She’d drive her knee into his groin, crush his testicles like cream-filled pastries, leave his scrotum swollen with semen paste and shredded tissue. Then she’d drive her fingers into his throat, insert the poker between his ribs and pry out his heart, fingerpaint the walls with scenes of hell, and sit on his bloated corpse until the monitors came for her. They would shut her down after that. A danger to the world around her, they would say.
That was what she wanted. She wanted to be shut down.
He took that last step. Her heel against the baseboard for leverage, her thigh tensed—
His hand shot out with unexpected speed; the webbing between his finger and thumb slammed into the hollow indention of her lower throat. A shock of blood surged through her carotid artery, wobbling her knees. She regained her balance as he slammed her into the wall.
The phone sang at his side.
A broad smile spread between his whiskers. Breadcrumbs hung from the curly mustache, his breath thick and humid, coating her face. Her muscles locked in place, her body unresponsive.
He had swiped the phone, hijacked her into submission.
He flipped her around, pushing her face into the wall. Hand pressed between her shoulder blades, her breasts flattened against the paneling. Then his belly weighed into her, pushing the breath from her. She could feel his crotch harden.
How many of the women had he done this to, threatened to expose a secret if they told, blackmailed them with false evidence? Did he hijack them and have his way, or did they let him do things in exchange for favors?
She couldn’t even close her eyes.
She stared at the tiny imperfections on the wall, helpless to stop him. She would endure another beating from life. All eighteen wheels grinding her into roadkill, picked over by carrion as she bubbled on summer asphalt.
All while clutching the sketchbook.
Haven’t you taken enough?
His chin rested on her shoulder, a strong hand around her throat. His breathing quickened, his heart surging against her back with anticipation. He licked his lips and flicked her earlobe with the tip of his tongue.
She would fucking kill him after this.
Let him have this body, she was done with it. The first chance she got, she would destroy him. She would wait in the dark, she would hide in the shadows, ambush him outside a bathroom, gut him like an animal. This was over. This was all over. Have your way, pig.
A belt buckle rang in its track—
The front door burst open. Winter whipped around her as Bob jumped back. The phone slipped from his hand and bounced on the floor.
“Stop.” It was Paul’s voice.
Disappointment settled inside her, followed by anger. Not at Bob but Paul. Still locked up, she hoped Bob would lock them both in place and follow through, give her a reason.
“Unlock her.”
Bob didn’t move. He was thinking, planning. He’d never been caught in the act or he would’ve done something already.
“Don’t think about anything else,” Paul said calmly. Matter-of-factly. “I bugged this house with my own surveillance. Everything that happened in the last hour has been recorded.”
“Bullshit. I’d know if you had a camera.”
“Want to take a chance? If I’m telling the truth, you go to prison, where I’m sure you’ll be the one pushed against the wall. If I’m bluffing, you walk away. Want to roll the dice?”
“Let me see it. Where’s the camera?”
“You’ve raped before.”
“Where’s the camera?”
“It was only a matter of time before you came for Raine, so I was ready for you. I want you to walk out of here and leave us alone. Don’t ever come back to this cabin again. You understand? Don’t ever fuck with us again or the world will know you’re a brick-loving rapist.”
Bob didn’t move. Decisions were grinding in the silence between his ears. He’d been caught and Paul was showing him mercy. It was a favor. Or maybe his boner was making a plea. Was it worth the risk?
He picked up the phone. His boots rang across the room and stopped somewhere near the front door. Raine breathed into the wall, waiting for a sound, a word.
Sensation gushed into her body like a water balloon filled from a hydrant. She collapsed in a heap of terrycloth, head bouncing, teeth snapping.
Seconds spun in a black whirlpool. Hands yanked her out of the cycling. She struck with the heel of her palm and felt the hard edge of his jawline before kicking into the soft tissue of a midsection.
Paul doubled over, hand up.
“Did he touch you?” he said between strangled breaths. “Did he touch you?”
He tried reaching again, tried to pull the fuzzy fabric over her bare shoulder. She slapped his hand, pushing against the wall, didn’t want his comfort or help, just wanted to fan the flames of rage, build the inferno of hatred that was consuming her minutes earlier, burning all her fears and hopes to ashes. That blessed rage promised to destroy everything until there was nothing.
Until she felt nothing.
Was no more.
“Did he touch you?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. Tears squeezed between her lashes and she hated that, trying to cling to the dry-eyed anger that quickly evaporated, an emotion sucked dry of oxygen until there wasn’t even a flame. She was back to where she was. Back to sanity.
“I was going to… going to kill him.” She swallowed the words. “I wanted to.”
Another wave of grief and regret fell over her, the realization coming when she said it out loud. If she died, if her body was no more, then her dreamland would die. And Nix and Joshua were still waiting.
A large travel bag was on the floor.
Paul turned off the lights and slid it behind the couch, hiding from the cameras that Bob and the monitors could use to watch them. They weren’t supposed to invade their privacy, their purpose only for emergencies. But they all knew better.
