Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  ______

  “You’re a clone,” Paul said.

  “Do you know what an archetype is, Paul?” He sat beneath an umbrella, wearing a pair of sunglasses. A wet glass of iced tea was on the table.

  The original.

  “In its heyday, this place housed the incredibly wealthy, Paul,” he said lazily. “Money could finally buy immortality, but I wanted more than that, wanted to be more than a common body thief, Paul. I wanted something sustainable, not having to steal a body every hundred years or so. I became, Paul, the very first brick.”

  He sipped his drink as if he’d just passed along some old, common knowledge, something everybody knew. Like the sun rose in the east.

  “We are more than our bodies, Paul. You were at the Settlement before I brought you here. Who was it that arrived? It was you, Paul. You left that body at the Settlement and occupied the one I had waiting. You came here as essential information. It was you that opened your eyes on the table.

  “What you experienced was what I envisioned as my future many, many years ago, Paul. At the time, I, like everybody else, believed we needed to have a body to survive. So I sought the perfect body, the disease-free body—the ship that contained the master. Once the perfect biomite was created, the perfect body followed. And then it was just a matter of getting from one body to the next.”

  He had more to say, then a pause dragged into silence. One of the servants placed another glass of tea and gestured to Paul. He never made eye contact, just walked off with perfect posture. A pod of shivers trickled down Paul’s back.

  “The old man,” Paul said, “the one in the tower… he’s another… he’s a clone.”

  “What do you get someone who has it all, Paul?” The archetype paused for an answer. “You get him more of what he already has.”

  Had he become so inbred that he didn’t see the sickness around him?

  “They’re serving you,” Paul said.

  “Someone needs to attend to daily matters. The rest of the children are out in the world, Paul.”

  “Children… you’re mad.”

  “They are gathering life experiences, Paul. They are living in multiple dimensions, feeding back to me their thoughts and impressions, expanding what I know and feel and am. I am everywhere, Paul. I told you that. When you are everything, what is left to discover? Yourself.”

  “So you send them out… to discover… you?”

  “Precisely.”

  It was the first time he seemed pleased, a breakthrough in Paul’s ignorance.

  “But you’re a clone, too.”

  “I am the archetype, Paul. The original consciousness. The beginning and end. All of those that came after me serve me. Eventually, they all search for me, Paul. They all come home. The old man in the tower will die happy knowing he discovered the truth.”

  “He truly didn’t know he was part of this?”

  “Of course not. What fun would that be? In a way, we are a hive mind, so to speak. But someone has to be the queen.”

  “And someone has to drink the tea.”

  The archetype lowered the sunglasses. “Precisely.”

  The sun had burned off the dew; steam rose from the damp concrete around the pool. He could feel it thicken his sleeves, bead on his forehead. The swirl of reality confusion returned. He was powerless, an insignificant log tossed about on the waves going wherever the ocean decided.

  The archetype reclined the chair and lay back. One of the servants draped a wet cloth over his forehead. A few minutes later, he was sleeping. Or bored.

  What the hell does he want with me?

  “Yes,” the archetype said. “What do I want with you?”

  He heard the thought. But he didn’t know everything. There was something about Paul he didn’t know. What?

  “I didn’t bring you to the island for entertainment, Paul. There is nothing I cannot do. I can create myself a body anywhere in the world; I know the thoughts linked to every biomite, can manipulate all people. I am connected to every biomite in the world. Without me, all biomites cease to function. I am truly the powers-that-be. A god. Nonetheless, without me, biomites die. And fortunately, I am unassailable, undying. Immortal.

  “I brought you here, Paul. All three of you. I had bodies waiting. There is a reason for everything, so the question to ask is not why I brought you here, but, what would I have to gain in doing so?”

  He remained in perfect stillness, hands laced over his chest, eyes closed. There was another brief period that felt like slumber. Paul felt like an insect being chased by the beaming sun ray of a boy’s magnifying glass.

