The Gift of Diony-505

Titus was broken.

Not in any one particular way, but in so many varied and peculiar ways for a ten-year old boy it could be said nothing had ever been right with him. A selection of his ailments included a rare blood disorder, a cancer of the thyroid, and a swelling of the brain that required regular draining through a tube layered under his skin. And as though to add insult to all these genetic injuries, his right leg bone ground inside the socket of his hip like a mortal in a pestle as he trudged along with an IV stand behind him.

Needless to say, he was in a lot of pain much of the time.

Titus lived in a place very much unlike him. The walls were white and polished. The view through the windows was bright and cheery. His caretakers, the staff of the Brillingburg Home for the Extraordinarily Unique, doted on him, and all the others, with fastidious love and attention. Everything was always in the right place at the right time—from regularly scheduled meals to board game night at seven on Saturday evenings—operating according to some well-thought out plan with few disruptions.

Titus entered the Interaction Room, as he did on every day, after his morning medications. Almost everyone else was there already, including Norty and Eila, who sat talking at a table in the corner. He shuffled over to them.

“Look at this lazybones who finally decided to join us,” Eelah said. She swept the long bangs of her black hair away from her hazel eyes. Titus watched them circle his face then drop to the card clipped to his uniform, her cheery grin muting into a sunken pout. “I’m sorry you’re having a purple day.”

Every morning, each child at Brillingburg selected a small colored card that matched their current level of pain. The colors changed regularly, too, so that red wasn’t always bad, and sometimes a delightful color like pink meant the worst of things. It was a kind of game that they were all constantly playing with each other.

Eelah’s card was blue. Mild pain with an outlook of cautiously optimistic.

“I didn’t sleep so well,” Titus said.

“Does anyone here ever sleep that well?” Norty asked. He clearly meant it as a sarcastic joke, but even he realized it seemed to fall flat. He rubbed his mohawk with a self-conscious look. Somehow he had convinced the staff to leave a small strip down the center during his daily shavings. Apparently Norty was having an orange day: middling pain.

A man and a woman in white labcoats pushed in through the double doors. Titus had never seen them before. They led a boy in the corner out of the room.

“Been doing that all morning.” Norty shifted uncomfortably in his wheelchair. “Think they’re giving us some kind of test.”

“Like an algebra test?”

“No, like a lab rat test.”

Titus’s heartrate monitor bleeped a plaintive tone. He didn’t like needles.

“It can’t be that bad.” Eelah smiled again. “Everyone has come back out again.”

“Well, except Chad, they took him away screaming. And that was four hours ago.” Norty shriveled up his face in a ball of wrinkles, but the faintest grin cut the edge of his lips.

“Stop it.” Eelah tapped the table in front of him.

No touching was another of the rules of the game they played at Brillingburg.

When it was Titus’s turn, the lab-coated pair led him back to the infirmary. After introducing themselves, his worst fears were soon confirmed. They needed a sample of his bone marrow, and that meant a very large needle. And first they would apply a local to the area, which meant at least one more needle.

“This is only going to hurt a little, we promise,” they told him.

Titus was already quite familiar with the lie in this particular game.

---

There was rampant speculation that evening over just what sort of testing they were doing. The Extraordinarily Unique children of Brillinburg were no strangers to tests and treatments both experimental and extreme. But the appearance of two lab-coated strangers from outside the facility lent the whole affair a mystery that had all the children talking at once.

“Maybe it’s for a giant database to match us with organ donors?

“DNA testing to see what’s going to go wrong with us next?”

“No, they’re actually injecting us with zombie serum. We’ll all be hungry for brains tomorrow!” (This was Norty’s offering to the discussion, obviously.)

For all their theories, none of the staff would confirm one to end the questioning. Nor would they deny even the more wool-headed ideas to put the many racing minds at ease. And so Titus could do nothing but slot this in with all the other games of managing discomfort that came with permanent residence at Brillingburg.

His answer arrived two days later. This time, the two lab-coated strangers appeared in the Interaction Room and escorted only a single child away from the hushed silence and questing stares of every other face in the facility.

