Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Jason Werbeloff

  “I … I have to,” said Daniel. “I need to know. And I’m eighteen now. They won’t let me stay at the Orphanage much longer.”

  Her voice was flat. “So am I,” she said, and drained the spleen of Rejek. “I’m going to work at Sales. In the call center. Ya’know, where they sell the org–”

  “I know,” said Daniel.

  “You’re different today.”

  “Different how?”

  Hooplah squeezed the last of the Rejek from the spleen. “You’re far away. No, not exactly. You’re here, but … there’s too much of you and too little all at the same time.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  Hooplah shook her head slowly.

  They worked on in silence for a while. Daniel realized that Hooplah had never been silent. Until today.

  “I guess this is the end of the O-team, then?” she said, and flung the spleen on the reject belt.

  The shift-end siren rang. He wanted to say something, to say the words that would make this right. He could see the barely contained hurt in Hooplah’s stiff lower lip. In the way her shoulders bunched. But he couldn’t find the words.

  Instead, Daniel stalked off toward Decontamination. He didn’t dare look back as he stepped into the metal chamber. He couldn’t let Hooplah see his tears.

  He counted the full 49 seconds this time. Didn’t feel the icy jets on his back. Daniel stood resolute against the arctic spray. Even as the tears streaked down his cheeks, his mind tucked into itself. Numbed within a crease of a fold of a distant dream.

  The humidity outside the Organ Farm was almost as thick as the humidity inside Decontamination. But hotter. Beads of sweat erupted on Daniel’s brow the moment he left the air-conditioning of the building. His fingers came away oily and slick from his acned forehead.

  A gust of wind swatted his face. Tiny particles of sand tucked under his eyelids. He battled to rub them out of his already raw eyes.

  He ran across the square, past the gray façade of the cafeteria, toward the Residence block. Wind buffeted his cheeks. Driven by the gale, black clouds surged from the north, from around the Bubble. They were headed his way. Silky tendrils of electricity tickled the nape of his neck. Static enveloped the sky.

  He couldn’t understand them – the tears. In Daniel’s eighteen years, he’d almost never cried. Sure, he’d felt them from time to time. But this was different. They flowed now, as quickly as the rain that soaked his hair.

  Daniel stumbled forward. He’d spent most of his life in this cluster of buildings – the Organ Farm, the Cafeteria, the Residence, and Administration. What else did one need? Work, food, shelter, and command. But now he was about to lose it all. He’d already lost Hooplah. But even with that loss, even with the tears, he felt … alive.

  Daniel yanked open the door to the Residence. Ascended the stairs in sevens (split into three-two-twos). Water dripped behind him as he climbed, leaving a damp trail in his wake. His generic lungs struggled up the last two flights. But there he was. Home. Or what had been his home until now.

  He passed his identity card over the door control. Flung the door aside. Odin dashed under the desk.

  Minutes later, in a blur of organization that made Odin bristle, Daniel had packed everything he owned – three pairs of trousers, five shirts, seven pairs of socks and underwear, a pair of shoes, 49 drawings of his parents, a pencil, and his toothbrush. With his satchel on his back, and Odin under his arm (Daniel tickled the cat behind his graying ears to calm him), he realized he’d almost forgotten his flash disk. Every Law and Order episode recorded. He tucked the thumb drive into his pocket, and shut the door behind him.

  It was time to leave.

  There was a beat in his step as Daniel exited the Residence. The rain had stopped, and the air had taken on an avocado glow. The wind had died down to a breeze, the consistency of egg white on his face. He inhaled, filling his cybernetic lungs with petrichor. As a child he’d loved this smell. Could the generic organs in his chest bask in the scent of rain like his original lungs had? In many ways, the generics were inferior. They spluttered in the cold, and grated in the drought. Running was always difficult. The 3D printers they used to manufacture the cybernetics had poor resolution, and couldn’t fully duplicate the functionality of the originals. But they’d have to do – his original lungs were probably sitting in the chest of some rich kid in the Bubble. The generics were all he had now.

  “It’s alright, Odin.”

