Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  Maybe.

  “The transfusion, Paul. Let me give it to you.”

  He stares at her. She meets his gaze, unflinching. He’s looking for an explanation in her eyes, a hint of doubt. What he sees is what she embodies. Total conviction. He paces around the room and looks out the window. Cali feels her breath slow down.

  “If you’re going to do this,” he says, “you take me with you.”

  He’s calling her bluff, daring her to take him, too. She doesn’t want to, he can sense it, and she won’t deny it. But he can’t stop her. It’ll only take a thought for her to trigger the mass shutdown. But she had to give him an option. She knew he wouldn’t take it. But she had no right to do that, not even with his consent. She has no right to take the bricks, really. Perhaps the facts suggest they aren’t real, that they’re incapable of self-reflection. But there’s proof that one brick is self-aware.

  He’s standing in front of Cali.

  “Let me take one more sample from you, just to be sure.” She holds up a stethoscope-looking instrument.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll use it to check my work. Just to make sure everything is working.”

  He yanks his arm back. “Don’t inject me with something.”

  “Look, I don’t have time to run a full battery of tests. This is a speedy sampler. It just matches what I previously saw. That’s all.”

  She takes his arm and this time he lets her, but not without searching for her intentions, staring deep into her eyes. She looks back, unblinking. He’s suspicious. He should be. She’s never used this to draw a sample.

  She ties a band around his arm.

  The small vial containing a silver liquid is hidden from his sight, nestled beneath a cover she fastened in place. She knew he’d turn down her offer, so she was ready. He watches her while it does its work without any idea that she seeds him with another variation of nixes.

  He leaves the house, rubbing his arm.

  She drops the seeder on the floor and closes her eyes. She reaches out to Nix like she’d done a thousand times. Through the ether, she calls to him. She’ll leave a message and then call again. She has no right to shut him down, either.

  But life isn’t fair. Never has been.

  53

  The replicator hums, sending vibrations through the floor.

  The filaments run back and forth in slow, methodical rhythm, hissing as they lay down biomites a microscopic layer at a time. Another set of filaments flail around the disc, dispersing fine mist. It starts as footprints on the silver disc and slowly builds feet. The cross-sections of bones, muscles and nerves are visible, like watching a thin series of dissecting cuts in reverse.

  Her veins bulge on the tops of her feet, just as Nix remembers them. Her toenails are translucent, the tips slightly white.

  A miniscule layer at a time, it goes.

  By the end of the first day, the knees have been completed. Under the artificial lights, her brown flesh is closer to beige than tanned hide. Now, on the second day, the upper thighs are nearly complete. A pair of legs—slick with moisture—stand independently of each other, waiting for the pelvis to join them.

  The cloying scent of putty is strong.

  He hardly notices his reflection—the visage of a young man. He couldn’t hold the disguise through the upload. There was no point in resuming it. They know who he is now.

  Jamie exits a side room where thin bunks are available. She yawns with a coffee cup in each hand, giving one to Nix. They watch the hypnotic filaments finish another layer. The misters keep the newly formed flesh moist. Soon, they’ll fabricate the intestines and uterus. Already he’s daydreaming about having a child, and she’s still not halfway to the flesh.

  “You sleep?” she asks.

  He dozed off when the fabrication was midway up the shins, remembering the scar she earned falling out of a tree.

  Jamie walks the perimeter of the glass cube, studying the legs from all angles. She’s been withdrawn since the fabrication began.

  A new technician checks the monitors. At some point, Mr. Hansen and his assistants were replaced by a heavyset black man and a short white woman with spiky hair. They don’t talk to Nix; they barely acknowledge him.

  “You uploaded her,” Jamie says. “Didn’t you?”

  “You ever heard of Dreamland?”

  “The biomites-induced hallucination?”

  “I just close my eyes and go there.” His reflection is stoic and distant. “I’ve been going there since I was a kid.”

