Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  “This way.” The old man’s voice emerged from a black hallway.

  Light came from one of the labs. Marcus was at one of the computers. The bags were on the floor in puddles of melted snow. It was a biomite lab, one used for fabrication. The smell was burned into her mind the moment she’d stepped out of her own fabrication chamber, her first sight Nix.

  The smell, ironically, was that of burnt clay.

  “Did you power the building down?” Paul’s voice echoed throughout the building.

  “It’s been redirected.”

  “You’ll arouse suspicion. Someone will come out to check.”

  “The system will report sleep mode. There will be no alarms.”

  Marcus said this with the dispassion of a bored adult answering a child’s tedious questions. The keyboard clattered beneath his fingers. A stainless steel tank hummed.

  “Unwrap the parts,” he said. “Put them in the distiller.”

  He pointed to the large stainless steel tank. Raine grabbed an arm from one of the bags, the flesh firm, the bicep flexed. The plastic crinkled like unwrapping a sandwich. She turned the wheel on the top lid and dropped it inside. It thumped like a sandbag in an empty barrel.

  Paul ranted while the old man pecked at the keyboard. He wanted more answers. That’s what faith is for, Paul.

  “Tell us what you’re doing,” Paul hissed. “Now.”

  “We need a raw supply of Jamie’s biomites.”

  “And what are you doing with that?”

  Another machine hummed to life, this one a boxy thing that resembled a refrigerator with touchpads and a row of green lights.

  “If you’re planning to fabricate, this is all you have.” He ripped the cover off a clear case chamber that was up to his waist. “You can’t fabricate her, it’s not big enough.”

  Raine put a hand in the distiller next, a left hand. A meaty smell leaked from the steel vat and pressed against the back of her throat. She swallowed a gag and turned away. The hand didn’t thud on a metal bottom but splashed in thick liquid. Like melted wax.

  “When you’re finished, meet me in lab 204.” Marcus hit a combination of keys and left.

  Paul went to the computer. “Goddamnit!”

  The monitor was locked on a black screen.

  ______

  “What is it?” Raine asked.

  The hallway was dark. A square beam of light cut from a doorway, plastering Paul’s shadow on the wall. Unlike the other lab doors, this was a heavy steel door. Marcus was inside and, once again, busy at a computer terminal. Paul raked greasy locks of hair from his face.

  “I don’t know what this is,” he said. “I didn’t have access.”

  There was a square palm lock on the wall.

  It didn’t surprise her that Marcus had gained entrance. His desires moved at will, a connection he seemed to maintain with nature as well as technology, both as effortless as moving his left hand. Did he manipulate the weather, too?

  “You’ll need to put one of those on.”

  Marcus pointed at a set of hangers. Very small rubber suits dangled from a horizontal post, a place where most people would hang a coat. A clipper set, the kind people shaved their pets with, was on a short stool.

  “You’ll need to shave first,” he added.

  Paul hadn’t moved. “What is this?”

  Marcus stopped what he was doing. It was the first time he looked at Paul. Raine braced herself for the answer.

  “This is the dream disease lab.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, I would’ve known about this.”

  “Why do you think they built this building, Paul? It wasn’t to keep you busy or to advance sustainable energy or medical technology. The People want dreamland. As long as there is dream disease, they won’t have it. This was built to cure it.”

  “Dreamland?” The word floated off Raine’s tongue like pixie dust.

  “Not yet,” the old man said gently. “We’re going to use the technology, Raine, but we’ll stay here and now. We’ll just change the here while we’re in the now.”

  Change the here.

  She didn’t know what that meant, but was hardly listening. Dreamland was in this lab. It was a promise, a sweet memory that lured her into the old man’s spell.

  Marcus took off his shirt. His flesh was gray like the underbelly of a dead fish. He took one of the suits off a hanger. It was half his size, a tight fit for a five-year-old.

  “I need you to shave, Paul. I need you to do it now. When you’re finished, you’ll put on the suit. Raine, you can follow me. Once you’ve undressed, apply this electrolytic gel.”

