The Way of All Flesh: Illusions Can Be Real

by Corey Furman

“If it isn’t too much trouble, do you think you could get me a pain killer?”

  His expression darkened at her comment. He said nothing as he looked at her, the seconds ticked by, and she crumpled a bit under his stare.

  She sighed and looked up at him. “Please… Dad?”

  Mercurially, he smiled and stroked her hair. “Sure. I’ll be right back, as soon as I turn up the heat.” With that, he left the room.

  By the time he came back, the infrared panels under the floor were already warming the air. She sat up a little, and he handed her the wafer and a tumbler of water. When she was finished she laid back down with Luna.

  “I’m sorry I had to punish you both last night. Are you hungry?” he said sincerely.

  “Yes, Dad, but I want to stay with Lu– my sister a while longer.”

  “As you wish. Come out when you’re ready.” He turned and left the room, gently shutting their door.

  As Breylin left the room, Maré tried to get closer to Luna, to put more of their skin in direct contact. She kept listening to her breathe, stroking her face and whispering soft words of love to her in a steady, unending stream. She knew it was irrational, but she had the strangest feeling that if she stopped, her Chroma would slip away. It was silly, but she didn’t want to stop, anyway – it was her job to protect her. She was just so cold…

  After a little while though, as her head was pounding noticeably less, she began to notice that Luna was warming up, and she redoubled her hopefully soothing efforts. Her breathing became less shallow, and she made a few low sounds.

  Maré maneuvered her so that she laid more on her side, and she scooted in to spoon her. As she did, she noticed the scrapes that covered her back – scrapes made by the rock to which Breylin had tied her. When she looked over the rest of her, she found that her arms, her chest, her legs were also marked, and she was filthy where the storm had caked now dried filth onto her. A deep sadness came over Maré, filling her, for the ordeal that they had both suffered. All she could do was hug her close and emptily hope for better times.

  A slight tremble passed through Luna and transferred itself to Maré, and she felt her fingers move just slightly under her arm. “Chroma?” she said, praying she was starting to come around, but there was no reply.

  She continued to warm up as Maré caressed her, and eventually, she started to wake up. “Maré…?”

  She hugged her tightly. “I’m here, honey.”

  “What…?”

  “Shhh… don’t talk. I’m going to roll you towards me, and I’ll hold you.”

  Maré worked at positioning her. It took a minute or two, but by the time she was done, Luna’s eyes were open and she was holding onto Maré’s hip.

  “I’ve been holding you for some time, Chroma. Truth is, you had me quite worried.” She picked her head up so she could look her in the eyes. “You were quite cold when he brought you in.”

  “It was horrible, out there…”

  “I know; he made me watch you all night – or at least until the pain in my head made my vision go out of focus.” She laid her head back down on Luna’s shoulder. “I’m sorry he did that to you.”

  “I hate him, Maré.”

  “Shhh… he’s in his family fantasy pretty deep,” she said as quietly as she could, “but he’s still lucid. Listen to me, we’re going to have to play into it, at least until he comes out of it. We’ll be safer if we can keep him in it anyway.”

  “Just now I don’t care – I feel like shit.”

  “Yeah, I get it. Listen, I’m starved. You want something?”

  “I just want to sleep…”

  “Okay, I’ll get you something after you’ve rested. Will you be okay for a bit?”

  “Stay with me until I fall asleep, please…” and she shut her eyes.

  Maré watched her for a couple of minutes. Her breathing was even, normal – just sleeping. Except for the scrapes, nothing she could see spoke of the ordeal she had endured last night. Moving slowly, she slid from under the cover, climbed off the bed and put her clothes back on. She slipped from the room, eased the door shut behind her, then leaned against it with her eyes clamped tight. Sleep for now, Luna, get what you can. It’s up to me to try to protect you, but I can only do so much… and I think we’re running out of time…

  Out in the kitchen, she found Breylin sitting at the table, drinking coffee. Showtime, she thought; she just hoped she could be convincing.

  “How is your sister?”

  “She woke up briefly, but she’s resting now, Dad.”

  “And you? How is your headache?”

  “I’m okay. I thought I would get something to eat. I’ll make something for Luna when she wakes up.”

  “Sounds good. Listen, I need to run into the city to get some food. Maybe I’ll even get something special for us. Will you and your sister be okay for a bit?”

  Another crazy mood shift! Last night he tortured us, but now he’s almost kind. I don’t understand… why the hell does he keep changing directions? In any case, a thought had occurred to her while he was speaking. Leaving them alone for a while might present her with an opportunity. “We’ll be fine, Dad. When are you leaving?”

  He held up his cup. “Now that you’re up, I’ll just finish my coffee and head in. I’ll only be a few hours. Please plan on making dinner later, okay? Enchiladas – your mother always liked those.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Dad,” she said softly. She didn’t think he realized that she meant something other than dinner.

  After she heard the lift port door close and his lift speed away, Maré checked in on Luna, who was still sleeping with her mouth open. Their room had gotten quite warm, and she had begun to sweat. She went back to the tiny display mounted on the living room wall.

