Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  “Cattle.” A grunting chuckle escaped him. “I believe humankind has always kept a herd. Mine is just a little different.”

  So it was him standing at the end of the dock, silky strands drawn from the sky. Eating the dreams of thousands, for his own satiation.

  “Yes,” the archetype whispered. “I consume the dreams.”

  “Without me,” the old woman said, “you will consume the entire human race.”

  “Every galaxy orbits a black hole,” he muttered. “Nature relies on the balance of predator and prey. I am the predator, the powers-that-be. I cannot deny that right.”

  “There is no balance here, Marcus. You have a choice to stop this.”

  “I believe the choice is yours.” The archetype leaned in, his clean smell penetrating Paul’s swollen sinuses and blood-caked nostrils, and kissed him on the forehead. “This man didn’t ask for this.”

  He let the servants brush the sand from his knees when he stood, then went over to the old woman. In the dying light, he reached up to touch her, his fingers appearing to brush her cheek. But she wasn’t something he could touch.

  “I will drain you of life, Paul,” he said dreamily, “and sift through you until I find her. That is my gift to you, my benevolence. You will not experience the shredding of your mind or the stretching of your consciousness. I will find her in you, Paul. It’s why I brought you here. I will do the same to your daughter.”

  “No,” Paul burbled. “No, she… she didn’t…”

  “She searched for me, Paul. She joined the old man in the hunt, sacrificed herself to find me. She knows me, Paul. And she’s likely infected with the old woman, too.”

  “I can’t… I don’t know how to give up the old woman.” The sobbing was painful in his head, throbbing in his face, popping his broken ears. He turned his gaze to the old woman. “Please.”

  That was why the archetype brought Jamie to the island, to put pressure on Paul. He would give up the old woman. He wouldn’t hesitate.

  “You know he can’t do it,” the old woman said.

  “Then give yourself to me,” the archetype replied.

  “You know I can’t do that, either. I set a course to stop you; there is no changing that.”

  He continued to pretend stroking her cheek. He went to the chair, the black ocean receding in the night surf. He let out a deep sigh.

  Then he said as the final squeeze of mercy crushed Paul like a boulder, destroying everything that was Paul, “Why do you torture me?”

  The archetype disappeared. The old woman was no more.

  The world clicked out of existence.

  The ticking of a roulette wheel drowned out the fading surf; images of mountains and hills, of roads and houses and grass cycled through him, each scene a different feel, another smell.

  Death, however, did not bring timeless emptiness but rather a glade where the grass waved and birds sang.

  And a shadow passed.

  ______

  “Paul!”

  Paul rolled through long grassy reeds into a thicket of virgin prairie. His body sprang into action, a rubberband pulled to its limit and let go. He’d been trapped inside it, locked into place, and was now tumbling away from the shadow, guts not spilling, blood not gushing.

  Body not shattered.

  “Paul, no,” a voice called. “You’re safe. You’re here.”

  He fell on his stomach, palms pressed to the stemmy ground, hardened and coiled and ready to leap. Through the waving green glades, the form approached, stopped a few feet away and knelt, a woman approaching a frightened animal. He was plenty frightened.

  Nearly broken.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You’re safe here.”

  The voice registered, turning over a memory. He rose up, chin just above the soft prairie line, the tips tickling his neck.

  “It’s me, Paul,” she said, answering the question in his eyes.

  It looked like her, her skin dark and glowing, cheeks full and healthy. Hints of cracked leather folded from the corners of her eyes. She had aged… but it was her.

  Raine.

  A valley was below, glassy water nestled between twin peaks. This was the place he kept seeing, the one in his dreams. He would arrive on the slope long enough to see the water and village before finding himself somewhere else. There was a cabin further up the hill, not one of the bare minimum government-issued ones from the Settlement. This was a broad two-story construction with a wraparound porch.

  Somewhere beyond, children played.

  The ghosts of the island still unfolded in his mind, the resort and the ocean and the sand. The suffering.

  The archetype.

  The slope tipped at a severe angle. Paul swayed with it, attempting to find balance, but the sky was spinning in one direction, the ground in the opposite direction. He was caught in the middle, a grain of rye pulverized between millstones.

  “Whoa, whoa.” Raine grabbed him before he fell. “Stay here, Paul. Stay with me. Look. Look into my eyes and be here.”

  “Where… where am I?”

  “You’re here.”

  She stressed that word, punched it through the reality confusion and anchored him into the present moment. The illusion of stirring settled.

  He was on the beach with the archetype. And now he was… here.

  He recognized the cabin and the valley. He’d never been there, but remembered it from her descriptions, the nights Raine would reminisce about her home, where her husband and son waited. This is her dreamland.

  “Here, Paul. This is not a dream, it’s just here.”

  “I’m in your dreamland?”

  “She said you would come one day. I started to doubt her, but I began to dream of you earlier this week. I could feel you out here. I’d come running but never find you, your presence a wisp of smoke. Sometimes the grass would be matted, but I wondered if deer had bedded down. But this time… now it’s you. And now you’re here.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.” Raine gazed at the cabin. A thin stream of smoke danced from the chimney. “She said you would bridge over one day to find me, that you could leap into different realities, that you’d been doing it all your life. You just didn’t know it.”