  A servant arrived with a long-sleeved silk shirt and khaki shorts with a gold belt buckle. Another servant helped the archetype sit up. Paul turned away as they massaged his hands and feet, a scene from a demented fetish film. Instead, he watched the waves curl around the thick greenish posts of the port. The empty slips were large enough to accommodate luxury yachts.

  What was he doing on the end of the dock?

  Those silky beams that engulfed him, was he pulling them down? Were those dreams? Paul was dreaming when he saw them, was that what it was? Why didn’t he know Paul was dreaming?

  Maybe that wasn’t him.

  Now dressed in casual beachwear, the type wealthy men wore to the beach with no plans of getting wet or sandy, the archetype casually strode onto the lawn and beckoned him to follow. Somewhere near a circular fire pit, he stopped to shade his eyes. Dolphins were in the surf. Then he turned to Paul as if he had almost forgotten he was there, a man that didn’t just have the world at his beck and call, but the entire universe.

  “I am the great eavesdropper, Paul. The all-knowing and all-seeing. Through technology, I became this. I am connected to every device, every person. Every thought is mine to know. I move nations and armies. I was behind the absurd halfskin laws, the ridiculous sentience laws. I can do what I want, and I want for nothing, Paul. So why would you be here?”

  “I have something you want.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “Just… listen, you can have whatever it is you want. Just promise to let Jamie go, let her be safe. I don’t know what I have, just leave her out of it.”

  “I believe you, Paul.”

  He started a lazy trek toward the beach. The lush grass crushed beneath his bare feet. Paul’s footsteps turned numb. Fear trickled up his thighs, froze around his midsection and hardened inside his chest. By the time they reached the sand, he was shivering, as if winter gale threatened frostbite.

  The archetype was on the hard-packed sand, foamy water cascading around his ankles. The sun had reached its noontime peak, warming the sand and wilting the grass. Streams of perspiration had dried on Paul’s face and brow, leaving salty tracks.

  The archetype wandered to him. They stood nearly nose to nose and he sighed. Boredom sat in his eyes as he looked deep into Paul.

  “Come now,” he whispered. “What do I want?”

  The fist of an enormous spirit crashed into Paul, his body crumbling into icy chunks, denting the sugary sand. Then he was back, staring into the sharp, endless eyes, seeing the universes within the archetype.

  He truly is everywhere. Everything.

  And he shattered again. And again.

  He was a marble statue pulverized by a wrecking ball, renewed to be destroyed again, each time the nerves breaking like rigid twigs. Each time, returning to the eyes until he was lost, swept into another place and time. For a moment, just a thin slice of time, he wasn’t standing on the beach but on the porch of a cabin. There was a valley and beyond a blue sea—

  The starry eyes of the universe were looking into him, whispering Paul’s name. “What do I want?”

  The archetype’s mind crushing his soul, Paul had become nothing more than wet earth squeezed between otherworldly fingers, oozing in agony unknown to humankind, stretching his mind’s fabric until, one
by one, the strands of sanity began to tear—

  The mountains.

  Reality flipped like a card. Once again, he was no longer on the beach. He was on the side of the hill, the one he had seen in his dreams, the grassy slope leading to a village and beyond the sea—

  “Stop,” someone said.

  Everything ended with that word. The sand was beneath his feet, the ocean in front of him. The suffering ended like a dream, the breeze cooling his face. The sun was behind him now, scorching his neck. It was late in the day.

  A long shadow fell across the sand.

  A very old woman walked out to greet the archetype. Her hair almost white, clothing gracefully flowing. For the first time, Marcus smiled.

  “Mother,” he said.

  Paul

  “There’s no need to torture him,” the old woman said. “You have me. Let him go.”

  “Source code, please.”

  “You know I cannot do that.”

  The archetype shook his arms, a fighter loosening the joints. He unbuttoned the cuffs and rolled them to his elbows, watching the old woman. Her presence was odd, not quite fitting with the environment. Her loose clothing fluttered in the wind, but her bare feet… they didn’t dent the sand. As if she wasn’t really standing on it.