Titus.

Another surprise waited for him in the infirmary. Two, more precisely.

“Mom. Dad. What are you doing here? It’s not Friday yet.” Titus’s words were both surprised and fearful. In the beginning, his parents had come to Brillingburg every day, often with presents or chocolates or coloring books. Over time their frequent visits had winnowed down to a single visit on Friday. They led busy lives.

“It is always a blessing to see you, my sweet child,” his mother answered, with a delicate kiss on his scalp.

“They asked us both in,” his father added. “On account of the test results.” He fiddled with the enormous watch on his wrist.

“So they’ve told you what this is all about!” Titus could not quell the curiosity thumping in his chest.

“I can’t rightly say, something about an experimental procedure.”

“That’s right.” A new stranger entered the room. He was dressed in an eggshell blue shirt and brown slacks and wore eyeglasses at least as thick as Titus’s. “But it’s so much more.”

The stranger crouched down to match Titus’s height. Titus instinctively braced for terrible news. Adults only took that posture when they were about to explain something else had gone wrong with him.

“I’m sorry for the mystery,” the stranger continued. He seemed to take note of Titus’s wincing frown. “We didn’t want to raise any fears or hopes prematurely with any of the children. But I can now assure you it is very much a good thing. A very good thing.” He made fierce eye contact with Titus. “Titus, what if I told you, you could be made whole again?”

“What, like you could fix my plasmid disorder?”

“Not just your plasmid disorder. All of it. Everything.”

“I don’t get it.”

The doctor—at least, Titus assumed then that he was a kind of doctor—explained that an experimental device had been designed using genetic resequencing and viral load mutation and computational artificial intelligence-driven nanobots, and several other things that Titus heard but scarcely wrapped his head around, that could be used to cure a certain set of individuals of nearly all their chronic ailments. It was all so abstract and theoretical that Titus could only grasp onto a very small piece of it and tug to find a thread of meaning.

“Certain individuals?”

“Yes. It’s very early in the development process and the process requires a certain marker sequence held by one out of a million children. That’s you. There are risks, of course, to discuss and I respect the decision matrix is suitably complicated, but—”

“So you’re asking if you want to hook our son up to a machine, and what—fix him?” his father asked.

“Yes. Essentially.”

His mother put her face up to his. “My sweet gift from heaven, is this what you want?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” Inside, where he usually felt things strongly—when he could feel things strongly—his heart seemed to have turned to metal. But there was one question that really mattered most.

“Will there be any needles?”

---

Titus went to bed that night unsure about anything. The idea of risking his own life to have it changed forever seemed so otherworldly, he might as well have been looking at it through a telescope. While there was a clear decision to be made, he couldn’t make sense of anything but the vague outline of it.

And so when his dreams came, he found himself in a dark place, a tight space. Terrified, he fought against the walls of his dark prison. Cracks of light formed around him and then he was breaking through a shell, thrashing and bursting forth under a brilliant sunlight. Wings unfurled from his back. He flew.

He surged into the sky, banking and turning tight rolls. Invisible currents of air lifted him, spun him, and then he was riding them ever higher.

In the heat of the sun his feathers molted, revealing a hollow, golden exoskeleton underneath. Panic struck. His magical flight was over. Already, he was plummeting back to the Earth and would soon land broken and bloody in the eggshells he launched from.

But the metal wings underneath only pumped harder. Instead of gliding, he blasted his way ever higher, the very might of his new gilded body commanding the air to support him. That’s when he realized he might never need to land again.

He was the first in the Interaction room that morning, waiting impatiently for Eelah to arrive. He told her everything.

“So, are you going to do it?” she asked when he finally ran out of breath.

“I don’t know. It might not work. I mean, really, how could it even be possible?”

His expressed doubt was a lie, though. All morning the thought of walking on his own without an IV drip trailing behind him had worked its way through him like an infectious disease. And he knew disease.

“Everything’s possible. I guess.”

“And, well, here’s the thing. It’s going to be painful. Really painful. Lots of needles.”

“Silly otter. We get stuck with needles all the time.”

“I know, it’s just… I never got used to them.”

