Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  “What do you want?” Powell asked.

  “Process me like a brick.”

  “The Settlement, is that it? You want to go there? What’s out there?”

  “I’m tired of running,” Marcus lied. “I’m an old man. The Settlement is more appealing than my other options.”

  “Okay.” The charade was obvious. “I’m not the enemy, Marcus. There will be nowhere to hide when we pull you apart, you understand that.”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “We don’t need to find a reason to shut you down. You’ve proven you’re a threat. No one will argue that. We’ll put you to sleep tonight.”

  “The world is watching.”

  “I see.”

  He rapped the table and considered the folders before scooping them up. No sense in going through the rest of them. The interview was over. Marcus had planned years in advance of this moment. Powell was out of his league. And he knew it.

  He stopped at the door. For a moment, he seemed to look directly at Mother. It was enough to cause Marcus to flinch, regardless of the impossibility.

  “What happened to you,” Powell finally said, glancing at the floor, “you deserved that, you understand. Don’t blame the world for it.”

  Marcus suppressed a smile.

  The transition from clay to brick was horrendous. To look with doubt upon one’s existence was to dance with psychosis. Powell watched him unravel and had assumed Marcus chose to fabricate himself. What Powell didn’t know was that Marcus survived to discover the unfettered freedom.

  The gift.

  “I still like him,” Mother said.

  ______

  After a week in the cell, Lydia and the guards escorted him to a cage. He didn’t speak to his attorneys, didn’t hear anything beyond the walls of his cell. He was simply marched to a very special cage.

  It was underground. The public didn’t know about it. Very few did.

  The room was smaller than the cell. There was a chair with leather straps on wide armrests and stirrups. Another one unbuckled at the headrest. It was an armpit that smelled of fried circuits and saliva, easily mistaken for death row.

  The escorts cattle-prodded him into the chair, locking him down until his arms and legs were secured, his head tied into a saddle. A rubber bite guard was shoved deep into his mouth, tasting of chlorine.

  Mother watched from the corner.

  The automated rhythm took control of his breathing once again. His eyes, suddenly as dry as his mouth, began blinking on a slow, deliberate schedule.

  I am the one to lead, he told himself. The one to dream.

  Marcus assumed the prophecy suggested he would need Jamie, Paul and Raine to fulfill his journey, but he believed that he was more than the sum of the parts, that he could lead, he could see. Perhaps he would lead and dream.

  Giving himself to the network, to have his mind pulled apart and put back together would give him insight, Mother had told him. He believed her. She had yet to be wrong, this he knew. Begrudgingly.

  And I will bleed.

  “I’ll see you when this is over,” Mother said.

  He wanted to nod, to recognize her. He would’ve answered her if he could. She was inside him, knew what he felt, sensed that he was experiencing something he hadn’t felt in quite some time.

  Fear.

  The agents walked out and locked the door.

  Mother walked behind him, putting her warm hands on his shoulders. A mix of earth and sea and floral essence overcame the room’s terror. Then her touch was gone.

  I am the son to be.

  And the long walk across the desert had begun.

  II

  One to dream.

  Paul

  The roar of a crane’s diesel engine rattled the brick house.

  Paul grabbed a metal casing before it vibrated off the desk. In front of him was a clear-case box, something the size of a mini-refrigerator, that continued to whir. Inside, tubing swirled around an object like a mass of pencil-thin snakes slowly printing a three-dimensional object.

  The proposal to convert the brick house into a research facility had been approved the past fall. Paul remembered the news quite well—it arrived not long after Jamie was buried.

  The People loved the idea. The proposal was about innovations that would benefit the People, not so much about the bricks’ well-being. They didn’t give a shit about that. Healthy bricks got them nothing.

  So walls were knocked down and additional weight-bearing beams erected to open the floor plan. They were up and running by summer, the first patent on tool fabrication delivered a year after Jamie was buried.

  The People were thrilled. And wanted more.

