Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Jason Werbeloff

“It is, yes.”

  She examined the fingers festooned around the knee in the bloody shirt. “And what are those for?”

  “Margaret requires all ten fingers implanted.”

  “But you already have six.”

  “Margaret requires these ten to replace all Margaret’s existing fingers.”

  Hal blinked, and the fan on her head whirred a little faster. A plate slid from her midriff. She extracted a paypoint, and typed on the keypad. Held it out to Margaret.

  Margaret waved a card over its surface. Handed the paypoint to Daniel.

  “We’ll need your discretion,” he said, fishing the credit card from his pocket.

  “Huh.” Hal snatched the paypoint from him. Tapped the keypad again. Returned the unit to the waiting boy.

  “Wow.” Daniel wasn’t too sure how much money Thomsin had in his account. But this seemed a little steep, even for a Bubbler’s account.

  “I charge triple for anonymous implants. The Rejek required is more expensive. Untraceable formulation. And I have to resequence the genes in the organ.” She held up a hand to avoid objections. Roger barked. “Yes, I know that’s done standardly when scrubbing organs. But traces of the donor’s DNA usually remain afterwards. When I’m done, that organ will be scrubbed cleaner than Margaret’s manifold. Nobody would ever know it wasn’t yours to begin with.”

  Margaret frowned.

  Daniel nodded. Was about to swipe his card –

  “Oh dear. You want anesthesia?”

  “Uh, yes I do.”

  “Sorry about that. Usually deal with androids.” Hal winked at Margaret as she yanked the paypoint from Daniel’s hand again. Adjusted the total, and returned it to him.

  Daniel sighed. And swiped his card.

  *

  “All done! It might hurt for a little while. Pop a painkiller. It’ll put a spring in your step.”

  Daniel raised a heavy hand to his face. Touched the bandage over his left eye. Numb. Soft and bulbous.

  He’d woken from the anesthetic on a bare metal table. Each of the three walls of the little room were painted in glaring primary colors.

  He swallowed one of the pills in Hal’s outstretched palm. Dry.

  “Should probably take two.”

  The two androids stared down at him with wide, curious eyes. A green wall behind them threw their features into sharp relief. Their eyes blazed against the backdrop. Daniel blinked. Tried to clear his head. The anesthesia had left his skull stuffed with cotton balls, soaked in vinegar. He wasn’t up for arguing.

  He reached for the other pill.

  “That’s better. Now be careful. You can walk on it, but don’t go running any marathons till it’s fully healed.” Hal petted his bandaged knee.

  “It is time for Margaret to go,” said the other android. Its single ear looked absurd on its metallic head. He wondered how Hal had done it – turned the lobe pink like that.

  “You want to sleep a little longer?” asked Hal. The fan on the crown of her head whirred to life again. “Could give you the table for another hour or two?” The compartment in the android’s midriff slid aside to reveal the paypoint.

  Daniel blinked. Struggled to part his eyelids.

  “That would be good,” he said, reaching for his pocket. “Yes, I’d like that pl–”

  The nerve impulse in his fingers melted into the bare mattress. The room dissolved around him. He was back. Back in that rubbled room in New Settlers Way. Lying on the bloody mattress. He was his mother. But the shrapnel wasn’t in his heart. It was in his knee, and in his left eye. He bled, while the Holey Man shouted morning prayers from a burning rooftop. Flames encased the Holey Man as he wailed his song.

  We had you cleaned

  We had you eat

  We love your toes

  Wake up your meat

  “Wake up, Daniel. Wake –”

  Hal’s hand was hard on his shoulder. She rocked him back and forth.

  The world snapped into focus.

  “How long have I?”

  “Two hours,” said Hal. She held out the paypoint. Almost dropped it. But caught the device before it hit the floor.

  Daniel blinked. Both eyes. The gauze was gone. The pain in his eye was gone. He peeled away the bandage covering his left leg. Touched the almost invisible scar where Hal had opened him up. He tried flexing the joint, and … no pain. It flexed smoothly.

  Gods, what two hours sleep and a bottle of pills could do. The analgesics and anti-inflammatories they used after surgery at the Orphanage were nowhere as good as these.

  His stomach rumbled something furious – he could do with some good old printed food from Thomsin’s apartment. But otherwise, he seemed fine. No pain. The grog in his head was gone. In its place, he felt a fire behind his eyes. Warm and steady. He was … alive.

  He jumped off the operating table.

  “Careful,” said Hal. “That knee needs time to heal.”

  Daniel nodded, not really listening. The red-blue-green walls pulsed around him. “Go,” they shouted. “Go … go.”

  Hal lead him to the door.

  “Oh, yes. Don’t forget your painkillers.” Hal handed him a small, unmarked bottle. “You know where to find me.” Only her mouth smiled.

  Daniel left the apartment. Descended the twenty-six flights of stairs to the ground floor. “Margaret does not travel to Halliberry 342 directly,” the android had said on their way here. “Margaret does not want to be traced to this location.” Smart move, Margaret, Daniel thought. He walked in no particular direction, wanting to put a few blocks between him and Hal’s before calling a taxi.

  The Bubble’s electric midnight sun bathed his face. Well, not quite midnight. It was 10:13 p.m. according to the blinking time display on his glasses, but it was so bright, it could have been day. By now he’d reached the outskirts of the Promenade, and the neon-glow of a thousand billboards bathed the streets. They screamed silently at him, about chewing gum and cocaine, liver replacements and sex clubs. As his gaze shifted from one billboard to another, his glasses shouted their messages through the center of his skull.

  He shut his eyes, stared up through his fluorescent eyelids. The voices died down. Stopped. His left eye didn’t hurt. Didn’t burn. Didn’t weep. He noticed flickering shadows pass across his vision, and opened his eyes. Thousands of hovercars crisscrossed above him, darting between buildings and under walkways, interweaving seamlessly through the morass of billboards.

  He noticed for the first time how grand it was. The Bubble was gobsmackingly awesome when one forgot its macabre price, paid in blood by the inhabitants of the Gutter.

  He put the thought out of his head, and walked on.

  Sure, the knee had been implanted only recently. But it was his knee. He sensed the difference immediately. The grinding of the rusted servo joint was gone. That ache in his leg that he’d lived with for almost a decade, that he’d convinced himself he could bear, was gone. Walking now was no trouble at all. Not even in the summer heat under the Bubble.

  He called for a taxi.

  Now that he knew how it felt to be alive, to get something back that was his, Daniel realized just how much of his life he hadn’t lived. The ubiquitous angst of waiting to ‘donate’ the next piece of him. Then the pain of living with the cybernetic replacements. The endless work shifts at the Organ Farm. The poverty of the Gutter.

  That was no way to exist. The Gutter wasn’t where he belonged. Here. He should be here, under the phosphorescent meniscus of the Bubble. This was a life.

  Daniel peered around while he waited for the taxi, his eyes drifting into the distance. He was enjoying the glasses. His gaze happened upon a lamp post, and in a moment the glasses overlaid his vision with information on its parts. Globe specifications. Solar charging techniques. Lux ratings.

  Daniel tapped the arm of his glasses, and the information disappeared.

  What else could the glasses do?

  “Can anyone trace my searches?” he whispered. />
  A woman brushed past him. “And I told him,” she said, “that anything less than both kidneys is unac–” But she was gone before Daniel could hear the rest.

  “Yes,” replied his glasses. “Would you like to switch to private browsing?” He was coming to like the glasses’ voice. It was richer than Hooplah’s. More sonorous than Florenza’s. And never impatient.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Private browsing enabled.”

  His glasses pinged, and he looked up. Out of the thousands of cars intermingling above him, one of them separated from the rest. Like a thread from a ball of string, the taxi descended from the morass toward him.

  “What’s the best way to dissolve a body?” he whispered before the hornet-yellow taxi landed.

  Dozens of web pages overlaid his vision.

  *

  Daniel whistled as he marched into his apartment. He liked the sound of that – ‘his apartment’. He was laden with bags from Phil’s Pharma in both hands. Lye, it turned out, was heavy. The store didn’t sell pure lye, but they did stock a high concentration lye-bleach combination product. “EATS THROUGH ANYTHING,” proclaimed the label. He’d bought buckets of the stuff.

