Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  Cali Richards fumbles with the tack room doorknob. The latch is stuck. She has to put the metal pails on the floor and turn it with both hands. She kicks the bottom of the old door, swearing she’ll get that fixed.

  She’s been swearing that for ten years.

  The former nanobiometric engineer turns on the faucet, letting the water run over her wrinkled and spotted hand. Her arthritic knuckles are knobby. She shoots some soap in the stream and lets the bubbles rise over the pails.

  An old song comes on the radio, reminding her of days before biomites were invented, when life was simpler. Is that what old people say? Only dusted memories make things seem easier. Still, she turns it up before reaching into the soapy water, reaching blindly for brush and pail.

  She yanks her hand out like a water snake was hiding on the bottom. A long red slash oozes along her index finger. She resists the childish urge to suck the blood. She wraps a paper towel around the wound, squeezing it. The dull pain recedes. She could will the nervous response away but prefers to feel the sting. It’s too easy not to feel it.

  Two horses trot across the frozen paddock. Cali watches them play follow-the-leader, their hooves rumbling past the tack room window. There were more horses when she bought the ranch. The previous family had died in an automobile accident. It seemed only fitting that Cali live here, seeing that an automobile accident changed the path of her life.

  Perhaps every path in the world.

  Haze settles near the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but the sun hasn’t breached. A red truck emerges from behind a stand of black gum trees. Two dogs run alongside it.

  Cali keeps pressure on her finger while the reflection of a leathery old face looks back, her gray hair pulled tightly back with kinky sprigs around her ears. Wrinkles line her upper lip. She’s only fifty-two years old.

  No one would recognize her. They’re not supposed to.

  The grass between the two-story house and the barn, once thick and green, is now frosted and tan. The dogs trot past her, waiting in the worn turnabout for the Ford pickup to make a wide turn. Meg puts it in park with one hand, a phone pressed to her ear with the other. She waves before abruptly ending her conversation.

  Country folks use phones. They don’t pretend to have a conversation while chatting through biomite seeds.

  “Hi, Ms. Stacy.” Megan hops out of the truck, tying her blonde hair into a ponytail. “Hey there, Baxter and Kooper.”

  She scratches the dogs’ ears and squats down for kisses.

  Cali answers to her assumed name, Stacy. She changed her face, changed her name—if she could just get a new life.

  “I was expecting your brother,” Cali says.

  “Carson had some chores to finish. He’ll drop off the hay this afternoon. I thought I’d run your groceries out in case you needed them.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “You cut yourself?”

  “Nothing but a scratch.”

  “I got essential oil salve for that. It’ll stop the bleeding, keep out infection. I can send it with Carson.”

  Cali opens the passenger door. Her weekly order of produce and dairy is on the seat. Megan gets around the truck in time to grab the box. There’s nothing she can do but smile.

  Cali shuffles to keep ahead of the girl so she can climb the old wooden steps first. The screen is torn on the corner of the door. Cali holds it open.

  The kitchen counters are cluttered with appliances, books and cans. It’s blessed with an ever-present smell of herbs. Cali pats the table for Megan to set down the goodies. The hickory table is gouged from years of use, where the previous family ate their meals. Megan pulls out a quart of milk.

  “Let me get you some money.”

  Her footsteps land heavily on the wooden floor. She passes the old chalkboard running the length of the hallway and goes to the room in back to put a Band-Aid on her finger. Megan is watching something on her phone when she returns. People are protesting behind a blogger’s commentary. Cali slides the bills between Megan’s fingers.

  “Thanks, Ms. Stacy.” She puts the money in her front pocket.

  “What were you watching?”

  “There was a big thing in Seattle the other day. A bunch of people overdosed on biomites and now they think they’re all dead.”

  Cali busies herself with the groceries.

  “All the bloggers are going off about the government shutting the doors and not letting the families see them. I feel bad for them.”

  “Very sad.” Cali puts the cheese in the refrigerator. “Pray for them.”

  Megan holds out her hand. Cali takes it and bows her head.

  “Dear Lord,” Megan says, “watch over Your sheep that are lost in darkness and guide them to Your Almighty wisdom, that they may walk the pure and untainted path that leads to Heaven. Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  They remain still. The words resonate in Cali and attach to her like angels of hope that they will find her brother and take root, that he’ll join her on the farm, where he’ll be safe.

  Because she knows he’s in Seattle.

  Megan leaves with a quick goodbye. Cali stands at the sink, watching the young lady texting on her way to the truck. Cali peels the Band-Aid off and throws it in the trash. The finger is healed.

  6

  The duffel bag feels like a sack of rocks.

  Nix lets it fall on the hotel carpet. He avoids the king-sized bed. If he lies down, he won’t get up. There’ll be time for sleeping later.

  He grinds his eyes with the heels of his palms. Death still lingers in his nostrils. He pulls the sliding door open, letting the winter wind into the room. Gulls cry somewhere above the patio. The moon hangs just above the bay. He opens his mind to nearby chatter, eavesdropping on newsfeeds. The tranquility is broken with a thousand voices.

  Marcus Anderson has taken control of the warehouse.

  The government is raping our civil liberties.

