The Way of All Flesh: Illusions Can Be Real

by Corey Furman

  When Maré tried the door, it wouldn’t budge. “Hey, what is this?” she said. “We’re locked out.”

  “What? Why would she lock us out here?” Luna said while picking up the last of the frozen parcels.

  “I don’t know… maybe we pissed her off.”

  “Are you turning it the right way?”

  Maré smirked at her. “You’re kidding, right? Try it for yourself.”

  Luna came over, jiggled the lever, and frowned. “That’s not good.”

  “Mrs. Breylin!” yelled Maré as she pounded. “The door’s locked!”

  But there was no answer.

  They tried to get her attention for a few more minutes, and got the same result each time.

  “We might as well sit down and wait,” declared Luna. “Whether we upset her or not, it’s all we can do…”

  “I guess,” said Maré. “But you know he’s probably going to beat us for it, right?” She walked over to the freezer and put the purple container inside, closed the lid and hopped up to sit on it. Then they waited in anxious silence.

  After a long while, they thought they could hear odd scraping and bumping noises in the house, and when it became crashing and breaking, they were sure. Luna decided to try pounding on the door as hard as she could, when she put her hand on the latch. “Maré, the knob’s hot! What does that mean?!” But dread was already dawning on her face.

  “It means the house must be on fire!” Mare began to beat on the door harder. “Mrs. Breylin! Mrs. Breylin! We have to get out!”

  “She can’t get to it, Maré! If the door’s hot that means the fire’s near it! We’ll have to try to get in from the front!”

  As they bolted to the front of the lift port, the overhead track lighting strobed, winked out, and the darkness solidified around them. Only a sliver of daylight seeping under the massive door oriented them as to where they were. Maré’s heart began to pound as Luna stumbled her way over to the console beside the door and began mashing its buttons. “Shit! With the power out it won’t budge!”

  “We’ll have to force it!” Maré screamed. “Help me lift it!”

  The two of them grabbed a reinforcement rib that went across it and began to strain at moving it upwards. After several seconds of groaning, Luna said. “It’s no use! We’ll never budge this thing!”

  “Wait,” said Maré, and she began to rummage around in the dark along one wall. Sweating profusely and searching blind, she began to panic, afraid that it was getting hotter in there. “Here it is! One of Mr. Breylin’s old shovels!”

  She hurried back and scraped it under the door. Working it up and down and kicking the top of the blade, she managed to move it a few more centimeters out. Shrieking as she used it as a fulcrum, she applied all her might to lift the door. Slowly it moved one, five, ten centimeters, and more daylight flooded in.

  “Luna!” she said through a grimace of gritted teeth. “It’ll slam shut if let go and I can’t hold it for long! Wriggle under and get the hell out!”

  “Ae you crazy?!” she replied as she ran over to where Maré had gotten the shovel. “Just hold that damn thing while I get something to hold it up!”

  “Hurry, Luna! I can’t hold it! The hydraulics are trying to force it back down!”

  A few precious seconds later, she rushed back with another shovel and one of the toolboxes. “Okay, hang on, Maré. I’m going to get this one under further and lift it higher. You get the box under as quick as you can!”

  Luna got in position, began to pull up on the makeshift lever, and managed to move it a little higher. As soon as Luna had taken the weight off of her, Maré dropped her shovel and began to try to get the toolbox under the door. “Luna, you have to give me a few more centimeters!”

  “Rrrr!” With the ropes of her slight muscles knotting, Luna cried out as she struggled to nudge the door higher. It edged up a tiny bit more, and Maré pounded the box under it. “Let it go!” Luna nearly fell over as she unclenched and the box took on the weight of the door. Immediately its lid began to protest loudly as it kinked and buckled in the middle.

  “C’mon!” said Maré as she began to shimmy her way under. Luna followed as the hinges on the box squealed and snapped off, and the lid crushed down further. Standing behind her, Maré grabbed her by the arms and hauled her out as the lift door finished the box’s demolition. The door was held with only five or six centimeters of clearance, but the box had done its job and Luna had gotten her legs out in time.

