Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  A vanished world. The things he’d cared about before, ideas about art and literature, ideas about justice and civilization, they’d been more fragile than he’d imagined. He doesn’t know what can be saved. Surely there is something. But already he’s forgotten so much.

  The speeding cruiser appears in his rearview mirror twenty kilometers west of Cheyenne, its cycling blue and red lights dully cutting the midafternoon dust. This is what he’s been waiting for. There’s no such thing as a routine stop inside the Sacrifice Zone, but John wants the officers edgy, ready to pounce, too angry to ask questions. He accelerates, the truck groaning when the electric motor gives way to the combustion engine, then drifts left to ride the highway’s center line as the cruiser charges, its siren wailing. He adjusts his rearview mirror to center the cruiser, watching how the aerodynamic curve of its black windshield hides the officers inside, how the driver’s hands likely haven’t taken the wheel yet, the officer letting the computer drive.

  Dust swirls up and over the freeway, both vehicles tunneling through the blowing dirt, the cruiser giving him every chance to pull over. If John’s truck were any newer, it’d have a kill switch built in, a way for the officers to shut off his engine from the safety of their cruiser. Another reason John’s kept this old model. Its engines groan, the tires squeal when he fishtails to keep the cruiser from squeezing up alongside him.

  Despite the demanding speed, John finds himself picturing Cal’s face: the jut of her chin, the one crooked tooth visible in her smile, the heavy intensity of her attention, the violence of her grip. What I love about you, she said once, caging his body with hers, pinning him to a tent floor pitched atop a dead prairie, is your wildness. He’d never thought of himself that way. But she’d showed him how to find the something wild that dwelled inside him: not a recklessness—nothing wild was truly reckless—but a joyful abandon, a deadly serious sense of play.

  John watches the cruiser slide right across the pavement, switching sides and speeding up. He yanks his wheel left, whipping the truck perpendicular to the freeway, leaving the pavement on two wheels. As the left wheels slam down with a bouncing jolt, he aims the truck across the horizon-spanning crust of clay, an expanse broken only by weather-beaten buildings in the far distance, by roaming dust devils closer up. He doesn’t have much attention to spare—the ground is uneven, rutted, and cracked, every dip threatens to trap a wheel—but in the rearview he catches the slight hitch in the vehicle’s previously smooth operation when the driver takes manual control of the speeding cruiser.

  John presses the pedal down farther, sends the truck bouncing faster over the pitiless landscape, the ground crumbling beneath the wheels. One old myth of the West was that much of it was empty, barren, lifeless; a useful story, because one way to convince yourself to spread suburbs to the horizon was to tell yourself there was nothing there.

  It wasn’t true then, but it almost is now.

  He takes a deep breath, tries to take in as much of the nothingness as he can. Nothingness is not emptiness. True nothingness, which existed nowhere on earth before humans made it so, is palpable, the earth’s distress made physical, the silent sign of something gone terribly wrong.

  John jerks the wheel and brakes hard, spinning the truck to a halt atop the cracked mudflat. Before the cruiser skids to its own stop, the first helmeted officer is out of his seat, advancing in a shooter’s stance, pistol raised, his voice barking rushed commands. John waits blank-faced until the officer tears open the truck’s door and hauls him out by his shirt, pressing his pistol to John’s neck. John doesn’t react, doesn’t speak; he makes no apology or any sound of pain as the officer brings the pistol butt down on his forehead.

  Then: fist and baton and boot, the officers beat him until they’re huffing behind their face shields. John doesn’t go under, doesn’t fall unconscious. “It’s okay,” he says, giving in, giving permission. “It’s okay.” His voice sputters wetly. He wants to say, can’t say: I’m afraid too. I’m afraid too, but there’s always room for more fear.

