Matthew Mather's Compendium

by Matthew Mather

  My phone chimed. I groaned but accepted the call. My boss’s face appeared.

  “Dr. Hedegaard, will we be seeing you in the lab today?” He wasn’t buying my excuses anymore. “I don’t need to remind you that you’re the leader of this project team. A physical presence is still required from time to time.”

  “Yes, yes,” I scowled. Even working from home, exhausted, I was keeping up with my workload, probably putting in twice the number of hours as anyone else. While not everyone had God-given intelligence, everyone could at least work hard, and my boss failed in both categories. For the hundredth time I asked myself why I submitted to working for him, for them.

  Weeks had passed since the dinner. I was ignoring calls from friends. When isolation overcame exhaustion, I’d take Buster out for short walks. The people passing me on the streets, the cars, the looming lampposts, the newspaper boxes with their horrific headlines—I saw everything as though from the bottom of a well. How can these people just chit-chat with each other? How does the world make any sense to them?

  I finally decided to attend another church meeting. I needed to find strength and salvation, to find some way out. Before arriving, I’d built up scenarios of how I would ignore Michael if I saw him, how I would give him a perfunctory hello and behave as if nothing had happened. As it turned out, he wasn’t there, and after the meeting, a desperation seeped in. Did something happen to him? Now I needed to know he was okay, even if I thought what he was doing wasn’t.

  Or was it?

  Who was he hurting? Nobody. I’d played back his phone messages over and over, his apologies, his clarifications for where the meat came from, that it was lab-grown replacement organs, that they weren’t butchers. Perhaps it was my own failure, my own closed mind that was the real problem. He might have explained it all to me first, but then I’d never have gone to his home. I thought about his friends that I’d spoken to there, how intelligent they were. Eating lab meat didn’t harm any animals, and it was genetically pure. The idea did make a certain…sense, I had to admit.

  After church, I rushed home and called him to accept his apology, to offer one of my own, but Michael didn’t answer.

  And he didn’t return my calls.

  ***

  “Five thousand dollars for peace of mind,” the med-world avatar said. I scrolled through the list of options: five grand for a liver patch, ten for whole one, twenty-five for a kidney and two hundred for a heart.

  Organ replacement was a big business.

  I’d done some research. Almost every time a human population faced an environmental collapse, it resorted to cannibalism as a way to rebalance: central Europe in the fifth millennium BC; the Anasazi in the 12th century; Papua New Guinea and Ukraine in the 20th century. The list went on and on as if it was a hardwired response to human-induced local ecosystem collapse. Now that local system spanned the entire planet. Human biomass would soon exceed 500 billion tons, more than any other single species, even Antarctic krill.

  What am I doing? I sighed and closed my tablet. Without missing a beat, the voice in my head answered, Why not, though? It’s not like I’d hurt anyone, and nobody needed to know.

  I made my decision.

  I logged back on and the med-world avatar said that I needed a medical center if I wanted a delivery made. One phone call later and I’d set-up a drop-off at a local clinic with my friend Mary. I finished our call with a promise to plan an evening together soon.

  Next thing, I was heading into the bathroom, wiping the inside of my mouth with a cotton swab and placing it into a double-sealed plastic bag. Moments later, I’d filled in the med-world forms and left the bag out on my balcony for a delivery drone to pick up.

  It was done.

  My phone rang. Michael’s number popped up. “Michael, hello! How are you?” I answered before the first ring had finished.

  His face appeared on my screen. “Very good. Sorry about not calling back right away—”

  “Don’t worry, I was just making sure you were okay.” I paused. “I didn’t see you at the church meetings” —another pause— “and I’m sorry about your dinner. About the way I acted.”

  He took a deep breath. “That’s not why I didn’t return your calls.”

  My heart was in my throat. “No?”

  “No.” He wiped his face with his biological hand. “You have your own path to follow. Self-discovery is an important part of my faith.”

  “That’s...well...I understand.” I wanted to tell him how much I missed our chats—how much I missed him.

  “I’ve been thinking about you, Freyja. I wish you luck in finding what you’re looking for.”

  It was the first time he’d ever used my full name. The tingling warmth I’d felt when I first met Michael returned. “Thank you.”

  “You take care.”

  With a smile, he severed the connection.

  ***

  Fat snowflakes fell outside my kitchen window while jazz played inside. A real fire crackled in my old fireplace, the first time I’d used it in years. Buster was laid out at my feet as I prepared dinner. I dropped down scraps of veggies from time to time that he snapped up.

  An entertainment show was playing on the wall of my living room. “…billionaire Martin Ludwig is continuing his buying spree…” said the reporter. I glanced at the display, into glittering photoreceptors. It was the same face of the small man I’d met at Michael’s party.

  I knew he’d looked familiar. Returning to preparing my dinner, the voice inside my head said, You see? Those are the kinds of people you need to surround yourself with.

  Delivery of my liver patch had taken two weeks. During the wait, I’d started taking Buster for long walks, waking up early to get back on track with my gene therapy research work. I even attended a rally for ending animal farming.