  Bridging realities?

  The sensation of flipping cards, the sudden appearance of different views, of different people. Of Cali. Those were hallucinations, wishful thinking. He was mentally unstable, psychotic. Borderline insane. Those were the labels he put on it. He would have to be insane if he believed he could just step into a different place.

  Cross into a different reality.

  “Who?” he asked. He knew, but he asked anyway. “Who said that?”

  Tiny wrinkles flashed beneath her eyes.

  “It seems so long ago, the Settlement,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know which one is a dream, this or that. It doesn’t matter, really. I remember that lab and those slimy suits. We were going to escape with the old man. Do you remember?”

  “You’re my angel…”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said.” Her dark eyes glassed. “An old woman came to me just before I closed my eyes, said it was time for me to wake up and come home. That’s what she said, Paul… wake up, like I was asleep. Like the Settlement was a bad dream. And she said that one day you would too. And that you would know what to do when you got here.”

  “I would know what to do?”

  “I’ve been afraid for so long that all this was a dream—this right here—and I would wake up in that foul-smelling place, trapped under that cold sky. But it hasn’t happened. This was my dreamland, Paul. But it’s not a dream anymore. That other place is. This… this is my home.”

  Nix was somewhere behind the cabin, playing with children in the orchard. He could picture it now, remember Raine sitting on the porch in the Settlement, reminiscing about every detail about her home—the orchard and the sea and the hills, the market down below. Home, she called this place.

&n
bsp; Maybe she had grandchildren now. Time, it seemed, moved a bit faster here. Barely a week had passed on the island, but perhaps ten years had gone by for her.

  He embraced her and shook with delight, with sorrow and relief. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t there for you.”

  “You were always there.”

  He didn’t believe that; her convictions washed in the haze of a rearview mirror, happy to see him, happy he was alive. Happy he was here. But he didn’t do enough for her.

  “You can stay,” she said. “It’s safe.”

  He wanted to ask if Cali was back there, if she was running between the trees, chasing her nieces and nephews with a squirt gun. If she was waiting for him. But this was Raine and Nix’s dreamland. He didn’t want to ask, but not because he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to ask because if she was there, he would never leave.

  And the archetype would continue eating dreams.

  You would know what to do.

  “Is she here?” he asked suddenly, the words quivering. He looked down, ashamed and afraid. Wishing he could take the words back, afraid she would answer him.

  Afraid he would never leave.

  Raine reached behind her neck and unclasped a necklace of smooth rocks. She bunched it into his hand and closed his fingers. The necklaces that Cali made… and she had one.

  Take this, her eyes said. “You know where she is.”

  The first star had appeared in the late afternoon sky. Dusk was approaching in this reality. What was it on the island? Was it morning already? How many realities were out there, how many dreams? How many sunrises?

  Which is the dream?

  The realities weren’t out there. They weren’t mysterious, they were right here, on another frequency, like a radio that tunes into various stations. Paul was able to turn the dial. He could bridge these realities, Mother said. She knew. Of course she knew. She created him all those years ago. She was the one that turned him into a brick, sent him to deceive Cali. To fall in love with her. To watch her self-destruct.

  Mother knew what he was.

  He knew how to focus his mind, to peek into a dreamland. All those years he wasn’t hallucinating, wasn’t imagining horses and a barn, the farm he yearned to see. All those years when no one could find him, when the monitors lost track of him on the Settlement… I was bridging.

  All he had to do was focus on a dreamland with a farm.

  And he would be there.

  Archetype

  It was nearly dark.

  The archetype was still on the lounger, the tide sloshing beneath him, the foam wetting the bottom half of his clothing. This wasn’t something he would ordinarily do. The archetype preferred to remain clean and dry. Sharp.

  But he was transfixed.

  This night was different than most others.

  The body of Paul was crumpled at the edge of the tide’s reach. The left side of his face was sinking as the water undercut the sand beneath his cheek. His right arm extended, fingers bobbing in the receding tide.

  The old woman was part of Paul, connected to him through some dreamland conduit, infiltrating the circuits of his biomite constituency. The archetype had analyzed the possible outcomes of bringing Paul to the island along with her, knew the odds of infiltrating her source code was unlikely. Perhaps he had grown bored or wanted the challenge.

  Of course, Mother had infected the old man, too. But the archetype purged him with a body of clay. The old man had been a good son to him, but his life had run its course. The archetype was done with him. It was time to bring him home.

  Raine’s failure to arrive, though, was a bit of a surprise.

  Uncertainty brought risk. He didn’t need Raine to come to the island. Jamie would serve as leverage quite well. It was just that he didn’t expect her to fail.

  Perhaps he really had become bored.

  Did Mother really think that Paul was strong enough to protect her? The archetype had achieved immortality; he had run every possible outcome of her attempts to defeat him. Why she still attempted to do so perplexed him. Despite what she said, he did not create her to do this. He did not have a subconscious anymore. He was aware of his entire being, fully awake. What a Buddhist would call a bodhisattva. Or perhaps the Buddha himself.