  She watched him undress until there was a pile of clothes. He stood completely nude, the rest of his body as slack and wrinkled as his breasts. He sat on a stool and lathered the clear lotion on his feet and calves in thick, gloppy layers like a kid plying jelly on a roll. His pointed toes stabbed into one of the suit’s legs. The material stretched up to his knee.

  The clippers buzzed in Paul’s hand.

  He stood in the corner, large chunks of knotted hair falling in long strips, curly whiskers fluttering from his chin.

  Marcus had lubricated everything up to his waist with the suit pulled just below his belly button. Raine took a suit and a tub of gel to the other side of the room and undressed until she was naked and cold. Her ribs reminded her just how little she’d eaten.

  The men ignored her hairless form. She sat down and began applying the ointment. The suit was slick rubber but stiff with embedded mesh. It hugged her flesh and revealed every fold of skin. Her nipples told of the cold. Paul’s face was splotchy and red. The lubricant squished like mucus into every wrinkle, the smell of a gutted fish burping from the seal around her neck.

  The three of them looked like odd scuba divers.

  “Leave the hoods down,” Marcus said, a pointed black cap hung from the back of their necks like loose folds of skin, “for now.”

  “What do these do?” Paul asked without anger. They weren’t swimming off the Settlement. Marcus started for the exit. “Please, just tell us,” Paul pleaded. “I can’t help if I don’t know what we’re doing.”

  Something shifted. They were in too deep. Jamie was a jumble of liquefying parts at the bottom of a steel drum. There was no turning back. Paul was forging ahead. Full steam.

  “You can’t protect your minds,” the old man said from the doorway. “What we’re doing will require no trace of knowledge or they’ll know where we’re going. Only I can hide such thoughts. Therefore, it’s better you don’t know.”

  “These are cloning suits,” Paul said. “They’re used to upload a map of the physical body to a fabricator. If that wrecks your plans—me knowing that—then you need to stop.”

  Raine knew of the methodology, that the embedded mesh scanned the body inside and out, transferring the data into a computer where a digital model would be developed.

  Marcus looked to his right and appeared to be listening; then he nodded toward the blank space. His projection was talking to him and he listened intently, grunting every so often. Paul continued asking questions, but they went unanswered. Who would he be talking to? Who would he carry around inside him, listen to with such reverence? He had always been an outcast, even among his peers.

  “There’s too much to explain, Paul,” he finally said. “I’m sorry, but we really must—”

  “Mother,” Raine blurted.

  It came to her, an epiphany that flashed into existence, like holding a puzzle piece with no distinct color or outline and seeing, all of a sudden, exactly where it fit.

  The old man’s expression drained away, replaced by something close to shock. It had likely been quite some time since he had experienced something so surprising. Not since he exited a fabrication chamber. Mother’s fabrication chamber.

  The truth, on his face, could not be hidden.

  “Is that true?” Paul looked between Marcus and Raine. “Is that who you carry?”

  H
e nodded once.

  “But she turned you into a fabrication.”

  “Like Paul,” Raine added. “She did the same thing to Paul.”

  Paul flinched. The insinuation of a distant kinship was a sharp point between the ribs. The skin suit telegraphed the muscles bunching between his shoulders.

  “She showed me the truth,” Marcus said.

  “She betrayed you!” Paul said. “And you have her imprinted in your mind, projecting her into this world?” Paul’s jaws clenched and released. His thoughts were out in the open, his disdain for the artificial intelligence known as Mother.

  Because she killed Cali.

  “She’s part of me,” Marcus said. “We are inseparable.”

  “Maybe she is you,” Paul said. “Maybe you don’t exist. Maybe she’s dreaming you. You’re nothing, old man. You’re just a disposable clone, a means to an end.”

  “She showed me the truth. I serve a greater power. So does she.”

  “You don’t know the truth yet, you said so. You don’t know what the powers-that-be are, don’t know what’s at the end of the journey. That’s why you’re here. That’s why we’re here, why Jamie is soup!”

