Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  There’s a door leading to the warehouse, a tattered tablecloth hung over the window. The filtered light doesn’t penetrate much further than the lounger. The room feels deep. Occasionally, something moves.

  Tabletops are anchored to the wall, littered with electronics, empty bottles, mirrors, cigarettes, clothes, and other strange things. A shorthaired stuffed animal lies facedown to her right, its tail dangling over the edge. It’s like Garfield fucked a lizard.

  Her internal clock says it’s been three days since they put her in the back. There’s a blank spot in her memory where the second day should be.

  The boredom has become torture. Without her field, she stares at the false ceiling’s stained tiles. When she feels a strange buzz—an itching behind her eyes and deep in her ears—it’s welcome. She clenches her teeth, feeling overdosed on caffeine.

  “Hey there, Jamie.” The door opens; light pours inside like a knife. The clutter deep in the room is briefly revealed. More freaky stuffed animals and a glass shower.

  The blonde brick closes the door. “How are you?”

  Despite the lounger’s comfort, her body aches. She refuses to call her Anna. She’s one of them. Even worse, she’s a brick.

  “You hungry?” Anna leans over the lounger, her short hair the kind of red that belongs on candy. “I brought some food.”

  Anna shakes the white bag, this time McDonald’s. They shut off her music, cut her connection to the outside world, but at least they left her in control of her senses. If she hadn’t turned off her olfactory and tasting senses, she’d be salivating. She’d also smell the wasting bodies.

  And thoughts of Charlie would return.

  She would remember him perched on the edge of the seat, remember his last words…and then gray walls and the rank odor when the club’s field dropped.

  She was crying and retching, holding him on the floor, screaming that he had to wake up, they had to go. If she could just get him out of there, he would come back. Even if he was charred, he still had a chance; they could figure things out.

  But then the police arrived.

  They were just outside the door before the nixes were decoded and the halfskins shut down. Only Jamie didn’t go down. If only she didn’t hesitate, if only she had taken that pill a minute sooner, she’d be out there. That was better than being in here.

  Better than surviving.

  That brick at the bar, the one that shut everyone down, was watching. It was like he was waiting for her to put that cold pill on her lips.

  Charlie’s the lucky one.

  Anna clears the sacks from her last delivery, wiping the crumbs and rat droppings on the floor before unpacking the chicken nuggets and fries. She peels open the dipping sauces and arranges them on the tray, very orderly. She takes a bite, rolling her eyes.

  “Mmm, you got to try this one, Jamie.” Anna points at the sauce. “It’s called sweet and sour.”

  She appears to be in her upper twenties with perky breasts and a tight frame. Her lipstick matches her hair. She picks apart the nugget with shiny red nails.

  “I got to piss.” The words scratch Jamie’s throat.

  “Take a bite first. Then we’ll go to the bathroom.”

  Anna holds the nugget to her lips. If Jamie’s quick, she can bite off one of her slender fingers, spit it on the floor for the rats. But what would that get her?

  She turns her head.

  Anna sighs. Her worried expression is convincing. She reaches in the pouch on her hip and puts the needles and tubes next to the food.

  “I need another sample.”

  “Don’t you have enough?”

  Anna takes a few minutes to record her actions, then comes over with an elastic band and a pair of scissors. She pauses with a very serious look.

  “Can I trust you?” she asks.

  Jamie doesn’t answer. The last time she cut the plastic cuffs, Jamie took a swing. She barely made a fist before a teeth-numbing sensation filled her head. She tumbled to the floor and stared at the fluorescent light while Anna pulled a blood sample, calmly pleading that she not fight, that she cooperate. That this would all be over soon.

  Anna waits for an answer this time.

  Jamie nods.

  The pressure on her wrists is relieved with a snip. Jamie slowly swings her legs to sit up, the blood rushing to her feet. The room sways with exhaustion and hunger. Anna strokes the insides of Jamie’s arms. Both are purple where blood was drawn the first couple times, the needle banging around the veins as she struggled. Anna’s touch is tender.

