Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  “I’m finished when I’m finished.” He turned it over, tracing the surface with dirty fingernails. “What’s your hurry?”

  “It’s late, I’m hungry. Don’t want to be on the porch with you.”

  This only slowed the search. Sweat prickles flashed under Paul’s sweatshirt. A thousand thoughts went through his mind.

  “You think you’re smart?” Bob asked.

  “I’m hungry, Bob.”

  “You stay in the lab like that again, I’ll have you banned.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m going back there to check your work, so you know.”

  “Big surprise. You done?” Paul had settled into an expression of boredom brushed with frustration. Any sign of panic and Bob would take the component. He took another drag on the pipe and threw the piece into the bag, leaving a minty trail of vapor to the truck. Paul watched the taillights disappear down the dirt road before going inside.

  His knees were cold.

  “He’s gone?” Raine stood in the bedroom.

  Paul nodded.

  “You got it?”

  He dug the clunky piece out, palms damp with sweat. Raine covered her mouth and stepped back. That dangerous temptress of hope danced before her eyes.

  Paul went to the kitchen and turned off the light, then went to the bathroom and cleaned up and changed clothes. Raine was sitting on the bed when he was finished, the crucifix of sticks between her hands. Paul lay on the couch, Raine on the bed.

  It was sometime in the small hours of the night that he got up. His leather bag was still in the front room. He took it to the kitchen but didn’t turn on the light. In the dark, he knelt in front of the oven.

  Raine’s bare feet were soft and sticky on the linoleum.

  He lifted the front of the oven, still hot with the smell of broiled chicken, and Raine slid a small oval rug beneath the peg legs. The only window was small, above the sink. From a distance, no one would see him slide the oven away from the wall (the rug slipping across the floor without leaving tracks) to expose a patch of linoleum littered with dusted crumbs. Beneath thick greasy layers were the seams of a trapdoor.

  Paul stepped into the gap between the cabinets and inserted the flat end of a screwdriver along the baseboard, triggering a spring-loaded switch to drop the panel (a system that took the last six months to design and build using fabricated parts that could be found in a new solar panel design).

  A draft gusted out of the dark hole, cold and mysterious.

  In the winter, the outside temperatures would keep it cold. In the summer, should they still need it for storage, it would draw from the freezer (the insulated space would keep energy consumption negligible).

  Raine handed him the capacitor.

  Only the sound of their breath filled the room. They didn’t dare communicate with words or thoughts, careful to protect what they were seeing and thinking as he placed it next to the trapdoor. There would be no reason for the monitors to watch them through the emergency security cameras, not at this hour.

  Raine leaned in, watching him play the faux capacitor like an instrument, his fingertips touching several places in a coded sequence and specific cadence.

  It popped opened.

  The spongy foam pushed the red, plastic-wrapped object on a delicate display. Even in the dark, it glistened beneath the plastic wrap, veins and arteries crossing the surface like a road map. As if freshly plucked from an open chest, it did not beat, lying in animated suspension, awaiting the spark of life.

  Jamie’s heart.

  The Settlement would never be allowed a printer large enough to fabricate an entire body. And even if there was, Paul could never hope to have enough time and raw biomite material to produce it. But he could do it a piece at a time. And in Frankensteinian fashion, assemble her when the time had come.

  He had spun the sample he scratched from her arm to replicate her DNA. The People had approved the bricks to establish a library of their own genetics should they ever need to fabricate organs for themselves. In that massive database, he hid Jamie’s genome and mapped her entire organism.

  Then he built the storage space.

  He placed her heart into the dark cavern, the tissue soft and pliable. Raine wept as he slid the oven back into place. There was no dreamland, but one day there would be Jamie. Angels, she was beginning to believe, would never come to the Settlement.

  Hope danced seductively around the table.

  Marcus

  Threads.

  Marcus stared at threads.

  Threads crisscrossing in minute checkerboards, a predictable pattern in an endless array of subtle colors.

  Threads.

  It was the first coherent thought of self-awareness, a bubble in a soupy consciousness that was aware that it was aware.

  Here. I am here. I am this.

  The universe dipped and swayed in stomach-dropping swirls like the first moments on a descending elevator, or the rising slope of a roller coaster.

  His head bounced. He was sitting in a chair, cushioned armrests, a silver buckle clasped over the waist of his bright orange jumper. As the universe of threads expanded, he recognized the crisscrossing pattern on the back of a headrest and the inordinately small oval windows. Marcus swam through the muddy confusion to find a word.

  Plane.

  A bag of vomit sloshed between his legs, still warm. Bitter slime coated his tongue. He continued counting threads, feeling his fingers and toes, returning to sense his head and chest after a long, long sleep.

  Not sleep. Not sleep.

  Sleep was silent, occasionally interrupted by episodes of dreams. The blank night that preceded his awakening with the thought of threads was an endless stream of images stretched across a distorted lens—fitful and disturbing. Silently screaming. His mind had been shredded, thoughts and memories tweezed apart, sifted for analysis, squeezed for secrets.

  Atlanta.

  That was where the horror show began.

  Transferred to federal detention, locked in a cage for… for how long?

