The Body Scout: A Novel

by Lincoln Michel

  I tried to imagine Kang, the eager player who was ecstatic to sign an autograph for me, killing anyone. The picture didn’t make any sense in my mind. He seemed like the type who would squirm if he had to smash a fly.

  “Kang seemed pretty depressed that Zunz was gone. Well, that his money was at least.” I picked at the seal over my cybernetic hand’s wound. The sealant had dried around the hole like a large, purple scar. “Anyway, I owe you, Dolores.”

  She smiled oddly. “I have an idea of how you could repay me actually.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  She picked up the Janus Club mask again. Held it open across from her face and admired. “Let me borrow this. Just for a couple days. I’d like to run it by a few of our guys. Maybe it’ll give them ideas.”

  That seemed to be a fair deal after what I’d put her through.

  “Be my guest.”

  Dolores said she was going to call her team about it. She knocked my chin lightly with her fist as she stepped by me and into the hallway. I scratched the back of my head, tried to knock something loose in my mind. Why would Natasha have asked me about Kang right around when her friend was killing him? Either she didn’t know or didn’t think I would find out about his death anytime soon.

  I decided to let that settle while I checked in with Okafor.

  “I got other cases, you know, Kobo.” Okafor was frowning and in their squad car. I could see the skystabbers flying past them. “I’m off to check out a potential double homicide. Twin brothers with mob ties who were hit with genetically tailored toxin. We don’t even know which one had been targeted.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “I really owe you.”

  “Look, I’ve set an alert in case her face scans on our cameras. We haven’t hit anything yet. I’ll let you know.”

  “Oh, another thing. Do you remember someone from our school, Hana Kang?”

  Okafor thought a bit. “Yeah, quiet girl. Back-of-the-classroom type. Had those weird religious parents, right? Wouldn’t let her eat any of the cafeteria food.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  Okafor hummed while doing a search. “Shit. She died of lichen lung years ago. Painful way to go.”

  “Okay, thanks, Sil.”

  So that ruled out another suspect. I did some more thinking, but then thought I wasn’t going to solve anything tonight. I drank a little more and smoked a lot more until my body felt as strange to me as the Janus Club costumes had. I kept remembering flashes from the club. Sensations.

  When Dolores came back inside, I stood up. Then I sat back down.

  “Do you need to go?” I said. My mind was racing with images now. I needed to get out of it. “Or could I bounce a few more things off you?”

  “Depends on the things,” Dolores said.

  We talked awhile longer. Then we moved to fooling around. It was just like the old days, when we were together. Our bodies remembered exactly how the other liked things. Between the erasers and Dolores’s touch, I was feeling nothing and everything at the same time.

  “That was fun,” Dolores said, as we lay naked on the bed. “But I was thinking about before. When we were dating. You used to have all those options…”

  “Yeah?”

  Back when I’d been playing in the Cyber League, the money had seemed endless. Contracts, licensing deals, advertisements. They were being showered on us. At least at first. I’d gone wild. Gotten a whole set of bionic eyes, different detachable fingers for my hand, and a half-dozen sensation machines that could be swapped out. Of course, as the debt collectors came knocking, I’d pawned most of the parts. And I’d traded some of the nether-regions modules to the identity-confirmation nonprofits for tax rebates. But I’d kept a few. I guess I’d grown sentimental about them.

  “Not that what you have right now isn’t functional, mind you.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said.

  “I’m someone who likes choices.”

  “Now that you mention it, I haven’t swapped out my unmentionables in some time.”

  I told Dolores to give me a few minutes, went into the other room. I wasn’t sure if the other ones would still work. They were old models. Antiques at this point. But right then it felt like a fantastic idea. My blood, both real and artificial, was racing through my veins.

  I pressed the release on my thigh, and my crotch popped out a half an inch. I grabbed the edges as gently as I could, turned it 90 degrees. I let the gravity slide the module out. I left my penis on the coffee table. It wobbled over, the tip plopping onto a coaster. The cool air flowed in my empty groin. An odd sensation. The absence of your own organ.