  Marcus Anderson should crawl back into the hole where he’s been hiding or be arrested for treason.

  M0ther is an enemy of the state.

  Nothing will change and Marcus and his bricks will do what they want in the warehouse, digesting the evidence like ants cleaning a corpse. There’ll be nothing left.

  And no one can stop them.

  That’s why Nix can’t sleep. Not yet.

  There’s information in there, Nix knows it. He can feel it. Years ago, it was so easy to network with other halfskins. But M0ther has systematically cut them up, severed ties, and traced down the outlaws. Nix is alone.

  He goes to the bathroom and splashes water on his face. He dabs his cheeks with a towel. An old man with dark eyes rimmed red looks back. His nose is thick, his lips thin and wrinkled. The bushy eyebrows are speckled white. He doesn’t just look like an old man. Today, he feels like one.

  He hates the way his body feels. It feels like someone else, like staring at the world through eyeholes. But he never changes it. Not even standing in a hotel bathroom all alone. He’s committed to being William Nelson until he finds a fabricator. If Nix Richards’s original face were ever caught by facial recognition, he wouldn’t last long.

  He cups another handful of cold water to his face, pushes his fingers through thinning hair and retreats to the bed. He lies back but never feels the mattress. It’s like he falls through it, his body dropping through the floor, building speed as it plummets downward, the solidity of his body falling away a particle at a time.

  A green breeze brushes his cheeks, a trace of smoke on the wind.

  Dreamland.

  Verdant hills slope to a clear lake confined by the peaks of distant mountains. Fishing boats have already shoved across the glassy surface from the village along the shores, where a market is vibrant with fruit and vegetables, cured meats and smoked fish.

  He lifts his hands and studies the skin of a thirty-nine-year-old. Only in Dreamland does he look like his true self, the real Nix Richards.

  Rain
e sits at the far end of the slanted porch. Her baggy pants are rolled to her knees with a white tank top exposing her dark brown shoulders. She cradles a mug on her lap, green eyes gazing over the bannister.

  “I think you’re foolish,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “You’re not invincible.”

  Nix steps off the porch, where the ground is worn to dust. Further out, the grass sways near his knees, clumps shifting in the wind. Scrubby trees dot the landscape. He looks back at the prairie home, the old porch wrapping around both sides.

  Dreamland started as a mental construct, thoughts that he visualized and connected. When he was a kid, he discovered his ability to build inner worlds by accident. It started when he looked at a picture. His biomites took the information and recreated this inner world. Nix thought it was normal.

  He was a freak.

  His thoughts took on a life of their own. They calcified and interlocked. They existed without his effort. He and Raine had outgrown the tropical lagoon of their youth. They wanted a home and imagined this cabin on the hill, the nearby sea and the ragged mountains. They would go down to the village, where people haggled over prices and arguments broke out and children laughed in the streets. He saw and heard things he couldn’t possibly have imagined, the details rich and endless.

  It was no different than the physical world. But still, a world he created. Will it exist without me?

  He could never be sure.

  A German shepherd lopes through the grass. Nix buries his fingers in the dog’s fur.

  “Shep,” Nix mutters, “where’s your stick?”

  Shep looks around as if he’s thinking, then darts around the house. Nix picks a seed stalk from the grass, nibbling on the broken end, the juice tart.

  “Do you think I’m real?” Raine asks.

  Nix used to answer that question. Sometimes, he tried to lie. He didn’t control her, couldn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to do. He’d always assumed she had risen from his subconscious, taken the details of her physical appearance from someone he’d seen but forgotten, that his mind had this barrier in place so he’d feel the separateness between them.

  So when she asked that question—Do you think I’m real?—he didn’t know how to answer.

  “If I die,” he says, “this will all vanish.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “It’s a safe bet.”

  “Can the mind die?” she asks.

  The koan. The unanswerable question. The body can be killed but is the mind the product of the brain? They argued that point many times.

  “I can’t take the chance,” Nix answers, as he always does.

  Raine lazily drags her hands over the swaying swards of grass. She nears a leaning white oak. They planted that tree. The hills and water, the clouds and soil all sprang from his mind, but they built the house and planted that tree.

  It’s grown older, just like them.

  Raine picks something up. Nix is still squatting when she takes his hand. Opening his fingers, she places an acorn in it.

  “You were the seed,” she says. “You are not the tree.”

  She closes his fingers around it, holding his fist in her delicate hands.

  “This Dreamland is more than you. Perhaps it’s more real than the world you live in.”

  “I don’t care about Dreamland. Only you.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem.”

  Nix always told his sister that Dreamland was a new reality, not just his imagination. But when asked to fully commit to that, it was too much of a risk. If he dies, it dies.

  She dies.

  “If I can fabricate you a physical body,” he says, “you won’t need me.”

  “The physical world isn’t the gold standard of reality. There are other realms.”

  “The physical is all I got.”

  “Are you an old man in the real world?”

  “That’s just how my body looks. It’s not me.”

  “Then if you’re not your body, who are you?”

  Another koan.

