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Stephanie woke beneath dark fluorescent lights. Pudgy footprints had been stamped into the ceiling tiles. It was a pediatrician’s trick: ask the kids who’d been walking on the ceiling so the brats would laugh while their stomachs were poked or palpated or whatever.

Stephanie groaned. She was at SF Children’s again, and as usual they’d put her in a five-year-old’s room.

She sat up. Outside her window shone a too-blue Californian sky that made her squint. Farther out, the famous bridge was straining the famous fog as it flowed into the stupid famous bay. Nothing Stephanie hadn’t seen a million times before. She tried to remember if she’d been in this room before, but rummaging through her mushed-up memory only gave her a headache.

She got out of bed and found her body wrapped in a hospital gown and her feet covered by traction socks.

On her desk, a monitor was flashing STEPHANIE’S ROOM in primary-colored balloon letters. Below this dollop of pediatric saccharine was a toy chest.

Possibly with neo-toys?

She started for the chest but then stopped. A memory was squirming through her head like a worm.

Not really knowing why, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small glass snake that was biting its tail.

For some reason, her throat tightened. She had seen this snake yesterday, hadn’t she? Or had that been a chemodream? Hot dread filled her stomach.

She ran to her door and found it locked. Next she tried her desktop. It functioned but blocked access to all non-hospital websites. Someone had removed all the phones and intercoms from the room.

There wasn’t even a call button for the nurse.

They’d locked her in. But why? Her head felt light and the room began to spin. Nothing made any sense.

Hot tears filled her eyes. She sat heavily on the floor and covered her face.

“Damn it, why aren’t you here?” she growled to her absent parents and then struck the floor. “I hate this stupid chemo, these stupid doctors, and my stupid stupid glio-effing-blastoma.”

She cried then until her eyes ran out of tears and she felt numb with exhaustion.

She took out the glass snake that was swallowing its own tail and examined it. On its belly, written in flowery cursive, was a strange name: Carsonella ruddii.

Stephanie frowned at this for a long time before she went to her desktop and accessed the hospital’s encyclopedia.

Carsonella ruddii turned out to be a freaky bacteria that lived only inside the belly of a kind of jumping plant louse that ate amino acid-deficient plant sap.The tears returned to Stephanie’s eyes. Only one person would send her such a strange and hopelessly geeky message.

“Mom,” she whimpered first in English then in Shanghainese.

But after a moment, she thumbed the moisture from her eyes.

Something very, very bad must have happened if her mother was reduced to communicating in this way. And the more Stephanie thought of it, the more she recovered hazy memories of both her parents lecturing her on...on...she couldn’t remember exactly what.

Then it’s not just the chemobrain, she thought and gave her ID bracelet a twist. There’s something...wrong. Really effing wrong.

She read on about the Carsonella. Aside from being totally gross, it owned the shortest known genome: only about 180 genes. That was so little genetic material that it lacked the ability to produce certain needed proteins.

It depended on its host for the needed molecules and in return manufactured enzymes helpful to the host’s digestion.

It was an endosymbiont that had given up so much of its genetic identity that it depended on its host.

All this had been figured long ago. Since then, several experiments had shown that certain mutations could cause the louse cells to swallow the Carsonella. Over many generations, the louse cells and the bacteria could evolve together so that the Carsonella gave up all of its genetic independence and became an organelle of the host’s cells.

Scientists saw this as proof that mitochondria and chloroplasts had evolved by a similar process of endocytosis.

Stephanie read on about mitochondria. They were like bacteria in structure; they multiplied independently of their cells; they possessed their own DNA. And all mitochondrial DNA was passed on through the female line.

In fact, the mitochondria of every living human came from one woman, dubbed "Mitochondrial Eve," who had lived in eastern Africa 140,000 years ago.Here Stephanie paused. All mitochondrial DNA was passed on from mother to child.

“Mom, what the hell are you trying to say?”

She typed:

> What the FUCK?????

into the search engine and mashed the enter key. The screen changed to a warning about using obscene language in a children’s hospital.

In frustration Stephanie bent forward and wrapped her arms around her bald head.

“Nothing makes any sense!” She started to stand up but then stopped.

The glass snake still lay in her lap. Suddenly it became fluid and swallowed itself into a tight knot. Then with a pop, it disappeared.

“Oh my God,” she moaned. “I really am crazy. I’m totally out of my sandwich.”

But then something moved in her pocket. She reached in and pulled out the same green snake, again its normal size, again biting its tail.

A sudden, disorienting wave of memory washed over her and she saw her neo-toy swallowing its tail. She saw Jani holding her down and saying a word that made darkness explode across her vision. She remembered her father’s explanation of uploaded consciousness. “The neurotech Mom invented will change medicine someday,” he’d said. “If somebody’s brain is hurt, we’ll be able to upload their mind into the concinnity processor while we’re fixing the damaged brain tissue.”

Stephanie found that she was breathing hard. Her eyes couldn’t focus.

Back then, she hadn’t understood the difference between mind and brain.

Now it was painfully clear.

She squeezed her eyes shut and put the pieces together: the snake disappearing, Jani knocking her out with the word "lullaby"...she wasn’t living in the physical world any more.

Her mind had been uploaded into a concinnity neuroprocessor. That meant her brain was either receiving repairs from an army of nanorobots or was dead.

But if the nanomed was digging the tumor out, why was she trapped in the pediatric hospital? Why was her mother sending her strange messages?

She turned the glass snake over and traced Carsonella ruddii with her pinky. It was odd to think that the snake didn’t exist, that her pinky didn’t exist. It was merely a sensation generated in the dark wet center of a super neuroprocessor.

“Why Carsonella?” she asked the snake. “What’s mom trying to say?”

Perhaps it had something to do with one entity enveloping another. That would make sense. After all, Stephanie’s own mind had been enveloped by a neuroprocessor.

This realization made her jump. That was it. Her mother was trying to warn her, trying to tell her the neuroprocessor was taking away her identity, making her into an organelle like the freaky louse cells had enslaved mitochondria.

Her head began to spin, so she sat down and took a few long breaths.

Her mom was trying to tell her to escape. “So how the hell do I do that?”

she wondered aloud.

She looked at the toy chest and remembered hacking the snake neo-toy.

That had glitched out the neuroprocessor. Perhaps she could hack the neo-toys again. Maybe she could hack into the whole hospital.

She started for the desktop but then a terrifying thought stopped her.

What if her mind hadn’t been uploaded? What if there was no nanotreatment? What if all of this was a hallucination caused by the glio-effing-blastoma?