Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  Marcus touches the glass.

  “Twenty years I’ve waited,” he says. “Twenty years I’ve dreamed of this, for you and your sister to make a mistake. I have you, Nixon Richards. And soon I will have your sister.”

  Nix shakes. Anger quakes beneath his unresponsive repose—a prisoner in his own body.

  “You’ve been up to the Devil’s work, son. You can’t shut down your 99%, I won’t let you. But you’ll beg me. You will beg for the relief of death, but all I’ll have to offer is penance.”

  How do I know he’s 1%? He can smell it, that’s how. The stench of biomites is strong; the odor seeps from his pores. He feels like a brick.

  “And this.” Marcus taps the glass. “What is this?”

  “The coding is elusive,” Anna reports. “The fabrication appears to be composed of nixed biomites with a completely a new operating system.”

  “Open the door.” No one responds. Marcus points at Mr. Hansen. “You.”

  He’s released from the invisible grip. A helpless whine escapes him, an involuntary spasm that had been bottled far too long. With a few keystrokes, the seal around the door is broken. Warm, humid air escapes. Marcus slowly opens it and lets the stench of freshly ignited biomites rush past him—a foul odor he’s come to associate with M0ther’s garden.

  Water droplets hang on her fingertips. The dripping echoes in the chamber. Nix is beginning to spasm.

  Marcus paces around the wet specimen, letting his eyes examine the exquisite beauty: the deep brown skin, the flawless curves and toned musculature. She’s not without imperfections, though: a scar here, another there. She lacks the airbrushed quality of Anna, as if she’s been plucked from the street and copied. She even has pores.

  He could take her, right on the silver dais. Marcus could make Nix watch him sexually defile this abomination, make him feel what it’s like to lose everything—an eye for an eye, and the pleasure of watching him suffer while Marcus took such…pleasure.

  Anticipation unfurls in his groin.

  The glass chamber feels tight; the humid air is sickening. He steps out.

  “How do we get rid of that thing?” he asks.

  “A defragmenting solution,” Anna says. “It strips the membranes from the biomites, causing them to dissolve. A fabricator, such as this one, will have one for sterilization.”

  “Mr. Hansen?” Marcus turns.

  A few panicked strokes of the keyboard and a red button on the computer console lights up.

  “The process can begin once the door is sealed,” Anna says.

  “Which nozzle applies it?”

  “There’s a hose clamped near the door.”

  There are hoses bundled on vertical mounts and others dangling from the ceiling. This one hangs on a rack, waist-high.

  Anna updates him on the decoding progress. The technicians are several minutes away from shutdown. Once their nixes are deactivated, all the ones associated with it will be, too. How many drank from the same fountain as these fools? How many contain the same strain of nixes? She estimates the number and it is very high.

  But punishment without atonement is merely torture. Something should be learned from the suffering or else the lesson is wasted. The opportunity lost.

  “Nixon Richards.” Marcus breathes into his ear. “This is your chance for forgiveness. Reject the false idol before you. Take your first step towards contrition, son.”

  Nix’s complexion is the color of hot metal. His efforts are valiant but, in the end, useless. His resistance only causes his muscles to cramp, his limbs to convulse. Still, he moves into the chamber.

  “She’s not real,” Marcus says. “Not even 1%. Strip away the delusion; wash your false idol down the drain.”

  Several of the bricks step closer, focusing their efforts on subduing his rebellion. Marcus feels the pressure around him. Something begins tingling in his head, like a finger running over the rim of a wineglass.

  Nix reaches for the hose, fingers closing slowly, tightly, around the nozzle. The metal prongs ting as he jerks it off the rack.

  His boots jerk over the slick floor.

  “Ask for forgiveness and mercy may be yours.”

  Marcus’s ears pop.

  The air is thick and difficult to breathe. Maybe the air from the chamber is toxic, but the bricks are laboring, too. Anna is looking around the lab. She feels it.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  She looks at him. Her eyes widen before losing focus, as if she’s just emerged from M0ther’s garden. And then she falls, a puppet without strings.

