The seizures start eleven days after I get back to Boston.

  The first one hits me in the hospital cafeteria. One moment I'm staring at a cup of coffee I can't taste, the next I'm on the floor with three nurses holding me down and someone shouting for a crash cart. I don't remember most of it. Just fragments - the fluorescent lights stuttering overhead, the cold linoleum against my cheek, a voice saying "he's coding" except I'm not, my heart is still beating its slow ten-beats-per-minute rhythm, my lungs are still moving air.

  When I come back to myself, Dr. Kessler is there. She looks like she hasn't slept.

  "This is it," she says quietly. "The CJD. The protein markers have been climbing for days. Your brain is--"

  "Dying," I finish for her. "I know."

  She doesn't argue. What is there to argue about?

  They move me to a private room. Palliative care, technically, though nobody uses that word around me. The nurses check on me every hour. My parents take shifts sitting in the uncomfortable chair by the window. My sister flies back from Portland again, and this time nobody pretends it's not a deathwatch.

  The seizures come and go. Sometimes twice a day, sometimes I'll go thirty-six hours without one. Each time I come back a little different - memories shuffled like a deck of cards, words slipping away and then returning, faces I should know becoming strangers for hours at a time.

  My mother holds my hand during one of the bad ones. When I surface, I don't recognize her for almost a minute. The look on her face when I finally say "Mom?" is something I never want to see again.

  "I'm here," she says. "I'm right here, Josh."

  I know. That's the worst part. She's here, watching me disappear piece by piece, and there's nothing either of us can do about it.

  The second week, something changes.

  I don't notice it at first. The seizures are still coming, though maybe slightly less frequent. The confusion still follows each one, though maybe I'm recovering faster. It's hard to tell from inside my own head - everything feels uncertain, unstable, like walking on ice that might crack at any moment.

  But Dr. Kessler notices.

  She comes into my room on day eighteen with a tablet in her hands and that expression I've learned to dread - the one that means she's about to tell me something she doesn't understand.

  "Your protein markers are down," she says, like dropping a brick on my foot.

  "I know, I know, they keep-- what?" is what comes out of my slightly drooping mouth.

  "Significantly. The 14-3-3 is at half of what it was last week. Tau levels are normalizing. S100B is almost in the normal range." She sits down in the chair my mother vacated an hour ago. "This shouldn't be possible. CJD doesn't reverse. Prion disease doesn't stop, and it definitely doesn't reverse, either."

  "But mine did?"

  "I don't know." She pulls up scans on her tablet, shows me the images. "Look at this. Your MRI from last week versus this morning."

  The left image is the Swiss cheese brain I've become familiar with - holes and shadows, damage spreading through the tissue like mold through bread. The right image looks almost normal. A few shadows remain, a few patches of damage, but nothing like the devastation I'd been expecting.

  "The spongiform changes are resolving," she says. "New tissue is filling in the gaps. Healthy tissue, as far as we can tell. Your brain is rebuilding itself faster than the disease can destroy it."

  I stare at the scans. The healthy brain on the right side of the screen. My brain. New tissue. New neurons.

  "So I'm not dying?"

  "I don't think so. Not from the CJD, at least." She hesitates. "Joshua, I need you to understand what this means. The damage that was there - the neurons that were destroyed - they're not healing. They're being replaced. The tissue in your brain right now is not the tissue you were born with. Brains don't do this, ever. Yours does."

  I want to start bringing up the Ship of Theseus, just to have something to talk about while I try to process this. But then I start doubting myself. I'm sure she's already run that in her head.

  On day twenty-three, the chemical sensors in the hospital start going off. I'm asleep-ish when the door to my room bursts open. Two nurses in masks, eyes wide with alarm.

  "Mr. Pleasants, we need to evacuate you. There's been a chemical leak somewhere in the wing."

  I sit up slowly. I've been feeling better. Clearer. The seizures stopped four days ago. My memories have stabilized, my thoughts running smooth and coherent for the first time in weeks. I was starting to think the worst was over.

  "What kind of chemical?"

  "We don't know yet. The sensors are detecting ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, some kind of organic compounds. Maintenance is trying to locate the source."

  They help me into a wheelchair, though I don't really need it. The hallway outside is controlled chaos - other patients being moved, staff in protective equipment, someone shouting about checking the HVAC system. The smell of industrial cleaner is strong, the hospital's attempt to mask whatever contamination they're detecting.

  One of the nurses pauses, sniffs the air. Her face contorts behind her mask.

  "It's stronger here," she says to her colleague. "Coming from this direction."

  They wheel me further down the hall. The smell of cleaner gets stronger. The nurse sniffs again, frowning.

  "It's following us," she says.