In the dark, he sorted through random objects and tools. On the bottom was a square circuit cabinet. He flipped a sequence of switches and pried off the back. There, laid in the soft embrace of beige foam, were two perfectly fabricated lungs, pink and soft, sealed in shiny preservation wrap.
“If I didn’t have this with me,” Paul said “I would’ve killed him first.”
If he didn’t have Jamie’s organs with him, if a third of her piecemealed body wasn’t stashed beneath the oven, he wouldn’t have opened the door and stood there. He would’ve destroyed him. And the People would’ve found the lungs.
The People would shut him down.
We both have people depending on us.
Bob didn’t know if there was surveillance footage or not. But that wouldn’t matter. Paul sold it. He’d bought them space and time to bring back Jamie. When all hope was lost, when they stood on the brink of annihilation, now they stood in a wide-open field of hope.
Bob would leave them alone.
God works in mysterious ways.
The Archetype’s Knowledge
Perry Dawkins had never been in a green room.
Turned out that the backstage room wasn’t green at all. He knew that, but he still had expectations, would’ve been happy if the walls were mossy. Instead, they were white and water-stained. A coffee machine was in the corner.
He was breathing a little too rapidly and feeling light-headed. He could control the nerves like other fabricated humans (a thought-command to increase dopamine and suppress norepinephrine for starters) but preferred to let it ride. The stress wasn’t debilitating. In fact, it was exhilarating. Humanizing.
After all, he’d started out human.
Emotions were evolutionary shortcuts to environmental response. It was only when he ignored them did they back up, an emotional river that spilled over the muddy banks and flooded him with anxiety. If more fabricated humans embraced the emotional aspect of their identity rather than exerted their will over them, they would have fewer problems assimilating into society.
Perry was more than a role model. I am a perfect human.
“How you doing?” an elderly man with wavy gray hair took his shoulders and asked. “A little nervous?”
Perry blew through smiling fish lips and nodded.
Dr. Wilkerson shook him, patted him and then embraced him with his characteristic hug that, for a moment, squeezed out all the air. He slapped his back with a heavy paw.
“You’re going to change the world,” the professor said gruffly.
One of the conference directors grabbed the professor for a few words but not before he imparted a fatherly grin, the stage lights sparkling in his eyes.
A stagehand came after Perry with a wireless mic. “It’s backup, just in case primary audio goes down.”
He worked on fixing it to Perry’s lapel while a young woman waited with a short brush in one hand and a box in the other.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
The professor mentioned they’d want to fix him up for the recording, add color blanched out by the stage lights. Perry’s complexion was mocha, his hair looping curls of surfer brown, eyes distinctly almond-shaped. He was an amalgam of several races. No one would guess him as a neuroscientist. The world’s leading.
“What’s the talk?” the makeup artist asked.
“What?”
“You look nervous.”
“Oh, yeah.” He shook his hands. “A little.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Um, dream disease.”
She exaggerated an understanding frown, intrigued but not really. “Friend of mine’s daughter has a friend at school that died from it a few months ago. It’s a shame, really need to do something about it.”
“I think I have an answer.”
“Tell you what the answer is.” She made long, soft strokes across his forehead. “It’s getting rid of the bricks. They started it.”
The smile that had grown through his nervous breathing wilted; the butterflies in his stomach curdled into lumpy, crawling critters with thick lapping tongues.
“That’s not true,” he said. “See, there’s evidence out there that… you see, the dream accelerators that allow halfskins to generate dreamlands are networked, which means halfskins are trading…”
Her brush slowed.
“Bricks have stable dreamworlds,” he blurted, hoping his use of the racist vocabulary would win her over. “They really have nothing to do with the dreamlands that halfskins experience. And there’s no connection with clay dreams. My analysis is conclusive. The sooner we can identify the real cause of this epidemic, the sooner it can be cured.”
“Done. Good luck.”
His hand twitched. He wanted to snatch her like a rogue calf that needed to learn how the ranch worked, but it would only scare her. She didn’t know he was a brick when she started applying makeup, but it was clear she figured it out.
Bigotry had a finely tuned detector.
Maybe he could convince the waiting room of academics, but how would he win over the general public? Prejudice wasn’t interested in facts. People like her already lived in an altered reality designed by their xenophobic thoughts.
People like her. He had to watch his own prejudice.
It was just hard to stomach reactions like that. The incidents of dream disease among the brick population were nonexistent while the casualty rate of halfskins using dreamland accelerators was pointing at the sky.
It was the scientists from the clay states that suggested a theory that bricks were carriers of the psychological disorder since dream disease didn’t exist prior to the sentience laws. They couldn’t explain why clays were succumbing to dream disease, albeit at lower rates than halfskins; just blame the bricks and everything would be all right.
Bricks were vectoring rats.
The link, as Perry’s lab discovered, between dreamland and dream disease was the halfskin accelerators. They were all networked. It would be like no one washing their hands during an influenza epidemic and coughing into each other’s mouths. Start by getting rid of the accelerators and then they could focus on clay dream disease.