  The cat was skeptical about the sudden change in location. He’d lived in Daniel’s fourth floor apartment since Daniel had negotiated his rescue, and wasn’t particularly fond of the outdoors. His ears twitched in the breeze.

  “We’re going on an adventure, old man.”

  Daniel stepped off the sidewalk, and arrived at the intersection through which he passed each morning. He would always turn left, north toward the Cafeteria, the Organ Farm, and Administration. North, toward the Bubble. But today, for the first time, he turned right. South. His heart, his real heart, galloped as his foot touched the new path.

  “Eigh-ty four Por-cu-pe-rry,” he muttered as he walked, counting the syllables on his fingers. His footsteps fell into rhythm. It was right that his mother should live at an address of seven syllables.

  He’d walked for only a few minutes before he noticed the change. The buildings here were … off. They crowded over the streets in a menagerie of shapes and sizes. Some were squat, others tall. But all shared one quality – they were old and unkempt. And although they lumped together in greater density the further he traveled from the Orphanage, each appeared lost and alone among the others.

  It wasn’t long before Daniel realized he too was lost. This was the heart of the Gutter. His teachers had spoken of it, but of course he hadn’t listened. Why should he? His world was circumscribed by the invisible borders of the Orphanage. But now, with a careful dread creeping up from his toes, spoiling his rhythm of seven, he began to wonder whether this journey was a fool’s errand.

  “Last known address,” the File had said. Last known. Not current. His mother may not be there now. How up-to-date was Administration’s recordkeeping? Daniel remembered the clerk’s tired face behind the glass. That wasn’t a face to stake one’s life upon. That was the face of a woman treading water. Barely coping with demand. Not someone who went out of her way to ensure everything was up-to-date.

  Daniel rubbed his weeping eye.

  The Gutter was larger than he’d imagined. The road on which he walked seemed to be a main thoroughfare. Buses in varying shades of dilapidation crawled past, puttering great sinister clouds as they moved. Cars hooted behind them, their drivers cursing in the ever-thickening atmosphere. The rain had hardly helped to clear the air. Here, the scent of petrichor had been replaced with the rot of sewerage. It wafted past him from open gutters to either side of the road.

  Odin was agitated, meowing and digging his claws into Daniel’s shoulder. After a bus with half its roof panels missing rumbled past, the cat bolted into the satchel.

  “It’s not much further,” Daniel cooed.

  But that was a lie. Or might have been. Because Daniel realized with growing panic that he didn’t know where he was going. He’d assumed that if he walked far enough, long enough in a single direction, eventually he’d reach Porcuperry Road. That’s how it was at the Orphanage. There was only a handful of buildings. The notion of getting lost, of the world being larger than he could traverse in a few minutes, was alien to him.

  But this was the Gutter. A maze of interlacing streets and cars and buildings. So many people, walking and driving and shouting without Administration to supervise them. Chaos.

  To his left and right, roads split off from the thoroughfare, and none of those roads (he’d checked) had been labeled Porcuperry.

  The street rose over a hillock, and by the time he’d reached the top, he was panting. The nerves connected to his cybernetic knee throbbed. Sweat dripped under his polyurethane shirt. Danie
l squinted. Squinted ahead to wherever it was that the road might end. But he could see no end in the dusk. It didn’t help that the sun had almost set. Broken windows winked into life around him. Faint, incandescent lights bubbled through the dirty glass.

  The street was clearing, the buses disappearing. Cars sped up, and turned off the thoroughfare this way and that, until only a few remained. As the minutes passed on the verge of the hill, Daniel felt more and more alone.

  His stomach groaned. As if on cue, Odin crept from the satchel, his claws raking up Daniel’s shoulder. The animal nuzzled his master. Purred, awaiting his evening meal.

  Food. Daniel had forgone dinner before he’d left, and he’d taken no food with him. Never mind that, Daniel had no water with him. And neither did Odin. Guilt swallowed him. What would the cat eat tonight?

  Daniel looked back the way he’d come. There in the distance was the Bubble. The seat of wealth glowed so brightly, it lit the clouds. He could turn around right now. Return to the Orphanage at the glowing foot of the meniscus. His apartment would still be there – he hadn’t told Administration he was leaving.

