“Scrape him,” Don said.
“Feds said hold him,” the sheriff said.
“I don’t give a goddamn. This is a clay state and we’ve been granted authority to protect our rights by the federal government. This man brought active biomites into the middle of our state and we are entitled to process him.”
“He’s not halfskin.”
“He ain’t clay, either.”
“Law doesn’t apply to bricks, Don. That’s strictly federal.”
“This man was once on the most wanted list, declared deceased by the federal government, and he suddenly appears outside the Atlanta biomite process office eating boiled peanuts? You think that’s an accident, Larry?”
The sheriff tipped his head.
Don turned his round body at Larry, his voice dialed down. “I only need one hour. I’ll get him over to processing and back before the feds get here. I want to know this man’s thoughts, want to know what’s in his head. That information could mean a lot to the state of Georgia, you understand? It means protecting our way of life. The federal government doesn’t give two shits about us.”
“They’ll know you scraped him.”
“I’ll take the heat. I want you on my side. Georgia’s side.”
The sheriff sighed, scratching the thick mustache beneath his nose. Then he called for help. Don patted him on the shoulder and marched out of the station.
“I didn’t expect this,” Mother said.
No, Marcus thought. If he could, he would smile.
A wheelchair was brought to the door. Two biomite authorities stood next to it with their tablets—one was Marcus’s primary hijacker, the other was the backup. His body was forced to turn around. The forced actions were dull needles in bone and flesh. Each movement agony, a coffin lid slammed over and over.
The wheelchair behind him, he was directed to sit and strapped into it. They rolled him past staring officers to a service elevator and exited a back door where a white van was waiting to transport him to the fifth floor of a reflective building near Olympic Park.
“Hey!” a kid screamed in the alley. “Marcus Anderson, over here!”
He held a phone up, recording the agents loading Marcus in a cargo van. In minutes, he would post it for a million hits.
______
The room smelled of metal and sharp things. Everything was new, from the tables to the chairs to the neatly stacked equipment quietly breathing exhaust.
Marcus was parked to the side of a silver table with edges lipped and wheels on folding legs—an autopsy table used to mount halfskins. No flesh was peeled back in this room, though. No blood spilled or organs removed. Just memories pulled like teeth, the roots extracted from the gums, the unfamiliar pain deep and frightening. This was the final destination of hapless halfskins that wandered into the clay state for black market business or the sheer stupidity of adventure.
The biomite authorities would legally extract their mind and process their memories along with samples of their biomite strains, upload it into a database for analysis, claiming it helped them stay atop their rigorous scanning abilities.
When Mother was functional, when she was nothing more than the arena-sized dome residing in Montana monitoring the human population for biomites, she did the same thing. And Marcus was her henchman. He ordered biomites to be sent back to the dome for full immersion analysis. Halfskins would be dropped into a clear vat and digested, every cell slowly absorbed into her database.
She took their lives, their souls, Marcus had thought. For the good of the human race.
“That’s not what I was doing,” Mother later told him.
“What, then?”
“Taking their essence.”
Essence. She didn’t say soul, didn’t say memories. Essence was something new. And when he asked, “Why were you taking their essence?”
“It’s who I was.”
He’d become accustomed to the childish manner in which she gave up information, like a computer that only provided answers when asked the correct questions.
“And who were you?” he would ask.
She wouldn’t respond to the question.
“Get him on the table,” a young female said.
“We can do it in the chair,” a middle-aged man said. “We got to work fast.”
There were half a dozen processing employees in the room, each at their stations. Marcus felt an animated buzz creep into the marrow of his bones as one of the scanning generators came to life. He didn’t resist and kept his mind completely open, waiting for the bridge to drop so he could peek inside the processing machine that would connect him to the network that identified bricks, the network that gave up Margaret, the network that went back to the powers-that-be.
Where Jamie had gone.
She had been in that room, had been subjected to the same body freeze. Was she afraid? Did they see her memories? Did they know about the powers-that-be? He wanted the answers to all of those questions, but more than any of that he wanted to know… where did she go?
The feds would never allow these amateur clay hacks to scrape Marcus Anderson, never give his mind access to the network. Mother said this would bring them closer to their destiny. He didn’t care for the word destiny, but she was right.
“I don’t like this.” It was the youngest of the crew, a man that looked barely out of high school. “I mean, why is the media everywhere, right? There’s a leak or something. It’s like someone knows we were going to do this. Like…”
“Like what?” the woman said.
He shook his head. His instincts were right, but he was too young to assert them.
“Smart, that one,” Mother said.
“Let’s go!” Don stepped into the lab and walloped big pockets of air between his meaty hands. “Do a quick scrape, send it out to all the clay facilities immediately. I want everyone to have a copy of this brick’s psychological profile, where he’s been the last five years, what he’s doing here. Draw a sample of his blood and do the same. We’re short on time, people.”
The team came at Marcus with a multitude of straps and gadgets. One wrapped around his arm, another pasted to his temples. The young woman opened a set of stainless steel tools all pointed and gleaming in the room’s bright lights.
