Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  She closed the door and sat across from him, wondering about all the evidence they were leaving. “Maybe we should leave the door open,” she said. “Like we found it.”

  “It won’t matter.”

  He was right. Their tracks would never be scrubbed away by the storm, not entirely. They led back to their cabin. And from there to the lab. They would only be safe until someone came looking for him.

  We may as well leave a signed confession.

  The walls were bare. There were no pictures propped on the tables, no knickknacks or books or even a box of tissues. If not for the coat and a pair of boots by the door, it appeared abandoned.

  Why didn’t he put on his boots?

  In the wan light, his feet had the bluish haze of a haunted moon. Biomite hijacking just wasn’t possible on the Settlement. They were all bricks. None of them had enough of an advantage over another to do that. And there was only one pair of footprints coming out of the house when they arrived, the soles of bare feet shuffled across the porch. The monitors could have frozen him, but not hijacked him.

  Or could they?

  They dragged him into the bedroom, tucked him under the covers, folded his hands over his stomach in a way they imagined he slept—all proper and textbook, like people are supposed to sleep.

  Paul bowed his head while she prayed.

  “How’d you do it?” she asked. “I know you didn’t mean to, but how did it happen?”

  He explained sensing Dennis opening a line. He was about to send a thought to the monitors, report what had happened. In that vulnerable state, Paul panicked. He only meant to kill the message. Instead, he shut down the brain.

  And the body followed.

  He stopped mid-sentence. “I forgot to wipe the program.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I… I forgot to erase what I was doing. If anyone checks the lab, they’ll see what I fabricated.”

  That meant instead of having a few days, they might only have hours.

  “Go, hurry,” she said. “Just go take care of that. We’ll figure out what to do when you get back.”

  They cleaned up what they could and closed the door. It wouldn’t matter, but it didn’t seem right to leave it that way. Dennis didn’t own much, but he liked order.

  They traced their tracks and parted ways at the halfway point—Paul starting for the lab. By the time Raine reached the cabin, she was dizzy with exhaustion. The sky was a pale puddle of watercolors. She fell in the bedroom and pulled a blanket over her head, not expecting to sleep until he was back.

  But the front door woke her.

  She lay still and listened to the heavy footsteps, expecting the monitors to come with phones raised. The door slammed again. There was silence. When she looked out the window, Paul was a tiny figure wading through the snowy dunes in the early morning. It wasn’t until she was back in bed did she notice the bag was missing.

  So was Jamie’s head.

  Paul

  The snow transformed into icy bullets.

  Paul hunkered into the wind as he emerged from the trees and followed the shallow pockets between the drifts, his lower body a senseless wooden substitute forced to march. Oxygen came in desperate cold gulps. Smoke was slapped from the cabin chimneys, the windows dim with flickering firelight.

  Marcus Anderson’s cabin, though, was fully lit.

  Through watery slits, he saw a shadowy form at the window, as if watching him cross the field. Paul was beyond caring. There was no point. The die had been cast. He no longer had to choose which path to take; the forks had been cut away, his life one long road that now led to the George B. Simpson building.

  The front door was still cleared away when he arrived the night before. But now there was another set of tracks. He didn’t have time to stuff the bag inside his coat before the door flung open.

  “The hell you doing?” Pete roared. “Get in here.”

  Paul stomped his boots on the way in; reverberations stung his bones.

  “Were you here earlier?” Pete asked.

  “Yeah, I was. Just wanted to get a trial running.” He raised the bag. “Forgot my supplies.”

  “You damn near froze.”

  Pete shook his head but didn’t ask about the trial or what was in the bag. Or just when the hell he had arrived earlier. Later, they would check the records and discover he’d been there all night. But that would be a small footnote, another detail of the disaster.

  Thankfully, Pete was a short-talker when he was at work: asked how you were doing and didn’t listen to the answer. Small talk was unproductive. In fact, the current exchange was a personal record.

  “Not staying long,” Paul said through stiff lips.

  “Get warm before you head back.”

  His soles squeaked in small twists as he walked off. He whistled a tight tune that sounded like spring had arrived. Paul stood dripping until Pete turned the corner, then went to the stairwell. Small puddles of snowmelt littered the steps up to the third floor where Dennis’s heels had thumped like heavy logs.

  The fabricator door was open, the monitor glowing—the three-dimensional head slowly rotating. His stomach curdled. If Pete had come up…

  It doesn’t matter.

  There wasn’t much time. Jamie wasn’t coming back. Even if he fabricated every bit of her, he couldn’t stitch her together. Even under the best conditions, it was unlikely she would be any more than a distortion of herself.

  What was I thinking?

  Once the program was wiped and the equipment cleansed, he stood at the top of the stairwell, listening for Pete. The elevators were shut down to conserve power; he’d have to come up the steps. Paul propped the door open and trotted back to the lab. He would never see Jamie again, but he could find closure on her death.

  A death he wasn’t there for, her exit alone and frightened, he imagined. But he could answer one question before the end of this hapless journey.

