Chapter 14: Revelation

The next two weeks were busy, but uneventful.

Stefan did not seem to have noticed the change in his lover, or perhaps he simply did not comment upon it.

Everyone worked hard, the papers began to emerge, and, every evening, they socialised and ate together, paired up and went to bed.

Every night, before they were taken into sleep, they were all joined in a sense of companionship, of comfort, of acceptance. This never paled.

Julie alternated between writing her own paper, and reviewing the papers of others.

Some of the programmers with experience were turning the journal papers into patent drafts, and these would go out to the attorneys by day, and return for review in the afternoon.

On the fifteenth day, Eve came in with John Landers, just after 11am, and was holding a stack of courier's envelopes. From each person's desk, she picked up a neatly printed paper submission, and inserted it into a pre-addressed envelope.

Signatures were scrawled, copyrights were transferred, each patent right was transferred to TAUPAN for a shiny new Australian dollar, and as, the last paper disappeared into its envelope, Eve cut them loose.

"Well done, team," said Eve, "You've made a stellar effort.

"With the evidence in these papers, I am sure that the women held in the USA will soon be released.

"Your brilliant inventions will also set up TAUPAN to be a very successful, and profitable, company.

"I cannot thank you enough.

"But my sister, at least, will soon be able to thank you in person.

"Lilli is travelling to Australia as I speak. The Australian government has agreed to keep an eye on her, just as they did for the other Australians who were cured in the United States. I hope you will all come to know her soon."

There was applause in the room.

Everyone knew that this had been Eve's chief priority in managing this project, and some, such as Cassie, had come to know Lilli very well.

Eve continued.

"I also have another announcement to make."

She wrapped her arms around John Landers, and she held him, and kissed him on the mouth.

He smiled at Eve, and responded eagerly.

She waved at the twins to come forward, and Eve and John put their arms around Sophie and Jessica's shoulders, facing into the room.

"I'm sure that all of you know my fiancée, John Landers. We'll be getting married in the fall, and I'm so proud of my new little family."

She kissed the twins, too.

They were clearly very happy with their father's choice of stepmother.

"And, girls, you will soon be getting a new baby sister, and I'm sure that she'll soon be spoiled rotten."

Eve patted her tummy, which wasn't yet showing a bump.

The twins laughed and clapped, and everyone in the room applauded, enjoying Eve's own obvious excitement and happiness.

"Finally," Eve continued, "as I cannot seem to help myself saying: Thank you! Thank you again, everyone! You all have given your very best to support my projects, and to support the new hospital, and you have all excelled.

"Let it not be said that I am ungenerous.

"I'm very happy to say that I have convinced the university to assign to each of you a parcel of shares in our joint-venture company, TAUPAN.

"For your obvious dedication, competence and hard work, each of you will be issued with 1% of the stock of the company. We intend to gain patent protection for all aspects of the scanner, the pathology tests, a new operating system for medical devices, and the many applications of the venom.

"We expect that this company will make each and every one of you financially secure in the very near future.

"Congratulations!"

Doctor Kelly had a few bottles of bubbly ready, and a stack of plastic cups. The mood was festive as the first cork hit the ceiling, and she laughed and as she started pouring a celebratory libation into each cup.

The twins went out of the room, and started to wheel in tables covered in food.

Everyone toasted each other, and Eve smiled at them all, and, as the speeches gave way to socialising in this impromptu party, Julie felt a wave of accomplishment flow over her.

She had done well, she was proud.

She felt like the little girl she once was, having ridden her bike down the big hill behind her parent's house, pedalling fast, and turning at the last second around the corner, and free-wheeling up to the top of her own driveway.

It had taken dozens of attempts to get it right, but she had done it.

She had doubted at the time that she would ever feel so proud ever again.

The party continued only until mid-afternoon.

Everyone was enjoying themselves, but they also wanted to return to their real lives, the lives that they had left behind weeks ago.

With the papers submitted and the patents on their way to being filed, the whirlwind of words which had dominated Julie's mind over the previous fortnight began to dissipate. She was able to start thinking about returning to the mess that must be left in the apartment.

It was well and truly Spring as Julie and Cassie wandered back, and the weather was beautifully clear and warm, an oasis of loveliness before the summer heat.

It was also a bumper year for fluff. The cottonwood trees in Union Court always dropped mountains of white, fluffy seeds at this time of year, which flew around campus and piled up in drifts.

Undergraduates had always feared the fluff, as its appearance was taken as a sign that it was far too late to begin studying for final exams, but Cassie and Julie regarded the white drifts only with affection. They had little to worry about now.

All of the trials of the last few months had been overcome, and rather than feeling let down, they were rejuvenated by knowing that they had a lifetime of exploration ahead of them. They would be exploring each other.

As they walked into their apartment, they were in for a small surprise, of sorts.

Their poo-brown couch, their CRT television, their mismatched dining table and chairs, the mess.

All were gone.

A voluminous leather settee, an entertainment unit under a massive flat-screen television, laminated wooden chairs and a gleaming glass table-top had replaced them.