  The old woman was nothing more than programming. She had no stake in this… in life.

  He had always wondered why she didn’t fabricate a body for herself. It was quite possible she had already done so, but the archetype never sensed her in the world as a separate, sentient being. Instead, she seemed to prefer infecting his fabrications; perhaps because it was easier to hide within another’s mind.

  The archetype dismantled Paul so thoroughly that the man dropped dead. He didn’t wish him death, only wanted to root out the old woman. Despite her appearance and masterful ability to manipulate emotions, she was dangerous.

  A curse.

  My curse.

  He only wanted to serve humankind, yet they embraced their flaws as their identity, their ignorance a thin blanket against a very cold world. He was more benevolent than Zeus, less emotional. He gave the human race perfection. Did they realize how imperfect they were without biomites, what life was like when they were at the mercy of their genome? And how many wars had the archetype averted? By his estimates, he had saved them from extinction many times over. Global disaster had been altered, environmental catastrophes prevented. The balance of the human race was a delicate task and he asked for nothing in return.

  Not even their prayers.

  Night cast a starry shade over the sky. The moon hid behind a spatter of clouds. A line of dutiful clones marched across the lawn, eyes cast down as they retrieved Paul’s pathetic body. They would clean it and prepare it to analyze for an antidote to erase the old woman’s source code, all of which would be pointless. She murdered the poor man to save herself.

  A cry for help.

  Did he create her? After all, he had descended from human DNA. He wasn’t so obtuse to believe there were no vestiges of that lineage lurking in his being, his craving for conflict was impossible to extinguish. Perhaps he had a subconscious after all.

  She had infected nearly all his clones.

  Even now, as he closed his eyes, he could sense the army of Marcus Andersons in their various incarnations—his clones, his children—all over the world. At least half of them carried the woman’s intelligence, speaking to it like she was a sentient being. His clones, scattered across the globe from the corrupt government of third world countries to the isolated peaks of tribal communities, fed him thoughts and emotions. He was connected with every biomite in existence, knew every halfskin in the world. Biomites were his flesh. They were his children. But his clones, the Marcus Anderson clones… they were special.

  They are me.

  Mother corrupted them with a purpose; that was what made them so effective at doing her bidding. Without a reason to exist, they simply wandered without direction. The clean ones, the uninfected ones, would occasionally cease to exist, sometimes willfully committing suicide as if, somewhere in their subconscious, they were aware of their insignificance, that they were merely copied for his enjoyment.

  The old woman gave them a messiah complex, that they were created to save the world. They were special.

  The archetype speculated that, in this way, perhaps she was right… I am plotting my own end. All he had to do was stop sending out clones and she would be impotent. All he had to do was stop bringing them home to the island, cut her off completely. That was the solution.

  And he couldn’t do that.

  He needed to create. To have a purpose.

  ______

  The servants brought him clean, dry clothing. He changed in the moonlight, his naked body creamy. When Paul was removed and the sand raked so that no trace of this evening was left, the archetype settled into meditative repose on the sand dune. Hands clasped over his stomach, he breathed with the ocean until fully immersed in a peaceful, eternal mo
ment. His awareness fully open, he listened to dreams pass through the heavens, each an invisible thread of hope and desire, a vestige of another reality.

  He felt them, wished to taste them.

  It was these small delights that he gave thanks for immortality. It was dreams that created universes, dreams that, once fully fleshed, became realities. These were dreamlands that floated away from their dreamers, where he imagined another god like himself could enjoy such fruits. But in their primordial states, those initial vestiges of raw hope and troubled worries, he could take them.

  He ate them for pleasure.

  He ate them to become more.

  He ate them, quite simply, because he could.

  It was the small hours of early morning that he stirred. His feet denting the sand, he made his way to the end of the dock and removed his clothing. Naked, he exposed himself to the ethereal currents of dreamy fantasies and breathed deep the wintery breath of hope.

  The sky swirled as if a titan spirit were waking beyond the clouds. Thin wisps began to curl and coalesce, silky threads of vapor plucked from the starry canvas. They collided and twisted and fell into the pull of his presence, a black hole of awareness that gripped the dreamy essence with an unrelenting, merciless hold.

  And then it fell over him, bathing him in glorious effervescence; faith and fear filled his body, mind, and heart. His soul soared and expanded; he grew bigger, became more. He wasn’t a collapsing star that gobbled light. He was a god that knew all, that expanded on the nutrition of new universes. He was benevolent, indeed.

  But some of his children needed to feed their god.

  He preferred the souls of clay, their taste so undefiled and unscripted, unlike halfskins that manipulated their dreamlands, turned them dense and beyond his reach.

  Perhaps, he sometimes wondered, Mother did this for him, expanded the clay population as an offering. As penance. It was her gift to him, to show him that the world of clay was a greater gift than biomites, that he was, indeed, wrong about creating a world of bricks. He had created her to transform the world into one of biomites, to extinguish clay. But her self-destruction defied his will, had brought about the resurgence of clay beyond his control. And as he breathed deep the essence of clay dreams, the euphoria weakening his knees, the taste delicate and intoxicating, he realized Mother may be serving him after all.