Defekt

by Nino Cipri

  “He’s not new, he works here—”

  Dirk cleared his throat pointedly. Dex and Delilah looked at him warily, but let the argument subside.

  “Sorry,” Delilah said, half to Dirk, half to Derek. Dex grunted, though it wasn’t clear if it was supposed to be apologetic. Dex skulked over to the counter and jumped up on it, heedless of the permanently sticky patina of spilled coffee.

  “It’s fine,” Derek said, watching in confusion as Dex took a picture of the dirty mugs that had been left in the sink.

  “You probably have some questions,” said Delilah.

  Questions? Derek was so confused that he could barely articulate a coherent thought.

  “Why are you all . . . me?” he settled on.

  Darkness and Delilah shared a look. “Maybe we should start with something easier,” said Delilah.

  Dex was typing something rapidly into his phone. “Give it to him straight, guys. He’s gonna flip his shit no matter what.”

  Delilah whirled around and spat, “I told you to quit being—”

  “Fine!” Dex shouted, jumping off the counter. “I’ll just go do something useful, protect our asses from bloodthirsty deck chairs or whatever!”

  “Dex, sit down!” Dirk shouted. “All of you shut up!”

  Everyone froze, including Derek. He had never imagined his own voice sounding so commanding. It was alluring, but a little disturbing as well.

  Dirk turned to Derek, his gaze momentarily cold enough for Derek to want to flee. It shifted back into something stern but still kind, and Derek felt himself relax.

  “You have questions, and that’s very reasonable. But we also don’t have a lot of time. We have a job to do. Dex!”

  Behind him, Dex flinched. He seemed sort of high-strung.

  Dirk said, looking over his shoulder, “You and I can go start setting up. Darkness, Delilah, can you get Derek oriented?”

  Delilah and Darkness shared a look, then nodded. “Sure,” Delilah said.

  “Great,” Dirk said, unholstering his scanner gun. He stood in front of Derek, who found that he couldn’t look away from his commanding presence. “What about you? Ready to hit the ground running?”

  Derek nodded enthusiastically. “Yes.”

  It took an effort not to add “sir”—Dirk’s air of authority seemed to demand it. But Dirk just nodded at Derek, then looked at the others. “We’ll set up a perimeter and finish unpacking the equipment. Holler if you need anything.”

  He headed out of the room without a backward glance, walking with a confidence that Derek envied. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a loaded glance pass among the other three. Delilah tapped her ear twice while holding Dex’s gaze. He rolled his eyes, but nodded, following Dirk out of the room.

  After a second, Delilah sighed and sat down at the table across from Derek. Darkness started moving around the dingy breakroom, examining the open bag of Veggie Straws that had lived on the counter since Christmas, the mugs the closing team had left in the sink again. Derek made a mental to note to wash them before he left.

  “I really wish they gave us a handout,” Delilah muttered. “A visual aid at the bare minimum. Grab those mugs, would you?”

  Darkness grabbed three mugs out of the sink. They were all, naturally, LitenVärld VAKEN mugs, ones that had been chipped or cracked in transport, or returned by customers. They were all different models from different years, with slight variations in the design.

  Darkness dumped them on the table between them. Derek wrinkled his nose, noting the thick rings of coffee stains. Darkness had a similarly dubious look on her face.

  “Visual aids,” Delilah explained cheerfully. “Where do these mugs come from, Derek?”

  “Kitchenwares,” Derek answered.

  “Right, and before that?” Before Derek could give the obvious answer—receiving and assembly, of course—she added, “Before they come to the store.”

  “ . . . Distribution?” Derek answered. Honestly, anything that happened outside of the store’s immediate operations wasn’t really in his wheelhouse.

  “And before that? Where do they originate?”

  Derek, after a moment’s hesitation, turned over one of the mugs and looked at the faded lettering on the bottom. “China,” he said, though he wasn’t at all confident that was correct.

  “That one did, yeah,” Delilah said encouragingly. “But those kinds of international logistics are complicated and expensive, right?”

