Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  Snip.

  The memories were washed out to sea by the squealing pitch.

  “You need me to do it?” Patty asked.

  Peterson had skipped to the left in a patch of missing seconds. Now his arms were crossed. His lips thinned, jaw set. He approached Jamie like a barrel of nitroglycerin on a wobbly plank. There were only two more objects he applied to her, the last a Velcro strap around her forearm.

  There was a soft knock at the door.

  Peterson stood back as Patty went to answer it. The small hairs on Jamie’s arm stood.

  “You’re here to witness?” She sounded uncertain.

  “I am.”

  “I’m Patty Madsen. This is Bo Peterson.”

  Pleasantries exchanged, a sizable pause hung in the doorway. The witness didn’t give his name. Peterson’s hands were at his sides; he stared as the witness entered.

  Jamie could feel him. It was the first time she felt something since waking outside the lab. His presence registered in her mind, sonar pinging his long strides. Peterson stepped back, making room for the stranger.

  He was old, his white hair cropped short, eyes hooded and dark. Expressionless, motionless—he looked down at Jamie. Something about him was familiar.

  “May I?” he asked.

  “Yes, sure,” Patty finally answered.

  The witness bent one knee, coming eye level with Jamie. As he did, slowly lowering to the floor, the high-pitched scream dampened, was pushed away by a rising buzz that started between her eyes, like the wings of a thousand insects fluttering inside her head. It didn’t make her itch, but rather trickled through her.

  He’s got biomites.

  He synced with her, communicating in soundless bytes that told her to relax. Everything will be all right.

  He was the legal witness, a halfskin from a non-clay state required to be present during processing. But he was familiar. She had seen him before. The face was blurry, but the eyes… where had she seen the eyes? Chicago?

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Just waiting on you,” Patty said.

  “Very well.”

  The witness remained still, his frame filling the space between Jamie and the desk. His eyes were calm and unblinking, containing slivers of two colors: brown as earth, blue as sky.

  Patty told her lab partner to make the transfer. Peterson removed the tablet from his pocket. The witness spoke before he could make a hand gesture.

  “Allow me?”

  “Be my guest.” Peterson stepped back.

  The catatonic hold fell from Jamie. The witness hadn’t blinked or twitched, simply passed a thought to her biomites to release the imprisoning grip. The buckles on the straitjacket had been released, the coffin lid raised.

  She was free to move.

  Jamie clenched her fingers, wiggled her toes. Ice still flowed inside her, chilling her muscles. But the fear had vanished in the friendly buzz, the biomite sync extinguishing the terror.

  Everything will be all right.

  “This way,” Patty called.

  Jamie felt the urge to stand, an urge she couldn’t deny. Unlike when she stood in the hallway when Peterson was fingering the tablet, she felt more like she had a choice. She didn’t, but she felt that way. She teetered on the balls of her feet and turned to the left where the plastic had rattled and metal bars snapped into place.

  A gurney.

  It was beneath a bank of lamps, wheels cocked at various angles. A brown vinyl bag was peeled open like a trap. Patty touched the center of the gurney.

  This is where you go.

  Jamie stuttered. Panic threatened to rise into her throat, a surge of bile that rebelled against this moment. The buzzing hummed until she itched all over, the sound of Peterson’s keyboard in the distance.

  Her steps were clunky, the exact opposite of the witness’s fluid pace that flowed next to the gurney, next to Patty. Liquid eyes. Long fingers unfurled.

  Jamie climbed into the vinyl bag.

  Patty tucked Jamie’s feet inside and folded her hands. There was no pillow to support her head, no need for comfort. When they were done, they would simply pull the zipper.

  Tears filled the pockets of her eyes, blurring the world until the next automated blink. The witness laid his warm hand on her arm, the spiderlike fingers wrapping all the way around, gently clasping. She wished for the world to stopped jittering.

  “Ready?” Patty called.

  “Just about,” Peterson answered. “Still waiting on state confirmation.”

  “How do the visuals look?”

  “Everything is good, just need—there it is.” Several keystrokes and one final punch, a whack on the coffin’s last nail. The lights above Jamie brightened. “When you’re ready.”

  “Test, test.” Patty leaned into Jamie’s view. Her lips were dry, complexion bleached. “Good?”

  “Good,” Peterson answered.

  “Okay, here we go.” Patty stood upright, clearing her throat. “Patricia Madsen with Atlanta Biomite Processing. Witness for the processing is… shit. What’s your name?”

  “My name isn’t required.”

  “Indulge me.”

  “My biomite identity will suffice.”

  Peterson muttered from the computer, “Can we just do this?”

  “Fine.” She started over. “Patricia Madsen with Atlanta Biomite Processing. Witness for the processing is present. Jamie? Do you understand me? Nod if you do.”

  Sensation filled her head from the neck up. Tears streamed down her temples. She swallowed under her own control. Her mouth was stale.

