Corpus Chrome, Inc.

by S. Craig Zahler

  CORPUS

  CHROME, INC.

  Corpus Chrome, Inc.

  © 2013 by S. Craig Zahler

  Published by Dog Star Books

  Bowie, MD

  First Edition

  Cover Image: Bradley Sharp

  Book Design: Jeremy Zerfoss

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956047

  www.DogStarBooks.org

  CORPUS

  CHROME, INC.

  By

  S. Craig Zahler

  Dedicated to my mother, Linda Cooke Zahler, the supportive and intelligent woman who took me to bookstores when I was a kid and told me what science fiction should be. Thank you.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter I

  The Tarnished Trophy Wife

  Chapter II

  A Murderer’s Encore

  Chapter III

  The Elasticity of Cat Vertebrae

  Chapter IV

  The First and Final Rocket (A Science-Fantasy Meisterwerk by R.J. the Third)

  Chapter V

  The Bifurcation of a Composer

  Chapter VI

  The Renter’s Gambit

  Chapter VII

  Lanced

  Chapter VIII

  The Joys of Incest

  Chapter IX

  Garbage and War

  Chapter X

  Spoken Intentions

  Chapter XI

  The Homeboyz of Brooklyn Borough

  (as Experienced from a Warm Couch)

  Chapter XII

  Bereft

  Chapter XIII

  Holy Shits

  Chapter XIV

  A Little Sibling Ribaldry

  Chapter XV

  Three Transubstantiations

  Chapter XVI

  Heroic Intentions?

  Chapter XVII

  The End of Spring

  Chapter I

  An Airborne Riot Wagon and the Little Reprobates

  Chapter II

  The Battle for the Empire State

  Chapter III

  Paternal Impulses (Kick the Stars)

  Chapter IV

  The Faces of Serfdom

  Chapter V

  Ecumenical Lightning Church of

  the Fourteen Rivers

  Chapter VI

  The Brokers of Extralegal Acts

  Chapter VII

  A Slug and the Demolishers of Heaven

  Chapter VIII

  Within the Brindled Light

  of the Glowing Cat

  Chapter IX

  Guys: A Thesis Statement

  Chapter X

  Delayed Reactions

  Chapter XI

  Oriental Lapdog

  Chapter XII

  Triumphant

  Chapter XIII

  It Needs Work

  Chapter XIV

  Blood Pudding

  Chapter XV

  Rotten Mangoes and Excreta Deleted

  Chapter XVI

  We Walked Upon Harp Strings

  Chapter XVII

  Saturday, August 31, 2058

  Chapter XVIII

  Cracked Heads

  Chapter XIX

  The Dotted Line (Connected)

  Chapter XX

  The Garbage Men

  Epilogue I

  The Limitations of Flesh

  Summer, A.D. 2059 (One year later)

  Epilogue II

  New Compositions

  Autumn, 2059

  Epilogue III

  Manifestation of the Fuzzy Gray Entity

  Winter, 2060

  Epilogue IV

  Dedicated to My Mother

  Winter, 2089 (twenty-nine years later)

  Epilogue V

  The Very Final Act from the Mote

  Environment Experience entitled,

  The 75% True Story of Champ and Eagle Sappline

  (The Zenith Achievement in the History

  of the Arts by R.J. the Third)

  About the Author

  Part I:

  Anchored to the Dead

  Spring, A.D. 2058

  Chapter I

  The Tarnished Trophy Wife

  “Your husband believes that he is trapped in fiction,” the German doctor said to an anxious seventy-four-year-old woman. “On most days,” he specified, “your husband believes that he is confined within a cinematic world, a celluloid film.”

  Her mottled hands huddled together like worried crabs, Mrs. Jennifer Albren pursed her lips, rubbed them with her dry tongue, opened her mouth, contemplated a question, and then exhaled a long breath instead of words.

  The doctor slid his magnetically buoyed chair to the table and leaned forward. “Do you understand what I am telling you?” he asked, his voice cloying and childlike. Small emerald eyes on either side of his upturned nose awaited an answer.

  “He thinks that this is a movie—that everything’s fake. Right?”

  “That is correct,” confirmed the doctor. “And he has been in this delusional state since his dawn, three weeks prior to today.”

  “Did you explain to him what happened—how he was resurrected and with the cryonics and everything?”

  “He was informed. Still, he continues to ask for the director.” A lavender light illuminated in the air and vanished, followed by a trilogy of chimes, each a major third higher than its predecessor. “Your husband’s shepherd has arrived,” said the doctor, pointing a finger that looked like a pencil at the wall behind Mrs. Albren.

  The old woman swiveled around.

