Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  Maybe that’s not a bad option.

  He went back to the rocking chair.

  Raine wedged a chair under the doorknob and retrieved a small object from the shelf. She fell on her knees, laced the special sticks between her hands—a little cross bound in the middle by sinewy twine, the sides worn smooth from long nights.

  She held her hands in front of her face, elbows sunk in the couch cushions. She closed her eyes. It was something she’d done the morning of the dying—the day her dreamland died.

  The grief was too deep, the suffering an undertow of thick tentacles. This was the only thing that brought her solace, a thin slice of daylight in an eternal night.

  “Dear Lord,” she prayed. “Send me an angel. Send me an angel to make all this right.”

  She prayed until cicadas announced the arrival of night.

  The rocking chair still creaked.

  Paul

  Paul stood in a hole.

  From a distance, it looked like his torso had been cut off at the waist. The hole was square, the bottom flat. Stones bulged from the walls, scarred from the sharp edge of a shovel. The ones painstakingly pried from the soil were piled next to him.

  A truck emerged from the distant trees.

  Paul leaned on the shovel. The wood handle was slick with sweat and bleeding blisters. His right hand (the one he had planted into the block wall) was still numb. His back and knees flared with pain; his muscles weak and burning—the usual aches a man would feel after digging a hole all night.

  A brick was not a robot.

  There were no superpowers, no ability to lift cars or leap buildings. Fabricated humans weren’t perfect; they simply worked efficiently, healed quickly. Their DNA lacked programming errors.

  But they hurt. They felt pain.

  Tracks of sweat began to cool. Paul wiped his forehead and drank from a bottle of water while the truck idled across the field, tires crunching over frosted grass that glittered in the early morning. Bob was behind the wheel, his head stuffed into a white cowboy hat. The taillights splashed the ground red.

  Raine was in the bed of the truck.

  A door closed behind Paul. Andy got out of the white truck parked twenty feet away, eating a sandwich. He zipped his green coat, the monitor badge embroidered on the sleeve. Paul could smell the ham and cheese, the mustard dabbed in Andy’s mustache. Despite aching ribs, Paul salivated. He hadn’t eaten in days, not since the bag arrived.

  “Someone’s been busy.” Bob slammed the door. “He dig all this?”

  “All night long,” Andy said. “Never stopped.”

  “You stayed up?”

  “Nodded off here and there, but he never quit. Didn’t want no help, either.”

  “Got a call that his location disappeared sometime around midnight.”

  Andy thought a moment. “No, he was here. I might’ve napped a few minutes, but he was digging the whole time. Heard the shovel in my sleep.”

  “Need to have you checked out, Paul. Can’t have your trackers going offline.”

  Paul had started digging at sunset, working at a slow, steady pace. Occasionally, he sat to rest, sometimes settling into the hole the deeper it got and watching the stars, but mostly he dug. Every once in a while he’d indulge in his hallucinations, watch a woman walk across the field, sometimes see her on her farm as the shovel’s blade would bite into the earth with a satisfying shhht. But mostly he dug in the glow of Andy’s headlights, dug to keep warm, dug to keep from thinking.

  Until the sun was up again.

  Bob inspected his work. His boots toed the ledge, soil trickling into the hole. His chin disappeared into his neck as he gazed down and grunted. His nostrils flared. “What you got there?” he asked Andy.

  “Breakfast.”

  Bob tipped his cowboy hat back and looked at the ham and cheese with more interest than the grave. Andy pulled out a cooler and happened to have a spare sandwich.

  Paul climbed out, debris grinding into the weeping blisters.

  Raine’s head was bowed, her lips silently moving. He couldn’t see her hands but knew they were counting the beads on a rosary. It was a gift from one of the kindest monitors ever to work the Settlement. He taught her the Lord’s Prayer the day after her dreamland died.

  She had counted those beads ever since.