  Slitting open the thermal bio-containment packaging that my liver had arrived in, I removed the organ. It was cold and wet, tinged purple and reddish brown. Closing my eyes, I squeezed it, trying to see if my proprioperceptive sense would magically expand to contain this new chunk of my flesh. I waited, eyes closed. Somehow it did feel like a part of me; somehow my skin sensed this wasn’t alien flesh.

  This thing was a part of me.

  I dropped it into the frying pan.

  An intense hunger gripped me. I was used to being hungry, but this was different. Watching my liver sizzle, I began salivating painfully. My nostrils flared. Picking up a fork, I turned it, trying to brown it evenly, but then, unable to wait, I used the side of the fork to nip off a piece and popped it into my mouth.

  At first I rolled it around my tongue. Then I chewed, sucking the juices from it; I moaned as I swallowed, remembering guilt-free days of eating meat as a youth, eating and enjoying. Stabbing and ripping with the fork, I ground off another piece against the bottom of the frying pan. It was still raw. Pinpricks of blood popped from the edges of the ragged meat, but I gobbled it down.

  The pan was empty before I realized what I was doing. Using the back of my hand, I wiped a streak of spittle from the side of my mouth.

  Buster whined at my feet, sensing something was going on. I looked down at him.

  “Not for you, little Buster, this is all for mummy.”

  He always preferred human food to his own food. Human food. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I laughed, and then another thought: You are what you eat. I laughed again.

  ***

  Personal organ stockpiling was something everyone with money was doing, I’d found out. I talked about it with anyone who would listen. I was finally sleeping at night. Michael got back in touch with me, and our coffee dates became regular again.

  “Sharks kill eleven humans a year on average!” I exclaimed to him one evening, startling some other customers. “Do you know how many sharks humans kill?”

  He shook his head.

  “Eleven thousand an hour!” I slammed my coffee down. �
��What are we going to do about this?”

  Michael shrugged and took a sip from his coffee. “What can we do?”

  “Stop being hypocrites,” I said, sipping my coffee and looking back to my tablet. I had an order page up. A liver and a pound of thigh muscle. I chose two-day delivery to the clinic to make sure I would get them in time for my next private Sunday evening dinner party.

  ***

  “What do you mean, you won’t let me send them there anymore?”

  “Effie, I can’t imagine what you must be going through...” My friend Mary’s face grimaced in my phone’s display. “…but this is getting weird. My boss is wondering who all these packages are for. I thought this was just a once or twice thing? Why don’t you get them delivered to your own lab?”

  I couldn’t tell her that half my deliveries were already going to my lab, and that my boss was growing suspicious as well.

  “This project is just taking longer than we thought.” I used the royal “we” without explanation. My little white lie was becoming a big one, even with my credentials to back me up. “You’re right. Sorry. Listen, we should go out like we said.”

  “Uh-huh.” She arched her eyebrows and disconnected.

  Sighing again, I looked down at Buster. “Do you want to go out?”

  Buster barked yes, and I went to fetch his leash. Spring was here, but outside it was still chilly, and we made our way into the small wooded park near my apartment. Walking through the bare trees, I remembered stories my mother had told me about the myling, the ghosts of babies who were abandoned in the forests at birth, left to die in the frozen wilderness, their souls forever doomed to wander alone.

  I began scheming for ways to keep my packages coming.

  ***

  It wasn’t fair. Any idiot could feed themselves like a pig and get millions from medical insurance to fix their diabetes. But ask them to cover the cost of artificial organs, and there were forms and questions. I made a stab at requiring the deliveries for religious reasons, but this just elicited, “You’re kidding, right?” from my insurance adjuster.

  After engineering an intricate web of delivery routes, they were all getting closed down, one by one. Even if I could find a way to keep the packages coming, money was becoming a serious issue. Custom-grown organs weren’t cheap. I’d used up my savings, maxed out my credit lines, and I was dipping into my retirement savings, eating away at my future.

  Desperate, I tried Michael.

  “Susan, you’ve come a long way since I met you,” Michael replied after I asked him for a loan. “I’m sensing a real transformation.”

  “I don’t know what to do.” I hated myself for asking for money, for appearing weak.

  We were back in our coffee shop. The heat of summer was gone, replaced with the chill of coming winter. Red leaves were falling from the skeletons of trees outside.

  “Money,” said Michael, “is not the solution to any of life’s problems.” He held my hands in his. Both of his arms were prosthetic now. “I applaud the enthusiasm that you’ve taken to our holy sacrament, but you need to find your own way through this.”

  There was only one way—had always only been one way—I realized now.

  Michael squeezed my hands. “The only constant in life is change. Life is ever evolving. It’s not about being something; it’s about becoming something.”

  I nodded. “Can I come for dinner with the Church again?”

  His eyes seemed to stare through mine, seeing through me into my soul.

  “Only you can answer that,” he replied.

  ***

  The ancient subway car rattled toward me, its wheels squealing. An encircled “Q” glowed on the front of the driverless lead car. It was the express train, rolling without stopping on its way past the 29th Street station. I was standing near the end of the platform, near the far wall. The squealing stopped as the train began to clear the station and accelerate back up to speed.