Someone shouted, “Testing!”
Another hum filled the room, this one synchronizing with the previous one. Marcus’s teeth sang. A tiny smile grew beneath his skin. No one would see it, but perhaps they’d read it on their monitors.
A third machine hummed.
The room dimmed. Marcus realized the lights hadn’t changed, it was his vision. The circuits were drawing him out of his body. A glittering ball of energy appeared near the ceiling.
No. Not moving. I’m not in my body.
He had assumed some other form, an astral projection that was weightless and effortless. The light was growing and no one seemed to notice, no one seemed to see it. The drawbridge to another place was lowering, a direct route to the source, to the powers-that-be.
Several ringtones rang at once.
A long pause as they all checked their phones. The youngest said, “Hello?”
The other phones suddenly stopped.
“It’s, uh, for you, sir.”
“Put that thing away, son,” Don replied. “Why do you have your phone on anyway?”
“It… it wasn’t.”
Another long pause. “Who is it?”
“He says he, uh, wants to speak with the head fucking idiot.”
An awkward moment was flung around the room like a shit storm. Every one caught a piece. Don’s footsteps were heavy and hard. He answered, got one word out. And then silence.
They waited.
Don threw the phone at the young man. “Get him out of here.”
Someone knew Marcus was there. Maybe they knew why. Someone on the other side of the drawbridge.
“And someone find out how the fuck they got all your phone numbers!” Don stormed out of th
e lab.
The machines died. The gear came off. They wheeled him out. Don clearly didn’t know who he was dealing with on the other end. Or what.
No one did.
______
A freight train slid down a pair of iron rails, crashing into Marcus’s head.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling was beige; the toilet was metal.
The walls were imbedded with mesh wire that hummed interference, a Faraday cage that nullified biomite activity.
“It’s eleven a.m.”
Mother stepped away from his bed, a mattress as thin as newspaper. Expressionless and calm, she watched him from across the room, her bare feet pressed against the concrete.
“You’ve been isolated for two days.”
He listened without looking. His actions would be monitored, even eye movements. They’d be looking for something unusual such as talking to himself or interacting with the projection of a nonexistent artificially intelligent old woman.
“Don was ordered to put you under until the federal agents arrived,” she said. “You were transferred to the Pentagon. They’ve taken blood samples, scanned your brain activity, and analyzed your biomite coding.”
He avoided even forming a thought.
“They didn’t find anything unusual. Nothing to explain how you’ve avoided them all this time. And no, they don’t sense my presence.”
The freight train rolled and crashed again. This time it was followed by footsteps; a lighter set of footfalls were bracketed by stern, heavy ones. They stopped outside the door. An alarm buzzed. A heavy lock tumbled and the door slid open.
A woman stood outside the cell, her hair pulled back, eyes large between thick black eyelashes. Her lips plump, a slight curl at the corner.
“Marcus Anderson,” she said.
“Lydia.”
“You were expecting me?”
“I’m always expecting you. Still with the agency, I see.”
She observed him like an experiment. Despite the open door, he posed no threat inside the cell. It was the sort of safety one felt at a zoo, a gulf that separated the lions from the observation deck.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“A little sore.” He stretched. “Your kids are grown up now, I suppose?”
“Now I know you’re a clone. The Marcus Anderson I knew didn’t give a shit about family.”
“I’ve changed.”
“Tell me we don’t need these.” A pair of cuffs dangled from her fingers.
It was a courtesy question. The woman to Lydia’s left, a deceptively petite African American with short curls and dark brown eyes, was the biomite agent—a highly trained operative composed of 99.9% biomites capable of mind manipulation and incapacitation. The heat from her mind spattered over his skin like oil jumping off an iron griddle.
To Lydia’s right was a slender man with strong hands and a smooth face. His brown hair was short and flat. His eyes, unreadable. His entire clay being was inaccessible. If the biomite agent somehow failed to control Marcus, the clay agent would use physical force. He would be immune to mind games.
Marcus stood. The biomite agent clamped her mind around him with a million needle-teeth.
“Back your dog off,” he hissed.
“There we go,” Lydia said. “The Marcus Anderson I know.”
Another pair of agents—one biomite, one clay—waited further down the hall. They led the way, bracketing him two and two with Lydia out front. Somewhere behind him, Mother’s damp footsteps followed.
He was led to a small room with a table and four chairs. A bottle of water sat in front of one of them. Two guards stationed themselves in the corners. Lydia closed the door. Mother appeared to sit in one of the chairs already pulled away from the table.
Half an hour later, the door swung open.
Jason Powell stood in the doorway, a red tie hung loosely around an open collar, a bundle of manila folders in his hand. His hair was a bit shaggier, a little sandier than the last time he saw him. He remained flat-footed, examining a miracle.
Powell closed the door. “According to the root analysis, you are the Marcus Anderson, the previous director of biomite oversight.”
The stack of folders hit the table.
