Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  “It’ll be all right,” he said, closing his hand around hers.

  Sticks poked out from between her fingers, the crucifix held tightly in her hands.

  The door held. No amount of pounding was going to break the lock or unseat the wedges. But still, they would need time. The four of them were ready to escape. It was why they dressed earlier and had their body-identity scans uploaded.

  There’s no room for error.

  A shiver of doubt ran through the old man’s hands as he lathered the clear gel over his ribs. He could only hope his team was ready on the other end. An error would set him back decades.

  Maybe longer.

  “They’re ready for you,” Mother assured him. “They’re ready.”

  There was no way she could know that, but her confidence steadied his hand. He stretched the hood over his head, the elastic tension pulling on his neck. The others had lowered the face mesh. Marcus went to each of their beds and touched an arm.

  He could abandon them now, leave them on the Settlement and take Jamie with him. There was enough time to pull her memories. They wouldn’t suffer through the swipe, their consciousness turned off before they knew they’d been betrayed.

  One to lead, one to dream…

  Marcus checked the system before lying down, the face mesh still bundled on top of his head. Mother sat beside him. He felt her hand on his arm, the warmth seeping through the cold gel that once again sucked through his pores.

  “Yes,” Raine said. “Yes, thank you.”

  She had pulled the mesh up. The old man told her to get ready, there wasn’t time. Paul sat up, assuring her everything was all right. But she was smiling, almost beaming. She was talking to someone.

  “You’re my angel. My angel.” She began weeping.

  She was hallucinating. He knew it was a risk, that her mental state was already unstable. This might not go well.

  But she pulled down the mesh and lay back. Her sobs continued. Paul soothed her, but eventually the suits pulled them unconscious.

  There were momentary lapses of door pounding. Silence would stretch out for long minutes, interrupted by their names being called through the thick metal. Bob’s booming voice wasn’t one of them. He would still be in his cabin. No matter what anyone did, he would keep watching television.

  Marcus was still awake when the machine arrived.

  Hours had passed when the vibrations came through the walls and floor. Something was coming down the corridor. An engine idled at first, then was open wide. Marcus could feel it in his teeth. A mechanical whine rumbled outside the door; a weighty crack reported into the room. The door bowed in the center like a fist. The engine growled over commanding voices.

  The door popped. Stress wrinkles appeared across the surface. The wedges stayed in place, the lip of the door plumping around them. Something loud broke inside the wall.

  The lock had given way.

  Mother walked over to the door as if she would sacrifice her last breath for them. Marcus pulled up his face mesh and initiated a preliminary procedure, feeling his flesh become a fuzzy barrier, a porous envelope barely containing his organs. If his skin completely dissolved, the suit would hold him together, would allow him the extra few minutes. Only he would be awake for that agony. The others would be spared.

  Mercifully, the engine idled.

  Something had gone wrong. Twenty minutes later, it fired up again. Marcus had become a bag of soup by then, his breath—hot and thick—the only reminder he was alive.

  Mother whispered, “Go now.”

  The door cracked like an iron I-beam.

  Marcus gave the thought-command. The cold grip on his awareness filled him, sipping him out of the suit like a cool drink into silent darkness, pulling him into the computer network, where he sought wireless pathways and cable conduits.

  He led them out.

  III

  One to bleed.

  The Archetype’s Knowledge

  “Your room is ready, Ms. Winters.”

  Norah Winters didn’t stop at the sprawling desk. She didn’t even take off her sunglasses. The cheerful receptionist offered a curt but pleasant smile and returned to her administrative duties.

  It was one of many reasons why Norah chose the Dream Institute. There were many certified dreamland accelerators in Denver, a few rated four stars with a clean record. But none of them had the service like the Dream Institute. The name even implied superior status.

  Norah liked that.

  The door to the left of the desk swung open. A petite young lady was there to greet her, a blonde with small breasts and athletic hips. Norah knew the way to her room but let the young thing lead the way.

  The hallway was wide with tasteful art on the walls (well, not all of it tasteful) and several quiet doorways. A mix of jazz played softly. The young lady opened the third door to the right, asked if there was anything else and left with a curt but pleasant smile (they trained them that way).

  The suite was plush and clean with a living room arrangement for entertaining (if you wanted to waste your time) and a large workspace. The spotless bay window overlooked the Rockies, a view Norah was enamored with the first time she leased the room but now had become as unnoticed as the wallpaper.

  A glass of red wine (Dana Estates Lotus Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon) was on a sterling silver platter, a wine she discovered in Napa with husband number two (or was it three?). Norah sat on the duvet to free her feet from the high heels.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Winters.” Sheila closed the door quietly behind her.

  “Good day.”

  Sheila sat next to Norah and opened a black leather case, humming a pleasant tune as she did so. Sheila was naturally chatty, something Norah put an end to after their first meeting. She allowed the humming, considering it a fair compromise.

  “It’s been six months since we last sampled,” Sheila said.

  Norah allowed her to tie an elastic band above her elbow, turning her head before the needle pricked her vein and the vial turned red. Sheila then placed a black box the size of a cell phone against Norah’s chest. A wave of prickly static scattered under her skin.