  The lead car was almost at me, and I stepped onto the edge of the platform, staring at the empty driver’s seat of the subway car as it rushed closer.

  “Hey, lady!” someone called out.

  The train was just feet from me. I stepped toward the ledge and empty space beyond.

  “Lady, watch—”

  The squealing began again, this time ear-shattering, but it was too late. I leaned in, feeling the train crash into me. There was no pain, just a flash of white before blackness descended.

  ***

  A keening whine woke me. Opening my eyes, I could see snow falling outside my window, but it wasn’t enough to stop emergency services. I hadn’t been at my office in months—on sick leave, or, more accurately, rehabilitation leave—so I brought my work home. Glancing at my side table, the cover sheets of the latest data downloads glowed on my tablet: Structural basis of lentiviral subversion in cellular degradation, genomic sequencing of flesh-eating bacteria, and new trial results of viral gene-therapy.

  It was nearly 9 a.m.

  I sat up in bed and arched my back. My whole body ached. Swinging my legs off the bed, I stood and wobbled, still not quite used to it. I pulled down the blinds to cocoon myself.

  Again the whining. “Buster, baby, please stop, someone will be here in a few minutes.”

  Walking into the bathroom, the lights glowed on by themselves. I reached my arms above my head in another stiff-morning-stretch and stopped to inspect myself.

  In the mirror I gleamed like a silvery spider, my slender arms glittering in the light reflecting from overhead. I’d chosen to keep my prostheses with exposed metal, wiring junctions and all, to keep the weight down.

  My legs were now lithe titanium-alloy slivers that supported the stump of my body between them. The meat of my midsection was criss-crossed with angry red scars where organs had been removed and replaced.

  The first steps had been easy.

  After some haggling, I’d convinced a doctor to amputate both of my arms, even gaining possession of them after the fact. I hosted my first Church dinner with my bicep as the main course. It was my coming out party. Eating my own flesh—my own true flesh—made my spirit soar, the cracks in my soul closing with each piece of my body that I consumed. As I devoured myself, I filled myself, making myself both more and less at the same time.

  When it came to my legs the doctors had balked. They’d refused more amputations, and I couldn’t afford a trip to one of the far-off places medical tourists could go to have this sort of work done.

  But…

  Just one misplaced step on the subway, and a leg was severed. Slip in the shower at the wrong angle and you could rupture a kidney. I always refused the insurance payments, only asking for the prostheses and organ replacements. I arranged for a round-the-clock medical monitor so that every accident brought near-instantaneous responses by emergency teams.

  The pain was excruciating but cleansing.

  I admired myself in the mirror, my misshapen torso laced with the cuts and lashes of my salvation. Taking a deep breath, I prepared for perfection, taking one final look into my eyes before closing them tight. Slowing my breathing, my mind filled until it was a cool, calm lake.

  “If thine eyes offend thee...” I intoned over the yelps of Buster. Reaching toward my face with my hands, I paused, and then dug my spiny metal fingers into my eyes.

  The world exploded in a rapture of pain. Black circles danced in my vision as my eyesight faded. I screamed. Tightening my grip, I pulled harder, feeling the optic nerves resisting my efforts. Finally, with a wet pop, one and then the other snapped elastically. Blood coursed down my face. Dropping to my knees, I stuffed my eyeballs into my mouth and began chewing. Gagging, crying, I tried to swallow, and with a final effort managed to get them down.

  “Don’t worry, Buster,” I choked out between sobs, “someone will be here soon, baby!”

  Already the paramedics had been alerted by my health monitoring service. They’d arrive in five mi
nutes, and by tomorrow I would be seeing through new eyes.

  A chime signalled an incoming call.

  “We are so proud of you,” announced a familiar voice.

  My heart filled with a bliss that blotted out the pain. I wanted to cry, and maybe I did—it was hard to tell. With the back of one mechanical hand, I wiped away my bloody tears of joy. “Thank you, Father Michael.”

  I felt as light as a feather.

  “I have spoken to God this day,” Father Michael continued. “Mankind’s depravity has once again permeated every part of his being, every man’s heart so sin-stained that nothing they touch is not evil. A new Flood is coming to cleanse God’s Earth, but not one of water, this will deluge will be one of flesh and blood…”

  He wasn’t just speaking to me—he was addressing the whole rapidly growing body of the Church, assembled virtually around the world to observe my ceremony. He took control of my robotic prostheses, and I could feel myself standing.

  “Freyja, you are accepted into the Church of Sacrificial Atonement. You will be the knife that cuts the rotting flesh from our God’s Earth. In your own blood I baptize you reborn, from now on to be known as Saint Freyja.”

  “Freyja,” he repeated, “archangel of love…”

  He paused, holding me high for all to see in my glory.

  “…and of death.”

  ***

  From the author

  I hope you enjoyed this novella story set in my Atopia universe! If you want read the full Atopia Chronicles, click here, or search for Atopia Chronicles on Amazon. NOTE that Atopia is in Kindle Unlimited, so is free to continue reading if you are part of this program.