  A plump black man with a neat beard and an olive tweed suit emerged from the wall. The magnetically buoyed armchair within which the shepherd sat glided across the room, half a meter above its shadow on the blue carpet. The transcended wall held the shape of his silhouette for a moment (through which Mrs. Albren saw a waiting area with foam-rubber hammocks and a woman adding soy to her coffee) and then closed over, healed by crackling nanobuilders.

  “Good afternoon. I’m Mr. Johnson,” said the shepherd, his deep voice comforting, like an old song. He took the septuagenarian’s right hand in a big soft palm and shook it warmly.

  “Hello.”

  “I am Edward’s shepherd, and have had sessions with him every day since his dawn.” His deep voice stirred her latticework earrings, upon which ninety-sided diamonds sparkled like rain.

  Mrs. Albren asked, “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Doctor Kreussen explained to you the disorientation that your husband is currently experiencing?” He tilted his head toward his left shoulder, as if the inquiry were an air bubble that would threaten his equilibrium until it was popped with an answer.

  “He told me that my Edward thinks he’s in some movie.”

  “Indeed, indeed, indeed.” Mr. Johnson righted his head.

  “You explained what happened,” the woman asked, “with the cryonics and everything?”

  “Slowly and in great detail every morning for the last three weeks, I have explained the tortuous path that led him—”

  “Torturous?” She fearfully recalled how Chinese men had tied knots into their prisoners’ intestines during the Beijing Conflict twenty years earlier.

  “Tortuous, not torturous,” explained the shepherd. “It means convoluted or winding. It has nothing to do with torture.”

  “Oh. I didn’t…I didn’t get to college,” confesse
d Mrs. Albren. More than fifty years later, her academic history embarrassed her like a piece of parsley stuck between white front teeth.

  Mr. Johnson continued, “Edward Albren isn’t the only resurrected performer to suffer from this particular psychological schism, which we call Schipmann’s Syndrome after the first man who had it.”

  “Schipmann thought he was in a movie, too?”

  “He believed he was in a theater play. Whenever somebody tried to explain his condition to him, he said, ‘Those aren’t the lines.’ Like Schipmann, your husband was dead for a longer period than most of the people we have re-bodied…and we have found that there is some correlation between length of absence and ease of recovery.”

  “Thirty-nine years ago, my Edward died,” said Mrs. Albren. “He was forty-six.” She remembered the call she had received that day, and how the life she had led afterwards always seemed dimmer, slower. “It’s gotta be pretty weird, waking up in that thing—especially when you think you’re never gonna wake up ever.”

  “It is incomparably strange,” said Mr. Johnson, flinging his chair around the crescent table so that he sat beside Dr. Kreussen. Upon the blue rug, the shadows of the two Corpus Chrome, Incorporated employees merged like reunited turtles.

  Dr. Kreussen said, “It is standard practice for us to require a reorientation test score of at least seventy percent before a resurrected individual is exposed to people from his or her first life. As you might imagine, the experience can prove traumatic for the re-bodied person.”

  He allowed Mrs. Albren a moment to imagine traumas.

  The doctor resumed, “We strive to have the re-bodied person well acclimated to his or her mannequin before such exposure, but—” He looked at the shepherd.

  Mr. Johnson pressed his large soft palms together and said with great kindness, “We have done what we can to reorient Edward, but have failed. Your husband continues to maintain that he is in a movie. And unfortunately, there are restrictions regarding how much time we may spend on any one patient.”

  “Corpus Chrome, Incorporated can only manufacture eight thousand mannequins a year,” Dr. Kreussen stated, “and at this point, there are close to one hundred and thirty million cryogenically preserved minds worldwide.”

  Fear like a cold squid wriggled in the septuagenarian’s stomach. She said, “He’ll get better,” and nodded authoritatively.

  “Not without changing our tactics,” opined the shepherd. “This is why we’ve called you here today. Our hope is that an interaction with you, the most significant person from his first life, will effect a change in Edward, an acceptance of what is. There are risks to such an encounter, but we have exhausted all other options.”

  Mrs. Albren felt something wet drip upon her folded hands. The shepherd plucked a handkerchief from his olive tweed suit, leaned over and handed it to her before she realized that she was crying.

  “I’ll talk to him.” She wiped her eyes with the silken fabric; the cloth warmed, and the fluid turned to powdered salt.

  “Wonderful,” said Mr. Johnson. Beside him, Dr. Kreussen remained inscrutable.

  “Will you come with me?” Mrs. Albren asked the shepherd. “When I talk to him? Please?”

  Mr. Johnson shook his head minutely. “It is better if I do not accompany you. I fear that my presence will only reinforce the continuity of his delusory state. He believes I’m a stand-in.”

  She managed to articulate the word “But,” before fear lodged the remainder of the sentence in her throat.

  “I will be just beyond the polarity curtain,” said Mr. Johnson. “You may call for me at any time.”