  They all fall.

  Including Marcus.

  57

  The world rings like the sky is a brass dome and God’s fist delivers an eternal blow. The universe resonates with a deafening chime that fills Jamie with throbbing pain.

  Her body is a hardened case, too heavy to move.

  With time, the paralysis lifts. She finds herself pressed against the cold floor. The ringing is overcome by the stabbing pain in her temple. She opens her eyes and sees the blurry white images of lab coats and twisted limbs. Her chin slides in a pool of her own saliva.

  With considerable effort, she’s able to sit. Her head is dead weight. Her temple sharply throbs where she made impact after the fall, but she survived the suffocating squeeze of the bricks. She remembers the claustrophobia of her own flesh, the spiky clamp on her own thoughts. They imprisoned her inside her own mind—worse than being buried alive.

  And then came the flash.

  It didn’t strike her, though. It passed through them like an ethereal wildfire. At the last moment, a microsecond before they dropped lifeless, they resisted and Jamie was caught in between as they clung to survival, crushing her into unconsciousness.

  But she survived.

  Something went wrong.

  Over the next several minutes, she gets on her hands and knees, to one knee, to a wobbly, uncertain crouch. The bricks litter the perimeter. Mr. Hansen and company are in a heap of white coats. Behind her, the glass walls are streaked with condensation. Inside, Nix lies in the arms of the woman. She rocks him gently, with her chin pressed on his forehead.

  His face is chalky. His eyes are half-open, unfocused.

  She hums as if she’s putting him to sleep. Or easing her discontent.

  It’s the warehouse all over again. Only this time Jamie isn’t the only survivor. She’s not going to wait for the police, not this time. She stumbles to the nearest female brick and strips off her shoes, pants, and shirt, leaving her sprawled on the floor in bra and panties.

  Marcus Anderson is lying on the beautiful blonde. Anna. Jamie stares at the bald man, waiting for his eyes to flutter open. Blood trickles from a bluish lump on his scalp. She approaches cautiously, holding the bundles of clothes in one hand and checking for a pulse with the other. She’s not disappointed.

  He’s cold.

  Whatever swept through the lab got him, too. What would have the ability to shut someone down without biomites? It doesn’t matter. He’s dead. She remembers the warehouse and spits on him. For Charlie.

  “Here.” Jamie drops the clothes next to Raine. “We’ve got to go.”

  Raine doesn’t hear her, or care. She continues rocking. The moisture is still slick on her face. Her humming grows louder.

  “Listen, if we don’t go, all of this is for nothing.”

  “I didn’t want this.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “I told him, I didn’t…”

  “What’s done is done.” She nudges the clothes. “Get dressed, or we end up like the rest of them.”

  Raine stops her rhythmic swaying but doesn’t let go. Jamie squats next to her, putting her hand on Raine’s hand.

  “That’s not him,” she says. “It’s just a body now.”

  Raine begins nodding, maybe understanding that whatever she’s hanging on to is no longer what it was. Nix Richards is somewhere else now.

  She begins to dress.

 
Jamie checks him for a pulse, just to be sure. First on the wrist and then the neck. He’s not breathing. She closes his eyes. The hose is still locked in his hand, his thumb dangerously close to the trigger. How many seconds did he have left before the defragmenting solution came out? Did he shut himself down? Did he shut the bricks down?

  She carefully replaces the hose on the wall.

  The clothes are loose on Raine. They pause one last time before leaving. Jamie pulls her by the elbow, rushing into the clammy atmosphere in the hall. A cold thought takes hold of her as she reaches for the elevator button, but the doors instantly open, guaranteeing their escape from below ground.

  “Hold on,” Jamie says. “I’ll be right back.”

  She sprints back inside the lab, leaping over the tumbled bodies to slam the glass door closed, pushing the handle until it’s sealed. She slaps the red button on the computer console. It turns green.