  Dolores’s jaw dropped a couple of centimeters, like someone was passing a magnet beneath her smile. But it was a smile.

  21

  THE SHATTERED HAND

  I went into my shower feeling like an electric eel had slithered across my skin. Alive, I guess you could say. Alive and on a mission. I felt like I could pull through, find the killer, avenge Zunz, pay off my debt, and settle down with Dolores in a little cabin in an eco-preserve with a white electric fence and a weathervane on top to spin in the natural winds. Sometimes it’s nice to dream.

  Dolores was in the bedroom and I went into the kitchen, started a pot of coffee. I pulled out an eraser, then thought better of it. Pressed it back into the pack.

  My arm still ached, and even that problem could be solved. I had a free upgrade waiting from Natasha’s friend. I picked up the chipcard she’d left. Dr. Earnest Ignatius Setek, MD, PhD, ED, CMD: Flesh, metal, or hybrid.

  Setek. The name hit me as hard as a brick to the face.

  I’d met the doctor before. He’d done a little bit of surgery on me. A weird guy with unkempt hair and a predilection for robotic legs. It was only one time, but that one time was with Zunz.

  A few months before Zunz died at home plate, he’d shown up at my door. It was one of the last times I saw him alive in person. He’d seemed healthy and happy then. He’d smiled in my doorway. “You got an upgrade you want, dude? My treat.”

  I had many I wanted and several I desperately needed. But Zunz was my brother, not the director of a charity for out-of-date oilers. I told him no, and to come on inside. “I feel like we haven’t hung out in a while.”

  Zunz had a black coat draped over one arm. He looked around in amazement at my dinky Brooklyn apartment. It was barely bigger than a dugout, but Zunz was smiling. “This is it. Right here. This is all you need, right?”

  I didn’t tell bother to tell him that in the daytime the view from my window was a rusty ion fan. Or how roaches had started nesting in my air filter and when I turned it on little brown wings fluttered around the living room.

  “I’d take the stadiums and the money and the fans,” I said. “You know, if you want to trade.”

  Zunz laughed, his smile creeping into the little birthmark on his cheek. “I’m trying to say that you’ve done well. I’m proud of you.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve come to the new place?”

  I’d moved into this apartment about two years earlier. It was on the tenth floor, which was higher than my income could afford if it hadn’t been shade subsidized. The building rotated slowly throughout the day that so the expensive apartments constantly faced the sun. I’d been claustrophobic ever since the building collapsed on me as a child, so staying high up was more important than natural light. All my plants were plastic anyway.

  “Sorry, it’s been a super busy season.” He smiled. “Well, couple of seasons. Shit, I forgot a housewarming present. Next time!”

  Zunz hardly looked any different than he had in high school. The Mets were pumping him with enough preservatives he was practically embalmed. Then Zunz slid the coat off his arm. I gasped. His hand was encased in a glass bowl, his fingers the filament in a dead bulb. A reconstruction glove. Inside the glass, thin yellow worms swam around his hand, seeming to nibble at the joints.

  “Jesus. Is that from the broken bat?”
<
br />   A few months before, a Leones de AstraZeneca second basemen had snapped his bat smacking a fastball, and the jagged tip crashed into Zunz’s hand. I’d wanted to go to that game, but couldn’t afford the plane, boat, and entrance tickets it cost to get to the floating barge stadium off the coast of Havana. But I heard the crunch on TV as the broken bat hit Zunz. It had cracked the bones and sliced a variety of veins. He was on the injured list for several months.

  “Yep. That Leones asshole smashed it up good. The Mets can’t get it to heal right. Not even with these new surgical worms. You know how tiny the bones are in a hand?”

  “The news said you were recovering fine. You should have told me.”

  “Mets don’t want any bad press heading into the final stretch of the season. That’s where you come in. I need a second opinion from someone who’s outside of the Monsanto payroll. Dr. Earnest Setek.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s mostly a military contractor. Works on traumatic tissue regeneration. If he can patch up bullet-ridden soldiers, I’m hoping he can fix a stupid baseball injury. You know, you might remember him.”

