not to remove all the native mineral at annual checkups, believing that the quanitity already in the hosts’ system when the verasite entered could seriously help or hinder the process.
Vera ended up moving to Panorama Hills, a community that had a half-and-half livestock and crops farming community. They provided food for themselves and for the nearby industrial plants. Now that the colony had more people, they were able to impliment some of the things they needed to maintain their preferred level of technology.
The Panorama Hills had instigated the haringberry technique for repelling growlers, however they had a greater problem with laconas. When asked, Vera had to admit she didn’t have a convienent way of keeping them away so the residents stuck with their usual method of hunting.
Panorama Hills was the home of Sarah, and this was whom Vera moved in with. Sarah worked on a livestock farm with her husband and two small boys. Additionally, three months after she came out of her sleep state, she revealed that she was pregnant.
Naturally as a female host it was expected that her child would likely become a host when it was born, this was of great interest to the symbiont studying community. Sarah made it very clear, however, that her child was not to be experimented on, whatsoever. Vera staunchly supported her decision.
Panorama Hills, Vera observed, was named for the amazing panoramic view that it had from the top of the highest hill on which the community centre had been built. That said, Vera thought that there was a view much nicer, and his name was Zeke.
Zeke was a dark-haired farm boy who lived and worked with his family on one of the crop farms. He had a very, very nice set of muscles from all that hard work which Vera admired a great deal. Unfortunately, Vera was not the only young woman in the community who thought so and was put off from pursuing her interest not only because of the other girls, but also because of Lloyd.
Even now she still felt haunted and hindered by his words. She didn’t want to repeat the experience. And she didn’t want Zeke to aquire the same opinion of her either.