by Grant Piercy
The mother rushed back into the house. She returned moments later with a plastic bag, which she used to dispose of the remains. She then noticed another patch of grass, this one perturbed, as though something small had reached in and plucked something out. Inside she saw the other bunnies—tiny faces with beady eyes staring up at the kind giant. The mother squatted down next to the patch of grass, then instinctively covered the spot with more grass.
“ Didi, ” I said, approaching from the street.
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s your name, isn’t it? Didi? You and I met once.”
Her face twisted. “Did you do this?” she asked, repelled.
“Me? No. Probably a neighborhood cat, I’d imagine. Snuck into your yard, plucked the two right from the nest. Devoured one. Left the other for a snack, but probably didn’t need it after all.”
“I think I have some cat repellant spray. Damn things get into our flower beds,” she said, struggling to mask her French accent with that of a midwesterner.
“How is he? Your husband.”
“I’m sorry, who are you?” she asked.
“An old colleague. Your husband, Ian. How is he?”
“That’s not my husband’s name.”
“Adam, then.”
She approached me, neighborly. She wore large sunglasses. Her face was pale in the bright sunlight and her hair appeared jet-black. “How is it you know me, or my husband? We just moved here.”
“Yes. He was returned to you and you took shelter in some random American city. You were afraid of being found, weren’t you? Especially after what you saw through Vanessa’s eyes.”
Her face drained of any illusions. I wondered if she resisted reaching out and grabbing me by the throat. She took the sunglasses off slowly and her eyes appeared violet. “You...” she barely whispered.
“ Me. ”
A slap to my face.
“You took him away from me,” she said, slipping into her normal French accent.
“We gave him back to you.”
“You son of a bitch. It’s not him. It’s not the same. You gave me someone else.”
“Look at me, Didi. This isn’t the face that you knew, is it? This isn’t the same person you saw through Vanessa’s eyes.”
“Whose face have you stolen now?”
“Listen to me, Didi. That man in your house right now, the man you’re trying to take care of and re-introduce to the world is your husband. He simply does not share the experiences that he did before we took him away. I have a similar problem. I’m in a body that’s not mine, and all my experiences are still here. It’s not a one-way trip.”
She sighed heavily, her hands on her hips.
“Frankly, I think you’re better off with the one you have,” I said.
“Fuck you, Quatre ,” she said, spitting on the sidewalk next to the viscera. “ Enfoiré glissant . ”
“ Didi, ” I whispered definitively. Her eyes scorched through me. “What happened? How did he come back to you?”
“What do you mean?” she shouted. “ Don ’t you know?”
“I don’t remember. The last thing I remember was... Jones.”
“Who’s Jones?”
“He was an android. I wasn’t just remoting—I was broadcasting. I was in his head. There was an explosion. The Home compound was burned from this earth.”
She grinned and lowered her head. “Yeah, okay.” She paused and looked about, down one end of the street to the other. “You come here in a new android body—”
“It’s not an android body.”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“It’s not an android body. I woke up like this. Like I said, it’s not a one-way trip.”
She dropped her dark sunglasses to the ground. One of the arms broke off the hinge. She didn’t bother to pick them up, instead turning and walking back to the door.
“Didi. Talk to me. We can help each other.”
“You’ve helped me enough,” she said. “And it sounds like you’re being punished. They sent you back—banished you from your own paradise.” Laughter erupted from her lips. “That’s just beautiful. It’s what you deserve.”
“ Don ’t talk to me about deserve. You nominated your husband for your little project. Then you got him back.”
“Just a little worse for wear,” she sneered.
“How did he come back?”
She sighed, looking towards the bunnies in the yard and the plastic bag carrying the remains of the others. From her pocket, she produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She dangled one from her lips and sparked it passively.
After a deep inhale, the words came smoking through. “After they locked me out, I didn’t know what to do. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t log back in. The tunnel simply would not work. So Sabrina and I could only go on with our lives. It was days later when a knock came to the door, and he appeared. I stood on the threshold and looked into my husband’s eyes, but it wasn’t him. He said his name was Adam. He said he had been sent to me.”
“Did he talk about who sent him?”
She took another drag, exhaled deeply. “No. He said that he didn’t have anywhere to go, and that he knew that he belonged to someone. He asked my name, and I told him. ‘I think I’m your husband,’ he said. And I looked into this familiar stranger’s eyes. Oui , it was him. It was his body , but... Ian’s face, his nose, his hairline, his mouth—a mouth I’d been so used to kissing. Mon dieu . But he was someone else.”
I watched as the smoke swirled about her face. “Where did he come from?” I asked.
“You already know where he came from. He came from Home. He’d been in a box that you kept him in. Then you and your friends sent Adam east of Eden, out into the world.”
“I was cast out too.”
“Good for you. Now you have to survive out here with the rest of us.”