  I was holding Zunz’s glass-encased hand in mine, looking at the mangled skin inside. It reminded me of my own arm, the flesh one I’d had snipped off and replaced. I looked up. “Remember him?”

  “Yeah, Setek was part of the whole astroclone disaster.”

  “The Colossus shuttle crash?”

  “That’s the one.”

  When Zunz and I were teens, then President Vega had started a program to clone the smartest minds in the nation to keep pace with One China and the Franco-German Union. The test case was a pair of astronauts who’d just returned from a mission to Mars. The only thing more arduous than the trip was the training, so cloning was the perfect solution. The project involved several biopharms and took years, but eventually they figured out how to use a combination of bioprinting on wetwire scaffolding and growth hormones to make it work. It took over a year to gestate them.

  I could still remember the day of the launch. Mrs. Z gave us extra bags of snacks, and after the final bell rang we ran with Okafor to Prospect Park where a gigantic holopad had been set up for the event. “Look at the size of that thing,” Zunz had said, elbowing me, as the Colossus shuttle appeared. The park was filled to the brim with people. We cheered as “the Amazin’ Astroclones,” as the media had dubbed them, were loaded into the shuttle door. But we’d gotten bored and started tossing around a baseball up the hill.

  I was running after a ground ball when I heard Okafor shout, “Oh my god!” When I looked back, the shuttle was falling back to earth. It hit the ground. The explosion filled the holopad in the middle of the park like a massive bonfire.

  It wasn’t an accident. The clones had overridden the system and crashed the ship. Suicide. The issue was upstairs. You could grow gray matter in a lab, but that didn’t mean it would work right. The clones had been unstable the whole time. Nightmares, seizures, aphasia, loss of motor and cognitive function. The government had been covering it up, hoping that once the astroclones got in space the computer controls could handle the mission.

  There were hearings and trials. Mostly they didn’t go anywhere. But it was the Colossus crash that made Congress completely outlaw the cloning of sentient beings with the Rank Act. Nothing with a functioning brain. Only zootech creatures with preprogrammed life spans.

  In my apartment, I let go of his injured hand.

  “Why go to a doctor who was involved in the biggest biopharm disaster of our lifetime?”

  Zunz gave me his grin. “Hey, everyone deserves a second chance, right? Remember it was their minds that went haywire. I’m just trying to get a hand fixed.”

  “Well sure. I’ll come.”

  I remembered Zunz clapping me on the shoulder, thanking me. “The ZuBo team, back together. Keep an eye open when we’re there. Be my backup while I get a second opinion.”

  And I remembered hopping in his car and flying out like partners in a buddy cop show. Zunz and me, windows down, and the cool air caressing us while we laughed about the old days. He turned up the music and drummed the steering wheel. New York rolled along below us. I could have leaned out the windows and spat on the whole city.

  Nothing about the doctor’s office seemed notable. Except the doctor. When Zunz said his name to the desk drone, the office door had swung open to let a billow of red detoxin mist spill across the floor as the doctor scuttled out. Scuttled was the right word. Dr. Setek’s upper half was attached to a set of robotic crab legs. A metal girdle clasped his torso in place of a belt.

  “The Z man! Let me get a look at you.” Zunz let the doctor grab his shoulder and look him up and down. They knew each other. If this was a second opinion, it was the doctor’s fifth or sixth one. “You are a work of art. They should put you in a museum. The Mona Zunza.”

  Setek carefully picked up the injured hand. Ran his fingers over the glass. Murmured. “Even works of art need touch-ups now and then.”

  The two of them disappeared for a long time. I looked around. Checked for tails. Scanned for bugs. Photographed the equipment. Nothing was out of place.

  Eventually Zunz came out looking excited and whistling, although his hand was still in the reconstruction glove. I told him it all seemed okay to me. He threw his arm around my shoulder. “It’s good to have someone watching your back. Listen, I have a Mets meeting. Can’t stick around. You understand, right? Training. But Setek will put your tune-up on my bill.” He shouted and pointed at me. “You hear that, doc? On my tab.”