  It was a small plane, luxurious. Three heads appeared above the seats ahead of him. He turned to see another two people behind him. One was a woman in her mid-thirties, auburn hair to her shoulders and delicate wrists, fumbling with a stack of magazines, notepads and folders. She walked clumsily to the seat across the aisle and dumped her cache in the empty seat next to her.

  “Mr. Anderson, I’m Marianne Stanhope with the Associated Press. I’m sorry to rush you, but we’ll be landing soon. They were expecting you to, um, wake a little sooner, so if you don’t mind.”

  Wake. She stumbled over the word like waking belonged to her kind. Not bricks. Bricks didn’t wake, they came online. They rebooted, turned on.

  “Can you answer a few questions?”

  He nodded once.

  “Okay. For starters, what do you remember?”

  His tongue crawled over his lips like a slug exploring new ground. He shook his head once. It was a stupid question.

  “I realize things must be a little fuzzy. You’ve been held in isolation and subjected to deep-scan analysis for the past year.” She reached across the aisle and pressed two fingers on the inside of his arm where purple and yellow bruises splashed his veins. “They kept you unconscious, fed you intravenously to download an entire catalog of your identity. Does that make sense?”

  Of course. He was a national threat. An undiscovered brick that, by his own volition, surrendered. The days of hiding from the People were long gone. They would have to make sure it never happened again.

  So why am I still alive?

  “Why give yourself up, Mr. Anderson?”

  He felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. She leaned forward, drawn in by the first sign of life.

  Why did he do it? Why give himself up? He’d been invisible for years, so why arrange legal counsel to keep the whole charade in the public eye, subject himself to a year of psychological flogging?

  Truth was, he d
idn’t know. Not exactly.

  Only one person knew the true answer. Marcus looked to his right, the seat empty. Mother wasn’t with him.

  “Did you want to be with your own kind?” Marianne asked. “Better to be in exile with your own kind than to be free and alone?”

  “Lonely?” He slow-licked his dry lips. “You can say that, yes.”

  “How’d you do it? How did you remain so elusive all these years? The public wants to know, Mr. Anderson. The government just hands out bullshit reasons, claiming you’re an anomaly that’s been corrected. How’d you do it?”

  She wouldn’t expect him to answer that if he was lucid. Perhaps she was hoping that he would blurt out a secret like an inebriated loner spouting love to the first person that touches him.

  How did he absorb thoughts? How did he control the motivations of others? How did he compel them to see what he wanted, to hear and see what he wished? How did he do almost anything he wanted? The clay humans, the ones without a single biomite, were the only beings outside his influence. The rest of the world was his to pick.

  The question couldn’t be answered, though. It was a gift bestowed upon him, but how could that be captured in words, let alone a sound bite? He could sync with her, press his mind against the fabric of her awareness and let her know the impression of his knowledge directly, know the secrets Mother had given to him years ago.

  The secret to his powers was to become the universe. And that would make no sense to her.

  A single slice of clay prevents her from seeing the universe, her imperfections clouding her cataract vision.

  And bricks are the inferior species?

  “What about these powers-that-be?” she asked.

  He twitched. She saw it. It was more than a sign of life, it was a reaction. She’d touched a soft spot.

  “You were muttering it over and over, warning about the powers-that-be. Someone on the inside leaked it to the press and it turned viral. You said there is someone controlling the world, one person. You identified this person as a male. It sounds very ominous. Could you expand on that? Who is the powers-that-be?”

  He looked out the window. His powers had their limits. The universe didn’t provide him with all the answers.

  “Marcus.” She spoke softly, like loud noises might scare the bunny. “Those were the ramblings of a madman. But you’re not mad. You know something. You owe it to us to share. Are we doomed? Is there something we should be doing?”

  Us, she said. You owe it to us.

  He wasn’t one of them, no. Not anymore. And maybe he did owe something to those that possessed clay, even a small slice. He’d shut enough of them off, and wrongly so. If there was a hell (he no longer subscribed to that theory), he’d spend twenty eternities paying for it.

  So, yeah. He owed them.

  The plane tipped to the left. Endless hills were covered in a patchwork of quilted trees and exposed boulders, frosted mountaintops in the distance.

  “We’ll be landing soon,” someone announced.

  “One more question.” She sighed, contemplating which of a long list of queries was the most important.

  She had very few answers and wasn’t likely going to get more. She’d write about the experience, give her interpretation of his expression, his mood. If she was politically liberal (which she probably was), she’d cast him as a victim of government persecution. Conservative and he’d be drawn as a threat to the human race and was being shown more mercy than he deserved.

  “How do we know you won’t do it again?”

  Marcus held her stabbing gaze. The answer she was looking for would be in a wry smile or a false denial or contrived confusion. Instead, he remained impassive to let her draw her own conclusions because the question itself was revealing.

  We know you can do it again, Marcus. But will you?

  The plane tipped again and circled toward a short landing strip carved out of the trees. Beyond it was a sprawling, one-story building.

  They landed near two yellow posts.

  ______

  A clay agent to his right, a biomite agent to his left.

