Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  An empty bed was on the other side.

  Computers and monitors were stacked along the wall, a silver rack with an IV bladder hanging flat and empty. The heart monitor was silent. Looking back, she realized the same arrangement was set up in her stall. Purple scars dotted the veins inside her elbow. Her heart monitor had also gone quiet, but another danced somewhere else in the room.

  A pile of papers fluttered beyond the door, followed by a wet cough.

  She took a couple breaths, lunged toward the door on rubber legs, and caught the L-shaped handle to keep from melting into a puddle. The door was heavy. She pried it open enough to squeeze into a hallway. There were several doors, all of them open at various degrees, but a big window caught her attention. It was at the end of the corridor, sunlight coming through a glass wall.

  She used a handrail along the wall (it seemed out of place, or something needful), flopping her feet, strength trickling into her waking limbs. The view beyond slowly came over the horizon as she neared—an endless sea of palm trees.

  The wall was slightly curved. She leaned against it, her cheek sticking to the cold glass. The outside wall appeared to bend like a cylinder.

  One building was tucked into the tropical menagerie, the walls algae-tinted, the windows dark and lifeless. It had the angles and structure of an institution, a sort of unimaginative box where research was done.

  The Settlement. She suddenly remembered where she was before waking up. She saw the face of… of someone. Paul.

  She looked at her hands, remembering stepping out of a fabrication chamber before they were rushed to another room. They… Raine and Paul… and… and…

  Something large fell. She felt it in her feet.

  Jamie had slid down the glass without realizing it, a dark slurry of thoughts swirling like silty water. She pulled herself down the hall and leaned into a half-open door that was across from where she woke. The knob cracked on the wall and startled an old man.

  Marcus Anderson.

  Yes, the old man was at the Settlement, too. He had brought her back from somewhere deep and black and empty. But someone was after them. She just woke up and people were locked out. Windows broke. There was shouting, chaos. They put on stinging slick suits and lay back because they had to get away.

  They stared at each other, each waiting for the other to make a move.

  “Where am I?” Her voice echoed in her head.

  The old man’s brows wedged together, darkening his eyes. The hospital gown hung on him like a bed sheet. His spotted scalp was the color of bottled rage. He limped over to an oversized monitor, his shoulders hunched stiffly so that he had to bend at the waist to look up. Coarse, guttural sounds tumbled in his throat while his fingers trembled over a keyboard.

  There were monitors all around the wedge-shaped room, enough space for five or six scientists to work their data. Scientists? She didn’t know why she thought the word scientists. Maybe it was the building outside that made her think that, or the smell around her.

  All the monitors flashed images.

  At first, she thought they were elaborate screen savers waiting for programming; then she recognized the tropical images. It was a view from above, a satellite image that panned around a tropical island. She recognized the institutional building from down the hall, the one tinted green with algae, only it was U-shaped from above.

  And not far from it was a fat round building three stories tall. That’s where we are, in a cylindrical building.

  “What did you do to us?” she asked.

  “This is not it.” The old man spun like a gargoyle, one eye bulging. “This is nothing like I wanted.”

  His teeth snapped like he was trying to bite the words for having to even say them. He looked around the room in mad, jerky motions, the one eye big, red and watery. Not finding what he was looking for, he returned to the massive monitor, data scrolling in nonsense.

  “Marcus,” she said calmly, “where are we?”

  The old man paid no attention, but the monitors, all at once, responded. Images flickered like a broadcast interrupting normal programming until they all showed the island. Even the main monitor was synchronized to the others as if they all answered the question.

  They were on a tropical island.

  The view continued to pull away. Higher in the sky it went until the spit of land became a speck in the middle of an ocean.

  “Voice-activated,” Marcus muttered. “Transportation! How can we get back to the mainland?”

  In unison, the monitors panned to a luxurious dock somewhere on the island. Ropes and bumpers hung along empty slips.

  “Where are the technicians? The laboratory… where are my fabrication engineers? Are they here? Why did they leave? Why are we here, goddamnit?”

  The blue waters undulated without response.

  He slammed his fist on the keyboard, plastic squares bouncing onto the floor. Jamie thought his fists would shatter before the keyboard, his frame too fragile looking.

  “Answer me!”

  He was huffing for air, leaning against the desk before he fell.

  “How did we get here?” Jamie asked.

  A row of fabrication chambers appeared on the monitors—doors ajar on glass cubicles. It took a moment to interpret the response. Jamie looked at her hands, turned them over, and put the wrinkled knuckles to her nose—the smell of freshly baked earth filled her head.

  Fabrication. I’m a… I’m a fabrication?

  “How did this happen?” she whispered.

  Marcus’s face appeared on the screen, this one slightly different than the red-faced old man hyperventilating across from her. There was no eye bulging in the socket, no age spots polluting the scalp. This one held a knowing grin with a secret locked between the lips and behind the eyes. It was Marcus, but not really. The eyes, she knew.

  Sharp pupils, slices of blue in the thin irises.

  I’ve seen those eyes.

  “This…” he muttered. “This is all wrong. How did this… how could this happen? Was it you? Did you do this?”

