The Body Scout: A Novel

by Lincoln Michel

  “You’re on liquids for another twenty-four hours,” Lila said. She passed me a bottle of grayish-blue fluid. The label said Breakfast in the Bottle. It looked like liquid chalk.

  I tried to reach out and grab it with my right hand, but there was nothing there. It was gone. I glanced at the empty space beyond my shoulder. My flesh ended in a mess of scars and bruises. I stared at the emptiness.

  “Where’s my arm?” I said. Then it came back to me. Coppelius grabbing, twisting, and wrenching. “Never mind.”

  I looked around the room, my eyes still bleary. It was lined with white tiles that had browned with age. Fungus grew in some of the corners. The air was stale and heavy.

  “Where are we?”

  Dolores and Lila looked at each other, then at the walls. “We didn’t think we could take you to a hospital,” Dolores said. “Not with all that blood and the body in your apartment. The police are looking for you.”

  The stimulant had run its course. I was cold again, my skin converted to gooseflesh. I rubbed my hand over my right shoulder. It had been smoothed out, the metal bits sanded down and the flesh a puffy scar. “Where did you take me exactly?”

  “To an ill paradise,” a voice said. A door creaked open. Noblood Gerald rolled into the room with a pair of men who walked beside on crutches. Gerald threw his hands in the air with a laugh. “To the Diseased Eden.”

  Dolores grimaced, placed her hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Hey, they did save his life,” Lila said.

  Noblood Gerald came up to me. Gently touched the scar tissue on my shoulder.

  “Better to have one arm and be alive than two and dead, no? Guess you ended up one of our Purified after all.”

  “Guess so,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about the arm, even if it was a poisoned machine staining your soul. I’m afraid we’re only used to removing cybernetics here, not repairing them. We did clean out the remains. Buffed you down to the bone. Let the infected flesh heal.” He lifted a black bag, tossed it on the floor with a clunk. “Lila insisted we save it. Perhaps you’ll find a less ideological doctor to reattach later.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “We did leave your eye and your unmentionables intact, despite the protests of our priests.”

  “I insisted,” Dolores said. “On the latter at least.”

  The arm was a sad, cold thing in the bottom of the bag. All its life and lights turned off. I shook the bag. It was hard to believe it was anything that could move, much less flex or pitch. Detached, it was as useful as a dead slug.

  I just stared down at my arm for a while, the bag open at my feet. I’d spent so many years tuning up my body, changing myself. Years of money, years of debt, years of time. And it had been swept away as quickly as a sandcastle in a tsunami.

  “So, where do we begin?” Noblood Gerald said.

  I looked at Gerald. “We?”

  “They’re going to help us,” Lila said. She brought over my clothes in a pile. They’d been laundered, but I could still see the red stains.

  “We wouldn’t normally even associate with you, but when Lila brought you here, she suggested your eye recording might have useful information.” He signaled to his men and they grabbed a large screen and lifted it onto the wall. “Your feed was grainy, but we saw this.”

  The screen lit up with the ruins of my apartment. I’d seen all this before, lived it, but it was strange to see my view in front of my eyes.

  “It’s not normally this messy,” I said.

  The Edenist fast-forwarded through my walking around the apartment, dazed and cursing, after I’d left Lila and Dolores. I watched myself shower and groom in speeded-up motion.

  We got to Coppelius emerging from my closet. His large, dark chest filled the frame. “Zunz’s body needs something from Lila’s body to live. Something vital, if painful to remove.” The Edenist paused the tape.

  I looked at Lila. Her face was blank, but I thought I sensed rage bubbling underneath. Her fists were clenched balls at her side.

  “I thought it was over,” I said, weakly. “When Zunz came back in the game, I thought that was the end.”

  “Nobody threatens a Diseased Edenist and gets away with it. Prospective member or not, we can’t let that slide,” Gerald said. He signaled to his men and they switched the feed to various security footage, each showing the pale, wide image of Coppelius. “This one had been sniffing around Edenist buildings looking for Lila for days. We had him flagged.”