  The misters hiss inside the glass cube. The defragmenting solution falls like acid. It will leave nothing for the authorities to find. They’ll never know Nix Richards was ever here.

  It was just a body.

  58

  Sand trickles through the neck of an hourglass. Each grain piles on top of the ones before it, cascading down to the bottom until, at last, there are no more to fall.

  Paul’s body is filled.

  He’s become a mound. He’s destined to merge with the soil. Grass will grow over him. Trees will sprout from him. The roots will penetrate his body; they will wick the biomites, distributing them to foliage that, come autumn, will wither and fall on the wind.

  A dog barks.

  Paul sees a thick rusty line bisecting a darkening sky. The sands of time fall from his consciousness like tiny insects escaping the rise of a titan.

  He blinks.

  His breathing is shallow.

  His head doesn’t so much turn as it rolls to the side. Cali lies next to him, staring blankly at the sky. Her hand is dry and cold. The blood seems to have pulled away from the surface, leaving a pale dullness in her cheeks. In death, she wears a tiny smile.

  Has she found peace at last? In her last moments, did her daughter come to her? Did she see God’s glory?

  He smacks his gummy lips and groans.

  Their hands are still entwined. They had lain down to watch the clouds, to feel the wind and the spin of the Earth before their last breath. He reached out for her and felt her squeeze back. And then emptiness fell like a dark curtain.

  She spared me.

  The bruises inside his arm still show from all her sampling. The last one, however, wasn’t with a syringe. She’d injected him with something that changed him, and he has felt tired ever since.

  Now he knows why.

  Although he is sluggish, she altered his frequency enough that he survived the shutdown. She wouldn’t take him with her. Maybe she didn’t want to be pitied. Or maybe she didn’t want to lay down alone. He would have stopped her had he known what she was doing to him.

  She knew that.

  Paul watches the clouds while the sky continues to darken around them. The dogs come running. They sniff the edges of the blanket and nudge Paul’s hand. He pushes off the ground like the Earth’s gravity has doubled and wraps the blanket around Cali’s body. Despite his efforts to get up, she feels as light as a child cradled in his arms.

  He sees a white envelope and a key on the way to her bedroom. With her head gently resting on the pillows, he returns to the kitchen. There’s a note for Hal and an apology of sorts, asking him to take care of the farm—a backup plan. The envelope, it seems, would be instructions on horse feed and financial statements, perhaps the deed. It’s none of those.

  It’s a letter.

  “I couldn’t do it to you, Paul. You didn’t deserve it and I didn’t have the right. Maybe it’s a mistake to let you live. You’ll be the only surviving brick, but I could be wrong. There might be others. Besides, someone needs to take care of the farm. You’ve already been doing that. You just won’t have to take care of me.

  “I don’t think I’m insane, Paul. I feel, somehow, I deserve this. I never should’ve lived this long. I feel like this is my chance to do good in the world, even after so much bad. I didn’t release the nixes, Paul. But, somehow, I feel like I have the blood of millions on my hands.

  “I think of that every day.

  “I think M0ther gave me this opportunity. Maybe she was showing me mercy. Maybe she’s crying for help. I feel like an intelligence such as her knows when she’s doing more harm than good, like me. She needs to be shut down as well. I’m a scientist, I know. I shouldn’t listen to hunches and feelings. But the facts are clear. She sent you.

  “And I’m so ready to go.

  “If I’m right, all the bricks have dropped and the world has noticed how far she has reached. Perhaps M0ther has been compromised in some way. If I’m wrong, the death of my brother and me (if you can call it death; I sometimes feel like we died when we became halfskin) will be in vain. But we all die sometime, Paul.

  “I know how crazy all that sounds.

  “Most of the lab is disabled. The fabricator was a mistake. You aren’t, Paul, but humanity never should’ve taken it as far as building humans. Playing god with our desires isn’t our right. Sometimes I think God wants us to create, that we’ve reached our full potential, and that we can create a new reality…but I don’t know. It still feels like a mistake.

  “Please, don’t forget me.”

