by Steve Berman
I’ve been lifting since college, but it didn’t change my body the way the company did. It’s not that I didn’t get stronger in college. It’s just that I lifted believing it would transform me into someone else. The truth, of course, is that if you are short and slight and you don’t want to be, lifting doesn’t actually help. It may fill out your frame, but your frame is still short and slight. The company recruited me in part because I worked out so hard at the gym, but not Thom, even though he worked just as hard and was literally standing right over there making me look all of twelve years old in comparison. Then again, Thom wouldn’t have found the offer the company made to me appealing. He has probably never wanted to make his body anything other than what it already is.
They rebuilt me from the inside out. Molecular biologists rewrote my DNA. Surgeons cracked then extended most of my bones. They pulled out my shoulders, expanded my rib cage, stretched out my limbs to build me a taller, broader frame. I spent months of agony enduring metal frames jutting out of me, holding cracked halves of bone apart so they could knit together millimeter by millimeter. I looked like some sort of high tech porcupine. The nanomachinery implanted in me constructed and distributed chemicals through my body that sped my recovery and packed on mass. Over time, a flat chest began to bulge. Stick-like limbs thickened with sharp curves.
While the body was healing, they attached my mind to a virtual reality and taught me to fight. With my skeleton being stretched out, I could barely move in the real world, but, in the virtual world, my body was fluid, agile, and strong. Or it became that. At first, as in actual reality some months later, I spent a lot of time falling on my face. Time in the virtual world patterned my responses. They trained me in hand-to-hand combat and I lost count of how many weapons. I’m not the greatest fighter but I’m good enough. Or at least I hold my own sparring my workmates. I’ve never had to fight or use a weapon on a job yet, but I’m so prepared to do so.
I joined the company with the body I was born with but work for the company with the impossible body I was promised. As it turns out, this is not quite the body I want. Despite all the changes, I still feel like me, the scrawny grad student trapped under the bar. And the changes were drastic. Nothing the company did to build my body was approved for use on humans or even published as research. Laws, even the ones on what they can do to other people, don’t really apply to the rich.
It’s a few weeks later when, as Thom and I are texting each other, he asks when I’m free for coffee. There’s nothing he can’t say to me in a text, but I’ll always rearrange my work schedule to see him in person. I’m in Hong Kong but, of course, he doesn’t know that. A quick search of flights says I can fly home, have coffee with Thom, then fly back in time for my next job. Of course, if I could afford that, I wouldn’t need this job. I managed Zurich to Boston only because I arranged for my following job to start there. The company covered part of the flight cost. Anyone with a lifestyle where they can fly from Hong Kong to Boston just for the afternoon can afford and can pull the strings to have his body reconstructed.
Asking around on the base, I work out some job trades that get me to Boston in a couple days. We just need our supervisors’ approval. Mine agrees with a cryptic “Sure. You’re ready for those sorts of jobs now,” before she breaks the encrypted connection. The first job in the sequence that will take me back to Boston is innocuous. It’s the one I was already assigned to. I go into the briefing during the flight out for the next one wondering what I’ve gotten myself into.
This extraction is like all the other ones I’ve done, except the client doesn’t know we’re coming. And the site isn’t some expensive hotel or other piece of overpriced real estate. It’s a camp site in the middle of nowhere. And it turns out we’re not extracting the client. She’s a worried and, apparently, fabulously wealthy mother in California. She’s paid for a large crew of us to extract her teenage son. By the time the briefing is over, this extraction is nothing like any of the others I’ve done. Change a few of the details and we could be the kidnappers rather than the rescuers. Depending on the details of custody that we, the crew, aren’t privy to, we may still be the kidnappers.
We unlock and drive through the camp’s gate. I recognize the sign overhead and the buildings on the grounds. Conversion camps stay around as long as there are parents who want to make their son a Real Man, I guess.