  He ignored the rumbling in his stomach. Hardly felt it at all. There was something good, something right about being closer to whole. He felt it deep in his chest. That he was purer now that he’d retrieved his knee and cornea. That he was coming together. As he was always supposed to.

  He had just one more problem to solve before he could settle down to a hot printed meal. Before he could plot the steps to find the rest of his missing organs.

  Three hours, the search results had assured him. Three hours in the lye, and Thomsin’s body would be reduced to an “easily disposable coffee-colored” sludge.

  He whistled the Law and Order theme song, as he dragged one of the casks of lye to the bathroom. He bumped the container against the doorframe, and the lid popped off. A soapy odor permeated the apartment. Like the suds in Decontamination. But much, much stronger.

  Odin was terrified. He’d bolted under the couch at the first whiff of the stuff.

  “I’m sorry old man,” he said to the cat, “but it has to be done.”

  “Jazz,” he whispered. The lights dimmed, and the saxophone’s voice drenched the room in lime-green tones. The walls of breasts hazed behind a shimmering curtain of electrostatic music.

  He reached into one of the shopping bags. Thank Gods for SunAway, he thought, as he smeared it over his smoldering cheeks. Along the back of his neck. His shoulders relaxed.

  He sighed. Glanced at the muslin-shrouded body on the living room floor. The fetor of decomposing flesh wafted between the molecules of lye, stirred by the saxophone. Daniel inhaled the mixture. Tried to taste it with his artificial tongue, but settled for tasting it with his prefrontal lobe instead.

  He shut his eyes, and rocked to the beat, counting the pentameter. He swayed on his toes, then on his heels, then from his hips. Images of Hooplah drifted behind his eyelids. Her curly hair. The Holey Man’s smile. His mother under the Birch.

  The completion of the song ended his reverie, and he came out of himself. The tongue. Yes, he’d find his tongue next.

  But first, Thomsin needed attention.

  Whistling the last movement of the song, he threw the shroud aside.

  The stench punched him square in the jaw. “Good Gods,” he cried, trying to retain his balance as he retreated. As if pleased with the acknowledgement, a maggot appeared from Thomsin’s nose. It crawled with careful purpose, stopping every so often to sniff the air, until it reached one of his cloudy eyes.

  The tentacle, green and hairy, reached down Daniel’s gut again. But he stopped it. Halted the spasms in his stomach. Steadied his thrumming heart. He swallowed the rising bile.

  “Okay,” he said to himself. “Okay.”

  He was about to try again, to approach the body a second time, when a cerise message box appeared across his vision.

  Coming for lunch tomorrow, Thomsin? Your cousins will be here. And you know how your father gets when you’re not around for Uncle Kent’s visits. Let me know. Love you.

  The text flanked a picture of a woman’s face. At first glance, with her creaseless skin and lips full as small intestines, she looked not much older than Florenza. But Daniel noticed the eyes. Recognition behind the smile. A rigidity that only came with experience. She may not have looked older than Florenza, but she was much older than she appeared.

  He was about to tap the arm of his glasses to dismiss the message, but paused.

  He hadn’t considered them. Thomsin’s family. His friends. They’d be looking for the boy soon enough. He could ignore this message. The next, and the next. But eventually, they’d come looking.

  “Reply,” said Daniel, and a flashing cursor popped up. As he dictated, his words appeared on the overlay.

  Not feeling so great. Need a few days to rest. I won’t be there tomorrow. Love, Thomsin.

  “Send,” said Daniel, and the text of his reply faded away, leaving him to look at Thomsin’s decaying face. Splotched patches had appeared around the body’s eyes. Blue streaks had leeched from the corners of Thomsin’s lips into his cheeks.

  “Music off,” whispered Daniel.

  He held his breath as he dragged Thomsin by the armpits to the bathroom. The Bubbler’s skin was rubbery in Daniel’s hands.

  Another cerise message box popped up in his vision.

  Feel better XOXO

  Daniel shook his head to clear the message. “Sorry about this,” he said to the boy’s milky corneas.

  He lifted the body into the shower. Navigated a series of menus on his glasses, until he found the setting for the shower’s forcefield. He set the shower’s sides to ‘Impenetrable’ up to waist height, and instructed the forcefield to plug the shower’s drain. Now the cubicle would act more like a bath than a shower.