  And then the nurse was gone. No goodbye, no the doctor will be here in a minute, just a little humming ditty out the door.

  There was a bathroom to the left. Norah showered and put on a Stefano Ricci robe. She hadn’t even requested that type of robe, they just knew she’d love it. She leaned over the sink and wiped away the condensation to study the loose skin beneath her green eyes. Not bad for an eighty-nine-year-old woman.

  But not good enough.

  When Dr. Toby Chalmers arrived, she was still in the Stefano Ricci and the pedicurist was almost finished.

  “Ah, Norah,” he said with all his pearly teeth. “It’s so lovely to see you.”

  “Of course.”

  “You look fabulous, as always.”

  “I suppose, but these bags.” Norah turned her cheek. “Can we do something?”

  Toby (she was on a first-name basis; just because he was a doctor didn’t mean she called him by his last name) bent over to examine her creamy complexion.

  “A little tweak might work,” he said. “Perhaps we can address that next time. Your biomites are at 94% and I’d like a full analysis before we do that. You don’t have time for that now, a busy woman such as yourself.”

  She felt the blood rush to her cheeks, admonishing herself for showing indulgence. He knew what she liked.

  And that’s why I’m here.

  “Your blood work and scan are perfect. Anything else we can do before you go?”

  Her lips parted. A tiny sound stuck in her throat, the words throttled in place. Something was on her mind; it had been since she read the newsfeed that morning. It was bothering her, but she didn’t want to say anything, didn’t want it to sound like little-girl worry (her third husband called it that, or was it the first?).

  Besides, if she said it out loud, it could make it true. It was like acto
rs that played terminally ill cancer patients (when cancer was a thing). If they believed they had cancer, they got cancer. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking. Her thoughts had always had a life of their own. If only she devoted more biomites to her brain, she could control what she thought and felt.

  She could commit the last 6% of her clay to brain biomites. Well, 5% of her clay. It was impossible to go 100%. Even if she could, she’d become one of those bricks and they’re the ones that started dream disease.

  Dream disease—damn it! She thought it.

  “No. Nothing else.”

  “Very well.”

  The nurse returned and the pedicurist left. Norah went to the side room, a small enclave that was without windows or decorations, that housed the largest most comfortable chair invented. It resembled a reclining throne.

  They helped her lie back. She tucked the flaps of her robe to avoid exposing her thighs (she was still nude) while the nurse fussed with an IV bag and Toby checked the monitors that tracked her vitals. There would be no catheter (no tube in there, thank you). They would have to clean her.

  The chair began to vibrate.

  Toby lifted her hand like a delicate flower and kissed it. “Bon voyage, beautiful woman.”

  It occurred to Norah they knew her thoughts. This disturbed and pleased her at the same time. There was no need for her to request her wants and desires, they were taken care of. It was just… some thoughts she wanted to keep private. But if that was the price of luxury and a handsome doctor (it occurred to her he wasn’t really a doctor), then she was willing.

  The bricks (damn them) didn’t need accelerator chairs to reach their dreamlands. They just closed their eyes and went. Well, back when they had dreamlands. The government took that away because of the dream disease.

  Dammit.

  When the door closed and the room was silent, the vibrations ramped up. She closed her eyes and let the vibrations take her. She could no longer feel the fabric around her. No longer tell the difference between where she ended and the chair began.

  She whirred.

  And fell.

  A salty breeze blew across her face. She opened her eyes to see an endless horizon on a blazing sea, the sun setting off to her right in a violet sky. She was standing on a glass portico that cantilevered over a sheer cliff that ended in ship-eating boulders.

  And that wasn’t all.

  Her hips were curved, legs shapely, her cheeks taut where once they sagged. She was young again. And below, relaxing around a pool with an edge that appeared to fall over the cliff, were ten young men straight from Greek mythology—racked abs and oiled biceps.

  Dreamland.

  She was wealthy in real life, so the excess wasn’t that much different, really. But she couldn’t control everything in the physical world. You must live life on life’s terms, her recovering alcoholic ex-husband told her before leaving (he was number four, she remembered that).

  But not in dreamland.

  She stepped off the portico and floated down to the pool as gently as a rose petal. Here, life lived on her terms. These were her rules. This was her universe. Perhaps some would find being a goddess boring.

  Not so.

  Later that night, she lay at the water’s edge, strewn across a large boulder like a wet rag. The black sky sparkled with diamonds; the moons were full (she preferred two moons). That evening’s orgy had sapped her. She could still taste blood and wondered if it was still on her lips. Even in dreamland she could become exhausted. Three men would do that to anyone. (And one woman, just to spice things up.)

  She murdered them when she was finished, cut them open and spilled their organs, rolling in the gore as her orgasm faded.

  Her inner fantasies indulged, she closed her eyes. She had another couple of days before having to make her exit, to return to the flesh for the required recuperative therapy (too long away from the real world and the body forgets you, they say). She wasn’t one to push it. But for now, she would sleep.

  In the morning, she’d have breakfast in the tower, perhaps fly over to the mainland and visit the city. The details of the urbanscape were unknown to her, something the Dream Institute provided for her to discover.