The apartment had been newly cleaned, and was spotless, their plants had all been well-cared for and watered, and there was a fresh vase of flowers in every room. The fridge and pantry were newly stocked with essentials, and there were two bottles of wine on the brand new dining-room table.

Their new apartment was perfect.

Eve works in mysterious ways, thought Julie.

Julie's memory stick was back, too, sitting next to the wine, with a post-it note attached.

Julie picked it up, and read the note with a smile.

Thanks for everything, Julie!
Thanks for everything, Cassie!
Hope you like your new "digs".
Love, Eve and Lilli.
XXX OOO

Julie re-attached the memory stick to her keyring.

That's nice! I must have accidentally left it in Eve's apartment.

She didn't remember what it contained; it had some test data on it, or something.

She could check when she went into work tomorrow.

Julie and Cassie got out their backgammon set, and opened a bottle of red wine and some chips.

They hadn't played for months.

They played hard, taking the game of chance very seriously, but whenever their hands touched as they reached for the dice, they found them lingering.

The tension between them was palpable.

They both knew where this day was leading.

But there was no hurry.

When the bottle of wine disappeared, and a draw declared, Cassie pulled Julie up from her chair, and held her close, kissing her.

She put an arms around Julie's waist, and they walked into Julie's bedroom, Julie's head on Cassie's shoulder, and they both smiled at the bedclothes, brand new and smelling fresh.

"Host-form make the best lovers," whispered Cassie, smiling.

Julie smiled, secretly, amazed at how wonderful love could be.

Even if this only happened once, she could die happy.

Julie went into work early the next morning.

There was nothing urgent to do. It was far too early for the reviewers to have returned her papers, but after the weeks at the hospital, she was eager to again visit her office, to immerse herself back into her sleepy academic life, happy, and contented, her career all but assured.

And she was curious about what was on her memory stick.

After last night with Cassie, she still felt pleasant glow, and smiled to herself as she carried it around with her.

Cassie had slept in this morning, and Julie looked forward to seeing her soon.

Julie would be glad of her company today.

They need never be separated now.

Cassie had become a constant, loving presence in her life, and Julie knew that she could never live without her.

Maybe getting married would be nice.

When Julie inserted her memory stick into her computer, she checked the images first.

When she saw that processed image of Gabby, with Gabby's body riddled with worm trails, Julie realised that everything had been tied up in her mind far too neatly, for far too long.

Her mind had been bound, all of the little facts which might have muddled her message had been tied up in a neat little bundle and hidden in a far corner of her mind.

But now the bindings were unravelling fast.

She remembered that last evening in Eve's apartment.

It was Eve. Eve had altered her mind.

However, as Julie's memories returned, she could only regard that time with a kind of sweet nostalgia.

She didn't begrudge Eve her assistance.

The whole process had, in fact, been rather pleasant.

And Eve had returned the memory stick.

Julie realised that there were still mysteries aplenty to solve.

She still wanted to know.

The first thing Julie did was to disconnect her workstation from the network.

She next checked all of her old images of the cured women on her workstation, using the infilling detector she still had on her memory stick.

The results were as she expected.

Someone, probably Stefan, had replaced all of the old images with modified versions. Each had a little bit of noise added to the in-filled regions. Detecting the deliberately hidden worm trails in the doctored images had always been a delicate operation, and now she knew there was little hope of ever again showing that the images had been tampered with.

Julie thought she'd worked out the game that Eve was playing.

The cured women were strange, Cassie had established that, but with Lilli's counselling, and Cassie's assistance, Julie thought them mostly harmless.

Even in the uncorrupted images of Gabby, there was no evidence of any worm tissue remaining in the cured women.

She had never felt under threat while working with women whom she knew, without doubt, had been host-form. Also, although Eve had encouraged her to visit the worms, she had never felt under much pressure to do so. Anjolie had been a loose cannon, but even though she had had clear evidence of anomalies with the cured women, she, too, had accepted that saving the women was more important than the small risk of the worms escaping.

Many of the people under Eve's purview had ended up in the clinic to become host-form, possessed by worms, but, as far as Julie could tell, the experience had done nothing but improved them. She'd felt the passion and focus of Eve's team as they had prepared the papers and the patents, but once again, she had never felt threatened by the presence of so many worms so close to her.

The cured women had to be marked, Julie could see that, the cured women had to be identifiable, otherwise world governments would feel under threat and the new clinic would not be allowed to continue.

By arranging for a trojan horse to be put into the Taubett machine to obscure the worm trails, Eve had given a free pass, a get-out-of-jail-free card, to all of her staff.

There was no reason for them to be discriminated against.

Julie didn't think that anyone she worked with was a threat to society.

She also had a look at the old Taubett firmware, and recalled that she and Cassie had been planning to use the Taubett scanner to have a look inside Cassie.

It was Friday.

She had one day to set everything up.

The six-month anniversary of the hospital's opening was on tomorrow night at the Uni Bar, so she expected that the whole weekend would be a wipe-out.

Julie rang Anjolie at the hospital to request time on the Taubett machine for that evening. As it was now official medical equipment, it would need a medical doctor like Anjolie to drive it.

