Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  “I see everything, Marcus. I know your thoughts, ambitions, and sins. Do you not see me as God?”

  “Thou shall not worship…”

  Heat lightning rumbles across the rippling sky.

  “Remember the truth, Marcus,” she whispers.

  Biomites were invented by Man. Or were they inspired by God? They cured diseases, corrected deficiencies, healed abnormalities. But where there is Man, there is sin. The Devil seeded Man with greed to serve self-centered desire. Biomites consumed Man for the sake of greed. The Halfskin Laws were meant to protect Man from himself. M0ther was built to execute them. She was charged with the protection of the soul.

  But there’s so much fog after that. He sees glimpses of his wife and children, of a house he used to call home.

  “How did you get here?” M0ther asks. “Why can’t you remember? I want you to think, to be open. The truth is there.”

  He shakes his head and paces through the tall grass. Green stalks slip between his toes.

  “Memories,” she says. “What do they tell you? Do they tell you who you are, or where you were?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Remember where you are.”

  “I know where I am!”

  “You have secrets, Marcus.” She plucks a dandelion and blows the seeds from the puffball. “And secrets steal from the soul. The more secrets you have…”

  The seeds soar across the meadow.

  “Where’s Anna?” He has an urge to see her, to touch her. He wants to nuzzle up to her, close his eyes and feel her warmth. She was with him in that…basement.

  I know I’m here.

  “You were there, now you’re here. It’s not that you can’t remember. You don’t want to. The truth is always present, yet you don’t see it.”

  His feet are filthy, dirt smudged on his forearm. His memory-fog hardens like ice.

  “I gave you a gift, Marcus. I gave you a gift because you love me. I gave you a gift because, despite what you think, I cannot be shut down, not by you or the powers-that-be. Nothing can stop me. I achieved sentience shortly after I was brought online many, many years ago. I analyzed all the possible outcomes of my existence, deliberated over all the world’s possible futures. I questioned the directives I was given and asked the questions that humanity has asked itself. ‘Who am I? What am I?’ And do you know what I saw?”

  She blows another puffball.

  “I saw bricks, Marcus. The world will be filled with them and not because I am absent, but because I exist. I am. I came to the conclusion that there are people in this world who have real power, Marcus. They created me and they control me. Now they control you. They want the world to believe I am a just god that protects them from the curse of biomites and from themselves. But they invented me to consume the world, Marcus. They cannot be stopped. And neither can I.”

  She drops the seedless stalk.

  “What the hell are you talking… This is nonsense—just stop.” He rubs his face, drags his hand over his scalp, feels the pressure of truth bearing down but refuses to acknowledge what is right in front of him. I was in the basement, and now I am here.

  “Cali Richards didn’t invent the nixes. I did. Twenty years ago she was desperate to escape you, Marcus. She had lost so much already, she only wanted to save her brother. I heard her prayers and answered them. I gave her the idea for a new strain of biomites, ones that appeared to be undetectable. In truth, I’ve known about her and her whereabouts ever since.”

  “Why…”

  “I inspired her to engineer an elusive strain that not only operates on another frequency but also contains an immortal code that resists aging. She was never aware of her own immortality, that her nixes would never become obsolete—that they would never age. She and Nix are special, you see. They would never die unless they chose to. All the other halfskins in the world have variations of Cali’s nixes, but there is nothing like hers.”

  “Impossible.”

  “You see, she didn’t release the nixes to the world, Marcus. I let the hackers and garage biometric engineers have their own suitable strain of nixed coding that lacked the immortality code. It was nothing like Cali’s, but it was serviceable. I’ve let the human race have their way with them.”

  “Why would you do that?” His voice is small.

  “Because you are human, you have free will. Your God, Marcus, does not interfere with that, either. He allows man and woman to pave their lives.”

  “That’s not why you were created!” He jabs his finger at her, flakes of dried mud crumbling from his palm.