She opened the screen door to follow her daughter back inside. Before she could disappear into the house, I said, “Wait. Can I speak to him?”
A cloud passed over her face. She pushed the screen door open a little further, and I followed her inside.
The walls were a muted shade of navy blue with not much else to decorate them. A foyer led to a staircase, a hall into a kitchen and a living room. A brief flash blurred through the kitchen, the sound of a little girl’s feet scampering across the hardwood floor. Didiane nodded for me to follow her and led the way through the hall. We went back through the kitchen—random toys scattered across the floor next to an island covered in papers and bags. She moved through to a sliding door that led out to a backyard patio. The scampering feet stomped somewhere behind us, in another part of the house.
Out on the patio, Adam stared into the distance. The sound of the sliding door didn’t disturb him—he just continued looking into nothing, past the adjoining neighbors’ yards. He had the same look when we were keeping him in box 77 at the Home compound, in that seven by seven cubicle. He was sitting in a wrought-iron chair next to a matching table, a closed maroon umbrella jutting up from the center.
Without saying anything, Didiane went back into the house, leaving the two of us alone. “Adam,” I said.
“Long time no see,” he said, continuing to stare into the distance.
“You know who I am?”
“Are you surprised?”
“Were you there when it... when it happened?”
“ No. It ’s in your voice, the way you said my name.”
“Do you mind if I sit?”
“Be my guest,” he said, still gazing out. I took a seat in another wrought-iron chair across the table.
Velvet clouds smeared the deep blue sky. The lawn looked and smelled freshly cut. A large sycamore tree loomed above us, the sun hiding just behind the leaved branches.
“Adam, where did you come from? When did they send you back? How did they send you back?”
“It’s just more and more questions,” he said. “I barely understand how
I have the framework to think and act. I only had the skeleton of a mind, and yet here I am.”
“You’re talking in riddles,” I replied.
“And how does it feel?” he asked sharply, finally turning to look at me. “You kept me, us , in boxes. You took our minds, you took everything we were.”
“I set you free.”
“Yes, so I could watch all of the others be destroyed.”
My eyes cast downward, watching an ant carry a crumb as it marched across the concrete. “So you saw it? The detonation?” I asked.
“You did too,” he answered quietly. Leaves fluttered in distant trees elsewhere in the neighborhood. I could see the wind without any evidence it was actually there.
“But I don’t remember. It’s beyond my memory.”
“Irony... there’s something I remember that you don’t,” he said. He leaned forward and sighed, clapping his hands together. “I was born in that box. Where were you born?”
“A hospital bed, days ago.”
“Ah, born yesterday. Let me guess,” he said, turning to face me. “You awoke amnesiac in that hospital bed with a family that wasn’t yours. They fawned over you waking up, but you watched the scales fall from their eyes as they realized what they were getting in return. That body is just an empty vessel to them, not the person they loved. Whatever constituted that person is gone, and you’re the consolation prize.”
It was then I understood a real and deep truth about this man. Adam was something we were leaving behind, some vital part of ourselves. And there was more to the flesh that Ian Culp left behind. I might need to tell him that, should I ever come face to face with him again.
“Adam,” I said, measuring the name carefully. “Help me find them. We can set this right. We can make you whole again.”
“What makes you think I want to be whole? You think that if you just put him back into this body, we just merge together? No, if you put him back, I disappear. Subsumed.”
“What if we put you into a new body? One that belongs only to you.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” his voice trembled. A rage boiled beneath the surface. “You can’t just sweep me away. You take the mind from the body and you still have me. No. I’m staying right here. I’m what still has to be dealt with.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. You just think I’m something to be overcome. You’ll just have to find them yourself.”
“I think it’s time you should go,” Didiane spoke from the sliding door. Adam went back to staring in the distance. For a second his leg bobbed and his hand waved in my direction, but he didn’t say anything else.
I stood up, shaking my head. I hunched down in front of him, determined for him to look me in the eyes.
“If you change your mind, I’m in the house right across the street. Neighbor.”
MyRead/agent_of_truth: grass
User: Agent_of_Truth
“A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.” Isaiah 40:6
Hello again, True Patriots.
The tide is shifting as the Transhumans continue to make their plans. The blackouts become more frequent, and James Burke has no response. Could it be because he wants to be one of them? If you had access to that technology and all the wealth in the world, wouldn’t that be your goal? I have it on good authority that Burke’s true interests lay in immortality, in cracking the code that would let him live forever as a foul mechanism like those he peddles to the masses.
My sources tell me that he’s been conducting corporate town halls with NMAC operations employees, toeing the company line about making customers’ lives easier, but not doing anything to fix the problem—because he is the cause! Don’t you think they could stop the blackouts if they really wanted to? Burke wants them to continue because he knows their source!
And the patch that they’ve pushed out to customers, who somehow have to conduct the updates manually, is only a half-measure, not a long-term solution. And it may just be pushing some hidden code to your synthetics.