  The other nurse stops. Looks at me. Looks at his colleague.

  "It's not following us, Patty," he corrects her.

  They both look at me. And then I realize I don't remember the last time I smelled anything.

  The full assessment takes three days.

  They put me in an isolation room. Bring in specialists from apparently three different dynological organizations, and a set of representatives from some ominously named organization called 'Aurora Springs'. They run every test they can think of, and some they invent on the spot.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  The results are... comprehensive.

  "Your brain function is normal," one of the specialists tells me. She looks vaguely familiar - if she's from DAAS, that means she's probably from around MIT. Have I seen you somewhere before? But I don't ask that. "Better than normal, actually. Whatever the regeneration did, it rebuilt your neural tissue to optimal specifications. No sign of prion damage. No cognitive deficits we can detect."

  "That's good," I reply.

  "Your musculoskeletal system is functional. Bones, muscles, tendons - all intact and operational. You can move, walk, run, lift things. No issues there," she says, her voice sort of muffle-broadcasted by something in the hazmat suit.

  "Also good."

  "Your lungs work. Not efficiently - you're not really doing gas exchange the way a normal human does - but the mechanical function is there. You can breathe, speak, cough."

  "Good. Really fond of coughing."

  She hesitates. Here it comes. "Everything else is... complicated."

  "Uncomplicate it to the best of your ability," I shoot back. "I was going to become a chemistry teacher. I know the basics."

  She pulls up a diagram on her tablet. My body, rendered in clinical cross-sections. Organs labeled and color-coded, some green, some yellow, some an alarming shade of red.

  "Your heart beats approximately eight to twelve times per minute. That's not enough to circulate blood effectively, but it doesn't seem to matter because your blood is--"

  "Coagulated," I supply. "Like sludge."

  "Like pudding. It's not flowing so much as... oozing. Very slowly. Your circulatory system is technically functional but practically inert." She points to my digestive system, colored in yellow. "Your stomach produces acid. Your intestines move things through. But absorption is minimal - nutrients aren't going where they should go. We think your regeneration is compensating, pulling what it needs directly from your digestive tract, bypassing the normal metabolic pathways entirely."

  "What about the smell?"

  She winces, even behind her mask. "That's the complicated part. Your liver and kidneys are filtering toxins, but the byproducts have nowhere to go. They're building up in your tissues and being released through your skin and breath. Ammonia from protein breakdown. Hydrogen sulfide from bacterial activity. Methane accumulating in your digestive tract. Various volatile organic compounds from cellular processes that aren't completing normally."

  "I'm fermenting," I say.

  "That's... not inaccurate." She sets down the tablet. "Mr. Pleasants, your body isn't decaying. It's not rotting in the traditional sense. But it's also not maintaining homeostasis the way a living human body should. You're in a state of... arrested decomposition. Your regeneration keeps resetting you to functional, but functional doesn't mean healthy. It means the minimum viable state to keep you conscious and mobile."

  I think about that. Dying but not dead, shutting down but not stopped. Just functional enough to walk out of a cave.

  "Can you fix it?" I ask.

  She shakes her head. "We don't know how. Your regeneration is the problem and the solution at the same time. If you're willing to stay for a longer period of study, we can see about bespoke support equipment to handle the worst of it. But, for the foreseeable future--"

  "I'm stuck like this," I cut her off.

  She nods at me. I nod back.

  I got exactly what I wanted. Survival.

  "There is some good news," she offers. "Your condition appears stable. It doesn't appear that you need to breathe, eat, or excrete. Your sperm count is somehow high enough that you could probably manage IVF if you needed to in the future."

  "And I don't feel pain," I add.

  "Come again?" She asks.

  I breathe, even though I don't need to. "I don't feel pain. And I've been denting things by accident. I don't think my muscles undergo lactic acid buildup the normal way anymore. So I can recruit them at a hundred percent whenever I need to."

  "Ah, yes, that would... That seems logical, yeah," she sort of stumbles through. "We have a report to send home with you, it's about 60 pages."

  It's quiet for a minute. I expect the 'so when can we submit our report to a medical conference?' question, but it never comes. Maybe that's just buried in the packet.

  "So what now?" I ask.

  "Now we discharge you. Help you acquire appropriate containment equipment. Provide you with documentation of your status as a registered metahuman." She stands, gathering her tablet. "What you do after that is up to you, Mr. Pleasants. If you don't mind being poked with needles, there are dozens of institutions who would pay you a generous stipend in exchange for research rights. Otherwise, I would... personally, I mean, I would just try to catch back up."

  She says it neutrally, without judgment. Just laying out options. Notably what's not there; rob a bank, put on tights and go fight evil, donate organs.

  "I'll think about it," I say.