  Luna climbed to her feet, and when they looked they found that the house was all but fully engulfed. Windows in the front and around by the kitchen were beginning to burst from the heat, one by one, leaving shards of clear glass littered in semi-circles below the gaping maws they left. Lurid reflections were flashing with flame twisted by shadows inside the structure, and fire driven by wind was beginning to jet from the roof line. Horrified, they realized that there was no way Mrs. Breylin could have made it out.

  It was a tiring day, Joss mused on his way home, but a good one. Harry had brought him a hunk of cake that his wife had made, and it had gone down well at lunch time. Most of it, anyway – he had kept himself from eating the last little piece so that he could bring it home to Riss. He had nearly left it in their work truck, but at the last minute he remembered and went back for it. Now it sat on the seat beside him in the lift. Cake at 150 kph. His mind wandered with odd thoughts, only half paying attention to how the gusts were moving the lift side to side as the pressure varied.

  The two of them, and their simulant workforce, had spent the day moving a set of gas taps from one part of the mining field to another a few hundred meters off to the south. Depending on the deposits, they might not have to move a particular set for a couple of weeks. This last one had made it a little over that, so the pipes were tough to extract from the dense rock layers. Regardless, the day had started out well. It had been full of honest labor, and even though he was dirty and his clothes were stuck to his sweat-soaked body, he was determined to carry his light mood home.

  He navigated between the low, rocky hills that fanned out before the mountains, using them for cover in the windstorm. He crested the last ridge before the canyon in which their settlement sat. The black plume of smoke rising from where the house had once stood dominated his view. His guts sank and fear tightened its grip on his frame, and he thought he would swoon. He ignored the sparks dancing in his vision as he floored the accelerator. He flew down the last stretch and screamed the lift to a halt sideways in front of the house, bouncing it off the unfinished surface of the road. Getting out, he could see that most of the house had already fallen in on itself; the fire was all but over. The girls sat on the ground, holding each other and covered in the soot and ash that had been thrown off the house in its death throes. They had been crying at one point – he could see the runnels the tears had made in the grime on their cheeks – but now they just sat there stunned, looking at him vacantly. Riss wasn’t there.

  “Where the hell is my wife?!” he screamed at them. He grabbed Luna, yanked her to her feet and yelled at her as he shook her. “Where is she?!”

  “She’s… in the house, Mr. Breylin,” she said detachedly.

  Breylin threw her to the side and ran up into the house. “Riss! Riss!” He was running around, over and under the remains of their house. “Riss!” But she was gone. He sat down in the remains of his life as squalls whipped ashen cinders and sparks around him. It was all gone.

  Breylin had no idea how long he’d sat there, but he’d had time to grow hungry. The burned plastic stink of the fire was heavy on him, and when he looked down at himself he was covered with smoke grime and ash. What remained of the outer walls was still smoldering, though part of the back of the house had partially caved in on itself. Idiotically, his mind wandered to the cake back in the lift. On some level he understood that his mind had withdrawn from the horror of what had happened, but he had no wish to fight it for control.
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br />   He got to his feet and looked around. This used to be the living room. He could tell where the furniture had been.

  Not wanting to see any more of what was around him, he got out of the house. The girls were asleep on the ground. One of them had her arms around the other, but at the moment he couldn’t tell them apart. He walked by them, and kept going back down the road. He stopped in front of the other house at the top of the canyon, tried the door and found it open. He walked inside, roving from room to room. When he found himself in a bedroom, sleep beckoned him, and his body relented. He laid down on the bare mattress and passed out.

  His bladder woke him up. His muscles felt like soft polymer, but he pushed himself up and stumbled to the bathroom. As he was peeing, a wave a nausea rolled over him. He stumbled into the wall and he pissed all over his filthy pants and the floor. He crumbled to his knees and vomited noisily in the toilet bowl. When he was done heaving, he lost his loose grip on the commode and fell down. He smacked his face on the floor, and quickly urine started to seep through the shoulder of his jacket. He couldn’t have cared less if he’d tried.

