The Survival of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson

Author:Tade Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Transcript

It’s getting difficult to breathe. The mass is pushing against my lungs, but also my stomach. I can’t eat or drink more than a few sips.

[PD breathes heavily and struggles to speak.]

[cut]

Eight

I read the research material surrounded by phantom mollys, six of them, with accusing eyes and no words. Talking to Nikitovich has tripped up my mindfulness and bruised my ability to ignore them.

Some of the stuff I’m reading is in Russian, but most has been translated. I speak a little Russian and I remember how my mother called me dorogoy because she did not want me to consider myself weaker than a male.

What the research shows is that the difference between the primes and the duplicates lies in the spleen, which produces specialized, artificial cells. All those years ago when Mykhaila worked in Russia, she stole and injected herself with a primary suspension of those cells. They nested in her spleen and lay dormant. When she became pregnant with Molly they activated and the child was born with the ability to make blood copies, hemoclones.

I’m surprised to find out Mykhaila had a splenectomy, though there is no information about whether she ever made duplicates. Why else would she have had her spleen taken out? I remember seeing her scar. I imagine the scenario, the army of mykhailas. This may have been why both Connor and Mykhaila Southbourne were so proficient with the rules before Molly was born, and knew exactly what skills their child would need. I break out in a sweat thinking of duplicate mykhailas wandering around the British countryside. She was deadlier than Molly, and if they attack me . . .

The artificial cells act as matter converters. Their design has not been penetrated by any scientists outside the Iron Curtain, but from a drop of blood they can make a full human duplicate based on the genetic material of the Prime from almost any base material: wood, soil, organic waste, even metals.

I have to stop; the more I read, the more intense the ghost mollys become. I wonder what I will find if I take a sample of my spleen and examine it under the microscope. Would the special cells line the splenic channels? Or would they have their own gland budding off like a science-fiction alien? If I return to work I will find a way to biopsy myself.

I can’t say when I fall asleep, or at what point the dream begins, but it’s always best to just ride it out. I should not have to pay for sins I did not commit. I didn’t kill the mollys, so I should not have the nightmares, the shakes, the deep regrets, the ghosts.

I see me. My face, crumpling under my own fist. The mollys don’t register pain, even when they are deep in it. They cry out involuntarily, but no rictus or grimace, even while I break their arms or push their shoulders out of joint.

I see myself in dirt, in the mud behind Southbourne Farm, struggling to get my head up, but my arm holding me under, caught on a root system.

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