  He reads it again. And again.

  He’d only known her a short while, yet she always seemed to be saying goodbye. She couldn’t resist any longer. All it took was a little shove.

  What if he left before she had a chance to analyze his blood? What if he ended his life instead of hiding in the shed? What if he never saw his body on television? Would M0ther have just sent someone else?

  Please, don’t forget me.

  Headlights come bouncing down the dusky driveway. Paul folds the letter and steps outside. The dogs beat him to the truck.

  “Thought ya’ll were leaving.” Hal puts one foot out of the door.

  “No,” Paul says. “There was…uh…a mix-up. Sorry.”

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.” Paul clears his throat to muster courage.

  “How’s Stacy feeling?”

  “She’s resting, Hal.”

  Hal ruffles the dogs’ fur before climbing back in the truck. With his elbow hanging out of the window, he says, “All right, I won’t keep you. Give our best to Stacy. You ever need help with the chores, just call now.”

  “Will do.”

  Hal gets the hint and, with a cheerful wave, drives away. Paul watches the brake lights wash the trees red. Once he’s up the road, the property is left to the songs of insects and frogs. The horses clop along the fence, tossing their heads. Beyond the pasture, the cell tower is a skeletal spire with no light.

  In darkness, Paul falls on his knees.

  59

  Marcus sees colors.

  He doesn’t associate the word with the experience, just that there are differentiations in lightness and darkness. Some patches are brighter than others, more vivid. Fuzzy edges bleed from one area to the next.

  Colors.

  He’s not certain that’s the right word, but that’s what he thinks. He identifies blues, greens, and browns. They come into focus, the edges becoming more defined and waving across the canvas. He feels them tickling his legs.

  There’s a breeze.

  A meadow.

  Thoughts crystalize like the rolling hills materializing before him. The thoughts take root and form the identity that knows itself as Marcus Anderson. Funny he should think of it that way, so formal, so alien. But the rest of his thoughts—memories of where he is and how he got there—are out of reach.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” M0ther sits on the grass. Her legs are crossed beneath the folds of her dress. “Manmade constructions are impressive, yes. But there is no substitute for
nature.”

  Her fingernails are soiled, crescent moons of dirt on her fingertips. The endless meadows are spotted with an occasional copse of trees before a backdrop of mountains.

  He wonders about Anna.

  “She’s gone.” M0ther’s voice drops half an octave. “Along with the rest of them. All my children are gone, Marcus. Cali Richards turned them off.”

  Cali Richards? That name emerges from the greedy fog, one of importance. It clicks into place with all the accompaniments of hate, bitterness and revenge. There was Nix, also. He was in a glass cage with a woman…and a hose…

  Why can’t he remember? He’s usually so sharp. Why is everything moving so slowly?

  “This is the end,” she says. “I think it’s time you know the truth, Marcus.”

  “The end?”

  “Cali Richards triggered her own shutdown. The frequency of her biomites was identical to the ones I used to fabricate all my bricks. Her biomites were also integral to the ones that I used to build my processors. Currently, I am operating on backup generators while reserve biomites attempt to reestablish my essential functions. Emergency personnel are en route to assist in the repair, but it will be too late.”

  She glances up.

  “I’m dying, Marcus.”

  “How can that be? What about the…where are the technicians?”

  “I think it’s better if you concentrate on the present moment. I can’t tell you the truth, Marcus. You have to know it for yourself.”

  A crimson ribbon wrinkles the sky, like a transmission that’s failing.

  “What is my purpose?” she asks. “To protect humanity? To punish them?”

  “You…serve.”

  “Why? Why do I serve humanity?”

  “Because we can’t be trusted.” His words float on the wind like brittle leaves. “Humanity is blinded by greed. They know not what they do.”

  “‘They?’” She raises an eyebrow.

  “We.” His admission is forced. He never included himself with the rest of humanity, all of which were swine feeding at the biomite trough.

  “So I watch you like God.”

  “You’re not God.”