The Way of All Flesh: Illusions Can Be Real

by Corey Furman

  Joss’ anger flared. I can’t believe my ears! “What? Until you’ve been there yourself, you don’t know the first thing about my anger! You can kiss my ass!”

  “We’re done here, Joss,” he said, exhaling smoke. “Go home and get some rest.”

  He started to reply, and Harry held up his hand. “Let it go, Breylin, before anything else gets out of hand.”

  Fuming, Joss stomped off for his lift at the edge of the motor pool.

  Back at home, Joss saw Maré’s container as he passed it on the way into the house, and it was enough to make him feel apprehensive. He knew his mood was nowhere near where it needed to be to bring her out. After the week I’ve had, tomorrow might be too soon. I’ll just have to see… But I’m starting to look forward to our reunion, Maré. He had the uncomfortable feeling he was lying to himself, at least a little, as he retreated from it with each step towards the door. Leaving her in the dark, he hastened his steps and went inside to get cleaned up and something to eat.

  It was nearly midnight when he had finished bringing the workweek to a close, but Joss was in a much better mood, so much so that he decided to break open a bottle of wine he had gotten some time ago. He sat down, cracked open the top and took a long swallow.

  By the time he shook the last black drops of it into his mouth, he was pleasantly drunk. Staggering into the bedroom, he laid down and was out before he could even manage to pull the sheet over himself or draw the shutters closed.

  The next morning, Joss woke up with a terrific pounding somewhere behind his forehead, made worse by trying to open his eyes in the sunlight streaming in the front window. Stumbling his way into the bathroom, he relieved himself, then rummaged around in the cabinets looking for some pain killers. When he located a blister pack that was still intact, he tore three wafers out, stuck them in his mouth, then leaned over and drank from the faucet. The water tasted flat, but he didn’t care as long as it got the tablets past the cotton in his mouth and down his throat.

  He dropped his clothes on the floor in the bathroom, stepped over them and into the shower. At first he let the water run so hot that it created billows of steam and reddened his skin, but he needed to wake up, so he tweaked it until it was nearly cold. Since he was the only one drawing on the cistern under the house, it was virtually always full, so he let it run over him much longer than usual. When the pain in his head eased off, he finished, got dressed and combed his hair. Now it was time to get the day started, and that meant dealing with Maré. No matter how he felt, there was no sense in delaying the inevitable. He gathered the few things he would need.

  In the back of the lift port, Breylin checked her vitals, then looked through the tiny port at her sleeping face, studying her seemingly bloodless features – pert nose, mousy hair, delicate mouth and lashes. He could just make out her earlobes poking out under her hair. Such a placid girl… If you didn’t know any better, you might mistake her for a real person – though dead…

  He opened the packet of documents affixed to the side of the coffin-like container. The top page was the title to her, the second was the mandatory lifetime registration. There were several bits of marketing enclosed, a certificate of authenticity, blah-blah-blah, all of which he dropped on the floor. Finally he came to her bill of sale disclosure statement, the only thing in the whole wad of papers with specifics pertaining to her. From it, he read that she had been woken up a couple of months earlier than normal, and that had left her a little undeveloped physically. Peering at her again through the window, he could now see a trace of youth in her features that only a just a couple of minutes earlier he’d identified as delicate.

  Reading further down, the document said that she didn’t have the memories that were always given to her bloodline. Evidently there had been some extenuating circumstances that had caused them to pull her early. Idly, he wondered what those details were, but he couldn’t say that it really matter to him one way or another. Her memory loss was hardly important – as long as she did as she was told.

  He also saw that after being woken up they had kept her at the facility where they grew her kind. I wonder what she did during that period… He was also curious if it would affect her personality, or if she would act like the others they’d had. He couldn’t say if he hoped she’d still be the same or changed.

  Breylin paused with his fingers over the controls, and the seconds ticked by.

  Finally, he grinned at his own foolishness, and he punched up the sequence to wake her. When the cover cracked open, he pushed and locked it up in place. Next, he withdrew her collar from his back pocket, put it around her neck, and calibrated it with the controller.

  He stood looking down at her sleeping form, and he began to feel somewhat remote. Almost of its own volition, his hand moved, and he found himself brushing her cheek lightly with the backs of his fingers. Chilly. Satin. Alive again. How could she be alive?

  He shook his head to clear the vision, bringing himself back to the present. Using the same hand he had to touch Maré’s face, he massaged his brow. When he pulled it away, he was surprised to find that his fingers were damp with sweat. So were his armpits.

  A twitch ran through Maré, and it contagiously echoed in him. It seemed as if she were lying in a coffin, and he knew he had to get her out of there.

  Scooping his arms under her shoulders, he flexed and hauled her torso upright. As he brought her close, her head rolled back and she moaned softly, the muscles in her neck working. Rushing, he thrust one arm under her legs and picked her up. He had to juggle her a bit to get the door, but he managed it. He maneuvered her inside, kicked the door shut and laid her down on the sofa.

  She cracked her eyes half open and said, “What…?” She swallowed, then said, “Where am I…?”