  Afterward they haul him upright, drag him to the cruiser, cuff him, and shove him roughly into the back seat. There’s blood in his mouth, a pounding ache in his temples, bright-flowering bruises blooming atop his cheekbones. He wants the bruises, invites their rising; hopefully the damage will hide his features from Earthtrust’s facial scanners. He sticks out his tongue and licks away the blood dripping across his lip, down toward his chin. The blood tastes, improbably, like applesauce. But probably that’s just a concussion.

  John dozes fitfully. When he wakes, the cruiser is devouring the kilometers, passing the sporadic autonomous long-haulers with smooth ease, the day lost, sunset falling gloriously through the dusty particulate in the Wyoming air. One of John’s eyes is bruised shut, his jaw so swollen it might as well be wired. He leans forward, puts his forehead against the bulletproof partition, does his best to take in the two officers, their helmets removed, faces visible. Wherever they’re from, it isn’t Wyoming: Earthtrust security shifts its people from region to region, breaking local allegiances, local concerns. An old tactic. A man who grew up on a plot of land might not be able to stand its destruction, but a non-native with a paycheck might gladly brutally extract its resources, especially if he wouldn’t have to live on the ruined land when it was over.

  The younger officer turns around, clacks a gloved fist against the glass. “Lean back,” he says. “You don’t need to be so close.” Less imposing with his helmet removed, old acne scars pocking clean-shaven cheeks, the cop could be anyone John grew up with in Ohio, back when rural life persisted, back when it was almost possible to have a normal American childhood—and wasn’t John’s the last generation to imagine such a life? Surely no one born today could expect a life like the one he’d been born into, a birthright of land and labor.

  They reach the detention center in the dark, the cruiser pulling smoothly to a stop on a dimly lit charging pad installed in the front row of the parking lot. John had expected the detention center to look like a prison, some imposing architecture surrounded by fencing and towering guard posts, but the Cheyenne post is simply a repurposed big-box store, emptied only a few years ago. In the Western Sacrifice Zone, every existing building might be put to new use: With so many structures abandoned or evacuated, why build anything new?

  Now we will be barbarians, John thinks, living in our parents’ ruins.

  The younger cop opens the cruiser door and drags John out. John walks forward in an injured hunch, past a series of temporary concrete barriers set in front of the building, meant to prevent a speeding vehicle from slamming into the glass storefront. The inside glows fluorescent, inviting even as it repels, repulses: it’s always been difficult for John to return from the wilderness, to resume life in the world of connected technology, autonomous systems, endless electric lights. Days ago, he was sleeping alone under the stars. Tonight he’ll bunk in an abandoned department store, a prisoner of the company he helped found.

  Once through the automatic glass doors, John’s expectations are subverted again: inside the detention center he sees no cells, no one else in cuffs. There are more officers here, but none wear helmets or body armor, just slacks and short-sleeved wicking t-shirts with the Earthtrust logo at their breasts, the officers looking tired but not unfriendly as they process the incoming detainees.

  The younger officer leads the way, supporting John’s limping walk with a gloved grip. Without letting go of John’s elbow, he leans in and speaks in a low voice. “You’ll be charged with trespassing in the Sacrifice Zone, illegal driving, resisting arrest. You could go to the prison camps and serve your time, but why? When they ask you to Volunteer, do it. If all you have left is that truck, sign it over. You look smart, healthy. Go east. Work the Farm, earn a new life.”

  John seethes. How many times has this officer given this speech? How many times has he convinced frightened detainees to give up what little they have left? John holds in his anger, says thank you. A mom
ent later, he’s at the front of the line, the cop wishing him good luck as his identification passes the loose scrutiny of the intake officer, a stocky sunburned woman who offers the promised choice: imprisonment in a work camp in Cheyenne or a new life across the Mississippi, in the Ohio Volunteer Agricultural Community.

  John signs the forms the woman shows him, the standard ninety-nine-year Earthtrust contract: he Volunteers, signing over his citizenship, his right to vote, his right to own property—all his guaranteed protections under the Bill of Rights—in exchange for a pardon and a leased home in the Ohio VAC, where he’ll receive guaranteed work at a fixed wage, plus access to safe food and clean water, a selection of affordable consumer goods. He will not be free to travel outside the VAC; if he quits or flees or otherwise violates his contract, he’ll find himself an illegal immigrant inside his own country.