  They stepped into a lobby, the new-smell still lingering on the Berber carpet. It was sparsely filled with furniture and looked more like an art gallery with paintings filling the empty spaces (bricks displaying their creativity for the few guests that made it out this far). Landscapes, still lifes, and abstract creations blended in an inspired array of creativity.

  Voices muttered on the other side of a thin paneled wall, laughter and deep-tone authority. The stream of conversations flowed in various tones.

  A young man entered from the left, wearing a puffy green coat, a stack of clothing folded on his forklift arms.

  “This way.”

  They went to a small room. He was given the clothes—khakis, flannel shirt, undershirt and low-cut boots—and changed while the agents watched. Marcus could feel their two minds but didn’t think much of it. He was still waking up, fitting back into his body that was stiff and new, the seams still freshly sewn.

  Not waking. Hibernating.

  No waking like a long sleep, not a hibernation. More like the sleep of a caterpillar that wraps itself in a cocoon, emerging with wings.

  A transformation.

  The wings still soft and unfurling.

  After another wait, the same green-coated young man escorted them back through the lobby, past a large room with projection screens and rows of padded chairs that seemed more fitting for a conference center than the entrance to long-term imprisonment. They waited outside a door where muffled voices continued.

  “All right.” The young man pulled the door open.

  Inside was an oddly long room with three tables pushed end to end. Several people sat like apostles with office supplies and coffee mugs. And behind them stood more men and women clad in puffy green coats with badges sewn on their sleeves. Their expressions ranged from bored to smug. The obese one in the middle, the one with hands planted in his pockets, sat on the smug end of the spectrum.

  Bob is his name. Bob is the leader.

  Marcus didn’t think much about that intuition, a name and a fact that dropped into his mind like a sponge drawing a bead of water.

  Marcus was led front and center. The agents sat against the wall. There was no chair for him. He would stand.

  Marcus had been on the other side of the table, once upon a time. He’d been part of committees that decided the fate of wrongdoers, parked behind cheap tables, asking questions and rendering a decision before ordering chicken wraps for lunch.

  It was a time he ran the biomite oversight committee, was part and parcel of pushing laws that protected human rights. But when his fetishes were exposed (the late night orgies with fabricated sex dolls that morphed into subgenres of titillation that included strangulation and kill sex) he was seen as unfit for duty.

  He’d been a prisoner all his life to those despot urges, those morally reprehensible addictions. Now he was free of them. He could choose how to feel, how to be.

  Real prison is a state of mind, not a location.

  “Marcus Anderson.” A woman at the table, hair professionally short, eyes sharp blue, offered a gentle smile without the placating generosity reserved for frightened children. “The purpose of this meeting is to make clear the rules and reasons that you find yourself here. Let’s call it an official introduction to your situation.”

  That was a new one. He wasn’t fabbed, wasn’t a brick or a fabricated human. I’m a situation.

  “Your presence is unexpected, of course,” she continued. “All fabricated humans were thought to be identified and accounted for and then you come along. While there is still some doubts about your assignment here, no evidence of wrongdoing or deceit has been found. Your unusual abilities have been stripped. Therefore, the People have ruled you have a right to existence under the statutes of the sentience laws. And here we are. Are we clear?”

  She waited for acknowledgement. He nodded.

&nbs
p; Notes were taken.

  She continued to outline his rights and what to expect. Occasionally, one of the other apostles would take over. There would be long pauses where he was expected to acknowledge that he understood.

  We are clear.

  “Pete Haywood is the acting director of the Settlement,” the woman said.

  A squatty man of Middle Eastern descent nodded, his olive skin dark, eyebrows thick as fur. Lips pink. He was a resident of the Settlement, a full-fledged brick. His fabricators were software engineers that lived in the Seattle area that sought to replace all their employees with Haywood clones.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Allston.” Pete ran his hands over the desk. “I’d like to welcome you, Mr. Anderson. The Settlement, despite its appearance, has grown into something we’ve become proud of and we hope you’ll join us in our continued productivity.”

  Pete continued spouting company-line bullshit about the advantages and how far they’d come, how they’d rebounded in this time of crises and the generosity of the People had given them opportunities to grow spiritually as well as academically and professionally.

  It was the sort of horseshit abuse victims spout before returning to old relationships, the rationalizations they told themselves at night so it didn’t hurt so much. So at least something made sense.

  The People are good, they are just. We understand why they did this. And it could be worse.

  Fear was why there was a Settlement. Fear was always at the root of suffering.

  “Late summer, we will open a state-of-the art biomite research facility,” Pete announced. “It will be equivalent to the best the world has to offer. Our advancements in biomite technology, as I’m sure you know, have taken the world to new heights.”

  Advancements they gave freely to the People. It could be worse, Pete would say.

  If you give the monster enough cookies, he won’t go away, Pete. He’ll only want more.

  Next up, the monitors were introduced. They were normal clays with normal lives that took these jobs to make a lot of money and build resumes for security jobs somewhere else. Marcus got a sense of their daily lives, their spouses and children, their struggles on the Settlement. Again, intuiting these facts did not surprise him, seeming as normal as reading a Post-it note.