  Again, he cast that straining eye around the room, his accusations searching for someone besides Jamie. His confident face looked back from the monitors, the mocking smile perhaps meant for him.

  The eyes.

  She remembered the eyes, but from where? Chicago. He was in Chicago. But what was I doing there?

  “What happened, Marcus?” she asked.

  He wiped his scalp with both hands and slid them over his face, withering like corn before the harvest. Words stumbled over his tongue, false starts that didn’t catch. Finally, he nodded. Resigned. He was about to say something, perhaps tell her what he knew or where they were supposed to be or why they were in Chicago, but the monitors went blank.

  Jamie felt it in the hallway, its presence a raging sun, a mind tainted with revenge. She stepped back. Marcus, however, seemed unaware of the danger, still forming the first words when it burst into the room.

  “I will end you!”

  The old man looked up as Paul wrangled one hand around the thin, crooked neck, a flap of loose skin squeezed over his fingers. Paul lifted him like a bag of straw and threw him into the monitor. The screen cracked in a gunshot pattern behind the old man’s head.

  “Where is she?” he shouted. “What did you do?”

  Marcus clawed helplessly at his forearm. Sound could not escape the crushing grip, a vice that would surely snap the old man’s neck.

  “I’m here,” Jamie said. “Paul, I’m here.”

  But he didn’t turn at the sound of her voice. He leaned into the wet sounds of the old man’s jaws that worked like a suffocating fish.

  “Where is Raine?” he hissed.

  “Paul, stop.” Jamie grabbed his arm. “Something went wrong, Paul! It’s not his fault.”

  His forearm was a steel bar, rigid muscles banding in twisted cords. Jamie hung from it and felt the old man’s loosely wrapped fingers, his face flushed red hot. The one eye had swelled
from the socket.

  Paul wanted to see him die.

  “Don’t do this,” she said. “We’ll never know where we are.”

  No level of begging would stop him from watching the old man die, but she found the words that hit the target.

  “We’ll die, Paul. Both of us.”

  The first breath came to the old man like a storm, the inhalation of a drowning man deep in the dark tunnel of unconsciousness. Paul dropped him on the counter. The old man crumpled like a paper sack of bones, panting like a sick dog.

  “I will end you,” Paul said. “If you don’t find her, I will end you.”

  The raging trance faded. For the first time, he seemed to notice her; perhaps he heard her words, just not where they came from. He put his arms around her, drew her close, kissed her forehead.

  The strained sounds of an old man faded behind them.

  ______

  “You all right?”

  She nodded.

  He examined her, looking for the truth, asking her again and again, like he couldn’t believe she was there, she was actually in front of him.

  “You know me?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  Her memories were scattershot images. Her past was dark, there were things she didn’t want to remember, but Paul and the farm were emerging in small pieces.

  Paul was always the strong one, the one that held them together on the farm when things got tough. But now his presence was even bigger, his mind filling the hallway, wrapping around her, keeping the world from hurting her.

  She didn’t feel that from Marcus. He was just an old man—a lost old man.

  Paul went back to the room where they woke. Jamie leaned against the doorjamb, watching him yank curtains aside. The beds were empty, the computers silent. He paused at the last curtain, bowing his head before grabbing it with both hands, the vinyl bunching between his fingers. The eyelets pinged as he tore it down.

  There was someone in the last bed.

  The flesh was sickly brown, a slab of meat left for days on summer concrete, collapsed around the bones like a vacuum-sealed package. The cheekbones were sharp, the lips pulled away from the teeth.

  And no bouncing ball.

  The fumes of adrenaline evaporated from Paul’s trembling knees. He fell over the corpse, forehead pressed on the hand-shaped collarbone jutting from her shoulder. His body shook silently, the sobs locked deep inside, fueling the anger that had choked the old man.

  And then Jamie remembered.

  She remembered the woman stepping out of the fabrication chamber all those years ago. Jamie was there, had watched the fabrication of the woman’s body a line at a time. She saw Nix pull her from his dreamland, transferring her into the physical world. She was her sister, a beautiful soul.

  She was Raine.

  And now she was that.

  Jamie touched his shoulder, feeling the anguish shudder from a deep place. The body hardly looked like the woman she once knew, nothing more than a poorly sculpted replication.

  “I didn’t plan this.”

  Marcus stood in the doorway, slumped and withered. He limped to a chair. Blood tracked a red trail from the back of his head.

  The moments stretched out, interrupted only by Paul’s guttural clenching.

  “We’re…” Marcus began, “not supposed to be here. The transfer… we were supposed to arrive in a New York laboratory where newly fabricated bodies awaited.”

  He lifted his hands, the skin thin and pale, snaky blue veins bulging on the backs. Not what he expected.

  After another long pause, he continued. The skin suits, as he called them, the black slimy things they wore, were body scanners that transferred specifications to a lab (a lab he swore, once again, was in New York) where fabricators quickly cloned them. Everything had been arranged before he had arrived on the Settlement.

  Their identities transferred like data.

  There was a team waiting for them to wake up, a group of technicians that would help them adjust to their newly minted bodies. It would be a simple transfer from one body to another, one vehicle to the next.