Eelah coughed, closing her eyes for a long moment. When she re-emerged, Titus had the strangest impression that she had donned the brightest mask she could find in some hidden inner treasure chest.

“If it would help,” she said. “I could be there with you.”

Something seemed to surge through him then. It reminded him of a time a pipe had burst in the bathroom, a rare occasion that something went wrong at Brillingburg. So much water, he feared it would carry him away forever on a mad river. Now that water was inside him, a torrent.

It wasn’t until much later—years later—that he realized he had not once looked at Eelah’s feelings card.

---

When the day finally arrived, his parents showed only the slightest surprise to see Eelah there with him for the procedure. His mother gave her a welcoming smile and his dad seemed to acknowledge her presence with at least some begrudging acceptance.

But there was a hitch.

“I’m sorry,” the white-coated doctor stopped them all with a hand. “Due to COVID-42 protocols, we can only let one person accompany you into the procedure room.”

He looked from his mother to his father to Eelah and then back again. One of these people had a daily presence in his life. The other two had created him, as he was.

He cleared his throat. “Mom… Dad…”

“It’s okay, my precious light. We’ll be out here for you when you are done.”

The procedure room was surprisingly small. Behind four doctors dressed in hospital scrubs, a white metal cube dominated the center, enclosing a surgical table of sorts. Inside, there were a multitude of sharp metal probes projecting downward.

Eelah took his hand in hers. In all their time together, this had never happened before. He felt all his attention drawn down into the soft squishiness of her skin in his squeezing palm. There in that place of pure sensation, he almost forgot what he was doing in the room.

But then she spoke. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Absolutely.” He didn’t just want to walk without an IV drip. He didn’t just want to run in silver clad running shoes through a field of green. He wanted to fly.

He lowered himself onto the table. The embossed name of the machine caught his eye.

“Why is it called Diony-505?”

“Oh, scientists often have a very bad sense of humor,” one of the lab coats answered him. He pressed a series of buttons then pulled a long cabled remote away from the machine.

“I’ll see you when you’re out,” Eelah whispered to him. She receded from his field of view.

And then the pain began, followed by relief, and then finally, nothing.

---

He woke to a rushing feeling, as though he had nodded off against the cold glass back window of an idling car, and now it was speeding along the highway. A loose collection of sporadic memories seemed just within reach. More doctors in lab coats. Pain. A sucking vacuum sound. Moving and lifting his legs. Pieces of him removed and pieces put back together again. It was clear that he had been in recovery for quite a long while but now that experience was nothing more than a foggy dream.

He put himself on his feet. There was no shakiness. He could not hear his heart, it seemed strangely quiet in his chest. He put his hand to his head but there was no tube there.

Kneeling down, he touched the linoleum floor. Then he leapt up as high as he could.

This was incredible!

He rushed to the door, but halfway outside he turned back for his feeling card. He rifled through the stack until he found the one he had never had occasion to use.

Eelah and Norty looked surprised when he bounded into the Interaction Room, like they didn’t recognize him at first. Come to think of it, he did feel a bit like a body snatcher, a ghost possessing someone else’s mortal shell. But then that chain of half-waking memories lurched inside again and he realized it probably had been several weeks since they last saw him.

“Look at this lazybones who finally decided to join us.” Eelah waved a hand in his direction.

Titus picked up one of the chairs at the table and turned it backwards before sitting down. Where had he learned to do that? He didn’t know, it just felt right.

“Whoa, dude.” Norty’s eyes swelled to the size of Saturday morning pancakes. His magazine dropped from his hands onto the table. “A rainbow card! I wasn’t so sure you were going to come out of there alive but look at you.” He thumbed his wheelchair back from the table so he could get a better look at Titus.

A wild idea flashed into Titus’s thoughts. “Hey, I think I’m going to ask the staff if I can go for a walk outside. Do you guys want to join me?” He looked down at Norty’s wheelchair. “I can push if you need?”

Norty and Eelah shared an awkward glance. Eelah began to speak but a gurgling cough started in her throat then seemed to take hold of her like a hurricane. She spit into a red-flecked handkerchief.