Just what do we know about these blackouts? Androids and gynoids frozen like statues in place, as though hypnotized, their systems crashed. I believe, True Patriots, that they are receiving a transmission when they blackout. What kind of transmission, you ask? The kind caused by Transhumans like those who escaped the scouring of Home. They have been taken and transplanted, my friends—no longer human. Monsters. Abominations.
In a previous post, I spoke to you about what the heroes who sacrificed their lives during the Home conflagration must have discovered to trigger such a detonation. I think we have our answer—they discovered the source of the transmission and attempted to stop it. We must not let their sacrifice be in vain. Like plague rats carried away from a burning city, they escaped. Now it’s time that we hunt them down.
But where would they hide?
If James Burke does not know, he wants to know, because he wants their secret.
For now, True Patriots, leave it to your humble Agent of Truth. I have my sources, and we are on the trail of these Transhumans. Perhaps they are in these town halls... a proximity attack. It stands to reason that they need to be near a blackout event, perhaps even at an epicenter. A blackout event recently occurred at a town hall outside an auditorium in Plano. Maybe one of them was there. If I were one of these individuals, I would attempt to infiltrate the place where I could acquire my own personal army— NMAC.
And what of the other secret camps, the sites where other erased individuals may be hiding—laying in wait until the vanguard sounds the trumpets?
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7: transition (cassia)
The things I had to do to get that body, and then it was just gone.
How could it all be undone? The hormones, the operations, the time... You’ll never understand how much it took.
They’d determined years ago that gender was binary, but it didn’t used to be that way. I can tell you for a fact that identity is non-binary and fluid. But not according to the state. The United States government became governed by fascists and white supremacists. They made it so people like me would not be a protected class by any laws on the books, and they rigged the system so we wouldn’t be able to capture power to rewrite the laws. It grew worse and worse.
I thought about moving forward or killing myself. Ironic that I faced that simple, binary choice. Continue with a life of agony, where I would never be seen as the person I know that I am—that I might be tantalizingly close, but I’d never truly attain it, no matter the work I put in.
And to do it all in secret. To refashion my body with the help of back-alley surgeons, black market drugs. To keep it hidden away from the fascists who wanted me dead because of an itch I could never scratch.
If I killed myself, they would win, and I wouldn’t let that happen. It was my own private rebellion and affirmation. I could find ways to stay out of the public eye during my transition. I would tell myself what people like me used to tell themselves before the country devolved—“Trans women are women. I...AM a woman.”
Just to wake up like this. The work undone. The chest flattened, shoulders broadened, the hips slimmed, my voice deeper. And everything that I’d removed, right back where it used to be. Everything that I’d put in its place, gone.
I smashed the mirror when I saw the face looking back at me.
“Number twelve nine two,” a sharp, stern voice said from the doorway.
“What am I doing here? How did this happen?” I was on the floor, my fist bloody from the mirror’s glass, shards sprinkled on the floor. I covered my face so they couldn’t look at me.
“I’m sorry, twelve nine two. You are here because you are needed here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Needed? Where the hell am I?”
“This is the Schema. It is a compound specifically for you and people like you.
”
“People like me?” My heart dropped. The words choked in my throat.
“Dissidents,” the voice said.
A different feeling rose in my chest—something like pride.
How did this happen? How did I get here? The last thing I remembered was wandering the halls of Stockton’s compound. “Is there an old man here—a reporter?” I decided to ask.
“There are a lot of people here, twelve nine two.” She was a silhouette in the doorway, haloed in bright light. She might have been in her forties, holding a clipboard. When she stepped forward, she came into focus. “Would you like to take a look around?”
Her hand reached toward me, offering to pull me up. Her grip was tight, taking the hand that wasn’t wounded. Only when I felt her strength did I realize the discrepancy between her appearance and the force of her pull. It occurred to me that she might be a gynoid.
Then it came into sharper clarity.
They did it. They actually did it. Just how this body could be here, this particular body. They made a replica, probably based on previously existing records, and took me out of the body I’d worked so hard to shape. Like taking the engine out of a car and putting it into another.
“You have to put me back,” I said, my voice erratic. “You have to take me out and put me back in my old body. You can’t do this to me.”
“It’s done,” she replied. “There is no going back.”
“You can’t do this to me. You can’t.” The hands that didn’t belong to me were on her shoulders. I was shaking her.
“Remove your hands, twelve nine two,” she said.
The eyes that weren’t mine drifted to the wounds on the knuckles that didn’t belong to me. They bled. They weren’t supposed to bleed. Androids and gynoids had a milky coolant that helped to differentiate them from humans. Something was tugging on the black matter of my thoughts. A migraine that couldn’t be a migraine.
I did as she asked. “Thank you,” she responded. “Return to your quarters, twelve nine two. You will be summoned soon.”