  Two months later, I'm in Baltimore, at two in the morning, standing in an alley behind a convenience store where a man with a gun is threatening a teenager for the thirty dollars in his register.

  It's the most recent place to me that's not home. College. Second home. Where I was going to start putting a life together. Now I get to assemble it again from the ground up.

  I'm wearing the hazmat suit DAAS provided. It contains the smell - mostly. Enough that I can walk down a street without causing a panic. The mask covers my face, hides the way my skin has thinned and tightened over my skull, the way my lips have pulled back slightly from my teeth.

  "Hey," I say, stepping into the light. "Maybe don't do that."

  The gunman spins. The teenager behind the counter freezes. I probably look like a nightmare - hazmat suit, gas mask, standing in the shadows like something out of a horror movie.

  "Who the fuck are you?"

  "Nobody important. But that kid isn't giving you his thirty dollars, and you're not shooting him over it. So let's all just calm down."

  The gunman's eyes dart between me and the door. Calculating. I can see him deciding that I'm not a cop, not a hero, just some freak in a weird suit trying to play vigilante.

  He decides wrong.

  The gunshot is loud in the enclosed space. The bullet hits me center mass, punches through the hazmat suit, and buries itself somewhere in my abdomen. I feel the impact - a dull thud, pressure without real pain. I feel the suit rupture.

  And then everyone in the room feels the smell.

  People have smelled rot before. Even a child has smelled spoiled meat, unless they have particularly overbearing parents. Even people who know about me think they understand what to expect - the smell of death.

  But it's so much more complex than that.

  The bullet ripping open my hazmat suit doesn't just release rotten meat. It's a bouquet. Fermenting organic acids. Flaking skin cells collecting at the surface. Coagulated blood oxidizing on contact with air. Ammonia sharp enough to make eyes water. Hydrogen sulfide like a punch to the sinuses. The deep, earthy funk of anaerobic bacterial processes doing their slow work in organs that should have failed months ago.

  The gunman gags. The teenager gags. Even I would probably gag, if I could smell anything.

  I look down at the hole in my suit. Dark black jelly is oozing sluggishly from the wound beneath. I poke at it with one finger. It doesn't hurt. It's already starting to close.

  "That's not going to work," I say, looking back up at the gunman. I take a step forward. He takes a step back, eyes streaming, one hand over his nose and mouth. "You could empty that whole magazine into me and I'd still be standing here. So why don't you--"

  I don't get to finish the sentence.

  Something hits the gunman from the side - a blur of motion, compact and fast, driving him into the wall hard enough to crack the drywall. The gun goes flying. The gunman crumples, gasping for air that's thick with my particular brand of chemical warfare.

  A woman stands over him. Cheap domino mask. Street clothes - dark jacket, practical boots. Athletic build, coiled energy, moving like someone who's been in a lot of fights and won most of them. She's already zip-tying the gunman's wrists behind his back. Her hair's bouncy, like steel wool.

  "I had him," I say.

  "No you didn't." She doesn't look up. "You were monologuing."

  "I was de-escalating."

  "While leaking." She finishes the zip-tie, stands, and finally turns to look at me. I watch her process what she's seeing - the hazmat suit, the hole, the smell that's filling the room like a physical presence. Her eyes water. Her nose wrinkles. But she doesn't step back. Doesn't gag. Just takes it in, files it away, keeps moving. "Get out of here, kid. Find somewhere safe and call the cops. We've got this handled."

  The kid runs.

  "You're new," she says, barely paying attention to the groaning, wheezing guy on the floor. "Hey, chill out, man. I'm rendering first aid. Don't squirm."

  "Relatively," I mumble, trying to project confidence I don't feel while she whips out a mini first-aid kit and starts palpating the guy she just body checked into the wall.

  "What's your name?" She asks.

  "Miasma," I reply. I've been giving it thought.

  "Breakout."

  "What, like the video game?"

  She snorts without answering.

  "There's a diner two blocks over," she says. "Owner owes me a favor. Won't ask questions about the smell. You want to get coffee and explain why you're wandering around Baltimore in a hazmat suit letting people shoot you?"

  I consider this. I haven't had a real conversation with anyone who wasn't a doctor or a family member since the smell became unmanageable. I haven't had anyone offer to spend time in my presence voluntarily.

  "I can eat," I say. "But you won't wanna be here to see what comes out the other end."

  "I'm sure it can't be worse than Taco Bell." She's already walking toward the door. "Come on, hazmat boy. I want to hear your story."

  Don't stop talking to me, I haven't been listening.

  Don't stop talking to me, I haven't been listening.

  This operation's been abandoned once again.

  This operation's been abandoned once again.

  Cut me gently, cut me out...

  Cut me gently, cut me out of mind.