The barracks are cold and dark. It stinks of sweat and urine. The kid is chained to his bed. Welts cover his body. The camp’s techniques haven’t changed and he’s apparently as bad at being a Real Man as I am. It’s hard to look at the rows of sleeping teenagers without being reminded that they are me when I was their age. A teammate hands me a set of keys and I snap to.
The patches that will keep him in REM sleep fit snugly against his temples. The manacles unlock with a soft click. I move the chains out of the way slowly to avoid making any more noise than I have to. He is too light. His body is a tree in winter, all thin and angular. I barely feel it across my shoulders. Several more of him wouldn’t weigh me down and there are a couple dozen here. I don’t free any more of them, though. It’s not in the plan. I tell myself that maybe they all have one rich parent who can steal them away from the machinations of the other rich parent. I know it’s not true.
His bedroom in his mother’s house is ostentatiously comfortable. The air is thick and warm. An overstuffed bed sits against one wall. Shelves of books line another. Dance gear litters the floor. It’s going to be a while before his body is tough enough and strong enough to dance again. He should be in a hospital, but I’m sure we advised against it when we booked the job. Her house has more layers of security should anyone want to steal her son back.
The next job is much more typical. High Powered Executive is extracted from her elegant high-rise condo. High Powered Executive is installed in her discreet but absurdly tasteful hotel suite. The hotel’s bottled water is thawing ice from a hundred thousand year old glacier. When you open the bottle, trapped air from a distant age attacks your senses. Or so I gather.
Several more flights and I’m headed to a coffee shop in Davis Square running on too little sleep. When the plane lands it’s such that I can hit Davis Square within a few minutes of when Thom says he’s free for lunch. This is either perfect or perfectly awful. I don’t get to choose how well flight schedules and Thom’s schedule play with each other or, rather, don’t play with each other. The nanomachinery inside me manufactures chemicals that force me awake. I’ve barely rested since the briefing for the conversion camp job. To line up jobs to get you where you need to be when you need to be there, something generally has to give. It’ll be all right as long as I rest eventually.
Thom hugs me when we meet. Somehow, I always manage to let go when he lets go. He orders some drink that takes a minute to describe. The clerk repeats it back to him perfectly. I stare at the drinks board for what feels like a millennium before I give up and order the gigantic herbal ice tea. There are already enough stimulants racing inside me. We get our drinks and go to a table next to the shop’s giant street side window. He seems to grow as he takes off his denim jacket. It obscured the way his chest and arms bulge, depriving the world of his perfection.
“How’s Jamal?” I sit across from him and clutch my iced tea like a giant sippy cup.
“It’s Aaron now.” Thom looks down before he meets my gaze again. “Charlie, what do you do for a living?”
“I’ve told you.” My brow furrows. “I’m a courier. Why?”
“How do you have a job and still be that broad and carry that much muscle.” He sips his drink. “It takes too much time and effort. No one is built like you unless they need to be. Like professionally or something.”
“So I’ve spent time picking up heavy things and setting them back down again.” I gesture at his arms and chest. “Nothing you’re not still doing.”
“I’d say that you’re also taking some of the more effective drugs—which I never have—except you’re a
lso taller now. You used to be shorter than me. What are you doing to yourself? It can’t be healthy.”
The question punches the air out of my lungs. Thom won’t believe the truth. He’s not rich enough to have heard of the secretive company that specializes in extracting and installing people. Half of what they did to me are things no one outside the company know are even possible.
“You have a problem because I’m as big as you now?”
His eyebrows rise. His face writhes trying to stifle a laugh.
“As big as?” His gaze sweeps up and down my torso. He gets up and steps around to check out my legs. “You have maybe forty pounds of lean muscle on me. And, you know, if that’s the body you want, that’s great—”
He tries to put me into a joint lock. I slip out of it before I’ve even thought about what I’m doing. We’re not really sparring. There’s no follow through and I just manage to keep myself still rather than fight back. He’s just hugging me now, his grip like a drowning man on water-soaked shard of deadwood. Eventually, he pulls back, his hands still around my shoulders. His gaze narrows. We both know my reactions aren’t what they would have been when I was in grad school.