  “HomeSys,” she said to it, and it acknowledged her with two tones. “Lower the temperature in the small bed room to standard.” Again, it made two tones, a few meaningless icons flashed on its tiny screen, then it went dark.

  So, it takes my commands, she thought. I wonder how far it extends. “HomeSys, deactivate the simulant collars.” In reply, it made two discordant tones, and a red X flashed twice.

  Evidently, certain functions were either locked out or inaccessible from this panel. Of course it wouldn’t be available here, only from the terminal in his room. And she wasn’t going to touch that.

  She padded over to the entertainment system and activated its screen. Its comm functions were rarely used, but it was to those that she turned to now. Unfortunately, she’d only ever seen the menu options on those few times she’d been told to activate the system’s stored music. She found herself stumbling now to figure out its operation.

  After a few minutes, she managed to find the stored connections list. There wasn’t much in it. Skimming through the items, she saw entries for “Larissa’s Parents”, “Joss’ Parents” and a few for various places in Twilight City, but nothing that obviously identified Harry. She selected “Work”, and looking through its properties, she spotted an entry for “Supervisor”. She couldn’t be sure, but she would have to take the chance. She highlighted it with her finger and pressed the Go button at the bottom.

  The screen flashed, went blank, and then came back with a large, red X. At the bottom, it displayed Unauthorized Comm System Use. You may proceed only under emergency conditions. Continue?

  She paused with her finger over the Proceed button. If she did it, the system might notify Breylin or send a separate signal elsewhere. She had no way of knowing what would happen, and there would be no going back. The seconds sweated by as she wrestled with the choice and the black consequences.

  Fuck it, she thought, and mashed the button forcefully.

  A red light began to blink on the front of the entertainment center. The screen went blank, then it slowly showed small, green concentric circles pulsing outward. After five or six pulses, the face of a woman appeared, and she breathed a sigh of relief.<
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  “Hello?” said Sirvon.

  “Hello… this is Maré.”

  “Harry!” she called out over her shoulder. “Maré’s commed us!” Turning back to the screen she said, “of course, dear. I didn’t expect to hear from you. Are you… okay?” Harry appeared at the side, wiping his hands on a small towel.

  “Maré! I’m sorry I couldn’t help yesterday.”

  “Hello, sir. Thank you for trying to help us. And yes, Sirvon – we’re okay for the moment. He’s left us and gone down to the city.”

  “What happened after Harry left?”

  “It wasn’t too bad at first, but later on I did something foolish and managed to provoke him, and it got really ugly.” She quickly gave them a rundown of the night’s events. Harry’s face got redder as she spoke, and by the time she was done, his wife appeared to be on the verge of tears.

  “How’s Luna now?” said Harry.

  “She was terrible when he brought her in this morning, but she woke up briefly a little while ago. She’s sleeping now.”

  Sirvon shook her head. “I’m sorry it happened, Maré. For both of you.”

  “Yeah… Can you help? Breylin’s mind is going, and he’s spending more time living in the past than ever before. On top of that, he’s very volatile. I don’t think it will be long before he kills one or both of us.”

  “Let me figure something out, Maré,” said Harry. “I’m not sure what to do yet, though.”

  She sighed. “We’ll be okay for a while, unless he finds out about this comm connection. Will he know?”

  Harry and Sirvon looked at each other before he responded. “I don’t know. He will if he looks at the logs.”

  “He hardly ever comes over to this thing.”

  He nodded. “Good. You’d better stay off it and not risk contacting us again.”

  Sirvon chimed in. “Sit tight, dear. We’ll figure something out.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “We’ll talk soon – be careful,” she said as she started to reach for the screen.

  “Wait,” said Maré.

  “Yes, dear?”

  Tears sprung forth. “I… don’t want you to go yet,” she said.

  Sirvon’s expression softened and she stroked the screen with her fingers. “Be strong – we’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  Maré touched the pixels of her after-image just as the connection was broken. Wiping her tears away with her shirt sleeve, she noticed that the little red light continued to blink on the front of the device, and panicked. She knew that there was no way he would miss it as soon as he entered the room. She had to do something about it.

  It was a small thing, and sticking out just a tiny bit, but it wasn’t a button – so pushing on it did nothing. She got a black marker from the kitchen and tried to paint over it. It did a lot to hide the light pulses, but it wasn’t good enough. Finally, she jimmied it with one of the kitchen knives, breaking it, and the light ceased. If he inspected it, he would know immediately that someone had tampered with it, but she couldn’t do anything about it now.

  She decided to go back to their bedroom to check on her Chroma instead of satisfying her immense hunger. As she reached for the lever, fear and nausea clenched her insides over everything so hard she felt like throwing up. She huddled in on herself and crouched against the wall outside their door. Tears streamed down her face. Rocking, she thought but she wanted to scream this is so unfair! Her mind cast for some meaning, something that made sense of it, but all she could come up with was a memory of a time Breylin had wept and asked the same why? of the sun. He’d been staring out the window, but he saw nothing as his mind had wrestled with it from deep in a fissure of despair. Is that all there is for us? Despair and pain, the monsters gleefully screwing each other over and over? Eating each other when they can get away with it and sometimes when they can’t? But there were no answers, only the wind under the eaves of the roof.

