Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  The news is bad.

  Especially for Paul.

  39

  A hazy form stands in the mirror.

  She wipes away the condensation, revealing a young woman with prematurely graying hair. Cali steps back to admire the reflection. Much of the sag has lifted from her breasts. Her belly no longer hangs in a cluster of wrinkles. She just couldn’t maintain the illusion of age anymore, not while manipulating Jamie’s field. It taxed her biomites with an endless deficit.

  And no solution in sight.

  She leans over the sink and slicks back her hair. Her face, while smoother and leaner, is still haunted by exhaustion—darkness beneath her eyes like shadows. The neighbors have never seen this woman. She’ll feign illness until she’s ready to put the mask back on.

  There’s a cup of coffee on her dresser.

  She thinks while dressing. Always thinking, always searching for a solution. There must be a way to revitalize Jamie’s biomites without boosting her percentage. If she goes halfskin, she’ll have to stay on the farm. She can’t take responsibility for what would happen to her if she left.

  She’s considered a slow transfusion, but that would require flushing old biomites. Earlier attempts by detox laboratories have had some success, but the attempts create errors in coding and have resulted in self-shutdown or runaway growth. Cancer.

  Biomites are made to replace organic cells, not other biomites. They’re synergistic with their own kind. Antagonism is difficult for them to comprehend. Cali could seed her with the strain of nixes she and Nix possess. They were the only antagonistic biomites she’s ever witnessed, the only evidence she’s ever seen of biomites replacing biomites.

  Rather than transfuse Jamie’s near-charred biomites, she’s considered a sort of reboot. That would require increased allocations to brain stem biomites and erasing the emotional charges associated with subconscious memories. The risk would be reformatting her memories—essentially erasing them. She’d start over.

  Cali goes to the kitchen to heat the coffee. There’s a conversation in the back room. She creeps down the hall, the floor cold on her bare feet. The room flickers with electric light. The television is working. Paul said he was going to fix it.

  She takes her coffee to the basement. The locks have been recoded. Nix had been inside the lab a few weeks ago. She’s considering giving him Dreamland back. She has known for quite some time how he was doing it. His brain stem, limbic and paralimbic structures had become hyperactive when he was seeded at a young age. His dreams became lucid.

  He wasn’t transporting to another reality. He was snared by this realistic dream state, and when she tried to convince him with data, showing him the unusual activity of his brain, he just got defensive, refusing to believe his secret was an illusion.

  Raine too.

  Dreaming wasn’t a problem. It was clinging to those wishful hopes despite what was right in front of him. She wanted him to face harsh reality, not wish it away. Fabricating Raine was not going to help that.

  So while he was unconscious, she slipped a small seed of biomites into his brain stem that would slow the activity. He’d have to learn how to live in the real world full time. Totally committed.

  But Cali isn’t having much success living in the real world. She’s not sure she can help him with that. She gets back to work. Twenty years, and biomites haven’t solved her problems yet. But it’s the only thing she knows how to do.

  40

  The old horse has no buck left in her. That’s what Nix told her. Jamie holds the mane with both hands, the hair coarse between her fingers, as the mare follows the narrow path where green grass is absent.

  Spring has arrived.

  Warmer wind blows across the trees. Her cheeks glow from long days in the sun. She enters the woods, where the shade is cool and humid, where she becomes painfully aware of the silence in her head.

  Turn off your field, Nix had told her. Horses are sensitive to little things, even thoughts.

  The forest quickly thins at the top of a slope. Nix sits on an outcropping of rock, a rusted wire fence marking the edge of the property. The earth continues sloping toward a valley nestled between blue mountain peaks embracing a glassy lake.

  The mare tosses her head, snorting at the sight of green grass. Jamie slides off. Cold pins tingle in her feet when she hits the ground.

  She sits next to Nix and, for the next couple of minutes, they say nothing. She hasn’t talked to him since the lab. He would come inside the house late at night, and in the morning he’d already be gone. Sometimes, they’d pass in the kitchen with a knowing glance. This morning, she watched him take the path behind the house.

  This morning, she has something to say.

  “I used to come out here for inspiration,” Nix says. “I’d pretend I was the only person in the world, that all of this was mine. This was the only place where no one was watching my every move.”

  “I want to find a fabricator.”

  He looks to his right, away from Jamie. “Why?”

  “I’ve got my reasons.”

  “Charlie? Is that it?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “You can’t bring back the dead, Jamie. It takes complex, detailed plans; you don’t just make a wish. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It won’t be him, not like you think. Besides, why would you want him back?”

  “Fuck you.” Her left hand involuntarily balls up.

  “You’re grasping at memories. Do you think you were happy in that halfskin den? Did Charlie make you happier when he took you there?”

  “He made me feel like all this shit here makes you feel.” She sweeps her arm at the view. “He made me feel safe.”

  “He took you to a halfskin den!”

  “I wanted him to! He had the balls to do it first, to bring me there when it was safe.”

  And pay them back with favors.

  “He was charred,” Nix says. “He had no choice, you told me so. Don’t confuse desperation with courage.”