  Instead, he returned his gaze to the street ahead. The windows of one of the buildings seemed less cracked than the rest. The light within shone more steadily, as though lit by a globe rather than by a candle.

  BUTCHER,

  proclaimed a sign above the door. As Daniel squinted deeper into the dying light, he could just make out below:

  LAUNDERETTE

  MASSAGE

  “Let’s ask for directions,” said Daniel.

  Odin meowed his assent.

  Daniel turned the brass knob.

  Even before his eyes had acclimatized to the light, before he could make out the old man standing behind the counter, Daniel felt at home.

  “Meat, clothes, orr massage?” asked the pockmarked face. Daniel had never heard an accent. All the children and instructors at the Orphanage spoke in the same level drawl.

  “I’m looking for Porcuperry Road,” said Daniel.

  “Porrcuperrry, Porrcuperrry. Hmmm.” The man looked up at the ceiling. His neck folded in two, but with his throat stretched out that way, his double chin receded.

  Daniel liked the old man immediately.

  That’s when Daniel noticed the smell. Heavy and savory. It was a scent he knew. The scent of blood. He hadn’t noticed until now that the streets lacked that smell. The scent he’d come to know so well.

  “Let me see …” Supported by a bronze-tipped cane, the man shuffled around a chest of frozen meat, to a shelf off to one side of the shop. He reached behind a pile of graying-white clothes, and withdrew a folded piece of ancient paper.

  A muffled chime of laughter sounded through the far wall. A girl’s voice. It sounded like Hooplah’s laughter when Daniel did something she said was “silly but cute.”

  “Porrcuperrry, you say.” The man unfolded the paper, and slid the glasses further down his lengthy nose.

  “Hahaha! My what a big boy you are,” said the girl’s voice through the wall.

  Daniel blushed. “Yes sir, number eighty-four,” he said quickly.

  The old man brought the map up to his face, then held it further away by vigilant degrees. Brought it closer again. “My eyes arre not what they werre. You look?”

  A deep moan vibrated through the wall. Maybe the old man had unruly neighbors or perhaps he couldn’t hear, but whatever the reason, the shopkeeper paid the noise no heed.

  Daniel shook off his embarrassment, and peered at the map. At the top was an enormous blank circle, filling the width of the page. Beneath it spurted an assortment of lines that he saw now were streets. In the north, close to the Bubble, the streets were organized at right angles. But as they dribbled down the page, the lines grew squiggly and chaotic, crossing and crisscrossing in greater and greater densities until they became an unintelligible web at the bottom of the page.

  The street names, other than the main roads, were miniscule. Illegible closer to the southern edge of the page. Daniel squinted in the gloom of the single incandescent bulb. He realized after a moment his head was throbbing from screwing his brow so tight. His left eye wept with the effort. He was about to hand the map back to the old man, when he noticed a label in the bottom-right quadrant of the page. “NEW SETTLERS WAY.”

  Daniel pointed.

  “You find it?” asked the shopkeeper.

  “I think so.” Daniel’s tongue was anesthetic-thick against his palate.

  “Let me see … hmmmm. Ah, therre. Therre … eh how you say … no good.”

  A hidden door behind the reception desk opened with a click. A girl sauntered out with her arm around a middle-aged man. He tripped over his lopsided smile as he made his way to the front door of the shop.

  “Same time next week?” she asked with boudoir eyes.

  “Definitely.”

  Daniel tried not to look, but the girl’s left nipple popped out above her low-cut blouse.

  The lopsided man extracted an oily credit card from his pocket. Swiped it across a paypoint in the girl’s hand.

  Daniel waited for the lopsided man to leave the store. Fixed his eyes on the shopkeeper, silently pleading for the old man to explain why New Settlers Way was “no good.”

  “Big trrouble therre. Poliss, they come inside therre and hurrt the peoples.”

  Police. Daniel had heard of them. Hadn’t seen them, though. The Orphanage was a safe place. Well, except for that one time, when they took away Mr. Sanders for questioning. But that had been just once.

  The girl stood arms akimbo. “Who’s the kid?”

  “He lookingg for Porrcu … Porrcu …”

  “Porcuperry Road,” said Daniel.