  Perhaps she could bring back some children for the evening’s festivities.

  She felt the warm arms of sleep when a cool shadow passed over her. It was a strange unsettling feeling. She’d been known to allow mythological creatures into her dreamland, but none now. Even so, one could only pass over one moon.

  Not both.

  She sat up and willed the ocean still. The frothy water settled as if a wave machine had been cut off. She listened and reached with her mind, her thoughts crawling to the extent of her universe. She fought to keep the paranoid thoughts out of her awareness, the worry she couldn’t extinguish in front of Toby. But she couldn’t help it. Something felt… foreign.

  The temperature plummeted.

  The ocean immediately froze into a solid sheet. The moon crystalized, the sky shattered. One column of fog escaped her lips before her body—her young, curvaceous body—turned into granite.

  Only a distant beeping rang in the silence.

  She was unable to turn her head, to move her eyes, to call for help. But the beeping grew louder.

  Voices.

  Someone was out there. Someone was coming.

  “Not yet!” It was Toby’s voice. “Don’t disconnect, she’s got to be stable!”

  There were people around her now. The boulders had disappeared; the glacial ocean gone. A quick journey through a dark shattered blackness brought her back to her tremoring flesh.

  “Norah!” His face was blurry. “Stay with us, Norah!”

  There was chaos, but it didn’t matter to her. The cold had stolen her breath and taken her will. She just wanted to sleep. No, not sleep. To give up.

  To give herself to the dream eater. Forever and ever.

  This, she realized as her body was lifted and rushed down a hallway, was what I worried about?

  She knew in the final moments where she was going. And she didn’t care. She would become something bigger, something better and pure.

  The dream disease works this way.

  Jamie

  Sound told Jamie she was alive.

  It bounced in rhythm, a sort of bouncing-ball rhythm. The kind she would see on television when she was young, a little ball bouncing off words at the bottom of the screen.

  Beep-beep, this one went. Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

  More importantly, it brought a memory, a little snippet of sitting in front of a television, sucking juice from a box, her hands tiny, tongue purple. But the memory didn’t smell like alcohol, the kind in a hospital. Clean and sterile, it didn’t smell like that in front of the television.

  It didn’t feel cold and stiff.

  Another sound joined the first one and now there were two bouncing balls, one slightly faster than the other. For a brief time, they would join their voices before one sped ahead, looping around to synchronize again.

  Beep-beep.

  Jamie was the heaviness of a giant bag, the sort boxers punch. She could feel its density, the thick membrane around it, the gush of blood inside it. And then she had the queer realization that she wasn’t inside the bag.

  I am the bag.

  A gasping breath broke the surface. Someone had been underwater, now chomping at the air. The man (she thought it was a man, the guttural hacks deep and smoky) coughed up thick mucus.

  Jamie continued to fill with muddy water, a slurry of grainy sand and silt that fell into place and settled with pins and needles that poked through the lining. It hurt. It fucking hurt. Like when she sat cross-legged too long and her foot turned into a slab of meat, the sensations coming back with angry pinpricks, like how dare you!

  Only this was her body.

  Another memory snippet, pins and needles.

  The coughing man murmured in blurry tones, the voice of someone up too late, had too much fun. The s
ound of fabric sliding off a cushion, sticky wet on a shiny floor. One of the beep-beeps went quiet.

  She wanted to get up, get out of this body bag. The sand was wet and heavy and the needles stuck her like an inside-out cushion, a voodoo doll tortured one prick at a time.

  Breathe. She felt breath, her own breath.

  It wasn’t like she was underwater, it was just an easy draw followed by an effortless release. She had arms and legs, a face and eyes. Eyelids that creased like new leather, their crunchy blink inside her watery head.

  She stared at starry ceiling tiles.

  It was sometime later that she opened her creaky eyelids again, the ceiling unchanged. She’d fallen back asleep, the bouncing ball song bringing her back. There were curtains drawn on both sides, fabric partitions that gave the impression she lay in a small room. Her neck bones offered little cracking sounds.

  She tossed her leg over the edge. It dangled. The big toes catching the hard floor. Blood thudded in her foot. She sat up. There was no fluid in her lungs—not like the hacking and wheezing—but her head sloshed with sleep. The pins and needles were gone, but she itched like a wool scarf. And ached.

  She ran her hand across her head, fingers knitting through two inches of thick hair. A hospital gown sleeve hung off her elbow. There were vague memories of going to sleep. It didn’t feel like this room, though. Or smell like it.

  It was a slow journey to the floor; pins and needles met the bottom of her foot, fractured nerves running up her thigh until she bit her lip. A tear squeezed between her clenched eyelids and raced off her chin.

  Something crashed.

  Jamie startled at the sound, a harsh contrast to the quiet, antiseptic feeling. It was beyond the curtain on her left. She eased off the edge of the bed until all her weight settled on her quivering knees. She reached for the curtain, teased it with her fingers until she clutched a handful of vinyl, and pulled herself up.

  The eyelets strained in the metal track, the curtain stretching but not tearing. Her flesh stretched over her ribs like cured animal hide. A gust of wind would carry her off like an autumn leaf. She rode the curtain down the line, feet slapping the floor.