  The cuffs come off, because he’s no longer a prisoner. Now he’s a Volunteer, and as a Volunteer he has different privileges: he’s taken to a medical station where his injuries are examined and treated by a kind pair of male nurses in pale blue scrubs; he’s led to a private shower stall in a coed locker room, where he disrobes, discarding his filthy clothes into an overflowing bin. He exits his second shower in as many days to find a folded set of printed clothing waiting for him, blue jeans and a pale gray t-shirt, underwear and socks and sneakers. Everything functional, in his size or close enough. Another handler meets him outside the locker room, takes him to the next station where he’s given a backpack containing a change of clothing, a box of nutrient bars, a tablet the handler says will start working as soon as he’s inside the VAC.

  “You are entitled,” the handler says, in lightly accented English, “to whatever clothing, food, and services you need. Don’t hesitate to ask. Not everything is possible, but we want you to be comfortable.”

  She passes her wand over his pebble and he flinches: it’s invasive to scan a citizen without asking, but of course he isn’t a citizen anymore.

  “There,” she says. “Earthtrust has advanced you your first month’s pay, in case you need anything from the company store before your first pay period ends. This way you won’t want in the meantime.”

  John knows this is all part of Earthtrust’s stripping as many Americans as possible of their citizenship and their constitutional rights, but it’s being done with such friendliness he can’t help genuinely thanking everyone he interacts with, his tired and battered body and mind grateful for every kindness. By the time his processing is finished, it’s three in the morning. He’s been up for over twenty-four hours, hasn’t had anything to eat since leaving Cal’s bunker. The night’s final handler leads John through the fluorescence to a darkened room containing rows of cots, good for a few hours of rest before he boards the morning bus to the eastbound train.

  John sits on the offered cot to remove his shoes, then digs a nutrient bar from his pack. Chewing quietly, he scans the dim room, his eyes slowly adjusting. There are thirty or forty other people here, men and women and children, refugees from the fallen West, new Volunteers all. Anyone who turned down Earthtrust’s offer is somewhere else, cuffed and unfed, out of sight in a cage of chain-link and razor wire. Most of the Volunteers John sees are asleep, but a few speak softly in the near dark. Their voices are gentle and sweet, fathers and mothers comforting their children, a surprising excitement in every sentence. They’ve sacrificed citizenship and home and belongings, rights and privileges it would have been inconceivable to relinquish before the troubles really began. But life in the Sacrifice Zone has been brutal for years now; the fact of these people’s late arrival here in the detention center means they’d held out as long as they could. What awaits them in the Volunteer Agricultural Communities isn’t the American dream they’d once been promised, a promise some of them have already wasted a lifetime futilely trying to earn, but perhaps it will still be better than what they’ve recently endured, the slow but undeniable loss of American possibility.

  C-433

  An assumption built into the Loom: any creature remade of many different materials remains itself. At the device’s heart waits a domed stage, a hump of closed steel ringed by a series of extruder arms, each extruder outfitted with a rotating plate of printer heads capable of spinning out organic bioinks, inorganic plastinates, coils of various metals. Soon after the recycler finishes processing C-432, the dome opens, its interlocking lids sliding apart to expose a shallow pool of blue-white liquid heated to body temperature, temperature of the body about to be made. With the recombinant C confined to the unsocketed rung, flickering senselessly in virtual space as it waits for its next body, there’s no one to watch the Loom work except the disembodied voice C calls O, the crawler’s only other occupant. Housed in the crawler’s data banks, O sings a harsh wordless sound, atonal, a rushing thud, a buzzing repetitive keening droning from speakers arranged throughout the chamber, clicking on in sequence as the Loom finishes booting.