  “Sounds familiar,” said the girl. She adjusted her blouse. “What you looking for there?”

  Daniel didn’t know what to say. These were strangers. He didn’t divulge personal information to Hooplah, never mind to strangers.

  Odin chose that moment to pop his head out of the top of the satchel.

  The girl’s face fractured into a smile. “Oh, look at you.” She reached forward, the scent of berries and sweat on her wrist. She tickled the cat under his chin. Odin nestled against her hand. Rolled over.

  Daniel was torn between ogling the girl’s cleavage, and pressing the shopkeeper for more information. But what’s wrong with New Settlers Way? he wanted to yell.

  He counted to seven. Steadied his voice. “Please tell me more about that area on the map?”

  “You have place to sleep?” asked the shopkeeper. “It darrk outside.”

  “He can take the spare room,” said the girl.

  Daniel was about to refuse, when Odin purred. Nuzzled the girl’s shoulder.

  “I think we got some cat food in the back. Might be a little old, but it’ll taste fine.”

  Daniel was so close. So close to his mother. He could see her on the map right there. New Settlers Way. He could point to it. Touch the font on the faded paper.

  But he couldn’t find her tonight. Odin needed food, and he needed rest. He was struggling to keep his eyes open in the gloom. Echoes of the anesthetic.

  “Alright,” he said. “Yes. Please. Just one night.”

  The girl tickled her lips in Odin’s whiskers, and the old man smiled.

  Daniel couldn’t help but smile in return. “I’m Daniel,” he said, “and you’ve met Odin.”

  “Welcome,” said the shopkeeper. “I, Geppetto. This my sisterr’s daughterr, Florrenza.”

  Florenza winked at him.

  “Dinnerr forr now. Tomorrrow, we show you to get to New Settlerrs Way.”

  Dinner was pleasant. The bed was comfortable enough. But by the end of breakfast the next morning, Daniel could no longer contain himself.

  “Please, tell me how to find New Settlers Way. I need to go there. Today.”

  Geppetto lowered his mug. Tilted his head. He studied the boy.

  “An hour’s walk from here. Quicker by bus,” said the gi
rl.

  “Why you want to go therre?” asked the shopkeeper.

  A cold sweat broke out on the nape of Daniel’s neck.

  “It doesn’t matter why he wants to go,” said Florenza. “Let him see for himself.”

  Geppetto shrugged.

  “Come, I’ll show you.” Florenza walked him by the elbow to the window. “Right, you see that building there. No, not that one. The far building, with the green roof … Yes. Turn left there. Walk far. Very far. A good few miles. You’ll come to a broken archway. That’s the entrance.”

  Daniel almost asked what it was, this ‘New Settlers Way’, but he knew the girl wouldn’t tell him. Or maybe, he didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “Bad place,” said Geppetto. “No good.”

  “He’ll make up his own mind, Uncle.”

  The ancient wooden chair scratched the floorboards as Daniel rose. “We must go.” He grabbed Odin, who was nursing a saucer of milk. The cat put up a moment’s resistance, but then climbed into the satchel on Daniel’s back.

  “I’m sorry,” said Florenza. She pecked Daniel on the cheek. Her wide, brown eyes held the echo of a tear.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  Pineapple and Hair

  Geppetto was right.

  NEW S LERS WAY,

  read the broken archway. It arced across the road, from one building to another. Or rather, they had once been buildings. Now they were burnt husks of twisted concrete. Glass had melted over the sides of the ruined structures. Metal struts pierced their glossy skin.

  Daniel passed under the broken lettering. Roads split off to either side of the main street in front of him. They could hardly be called roads now, though. Houses and buildings had burst open, vomiting their bricks and mortar onto the rubbled paths.

  The sun beat down on the crown of Daniel’s mop of thick, black hair. The hanging smoke in the air thickened. His left eye cried. His lungs protested, spasming as he penetrated deeper into the warzone. About a hundred yards into New Settlers Way, the sweet stink of burning flesh competed with the smoke. Daniel remembered that smell from the operating theatre, when they’d removed his amygdala. But it was stronger here. Omnidirectional. As though the entire area were a seeping wound, and the sun its surgeon.