The answer sure as hell wasn’t getting rid of the bricks’ dreamlands. No evidence supported it, yet they still kept them from dreaming. It was only Dr. Wilkerson’s connections that allowed Perry to venture off the Settlement to lead the research. This was rare and, as it would turn out, would be the last time it ever happened.
Perry had proof that the accelerators were the problem. Halfskins were using them to create their dreamlands. Dreamland accelerators were malleable resorts, digital funlands that expanded the dreamer’s recreational opportunities. This was a trillion-dollar industry that Perry was blaming.
But they were missing the entire point of dreamland. It was so much more than a dream vacation world where they could sleep with twenty women or skydive without risk or murder without repercussions.
Dreamlanding is world building.
Imagine a creative outlet that wasn’t a blank canvas or pages in a book or images on a screen but an actual universe with planets and stars and outer space. Perry believed that dreamlands were real.
We are the seeds of new realities.
No single region of the brain controlled dreamland. It was a production of the entire organ. That was Perry’s proposal: biomites would be used to rebuild the entire brain. That was why the bricks could dream so effortlessly, why they were immune to dream disease—there was no clay holding back the experience. And clay, by the clay state’s own admission, was imperfect. We are descendants of original sin, one such pastor claimed, proudly.
But we don’t have to stay in the garden!
Perry would show the audience that he had proof that imagination didn’t just create images and sensations but acted like a portal to new planes of existence. He would pull back the curtain on God, give a purpose to each and every human being. We weren’t just here to enjoy ourselves.
We are creators!
Perhaps that was what God intended, not for us to live a good life, an obedient life, a fun-filled healthy life. But a creative life.
And dream disease? Maybe that was our failure to live up to that purpose. Our imperfections created monsters that terrorized dreamlands instead of spinning new and amazing solar systems.
The dream feasts on the dreamer.
“Five minutes!” someone shouted.
Perry took several short, choppy breaths, shook his hands and jogged in place. Dr. Wilkerson was with his peers. They gave him a thumbs-up. He would be presenting for the team. It was a collaborative effort, but Perry was leading them. It was his baby. They wanted him to deliver salvation.
A brick to save the world.
Stagehands rushed past him. His introduction had begun. The makeup artist was approaching for a last second touch up. He closed his eyes and bowed his head for a few moments of inner solitude.
He didn’t see her press the Taser against his stomach.
Didn’t feel the floor crumple beneath him.
The electrical charge delivered enough voltage to cause serious damage. He never recovered.
And the world never changed.
Paul
A summer breeze rolled over open ground, swards of wildflowers swept by an invisible hand, slapping the hair from Paul’s eyes.
The row of cabins sat dark, still and empty beneath the churning wind harvesters. The contractors had moved out once the George B. Simpson Center of Energy and Conservation Research building was finished, a three-story monstrosity that cast a shadow over the red brick house. A few of the cabins were still occupied by workers, but they would be gone soon.
The one across from the red brick house, the one that used to be Raine’s cabin, was the only one occupied. A construction worker stepped onto the porch and dropped a bright orange duffel bag, one about the size Paul had been using to smuggle his fabrications. This one made a heavy clink—metal on metal—that echoed in the trees. The worker didn’t wait, didn’t knock on the door. Just left it.
A silhouette moved past the window—a fuzzy shadow within the dark interior.
Marcus Anderson lived there now.
They put him in the cabin where Raine had lived. Paul took that as a fuck you when Bob and the monitors helped the old man move in. He’d rarely been seen since that day.
Almost five months.
He never appeared at the monthly meetings, never went for a walk. The porch swing was always still. No one ever saw him except when he’d retrieve a box of food the monitors set on the steps (they delivered to no one else). He would hobble out, his left leg stiff, the knee a rusty hinge.
Like an old man.
Bob visited him. His truck would be parked out front at least twice a week, sometimes more. On the rare occasion Paul glimpsed inside, they appeared to be sitting on the couches having a chat. Bob never talked about it, even when asked, “What are you and the old man doing?”
He pretended he never heard it.
Marcus Anderson had made such a stink about being discovered, like he wanted the spotlight. The People were consumed with his capture (the best reality TV reality has ever seen). His case dominated the newsfeeds, the lawyers chronicled his every move, every word. Transcripts of babbling prophecy were leaked to the press, spread throughout the blogosphere. Small cults dedicated themselves to his prophecy.
One to lead, one to dream, one to bleed and the son to be.
Some were worshipping his massive shutdowns of halfskins, others decrypting his warnings of a powers-that-be. They were sycophants that would, in another era, rally around Charles Manson.
And then it went away, a cheap fad of leg warmers and spiky hair. The People just didn’t care about him after he arrived. He was no fun after all. The old man’s lawyers said he just wanted to be left alone and forgotten. Like the Settlement was a retirement community.
“Everyone!” someone shouted. “If I can get everyone’s attention? Up here, please!”
Excitement buzzed behind him—equipment clicking into place, the blur of conversation and fake laughter. The man attempting to get everyone’s attention was clapping; then he was interrupted by audio feedback before his voice projected into the great wildness, echoing off the distant trees.
Halfskin Boxed Page 60