  “You’re still pretty out of it, Maré. Just relax, and I’ll get you something to drink.” He stepped into the kitchen and began filling a tumbler from the tap. Coming back into the living room, he found her with her eyes open. She watched him with a drowsy, unreadable expression as he came closer.

  Sitting next to her legs he said, “How are you feeling?”

  Immediately, she drew her knees up to her chest, groaning with the sudden reaction.

  “Breylin,” he said. “My name is Breylin. You can call me Sir, if you prefer.”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “Maré, it’s okay. This is your home now.”

  “I… was somewhere else,” she rasped. Her head swam with disorientation in these new, sudden surroundings.

  “And now you’re here with me. Would you like some water?”

  She nodded yes, and he handed her the tumbler. She pinched her lips at the taste after a couple of sips.

  “I’m afraid the water here is reprocessed. It rains often enough, but the mineral contaminants have to be removed before it’s safe to drink.”

  She took a few gulps of the stale water. “Where is here?” she said.

  “You’re on Zarmina. This is one of the settlements near Twilight, the planet’s only city.”

  She took another swallow and reached to set the cup down on the table. “Who are you?” she probed timidly.

  “I’m Breylin. I own this place…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And you, as well Maré.”

  Her eyes went wide as tears started to brim.

  “Oh, don’t worry, dear. I’ll be here to help you through the difficult times.”

  Eighteen

  After he had administered her hormone treatments, Doctor Almeida had 370 Bravo shipped out to Zarmina fairly directly. With an existing order to fulfill, that was the easy part. The difficult part was trying to figure out what to do with 183 Alpha.

  He had been a rising star among the young biogeneticists, but in the middle of Almeida’s career, he had made a serious misstep. He had introduced a brand new experimental mitosis agent of his own design, in the hopes that it could further reduce the time of crop maturation down to two thirds,
and perhaps as little as one half. Had he been successful, he could have revolutionized simulant production and certainly propelled his company far ahead of its competitors. The hard profit margin dollars were enough to convince senior management to allow him to put his theories to a serious test, and was given control of one bloodline of simulants grown for their analytical powers. None of that had mattered to Almeida; he was only indulging his near obsession with efficiency. He would squeeze each bottleneck in the process into something better-faster-stronger, until a new bottleneck appeared. When it did, his focus would shift, and the squeezing began anew. He was fully driven, and it seemed to be going according to his plan.

  In his rush to push the limits of his ideas however, he had not fully vetted one of the steps invented by a colleague as an exercise in thought. As a result, most of the bloodline he controlled had developed at substantially faster rates – far exceeding his own expectations – but the process that arrested the accelerated mitosis had failed, causing them to continue to experience accelerated growth after maturation pod extraction. The few that had made it that far had died from several flavors of previously unseen cancer. In short, the entire crop was ruined, which was bad enough, but it also created a shortage of simulants needed for planned sales. Into that vacuum their competitors had rushed, deepening the failure of the project. The colossal blunder sent his career into a scorching freefall; all of Almeida’s future experimentation had been cancelled, and he been relegated to managing the relatively unimpressive crop of simulant pairs. He’d been there ever since, decades, and in the interim new biogeneticists had perfected the technique. His technique, but because he had developed it under the auspices of the company, they owned the intellectual property rights, effectively rendering his desires irrelevant. It had been a spectacular failure for all concerned, but it was his own marginalization that consumed him and turned his thoughts inward.

  His corrosive attitude toward his superiors had helped to fuel his professional setbacks, but he didn’t give a damn about that – or if he did, the collective intelligence of mankind had yet to design a device capable of quantifying something so profoundly small. The bitter twist that had kept him awake at night, however, was knowing that he’d never be afforded the opportunity to prove them all wrong. He knew he’d never recover, and that effectively made him indifferent to everything else, including bioengineering. He just didn’t care anymore. As he grew colder and withdrew further from everyone, his wife left him and his children stopped returning his emaciated attempts at contact. Eventually, even his bitterness left him, and all that had remained afterward was a husk of a man and the minutiae of the work assigned to him. That, and whatever little diversions crossed Almeida’s path.

  Some of those really did pick up his spirits.

  85 Alpha had made a fair recovery in the months that had passed since 370 had nearly killed her. She was now awake, and though she was largely responsive, she would never have the same cognitive abilities. Too bad, she was a good worker, he thought with a smirk. And she never failed to add interesting dynamics.

  Certainly her availability meant that he had diversions aplenty to keep his interest now. He would have to deal with 183, but at the moment, he was trying to decide what to do with 85. I wonder what would happen if I over-steered her emotions in different directions? That might be fascinating. It was an idea with possibilities. Maybe I could bring a male into the mix. An aggressive one would really push her buttons. Force them together and ramp up their libido, then start pitting them against each other. That had even better possibilities.