“Of course, there could be multiple clones of you all over the world.”
“You know the truth.”
“But do you?”
Mother got up and Powell dragged the empty chair from the table to sit. He spread the folders out and opened one.
“Five years ago,” he mused, “the biomite surveillance system known as Mother collapsed. You were acting director at that time, living within the confines of the Montana dome. Records show you, toward the end of your assignment, wandering aimlessly in a paranoid and delusional state, claiming an inner world was somewhere within the industrial complex. And the system was not merely a program but a sentient, self-aware intelligence that you referred to as Mother. You remember that?”
Marcus looked at his hands folded upon the table. Mother chuckled from the corner.
“During the postmortem of said events, you made claims of conspiracy theories, of so-called ‘powers-that-be’ and, I quote, ‘the human race has been duped into sleeping… Mother saw the truth of her own existence and the path of humanity and, accordingly, had issued her own self-destruction… we are all being farmed for a greater unknown purpose.’ End quote.”
Powell ran his finger along the highlighted lines.
“You remember that?”
“And then dream disease started,” Marcus said, smirking.
“You never said dream disease.”
Marcus sat back in the hard chair. Of course he remembered. They apprehended him after Mother collapsed, accused him of destroying her. He’d been kept in isolation for months, sleep deprived and harassed until his sanity teetered. He spoke to the walls, his logjammed thoughts plowing through streams of nonsense. There was so much to say, so much truth to impart.
There were episodes of him sobbing for days, begging for the end to come to the one realization that shouted louder than all the other thoughts.
I AM A BRICK!
“If you were an animal,” Powell said, “we would’ve put you down. You were a psychological mess, a brick that thought it was human. But you were our only link to Mother’s mysterious collapse, a rambling idiot having conversations with ghosts.”
The days of madness were eternal until Marcus woke in a drug-fueled haze and there she was, standing in the middle of the room, wearing a flowing dress, short gray hair and a cherub grin. He blabbered through tears because his delusions were becoming too real. He tried to hurt her, swung on her, and put his hands around her neck. In the end, she held him and comforted him, warmly and gently.
“The gift,” she whispered. “You are the gift.”
“And then you were gone.” Powell snapped his fingers. “You were sleeping in the cell and suddenly gone. Surrounded by buildings and walls and fences, you disappeared. Security footage showed you blipping out of existence like an apparition. Did you walk out? Was it an inside job? What was it, Marcus? What happened?”
Marcus offered a kind smile. A magician never betrayed his secrets.
Marcus was hunched at the shoulders. Although he didn’t wear glasses, his left eye was still slightly misshapen and his bald pate sun-spotted with age. The grimly bitter old man, however, was no longer there.
“Do you still talk to yourself? Still see Mother?” Powell’s fingers danced an erratic rhythm on the table. “Does she answer back?”
Marcus slid the folder back. “I have rights.”
“What do you want? Let’s start there. You reappear after five years of being completely off the grid, which, I’m assuming, you did by choice in a very public setting. You wanted everyone to see you because we assured the public that every brick had been identified and relocated. You did this because… why, Marcus? To make fools out of us?”
“I have rights pr
ovided to fabricated humans under the sentience laws—”
“Not until I get answers!” Powell slammed the folder with a dull-thumping fist. “You are still a brick, you understand that? Your rights don’t mean shit when it comes to threatening the security of the United States, so find a dark corner in your fucked-up brain to file that fact because I’m not playing.”
“A law firm will be contacting you—”
“How did you leave? Where have you been, Marcus? And why did you come back?”
“I’ve prepared a statement that my legal representatives will deliver.”
Powell nodded incredulously, leaned back and sniffed. “Make all the statements you want. We’re going to pull you apart, Marcus. Whatever you pulled last time will not happen again, I promise you. You’re going in a cage and you’re going to stay there a very long time. We’re going to find out what you’re made of.”
“My lawyers will be holding a public conference soon. After which they will file for my legal rights to exist as a fabricated human and you will treat me as such. That is my legal right.”
“This is the federal government.” His fingers pattered another nervous rhythm. “You think the world cares about bricks, Marcus? They’re the new race we can blame all our troubles on and not feel guilty. You are the new-age scapegoat. That’s why you and the rest of those plastic fabbed fakies are alive, why they’re on display in the middle of nowhere, without their dreamlands, without their freedom. The world needs a scapegoat, Marcus. And the world doesn’t give a goddamn what we do to you.
“Your lawyers can hold press conferences on the White House lawn for all I care. Whatever you planned on happening after you surrendered, it’s over. You’re not leaving. You live here now.”
“He’s quite convincing,” Mother said.
Marcus considered the bottle of water. The ring broke beneath the lid as he twisted it. He took a swallow and slowly replaced the cap. After a long pause, he leaned in and said, without menace, “The world is watching.”
In today’s day and age, public opinion could move buildings. His legal team, vetted and retained well ahead of this day, would continue breathing on that fire. They would sway public opinion.
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