“I’m sorry, Titus, but it’s a beige card day for me.”

“Me too,” Norty added. “But you have a great time for us, okay? Catch a butterfly or something.” He rolled his wheelchair back under the table then picked up his magazine again.

---

His parents made another surprise visit the next day. It wasn’t a Friday, but he should have expected them nonetheless.

“We heard the news,” his father announced. He stared at Titus with judging eyes.

“All of creation has smiled on us this wonderful day!” his mother announced. She advanced on him hesitatingly, as though he were made of porcelain, then seemed to catch herself with a bright grin. She pounced, devouring him with a ferocious hug.

“Careful, mom. You might break me all over again!”

She set him down and wiped tears from her eyes.

For the first time he could remember, his father looked warily at the decorations of his room. Finger paintings, the model volcano, a cat’s cradle made by Eelah. His father picked up a smallish medal he had earned in last year’s checkers competition.

“One box should do,” he grunted.

A great sinking feeling opened in Titus’s belly. His body—his healed and now immaculate body—seemed to know something that his head did not yet understand.

“What are you talking about? A box?” The words splintered and splattered out of Titus’s mouth.

“Yes, my sweetest honey and light! They’ve cleared you to return home with us as soon as tomorrow!”

“For a visit?” He knew he should be excited. But that pipe, that terrible pipe, it gushed inside him. The water was dark and cold.

“No.” His father said it like Titus was four years old. “Permanent.”

It all made perfect sense, so why did he feel as all the walls were tumbling in on him? He had wanted more than anything to be normal again and living with his parents was an obvious part of that equation.

“What’s wrong?” His mother “Do you not feel well yet?” She began to search for some visible defect in any exposed part of his body.

For the briefest of seconds, he thought he might throw himself down on the ground in a spasm. But if he pretended to have heart palpitations, a phantom pain in his left abdomen, or even the slightest of migraines, would it make any difference?

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

---

That night, Titus broke one of the most serious rules of Brillingburg. He snuck out of his room after bedtime. Using a flashlight he had snatched from the nurse’s table earlier that day and a preternatural dexterity only made possible by his healed legs, he winded down the hallway then slowly slid the door open to room 18.

“Eelah,” he whispered, gently slipping the door closed behind him. “It’s me. Titus.”

It took considerable effort but she eventually lifted her head, pushed back her pillow, and stared at him in the spiraling glow of the flashlight.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“They’re taking me away. I have to leave. Tonight is my last night.”

“Well, yes.” She said is matter-of-factly, as though he had just announced that cloudy skies would soon rain.

“I’m going to come and visit you. Every day, I promise.” It was indeed a promise, but for some odd reason, it felt as though he was trying to make a deal with her in a game of apples and turtles. He sidled closer to her bed.

“Well,” she said and licked her lips, squinting. He set the flashlight on her bed.

“Forget that. Come with me! You can stay with us. My parents will take care of you. We can eat pancakes every morning and play board games and run down by the creek. There’s always a creek and a big oak tree and a blue wind blowing, right?”

He snatched at her hand as though he was grabbing onto a life preserver while drowning. It folded into his just as softly as before the procedure. But a change seemed to overtake her then. It was as though he had frozen her with his touch. He face contorted into a rictus of something alien, something altogether horrible to see. But it lasted for only a moment and so that night, and for hundreds of nights that followed, he wondered if he had indeed cast some foul spell that stole even the faintest amount of life force from her.

She yanked her hand away.

“Touching is against the rules, Titus. You know that.”

---

Titus moved back in with his parents. There wasn’t a creek or an oak tree or a big wind blowing. They lived in the city in a high-rise apartment filled with breakable things Titus wasn’t allowed to touch. His parents found a nanny for him because they had busy lives, didn’t they, and wouldn’t be able to take care of him every minute of every day. The nanny, of course, had about as much time for him as her smartphone.

And then there was school. Titus had loved the splendorous but well-contained variety of rules at Brillingburg. But at his new school, named for some long-dead guy, there seemed a multitude of unexpressed and complicated rules that he never seemed to understand, and simply could not master fast enough. He tried to make friends, but he never seemed to know what to say or whom to say it to.