  He couldn’t be at the wake, couldn’t deal with the ritual and the endless condolences. Couldn’t take any more sorrow. Anger dripped into his chest, a high-grade fuel that burned hot and clean. If he went to the wake, if he sat there and saw the endless string of sad eyes and droopy frowns soaked in sympathy while his daughter (a fucking body bag) was on display, that tank of angry fuel was going to explode.

  So he dug the hole, instead.

  He had chipped at the earth until exhaustion drained the rage, pulled out the stones one by one until his legs burned, his arms grew weak. And now three steps from her body, the angry blue flame reignited.

  The tailgate dropped with a thud.

  Jamie lay in a bed of wildflowers, hair tied back, fingers laced over her stomach. She was wearing the summer dress and the stone necklace. Cali made that.

  Cali, the woman on the farm, the woman he watched in his hallucinations. The woman he loved. Cali had harvested those flat, smooth rocks from the stream. She drilled holes and strung them together. Paul lost his necklace when the Settlement occurred. But Jamie, she never took hers off. Even in death.

  The back of her arms were taut and rosy, but clay revealed the lifelessness in bluish-gray tones. He resisted shaking her, telling her to wake up.

  He looked away, trembling.

  What were you doing in Georgia?

  She was travelling. It had been months since he’d seen her. She was busy with a grass-roots campaign to repeal the Settlement laws, to restore the citizenship of all fabricated humans. Last communication he had with her, she had stumbled onto something big, something that would solve everything.

  Plastic beads rattled in Raine’s fingers.

  “I’m sorry… I wasn’t there.” He pulled a strand of hair from Jamie’s cheek. “She’s beautiful.”

  Raine’s chin wrinkled.

  “I just couldn’t… I’m sorry, Raine.”

  Beyond Andy’s truck were the distant mountains, the peaks engulfed in low-hanging clouds. So much beauty, Jamie used to say when she was visiting, as if there was some blessing hidden in the curse. She had a way of seeing that way, recognizing opportunity where there was only sorrow.

  “I hate this.” Paul rapped his knuckles on the truck’s bed.

  Over and over, he drove his fist until the skin tore; blood smeared the chipped paint. The partially healed knuckles spiked pain into his wrist, agony ringing between each blow.

  He hated the truck, hated the monitors and the Settlement. Hated the mountains, the air he breathed, the pain, the sorrow, the world.

  The human race.

  His hatred drilled deep, tapping an undisturbed bed of emotions that gushed like black gold, drowning him—we are the bricks.

  His experience was a human experience, regardless of the nature of his body—clay or biomite. But now he knew—watching the monitors chat in front of a grave while licking mustard from their fingers, chortling about something that happened the day before.

  And bricks are not human.

  No, bricks weren’t human. They were a different species, an evolutionary step in human development. It explained why humans couldn’t convert into a brick. Halfskins could become 99.9% biomites (ninety-nine percenters), but no technology could make the body give up that last bit of clay. Humans could never be a brick. And bricks were better than them.

  Human bigotry was well-founded.

  “We’re going to die,” he whispered. “If we don’t leave this place, we’re going to die.”

  “Shhh,” Raine said.

  “We’ll die soulless,” he whispered. “Dreamless.”

  “Be quiet.”

  “Every one of us.”

>   He slammed his fist into the bed. Bob and Andy looked up and threw the wrappers in a cooler.

  “They’ll kill us all,” Paul whispered, looking at Bob.

  “Shut up. Don’t make this worse.”

  Paul slid his arms beneath his daughter, her body light, as if the life that left it had accounted for all its weight. He cradled her head in the crook of his elbow.

  Andy came to help, but Paul laid her next to the hole and jumped inside. Andy knelt next to her.

  “Don’t touch her.”

  Paul pulled her against his chest and, despite his warning, Andy placed her dangling arm on her lap. There wasn’t enough room to lower her while standing in the hole. He tried not to drop her, but the lack of grace with which she hit the dirt was a knife-twist to his chest.