  Why were you in Georgia?

  He dug through the lower cabinets and dropped a heavy metal plate that rang through the building. He paused to listen, making sure Pete was still somewhere in the lower offices before clearing off countertop space. Fingertips thawing, sensation aching in stiff tendons, he wiped the condensation from the plate.

  The bag was delicately placed in the sink. The partial skull felt like a softened melon—the scalp coarse with empty hair follicles. Hairless brows hooded eyelids in mid-sneeze. The preservation wrap was pressed into the ridged top palette of her partially fabricated mouth. It stopped at the gums.

  The brain was complete, though. The eyes, too.

  There was no tissue damage. He could scrape her last impressions without applying the spark of life. There was a risk, of course. Should she wake with only half her head fabricated, her nervous system exposed—

  No. That won’t happen.

  The preservation wrap peeled away from the pink underside with a wet meaty sound. The bottom half slapped on the metal plate.

  Meat. It’s only meat. It’s not Jamie, he told himself.

  He laid a mesh interface over the naked scalp, turning the face away. Once energized, the neoprene wires embedded into the flesh, seeking wireless connections with dormant neurons.

  Paul tapped the keyboard to life and initiated a secret incognito program before opening neural imaging. The lower half of his body was still painfully cold, but his thudding heart warmed his chest, blood surging in his temples. The program began a synchronizing sequence that seemed to stall. It was taking too long.

  He ran to the steps and listened, his pulse echoing in his ears. He did this two more times. Pete’s bird-whistling was a distant call. He must’ve been in the hallway, but still on the first floor.

  But near the stairwell.

  It was the third trip back to the computer that the screen changed. Images were smeared in an abstract presentation, something that resembled ultrasound technology at its inception—a blurry amalgam of an inner dream world.

>   The mouse wheel clicked beneath his fingertip, cold and numb. The watercolor scenes drooled into each other. There wasn’t time for another pass through calibration, not with Pete in the building. He could come back, but there might not be another time.

  He targeted the visual cortex and made a trip to the stairs while the program ran. When he returned, the images were distinguishable. A man was looking at him.

  This is her view. The last moments of her life.

  The timeline started at the end. He would rewind it as far as it would go, but he was fascinated by the eyes that were looking at him, the pupils big and black and deep. They sparkled like galaxies.

  Who the hell is that?

  He turned the time wheel back and realized this was the processing lab. She was lying down. A woman and the man with the deep eyes looked down on her. Except for the eyes, the faces were blurred beyond recognition. The woman’s lips appeared to move silently (he’d cut the auditory access to save processing time). Their movements were jerky and unnatural, the memories patched together, pieces of film clipped from the movie.

  The timeline suddenly swirled into a slurry of melted crayons, pastels that bled into a patchwork of lights and darks. A face would appear, a tree or a sidewalk. She was walking. There was water. The gaps grew larger and emptier.

  Whistling.

  Pete was in the stairwell. He needed to wrap up, clean up and destroy the evidence. The timeline spun beneath his fingertip, a kaleidoscope of memories morphing and merging and blurring.

  A face suddenly jumped from the primordial soup with great clarity, flashing like a magician cutting a deck in half. Remember your card.

  He wheeled back.

  A balding old man.

  It was a memory of a balding old man, just a memory. But Paul had the sense the old man was looking back through space and time, eyes looking at him.

  Marcus Anderson.

  The progression slowed in reverse, then started from the beginning. Paul watched the old man from Jamie’s eyes, his hand out, fingers encouraging her to follow, pointing at a bench beneath the shade. She turned and sat.

  The fountains of Olympic Park arched in front of her, children dancing and splashing. Marcus took her hand and patted it gently. His face hovered close to hers, filling her vision. Ensuring she would remember this moment, burning it into her memory.

  They found her in Olympic Park.

  The clay report stated she came on radar like the old man had done himself. There was no explanation as to how she got so deep into Georgia before being discovered.

  “You about done?” Pete leaned into the lab.

  Paul jumped and shouted, “Yeah.”

  “Power down before you leave.”

  “Okay.”

  Pete thumped the doorframe and whistled his way down the steps. Paul remained fixed on the frozen image. The knowing eyes.

  He slid the half-head off the metal tray and dumped it into a chute like a spoiled hunk of boiled ham. The door swung on spring-loaded hinges, a conduit that would deliver the meat to an incinerator.

  Meat. It’s just meat.

  Paul wiped up watery red streaks, erased the program and ran a mop over Dennis’s heel-streaks, then turned off the lab.

  Someone would discover Dennis within a few days, a week at most. Paul didn’t need that much time. He just needed the next hour to finish up his life.

  Empty handed, he crossed the field to a brightly lit cabin.

  The Archetype’s Knowledge

  The room was warmly lit with a corner lamp, the walls dark olive with three sofa chairs a dark shade of pumpkin. It would be described as cozy, something a therapist would design.

  Exactly what Hanoi Fender expected.