  After a couple of minutes, the feeling of nausea and weakness waned, and he opened his eyes. Laying there, he felt numb and stared out at nothing, but gradually he became aware of a familiar shape. He focused in, and realized that it was a thin, plastic water pipe. It snaked its way out of the floor and up into the tank at the back of the commode. It was white, and though it appeared smooth, it looked like it had dark fibers ringing it for reinforcement. It was pretty narrow as pipes go, but it was still a little bit thicker than the tubes they often used with the drilling rigs out in the zone. It might have even been made in the same facility.

  He pushed off the floor and took a couple of minutes to let his head clear as he lean against the wall. The urine on his clothes had turned cold, but he barely noticed it. He just didn’t care; it was all he could do to fight off the miasma that was threatening to make him lay back down.

  Once he had nearly reasserted his self-control, he decided that the time to go find the girls and get some answers was long overdue. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any of those pressure tubes handy.

  When he walked outside, the wind was starting to kick up, stinging his face with the cold rain it drove sideways. He walked towards the burned out shell of everything he ever cared about. As he got closer, he could see that the two of them were sitting on the ground, huddling over by the lift for the shelter it provided from the squall. As he walked over to them the storm plastered his hair to his head, and he wondered if he looked as sorry as they did. Probably worse, he thought.

  They watched him as he walked in their direction, and stood holding each other when he got close. They were soaked to the bone, shaking and miserable. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  They just looked at him.

  “Tell me what happened!” he shouted into the storm. They flinched as if he had struck them.

  Maré was closer to him, and she said, “we don’t know, Sir.”

  Luna said, “Mrs. Breylin locked us in the lift port.”

  They started talking over each other, and Breylin held his hand up. When they quieted, he pointed at Maré.

  “We thought we must have done something wrong, when we found that she had locked us in the lift port. She sent us out to get something from the cold storage chest.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. We sat there a while, and when we tried the door again, it was hot. We could hear noises in the house. We went outside and saw that the house was all on fire. That’s all we know.”

  With his eyes down, he seemed to be thinking about it. All of a sudden, Breylin’s fist exploded against the side of Maré’s face, and she went down like an avalanche. Luna had no time to react before he was on her. The storm raged on, oblivious to the dance of violence. He had his hands around her throat, squeezing, squeezing, and he drew her in close so that he could look into her eyes. She started hitting him, trying to push him off, but he had her tight. Scrabbling, she tried to pry his hands loose as her face was getting so hot, but her hands were wet and she couldn’t find the purchase she needed to dislodge him. She started to grow weak, and the edges of her vision were turning, fading. As she fell down a deep hole, the blackness swallowed her completely. Why am I falling? Where’s… Maré…? She was… here…

  And then, nothing.

  Maré woke to a blinding pain in the side of her face. There was something wrong with her jaw; it felt… wrong. She was lying in ashes. I must be in the house, she thought, but I can’t move. Looking around she saw Luna lying next to her, with her face slack and eyes closed. Her mouth was open, and the rain was bouncing off her skin. “Luna… wake up, please, honey!”

  “She’s not going to wake up, Maré,” Breylin said. She looked, and Breylin was sitting nearby in the rubble looking at her. “I used my hands to wring the life out of her.”

  “Nooo… Why?!”

  He moved to kneel next to her. “Now you know, Maré,” he said, barely audible over the violent oscillation of the wind. “Now you know what loss is like.”

  She was crying hysterically and trying to scoot closer to her Chroma. “Luna!”

  “Here, let me help,” he said, as he got to his feet. He picked her up by her lashed arms and laid her across Luna. “Is that better? Does it help, to be near your dead twin?!”

  “Why? Why?”

  “You know, I’ve been sitting over here next to what’s left of my wife’s burned corpse, and I thought you might like to do the same!”