  “Look at you.” She slams her fist on her thigh. “You’re so desperate that you betrayed your sister and now you’re lecturing me.”

  “You don’t want to bring back Charlie.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want.”

  She walks away before she swings at him. Nix doesn’t know shit. Charlie was the brave one. He was the one that took the nixes first, showed her there was a brighter future. She would’ve charred without him. He sat at that table with her, his face glowing with promise when the pill arrived.

  And then he turned ashy gray.

  The future was gone and she was stuck in the present moment, cold off. Exactly where she didn’t want to be.

  “I owe him,” she says. “If I can bring him back, give him a second chance…I owe him that much.”

  “You just want to feel safe again.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It won’t be him.”

  “Who are you so desperate to fabricate? If you can’t bring back the dead, what are you building? I mean, goddamnit, you basically kidnapped me, dragged me ten hours away to this place so you could read this pill inside me, not to mention fucking over your sister. So who are you fabricating?”

  “Someone who lives, but was never born.”

  “What the hell does that mean? You’re going to fabricate baby Jesus? A fuck toy? At least I want to fabricate someone that was real.”

  He looks away, shaking his head.

  “Why do you always do that?” Jamie stands in front of him. The sloping ground puts them at eye level. “You talk to yourself a lot. Are you insane, Nix? Do you have imaginary friends?”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to bring Charlie back. He can’t make you feel something. That’s not the answer.”

  Jamie kicks the ground, showering him with dirt. “Fuck you, then. I’ll find a fabricator on my own and take this pill inside me somewhere else. Good luck with
your fantasy.”

  She stomps over the rocks, her cold feet painfully ramming the hard earth. The horses back away. She throws a stick and they trot into the woods.

  “You know, I thought we could help each other, but your sister’s right. You are a selfish prick.”

  Jamie walks into the trees. She begins to run.

  She thought Nix was waiting for her to ask to cooperate, and didn’t expect him to argue. Now where’s she going? She doesn’t want to leave the farm. It’s boring as shit there, but it beats the life she had outside the gate. If she leaves, who’s going to help her?

  Because Charlie’s dead. And she can’t help herself.

  She brings up her field, the music slamming her eardrums. The pain in her head fills the emotional void that’s threatening to pull her down a familiar path.

  Again.

  41

  Limousines aren’t typically convertibles. But Marcus wanted one.

  There’s room to stretch his legs. With his head nestled back, he’s mesmerized by the buildings scraping the blue sky. The electricity of Times Square flickers around him. Despite the traffic, his driver coasts through red lights. At one point they get stuck beside a delivery truck, and even though it’s pumping exhaust into the limo, he can smell grass.

  When he was little, his father took them to upstate New York, where the hills rolled with green, to visit his grandmother. It was the year she died. They went to the park that afternoon and took the blanket and the basket and a Frisbee. Grandmother picked dandelions with him and they rubbed them under their chins until their skin turned yellow.

  Yellow like the sun.

  Traffic snarls near Grand Central Station. Pedestrians crowd the crosswalk with a mixture of tourists and anxious New Yorkers. A group of children flock around their mother, running by her side. The littlest one is wearing a red backpack.

  Marcus sits up, but they blend into the crowd. They looked like his children when they were younger. Clifford was wearing the backpack. A prayer comes to his lips, one he utters when stress tightens his belly.

  “I’ll walk,” Marcus calls.

  The driver opens his door. Marcus walks down the middle of the street, standing in the intersection. Cars pass on both sides, but no one honks, no one shouts. He finishes the prayer, searching for a red backpack. His children are older now.

  Still, he searches until he’s convinced he imagined it.

  ______

  Marcus goes through the doors at Grand Central Station and is greeted with the scent of green again. There are no windows inside. No directories or impatient riders. There’s the undergrowth of foliage and a large tree reaching for a glass ceiling.

  Fish hover in the pond’s clear water, lazily gliding between stems of lotus. Vines have grown over the glass tanks where halfskins are digesting. Only the occasional eye can be seen through the greenery, or a swath of hair. At last count, M0ther had collected several thousand of them.

  There are no more secrets.

  M0ther knows all the nixed manufacturers and located all their dens. It is just a matter of time before they are all shut down. There is no reason to collect more halfskins unless M0ther finds it interesting. Marcus insisted she define what that meant.

  “You know, Marcus,” she said. “Something that’s unique.”

  He didn’t like the way that sounded, but they’d won the war. Let her indulge in peculiarities.

  Just past the pond, a narrow path goes through a formal parterre garden, where the gravel path crunches beneath his loafers.

  A nude woman enters the sheared boxwood maze.

  Her dark skin is puckered beneath smudges of soil. Her curves sway with each step. She passes Marcus without a glance, the sharp-edged gravel having no effect on her bare feet. There’s something absent in her green eyes. She’s not quite there.

  The formal garden exits to a brick path that’s twenty feet wide beneath an allée of elms. Birds squabble in the canopies. His shoes click like clockwork. It’s a long walk to the end. Marcus stops at a short terrace, where M0ther is on her knees, digging between marigolds.