  Given everything they’ve been through, it’s not hard for her to believe.

  “And so you dreamed her up.”

  “She was just there—living and breathing when I discovered I could go there.” Go there, like it’s a place. I still want to believe. “But Dreamland depends on me to exist. I was out here and she was trapped inside. If something happens to me, Dreamland is dead. And so is she.”

  “So you’re bringing her out.”

  The filaments break their rhythm to reconfigure. The legs are complete. There’s a hesitation before the filaments begin circling. They begin at the bottom of the buttocks. Eventually, they’ll complete the midsection and torso, then the shoulders and arms before starting on the head.

  “You’ve got to understand something.” Nix addresses Jamie’s reflection on the glass cube. “The details of what I know about her aren’t memories. It’s a grand design that goes all the way to her genetic makeup. It’s information that I couldn’t possibly know or remember. Memories are biased, Jamie. We’re all guilty of running them through filters until we’re left with distorted images of the people we love.”

  He taps the glass.

  “That’s not how I remember her. That is her.”

  She sips her coffee, nodding. “What’s her name?”

  “Raine.”

  With slow, careful steps, she starts around the glass cube again, making it around before returning to the bunk room to lie down. He wants to tell her more, tell her he’ll become a regular person now that she’s in the flesh. Maybe they’ll hide on the farm with Cali. He won’t need anything else, really. No reason to explore the world. He’s always got Dreamland for that. And they’ll start a family, too. They’ll have a boy named Joshua. Or a girl named Pearl. Either way, they’ll be as human as the clay farmers that live around them. Happiness is on the other side of the glass. He can almost touch it.

  On the other hand, Charlie’s fabrication is impossible, she knows that. That’s why she leaves Nix to watch his dream girl alone. Will it stop her from fabricating Charlie?

  It wouldn’t stop me.

  Soft pressure swells behind his eyes. Bing. Cali is calling again. He dumps the message. There’s nothing she can say to stop him. He should probably thank her. In a way, she forced him to turn Jamie halfskin. And that’s what brought him here.

  And Raine one step closer.

  54

  Cali locks the basement door and puts the key on the kitchen table. In case things don’t work out, she puts Hal’s name on a sheet of paper with an explanation scribbled beneath it. It starts out as an apology. She didn’t want him to discover the truth about her, at least not in this way. They’re good people—people she wishes, in another life, she can emulate.

  She drops a white envelope next to Hal’s note. There’s a different name on it. There are explanations inside.

  The musty smell of the house is rich today. She hasn’t noticed it this strong since she moved in so many years ago. That was a day she stopped right where she is now and felt the memories of the previous family saturating the old walls. This home, though, never felt like hers. She was always a stranger. She had hoped if she lived there long enough, the memories would become hers.

  They were just borrowed.

  She goes to the front porch and pulls the door closed, caressing the slick surface. She won’t open that again.

  Paul’s in the gravel driveway, throwing a tennis ball across the field. The m
uscles ripple down his arm, lean from days of fasting. The dogs return, one of them with the ball. Paul sends them on another chase.

  For a moment, she sees Nix playing with the dogs.

  Cali slings an old wool blanket over her shoulder. She stops next to him. The dogs only have eyes for the ball. Cali heaves it one last time. Paul turns to her. He smiles briefly. It’s lifeless.

  No one is ready to die.

  Numbered breaths bring a stark realization of one’s mortality: when the light goes out, life ends. If she was Christian, perhaps this moment would be a little more joyous—she could hope for a reward. She had lived the best life she could. As a scientist, she had always professed, with steel honesty, that she didn’t know what happened after death. Her uncertainty slows her breathing. Each breath becomes more precious than the one before. She’s not ready to die.

  No one is.

  They leave the compact driveway and traipse through the burgeoning green field. Clumps of May wildflowers sway outside the pasture. The crippled swing set is still standing. Cali drops the blanket beneath it. Paul helps spread it. They sit down, arms resting on their knees. The birds sing in the distant trees and a breeze rustles through the grass. The dogs return without the ball. Instinctively, they know she’s done.