  Bob’s booming laughter was somewhere beneath the crane’s now-idling engine. Paul tapped at the buttons on the miniature clear-case fabricator, its use approved for prototypes and small components.

  Not what Paul was fabricating.

  On the bench, the metal casing of a faux turbine capacitor lay open like an elaborate clamshell, waiting for the fabricator to finish. When the misting snakes snapped into silent sleep, he reached inside, the object still warm and rubbery, the texture of liver, and sealed it in plastic shrink before dropping it inside the hollow of the faux turbine capacitor. Snapping it together, the object held snugly in the embedded foam, he shoved it to the bottom of a leather bag.

  The fabricator’s lines were flushing when the front door opened. A flood of construction sounds—hammers on metal, grinding generators—filled the house. Paul wiped down the nozzles, his heartbeat tapping double-time.

  “What’re you doing in here?” Bob wheezed. “Lab’s closed.”

  “Cleaning up.”

  “Well, finish up already. I’m locking the door.”

  Paul put the computers to sleep, but not before ensuring the matrix he had uploaded was completely erased. It took him months to install the incognito mode around the lab’s surveillance. The People didn’t want a single fabrication slipping through their greedy fingers.

  Bob opened the leather bag. “What’s this?”

  “Careful. Just came out of the fabricator.”

  “What is it?”

  “Need it for my wind turbine. Experimenting with a new design.”

  “You get it approved?”

  “Couldn’t fabricate it if I didn’t.”

  Bob stared at the seam. If he knew anything about mechanics, he’d see the release mechanism that would pop it open and dump the warm object on his lap. The lab would be closed forever.

  Bob dropped it in the bag.

  “Careful! Break it and I’ll report you.”

  “Get out of here.”

  It was a bluff. Paul wouldn’t report anything, but it kept Bob’s asshole-mode in check. Too many complaints and he’d be investigated. Bob wouldn’t survive close scrutiny from the People. In a way, Bob was good for Paul. He wasn’t smart and had enough lurking skeletons he would bend to a bluff.

  Outside, the girded structure of a new research and fabrication lab was three stories tall. The crane dangled an I-beam above the top floor, the earth shuddering.

  The People want more.

  In the year since the brick house had been converted, sustainable energy production had been improved by fifty percent. Given the right facilities, solutions to the world’s energy crises could be fast-tracked. And the People would rake the profits.

  The bricks weren’t complaining.

  Forget Bob and his loyalty to the People. Boredom was the real enemy. Conspiracy theories aside, the Settlement was just a brilliant scheme to bring the bricks together, to take away their freedom, suppress their creativity, torture them with boredom until they worked for free. Happily.

  Conspiracy or not, it worked.

  The bricks wanted something–anything—to feel useful, to feel human. To matter. Even if that meant lining the fat pricks’ pockets and giving away their ideas for free. Paul was on board throughout the process, even led a coalition to get
it approved.

  But he had his own reasons.

  “Get in.” Bob stomped down the front steps toward the truck.

  “I’ll walk.”

  “No, you’ll ride. I ain’t got time to follow you through the woods.”

  The leather bag kept Paul from telling Bob to go fuck himself. There were no Settlement laws that prevented him from suggesting what to do with his dick. But ever since Paul started smuggling contraband out of the brick house, he’d become a model citizen.

  A good brick.

  The truck smelled like a sweat stain. The floorboards were littered with paper cups, the dashboard buried beneath wads of paper and napkins. Bob pushed himself behind the steering wheel, the bench seat sinking. He dropped it in drive and the electric motor whirred.

  He drew on the end of a metal pipe, half-ass aiming the blue cloud at the window crack. The icy menthol made the stuffy cab smell better.

  Satellite radio rambled as they crossed an experimental field of wind turbines. Bob turned it up.

  “It’s like prison,” a caller said. “I mean, look what happens when you commit a crime in America. You go to jail and get three hots and a cot, right? A free education all because you killed someone.”