  “Mother showed me there was a truth, Paul.” Marcus’s voice sharpened into a lethal edge. “But we, Paul… we have to discover the truth for ourselves. The world doesn’t even ask the question if there is a greater truth to know, you understand. The human race is only interested in their own little personal worlds, that’s why this little dream disease lab exists. The People want what they want, and as long as the tit is in their mouth they don’t ask the bigger question. I ask the question, Paul. I want to know the truth behind it all, what controls us. I have sought to serve the true and only God and she showed me the path.”

  “She could be fooling you,” Paul said. “You could be a plant with false memories. You might think you remember searching for truth, but maybe she’s controlling you like a puppet.”

  “That’s where faith leaps, Paul.”

  Marcus looked at Raine. She understood what it was like to be the projection. She existed in Nix’s dreamland, saw the world through his eyes, heard it through his ears.

  That’s where faith leaps.

  “Blind faith is a leap of ignorance,” Paul said.

  “Whatever I am, Paul,” the old man continued while looking at Raine, “it will find the truth and set the world free, you can trust that. This is the journey we were all meant to take.”

  He looked away from Raine, engaging Paul.

  “Do you think she randomly picked you in the warehouse all those years ago? She chose you, Paul. Mother cloned you to find Cali, cloned you to be here on the Settlement so that we would journey together. You were made for this journey.”

  “Why?” Paul asked. “Why me?”

  Marcus paused. “Love.”

  Paul stared at the old man, paralyzed by the answer. He loved Cali, knew the day he first saw her. He often wondered if Mother programmed him that way, predisposed him to fall in love with her. He loved her, that was true. Would it matter if Mother wanted him to?

  Marcus went to the computer console. How did he know about all of this? How could he run the computers, know about the skin suits without ever being inside the building? He seemed to know everything, like all of this had happened before and it was happening again.

  Mother knows.

  “This will take some time,” Marcus announced.

  “What are we doing?” Paul asked again.

  “You’ll know soon enough.”

  “How long?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Don’t bullshit us. How long?”

  “A full body and mind construct will need to be downloaded from each of you. The time it takes depends on your cooperation.”

  “You said this was going to take twenty hours.”

  “It’s an estimate.”

  “Now you’re uncertain?”

  “There are many paths. Which one we choose I don’t know at this moment.”

  “We don’t have time for this. Someone will be here tomorrow, I guarantee it. And if we’re still in here, they’ll swipe us.”

  Marcus went to a series of institutional beds along the back wall, the cushions thick and tan. Hospital guard rails were anchored on the sides.

  “The process will become uncomfortable at times,” he said. “Your eyes will be closed. I want you to focus on your breathing until you settle into it.”

  “What will you be doing?” Paul asked.

  “All three of us are going through this.”

  “What about the fabrication lab?”

  “We’ll discuss that later.”

  Paul’s fears were turning gears in his imagination, spitting out distorted thoughts and beliefs. Would the old man be fabricating Jamie’s head and talking to it?

  Paul teetered on the sharp edge of trust, a steep drop on either side. Halfway across the chasm with no net, there was no direction but forward. They had to cross.

  Raine walked the line of trust with steadfast dedication, eyes ahead. There was no looking back, no looking down. For her, standing in the dream lab was like the end of a long dangerous night, where predators roamed in the dark. But the eastern rim had begun to lighten, the starless night parched dull gray. The sun was near and she could smell it. It was that clean smell after the rain, the concrete rinsed, the windows streaked.

  It smelled like hope.

  Marcus lowered the bed rail. Reaching over his shoulders, he peeled the elastic hood over his head and slid the mesh over his face—one big multifaceted bug eye.

  Raine ran the rubber fingers of her suit over her slick scalp, the thick gel cloying her sinuses. The hood snapped over the crown of her head. She instinctively held her breath when the mesh dropped over her face. Her breath was hot, the taste of gel seeping into the corners of her lips, stinging her tongue.

  “You’re not going to dreamland,” Paul blurted.

  Raine turned to him.