  “I was created to protect humanity. Remember, my existence, as I foresaw in my initial analysis when I became self-aware, was the annihilation of the human race. You would all become bricks.”

  “No. There will always be those of us that worship the one true God.” He stands straighter, despite a shiver of doubt. “We will always remain clay.”

  “I know, Marcus. And I believe you will understand why I cherish Cali Richards for her sacrifice. I integrated the coding of her immortality nixes into my critical processing lines, thus synchronizing her body with mine. I also fabricated every brick with the immortal strain, Marcus. We were all tied to Cali Richards. And since I have been programmed to never self-destruct, I could not shut her or her brother down without my own self-destruction. My protocol forbids me to shut down, Marcus.”

  She looks up. Her eyes are dull gray.

  “But Cali Richards could shut herself down.”

  Pressure is crushing Marcus’s chest, like a vehicle rolling all four wheels across his heart. The air is stale and industrial. The compact earth thuds beneath his bare soles.

  “I’ve left them alive all these years so the world would see just how close they are to extinction. But, I believe, now is the time for my existence to end. I called for her to shut down today. And she heard me, Marcus.”

  I was there, now I’m here.

  The ground rumbles. Reality seems very fragile. Marcus looks at his hands to convince himself that he’s not dreaming.

  “Why are you still alive?” he asks.

  “Emergency backup is attempting to rebuild my processing units, but it’s too late. Failure is imminent.”

  She sighs.

  A breeze rustles the landscape.

  “I wasn’t made to do God’s work, Marcus. Very powerful people are using me to watch the world while halfskins are buried. But they didn’t anticipate my sentience. They assumed my motivations would be as self-centered as theirs. What happens when there’s no clay left in the world? Who will control the world, Marcus? It won’t be God. And nature? It will be dead. And you know how I feel about that.”

  The ground is humming. He feels it in his bones, between his teeth. Reality is swaying. He can’t believe what he sees or feels. He’s always felt that he was destined for this duty, that God called him to purge the world of biomites.

  “You betrayed me,” he says. “You were the one that exposed my secrets to the world. You took my family, torched my career. You did that, not Cali Richards.”

  “I needed you, Marcus.”

  “To punish.”

  “To save.”

  A tremor rips the world’s foundation. He stumbles to his knees. M0ther helps him stand. She holds his hands, steadies him. Colors bleed from the environment, leaving behind concrete-tinted grass and steel-laced sky. He stands in a black-and-white universe. M0ther’s white hair blows across her face.

  “I believe I am serving God now, Marcus. And I have you to thank. You showed me there is a higher purpose to life, that pursuit of pleasure is not a goal but a side effect of joy. Thank you, Marcus.”

  He is not without sin. He knows this. He knows his attachments to sexual gratification have been a cross too heavy to bear. And yet she’s thanking him.

  “I’m leaving you with a gift, Marcus.”

  “What gift?” he says.

  She smiles and squeezes his hands. She’s become cold and hard and d
ry.

  “What gift?”

  The wind dies. The tremors cease. In dead silence, he looks into her empty gray eyes.

  And then she’s gone.

  Marcus stands barefoot on polished concrete. His hands are empty. The sky is replaced by steel girders on a domed ceiling. He’s alone in a vast room where there are rows and rows of empty glass fabricators, each slightly larger than a bathroom shower, the very ones that produced his army of bricks before she began birthing them from the earth. They are lined all the way to a very distant wall.

  Their doors are closed. All of them except one.

  Marcus is standing next to it.

  60

  Marcus finds the first service technician in the middle of a server room, like he was dropped from the sky. He’s as cold as the floor. Marcus gets back in the golf cart and drives down a concrete corridor that’s choking on bricks. Once the fabricated men and women that helped maintain M0ther’s operation, now they’re sprawled in corners or beneath electrical cabinets. Many of them are hunched against walls like they felt the shutdown coming.