  Maré was moaning Luna’s name when he started to pour the hydraulic fluid he had stashed in the lift port over her and her Chroma’s corpse. When he got it in her hair, it ran down into her face and she spluttered at the noxious stuff. As she was coughing, he bent down to her. “Can you hear me, Maré?”

  “What do you want from me? You’ve killed my Chroma, you bastard!”

  “I did, Maré, and pretty soon I’m going to kill you too, but I wanted you to know how it felt first.”

  Breylin stood, backed off a couple of meters, lit the waterproof torch and threw it on them. He closed his eyes and stood in the rain. Her screams did nothing to satisfy the utter poverty that pierced his soul; after they wound down to nothing all he could feel was wet and a vast emptiness inside.

  Fifteen

  There were no holding cells in the facility, so Maré and Luna were made to stay in their room by the dim, stoic androids positioned outside their door. The guards would tell them nothing – indeed, they wouldn’t say anything at all; even their look was vacant. The twins brought them their food, and though their manner was compassionate, they weren’t allowed to talk, either. Even LabSys had gone silent. They had no choice but to wait in fear for whatever would come. At least they had been allowed to stay together. All things considered, it was a great comfort.

  After they had been forced into their room, they lay together in their bed without even having taken off their clothes. Maré still had some of 85’s blood on her fingers, but she and her Chroma were too numb to notice. They simply held each other in the meager illumination cast off by the light over the desk. Eventually, they slept.

  Luna woke sometime later to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the holo of their parents. Maré heard her Chroma stir, and she turned. When she saw her eyes open, she gently reached over to stroke her hair. Luna could smell the antiseptics she had used as she leaned into Maré‘s tender touch. In better times she might have nipped her fingers, but she couldn’t summon the cheer to do it now. Instead she sat up, moved behind her Chroma, and put her arms around her.

  Maré held onto Luna’s arm with one hand as she turned back to the semi-flat image. She lightly tapped its edge a few times, and though it flickered, the illusion wouldn’t pop out as it should. Perhaps it had hung there for a long time.

  “Tell me more about our parents, Luna…”

  “What would
you like to hear?”

  “I don’t know – something… sentimental.”

  Luna pondered. “Well… There was an occasion when Mom and Dad took us to see our grandparents for the first time. I’m pretty sure they were Dad’s parents. I guess we were about… maybe five or six. It felt like we had spent hours in the lift.” She thought for a moment before she continued. Maré could tell from her voice that she was a little girl back in that lift a long time ago. “We were in the back, and we were on a grand adventure. Sometimes we watched the scenery – actual trees, Maré! None of that stuff grew in the city, not the real stuff, at least. The big, green leaves on them, the bushes and tall grass, and small explosions of colorful flowers along the edge of the road…”

  “It sounds delightful.”

  “Mmhmm, it was…” She laughed, saying, “we got to romping around on the bags in the back, and Dad hollered that we’d better stop or the jumping around would crash the car!”

  “Really?” Maré said incredulously.

  “Oh,” she said as her laugh was winding down. “As little as we were, I can’t believe we were in any danger. Dad was ticked, but Mom laughed, anyway.”

  “And our grandparents? What were they like?”

  “Gramma was heavy, but she hooted when she saw us. She smelled like the food she was cooking, too, and she wouldn’t stop hugging us. Pap was so serious, but he sneaked us candies when he thought no one was looking. Mom saw, but she just winked at us and stood so Dad wouldn’t see us eating before dinner.”

  Luna’s tears were on Maré‘s neck. For once, they were the tears of happy memory.

  “What else? Tell me more, Chroma.”

  “Lay with me and I will,” she whispered.

  Maré got up, padded over to the desk and turned off the light. She stripped, dropping her things on the floor and crawled into bed. With their cheeks and their breasts touching, they lay there with their arms around each other and their legs weaved. Though she had the tang of old sweat, Maré loved her Chroma’s smell, and she inhaled it deeply.