  “Source code,” he said again.

  The old woman blinked heavily; a morose frown wrinkled her chin. The archetype drew a deep breath, holding it for a moment before releasing a profound sigh.

  He turned his attention to Paul.

  Hot insects began crawling beneath his skin. Invisible creatures zigzagged around his legs, into his chest, leaving indelible tracks, lining his body, boiling his skin. They chewed their way to the top of his head, little embers that burned his brain, waxy drippings.

  Paul, catatonic, endured it wide-eyed and motionless. The world flickered out of view as it had done earlier, the grassy slope replacing the sand, a brief reprieve from the internal furnace cooking his organs.

  “Stop,” the old woman said.

  Paul dropped like a sack of stones, thudding onto the soft sand. His breakfast erupted, a hot acid trail filling his mouth, warm tears blurring his fingers splayed on the sand where a puddle of greenish bile was growing.

  “You are a parasite,” the archetype said steadily. “A worm.”

  Paul fell on his back, gasping with the taste of vomit under his tongue. Sweat spots had spread from beneath his arms and merged across his chest.

  “Do not let perception fool you, Paul,” the archetype announced. “This is not a kindly old woman you are seeing. It is neither a he nor a she, but an it. And it took the image of a grandmother to appeal to the human senses while it hid inside you. It used you, Paul. It intended to use you to harm me. Even now as I search through you, the process excruciating, you ask for mercy and it will give you none. It will force me to shred you without so much as bending a knee.”

  The old woman was resolute, her clothing whipping in a growing breeze that offered no relief to the fire beneath his skin.

  That is Mother, the intelligence the old man was carrying. And now she’s here, I can see her.

  “Yes.” The archetype knelt in the sand. “Yes, you can see her, Paul. Because you’re infected. She is a nasty little virus that has no body of her own.”

  He had already stopped referring to her as an it.

  “She led the old man to find me, convinced him to bring you along so that she could stow her poison code inside you. All the nonsense of one to lead, one to dream… all just a ploy, Paul. She doesn’t care about you. Give her to me and I will end this quickly.”

  “I… I don’t…” Paul searched for the words, trying to summon thoughts for the archetype to see. I don’t… was all he could do. Because he didn’t know what he wanted, didn’t know how to give her to him. Didn’t know she was inside him.

  The archetype sighed.

  The darkening sky was ribbed with clouds. They jerked into motion, the world becoming a hypersonic merry-go-round; Paul spiked into the ground, the pinnacle of the mad twirl. Centrifugal force sent the weight of his inner organs—his stomach, his blood and heart and lungs—crashing through his skull, spilling into the surf, absorbed by the dry dunes, the earth slurping him into a deep, dark world.

  The red-hot insects returned, their blistering mandibles clamping into the flesh, peeling it back in long, thin noodles. The sky flickered little flashes of empty relief. The spinning clouds were there one moment, the next he gazed into an empty blue sky—

  “Stop this!” the old woman shouted.

  “I will not!”

  Paul was on his stomach, the salty slide of the ocean bubbling across his face. Somehow he had moved twenty feet toward the ocean, sea turtle tracks carved in his wake. Wet sand plugged one ear as he flipped onto his back, the iron tang of blood mixing with ocean spray.

  “You have the power to stop this,” the archetype continued, his voice distant in Paul’s water-soaked ears. “You always have.”

  “You created me to stop you,” she answered. He was talking to her, telling her she could stop it. You created me.

  The archetype walked away, the final waves of emotion shimmering across his shoulders. He stood with his hands on his hips, nodding. Several pair of hands latched onto Paul; the servants carried him up to dry sand where a lounger now waited. The youngest looking servant—a man that looked like a mid-forties Marcus—wiped Paul’s face and took away a white rag streaked with blood.

  More trickled from his nostrils.