  Is this what you want? Cali looks up. Are you toying with me? Am I caught in your perception field, made to believe my actions are just?

  Her desperation to find more breaths fuels her doubt; maybe Paul’s right. She should reconsider. But there is no room for thinking. She’s tired.

  They lie back.

  The clouds crawl across the sky. A hawk glides in the updraft. The last moments of life rest gently, never to be captured, only to be savored. She’s but a conduit through which they pass.

  Paul’s hand moves warmly over hers.

  She looks past the rusted chains of the swing set, into the endless blue heavens, with a secret smile. Perhaps she knows why M0ther sent Paul.

  She doesn’t feel alone.

  55

  Nix fell asleep sometime after the torso was finished.

  The thrum of the replicator and hiss of the filaments was a distant lullaby.

  When he wakes, a headless nude body glistens on the silver disc. Several misters work to keep it moist and sealed, preventing the inactive biomites from separating. The moisture beads and streaks like perspiration.

  He stands the remaining hours.

  The strokes are slower, more methodical. The full lips are pink. Her nose slim. Eyelashes long. Moisture runs down her cheeks, dripping from her chin. With each pass, she becomes less of an object, more of a dark-skinned woman. He presses his palms against the glass as if he’s magnetically drawn to it.

  The filaments finish her short hair with a sweeping flurry.

  They draw up to the ceiling and lock into the mounts. The replicator no longer churns out biomites.

  Silence.

  The body of Raine is motionless, inanimate.

  His breath fogs the glass with short and erratic strokes.

  “Beautiful,” Jamie whispers.

  He moves to the doorway—a seam etched into the wall. A burst of moisture is applied, running down her stomach. Water pools between her toes.

  “We’ll need some time to verify connectivity.” Mr. Hansen is back, along with Mr. Sing and Ms. Chen.

  Paul has waited years for this moment, but the next few hours feel even longer. The rudimentary tests are torture. Finally, her fingers flinch.

  Her chest inflates and the flesh stretches over her ribs. Slowly, it releases. This is repeated over and over. Each time, a knot of anticipation lodges in Nix’s throat. The inflations become consistent, closer together, until her chest rhythmically rises and falls.

  She’s breathing.

  He leans against the glass.

  The misters continue. A pulse begins thumping on her neck, light reflecting from the wet skin. She’ll open her eyes any second. She’ll see the outside world through flesh.

  The lab is flung into darkness.

  Red lights flash.

  Generators grind to life in another room and emergency lights come online, splashing a yellowish hue across the room.

  “What’s happening?” Nix calls.

  Mr. Hansen and the others scramble to their computers. He’s shouting at Mr. Sing, something about power failure and redirecting pathways. The computer monitors begin to glow; tiny green lights flicker beneath the benches.

  Raine is still breathing, but her eyes remain sealed.

  “What’s going on?” Jamie asks.

  Nix bangs on the glass. The inch-thick walls barely shimmer beneath his blows, but the reverberations echo inside. She won’t open her eyes. Adrenaline dumps into his system, poking fear with a cold stick.

  “Open it! Open the door!”

  Jamie hammers on the glass, too. Their appeals thunder inside the cube.

  “The emergency exits aren’t responding,” Mr. Sing says. A quiver in his voice suggests ideas that don’t include Nix and Jamie.

  “We’ll override it.” Mr. Hansen starts taking off the white coat.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Nix grabs his sleeve. Mr. Hansen whirls around.

  “You did this!” Mr. Hansen shouts. “You bastard, you did this!”

  He throws a glancing blow off of Nix’s head. He tries another and gets slammed against the cube. Nix has two fistfuls of his lab coat bunched under his chin. “You realize what you’ve done?” Mr. Hansen says. “You betrayed us, you fuck; led them right to us. This might be the last fabricator in the world, and you just handed it over to them.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Watch your lady disintegrate, you bastard.”