  “This is bullshit,” Jamie says. “I’m 49.9%. Just scan me.”

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Just 49.9%?”

  “I’d be out there if I wasn’t.”

  Anna finds a vein where the purple gives way to yellow. She taps a few times before plunging the needle in it. Jamie is able to dull the pain response, but the sting still registers. The tube fills with dark red.

  How many of those blood cells are biomites imitating blood cells?

  “Is your blood red?” Jamie asks.

  “Of course.” Anna pops a second tube into the needle. “You’re wondering how I feel, aren’t you?”

  Jamie flinches. That’s exactly what she was wondering. Anna was in her head, seeing her thoughts. Jamie hates her but likes her, too. She wants to be like her, in total control of her thoughts and feelings. And she hates herself for wanting to look like that, too: confident and slutty. Powerful.

  Hating herself is nothing new.

  “You’re a copy,” Jamie says. “You’re a fake and you know it.”

  Anna pulls the needle out and bandages the spot before packing the tubes and needles.

  “You’re a puppet, Anna. That guy out there makes you do what he wants, he makes you like it. You can be turned off, you know that.”

  “So can you.”

  “Only half of me.”

  “The other half won’t survive.”

  “At least I started out as clay. You never were.”

  Anna zips up the pouch. She holds up a fresh pair of plastic cuffs. “Do you still need to use the restroom?”

  “No.”

  “Then eat.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “No,” Anna says. “You don’t.”

  She says it calmly, knowingly. There’s nothing out there for Jamie, and she knows it.

  There are voices outside the door.

  “I want out of here!” Jamie shouts. “Goddamnit, you can’t do this! This is illegal! Where’s my mom?”

  Jamie hurls a chicken nugget at her. It smacks against the door.

  “Where are the cops? I want out of here, you puppet bitch! I want to talk to someone! You can’t fucking do this illegal shit!”

  She reaches for the tray when her arm seizes. Every muscle in her body locks. The smile has dropped from Anna’s friendly face. Her eyelids heavy. Jamie is trapped in a catatonic pose, fingers curled like claws. Unable to even swallow.

  Anna’s heels rap the concrete. She puts the spilled food into the bag, retrieves the chicken nugget from the floor and wipes the grease from the lounger. Jamie can see her in the periphery. Panic fills her like icy insects. There’s not enough oxygen in the carefully measured breaths she’s forced to take. She tries to scream, to apologize, to sob…she can’t even blink. That strange itching sensation burns the back of her eyes and tickles her ears, like someone’s eavesdropping.

  She’s trapped in her body.

  Anna steps out of sight, her footsteps fading toward the back of the room where darkness cloaks strange objects. Something scuffs across the floor. Anna returns with a large chair, the wooden legs thick and heavy. She squares it to the right of the door and goes back to the dark. An identical chair is placed facing the first one, visually framing the door.

  Anna drops her hand on the doorknob.

  Jamie begins to involuntarily move. Her chest burns for oxygen. She stands and shuffles her fe
et toward the chair on the right. Her efforts to stop or look around are futile. Anna has hijacked her biomites, moving her like a remote-controlled object, simply willing her to slowly squat into the chair, arms on the wooden armrests. The empty chair stares back.

  Who’s the puppet now?

  Tears swell on her lower lids, rolling down her cheeks. She feels them on the corners of her mouth.

  Slowly, she moves her fingers. Jamie grips the armrests. She inhales a deep breath as she breaks through her confinement. Another breath. And another. She holds back the sobs, her heart hammering in her throat.

  The doorknob clicks.

  Light falls across Jamie’s lap. Shiny black shoes step unevenly into view. The man stands for a moment, looking down at her struggling to grasp the world that’s betrayed her. He tugs at his gray slacks and sits, crossing his right leg over his left.

  Jamie wipes her eyes before sitting up. It’s the old man. He’s mostly bald. What little hair clings to the perimeter of his skull is white and his left right eye misshaped.

  “You’re very lucky.” His words are crisp. “You should be out there, you realize.”