“What have you done to yourself, Charlie?” He goes back to his chair and he sits so far back I can’t tell if he’s trying to get comfortable or out of striking distance. “It’s not bad. It’s just… sooner or later, either it’ll kill you or your job will. Is whatever it is you really do for a living that important?”
“Look.” I set down the iced tea. “We’re not all you. Practically nobody is you. The rest of us need a little help.”
The idea of lying to him makes me sick so I violate my NDA for him and risk some of the truth. I don’t tell him about the gene resequencing but I do tell him about the surgery to stretch out my skeleton. Distraction osteogenesis. What they did to me is more involved than that, but close enough. I tell him about the cocktail of drugs rushing through me, but I leave out the implanted nanomachinery and I don’t mention my job at all. Throughout all of this, Thom just nods.
“God, Charlie, if you just wanted to be bigger, you got that with the surgery. I can see taking the drugs to help you fill out your expanded frame faster, but you don’t need them now. Not anymore.”
Thom can’t understand. He’s wrestled all his life. All-American in college. When I first met him, even now, he’s always been on the deadly side of handsome. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be towered over.
“What’s it to you, Thom? Just let me do what I want.” I’m still waiting for the magic lightning to strike. I’m still waiting to feel big, brave, and strong.
“Fine.” Thom pushes himself away from the table. “I can’t stick around and watch you kill yourself, Charlie. I’m sorry.”
He puts on his coat. It’s like watching a superhero bury himself in his mortal disguise. He nods at me, then leaves.
I text Thom between jobs. He never answers. The man goes through boyfriends like he changes shirts but we’ve been friends for over a decade so I hoped we’d be different. Guess not. I know what I have to text him to get him to text me back. All I have to do is tell him he’s right and that I’ll stop with the chemicals and I’ll quit this job. My hands freeze, my heart pounds too hard, and I can’t breathe whenever I try to text him the lie. I stop texting him instead. Not being able to talk to him tears me to pieces, though, and I can feel my life ebbing out through the wounds.
The next few months grind on. I pick people up. I set them back down. I pick up heavy weights. I set them back down. My body is its usual never not sore. I date a guy from work. Bad idea. I’ll never do that again. So little in my life has changed but everything is different. Thom is this palpable lack, a void that nothing can fill. The only thing pushing me from one day to the next is a concert production of The Golden Apple in New York City in May. I’m counting down the days. The show is almost never produced and who knows when I’ll have another chance to see it.
The company is assigning me to fewer hotels now and more campsites, hole-in-the-walls, and odd shacks in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, we are chased extracting or installing the client. Most of the time, we aren’t. The job I swap into so that I can be in NYC in time for The Golden Apple almost doesn’t surprise me.
As with all of our operations, it’s the middle of the night. This one will take literally two dozen of us. In addition to mics and earpieces, we are outfitted with combat armor and a wide variety of weapons. It’s one thing to know the company has military-grade weaponry. It’s another to have it issued to you for a job. The nano-scale chemical factory inside me keeps my mind focused and my heart from pounding through my chest. We go through our obligatory checks then we load into the helicopters.
The helicopters have a stealth mode. They whisper towards the compound. High walls surround a two-story building. One helicopter lands just outside. My workmates stream out to secure the perimeter. The other hovers just inside the walls. Ropes drop. We slide into courtyard. One after another, we rush out of the way of the one above us as we hit the ground.
Unlike most of our operations, there’s no sneaking in and out of this one. Explosives blow out a house wall and door. We rush in then fan out through the house, looking for the hostage. Plan A, as always, is to find her and whisk her away before anyone can mount a response.
My partner and I sweep room by room down a hall on the second floor. The first few rooms are empty. The door to the next is blocked by something on the other side. I step back, aim just below the doorknob, then kick as hard as I can. The door splinters off its hinges. Something skids, thuds then crashes. Screams tear through the air. Except for the noise, that worked much better than I expected.