  Zunz left, and the doctor waved me into his office. Ran a finger up and down my bionic arm. “Haven’t seen this model in some time.”

  “Guess I’m a little out of date.”

  The doctor clapped his blue-gloved hands together, laughed. Rapped his knuckles on his spider legs. His voice had a hint of helium in it. “Aren’t we both? Still, it’s a fine time to be alive. Can you imagine living in olden times, when you couldn’t do anything about it? You’d get older and more broken each year. No medicine or upgrades to halt the decline. You couldn’t do a damn thing. Only sit back and watch as your teeth fell out, your skin wrinkled, and you broke apart piece by piece.”

  “I guess that still happens to us, just takes a little longer.”

  “I don’t accept it.” He stuck a needle in my arm, drew blood, and squirted it into an analyzer. “You know, we oilers might get our true flesh back one day with a little luck.”

  “I can barely remember what they lopped off,” I lied.

  “Keep faith!” The doctor rubbed his chin while looking at my readout. “Well, I can tell that you smoke and drink. Too much on both counts. You need a fresh lung lining, the left one is burned-out. Could develop lichen lung if you’re not careful. Wouldn’t hurt to get a new liver either.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “I paid fifty thousand for a new liver four years ago. Surgeon said it would last a decade.”

  The doctor laughed. “It should have. But that’s the rub of modern life. We build better livers, and someone concocts stronger booze. We get sun treatments, then our chemicals burn up the ozone even more. Cure one disease, and another pops up. The pitcher juices up his throw, and the batter juices up his swing. On and on it goes.”

  “I guess you get paid either way.”

  “Quite!” Setek said. “It’s all about picking the right team to play for.”

  I looked through his catalog of modifications. I wanted everything, but I couldn’t make Zunz pay for it all. I’d rather go around half finished than have him feel like I broke his trust. The doctor and I settled on a lung lining. A simple expanding one, excreted from a scope right into the bronchi.

  “You need a new shoulder fitting on the cybernetic arm,” the doctor said. “Your current one is degraded and the skin is inflamed. I’ll throw that in for free.”

  Setek hooked me up to a canister of gas and twisted the valve with one sharp creak.

  On the surgi
cal table, waiting for the gas to put me to sleep, I had assumed that Zunz had been doing me a favor. That he hadn’t needed me as backup but felt bad that my career had stalled while he’d become a superstar. He was back on the team a few months later, both hands working just fine. He never mentioned Setek again.

  But now, standing in my apartment and holding Setek’s card, my brain was spinning in a different direction. I was thinking that Setek might know not only know how people got patched up. He might know how they got broken down.

  22

  THE STRANGE SURGEON

  Dolores walked out of the bedroom, stretching. “Don’t tell me you’re already hoping for another inning?”

  “Actually, I wanted to ask you for a favor.”

  “Sounds like I need to get dressed.”

  I explained the details, asked if she’d be willing to come with me to Dr. Setek’s office and snoop around while I got my arm fixed. To be my backup as I’d been Zunz’s.

  “Backup?” she said.

  “Okay, okay. Partner.”

  I didn’t know if Setek was involved in killing Zunz or if he was the one who could tell me what substance had done it. But he was a clue. There weren’t many of those left with Kang dead and the girl missing. Plus, my arm had started spazzing uncontrollably, trying to tear itself off from the shoulder. If I didn’t fix it soon, I’d have to rip it off myself and throw it in the trash.

  Setek had moved offices. When Zunz had taken me there, it had been downtown. A big, open office overlooking the storm wall. Now, his card said he was in Midtown. Mouth Tower.

  “Maybe the Mets purchased him?” I said.

  “I can check.”

  Dolores made a call to another scout at Pyramid to see if they had any opposition info on Setek while I made breakfast. I cracked a half dozen eggs into a pan, scrambled them with a lot of butter and a little hot sauce. The way Mrs. Z used to. Tossed them on a bed of fried rice with a pile of onions and handful of synthetic cilantro. Filled the coffee machine with triple-caffeinated beans.