SYMBIONT open thread!

I was sad for Fishy, but he also made me laugh. The constant "life is a video game" aspect reminds me of my son who puts much of life in video game terms.

Thank you. Symbiont was wonderful.

But I hate waiting for another year for the rest of it.

This is cool.

"A genome of a rare species of tapeworm found living inside a patient's brain has been sequenced for the first time. The study provides insights into potential drug targets within the genome for future treatments.

Tapeworms are parasites that are most commonly found living in the gut, causing symptoms such as weakness, weight loss and abdominal pain. However, the larvae of some species of tapeworm are able to travel further afield to areas such as the eyes, the brain and spinal cord."

It was at BioMed Central, but I found it at Science Daily.

That's awesome. In case some are too lazy to google, the article is here, a summary is here, and PICTURES (!!!) are here.

Seanan, I know I said this to you after the latest Vel adventure, but THANK YOU FOR CREATING COMPLEX DISABLED CHARACTERS. Dr. Cale is paraplegic. It's a fact of her life now. It's not overemphasized OR ignored. Accessibility is important, so the hideout (IN A FUCKING CANDY FACTORY) is set up so that she can access things. Sal has PTSD/a phobia of cars and driving. It doesn't magically go away when it's inconvenient. She panics even when she knows it's necessary in order to get away. Tansy is.......well. Tansy I guess would be neurodivergent in a variety of interesting ways. Adam too in some ways. But they're all wonderfully rich characters that aren't reduced to one trait, their disabilities. Thank you. Seriously, thank you. You're one of the only authors I've ever known who gets it right. And the only one who gets it right who writes dystopian/fantasy/etc.

On other notes:

-I nearly shit myself when I realized what Sal was about to do at the end.
-Is Joyce ever going to wake up??? She doesn't have an implant anymore, does she, because of the antiparasitics??? So if she wakes up, what is she going to be like?
-How much of Tansy was taken from her host body? The implication was that she was still herself. Did Dr. Banks only take a little bit and cultivate the rest to form a fully mature tapeworm before inserting it directly into Claudia's (now Anna's) brain?
-What did Ronnie do??? I wasn't quite clear on that. Did he dump antiparisitics into the water supply? Didn't they said that that wouldn't work for some reason?
-Why are the sleepwalkers, y'know, sleepwalkers and Sal and the other chimeras aren't? What's the difference? Is it because Sal and the others were already "vacated" so to speak? But why is Anna not a sleepwalker then?

My prediction for Chimera is that the old Sally will re-emerge somehow in some way and Sal will have to struggle with having two identities in one body.

One last thing. The first time I started Parasite, months ago, I stopped after a few chapters, because it wasn't hooking me. I felt bad because here I was, a huge Seanan/Mira fan and I didn't like Parasite. But since Symbiont was coming out and I had a few friends who LOVED Parasite, I gave it another shot. And after pushing past the somewhat slow (in my opinion) beginning, I was hooked. BOY, was I hooked. I finished Parasite and Symbiont in the span of about four days. It's similar to Newsflesh in a lot of ways, but in a lot of ways it's not. I love it. I can't wait for more.

Oh man, I hope Sally doesn't return (though I really don't think she'll wake up after all these years), it'd be like Caroline in Dollhouse and nobody liked her either! But it would be quite a twist.

Hope Sal can pull off that level of jerkitude in faking.

I thought that Ronnie was adding tapeworm eggs to the water supply, as part of Sherman's plan.

Would that work?

Why are the sleepwalkers, y'know, sleepwalkers and Sal and the other chimeras aren't?

I don't know if it is spelled out or just how I put it together, but I think the sleepwalkers worms have broken their human's brains when they try to move into it. (That was a very weird sentence to write.)

Like Sal mostly integrated with her human's brain, but in the process she did something which produced a similar effect to dyslexia. So the sleepwalkers worms have done something which disconnects or disturbs a bunch of cognitive functions, although they can recognize other sleepwalkers and sometimes chimera through pheromones, and some of them respond to speech if it's combined with the right pheromones... so there is probably a lot more to find out in book three.

I can see why there needs to be a third book

So...

Tansy might be alive or might not.

Anna might gain some of Tansy's identity, going by Ronnie's experience.

Sally might come back and retake control of her body. (Although I suspect this might be a red herring)

Sherman might turn a whole community of tapeworm free people into Chimera. (And since they'd all be clones of Sal, would she be able to take control of them?)

"Fishy dispatched the lock with a single swipe of the crowbar he'd acquired from somewhere." That made me laugh out loud! I was (am) rubbish at Half Life, but smashing things with a crowbar was so theraputic. :)