Harriet addresses some issues...with an AI therapist

No one knew where the fleas came from. Correction: no one knew for certain where the fleas came from. Some said it was a foreign power. Others that it was internal subversion, undermining the already crippled state. But the forties ended with shrinkage: of economy, of muscle bulk, of people. All male.

The therapist had conjured up a version of her father’s face. Harriet tried to look away, but it followed her gaze wherever she turned her eyes. The stubble from the angle of his jaw. Hairs sprouting from behind his ear tragus, a glimpse of a nostril. It chased her, running her down. 

‘Tidal breathing now. Gently in, hold for three seconds, then gently out.’ The calming voice did little to counter Harriet’s disrupted rhythm. She had been working up to this point over several sessions and  accumulated a whole load of pent up stress in anticipation. She tried to focus. How to control this, release it, disperse it. 

Harriet let her gaze settle on her father’s cheek. It was sunken. Hollowed out. One … two. She flicked up to his eye. An iris so beautiful, ridges of colour, both radial and radiant, separated by dark valleys, like narrow ravines embedded in a crystal clear fluid medium. Absorbed in the perfection of this structure she allowed herself to pull out, to encompass the whole orbit. Three … four. Too much. She could see the fear in his soul, sitting behind his ravaged face. She looked away, shutting her eyes.

‘Can we change the settings?’ she pleaded. 

‘You have been making such good progress,’ the therapist intoned, a phrase of praise cut with undernote of “don’t stop now”. Harriet steeled herself. 

She looked at his whole face. There were hints of his happier times, the creases splayed from the corners of his eyes she remembered so well from when he raised her above his head, a chuckling greeting at the return from a hard day's work. But the horror of his predicament, their predicament, could not be hidden. 

Harriet shut her eyes. She was transported back to the day disturbed by her mother Eileen’s hammering. 

‘Get your head out of that screen!’ The left half of Eileen’s face looked at Harriet in disgust. The right half was replaced by an implant housed behind an ornate case. Eileen had opted for “Corinthian” today. ‘Can you just hold this end while I unroll it.’ Eileen was angry and flustered.

They were in the main bedroom. A metal frame had already been erected by Eileen to form the outline of a cube around the bed. Harriet’s father lay inert, his head propped up on two pillows. The thick wire mesh was hard to attach, but Eileen struck the clip fastenings with a rubber mallet. The regular thump caused the whole structure to resonate. 

‘I knew he would come back with fleas!’ Half the men in the district had already succumbed. No one knew what it was to begin with. Forgetfulness, well that might just be expected. There was a lot that needed forgetting. But within a few days, patterns began to emerge. It was almost as if men of a particular political leaning were being targeted.  Then her friend brought her something in a jar.

‘Eileen, look at this.’ There was a tiny black dot in the bottom of a jar. ‘My Alfie kept scratching the back of his neck. I had a look and peeled this off his skin.’ They both looked at it. Less than a millimetre in diameter, it looked featureless. But they both knew what it could be. 

‘I’m going to take it to the lab. Harriet, you sit with your father.’ 

Inside the Faraday cage, Harriet sat on the edge of the bed. There could be no distraction from screens, or any electronics. The defence against electromagnetic waves was complete, her father isolated from any malign instructions that might control his invaders, and isolating her from the comforters she so depended on through her teenage years. For the first time in a long time she looked at him closely. She lifted his hand from the sheet. Veins raised, flowing like rivers, formed a pattern on the back, of tributary followed by confluence. The skin was thin and slack, crazed by tiny wrinkles, ridged over the joints of his fingers, up towards the nails. His thumb hung down. This hand, once so strong had lifted her, and now all life seemed to be flowing from it. His half opened eyes flickered, then widened, his mouth rounded as though he had something important to say. But nothing came out. As though something was stuck, a thought of such import, but he couldn’t enunciate it. Then his head relaxed back, the tension drained from his face, beyond normal until the flesh sank into the pillow. And with that, so went his colour, pink nails went white and then turned bluey-grey.

Eileen let out a stifled shriek. Her rushed attempt to save her husband had been too late. Harriet was distraught. Her father had died on her watch. In the weeks following, the truth was revealed. Eileen’s lab had found residues of mRNA in the flea, with a sequence that coded for an amyloid type protein. The men’s own neurons had been hijacked to produce a substance that gummed up their brains. They had died of acute rapid onset Alzheimer's disease. 

‘That fucking tunc Tusker!’ exclaimed Eileen.