  She lay in the earth, eyes closed, hair fanned. Raine passed him a sheet. Paul adjusted the stone necklace so that it lay in a perfect ring on her neck, then he lay the sheet over her, meticulously tucking it beneath her feet and legs, pushing it beneath her arms. No one saw him claw the back of her arm, his fingernails digging into the soft patch of biomite flesh. He pulled the sheet over her face and turned away with a handkerchief in his hands.

  Crumbs fell across the white fabric like scattered rain.

  “Any last words?” Bob asked.

  Raine began weeping. Andy put his arm around her, kindly guiding her away. Paul wanted to tell him to stay away, but she needed someone.

  “Then you might want to step away,” Bob added.

  He pulled a nozzle off a red one-gallon canister. The plastic hose smacked against his leg. A stream of clear liquid jetted from the nozzle, drenching a zigzag line over the sheet, the wet fabric sticking to the lumpy features beneath it.

  The chemical fumes burned their nostrils.

  “I’ll bury her, Paul.” Andy patted his shoulder.

  “No.”

  He waited for Bob to empty the tank. The two monitors stepped back and watched him lift the shovel, his bloody palms sliding on the handle that listed in his limp, once again completely shattered right hand. The sheet had already begun to collapse where the chemical dissolved her biomites into useless byproducts.

  Can’t allow variant biomite strains on the Settlement, the People said. If you want to bury her, you got to melt her first.

  He swallowed a bitter knot.

  Raine was gone, having walked off before he was finished. Paul dropped the shovel.

  Bob’s deep voice followed him across the field. There was no laughter, no jokes. It wasn’t until Paul was inside the trees, a couple hundred yards from the grave, that he stopped to pull the handkerchief from his pocket. Hidden in the paisley folds was a white square of gauze and a smudge of biomite flesh from beneath his fingernails.

  Paul wasn’t going to die on the Settlement.

  And neither was Jamie.

  The Archetype’s Knowledge

  George Knightly swallowed a gray capsule.

  He stood in front of his bedroom window, the heavy oblong capsule settled into the cup of his palm. He threw it to the back of his throat. It tasted cold and silky and landed with a thud, what he imagined mercury must taste like.

  It was eleven thirty.

  The heavyset Chinese-American put a black disc (what could pass as a Mexican pebble) between his hands prayer-style and stood perfectly still. The object emitted a dull hum.

  It was hard for him not to move. George was in entertainment. He was used to talking, accustomed to moving around. Not a big fan of contemplation. So standing at the window with a now hot buzzing black rock between his hands wasn’t easy.

  Fabricated by George Knightly III (a Chinese immigrant that became a self-made billionaire in biomite fabrication and coding), George (or Junior, as those in the family called him) wasn’t like other fabricated humans.

  Junior was a clone.

  It could be worse. He could be a dreamlander, the type of brick that was born in a dreamland and downloaded into the physical world. Junior regarded dreamlanders as somewhat artificial, like downloading a superhero.

  Junior was a duplicate of George Knightly III, who, given his daily demands, didn’t have enough time to enjoy life. One lifetime, he would say, isn’t enough. So he fabbed Junior to indulge in entertainment.

  A bit sick, a little twisted, but Junior understood. When you had that much power and money, it was hard to leave an opportunity unturned.

  But all that was then.

  Now Junior lived on the Settlement in a one-bedroom cabin that was smaller than his luxury apartment’s closet. His ass barely fit on the toilet.

  “Do you know who I am?” Junior said when the People caught him on set (he really didn’t believe they’d come to the studio; the whole get the bricks campaign was too surreal, too dystopian).

  “We know,” they said. “You’re a brick.”

  That wasn’t the first time he’d heard that word. It was the first time he’d been called it to his face.

  They won’t find you, Father had promised.

  George Knightly III insisted Junior call him Father. It was a bit sick, a little twisted, seeing as they were more like brothers. But he was Junior’s first sight, standing outside the fab box when he opened his eyes. But George Knightly III had all the money, all the connections. Junior had nothing.