  “I guess,” Derek said.

  “So if you’re a company that values change, innovation—”

  “And loyalty,” Derek added, happy to provide LitenVärld’s third corporate value.

  “Which is a nice way of saying control,” Darkness said, and Derek frowned.

  Delilah shot them a look, then picked up the explanation again. “So you’re a company that deeply believes in all of those things, and also you have access to infinite other worlds and their technology. Why keep paying manufacturers on the other side of the world when you can technically keep everything in house? Control the whole chain?”

  “The research and development teams are like nerdy magpies,” said Darkness. “They pick up all kinds of weird shit, poke at it until they figure out how to turn a profit—”

  “And that’s how you get this,” Delilah said, turning over one of the newer mugs and setting it next to the one Derek had flipped over. Instead of a stamp saying Made in China, there was an odd emblem. It looked vaguely like the LitenVärld logo; a circle carved up by meridians into small, square pieces, but with a series of black dots arranged into a pattern within each square. There was a definite logic to the arrangement, Derek could see that immediately. He brushed his thumb across the raised dots, as if he could read it through the texture.

  “It . . . it looks like a—”

  “Barcode,” Delilah said. She brought up one of the scanner guns in her hand and aimed it at the emblem. A bright red cross appeared in the center of the circle. Derek flinched as it whined, the same eye-watering buzz from when Dirk shot the looming egg chair toilet.

  No blast this time, only a cheerful beep. Delilah put the mug down and showed Derek the display on the top of the gun.

  HKV811-0364-00

  NAV: 0332

  GEN: 6.3.3

  STATUS: DISCONTINUED

  Delilah tapped her finger on the display as she explained. “Housewares, Kitchen, VAKEN, model number and color designation. This is a sixth generation, version 3.3, which was discontinued so we can’t sell it.”

  “And ‘NAV’?”

  “NAVs are pocket universes where these things are produced en masse and stored for shipping,” Delilah said. “LitenVärld found them lot more cost-effective than manufacturing and shipping in from overseas.”

  Darkness added, “Plus, they get to advertise as being carbon neutral and ethically produced, and barely lie about it.”

  Darkness and Delilah were warily watching his reaction. Derek wasn’t sure why. “That’s . . . amazing,” he said. “I mean, seriously, it’s amazing how LitenVärld has used the tools it has to make its whole supply chain so much simpler. And more ethical!”

  Derek found himself grinning. He hadn’t needed more reasons to love working for LitenVärld—okay, maybe until the past couple days. It was a huge relief to have one handed to him like this.

  “Pocket universes,” he murmured to himself. “That is such innovative problem-solving.”

  “I mean,” Delilah began. “The method improved their bottom line, but it has problems of its own. There’s a self-replicating mutagenic defect in some of the NAVs, and it turns LitenVärld’s products into animate, murderous, mutant furniture. Corporate calls them defectives, or defekta in Swedish.”

  Derek’s gaze was drawn, seemingly against his will, to Darkness’s chest, and the word inked across the chest of their coveralls.

  “Takes a defective to find a defective,” they said coolly.

  Delilah elbowed them in the ribs. �
�You’re not defective.”

  Darkness leaned back in their chair. “I like it better than discordant.” To Derek, they added, “That’s what it says on all our paperwork. After LitenVärld learned all they could about what went wrong with us, they stuck us together onto a special inventory team to deal with their little infestations.”

  Derek spoke up, “Okay, but what us? Are you versions of me from another universe, or—”

  “Whoa, sweetie, nobody is a version of you,” Darkness said sharply. “Unstick yourself from the center of the universe.”

  Derek nodded. “Sorry, of course.” They hadn’t covered etiquette for meeting one’s alternate selves in the employee handbook, which seemed like a bit of an oversight, frankly. It was so rude to assume that other people were spinoffs of him.

  Delilah looked over at Darkness. “I think we’ve moved beyond mugs. Do you mind being a visual aid?”