  “Luckily I’m wary of strangers,” she said. “That’s why I was hiding out at my dad’s house.”

  “And to create genetic abominations? Clones? No, we have to act.”

  I shook my head, trying to make it all disappear. “We don’t know if that’s it. Even embryonic cloning is illegal, and we’re talking about duplicate cloning an adult? That’s never worked.”

  Dolores was scratching at the edge of her goggles. “Well. Yes. It’s illegal, dangerous, and impossible. But everything was impossible once. Maybe Monsanto has found a loophole to jump through.”

  “Why the hell does it involve me?” Lila said.

  “They must need something from you to perfect his clones. Maybe his genes are corrupted in some way and they need to splice in part of your code.”

  I was still shaking my head. I could feel bile spurting up my throat. “Zunz must not know what they were planning. Maybe he’s being held hostage?”

  “You don’t have to always defend him,” Lila said. “Anyway. Either we kill him or we rescue him. Otherwise, they’re going to keep coming after me. And I’d like to have one parent left. I vote rescue.”

  “It’s game seven tomorrow. Everyone will be busy. Our best chance to extract Zunz,” Dolores said. “Once the World Series is over, who knows where they’ll lock him up.”

  “We don’t know where he is,” I said.

  Dolores went over to the screen. Plugged in a code and an image of a small white shack appeared.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s where your finger lost signal, remember? When you left it with Zunz. Now look at this.”

  Now it was Lila’s turn to play something on the screen. She pulled up a series of blueprints. A mess of pale white lines on a blue sea. She zoomed in until a building came up. It was a large, underground structure with only a tiny shack on the surface. Walking past, you’d have assumed it was a toolshed.

  “Dolores got the blueprints,” Lila said.

  Dolores reached into the purse at her side and pulled out a black, fleshy mess. She unfolded it before me and I could see the nodes and wires. The mask from the Janus Club.

  “My bosses were pretty interested in this tech. They were even more interested when I said the Zunz playing in the World Series might not be the real Zunz. They’ve authorized me to take you inside and see if we can shake up dirt on the rival team. Off the books of course.”

  “What? You can’t risk this.”

  Dolores walked over to me, lips pursed. She put a hand on my uninjured shoulder. “Kobo. This is my job. My bosses are desperate for any dirt they can find on the Mets. If Zunz is an android or a clone or whatever the hell else and I can prove it, then they win the World Series by default.” Then she leaned in close, so only I could hear. “Plus, you broke up with me. Remember? Stop trying to tell me what to do.”

  I started to explain myself, how I’d been young and a fool, but I looked around the room of Diseased Edenists and figured now wasn’t the time to relive our relationship.

  I sipped the chalky liquid. It tasted tart and chemical. As I got dressed, Dolores, Gerald, and Lila were discussing strategies. How to distract the guards while we broke inside. I could barely follow what they were saying. I felt dizzy and overwhelmed.

  I stood up, steadying myself on the chair’s back. “What are you guys talking about? I was nearly killed. They’re trying to harvest Lila. We’re not going to save Zunz. We won’t even be able to get near
him.”

  “We’re doing this with or without you,” Lila said. She coughed a little, and I thought I saw a bit of blood on her lips.

  “Doing what?” I said after she’d recovered.

  “Just because you’ve been sleeping doesn’t mean we have,” Lila said. “We have a plan.”

  42

  THE DEEP HOTEL

  When Zunz and I were in school, other kids would tell us about the mole people. A race of mutated men who sloshed around in the bowels of the city. They created a whole society strung between the sewers and the subway tunnels. Houses suspended between the tracks, shops in abandoned stairwells. Sometimes in the tales they walked pet rats on leashes. Other times, they rode wild crocodiles across the platforms at night. But always, they came for us. The poor kids. The families living deep underground in apartments that never saw natural light. They said the mole people would let their rats loose into our buildings, or they’d be the cause of a wall that collapsed like the one that destroyed my arm.