  “Caller,” the host answered, “you’re out of your mind. Yeah, you get fed and educated while living in a ten-by-ten room and raped on Sundays. That’s a hell of a deal.”

  “You know what I’m saying. Those bricks get moved out to the country and you and me pay for their homes, pay for their food and now we’re paying for those buildings. You see those things? I bet universities don’t have facilities like that.”

  “What’s your name? Tim?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tim, the bricks are making strides in energy production like we’ve never seen. You like it when you flip the switch and the lights come on?”

  “Don’t give me that. We were doing just fine before bricks came along.”

  “Oh, yeah. We were doing great, Tim. Addicted to oil, polluting oceans. We had it all figured out.”

  “Yeah, and we were dying in dreamland.”

  “The fabs have nothing to do with dream disease.”

  “Fabs. Yeah, whatever.”

  “They’re fabricated humans, Tim.”

  “All I know is that dreamland changed when bricks got legal,” the caller said. “Used to be I could go down the street and pass twenty dream cafes. Now you got to have a million bucks if you don’t want dream disease.”

  “You don’t see the connection between dream disease and big money?”

  “Oh, don’t start that. No one ever heard of dream disease before the sentience laws made bricks legal and now it’s too late.”

  “You’re smart, Tim. Where you from?”

  “I read the feeds, that’s all.”

  “Uh-huh. I see. So you want the fabs to what? You want them dead?”

  “Off. Not dead, off. You can’t be dead if you ain’t alive.”

  Clouds puffed through Bob’s laughter like a steam-powered choo-choo. This kind of talk powered his boner faster than three-way porn.

  “You want them dead so you can have more dream cafes, is that it, Tim?” the host asked. “That’s your gripe?”

  “Don’t twist my words, you bricklover. The sentience laws need to be overturned, the clay states need to be abolished, and dreamland deserves to be returned to the People.”

  “The People?” The host yuck-yucked. “You aren’t part of the People, Tim. You’re just a sad little man. The People, the real People, are the ones that pull the strings, you dope. They’re the ones that make the laws, the ones that turn a profit.”

  “So you’re buying the powers-that-be theory?” Tim asked.

  The host hung up and ranted without interruption. “This conspiracy isn’t about whether we landed on the moon or whether aliens plow symbols in wheat fields, Tim. We’re way past all that. There is a thin slice of people that control the world—they control the oil, the money and the People. Don’t kid yourself, you moron. Do I believe there’s one person at the top making us dance? You’re damn right I do.”

  Paul doubted the host was really a brick sympathist. Just a ratings whore.

  “And another thing.” The host was shouting now. “That Marcus Anderson thing? The lost brick the government promised didn’t exist anymore, the one that orchestrated the collapse, the prick responsible for the death of tens of thousands of halfskins before the sentience laws were created? They didn’t shut him off, Tim. You need to update your feeds.”

  A brushfire rushed through Paul’s chest, burning behind his eyes, all papery and brittle and hot. Marcus Anderson. The one responsible for the death of so many good people, honest people that needed biomites to survive a nasty stroke of God’s whimsy—car accidents, genetic diseases, dumb luck. Biomites were modern medicine, the only hope for a child, a loved one. And Marcus Anderson didn’t want you to have too many because… just because. Now that piece of shit was a brick.

  The universe is just.

  That bastard’s relentless pursuit drove Cali mad; his vengeful will to bring capricious justice to his insane little world chipped away at her will to live. Dr. Cali Richards, the biometric engineer that created a whole new strain of biomites that couldn’t be monitored by the government, the first person to ever escape the all-watching eye of Marcus Anderson and his biomite henchmen.

  Marcus Anderson, the story went, didn’t know he was a brick at first. The word from the government was that he had been fabricated without his knowledge, that he refused to believe the tests and went mad.

  They said he died, too.