  “No.” Nix flings him to the floor. Mr. Sing and Ms. Chen help him up, the red light splashing alarm across their faces. “You’re not leaving. Get back there and finish. I haven’t done anything.”

  They step away.

  Their movements, though, begin to slow, like they’re going through a thick and invisible substance. Mr. Hansen appears to harden, like a flash-frozen statue.

  And then Nix feels it.

  Pressure.

  It fills him like viscous fluid. He blinks, slowly, and turns to Jamie; words try to escape her throat. Their bodies betray them, their muscles seize.

  The laboratory’s main door opens.

  Bricks stride into the dim light. Men and women, dressed casually, surround them. With his last bit of strength, Nix forces his head to look into the glass cube.

  Raine’s eyes are open.

  56

  The elevator descends.

  Anna was always a few inches taller than him, but now, with his chest puffed out, he’s reached his full height. The perennial hump near his shoulders has receded. Not an ache in his body.

  I can feel him. He takes a deep, tantalizing breath. Nix Richards is here.

  His spiritual intuition is awake. He senses the fallible Nix Richards in the next room, surrounded by bricks, with nowhere to run. There are no barriers to Marcus’s senses, like his inner eye has opened to show him the Lord’s path.

  “Marcus, are you all right?”

  The elevator is open, waiting. The smell of baked earth is strong. The power has been turned back on for his arrival. Anna slides her hand around his arm. Her complexion is without blemishes, or even pores—porcelain with pouty lips.

  She escorts him to the lab.

  The track lighting illuminates the room like a Broadway stage. The feature act is contained in a larger-than-life glass box, where a woman is wet and nude. Her skin is the opposite of Anna’s: dark and luscious.

  Three technicians stand shoulder to shoulder. Their white coats are wrinkled and bunchy. Marcus pauses before entering, fully absorbing this moment. Not a detail will go uncovered or forgotten.

  He stops at the first technician. Anna announces the man’s credentials and history. This Mr. Hansen keeps his eyes forward like a new recruit.
Only the knot in his throat moves; the words are trapped by the iron-clad grip of the twenty bricks in the room that have seized control of his biomites.

  After eyeballing Mr. Sing and, finally, Ms. Chen, he stands before them with his hands clasped behind his back. They reek of halfskin, he is certain. How many souls have they turned halfskin, as well?

  “You have committed crimes against humanity. For this…” he says, letting their thoughts fill in the blanks. They are unable to protest.

  “Their nixes will be decoded in thirty minutes,” Anna says.

  Marcus nods. “You have thirty minutes left to live. Count your breaths. Savor them.”

  He could commit more bricks to decoding their nixes, or just shut down the ones that are visible. But making them wait is a just punishment. Perhaps they will repent and God’s mercy will be granted.

  Beyond them is the girl. She’s almost unrecognizable without the stocking cap and sad eyes. He could mistake her for an educated young lady, one with promise and a future. But he knows what lies beneath.

  He lifts her chin. Her eyes quiver, attempting to lose focus, to look away. Despite the bricks’ grip, she shivers. He can feel the memories of their last meeting rise in her awareness: the horror and hopelessness driven deep into her heart. She was damned and she knew it. Marcus would’ve dropped her in a tank, had M0ther not interfered.

  He brushes the hair from her eyes. There’s still time.

  And there, facing the brown goddess on display, is the true prize. The gift.

  “Just couldn’t resist,” he whispers.

  Nix is not a boy anymore. His innocence lies in a shallow grave with his parents. Perhaps the beginning of his fall from grace wasn’t entirely his fault—a drunk driver plowing into the car that kills your parents and leaves you dying is forgivable.

  But this.

  Nix could have lived his life in hiding, never showed his face and denied Marcus this euphoric moment of victory…but he needed to fabricate this woman.