  Jamie wants to duck her head to avoid his piercing glare. She stares at her blue fingernail polish that’s partially stripped away. She rubs her eyes, but the burning-itching sensation won’t go away.

  “Why did you come here?” he asks.

  A sudden compulsion to tell the truth rises in her throat. Jamie’s lips part, but she presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth, refusing any sort of confession.

  The man looks at Anna. He brushes his knee, picking at bits of lint before folding his hands.

  “I know everything about you, Jamie. Your biomites cannot keep secrets.”

  His stare is penetrating. She looks to the dark end of the room. Her head, though, is forced to turn back. His gray eyes are fearless. His expression joyless.

  “Your father left when you were seven years old. When you cry, you hug a pillow and bury your face so no one hears, although you haven’t cried in years. You killed your sadness, didn’t you? You shut those emotions off so you didn’t have to feel them, so you wouldn’t cry anymore. And you masturbate with your left hand.”

  “Why’d you even ask?” she blurts.

  “Because half of you is still clay. That half is God’s gift, Jamie. That’s the half Anna can’t read. Maybe there’s more you’d like to tell me?”

  She doubts that’s true. Her clay doesn’t hold secrets from her biomites. She’s committed so many biomites to replace brain cells to amp her pleasure centers that she couldn’t hide from Charlie anymore. She doesn’t stand a chance against a brick.

  “You’re special.” A grin touches one side of his mouth, just below the large eye. “Do you know why?”

  He leans forward.

  “You took a pill to destroy God’s gift. The ingested biomites began integrating with your clay when my brick shut them down. You are as close to halfskin as any human being could possibly be, but that’s not why you’re special.”

  The tip of his tongue grazes his parched lips.

  “The shutdown occurred at a precise moment, Jamie. My brick waited for you to swallow the pill. He waited for it to expose its secrets, crystallize the embedded code before it was corrupted by your identity, before it began replicating your DNA. You contain nixes in an open state.”

  The man unfolds his hands.

  “Do you know what that means?”

  He continues staring, with the curl at the corner of his mouth, as if bathing in her innocence, soaking in the pleasure of her ignorance.

  The doorknob clicks and the warehouse light falls on them along with death. Jamie’s olfactory senses come online. She blinks as the foul odor fills her nostrils, seeps through her pores. Her attempts to turn it off fail.

  She retches.

  The man watches as she struggles to breathe, tears spilling down her face. She tries to look toward the dark, to close her eyes, but she’s forced to turn toward the warehouse, where nude bodies are neatly lined on the floor, head to toe, their clothes stacked next to them.

  “You are the chosen one, Jamie. You will be the one that climbs upon the cross and dies for their sins.”

  Several bricks walk among the corpses. Jamie tries not to focus, tries to blur the vision with tears as the man babbles on. Her eyes itch madly, her ears burning.

  “What…” She wets her lips. “What are you going to do?”

  It feels like the words were spoken for her. She doesn’t want to know what the man will do to her; she just wants the door to close, for him to go away. She just wants this all to go away.

  “I will set you free.”

  He means it differently than it sounds. A whimper escapes her.

  “Your mother will see you.” The man stands. “I promise.”

  Anna steps aside. The man limps next to her and braces himself in the doorway. For a moment, he blocks the view.

  “It’s a shame.” He turns his head. “You strive to kill your feelings, to dim your senses so you don’t see the ugly of the world. Everything you experience is a gift, Jamie. I would like you to accept what has been given to you.”

  The man walks away, his gait uneven. He shrinks away from her, continuing his limping pace down an aisle, slowly revealing the exposed bodies. Anna follows him.

  The door remains open.

  Jamie is forced to watch. She contains her panic until she recognizes the military green jacket atop a pile of clothing.

  There’s no pillow to hide her face this time.

  M0THER

  M0ther taketh away

  ______

  Dr. Kaplan didn’t know what day it was.