  But… a great idea just wouldn’t crystalize. Ah, I’ll keep her around a while longer; something’ll come up. He dropped the stylus he had been chewing on and sighed. He pulled out a cigar, sucked hot butane fumes through it, and decided to let 85’s fate go for now. Business before pleasure, as they say, but before he could put any thought into what to do with her, a screaming tickle caught in his throat and sent him into a spasm of coughing. He could feel his face heating up and turning purple, and it caused so much pressure in his ears and temples that he was afraid he’d rupture something. Ignoring the red flecks he was expelling onto the rubbish and reports that covered his desk, he scrambled for the hypo-spray in his coat, pulled it out and jammed it into what little meat he had in his thigh. He depressed the actuator once, twice, three times in rapid succession, and prayed to the god he’d never believed in that he wouldn’t keel over dead before the suppressants did their mean work. He wound down, ceased, then decided to break his own rule about mixing the powerful drug with which he’d dosed himself and his beloved scotch. He pulled out the bottle from one of the locked drawers and unscrewed its cap. Instantly he smelled its siren aroma, and nearly gave in to the urge to take a slug directly from it. Instead, he poured two fingers into the tumbler and quaffed it all in one go. He nearly put the bottle back, but he was feeling pretty mellow and he decided a bit more would hurt. He poured a finger and a half, looked at it, then ran it up to the full two fingers. He licked the threads, capped the bottle and put it away.

  Swirling the glass, he decided to turn to the problem of what to do with 183. Reviewing the notes on the different divisions he had contacted in trying to find a home for her would be useless; instead, he went to the sheaf that contained the responses themselves. It was pretty unlikely, but he wanted to make sure he hadn’t missed some vital clue, and he began to glean.

  Because she was more than a year old, the brokers over at organ farm management were only willing to bid a value of ten percent standard at consignment, making it hardly worth the paperwork. Almeida hadn’t really expected much better, so the offer to them was only cursory, anyway. At ten percent, he was better off losing her in the shuffle of paperwork and having her clean his office.

  Psyche Services was vaguely interested, but they had capped their offer at a measly fifteen percent. The shrinks could always use new lab rats, but what they really wanted were simulants without implanted memories – they were currently offering 103% market value – so they had cut their offers for everything else. If only he had known that before shipping 370 out; he would have sent her to them and 183 to Zarmina, killing two birds with one stone and wrapping up the whole damn mess with a tiny profit as a bow. As he reviewed the files, he mentally kicked himself again at the missed opportunity. Maybe a sale from the current crop would fall through. It would still be a few months before he’d be able to pull a pair out of maturation, but the thought managed to give him a small glimmer of hope.

  Moving past the outright rejection letter from Entertainment Services, he pulled up the offer from Warfare Research and Development. Theirs was the strangest of all, since they didn’t make a formal submission, only a suggestion that they might be willing to take the simulant, since she was in hyper-sleep. Almost as an afterthought, they requested contact if a large supply of dead simulants became available. Curious. What good are dead simulants?

  There were other divisions, of course – Sanitation, Mining Services, Animal Care… but none of them had ever held any promise before. They just weren’t as well funded as the bigger divisions.

  None of these options are good, he thought in frustration. It’s time to try something novel. But what?

  He decided to let his mind wander loose around the edges of the problem. What makes a profit? Obviously, the most direct route to a profit was sales. How can I sell a damaged simulant with ten percent of its lifespan already consumed? That was the brick wall, right there: you can’t. No one wants a slightly used, slightly damaged simulant.

  But wait, he realized. That dirt farmer on Zarmina wanted a pair. And I had negotiated it to one at full price. Apparently, what Almeida needed was someone else like that guy. Again, there was that brick wall.

  Then, an idea occurred to him. What if I just sent her to Zarmina with an invoice? I could put in a letter explaining that there had been a mishap and she had gone to the wrong place. The worst that could happen is the guy won’t
pay, and if that happens, so what?

  It had been about seven months since he’d delivered 370, making the story ridiculously thin. The buyer would have to be an idiot to swallow it, but he decided he had nothing to lose. It was time to roll the dice.

  “LabSys? Access the resolution details of previous resident 370 Bravo.”

  “Acknowledged, Doctor.”

  “Prepare current resident 183 Alpha for shipment to the billed owner of 370 Bravo and mark the case as resolved.”

  “Doctor, there are no active requests from that entity.”

  “On my authority, LabSys. Do it anyway.”

  “Acknowledged, Doctor.”

  He was already feeling pretty good, but having settled on a course of action regarding 183 made him feel positively capital, so much so that he decided to see what fun he could conjure for himself with 85. Perhaps a chemical dependency…

  Nineteen

  Difficult times? What does he mean by that? Still groggy, Maré wasn’t sure if she was getting what Breylin was saying. Maybe he said something important and she missed it. Still, the way he spoke of owning her was unnerving. Luna… I need you, Chroma… But Luna wasn’t here. The lonely thought of her Chroma being gone left her hollow, and tears welled up in her eyes. “How long was I unconscious?”

  “Well, I’m not exactly sure, but I’d guess you could have been asleep for about two months.” He looked at her expectantly. “Are you hungry, Maré? You should eat something after a long hyper-sleep. I haven’t eaten yet today myself.” He raised his eyebrows in question. “If I make us both something, will you join me?” His cheeks rose up as his smile curved warmly.

  Maré was still waking up, but her head was starting to clear. What she needed was some time until she understood what was going on and adjust to a new life. “Uh, yes. I should eat something.”