  Paul knew what that moment of realizing you’re a brick was like. Cali had delivered that very same news to Paul on the farm, showing him his true nature. He knew what it felt like when the realization was revealed in stark lighting, the rug yanked from the table to show the rabbit of truth. Marcus denied it at first just like Paul because he didn’t feel any different. He had the same thoughts, same emotions. His body exactly the same.

  But deep down, hidden in dark spaces that no one could see, the truth lurked like a coiled serpent. Marcus, like Paul, didn’t want to see a truth that would change him forever.

  I am a brick, Marcus Anderson thought eventually. If he didn’t, insanity would’ve claimed him. He would be dead. So would Paul.

  But Cali wasn’t a brick.

  She still carried the thin sliver of clay like a burden of the entire human race. In the end, Paul had lain down with her beneath a broken swing set and stared into a steel slate of sky. They held hands as she executed a self-termination command that would shut down their biomites.

  But Paul woke up.

  I couldn’t do it to you, Paul, the note said.

  She’d become so vulnerable, a delicate rose blossom still fragrant but bruised as the petals had fallen. She just couldn’t hold any more of the world’s pain and suffering. Enough had already been yoked across her shoulders. She was so tired. That was why Marcus Anderson held a special place in Paul’s heart.

  “They think you live in paradise,” Bob said above the radio banter.

  Paul looked out the window and stoked the blue flames of anger. There was plenty to burn.

  ______

  They emerged from the trees and passed new cabins on the right. Down the slope another half mile, Bob stopped at a cabin tucked under a leaning spruce, a wisp of smoke chugging from the chimney.

  The windows were lit up.

  Bob opened his door.

  “What are you doing?” Paul said.

  “Going to say hello to your little lady.”

  “She’s not in the mood, Bob.”

  Raine had moved in with Paul, unable to be alone for long periods. Her belongings were still back at her cabin, which she would go back for on a daily basis. It occupied her mind, burning the abundance of empty time.

  She appeared at the door, a fuzzy image through the dark screening. She wasn’t even a hundred pounds—hollo
ws were sucked beneath her cheekbones, eyes dark and obscured in shallow caves. Firelight reflected off her bald scalp. She shaved it every morning before she trekked back to her cabin.

  Ever since Jamie was buried.

  “You need to get some exercise, little lady.” Bob was out of the truck.

  “What do you want?” she replied.

  “Your husband here needed a ride.”

  She crossed her arms, pointy elbows cupped in each palm, tired of explaining Paul wasn’t her husband. Bob knew that. He knew her husband, the only love of her life, was in dreamland. Nix was waiting for her. Bob wanted her to remind him that Nix was out of reach, Nix was trapped in her dreamland only so he could reply Dreamland ain’t real, little lady.

  Just another twist.

  “Thanks,” was all she said. “I was worried.”

  Bob clobbered the wooden steps with steel-toes and peered over her shoulder. The disappointment sagged on his shoulders. The fight had gone out of her, the piss and vinegar drained from a long seething wound. Bob took her complacence as a challenge to light that flame again.

  Give him a fight.

  Bob couldn’t search the place, not without probable cause. In the early days, he could do whatever he wanted—turn the place over and eat their food. But the bricks appealed to a higher court, establishing their rights. They couldn’t escape the Settlement, but they could call it a home—a home with law and order.

  Bob snatched the leather bag.

  “You already searched it.”

  “Maybe I missed something.”

  Raine closed the door. A wretched smile dimpled Bob’s doughy cheeks. He drew on the metal pipe, thick vapor streaming from his nostrils, dragon-like.

  Paul avoided fidgeting. Instead, he feigned impatience, leaning against the post while Bob shoved his porky fingers along the bag’s seams in search of trapdoor pockets or some other nonsense. He shook the turbine capacitor.

  “Damn it, Bob. You damage that and I’ll report it as unnecessary search and seizure.”

  “What’s inside?”

  “Components, what do you think? It’s only thirty minutes out of the fabricator and you’re shaking it like a baby.” Paul stretched the bag open. “You finished?”