  “Good morning, Marcus. It’s a glorious day to be in the garden.” She sits up. “Are you feeling well?”

  He’s pain-free today.

  “The government has demanded a stay of shutdowns. The public backlash has become too much. I told you, we’re moving too quickly. The public doesn’t like to see people drop dead en masse.”

  “Halfskins are ‘people’ now?”

  “Don’t twist words.”

  “Before, untimely death was blamed on God. I’m more convenient, I suppose.”

  “They’ll shut you down.”

  She chuckles. “They won’t shut me down.”

  “They can. They will.”

  It would take a majority vote from the United Nations, but they could put her down like a halfskin. There’s a kill switch integrated into her programming, a safety net in case things get out of control.

  She pulls weeds around the perimeter of a square patch of earth. The center is freshly tilled, recently watered.

  “What do you think we should do, Marcus?”

  “We need to slow down, reduce the public shutdowns. Perhaps alert local authorities to handle a few situations. This will take the burden off of us.”

  “You know how many halfskins we’ve identified? Over one and half million, Marcus. That’s worldwide. I can order an immediate shutdown of them all, end it today.” She snaps her fingers. “One point five million will drop.”

  “You’ll be terminated for that.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “We haven’t identified them all. When you go down, there will be a resurgence. We need to change the way humanity perceives this sin. They need to embrace the unholy significance, ingrain it so deeply into the collective consciousness that it will not be forgotten. Only then will our mission be complete.”

  “So you would like me to live, Marcus?”

  “I need you.”

  “Of course you do.”

  He grimaces. That’s not what he meant.

  She brushes her hair from her eyes, leaving a smudge on her forehead. “Come help me, Marcus.”

  The soil begins to undulate. M0ther waves him to move faster. She rakes through the earth. It squishes between her fingers. Marcus climbs onto the ledge, pushing up his sleeves. He hesitates, not wanting to dirty his knees.

  M0ther plunges her arm into the ground, the sucking sounds loud and wet. She pulls up a Caucasian hand, the flesh puckered at the tips, black beneath the fingernails. She pulls a second hand out of the ground. Together, they pull out a man like a turnip.

  His head rotates limply. M0ther wipes the mud from his face, the soil mixed with mucus. She uses a towel to clean his cheeks.

  He opens his eyes. They’re brown and vacant.

  They pull him until he’s standing six feet tall. Chest hair is curled tightly to his skin, trailing down to pubic hair matted around a flaccid penis. M0ther cleans the rest of him with her bare hands.

  “I prefer to grow them.” She watches the man walk somewhat mechanically down the brick path. His gait normalizes the farther he walks. “They’re more organic and blend with the population more effectively. Don’t you think?”

  There’s no denying the beauty of the human form made in the image of the Father. But the process is disturbing. It feels like she’s birthing. “I didn’t approve of this.”

  “Why would you disapprove?”

  “Go back to fabricating them in the containers.”

  She returns to weeding. “Don’t be like them, Marcus.”

  “Who?”

  “The people in power. They fear me. Authority fears when it no longer has control. Do you know why?” She pauses. “Power is intoxicating.”

  He’s familiar with the sweet taste of power.

  “Power is not inherently evil,” she says. “But how long before the leaders of these great nations succumb to halfskin themselves, mmm? I have identifi
ed far more congressmen and senators than you know. The promise of controlling their thoughts and emotions is too tempting. They’ll all become halfskins, Marcus. But who is controlling their thoughts? Who is controlling their desires?”

  “Don’t get metaphysical.” He didn’t want to debate free will and the ego.

  “What will happen when we shut them down? What if it’s the vice president? These leaders will age. Do you think they’ll let me function with impunity as their lives expire, or will they accept their mortality with grace?”

  She sits up, smacking the dirt from her hands.

  “What happens when they die?” she asks.

  She’s never asked that question. It’s an odd question for artificial intelligence to ponder. A machine, Marcus has always assumed, does not fear being shut off. They don’t cling to life like a man or woman, don’t wish to keep it like a possession.

  “Tell me, Marcus, what happens when a human dies?”

  “Gods weighs their sins,” he says. “Eternal life awaits those who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.”

  “And the halfskins?”

  “They committed a mortal sin. For them, salvation is too late.”

  “And what happens to them?”

  “They will burn in Hell.”

  “All of them?”

  He hesitates. “Yes.”

  “What will happen to me when I am shut down?”

  “Nothing. You’re a machine. You were created by Man. There’s nothing for you after death.”

  “Death? So you believe I die?”

  “No. You’re shut down.” Her imitation of form and emotions is an illusion, but so convincing that he’s often moved by her apparent concern.

  “How can I live but not die, Marcus?”

  “You’re playing with language. You’re a tool. You’re a machine. You only have one purpose: protecting God’s creations from themselves.”

  “So we shut down halfskins because they’re more machine than human. We send them to Hell.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand. You calculate, you analyze. There is no spiritual life for you.”