The splintered wreck of a dresser is scattered on the floor. My flashlight sprays the room. Four people huddle on a bed against the far wall. The fear carved into their faces deepens as I step through a mix of wood shards and clothes on the floor. My partner slides past me towards the bed. The glare she shoots me with on the way screams “You dumbass.”
We get the signal to leave over our earpieces as we examine the people on the bed. They’re neither dangerous at the moment or, obviously, the hostage, not that anyone expected to find the hostage just sitting in a bedroom. On the way back to the helicopter, the hostage is asleep, wrapped in a blanket. She’s a string draped over the woman carrying her. We all load into the helicopters with breathless precision. They take off. Dust bursts in silent plumes from the ground.
The client has obtained a bed for the hostage at a military hospital in the States. Again, the rules for the rich are different from the rest of us. You don’t even need to change any of the details of this job for us to be the ones taking her hostage rather than the ones rescuing her. We install her then the team breaks up, most of us headed off to the nearest base. In my case, I change my clothes in the van to the usual jeers and compliments then they drop me off at the bus station. It’s still the middle of the night and the bus to New York City won’t be for a few more hours.
Sleep isn’t really something I do any more. Too many drills where someone comes at me with a knife while I’m in bed means I rest but I don’t know that I ever really sleep. Right now, though, I can’t even rest. Knocking myself out or taking a little something to just to relax me is always an option. After all, there’s a complex and sophisticated chemical factory installed in my body essentially at my command. At the bus station, though, the former is a bad idea and I never do the latter. Maybe it’s odd considering the chemicals I do pump through my body, but there are lines I don’t cross.
While I wait for the bus, I close my eyes and the job replays in my imagination. It’s stupid what weighs my mind. Maybe I over-estimated how solid the door was. Or maybe assuming I always need to hit as hard as I can is not a good idea anymore. Mostly, though, my imagination is stuck on the faces of those huddled on the bed. Not that they were the epitome of calm before, but a couple shifted to panic and the rest to a flinty stoicism as I steppe
d into the room. Maybe strangers have been shifting to their “This is how I meet Death” face when they first see me for a while now, but I’ve only just noticed. There are too many scenarios where we all meet Death together. That is, if the chemicals that make me who I am don’t kill me first.
Is it even possible to quit this job? In theory, yes. They’ve always made it clear that I can hand in my resignation and walk away at any time. But do I want to? The company specializes in stealth extraction and installation. If I quit, I’ll wake up one day with a few days unaccounted for and mysterious scars across my body. They don’t need to leave scars but they will to make sure I know. The nano-scale chemical plant that makes me me or at least gives me the chance to become who I want to be will be gone.
Who I was in grad school is just a bad memory never to return. They’ve lengthened my limbs, pulled out my shoulders and expanded my rib cage. None of that will go away. If I survive the sudden, drastic shift removing the nanomachinery will inflict on body chemistry, I won’t regress to my old self. My chance to become who I want, though, will be gone. I’ll become this tallish, gaunt figure instead. Plenty of amazing people are tall and gaunt but, after years of being whatever I am now, it’s not what I want for myself. And I can’t make myself want that.
That’s why the company recruited me in the first place, I realize. And why they never recruited Thom. They spent who knows how much money on this body certain they’d make their investment back. Because, even if my rational mind understands becoming ever harder and more muscular won’t make the magic lightning strike me, I’d still rather die than quit.
I pull my cellphone out of my pant pocket. They are disallowed on-duty which makes me oddly addicted to mine off-duty. Messing with a nanogram app, though, can’t possibly fill the Thom shaped void in my life. It’s been months since I last texted Thom but I send him one last, possibly ill-advised, message:
“Thom, you’re right about everything. How people see me. What I’m doing to myself. What my job is doing to me. I know exactly how I’m going to die. I can see it happening and I can’t make myself stop it. I’m sorry.”