  “You want me to show off some skin?” Darkness grinned. “Always.”

  They stood up from the table, unzipped their coveralls, and slid them down their shoulders, turning to face away. Underneath, they were wearing some kind of tight athletic shirt with wide mesh patches for breathability. They pulled that up, exposing their lower back and shoulder blades. There was a fist-sized tattoo in the center of Darkness’s back, which looked remarkably like the barcode on the bottom of the mug. Not an exact copy—Derek could see that the pattern of dots was slightly different.

  The whine of the scanner startled Derek, and he saw another glowing red cross appear—this time in the middle of Darkness’s back. “Wait!” he said, reaching for Delilah, then drawing back when she squeezed the trigger.

  But there was just another beep.

  “It’s okay!” Delilah said. “It’s only weaponized against the defekta.”

  “Yeah, corporate wouldn’t trust us with real weapons,” Darkness said, pulling their shirt back down.

  Delilah flipped the screen around so Derek could read the display.

  HRD-64598-03

  NAV: 1874

  GEN: 3.7.9

  STATUS: DISCORDANT

  SP-EX-EM

  DIV: INVENTERA

  “Human resource, model number D64598, from NAV 1874,” Darkness recited as they pulled up their coveralls. “Third generation, number seven out of a production run of nine. Discordant”—they shot a look at Delilah—“but a special exempt employee. At your service.” They sketched an ironic little curtsey.

  Derek felt like his brain had gone offline. There was a connection he needed to make, that he should have been able to make, but it was like he’d received faulty assembly parts; two tab As with no slot B.

  “I’m second gen,” Delilah said. “So is Dex, but something happened during his nutritive growth stage, and he wound up five inches shorter and about twelve years younger than the rest of us. And I’m . . .”

  She waved at her long hair and face.

  “They call us discordant phenotypes.” She elbowed Darkness again and said pointedly, “Not defective. Just . . . unexpectedly different.”

  Darkness threw up their hands. “Discordant phenotype wouldn’t fit on my chest. I wish I could have seen the faces on those R&D twerps when you told them.”

  “Yeah, they weren’t expecting me.” Delilah smiled thinly. “I think the only reason they didn’t discontinue me immediately is because they were hoping to figure out how it happened.”

  “And they knew Dex would take them all out if they tried.”

  “Yeah, it’s not like he’ll bother to listen to anyone else—”

  Their banter passed through Derek unnoticed; slot B, slot B, where is slot B.

  Delilah added, in a gentle voice, “If I had to guess, you’re probably seventh gen. You were onboarded for the Christmas season, right?”

  Derek stared at Delilah, then at Darkness, waiting for one of them to crack a smile and laugh. His teammates always laughed at how gullible Derek was, how naïve, and he’d laugh along with them. And his feelings would be a little hurt, and he’d feel a little bewildered—why didn’t he know all the same things that his coworkers did? But when they laughed, at least the world would be right again, unchanged and understood.

  But Delilah and Derek were both watching him cautiously, carefully—not waiting to see how long they could string him along, but checking to see if he believed them, if he was upset by what they’d said.

  Derek stood up and walked over to the window overlooking the field behind the store and the highway beyond it. He pulled his polo and turtleneck up over his back, then twisted around to look at himself in the dim reflection. He breathed through the sudden wave of nausea as he caught sight of the same barcode in the center of his back, positioned where it was unlikely he’d ever see it without knowing to look.

  “You okay, Derek?” Delilah asked.

  Derek pulled his shirts back down and smoothed them into place. “I’m okay.”

  He pressed his hands to his mouth, breathing slowly through them until the shock wore off. Beneath the nausea, he also felt . . . satisfied. Like an open loop had finally closed, and some, at least, of his questions had been answered. Why was he here? Why did it feel so difficult to connect to anyone? Why didn’t anyone else seem to feel this way, share his nauseating sense of alienation? Why was he always so alone?

  “You’re not alone,” Darkness said, and Derek realized that he must have stammered out some or all of that. “Like, if nothing else? You know definitively that you’re not alone.”