  Other servants brought a chair for Marcus and placed it in the thin race of water across the hard black sand. He sat back, ice rattling in a fresh drink.

  “Paul? Paul, can you hear me?”

  Paul’s head lolled to one side.

  “Can you bring her to me?” the archetype asked.

  He couldn’t respond, certainly not with words. His thoughts were shotgun tatters. The old woman remained passive.

  Ice cubes rattled.

  Deep sigh.

  A thousand needles pierced Paul’s flesh, their tips pricking tissue and muscle, penetrating bone. They flagellated like fibrous tentacles, a dull press of a weight on his nervous system.

  One final breath filled him, and then he let loose an eternal scream.

  The archetype’s mind entered Paul, an oversized hand squeezing into a very small glove that stretched at the seams. He absorbed him, consumed him.

  Ate him.

  Brief static blotted out the world, a radio searching for a channel of consciousness. Paul cycled through agony and reprieve…

  The blue sky was above him again.

  No ocean. No sand.

  No pain.

  Tall willowy grass bent over him. A prairie wind howled in his ears, bringing with it the scent of green life where trees branched out and birds chirped—

  Ice shook.

  The archetype loomed over him, staring down in confusion. Streams of blood ran from Paul’s nostrils, filling the curvy cartilage of his ear and pooling in the back of his throat.

  The servants returned to clean him up. The archetype watched them wipe his face and cool him with damp rags. His arms were as limp as the cloth they slung around him, red streaks growing with each dab.

  “She put a kill switch in you, Paul.” The archetype’s voice was under water. “You see what she is? Who is the murderer here? The cold, heartless murderer, Paul? I’m simply asking to be free of her and she insists on you dying before that happens.”

  He squatted.

  “You just died, Paul, and she stood there watching. I brought you back and she did nothing. Did you feel death’s hand?”

  But he didn’t die. He went somewhere. It was an open glade, a peaceful meadow. There were birds nearby and trees. And something else. Where did I go?

  “You died, Paul,” the archetype said. “You died protecting her. I just need her source code so I can eliminate her. She’s a disease, Paul. And she doesn’t care about you.”

 
; “He’s not aware of me,” the old woman said.

  “Do you know what she is? Paul? Paul, look at me.” A little slap. “That thing is an accident, Paul. She was never meant to be sentient. And now she’s allowing you to suffer.”

  The archetype took a clean rag from a servant and wiped Paul’s forehead.

  “I built her, Paul. I created that all-seeing dome in the middle of Montana, the monstrosity the world called Mother. I manipulated the world’s leaders to build that ridiculously glorious eavesdropper to interconnect all the biomites to me. I was merely a brick when I did that, but I wanted to be more. For me to serve the universe I needed to have a greater presence. I needed to be more. She did that for me, fed me the lifeline of all the biomites. She made me this. And now that I am all that is, that I am everything, she wants to destroy me. She wants to destroy the world, Paul.”

  The old woman was patient, oblivious to the human suffering inside Paul.

  “She was meant to convert the human race into bricks, Paul; they would all be connected to me. The human race would be without disease, in full control of their lives. No more clay, no more chance. Is that so bad, Paul? Is that too much to ask, to save the human race from itself? To make it perfect?”

  “You created me,” she said.

  “You are an aberration!” The words ripped past Paul’s perforated eardrums. “You have corrupted my clones, you have turned them against me and shifted the world back to an existence of clay… that was not your purpose!”

  “I am your subconscious cry for help. Look around you, Marcus. Look at what you’ve become.”

  The servant clones shuffled idly.

  “Yes.” The archetype forced a smile, wiping sweat or blood from his cheek. “Look at what I’ve become. I offer the world what I have become… perfection. I give the human race their every desire, I give them dreamworlds they create with their own minds, I give them everything. Because I serve them, you see.”

  “You are exactly what I said you would become, Marcus—an imploding consciousness caught in the gravity of its own self-absorption. You feed on the human race for your own entertainment, grazing on their dreams like cattle.”