There was a lot of TV. He could eat anything he wanted. His nanny sometimes took him for walks in the afternoon through the big park in the city where people threw frisbees and dogs caught them and joggers sped by in spandex pants and sirens blared their part in some infernal orchestra. It was all terribly overwhelming and he always returned home to his room where he could shelter under his blanket and pretend the world was much, much simpler.

He lasted two weeks before telling his parents he needed to see the doctors again. Worried that something was truly wrong with him, that perhaps the chemical sutures binding his broken cells had frayed or snapped, they called for an immediate emergency session. And because follow-ups were already part of the routine, no one at the hospital balked at his demands.

But when he told them what he really needed, every face in the room was aghast.

“I want you to put me back in the machine, in Diony-whatever.”

The man with the eggshell blue shirt and thick spectacles was the first to speak. “You haven’t shown any hint of cellular degeneration. In fact, you are healthier than we ever imagined. What is wrong that you need the procedure again?”

Titus struggled to hold back tears. “I want to go back. Make me the way I was before. I want to go back to Brillingburg.”

“What?” The blue-shirted man cocked his head as though Titus had stumped him with the most devious of scientific problems.

“Please, I want you to undo whatever it is you did to me. Make me like I was before.”

The doctor looked at his parents as though an answer could be found there. Speechless, they only shrugged. He turned his gaze back on Titus and shook his head.

“It is not… We never conceived… that anyone would…”

“Please,” Titus begged.

---

Titus grew old in his perfectly healthy body. He eventually learned the intricate rules of the outside world: how to take tests, how to please his parents, how to pass the time when he was bored and alone. From there, as time took its uncaring hold upon him and forcefully carried him along the stream of his new life, he eventually learned to ride a bicycle, the subway, in a car. He graduated from one school and then another and took a job. He was just like everyone else.

Except he wasn’t. In private, he burned cigarette holes in his ankles, cut slashes in the crook of his armpit with needles. He broke his pinkie bones to see what it felt like. An experimentation with piercings grew into an addiction to skin art, secret tattoos forming a patchwork across his legs and arms until, over time, they swarmed together into a discontinuous whole, a story of his life inked in imagery he was desperate to decipher but could never quite appreciate. Needless to say, needles no longer frightened him.

He became fascinated with how his body was put together. Atlases of anatomy dotted his apartment and he dissected rats, frogs, and birds with a scientific zeal. His application to medical school was first denied and then again, but something in his third attempt convinced the registrars of his dedication, which carried through into his first year. He had no hobbies, no friends, no passions outside of medicine and so his monkish fanaticism translated into sterling accolades and the promise of a great career.

His teachers were shocked when he declined to accept the offers of the most renowned surgical units around the world. They begged him to reconsider. But he was not interested in surgery or family practice or in any of the varied and peculiar pathologies that required a particular specialist to address. Instead he doubled down, returning for another degree in genetic engineering. Armed with another PhD, the years now having stolen his perfect hair, added a rough hiccup to his gait, and clouded his eyes with the hinting of cataracts, he single-mindedly pursued employment at one very specific company well known for a very specific machine.

And that is how he finally found himself back in the infirmary at Brillingburg, staring up at the brown-stained ceiling tiles and out through the dusty windows.

A small boy hesitantly entered the room, followed by Titus’s assistants, dressed in polished and pressed white lab coats. The boy gaped at the giant white box of a machine that dominated the center of the room.

“Do you know what this machine does?” Titus asked the boy.

The boy nodded. “You’re going to make me better.”

“Yes. Mostly.”

Something on the machine grabbed the boy’s attention. “Can I ask you a question?” he asked.

“Ask anything you want. And know that if you decide not to go through with this, it’s perfectly understandable. I want you to think through everything very carefully, okay?”

The boy touched a label on the machine. “Why is this thing called HPTY-DPTY-1?”

Titus smiled. “Because scientists often have a very bad sense of humor.”

Image: Magnus Hagdorn from UK, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons