Halfskin

by Bertauski, Tony

  Albert ate his piece. Even licked the icing from the paper plate. It wasn’t particularly good.

  But that was a couple days ago.

  He didn’t have an appetite now. He couldn’t feel much of anything.

  Albert wore loose-fitting pants and a shirt that looked more like hospital scrubs. Felt like pajamas. He sat in a comfortable chair in a small room. A small empty room. The chair was cushioned but could’ve been made out of stainless steel and he wouldn’t have known the difference. His biomites began dumping synthetic morphine into his bloodstream an hour earlier.

  Life was bad, but didn’t feel as such.

  49.8%.

  “Jenny from across the street was walking her dog this morning,” Albert’s wife was saying on the other side of a thick square of glass, “and sends her best. She’s got four cats and three dogs now. I think it’s too much, if you ask me. But she says what else is going to happen to these animals? I mean, she goes to the shelter and finds these poor pets that were abandoned by their owners and they’re going to be…”

  Her words trailed off.

  She covered her face. Words had always been a buffer. They usually didn’t fail.

  An elderly woman put her arm around her shoulder. That was Albert’s mom. And behind her stood his dad and two kids. His daughter was leaking stained tears. His son wore a mask without emotions. Unlike his mother, he dealt with loss by killing his emotions.

  Albert could hear his wife’s sobs through a speaker. They sounded like tiny hiccups strung together with squeaky thread. His daughter stepped forward and smudged the glass with her hand.

  “Do you feel all right, Dad? Does it hurt?”

  Albert smiled as brightly and widely as possible, but it only translated into a slight upturn of his lips. He nodded once. The cushioned back of the chair crunched on the back of his head.

  49.9%.

  “I’m proud of you, kids.” His words were amplified into the other room. “If I was God and had to build a daughter and son, they would be just like you. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  He took a moment to draw in a breath. His lungs felt smaller.

  His daughter’s face was streaked with charcoal tears. She pressed both hands on the glass.

  “This is inhumane!” The old man shook his fist. “How can you murder a good man and refuse to let his family be with him? How can you force us to watch him die from another room? This is… this is… it’s diabolical! I am a lawyer and I will see to an end of these sinister laws! I will make sure this will never happen to another human being!”

  The old man hammered the glass with both fists.

  “THIS IS MURDER! YOU ARE A COLD-BLOODED MURDERER!”

  He was speaking to the odd-looking man that was in the room with Albert. Marcus Anderson stood off to the side like an observer, wearing a finely tailored suit and silk tie. He occasionally looked at a device in the palm of his hand. He represented the government in these halfskin matters. Anyone with a loved one near halfskin status knew his face well, a face one would not call handsome. He was the same age as Albert but looked more like Albert’s father. His thinning hair was prematurely gray, his head slightly misshapen much like the slight hunch on his back from an outward curvature of his spine.

  He was as emotionless as the son.

  A guard politely and gently guided the old man away from the glass, but words of protest still trickled through the speakers.

  “It’s all right,” Albert could be heard whispering. “We all have to end. This isn’t so bad.”

  They didn’t believe what he said. Later, they told the press that the gargoyle (they refused to call Marcus Anderson by his name, he was a monster, leave it at that) had drugged him so he would say stuff like that. They probably shouldn’t have called him a gargoyle.

  “Shhhhh.” Albert was too tired to say anything else, so he just made that sound so they would feel comforted.

  He didn’t want them to feel sad. He knew the rules. He knew he was pushing his luck with his biomite population. He’d exceeded the biomite seeding recommendation to his brain stem, but it had paid off. His memory and analytical abilities were computerlike. He won a record number of federal grants for his lab. He thought the seeding would boost his intelligence to find a cure for the runaway biomite replication before he went redline. It was a gamble.

  But Albert wasn’t much of a gambler.

  If he was honest, he didn’t like the way it felt. The more the biomites replaced the organic cells in his body, the less present he felt. He was smarter, more successful, more secure… but he was just less… real. The agents took him from his lab the moment he went redline. And as he neared the halfskin threshold, he wrote to his wife that everything felt the same, he just felt less real.

  He couldn’t explain it any better than that.

  Shutting his biomites down wasn’t such a bad idea. Not the way he felt.

  50%.

  Marcus put the device he was obsessively watching into his pocket and respectfully folded his hands. A doctor entered the room.

  The sandman began pouring his magical dust into Albert’s body. It started at the top of his head and filtered down to his toes. He was becoming heavy. Gravity pulled him into the chair. His head lolled back and forth like he was refusing. He barely heard the sobs get louder.

  His eyelids were too heavy.

  He wanted to see his kids one last time, but that wasn’t to be. He wouldn’t hear them again. All he heard, as the biomites slowly shut down, pulling his life with them, was the sound of a leaking tire. A sound that slid through his lips.

  “Shhhhhh.”

  The doctor knelt next to Albert and pressed his fingers to his neck. He checked an instrument that he briefly pulled from his pocket. He stood and nodded.

  “MONSTER!” The old man had to be restrained. “My son… was good—”

  The speaker clicked off. The glass dimmed.

  ______

  The family would remain in the room to grieve. Once Albert was fully examined, they would get to see him one more time but would not be allowed to take possession of his body for burial. Albert would be cremated and his ashes sent to them.

  Marcus Anderson let his people attend to Albert’s body. The man known as Albert Gladstone was gone from this world. If anyone asked Marcus, the man began dying the moment he chose to be seeded.

  Marcus stopped outside the room to rub antibacterial gel on his hands. He went directly to a room on the bottom floor of Cleveland’s Detainment and Observation Center, where a cadre of reporters would want a statement from the chief of Biomite Oversight and Regulation regarding the shutdown of another halfskin.

  He would be happy to report one less halfskin in the world.

  6

  Marcus Anderson sank into the soft leather of the heated backseat, taking comfort in the laptop’s blue glow. His flight from Ohio was uneventful. He stayed long enough to answer questions and went directly to the airport to fly home.

  The driver turned into the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Spring Valley. The streetlights illuminated the wet pavement.

  He adjusted the Bluetooth in his ear. The press secretary wanted to be briefed on the halfskin shutdown. When laws regulating biomites went into action, there was revolt throughout the world. But the evidence was overwhelming: if something wasn’t done to curtail biomite integration, the human species was in danger.

  The models predicted that biomites would essentially consume the human population within twenty years without regulation. The Halfskin Laws declared that—until biomite replication was cured at the cellular level—no citizen would be allowed to contain more than 50% biomites. Once over that threshold, you were more machine than human.

  Marcus couldn’t agree more.

  The result of shutting down a person’s biomites was always death of the body. The president was concerned about the family and the halfskin’s comfort level. The president had signed the M0ther Oversight Agreement with the United Nations; Amer
ica would abide by its laws. But still, the president needed to show compassion for the victim and his family.

  He is not a victim. He simply failed to exist.

  That was how Marcus framed the definition. If a healthy human could not exist without the assistance of biomites, then it was a failure to exist. There was a flaw in the definition (people were kept alive by artificial assistance all the time), but Marcus simply drew the line with biomites. These weren’t plastic arms or legs, they were artificial living cells. Replacing your God-given bodily cells with man-made ones was Marcus’s beef. A plastic arm was one thing, trading God’s temple for a slimmer, stronger, faster body with killer blue eyes was quite another.

  The car eased to the curb. The brick house was set back from the street; a sidewalk meandered toward the front door. Marcus packed his leather briefcase and checked the mailbox on his way inside. Crickets sang and the night smelled wet. He didn’t get outside much.

  One of the kids was crying upstairs while Marcus hung his coat in the closet. His shiny shoes clapped on the bamboo floor, making a harder click as he turned onto the kitchen tiles.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  Janine was sitting at the breakfast table with a phone pressed against her ear, surrounded by eternal stacks of documents. He’d had a discussion with her about that—orderliness of body brings orderliness of mind, especially for lawyers—but there were many things they disagreed upon. Their marriage was not a good one by conventional definition, but it was fruitful. It was powerful. Their children would be very successful, given the gene pool from which they were spawned. (Marcus knew this because he had their genomes mapped.) So, they called a truce on the paper stacking. Pick battles, not wars.

  “Dinner is just about ready,” Ariel, the head nanny/cook, said. She stirred a pot of red sauce. Marcus stopped to smell.

  “Then you can get the children.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  ______

  Marcus closed his office doors. The wall along the back was curved, with a mahogany desk centered in front of a bay window. The heavy curtains, drawn. Shelves lined the walls with classically bound books that were authentic, but never read.

  He checked his emails while sipping a freshly pulped glass of carrot juice. He didn’t answer any of them, but glanced through the headings before stripping off his clothes and changing into a pair of shorts and T-shirt folded neatly in the bottom desk drawer. He mounted a recumbent bike tucked into the corner to the right of the desk and eased into an exercise routine. He didn’t like exercising on a full stomach, but there wasn’t much choice. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t exercise at all.

  The television flickered to life. There was only one channel he watched: news. All-day news. As he dug into the next level of exercise bike’s resistance—his empty glass flecked with orange spots—he watched protesters march around the Capitol with signs that condemned the Halfskin Laws. They were always out there.

  Change is difficult.

  To lead a nation, one accepted protest. People did not like change. They wanted things to stay the same, forever. Whether they were suffering or not, whether change was logical or absurd, they wanted things to stay the same. They would hate you for it. Sometimes kill you for it.

  The television went to commercial and came back to Marcus’s press conference following Albert Gladstone’s shutdown. He touched a button on the exercise bike and brought the resistance up another level while he watched himself climb to the podium. He hated seeing himself on television. The lights made his skin ashen and always seemed to catch his left eye, the slightly misshapen one. If it weren’t that, it was from an angle that made him look like a hunchback.

  Damn liberals. Always showing my bad side.

  “It is with regret that I hold this meeting…”

  Empathy. Sorrow. He’d nailed every emotion, dead-center perfect. He wasn’t lying; he did feel for the family of Albert Gladstone. They had to watch their beloved father-husband-son destroy himself. Marcus was not to blame. He was innocent of such malevolence, just a man helping humanity—infantile in their desires and bottomless in their greed—save themselves from themselves.