  Before I learned what claustrophobia was, I’d wake up in the night with the feeling of the mole people’s stubby fingers around my throat. Squeezing. Only scampering into the shadows when I turned on a lamp. I hadn’t thought about those dirty nubs in a long time. But I did that night before game seven. Woke up in a panic in the burrow hotel. Kicked off the sheets, gasped for air.

  We hadn’t known if Dolores’s apartment was compromised, and mine was under police surveillance. We booked a subterranean burrow hotel instead. Hoped anyone trying to track us down wouldn’t look underground. I didn’t love the idea, yet didn’t have any others.

  It was the middle of the night. I must have jostled Dolores with an elbow. She reached over, half asleep, and squeezed my one hand. Just like Zunz used to do when we shared a childhood bedroom. “It’s okay,” she slurred. I looked over at her. Her eyes were bare and closed. I could see the blue metal points where her cybernetic goggles connected protruding just above her eyebrows.

  I got up, tiptoed to the bathroom. Pissed in the sink so the flush wouldn’t wake her or Lila. I still wasn’t used to doing everything with my left hand. Dribbled a bit on my fingers.

  I put on underwear and a pair of pants. I was off-balance without my arm. I felt its absence every second. When I looked at the empty space, I could see it still there. A phantom arm. My mind filled in the form.

  The hotel was called The Pomegranate, a Persephone reference I assumed. It did make me angry to be here. To see the places I’d been forced to live turned into hotels and sold to gawking tourists looking for an “authentic stay in old New York.” But I guess that was the way of things. What was oppression one year was a marketing opportunity the next.

  I made the mistake of checking my screen and found a dozen messages, mostly from Okafor. The last said, Kobo, this isn’t a joke. We have a warrant for your arrest. There was a body in your apartment and its DNA isn’t in any of our databases. You have to come to the station now and tell me what happened. That’s the only way I can help you. I deleted the message. That was a problem for another time.

  I walked quietly to the balcony, thinking it would calm me. I’d forgotten there was no air or view underground. Instead, it was a thick glass wall pressed against a panorama of rocks and dirt. A few worms squirmed against the glass. In one corner, a replica human skull sat above a glittering treasure chest. Props put in by the hotel to trick people into thinking an old dirty burrow was an exotic retreat.

  “Shit,” I said, nearly tripping over Lila. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Her eyes were closed, hands upturned on the ground. She wasn’t moving.

  I knelt, shook her shoulders.

  “What?” she said, opening her annoyed eyes.

  “I thought you’d been poisoned or something,” I whispered.

  “I was meditating.”

  “Oh.”

  I sat down across from her, back against the glass. I tried to pretend there was an ocean vista behind me. Sands, trees, gulls, and bright blue waves the color of candy stretching to the horizon.

  “I didn’t know you could be an Edenist Buddhist.”

  “I like to empty my mind sometimes. To live entirely in my skin.”

  “Sounds swell,” I said. It sounded horrible to me. I lit an eraser, blew the smoke up toward the filter fan.

  “You should try it. You seem kinda panicked.”

  “I don’t like being underground.” I took another drag and started to breathe easier. “You know your father and I grew up in a place like this? I mean when these were apartments, not hotel rooms.”

  “Could be worse,” Lila said. “Try an Edenist bunker with thirty other children peeing their cots each night.”

  We both laughed. Caught ourselves. Quieted. Dolores was still asleep in the other room.

  I still had my back to the glass, pretending the ground wasn’t behind me. But Lila walked over and touched the glass.

  “You know, this reminds me of my mom.”

  “The dirt?”

  Lila rolled her eyes. “No, the display here. The skull and the treasure. Before she passed, my mother used to take me to the Museum of Natural History. Said it was important for me to learn about the natural world. What it used to be like before we screwed it all up. How animals used to look. Skies without smog. Unmodified plants. That kind of thing.” She shook her head. Smiled. “I didn’t know what she meant, of course. I just loved the dioramas. I’d stare at them for what felt like hours, imagining my mom and me roaming in some ancient land, with no one to bother us. Just her and me.”