  “Not this.” He was staring at the hands. “It wasn’t supposed to be this.”

  Jamie remembered the long, dark sleep, the endless black void of a blank dream. A journey through a cold network, a vacuum of outer space where there was no time, where nothing existed in between one body and the next.

  “You killed her,” Paul said.

  “I did not.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “I don’t know how any of this happened.”

  “But you… you did this to us. You did this to her.”

  Darkness returned to the old man’s eyes. “You would be on the Settlement if not for me.”

  “And she would be alive.”

  “And Jamie would be dead.”

  Paul spun around. “You murdered her in the first place.”

  “I was not in Atlanta. Her memories are corrupt.”

  Jamie had no memories of Atlanta, no recollection of dying. But the eyes. I remember the eyes.

  “You are responsible for all of this,” Paul said.

  “I freed you, Paul. Would you rather be on the Settlement? Would you rather watch Raine suffer without her dreamland?”

  “I would rather you join her.”

  Weakness suddenly overcame Jamie. Paul caught her before she slid to the floor.

  The old man hadn’t moved. If not for Jamie, Paul would squeeze the life out of him. And there was nothing Marcus could do to stop him. He sat there turning his hands over, a look of revulsion gliding down his bulbous nose, turning his mouth. Glancing at Paul, he got up as if he’d grown bored with the conversation and limped from the room.

  “I’m all right. It’s okay,” she said.

  He helped her into the chair, the seat still warm. Exhaustion tugged at her consciousness, her fuel tank already tapped. Paul knelt next to her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He wasn’t just talking to her. He was sorry for everything. Sorry for Raine, sorry for dreamland. Sorry for the state of the world. And there was nothing he could do about it.

  She began to doze, patting Paul’s hand while sounds of chaos came from surrounding offices. The old man shuffled more papers in search of an explanation of where they were and how.

  Raine’s body continued to deflate.

  “Angel,” Jamie remembered her saying just before they left the Settlement. “You’re my angel.”

  Who was she talking to?

  Marcus

  Marcus’s left leg wouldn’t bend.

  The knee, exposed just below the thin gown, was puffy and pink, razors pulsing inside it. He swallowed a slick of bile, the knob in his throat sore, neck stiff.

  Muddled thoughts melted into globs of nonsense. Sifting them for an explanation was like looking for clean water in a mud hole. He just couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t feel the world around him.

  He would’ve killed me.

  Marcus couldn’t stop Paul, not like he had in the cabin; couldn’t sense the enraged man’s thoughts, couldn’t reach inside him to manipulate his desires, to lock his muscles. To save his ass.

  Marcus was the prey.

  What has become of me?

  His ribs sang with each inhalation, the back of his head throbbed. Paul and Jamie were exactly as he expected them to be, even smelled of freshly fabricated biomites—the scent of baked earth. Marcus smelled of sweat, pungent and ripe. Dead skin.

  “Where are you?” he said. “What have you done? Answer me! What have you done?”

  Mother was gone.

  He couldn’t see her, couldn’t feel her. Not since she first appeared to him all those years ago had she felt so distant. As if she never existed. Never had she abandoned him, not like this. He was in need. She was the one that fabricated his body, showed him the truth, sent him on this mission.

  “What have you done to me?” he murmured.

  There was movement in the
hallway. A door slid open and closed, and then there was silence. Marcus’s heart fluttered; anxious threads of fear tugged his chest. He hoped it was Paul and Jamie leaving, but he’d wait to confirm. He was not ready for another confrontation.

  This was not the plan.

  The monitors were black, the floor littered with debris. He sat in the dark office, his raspy breath filling the silence.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  The monitors scattered. A fractured image flickered on the main one, jagged lines splintering palm trees where the back of his head smashed the glass. Marcus spun the chair, his heel dragging across the floor, a fiery slick of pain lighting up his knee.

  An island. A fucking island.

  A speck of land so isolated that the United States Air Force couldn’t find it. It would take a day to reach the nearest land by water. How did any of this get out here?

  How did we get out here?

  The buildings were clustered on one end of the island, mostly shrouded in wilderness. Something moved across a wide patch of grass. Marcus pulled closer to the monitor.

  Two people. Paul and Jamie, he guessed. One of them carried a bundled white sheet.

  Is this a live feed?

  The sophistication of technology was cutting edge even for a laboratory located in the middle of an industrial park. How could all of this get out here? And where was the power coming from?

  “What is this place?” The words hurt his throat. “Why are we here?”

  The views changed but only served to show different angles of a large bank of solar panels and a row of wind turbines on the north shore; there was also a small power plant of generators wired to tidal harvesters. None of his questions, though, were answered beyond what the island looked like.

  He hobbled into the hallway. The silver door of an elevator was to his left, three lights over it. The one on the left was lit. The first floor.

  He used the handrail to reach the end of the corridor, dragging the useless leg along the way. A cool draft slipped through the open back of the gown, his buttocks exposed. He was panting when he pressed his hand against the cool glass and looked across the island from what appeared to be the second floor. A sharp blue line of water slit the horizon.