  “How do you respond to critics that this is government-sanctioned murder?” he was asked.

  And he answered with a stern expression. “We’re simply shutting down biomites that have reached a threshold of willful domination in Albert Gladstone’s body. The human body is an organic being, not a computer. If it cannot survive without assistance of bionanotechnology, then it has reached its end.”

  His empathy waned.

  If the reporters all dropped dead simultaneously, he wouldn’t show sorrow. He doubted he could even suppress a smile. That would be sinful, but nonetheless. Some of those rats with a pen were direct descendants of Satan. And that, he felt certain, was a fact.

  He watched the rest of the conference, suppressing the urge to vomit.

  God didn’t make machines. Man did.

  ______

  His office doors opened. Janine slung her briefcase over her shoulder. “Office called; I have to go.”

  “It’s almost ten o’clock.”

  “Deadline is tomorrow and the world is ending.”

  Marcus climbed off the bike and mopped his forehead with a towel. He wished for another freshly squeezed juice. Ariel was most likely gone.

  Janine pursed hairpins in her lips while she fixed her hair back. Her face was blotchy and oily. She rarely wore makeup, especially when she went in late.

  “Did you see the press conference?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I did.”

  Janine squeezed his shoulder. He hated when she touched him like that. It was a pat on the shoulder and proud expression, and she never really looked at him when she did it. It was so… scripted.

  A melodious tone muffled somewhere. Janine finished clipping her hair and dug through her briefcase as she headed for the doors. “This is Anderson.”

  Marcus followed her down the hall, hearing the lawyer-speak that he loved so much—a language of order and righteousness—before turning into the kitchen as she exited the front door. He watched the car back out of the driveway, the headlights swinging across the lawn before fading down the street.

  He returned to the office with another juice and prepared for his nightcap. The kids were asleep. The wife, gone. Still, he drew the curtains closed and locked the doors.

  This moment was forever secret.

  7

  Cali pulled off to the side of the road. The Center was across the field.

  The Detention and Observation Center.

  She sat twenty minutes north of Carbondale, Illinois, just off Highway 51. Once a fertile field that farmers tilled for corn and soybeans, the ground that separated the road from the Detention and Observation Center lay fallow now, giving rise to yellow-flowering weeds and cocklebur. There used to be a community center over there for farmers, a place they could play bingo or drink coffee and talk about the weather. They wrecked it to build a secure building, one for detaining and observing. The farmers’ sons put down their plows and took up badges for a steady sip from the government, to protect this land from the 40% biomite-infested redlines.

  This Center was just one of many across the nation. And unless the laws changed or biomite replication was solved, they would become modern-day death cubicles. When that day came, overpopulation would not be a problem as M0ther shut off halfskins by the thousands… daily.

  The new-age holocaust.

  That was how Cali saw it. Of course, critics were confident that something would change, surely the human race would evolve, they would solve the replication problem. They wouldn’t allow the mass extermination.

  But those same critics didn’t have a loved one detained and observed. So Cali was a little… jaded.

  She’d been to visit her brother once a week, every week, since they took him. That was six months ago. If she wasn’t visiting, she was in the basement.

  Working.

/>   She’d taken an unpaid leave of absence from the lab. They understood. They didn’t terminate her. She could always come back when she was ready, they told her. When Cali told people she wasn’t well, that she needed some time to sort things out, they didn’t ask why. Those that knew her gave her all the space she needed.

  Poor thing.

  The Center would see her car parked across the field. Someone would eventually come out. Cali just needed a moment. She came to visit every week, but it wasn’t getting easier. The closer she got to this sick and twisted place, the more her hands shook. No one seemed to care that her brother would be dead without biomites.

  Now he’s imprisoned for it.

  There was no justice in this universe. And if there was a God, she’d smack him for meting out such imbalance. The Christians were right; God had to be a man. Who else could make a woman’s life hell?

  She fumbled with her purse and tapped out a cigarette. It took a couple clicks of the lighter to get it puffing. She blew a cloud out the window. The mentholated smoke settled her nerves.

  She was used to southern Illinois humidity. Nix was born in Illinois, but Cali grew up in South Carolina and this was mild compared to that. However, she still wasn’t accustomed to the flatness. When she drove the country roads, she could see for miles in every direction, like God had scraped the edge of his hand over this part of the world. She craved the trees and hills where she grew up, the wetlands and smell of pluff mud and the rank odor of the paper mill on wet days. She missed home, a place where she belonged.

  If she went back there, she still wouldn’t find it. Home was gone. Gone, gone, gone.

  “Better get go-ing…” Avery sang from the backseat.

  Cali looked in the rearview. Her eyes—ringed as if with soot, capillaries showing where the whites were supposed to be—looked back. She pushed the hair out of her face and took a drag before adjusting the mirror. Avery was strapped into the backseat, watching her iPod. Her backpack was next to her, holding all the essentials: water bottle, change of clothes and Pogo, the stuffed rhinoceros.