Two Sams, a Not-Sam, and the Ever Expanding AU Web

“Wow!” said Marius, carefully sidestepping the puddle of miscellaneous bodily fluids on the floor, “That is a lot of rabies.”

“You can’t actually contract “more rabies” than someone else. It’s a Boolean function; either you’ve got rabies or you haven’t.” Ivy idly said, leaning against the sink shoved into the corner of the examination room. Looking over the cadaver gently writhing on the table, she paused. “Though if it were possible, then yes, Martin has indeed contracted so many rabies.”

And what a dramatic display of said rabies too, Marius thought as he slipped a pair of gloves on. Martin was looking positively ghastly; skin going so grey that Marius was starting to see the individual pores slowly opening up, revealing Martin to be soft, gelatinous, and quite rubbery. It could have been passed off like he was touching the back of a particularly gooey stingray if not for the fact that Martin is still foaming at the mouth somehow. The contrast of the ever expanding amounts of paper white spit-brine and the brass of his wrists and fingertips was just the slightest bit disconcerting.

“It is a tad odd though, isn’t it?” Ivy murmured, looking over the corpse that was finally coming to an eerie stillness, “Amphibians by their nature shouldn’t be able to carry nor suffer from the disease. I thought that we’d come to the conclusion of his being primarily amphibious, but there appears to be something mammalian hidden somewhere in there- of course, those sorts of taxonomies are rather reductive-”

“- and you can classify a coconut as a mammal ‘cause it’s a giant hairy tit,” He shuddered a bit at the mental image. Marius prayed he would never see the day where he would have to see a coconut in real life. All those little papillae… the teeth... “Do we still have Raph’s notes on hand?”

“Memorized and accounted for.” Ivy said, “She’s going to have a field day with this, you know.”

“She’s going to want to cut him up live if anything,” Marius waved it off. 

“Fair enough.” Ivy said, “Cadavers don’t exactly make for lively dissections.” 

“They most certainly do not.” 

Thankfully, there wasn’t much Marius needed to do here- the bloke had gotten a nasty gash to the flank, but the wound had already started to heal before the whole rabies thing finished him off, so the most he needed were some stitches. Sewing skin and sewing fabric was basically the same to Marius. The only real difference was that skin was bloodier and also needed to be stabbed a touch harder, generally! Easy as could be.

Marius continued his examination, poking Martin’s currently very dead body and watching his head wetly roll back. His prognosis: gross. He started wiping up the foam, uncovering the human looking face beneath and thanking his lucky stars that the damn body wasn’t making any more of a mess. It just seemed wrong for the poor bastard.

“We’ll just get the kid sewn up and he’ll be right as rain,” Marius grinned, already pleased with an easy job and imagining what favors he could get out of this. Sure, Marius treated Martin every time any diplomatic meetings went south, but he thought this particular case was one the ship’s ambassador would really want to thank him for. 

(Marius also just so happened to be in the possession of two thousand little unassembled space ikea bookshelves. He also did not know why. But they were there, looking smug in their little cardboard fortresses and their Spedish. Mocking him. Tempting him with their wooden depths.)

“Mmm.” Ivy said in a tone that implied that not everything would, in fact, be right as rain. 

Marius turned to her, squinting. “You think my assessment is wrong.”

“Not wrong per se, just… underdeveloped.” Ivy said, “The rabies virus persists inside a dead animal for at least twenty-four hours after expiration- unless we kill it, Martin is still ah, full of rabies. If we leave it, he’ll die again after a few weeks. And since his regeneration appears to take about six hours to revitalize the damaged brain tissue, there is an 87.34% chance of his contracting the rabies virus again and dying after a few weeks, and so on and so forth, until such a time that his body spontaneously produces cells that have mutated partial immunity to the virus. At the current rate and due to the completely jumbled mess that is his genetic code, we could be looking at Martin continuing this cycle for… seventeen years.”

“Seventeen years?!” Marius exclaimed, “But I don’t want to operate on him for seventeen years! Think of all the inter-crew drama I’ll miss!!!”

..

Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, does not set out to be the tyrant of a ruined world. he’s coaxed into it.

he’s manipulated into it, with the threat that if he doesn’t follow his urge to Know he will be less of the person he is, even as he slowly morphs into an entirely separate entity entirely. one slowly disillusioned by the horrors. one who, by the end, is sure that the prophecy of the fears- that he will set them free- and yet is thwarted by the invisible strings of fate which have dictated his life from the moment he read that first book, all those years ago.

his friends pull away. those he loves are killed or else refuse to look him in the eye, and he must only rely on the love of his life, his one anchor, even as Martin must bat away his own creeping madness

Jon has no choice but to be the architect of his own demise.