  Daniel opened the cask of lye, and poured.

  Shouldn’t have inhaled that, he realized, as a violent spasm seized his lungs. He hobbled from the bathroom. Hacked until the paroxysm subsided.

  Gods, he’d just been at the pharmacy. They would have had gas masks.

  He rummaged through Thomsin’s closet. Grabbed a shirt, and tied it around his nose and mouth. The smell of lye dissipated almost immediately.

  He was just about done pouring the rest of the caustic liquid into the forcefield around Thomsin’s body, when –

  Tingg

  He paused, the bottle of lye suspended in the air.

  Ouch! He’d jerked at the sudden noise. Splashed a few drops of the lye on the back of his right hand.

  Tinggggg

  The chime sounded again. “What is that?” he whispered.

  “You have a visitor,” cooed his glasses. A camera feed appeared in his vision. A taxi hovered just outside the entrance of the door, about a yard from the building.

  “Shit … shit … shit.” Daniel dashed out the bathroom. Shut the door. Who was this now? Thomsin’s mother? A friend?

  He rifled through the contents of the bedside tables. Deodorant. Excellent. He let the bathroom door fall open a slice, and let out a good measure of the can. Vanilla clouds mushroomed through the little room. For good measure, he doused the living room in deodorant too. The stench of Thomsin’s body had lessened here since he’d dragged it to the shower, but the corpse had been lying behind the table not too long ago.

  That’s when he noticed the tingling on the back of his hand where he’d spilt the lye. The skin was dotted a brilliant scarlet.

  “Shall I ask who it is?” prompted his glasses.

  He hadn’t thought of that. “Yes,” he said. He yanked the smartshirt from his face, and wiped his hand. Threw the shirt under the bed.

  “He says his name is Private Investigator Kage Jackson.”

  The skin on the back of Daniel’s hand bubbled. White-hot tendrils of pain burrowed into his knuckles. Welts had begun to form where the dots had been.r />
  He dashed to the bathroom again. He opened the door. Stepped into the rancid blend of rot and deodorant. Thrust his hand into the basin’s forcefield. When he removed it, his hand felt a little better. He rubbed it with his other. His skin was soapy. He rubbed more. And realized that his hands weren’t lubricated by soap. As he rubbed, more and more of the skin on the back of his hand came away. Great layers of it. Peeling and melting away from him.

  Tinggggg

  Daniel swallowed his escalating heart. Ignored the skin sloughing off his hand. He blocked the pain. Erected a smile.

  And strode to the door.

  Gutter Leather

  In his blood-soaked moccasins, in his Rejek-stained jacket, in his rotten suit pants, Kage marched from the murder scene at Amputating Amy. He strode with his longest, most androgynous gait. Down the corridor. Past the Beehive – he ignored her belligerent pleas for information. Past tanks of floating Gutter children. Past the bar, lit in the gaudiest shade of plum imaginable. Past the only patron, in the lime-green shirt. Out the doorway, and –

  They weren’t there. He peered up the alley. Down the other way. He saw nobody. No people. No clothes. The pile he’d left beside the doorway, under the pulsing blue-red light of the patrol cars, was gone. Every item he owned, his entire wardrobe, had been stolen.

  At another time, this would have been a problem. A calamity. But Kage wasn’t in the mood for calamities right this moment. He had a case to solve. “Recording off,” he whispered to his glasses. The app saved the video of the crime scene in his personal folder, and encrypted it.

  “Taxi,” he said.

  A moment later, a hovercar descended to the alley.

  The seats were new. Plush leather. He brushed off the remnants of the limb pit from his pants, and sat. “Bubble PD,” he said.

  “Certainly sir. Please note, there will be an additional sanitation charge.”

  Kage grunted. But as the cab rose into the air, he couldn’t help but stroke the leather. Too soft for animal hide. Must be Gutter range. He felt a little queasy at the thought. Kage was old-fashioned that way – the touch of human leather made him uneasy, even if the humans were Gutters. He ignored the voice in his head that protested that his moccasins were made from Gutter leather too. There was no way around it – almost everything of quality these days was made from moisturized Gutter leather. Sure, there were slacktivists who protested from their hemp armchairs. But their cause had been lost years ago.