  Lila coughed a bit but didn’t spit up any blood. I put my eraser out. She’d been coughing a lot since we’d been underground. I was worried the dampness of the burrow was damaging her lungs as much as it was damaging my mind.

  “Did you ever go there? You and my dad?”

  I nodded. History hadn’t exactly been our thing as kids. But we’d gone a few times. School trips mostly. Zunz and I would run through the different rooms, debating who would be the squid and who the whale. What I remembered most was the Hall of Human Origins. The weird scared apes half covered in wiry fur. Their mouths agape and their ribs pressing through leathery skin. They looked so different from the upgraded actors and models on TV. I never understood how we could all be the same species.

  “It was a special place. Before they tore it down for an Amazon warehouse.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lila sat back down and leaned into my shoulder. We were both silent for a while and I thought she might be falling asleep. Then she stirred. “What if rescuing him doesn’t change anything?”

  “What?”

  “What if nothing changes?” Before I could speak, she added, “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, it’s fine. It’s just.” I looked out at the dirt wall. Remembered all the times Zunz would see me panicking in our burrow and grab my hand, guide me upstairs to the street level. “He’s a good man.”

  “Sure. Forget it.”

  “I promise. It’s going to work out.”

  “Forget it. I’m just being a stupid kid.”

  The air was stale and cold. The only sound was Dolores’s faint snores. The quiet irritated me. It felt as oppressive as the infinite dirt surrounding us.

  But then Lila said, “I love how quiet it is down here. No honking. No jerks yelling. Peaceful.”

  I nodded. “It could be worse.”

  “I could live down here. Or somewhere far away. Somewhere without buildings everywhere you look. Without people. Just trees and birds and free things.”

  “Not many places like that left. Maybe the desert.”

  “Okay,” she said. She stood up, put one of her hands on the glass. “The desert. Sand and cacti and lizards and me. I’d be okay with that.”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t be so bad.”

  Lila looked at me. Turned away and gazed out of the window at the wall of dirt, nodding her head over and over like a stuttering hologram.

  43
r />   THE LAST CHANCE

  I felt the claustrophobia again, the next day, as we sneaked into the Monsanto compound. I couldn’t see anything, could barely move. The weight on top of me kept me pinned down. The van jostled to the left, then the right. The low hum of the engines below us sounded like the purr of an animatronic jungle cat.

  I wasn’t in a burrow, only buried under a pile of clothes. A big heavy mound of cloth that shifted with each turn. It didn’t help I didn’t have my right arm to balance myself. I kept trying to reach out and steady myself on something with the nonexistent limb. All I had was a plastic prosthetic in my sleeve, suctioned to the stump, so no one would get suspicious of a one-armed man walking around the Monsanto compound.

  I was starting to hyperventilate when Dolores, somehow sensing my panic, reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “We’re nearly to the stadium.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know, I’m okay.”

  The van was bringing fresh towels and uniforms with World Series Champions Monsanto Mets printed across in big blue letters. If the Mets won, they’d be passed out to the team as the confetti fell. If they didn’t, they’d get loaded back in the van, shipped off with the military to help pacify the civilians while their houses burned.

  I could barely make out Dolores’s face in the dark of the van, but she seemed to be smiling. A big goofy smile, like a kid about to be let into the amusement park.

  We were being driven by one of Dolores’s contacts, a deaf man who bused in new uniforms and gloves before each game. They’d met back when he did deliveries for the Cyber League and now he fed her intel for a finder’s fee. Last year, she’d paid for aerial footage of the Monsanto compound. Had the driver attach minicams to the underside of his van as he flew across. He hadn’t snitched then. We were hoping he wouldn’t now. I’d had to pay him most of Natasha’s fuck-off cash to get us inside.

  As we landed my claustrophobia was diluted with adrenaline. I felt like my whole being was vibrating. No matter what happened here, something would. I’d find Zunz or be found out by the Mets. I’d save the day or fail. Either way, we were reaching the final inning.