  “Jamie? Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “You entered the sovereign clay state of Georgia knowingly and willfully eight days ago. Your biomites were, at that time, commandeered by the state’s satellite control system at which time you were impounded for processing. Federal law empowers the clay state of Georgia to forbid the possession or introduction of biomites across its borders. Currently, your body consists of 86% biomites. Do you understand? Please nod.”

  It was coming too fast. Patty recited the declaration like a bored announcer. Jamie couldn’t remember anything. How was she supposed to agree?

  “Jamie?”

  She refused to nod.

  “I’m not asking for you to agree, just verify that you understand what I’m saying.”

  Jamie’s lips fluttered. She opened her mouth, but her throat was empty. A hiss squeezed out. I want my memories.

  “You’ll get your memories,” the witness said.

  “Stop,” Patty said. “What are you doing?”

  “She simply wants to remember.”

  “Is this your first witness?”

  “It’s a simple request.”

  “It’s not how it works. Bo, cut that last bit and pick up at the end. Can you verify she understands? All right, good. Let me know when you’re ready.”

  Her memories, where were they? Why did they have to take them? They could download them, sift through them, see her entire life, secrets and all. It was how they knew she entered the state knowingly and willfully, how they justified her disposal and documented her end. But why did they have to take the memories? She could accept her death, just not with an empty slate.

  Like she came into the world.

  “All right,” Patty announced. “By entering the clay state of Georgia, you have surrendered your rights to possess active biomites. The biomites currently in your possession will be deactivated. Since your body is composed of 86% biomites, you will not survive.

  “Your remains will be delivered to your next of kin. Do you understand? Please nod.”

  Jamie’s nose began to leak.

  “Verified,” Peterson called, confirming she understood.

  “Are you comfortable, Jamie?” Patty asked.

  It was a humane question, but sounded more like someone asking her to move the hell out of the way.

  “Okay. You can release her emotions.”
<
br />   She was speaking to the witness. He was in control now. His biomites acted as her proxy. She sensed the distant howl of fear and low flicker of anger, but it wasn’t until the witness allowed her to feel did she realize just how hollowed out she’d been.

  She was cold. Scared.

  But with the witness at her side, his gangly fingers applying pressure, there was more to feel than just fear. In the last moments she was filled with warmth, light and an unquestioning sensation of belonging. He was there to witness her end, but it was more than that. Despite everything Patty said, it was the witness’s presence that made this humane.

  You are loved.

  “You may have last words,” Patty said, a sliver of warmth infecting her words. “Your last of kin will hear them.”

  Her throat relaxed. It was full of so many things to say, but she had to choose the last ones. What would be the last words of her life? What was the last thing she wanted the world to hear?

  She turned toward the witness. “I’m sorry.”

  He smiled down at her, a slight upturn of his mouth. A twinkle deep in the dark universe in his eyes. For a moment, she was looking through space, past planets and solar systems, black holes, quasars, asteroids. She gazed at celestial constellations, pink clouds of star dust, lights glowing in the belly of infant universes, the lightless core of collapsed stars.

  There was no beginning to the existence in him. No end. A circle that went on forever.

  “Goodbye, Jamie,” Patty said.

  Jamie was back in her paralyzed body. The witness looking down upon her, his ashen complexion somehow glowing in the bright light.

  Patty nodded.

  A switch was toggled on Peterson’s computer.

  A wraith slid over Jamie, its touch cold and complete. The world slowly died. The light evaporated from her eyes. She began to shrink, becoming smaller and thinner and less and less. She didn’t blink out like a light bulb, didn’t extinguish from the world like a blue flame.

  She just faded.

  In the last moments of her life, when the last shred of Jamie’s identity thinned into pure energy and she was embraced by the uncold, undead arms of Death, she saw everything in the witness’s eyes.

  He controlled everything.

  He was what she was looking for in Chicago, the one that would free Paul and Raine. He was the eater of dreams. And she went to him willfully, never knowing his name.

  He was the powers-that-be.

  Paul

  The house was made of bricks.

  The fucking irony.

  The roof was sagging, the windows fogged with algae. The railing led up to a rotting porch, weeds growing between the spongy floorboards.

  It had been abandoned long ago, left to be forgotten, to die a slow death by nature. Bad things had happened inside where once upon a time wealthy old women exorcised the souls of young girls and stole their bodies, the story went. Urban legends had turned the old women into witches that kidnapped innocent girls to restore their youth by punching a needle in their foreheads and sucking out their souls.

  Some of it was true.

  Paul stopped on the porch, the boards bowing under his boots. He looked down upon a valley where horses romped through a pasture enclosed by wooden fences and a woman hauled steel buckets of feed. He was hallucinating, he knew. This was a scene he saw when he felt the world was hopeless and lost. This was a place he wanted to be, a woman he wanted to see. A place where he could smell the manure and evergreen life around him.

  “There you are.” Carl stepped onto the porch. “Where have you been?”

  “Right here.”

  The portly man shook his head, not unfamiliar with Paul’s sudden absences. No one could find him when he didn’t want to be found.

  Carl went with the others to survey the outside of the brick house. Paul remained on the porch. The horses were gone. Instead of a valley and pastures there was an open field before him with a row of single-occupant cabins, the prefab kind that were built in a day, the walls so thin that the Wyoming winter seeped inside like a frigid breath through a thick layer of gauze. Chimney smoke mingled with slow-churning wind harvesters that faced distant snowcapped mountains.

  Five hundred and twelve of those cardboard shitboxes were scattered through the Wyoming wilderness for five hundred and twelve fabricated humans.

  Bricks.

  The last of them was delivered three months ago, a woman named Margaret that eluded authorities by living in the back of a tavern. The People confirmed she was the last of them, all of the bricks in the world now segregated from society (the People are safe, hurray!). Her husband, an uneducated prodigy that taught himself biometric engineering in the back of his bar, had his dead wife’s body fabricated and transplanted all her memories—all her memories except her death.

  Margaret was a plant.

  In the pecking order, she was below a clone and above a dreamlander. A clone was a duplicate identity without the memories. Dreamlanders were identities born in dreamland, a place regarded by most as imaginary. Dreamlanders weren’t real, body or not.

  Paul was a plant and couldn’t give a shit about social status. None of that mattered on the Settlement.

  They were all less than clay.

  Across the open field, a Jeep hadn’t moved in months. Raine was sweeping the porch. Afterwards, she might sit on the swing and stare at the mountains. If it wasn’t too late, Paul would bring over a cup of tea and they’d listen to the night. They wouldn’t talk.

  She rarely did that anymore.

  Paul, a voice called inside his head, there’s a courier at the gate.

  Hold on, Pete, Paul thought. I’m in the middle of something.

  They’re here to see you. I think you should come up here now.

  Alice and Carl, the Settlement’s engineers, walked up the steps, testing the floorboards before going inside.

  Have Frank handle it.

  You don’t understand—

  Paul cut him off. There was no need for phones or texting between bricks, just the wireless transmission of thoughts. But sometimes there were just too many thoughts.

  The inside of the house wasn’t as bad as the porch. The walls were black with mold, the damp carpet littered with tiny turds. The remains of a grandfather clock leaned in a corner like a classroom dunce.

  “It’s salvageable.” Carl picked at the doorframe. “But we’ll need more than raw materials to get a working lab in here.”

  He waddled down the hall, his overlapping gut convulsing with each step, and peeked into the remnants of a kitchen. Like most bricks, he was a perfect imitation of an imperfect human—designed to blend into the population. He wouldn’t be troubled by disease or cancer, just hack and wheeze his way through a long, suffering life.

  “We can probably harvest timber to repair the roof and porch,” he continued, “but we’ll need to upgrade the mill. Concrete will be needed for the foundation, mortar for tuck-pointing.”

  “What do you think?” Alice turned to Paul. “Think we can use it?”

  “Depends.”

  “I’m not talking about government permission, I mean the facilities.”

  Of course she wasn’t asking about permission. He was the resident carpenter, not a politician, not a paper-pusher. He stared out the window and shrugged. When the gray days lined up back to back for weeks at a time, he found it hard to give a shit.

  A horse whinnied, but he looked out to see Raine sweeping. Despite the chill, her arms were bare. She’d be out there until sweat glistened.

  “Paul?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Listen, if you don’t want to do this, just say it.” Alice, a petite redhead, put her hands out. “Don’t make me waste my time on a proposal if you’re not on board.”

  He rubbed his face like the gloom was a layer of dust he could scrub off. Of course they needed a biometric lab to keep their biomites healthy.

  “Paul?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I’m on
board.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She was nodding, but he felt her reach out for his true intentions. He could hide them from her, close his mind. Brain-to-brain communication was an optional conduit.

  “Bad day?” she asked.

  “Every day we’re out here.”

  “So we do this?”

  “Of course.” He smiled weakly.

  “We can make a good argument, you know. Once I get a preliminary proposal together, we can bring one of the monitors out here to see it. If we get one of them on board, let them know how the People will benefit from this more than us, they’ll listen.”

  Since arriving on the Settlement, the brick community held multiple patents on new sustainable energy production simply through thought experiments. The project revenue from these ideas (once they were confirmed and put into production by outside companies) would eventually be funding their captivity.

  Who said bricks weren’t agreeable?

  Imprisonment spurred their creativity in an effort to battle loneliness and apathy. And the People would make billions. And we’ll never leave.

  But if they cured dream disease, their freedom could be negotiated. Dream disease was one of the reasons the Settlement was created. Only halfskins (and now clay) succumbed to dream disease. Bricks were immune, but they didn’t cause it.

  But that didn’t stop the People from believing they did.

  Not only were the bricks rounded up and segregated, the People killed their ability to create their own dreamlands (how they were doing that Paul didn’t know; someone had conceived of a new frequency algorithm that was beyond his comprehension). Despite the fact that dream disease was still rampant, the People refused to reinstate their dreamlands even though they conducted a multitude of successful thought experiments in the simulated reality.

  So the gray skies got grayer, the winter wind colder.

  And Raine was still on the porch.

  You need to come to the gate. The intrusive thought startled Paul. He had blocked incoming calls.