  Dr. Kreussen added, “There is nothing for you to fear: We have locked his motor controls.”

  “You turned him off?” asked Mrs. Albren, befuddled.

  “Partially,” the doctor said in his thin child’s voice. “He can see and hear and speak, but his limbs are offline. He cannot move.”

  “Why? Did he try to hurt somebody?”

  The doctor and the shepherd exchanged glances that seemed grave.

  “No,” said Mr. Johnson. “He…Edward…has only proven to be a danger to himself.”

  “How? What did he do?”

  Mr. Johnson hesitated, and the German replied, “He cracked open his head. Twice.”

  Mrs. Albren envisioned her handsome husband (eternally forty-six in her mind) slamming his skull against a brick wall until gore erupted.

  “The damage has been repaired,” clarified Dr. Kreussen.

  “Oh. Okay,” said the unnerved old woman. “How long will he last? If we can straighten him out?”

  “Our scientists believe that most brains will survive longer in a mannequin than they would have in a healthy body. A total lifespan of one hundred and twenty years—perhaps more.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Have you have seen the chromium mannequin model 8M?” asked the shepherd.

  “Yes. I saw it on m.a.”

  “Wonderful. Though you should refrain from referring to the mannequin unit with the word ‘it’ in front of Edward.”

  “You’re right. I will.”

  “Wonderful,” responded the shepherd. “Would you like to speak to him today…or do you feel that you need some time to prepare yourself for the visitation?”

  Terror and hope coursed through her blood in dueling currents. The old woman rose from her chair and said, “I want to see him now—it’s been long enough. But first I need to change my clothes.”

  * * *

  Ice lights that were embedded in the ceiling cooled and illuminated the royal blue hallway and its two occupants, Mrs. Albren and the shepherd. They walked east.

  “This is what I was wearing when Edward proposed to me,” said the tall lean woman. “I brought it in case I got to see him today. He always said it was a head-turner.” She smiled as she remembered the compliment. Although the gold and lavender dress tugged at the four and a half pounds she had gained in the last five decades, she was proud that she had not fattened, as had so many of her friends (especially the widows who showed their nude bodies to nobody but doctors). “I used to wear high heels with it.” The septuagenarian glanced with contempt at the designer-label foam-rubber shoes adorning her feet.

  “You look very nice,” said Mr. Johnson. He sucked air through a mint vapor tube wedged between his thick lips, and produced a trilling B-flat.

  Mrs. Albren looked up from the serpentine veins that covered the backs of her hands. “Is there anything I should do? Stuff I should talk about? Or not talk about?”

  “You should not focus overly on friends or family members who have passed away in the interim.”

  “Okay.”

  The passageway split into two; with a paddle-like hand, Mr. Johnson motioned for them to continue to the left. Iridescent numbers, spaced six meters apart, glowed upon the living walls on either side of the sky-blue hall.

  Mrs. Albren smelled gelatin and chrome in the air as she proceeded. “William and Jana are still alive, though William has slowed down a bit these last years. I’ll talk about them.”

  “That sounds like a good topic for discussion.”

  “What else should I mention? There were those wars between the Indians and the Chinese, and that mess in Korea. Glad the Global Senate put an end to that sort of thing.”

  “Major historical events are good topics. They will help give him a sense of time elapsed.”

  The iridescent numbers diminished.

  Mrs. Albren ruminated for a moment and said, “The New York Yankees have won the World Series nine times since he died. He won’t like that—he liked the Pirates. But I paid attention so I could tell him whenever I saw him next. In the afterlife or wherever.” She was fully aware that she was ramb
ling, but since silence made her anxious, she continued. “I don’t really care for baseball. I’m not sure what the point is. It’s just a ball. Do you like baseball?”

  “Not especially, no.” Mr. Johnson’s kind eyes appraised her face for a moment. “Would you like a softener?”

  “I don’t take drugs. That’s why I still have my figure, even if some of it sags a bit.” She giggled in a girlish way that belied her years and betrayed her anxiety.

  Mr. Johnson stopped in front of the living wall numbered 784.

  Mrs. Albren’s heart thudded as though she had just climbed five flights of stairs in twice as many seconds, and her throat became dry. The shepherd reached his hand into the wall; the fleshy extremity disappeared as if in opaque water. Three musical tones rang in the hallway.

  Mr. Johnson withdrew his hand and said, “Please pass through. The waiting area is on the other side.”

  Mrs. Albren strode through the malleable part of the living wall and entered a brown alcove, where she saw a suspended leather couch, a water sphere, a table with two movie sheaves, a mote aquarium and, on the far side of the room, an orange polarity curtain that was a meter taller and wider than was she. The shepherd strode beside her. Behind them, the Mr. Johnson- and Mrs. Albren-shaped wounds in the living wall were healed over by crackling nanobuilders.