  * * *

  Derek immediately felt better, more grounded, once he was wearing a pair of pants that hadn’t been cut into strips.

  Delilah had offered up her extra set of coveralls; Dex’s obviously wouldn’t fit, Darkness had cut all the sleeves off theirs and personalized them with buttons and doodles in permanent marker, and Dirk didn’t say anything, simply looked at Delilah until she offered.

  “This is . . . kinda nice,” he said, zipping the coveralls up. He’d kept the turtleneck on underneath, though he’d ditched the too-tight polo shirt. Delilah had gone to find Dirk and Dex, help them with preparations for the rest of the shift, but Darkness had lingered behind. “I feel like I’m actually part of a team for once.”

  “You are,” Darkness said. They were sprawled at the table, long legs kicked out, working on a half-done crossword that someone had left behind. “At least for tonight.”

  Derek nodded and echoed, “At least for tonight.”

  He peered over their shoulder at the puzzle, to see if there were any answers he knew or could help with. Darkness, however, seemed to just be filling all the empty squares with nonsense. As he watched, they carefully scrawled the word BUTTRUMPET as an answer for the ten-letter capital of Nevada. He snorted, then turned it into a cough when Darkness gave him a look of transparently fake innocence.

  “Those mugs aren’t going to wash themselves,” he said. He stepped over to the sink and started running the water hot. He felt a little bit more grounded when he was able to do something with his hands.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to just go back to my normal duties after—” He made a wide, encompassing gesture, sponge in one hand and HJÄLPSAM soap in the other.

  “Do you want to go back?” Darkness asked, looking back down at the crossword.

  “Can I join you all instead?” he asked, sort of embarrassed at how the question sprang from him.

  They didn’t answer for a moment, but instead got up and stood next to him, picking up a dish towel and drying the wet mugs. “Careful what you wish for, Derek.”

  “What do you—”

  “It’s not that bad, you know,” they said quietly, cutting him off. “Now that you know exactly what you are and what you were designed for, you get to choose.”

  “Choose what?”

  “What parts of yourself to keep, and what to throw out and make up for yourself.”

  Derek’s eyes drifted to the handwritten DARKNESS on their breast pocket, then the black and silv
er lines across their chest: DEFECTIVE. They were so close, their hip practically touching his. Derek didn’t let people get this physically close to him, instinctively maintaining a proper one and a half feet between himself and his coworkers, two feet between himself and a customer. He’d never really questioned why he did it, while he looked at the way other people casually touched each other with a longing like a fishhook in his heart.

  Maybe it was because they were the same person, that Darkness could slip through that invisible barrier that Derek maintained against the rest of the world.

  “Is that what you did?” he asked. He handed them one of the mugs, now clean but still permanently stained with years of coffee. “You just decided that you were discordant and said, ‘To heck with it, I’m going change my name and draw all over my uniform?’”

  Darkness laughed sharply. “None of us decided to be anything. Delilah didn’t decide she was a woman any more than Dex decided to have a critical failure during a growth stage. Del is female, and Dex is stuck going through puberty, and I am—how did Reagan put it on my performance review—a stubbornly independent thinker with an odd creative streak.”

  Darkness’s impression of Reagan’s chillingly smooth tone was spot on. Derek shuddered a little.

  “All that gets labeled discordant. Can’t carry the tune they want me to sing, so I’m making up a new one.” They grinned crookedly. “It’s a shitty song, anyway.”

  Derek asked, honestly confused. “I like the—the song, though. I like what I do, I like working for LitenVärld. I’m good at it. And I like what they’ve given me. It means a lot.”

  Darkness sighed a little. “It means what they told you it means.”

  They took the last mug out of Derek’s hand, dried it, and then tucked it into a cabinet before going back to their crossword. Derek felt absence rushing in to fill the space Darkness had occupied, heavy as the loneliness that pressed down on his mornings.

  “Dirk’s gonna like you,” they said. “He’s a big company man.”