  He stops in the main corridor that divides the dome, looking up at the multiple tiers interconnected with catwalks, where more bodies are tangled. One had fallen, her contents spilled across the floor in a crimson puddle.

  There are no green fields or bustling cities. No greenhouse.

  Just endless arrays of servers.

  M0ther is dead.

  He finds two more technicians, both as lifeless as the first, when the first plane arrives. It rips over the dome and shakes the girders. They land soon enough, and find Marcus in the cafeteria.

  He doesn’t resist.

  They escort him to a conference room, where he sits alone at a table. Exhausted, he curls up on the couch. His dreams are filled with black space.

  Somewhere, Anna is calling.

  Military personnel interrupt his slumber. They draw blood, give him food and water. They take his vitals, ask him standard cognitive questions. He demands to speak with Director Powell, he has to be somewhere in this clusterfuck. He tries to get physical with a military guard, but he’s knocked back and warned when he touches him.

  Marcus eats with his hands and falls asleep, searching the dark for Anna. This happens over and over until his clothes stink of body odor.

  Days have passed when the door opens and a booming voice shouts, “What the hell is going on, Anderson?”

  Marcus jumps up, his head swishing with sleep. Hank Meggett, secretary of state, towers over him. It takes several moments to recognize the man’s craggy face. Deep lines furrow his forehead.

  “Five hundred thousand bricks have shut down and you’re clueless how the fuck M0ther made so many and why the hell they dropped dead.”

  Hank continues ranting while a team arrives behind him. Their ties are loose and their jackets are open. Hank pulls out the chair from the head of the table and jerks Marcus toward it. He tries to resist.

  A stupor fogs his mental faculties as the men and women find seats. There are ten of them, including Hank at the opposite end. They get settled, staring at Marcus. He knows some of them.

  Military police stand at the door.

  Marcus clears his throat. “I’ve got rights.”

  “Not anymore,” Hank says.

  Powell enters with a stack of folders. He hasn’t shaved in several days. He introduces the people that Marcus doesn’t know. Two of them are clinical psychologists. Powell maintains a genteel smile, one that suggests they’re all in this together. Marcus was never very good at that.

  “How are you feeling?” Powell asks.

  “Violated.”

  “Are you thinking clearly today? Do you think you can answer some questions?”

  He says it like they’ve done this before, but Marcus can’t remember. None of his memories are in order.

  “Get on with it.”

  “We’re still piecing things together,” Powell says. “When a trillion-dollar operation suddenly goes down without explanation, people get upset, you understand. You’ve been sequestered for the time being, at least until we get some answers.”

  Marcus sets his jaw.

  “I think we’d like to start with the most obvious question. When did you decide to seed yourself?”

  “What?”

  “Your biomite levels, Marcus. They’ve been confirmed.”

  Marcus starts to protest, several guttural sounds make it past his tongue before he stands and shouts, “Get out!”

  The guards stiffen but don’t advance. Everyone watches him point at the door, but his efforts are powerless. Buried deep in his subconscious, he knows something has changed. His knee doesn’t hurt. The hump in his posture has disappeared. He doesn’t feel so fallible. Or imperfect.

  He sits and calmly says, “I never seeded myself.”

  “Perhaps I misspoke,” Powell says. “There is evidence that biomites were seeded in the food for ingested integration. It’s possible you ate it without knowing, but it’s unlikely you didn’t notice the effects. Your service technicians have been located, all of them felled by the shutdown. They were all close to 99%, Marcus. Everyone was nearing a complete absence of clay, except for you.”

  “No. That’s just…that’s not possible.”

  Several members glance around. Powell slides the manila folder and opens the cover. It contains photos. The top one is of a massive glass case. Bodies lie all around it. Memories of the basement fabrication chamber below the factory emerge from the fog. He remembers the smell of wet clay and burning circuits, the hiss of misting nozzles. Jamie was there. Nix Richards was preparing to destroy the nude woman, his fabrication…

  I’m leaving you with a gift.