  He marched down the corridor and reviewed case notes that scrolled past his vision, superimposed on the passing wheelchairs and nurses’ stations. He had supervised ten organ transplants and three skin grafts and there were more. The only part of his body that didn’t ache was biomite-enhanced.

  His clay was exhausted.

  It was getting difficult to focus; he could hardly remember what he just read. He attempted to enhance brain activity.

  “Denied,” his internal monitor responded. “Core body temperature is elevated. Enhanced limitations have been exceeded.”

  He didn’t break stride. An override had already been allowed due to the nature of the emergency, but he was nearing thirty-nine hours of work. Six hours of sleep would be required to reset enhancement mode.

  He rubbed his face. The sun wouldn’t be up for another three hours. There was no choice: he had to sleep. Dr. Heigel would have to supervise his transplants.

  He was waiting at the elevator when Drs. Angleton and Bates rushed past, white coats fluttering. The elevator opened, but Dr. Kaplan watched them run to the end of the wing.

  There was chaos outside the Organ Fabrication Lab.

  He left the elevator empty. Two nurses and a technician ran past him. His pace quickened, but his adrenaline had already been exhausted. He punched the door open and entered the lab.

  The large room was lowly lit and segregated by aisles and crowded shelves. Red lights flashed on all the clear boxes that were always printing three-dimensional biomite organs. Dr. Kaplan had a liver due in less than an hour and the fabricators were standing still.

  All of them.

  An argument started up. Something broke. Doctors were shouting and technicians worked feverishly at their workstations. Dr. Felton, chief of Biomite Medicine, was more vocal than any of them.

  “Jimmy.” Dr. Kaplan grabbed the technician rushing into the lab. “What the hell is going on?”

  “M0ther shut us down.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, no warning. Just cold off.”

  Jimmy tried to pull away. “But hospitals are exempt from the fabricator shutdown.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “We’re printing organs, Jimmy! We’re not creating identities.”

  “I didn’t shut us down.”

&
nbsp; “We’re not ready for a shutdown, you understand? I’ve got people in pre-op waiting for organs that are half printed.”

  Jimmy pried the doctor’s hand off of his coat. “You’ll have to do raw seeding.”

  “There’s no time. They need functional organs now.”

  “Sorry, Doctor. M0ther declared every fabricator illegal.”

  Jimmy made his escape. The government had declared that fabricating life was as illegal as cloning. M0ther supported their decision and killed the raw biomites the fabricators used to build hearts and kidneys.

  Dr. Kaplan left the lab. He went to his car and drove home.

  9

  Nix floats, disembodied, a wraith with no home, a voice on the wind. He drifts through the droning static of cyberspace like an aimless being caught in the current, the tide throwing him where it wants.

  The static comes in waves, its rhythm crashing on a nonexistent shore, scratching its existence on the ethereal current. In silent ebbs between the peaks, he can feel his body out there.

  The waves get louder. They scratch his throat, burn his nostrils. Nix opens his eyes, chest heaving.

  “Relax, old man.” Byron drops his hand on Nix’s shoulder.

  The stench of death still clogs his sinuses. A stream of snot trickles over his lips. He wipes his face, blinking away the tears. A few people turn around.

  “Don’t panic,” Raine’s voice whispers in his ear. “Relax, stay put.”

  If the bricks sense him, he couldn’t outrun them. The main thing is to blend in.

  “What the hell were you doing?” Byron says.

  “Tell them you were caught in a data stream,” Raine adds.

  “Caught in the data stream,” he mutters. “Couldn’t disconnect.”

  Byron snorts. Rookie mistake. Every streaming blogger knows you don’t attach your identity to a heavy upload, especially when you’re streaming across the globe. The momentum can pull your consciousness with it, deposit your memories in a computer, fragmented like data.

  “Next time,” Henry says, “redistribute more biomites into the hypothalamus.”

  “Smaller chunks, old man,” Byron adds.

  Nix pulls an energy bar from his bag and chews slowly. A news truck is moving down the road. The crowd is beginning to swell. His breath returns to normal, the basic act of eating resetting his behavior.