  Okay then, she resolved. Somehow we’ll make our own answers.

  Her mind had become clear with a new purpose, but her gut was still churning with acid and morose dread. She forced herself to breathe slowly, deeply, measured. They might pay for what she’d done, hell, probably, she thought as she stood back up. But it had been the right thing to do.

  “Now what?” said Sirvon as she broke the connection with Maré.

  “I don’t know…” said Harry as he raked his fingers through his hair, then he let out a big sigh.

  “I knew that bastard was mean to those girls, but I didn’t guess he was capable of what he did,” she said.

  “Tell me about it. He’s a lot worse than I suspected, too. But if I had known, I would have fired him, and we probably wouldn’t know what was going on in the house now.”

  “Do we tell the corporate security people know?”

  “We’ve been over this – CorpSec doesn’t care if he’s doing what he has a legal right to do. Same goes for the Marines,” he said with wearied frustration.

  “We have to help them!”

  “I get it, honey. Dumping extra pressure on me is not helping me figure out what!” he shot back.

  “Okay… I’m sorry. I just want to keep him from hurting them.”

  He sat down heavily in a chair, letting out a big sigh on his way down. “Me too. Let me think. You know… as hard as it’s probably going to be to get them out, that won’t be the most difficult thing.”

  She sat down opposite him. “What do you mean?” she said with raised eyebrows.

  “I can’t just seize the girls – his property – without giving him the chance to bring in the authorities against me. Keep in mind he knows things about us that would be bad if they came out.”

  “Oh my stars…”

  “Yeah… If I can get them out –”

  “When you get them out!”

  “Okay, when. When I get them out, I’m going to have to give him a reason to not go after them.”

  She thought about it. “Could you hold his job over his head?”

  “I can do what I want there, I just don’t know if that’ll be enough. Maybe I can threaten him with contacting his family back on Earth. They’re all distant, I think, and they’re too far away to really help, but maybe he’ll want to keep what he’s done secret. It’s worth a shot. It might depend on how deep his delusions run.”

  “You won’t be able to go to him by yourself…”

  He put his head in his hands. “Shit, I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but that’s another issue.” He started going through their coworkers, one by one, trying to think if any of them would be motivated enough to get involved. The problem was that Breylin had kept them all at arm’s length, and none of them were particularly motivated about dealing with the simulants outside of the work. Even Janice, the dispatcher who sometimes talked to Joss, wouldn’t be much help because she was on in years.

  Then he realized he’d fallen into the same thinking that almost every other human was guilty of – only considering the humans. Of course, that’s it! Someone from the worker crews would be willing to help!

  Getting up he said, “I’ve got an idea, honey…” He rushed around and got ready to head into work as he explained it to her.

  “Harry,” she said, and he paused halfway out the door. “Have you thought it through if he won’t cooperate?”

  “I don’t see those girls any different than anyone else, honey. I’ll go as far as I have to in defending them.” He turned and walked out into the breeze as it was picking up and blowing trash around in the street in front of their house.

  Sirvon threw the door open and hollered after him, “Please, be careful!” As he moved down the block towards their lift, the wind gusted and blew her hair into disarray, and she shivered.

  Because it was Sunday, his presence at work would be conspicuous. Harry hoped it wouldn’t matter. From his office, he opened a comm channel over to the simulant barracks complex. A young woman –
a simulant from the support staff – answered.

  “Can I help you, Sir? I’m sorry it took so long to answer your call – we rarely ever get commed on Sundays.”

  He tried to sound official when he spoke. “It’s nothing. I need Tomas Ridder from Breylin’s crew to come to my office. Please have him bring any notes from last week’s activity out in the subsolar region.”

  “Right away, Sir, but it may take him a few minutes.”

  “Understood – as soon as he can without breaking his neck.”

  He chain smoked while he waited, and it seemed like Ridder was taking forever. Nearly twenty minutes and about ten smokes later, he was just about to comm the barracks a second time when he knocked on the open office door.

  “Sir? You wanted to see me?”

  “Yep, come on in, Tomas.”

  He walked in hesitantly and stood before the desk. “Sir? I’m not really sure what you’re looking for… I don’t have any notes –”

  Harry held up his hand to forestall any further uneasiness he might be feeling. “Hang on, Tomas. I’m afraid I asked you here under a pretense.”

  “Whoa – what happened to your face? And were you burning something in here?” he said as he coughed a couple of times and waved his hand in front of his face.

  “Ignore the smoke, and we’ll get to what happened to me in a bit. Can you sit down for a minute? I need to ask you a favor, and it won’t be an easy one.”

  Ridder sat down, and Harry laid it all out for him. Before he was done speaking, Ridder’s mouth had gone dry.

  “I can’t believe it…”

  “I know. I knew it had gone bad with you, but it seemed like it was a fairly isolated incident. That is, until I found out about what was going on in his house.”

  “Sir? Can I ask you a question?”

  Harry realized he’d been leaning forward, and he sat back and tried to relax. “Go ahead.”

  “Why do you care what happens to them? After what Mr. Breylin did to me, it seemed like he got away with it.”

  “You mean like I let him get away with it?”