  She knows why he wants to fabricate a physical body. He doesn’t want to possess her, doesn’t want her existence to be limited to Dreamland. He wants to give her a life, her own life. He wants to have children in the real world. They discuss this often; they already have names. Joshua, if it’s a boy. Pearl, if it’s a girl. That was the plan.

  Raine didn’t want to wait; she wanted to start the family in Dreamland. But Nix didn’t want to raise children in a fantasy, he wanted them in the flesh, where he could rock them to sleep and kiss their boo-boos and watch them grow. He didn’t want them to disappear if something happened to him.

  Shep returns with a stick. Nix hurls it deep into the meadow.

  “There’s a girl in the warehouse,” he says. “I think I can use her to look around. There must be some clue to the underground network, something that can give me some direction of where to find a fabricator. I’ll need to get closer, though.”

  “They’ll sense you.”

  “I’ll use a proxy and cover my trail. I just need her eyes and ears, to see what’s in the back room.”

  Shep is already returning, stick in mouth, black lips flapping. Nix stands to look at the valley. One of the boats is returning.

  Raine drapes her arms around his neck and leans her head on his shoulder. The morning chill is already lifting, but a fire in the hearth would be nice. And he could use the rest. In the morning, he’ll get a fresh start.

  But he wonders, as he often does, how he could ever leave this place.

  7

  The sun is locked behind a gray sky.

  Nix walks down the middle of a long street—the warehouses on his right, the water to his left. Raine’s image walks silently beside him. The white sedans are parked far from the shrinking crowd. Only hardcore bloggers and a few reporters are up this soon.

  He doesn’t want to mingle, but there’s no other way to get close. Bricks were behind the warehouse on the loading docks. He’s made slight adjustments to his facial features—altered his cheekbones, thickened his nose—and changed his biomite identity. If anyone checks, he’s a blogger. No one will recognize him from yesterday.

  There’s not much activity. Most are chatting or eating fast food, a few are streaming reports or video. Several bloggers are curled up in sleeping bags near the pier, stocking caps peeking out.

  Nix’s biomite identity pings as onlookers watch him approach, scanning his identity, curious if he’s someone with information. The activity dies down. He spots two men, early twenties, on a short guardrail, digging breakfast from a white bag. Facial recognition identifies them: Byron is African American; Henry, Korean American.

  Nix drops his bag on the grass. “Any word?”

  “None,” Byron says. “They’re slammed tight. Rumor floating that the bricks will make an announcement today, but they said that yesterday. Police don’t know any more than we do, just standing guard.”

  Two officers sip coffee near the steel door.

  “Bricks got the cops under wraps,” Henry says. “Moved them out day one. Like to be a fly inside.”

  “You try tapping surveillance feeds?” Nix asks.

  Byron shakes his head. “Like I said, slammed tight. Bricks are running field static to prevent scanning, and no hardwires to ride inside. No one knows what they’re doing in there.”

  Nix thought if he had proximity, he could surf his senses through the Ethernet and link up with the girl’s biomites. Maybe not.

  “You staying put?” Nix asks. “Need to patch an update across the water.”

  His biomite identity told them he’s a freelance blogger just picking up news for a London-based outlet. In the world of bloggers, he’s about as low as it gets.

  Byron smirks. “Ain’t you a bit old to be streaming?”

  “Never too old.” Nix taps the back of his head, the universal sign of a recent biomite seed.

  “Get comfy, old man. We’ll
watch your gear.”

  Nix throws a blanket on the ground. He leans back on the guardrail. Byron and Henry chat silently and figure an old man like that can’t sit up and stream. Nix gets comfortable, leans back, and closes his eyes.

  The sensations of the physical world recede.

  His awareness slips into cyberspace, where information streams and thoughts collide. Byron and Henry’s encrypted chat blends with other conversations in the vicinity. Nix moves his awareness toward the warehouse, where the information feels like a white cloud of static, of buzzing insects meant to scatter any attempts to look inside.

  He sifts through the obscure net, searching for any semblance of organized consciousness. He feels several dense formations but avoids merging with them. His heartbeat picks up. If he connects with a brick, it could be the last thing he ever does.

  There’s nothing discernible in the warehouse, no information he can glean, no images he can stream. It’s what keeps the bloggers from learning anything. But they don’t know about the girl. Even if they did, they can’t ride the Ethernet like Nix.

  Too much clay.

  Nix can’t tell one identity from the other. They’re all virtually identical, which tells him that everything he’s feeling inside the warehouse are bricks. He pushes deeper when he feels a slight aberration in organized consciousness. It’s the sign of imperfection, the activity of the subconscious.

  The clay of a human mind.

  Nix pushes his awareness through the white static until he’s centered over this identity. He takes a moment to locate it in space and time, estimating that it’s located near the back of the warehouse, sitting still.

  Slowly, he wraps his mind around it.

  He touches it like a toe in the water.

  Her perception field is malleable and open. Nix merges with it like two computers reaching through cyberspace, attaching his perception field to hers. Forms swim out of the static as if layers of veils are lifted, one by one.

  Until he’s seeing.

  Hearing.

  He’s in the back room of the warehouse.

  8

  Jamie’s cuffed to an ergonomic, gel-infused lounger. And cold off, once again.