  One of the chairs was singled out and faced the other two. That was his chair. He wasn’t ready to sit, but they’d be watching what he did while he waited. He wanted to appear relaxed, confident. For the next fifteen minutes, he slouched into the deep cushion and watched a fish tank bubble. It was home to a goldfish that seemed obsessed with escape, bumping its nose against the glass the entire time, probably since it was dropped in its new home.

  Probably until it died.

  Funny thing was this: if it managed to somehow escape—flop out of the tank or push through the glass—it would suffocate on the carpet.

  Maybe that’s what it wanted.

  “Good morning.” A woman stepped inside with a man.

  “Good morning,” Hanoi answered.

  They sat across from him, smiling pleasantly. They were athletic looking, attractive and nonthreatening. He doubted they mixed it up outside of work, but they’d make great babies if they did.

  “Okay, well,” she said. “Here we are.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you comfortable?”

  “Very.”

  “If you’re thirsty, there’s water on the table.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “This will take about an hour.”

  “Yes.”

  He let out a long, easy breath, questioning whether he should’ve acknowledged that last statement. It wasn’t good to know too much, but everyone knew this took an hour.

  That answer was fine.

  “Nervous?” she asked.

  “Little bit.”

  The couple nodded. They didn’t write anything down, didn’t need to. Everything was being immediately analyzed—every word, every movement. All the way down to how he blinked.

  He let out another long breath, let this one shake a little at the end, and darted his eyes between the two evaluators. That would look cautious.

  “Did your parents prepare you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I mean, we talked about it, of course. But they didn’t, you know… we weren’t able to—”

  “It’s all right.” She smiled.

  Shit. That was too much. He wanted to look nervous, not act it. Shaky breathing, quivering hands, dry mouth and rapid blinking, that was what a nervous person would do.

  “So you have parents?” she asked.

  “Yes. A mom and dad.”

  “They fabricated you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a transplant, is that right?”

  He hid his annoyance. She knew the answer to that.

  “Yes. They lost their son in an unfortunate accident and, um, used his DNA to fabricate me.”

  “So you’re not him?”

  He nailed a nervous laugh. “No, no. He’s like an identical twin.”

  “Do you think of yourself as a transplant or a clone?”

  This is stupid.

  “A brother.”

  “Does that bother you? No? Not being original?”

  “I have my own thoughts, my own interests. We’re twins born at different times.”

  “But you have his memories.”

  “That’s where he ends and I begin.”

  “How do you know?”

  Shrug. He was tired of this line of questioning. Besides, the shrug showed indecision. That was a good human trait. The shrug was well-placed, well executed. I don’t know and I don’t care.

  The man spoke up for the first time, asking Hanoi to compose a poem.

  “Roses are red, violets are blue… that sort of thing?”

  “Yeah,” the man said.

  “All right. Roses are red, violets are blue, you’re very pretty, and I like you.”

  He said it to the woman and elicited a rush of blood to his face. His cheeks turned pink. Like roses. Nailed it.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you go to school?”

  “I do.”

  “What grade?”

  “I’m a junior in high school.”

  “What’s your favorite thing about school?”

  “Recess.” It wasn’t, really. Then it occurred to him that recess was what grade schoolers did. That sounded rehearsed, but before he could correc
t himself—

  “What’s the square root of 88,574?” the man asked.

  Pause. “297.6 something something.”

  They didn’t react. He had paused for at least five seconds before answering. Was that long enough?

  “I like math,” he added.

  The man asked the chess problem. Hanoi knew that was coming; there was always a chess problem in Turing tests. He stared dully as the man set up a scenario and asked Hanoi his next move. The rook could mate in one, but he leaned forward, pinching his lower lip, watching the goldfish hit the water’s surface.

  “I don’t like chess.”

  “Why not?”

  Shrug.

  He wished they would write something down. It would be a good way to gauge how he was doing. The sitting and staring was unnerving, the pauses getting longer, the silence broken by the bubbles.

  “Hanoi’s an unusual name,” she said.

  “My father served in the military.”

  “Do you love your parents?”

  “Of course.”

  “What is love?”

  He stammered. That was genuine; he didn’t see that coming. They were supposed to ask why he loved his parents. He loved them, of course, because they were his parents and they gave him life and it was how he thanked them. Children loved their parents, that was the rule.

  “Love is an emotion.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” A very long pause. “Tell me more about emotions.”

  “Emotions are evolutionary shortcuts. It takes too long to think about everything. A human hears a twig snap in the bushes and fear instantly makes him ready to fight or flight.”

  “A human?”

  “You know what I mean.” He shook his head. That was stupid. “I just meant early Homo sapiens, that’s all.”

  “Do emotions define human?”

  “I think so.”

  “Are they required?”

  He paused. He didn’t mean to, just tripped up on the answer that was thrust onto his tongue. He caught it between his teeth before it escaped. The answer, it seemed, was obvious. Emotions were often irrational, were not good choices. But emotions, to some degree, were required. At least, he wanted to believe they were.