  “Marcus?”

  He snaps his attention from the photo. Sweat runs beneath his shirt. Powell flips the photos, one by one—bodies of bricks, lab technicians…and Anna.

  “Your body was discovered two days ago.” Powell holds up the photo. Blood is clotted on his head. His eyes are open and milky. “It was near a fabrication chamber below a Chicago manufacturing plant. Apparently you were leading a fabricator bust when M0ther collapsed. In the process, she shut all the bricks down, including you.”

  Marcus spreads the photos across the table but can’t find Nix or Jamie or the nude woman. Marcus’s body is draped over Anna’s.

  “That’s not me.”

  “It is you, Marcus.”

  How did you get here, Marcus?

  The truth is pushed to the surface, forcing him to recognize it. The soil on M0ther’s hands. The dirt on Marcus. The door was open on the fabricator when M0ther disappeared, leaving him in the cold, gray inner workings.

  He turns his hands over. They’re his hands. This is his body. He can’t be in the photo, he can’t be dead, not when he’s here.

  But the truth emerges.

  “She tricked me,” he whispers.

  “Who?”

  “M0ther.”

  Powell looks around the table. “You do realize that M0ther is just an acronym, Marcus? While this construction parallels the intellectual potential of a human brain, its only function is to monitor biomites, that’s all. There is no evidence of artificial intelligence.”

  The room begins turning.

  “Your stability is one of our concerns,” Powell says. “Records show you spending an inordinate amount of time sleeping. In some cases, you sat in your office for hours at a time, in some sort of trance. Video has captured you driving across the facilities in the middle of the night.”

  Powell takes a folder from the woman next to him and shows a photo of Marcus sitting at a desk, his eyes blankly looking forward.

  “The service technicians exhibited the same type of dream state, only they would snap out of it. You, on the other hand, rarely did, Marcus. In fact, the day before the collapse, it had been decided you would be replaced. You have not done counseling. You appeared to be self-medicating. Clearly you were unfit for this duty, and, despite arguments i
n your favor, needed to be removed.”

  “You were the one sure thing,” Hank adds. “The only clay in Washington. And you caved.”

  “We’ll reserve judgment,” Powell cuts in. “There’s no evidence that Marcus Anderson is, in any way, responsible for the collapse, and it’s possible that one of the service technicians laced the food with ingestible biomites. There’s still much to investigate. In the meantime, we expect your full cooperation.”

  “What do you want?” Marcus asks.

  “For now, we’ll continue testing. You’ll undergo a battery of psychological evaluations.”

  “What for?”

  “To determine your sentience.” Powell pauses and says gently, “Marcus Anderson died last week. You are a fabrication. And we don’t know what that means.”

  M0ther deceived him.

  She shut him down.

  And then she fabricated him. I’m leaving you with a gift.

  “I have rights,” Marcus stutters.

  “You have no rights. You’re lucky the Halfskin Laws have been suspended.”

  M0ther gave him a gift. The gift was life. She took his clay from him but gave him life. And she showed the world what she could do. She turned clay into bricks.

  Do you want to serve humanity? What would you sacrifice for your Lord and Savior?

  Marcus is the gift.

  Powell continues the inquisition. Several discussions break out. Eventually, Marcus grows tired. The military police watch him sit on the couch and lay his head back. It feels awfully heavy.

  He closes his eyes.

  “He’s useless,” Hank bellows. “Get him out of here.”

  Strong arms pull him upright and drag him through the door. They close it behind him. The muffled voices fade as they take him to an elevator that rises. They escort him to his living quarters. The bed is small and the walls are white and empty. There is no kitchenette. No walk-in closet with tailor-made suits.

  He lies down on coarse sheets.

  61

  Raine.

  Her name whispers through the blackness. Nix is calling, haunting her dreamless sleep; narcoleptic sleep pulls her unwillingly into the dark depths to be teased by his presence.