  Now the Loom’s limbs move in concert with O’s freed sound, the extruders slipping along their circular track in time with the sound, their hydraulics whirring as they lay down different colors and textures of bioinks alongside melted steel and fast-drying polymers, assembling C’s next body layer by layer inside the viscous pool of milk-thick fluid, stacking organs and bones, lacing muscles to tendons, encasing the spinal cord in the bony sheath of the vertebrae, the brain within the shell of the skull; it prints the heart and the lungs, then all the other organs arranged inside the rib cage and the abdomen, each an algorithmically determined composite of bioink and plastinate. Immense numbers of nerve cells and blood vessels must be threaded throughout the accumulating body, a task of exquisite intricacy with only the tiniest tolerance for error: one hundred billion neurons in the brain, ten times more glial cells, one hundred thousand kilometers of arteries and veins.

  Every time C is reprinted, his skull shows the evidence of a long-ago natural birth in its sealed fontanelle; always the creature bears healed breaks in both its femurs, an unremembered injury not one printed C has ever noticed. Then come the horns, rising in heavy layers from the forehead; then hooves capping the cloven toes, the left hoof keratin, the right polymer and metal.

  Before the skin can be laid down, the Loom’s ceiling opens, loosing two prehensile metal tentacles: one squirms between the jaws of the muscle-fleshed face, sliding between half-plastic teeth and over the muscular tongue to push into the trachea, starting the flow of oxygen into the lungs; the other stabs through the abdomen beside the navel, seeking out a temporary nest in the stomach to start a slow, sludgy nutrient drip, the creature’s first sustenance.

  The skin and fur go on entire: momentarily there’s no mouth, no eyes, no nostrils or urethra or anus, the creature blind and deaf beneath the sheath of its face until the Loom sends a scalpel arm to carve the eyelids, the ears, the nose, and the lips. Then the blue fur is tattooed into the rubbery skin, one strand held in each pinprick, laid down a thousand pinpricks a second.

  O’s sound changes, the new noise as discordant and screeching as before, becoming a beseeching, an asking, a bringing forth. A summoning song. Powerful electrical charges jolt through the water in steady waves, continuing until the creature’s muscle cells twitch, until the heart begins to thump thump thump. The body complete, a third articulating tentacle snakes from the ceiling, heading for a port installed at the base of the creature’s neck. While it drops, the creature is only itself, instinctively fighting the machine making it, desperate to leap from the bloody bluish milk, wanting to tear the tubes from its stomach and throat, to lift the metal paddles holding it down.

  In this moment, the creature has the same birthright of any animal, the right to be only itself, to make its way in the world for its own reasons. Self-sufficient, self-aware, self-willed.

  Then the memory module locks into its port, the tentacle cranking its pin into place.

  The module has had many names. Mostly every C has thought of it as the rung, the handhold by whi
ch he pulls himself up into himself. After it’s installed, the creature becomes C, C-433 and also every other C besides, all alive again inside this one body.

  C-433 drags his gasping body free of the Loom’s pool, the lid sliding shut behind him as soon as his hooves come free of the fluid. He crawls down the Loom’s slope and across the cold metal floor, shaking loose a milky trail from his fur. Lying heaving at the Loom’s base, he aches everywhere, his body throbs inside and out with the hurt of having been made all at once. The worst pains are in his neck, where the rung was installed; in his throat, scratched as the breathing tube roughly extracted itself; in his navel, where the departing feeding tube left behind a raw pucker of seeping flesh.

  Despite the pain, he can soon stand, wobbling on his hooves; not long after, he takes a few halting steps toward the chamber’s exit, fleeing O’s screeching voice. Everything he experiences outside the chamber’s hatch is both novel and familiar: as C-433, he feels nervous and skittish and newborn; as C, he’s taken every possible route inside the crawler thousands of times before. His fabricated hoof clangs across the crawler’s steel floors, as the remainder guides his movements gently at first and then more insistently, steering him toward the life every C has pursued since finding the crawler, an event no remainder remembers but that the whole assumes.