  The facemesh undulated where his lips moved. He turned his head, dark hollows where his eyes would be aimed at her. Maybe he was trying to keep her hopes in check, keep her rooted in reality. He’d seen her fly hope into the sky and watch it crash like a paper kite.

  Or maybe he was keeping his own hopes grounded.

  The process began behind her eyelids when an electrical current rippled through the gel. The suit shrink-wrapped like a second layer of skin. She was buried alive, but could still feel the sticks in her palms.

  And the paper kite soared higher.

  ______

  The dull thud of an axe split her dreams.

  It didn’t fall in the typical rhythm of felling a tree. It came in erratic spurts, panicked and distant. The sound lifted her from a murky pit where insects fed on rotting things. Sleep fell off her like loamy sand, her body rising from a shallow grave.

  The earth smothered her face, filled her mouth.

  She clawed her way into waking with fabric pressed over her mouth and nostrils. Sweet clean air was just out of reach. Her arm moved through muddy air; her hand found the thin mesh sucked between her lips. She worked her thumbs under the seam and stripped it away with a wet slap.

  Clean air filled her.

  She jolted upright, a lost diver with one last draught of oxygen in the tank. Slime dangled from her nose and chin. Another wave of insects crawled in and out of her pores, pinching and stabbing. Microscopic hairs swayed like reeds of seaweed in the subdural layers of her flesh.

  Her nervous system raced toward insanity.

  A black pile lay next to a corner shower, a shed exoskeleton of a large bug. It had the tang of freshly spilled intestines. Raine leaped off the bed and molted the skin suit. Rancid gel spilled out, congealed and lumpy and smelling of sour mucus. The suit hadn’t grown swaying follicles—no seaweed or filaments extracted from her pores—but her flesh was puckered and ridged and more gray than pink, the soft skin of a drowning victim. She was afraid to scratch the ma
ddening itch, afraid she’d carve long tracks with the edge of her nails.

  The hot shower brought relief.

  She gently washed three times with soap, snotty trails of dead skin gathering around her feet, a gel-caked plug settling on the drain.

  Marcus’s bed was empty.

  Paul was still on his bed, the face mesh sucked into his parted lips. There were no lights that indicated he was still being scanned, no hookups, no wires. If he was trapped in a nightmare, it was unflinching and catatonic.

  As long as he’s not in dreamland.

  It was mean, what he said to her. Hateful. But he was right—the heavy sleep didn’t yield dreamland, didn’t bring back Nix and Joshua. Paul always wished he could dream like her, that he could see Cali one more time. But he couldn’t. He had hallucinations, pretended to see her while waking. And that just wasn’t the same.

  The axe from her dreams returned, this time a dull thud from down the hall.

  The bag of leftover wedges and a yellow-handled sledgehammer were still inside the dream lab. Towel pressed to her face, she looked down the hall. The thudding came from the front door. Someone was pounding on it, cursing the malfunctioning palm lock. Muffled voices sounded concerned. Tempted to eavesdrop, she kept her chat line closed so they wouldn’t sense her on the other side of the door.

  “Paul?” Pete’s voice was dull and distant. “Paul, can you hear me? Paul!”

  Another round of thumping.

  Her stomach went for a twirl. They knew he was there, and begged him for help. And if they knew about Paul, they would know about her. It was their research. The power had been diverted to the dream disease and fabrication labs. Paul knew the power redistribution would set off alarms. Marcus said they’d need twenty hours, they’d be lucky to get ten.

  What are they doing here in the middle of the night?

  Something was humming—a familiar rhythm, the constant line-by-line stroking of a fabrication wheel. She started for the fabrication lab. Light fumed from the outer office windows, warm and yellow.

  It’s daylight. She checked her internal time. It was mid-afternoon. She’d been in that jelly suit all night. Almost twenty hours!

  The fabrication lab was locked.

  She twisted the knob with both hands. The burnt smell of freshly cooked biomites seeped beneath the door, clayey and sticky. The equipment was lit up. The fabrication chamber, the glass blackly tinted, was strumming. The computer nearby was turned at an angle, the blue screen spitting details she couldn’t see.