She felt comfortable asking. Anjolie and herself were the only two women that Julie was sure were free, the only two that Julie definitely knew had never been host-form. She had never been sure about Eve, or even Doctor Kelly. They weren't normal people, but that wasn't to be expected: they were both brilliant, and Eve was an entrepreneur, and Doctor Kelly an oncologist.

Julie knew that the firmware in the machine at the hospital had been modified to doctor the images.

She believed that Stefan had succeeded in writing a version of the software which could remove the evidence of worm infections, without the doctoring mechanism being visible in a code review.

It wasn't hard to piggy-back extra code into the device, as there were hundreds of megabytes of test patterns included with the software for its self-tests, run by the device whenever it was booted up. Some of these test patterns consisted of pseudo-random noise, which is exactly what a cryptographically encoded version of Stefan's modified software would look like.

Julie guessed that the kernel inside the Taubett machine itself must have been compromised to run the extra image-processing code. Stefan's Ph.D. topic was related to the security of kernels, so she expected that he had found some way to produce doctored images out of a machine, even where the software had been carefully reviewed before it was allowed in a US clinical setting.

To get FDA approval, all of the source code had to be reviewed by experts before it would be allowed near any patients in the USA. This process was well in train, and was being fast-tracked because of the importance of the Taubett device to "national security."

With all of the image-processing and kernel work, Julie was amazed at the huge amount the university programmers had accomplished in only a few weeks.

What had Cassie said?

Being host-form was like being on speed?

It must have been good stuff.

All of this work was very impressive, Julie thought, but it made it very difficult do what she intended to do this evening.

If she wanted to see the raw images, she would have to use the old firmware that she'd copied from her backup tape, such a long time ago.

Julie spent the rest of the day preparing a boot loader for the Taubett machine using the old firmware.

Tonight she would be imaging Cassie's body, without doctoring.

Cassie turned up in Julie's office in the afternoon to hang around, waiting for her to finish preparations.

Gabby was hanging around, too. Somehow she had picked up on the nature of tonight's expedition, knew all of the details, and wouldn't be dissuaded from coming with them.

"You could image me instead of Cassie," Gabby said, "You've already got the scans of me. They'd be better to compare. And I've used the scanner when it was here at Physical Sciences, so I can help Anjolie with that.

"And, I think I have something rather special that I want to look at."

Julie was getting a bit irritated by Gabby. Had Cassie told her everything?

Anyway, it was too late now. The cat was definitely out of the bag.

Eventually they decided to ask Anjolie to scan the three of them.

Julie had been feeling uneasy about her emotions for some time now. After Cassie had returned from the hospital after their fight, everything had been so easy. Julie had fallen into love like a duck to water. She had never felt anything like this before. She simply couldn't believe that she had found happiness without artificial help.

That evening, the three of them made their way to the hospital, up to the fourth floor.

Anjolie was there to greet them.

And Lilli was with her.

Julie recognised her from the photograph on Eve's desk.

Lilli was a small woman, and looked to be in her mid-twenties. She must have been barely an adult when the invasion had started, when she had been infected with the worms in that shopping mall.

Cassie knew who it was immediately, and she grabbed poor Lilli in a bear hug. The two had spent countless hours chatting about inconsequentia, and Cassie thought she knew Lilli intimately.

Lilli laughed, and kissed Cassie on the cheek in greeting.

She then began to look very serious.

She took Cassie's face in her hands, and looked her straight in the eyes.

"Greetings, Earthling!" Lilli said, her voice deep, and commanding.

She rubbed noses with Cassie.

"Take me to your leader!"

Everyone laughed, and Lilli's voice softened.

"Cassie, finally we meet. I've been waiting for such a long time. Thanks for getting me out of that dreadful FEMA camp. And you don't know how much our midnight conversations have meant to me."

She turned around, and spread her arms in greeting, so as to include everyone.

"And thank you all. Thank you all for helping me get to Australia, to rejoin my sister. Thank you all so much."

Lilli spoke with the same rich, exotic East-coast accent belonging to Eve, but she was much younger than Eve, and seemed more playful.

Lilli kissed them then, and greeted each one of them individually.

Julie knew then that ever since that day in Eve's apartment, on the day she had seen that beautiful photograph, she had fallen in love with Lilli.

She loved Cassie as well, that was true. She loved Cassie, and she had loved Cassie for a long time.

Years.

But Cassie was only a woman.

It was different from the love she had for Lilli.

Lilli was a goddess.

"Julie, Eve's told me all about your work." said Lilli. "I'm looking forward to seeing us all on the inside. I want to know what we really look like."

Cassie began to regard Lilli warily.

She thought that she detected the same predatory gleam in Lilli's eye that she now knew lurked inside Eve.

Did Lilli hold the same secret inside herself as Eve? Was Lilli not a woman, but a pastiche of women, a container holding the souls of so many?

Lilli had spent countless months in the FEMA camp, holding prayer sessions with women that did not know what the future held, that knew that detention might be followed by an ignominious death.