  Father would use his extensive knowledge in biometrics to hide the code imbedded in Junior’s biomites (a unique code that only bricks possessed) to keep him off the People’s radar. He’d make a few calls, hire additional public relations personnel to re-create Junior’s background. It’d be fine; it would all work out.

  Number 122.

  That was what Junior became, the one hundred and twenty-second brick to be apprehended and relocated to the Settlement. And since that moment, Father hadn’t spoken to him. He wrote Junior off like a bad investment. You keep one hand clean for the public to see and the other hand can do whatever you want. Junior had been washed.

  He knew he would be.

  The black stone had become searing hot. Skin melt seeped from between his hands, a mixture of plastic and sweat, something he oddly didn’t find offensive. A bit twisted.

  Don’t let go, the note said. Whatever you do, don’t let go of the stone.

  That was what the note said. It was smuggled onto the Settlement by a new monitor (a woman paid handsomely by Junior’s associates) along with a box and instructions.

  He peeked at the clock. It was eleven forty-eight.

  Twelve more minutes.

  The blazing rock (he swore, any second now, would melt a hole through the back of his hand) took his attention away from the synchronized hum in his belly. The metal pill was synchronizing with the black stone.

  Eleven more minutes.

  And when he got out of this godforsaken place, he would meet up with Father’s lifelong business partner (a greedy bastard that felt overshadowed) and take over the family business.

  First, he would kill Father because Junior was a clone. Ruthlessness was in the genes.

  A set of headlights cruised down worn tracks, flashing across the front of Junior’s house. The taillight turned the trees bloody as they crept into the forest.

  Midnight.

  Junior tossed the hot rock on the bed. His palms, miraculously, weren’t scalded. They weren’t even hot. He snatched his bag and headed for the back door. His stomach gurgled in the kitchen and, for a second, he considered leaving an unflushed turd for one of those stone-cold monitor fucks to find. At some point, they would look for him in bed. The pill transferred his coded identity into that black stone. But he only had so much time to meet his contact.

  He’d shit later.

  It was a cloudy night, black as ink. He started off running, but had to frequently rest, checking his GPS. His breath was noisy, the air thick. He was halfway to the perimeter when the cramping started. It would require an emergency stop. Brown liquid splattered on the back of his legs.

  He barreled through the overgr
owth, a rabid animal. Branches clawed his face. Another cramp attack, this time he didn’t stop, just released it on the run.

  At four a.m., he emerged from the trees. Across a shallow stream, he could see the stout yellow post that marked the Settlement’s perimeter. A figure stood next to it.

  Junior thought of hiding until he could be sure that was his pickup, but he had been coughing and hacking for the last half an hour. And there had been two more bouts of bowel-purging cramps now soaking his trousers. His approach wouldn’t be a surprise.

  The dark figure raised an arm.

  Junior waded through the stream, the frigid water numbing his legs, soothing the chapped flesh between his buttocks, a diarrhea rash chafing his inner thighs. Another wave of cramps was coming. There couldn’t possibly be anything left to shit.

  He climbed the opposite bank and fell, finally crawling toward his savior. This man would put him on the all-terrain vehicle and cart him off to a nearby helicopter, fly him to an unknown safe house where they’d plot Father’s end.

  The cramping tugged his intestines, poking them with dull points and serrated edges. He powered through the discomfort until the ringing took over. It started between his eyes, then consumed his body. He collapsed like a hunted beast.

  The yellow post next to his ear.

  The perimeter. It wasn’t supposed to affect him.

  Grass and leaves crunched beneath approaching boots. A silhouette leaned over him. Tears stung Junior’s eyes, blurring the figure into a blob.

  The man whispered something in Chinese.

  Junior heard the all-terrain vehicle drive away, leaving him staring at the starless sky as his intestines liquefied. His body began shutting down, twitching in the final throes. Eyes open and dry.

  The man didn’t meet him to escape. He wasn’t there to help overthrow George Knightly III. He was there to make sure the metallic pill had sufficiently washed Father’s hands for good.

  He was there to deliver a message.

  Goodbye, son.