by Kaleb Schad
The kid moaned and rolled over so that one leg was dangling off of the table. One of the men in the green smocks grabbed it and hauled the kid back up. Tyler didn’t like how rough the man was about it.
“I’d been there a couple years. Listen, is he going to be ok? I need him. If he’s not going to be, I need to get moving.”
“We don’t have a lot of time, no. That’s why I need to understand first. Help me. My name is Sara Lemira.”
Names were power. He didn’t want to reveal his, but what choice did he have? He never had any fucking choices.
“Tyler.”
“Tyler, do you know what that boy is?”
“I know all about him.” There was a line to what Tyler would admit. Ignorance was on the other side of it.
“Then, you know who made him and what he does?”
“Yup.”
The kid screamed, stomping his heels against the table.
Sara smiled and ran a hand through her hair. Silver and brown strands twisted between her fingers. “What I’m trying to decide, Tyler, is if we can help each other, because if we can, I think we could do something great together, but if we can’t, I need to make some fast decisions on what to do with you and that boy. Lying to me isn’t helping.”
She was right and Tyler knew it.
“He’s a Cull,” Tyler said. “Staern Life Sciences designed him to be…” What had Glasses said? “…a less invasive Cull.”
“So you know how he works? Why do you need to get through the Veil? Are you, Tyler, taking him back?”
“Yeah.”
“We know you’re not working for SLS or the LCP military...”
“I’m going to find Malcolm Staern and I’m going to blow us all to Hell.”
“Us.”
“Staern, the kid and me.” Tyler tapped his watch. “Time’s running out.”
That seemed to be what Sara wanted to hear, her play-it-cool mask giving a little too much away.
“So you plan to use the overclock?”
Tyler had never in his life had a play-it-cool mask, so he wasn’t surprised when she spotted his confusion like spotting a hair on a whore’s tit.
“That’s what I thought. Couple years in Wisconsin, you said? Ok, here’s the short version.”
Turned out Tyler had thrown more shit at the fan than he ever realized two years ago in Liberty Heights. This Sara chick started talking about a residence tower and how it came crashing down during the last Culling. She asked Tyler if he had heard about it or seen it and Tyler had to keep himself from scoffing—barely able to nod. Seen it? Sure. Heard about it? More like his nanocellotics did everything they could to mute the sound as it crashed around him. Anyway, this kicks a hornets’ nest nobody, not Sara, not Staern, not President Thatcher of the LCP, definitely not Tyler, knew existed. Something about that building coming down, the carelessness of it all, rattled people’s cages. As if the country just then realized there were people in that building. Dead was dead. Tyler didn’t get it. They hadn’t had a problem sending cops in with personal-incinerators and vacuum bots, but for the love of God, a building comes down and now we understand that people were dying? The fuckers.
People in the High Lanes started speaking out. Not necessarily everywhere, but at home, to each other, around the dinner table. Tyler could see it like in the syncasts he’d play through as a child. Honey glazed salmon on the end of their fork, bobbing between them as if on waves of indignation as they started to say things like, “This is horrifying. Somebody should do something.”
Sara Lemira happened to be one of those people, but she’d “never been one to wait for someone to hitch her pony for her” so she decided she should be the someone doing something. Enough people were squawking that when she and a couple like-minded fella’s started feeding syncasts into the system revealing what actually happened during Cullings, those squawks turned into screams. High Laners weren’t fans of LCP’s propaganda lies—that this wasn’t a peaceful, sacred affair, but a simple slaughter of innocents.
“And then the Kibashi girl happened,” Sara said.
“Kibashi Communications?”
“The same. The only child of Himoto Kibashi. She walks up to their headquarters in Central Fields, head shaved, dressed like a Skimmer with a synmap plugged in and she sets herself on fire. Right there. The assumed heir burns to death in front of her dad’s company in protest of the Cullings.”
“She killed herself,” Tyler said. “For Skimmers?”
“Unreal, right? Something had to be done.”
“Lady, this is fascinating, but…” Tyler tapped his watch again.
“The boy, Tyler. He’s the something. Malcolm Staern,” Sara smiled. “The man’s a genius. He knew if he could declare—or tell the LCP president to declare—that Cullings were being ended, that would remove the raison d’être for the Silent Uprising. But it wouldn’t fix the Resource Gap. So he created the boy, the first of his kind, as far as we know. A genetic super weapon. Once activated with a recombinant, his DNA uses a process similar to steganography and becomes viral-like and airborne. Little stegs of genetic data embed themselves in the people around him and start to exploit vulnerabilities within their own genetic code. They begin to die from natural causes at an unnatural rate.”
“That sounds complicated and slow,” Tyler said. “Cullings are simple and fast.”
The kid tried to sit up, but a soldier pressed him back to the table.
He called, “Mr. Tyler?”
“Say you were going to die of a heart attack at age sixty,” Sara said. “Now maybe you have it at twenty-four. Alzheimers at ninety? You’re forgetting your name at nineteen. The average lifespan wherever he is drops by decades, but nobody knows why or maybe even notices. And that’s the point.”
“Mr. Tyler, please, let’s go.” The kid turned to the soldier, “Let me sit up, okay?” The soldier helped him up.
Tyler looked at the boy. That was how he worked? He made people sick? An emotional coin was flipping within him; on one side, frustration that the kid wasn’t a bomb or something spectacular that would make a statement, that his mission may be for nothing. On the other…relief?
“You’re disappointed,” Sara said. “You were hoping for something grander. Indeed he does have an overclock function.”
The kid grunted, holding his stomach, then vomited between his knees. Pieces of venison and bile slapped onto the plastic.
“Ma’am,” said one of the men in the green smocks.
“We’re out of time,” Sara said. “SLS built in a military application to make the contract with LCP more robust. We don’t know how the overclock key works, but we do know that Staern keeps it on himself at all times. As far as we can tell, if the boy’s triggered, he’ll dissolve any living material within a hundred meters in every direction.”
“How do you know all this?”
“We were skating SLS’s optic channels looking for sweets.”
“Okay, that.”
“Sweets?”
“The overclock. That’s what I’m going to do.” In Tyler’s heart, he felt a frantic flapping at the words, as if he were trying to herd them back. But why the guilt? The kid would be used to slaughter millions or be a pawn in some ridiculous revolution at best. The merciful thing would be a swift end. Tyler could be merciful. Couldn’t he?
“Well, see, now we’ve come to the part where we decide if we can help each other. I need that boy, Tyler. The syncasts we can make with him, when we reveal this new weapon, that beautiful face, it’ll be the end of all of them. The Big Seven CEOs will lose their grip on Thatcher and the LCP government. But I need the recombinant first. And I need to see if there are more Culls. Both of those things are inside SLS. Not an easy building to get into. I could sure use a soldier who knows a thing or two about incursions. A soldier like a JACKK.”
Was her play-it-cool mask slipping? Tyler thought he saw something new beneath it, oily and putrid. “Seems like we’re heading the same direct
ion,” Tyler said.
“Seems like.”
“But the boy goes with me and we kill Staern.”
“We can talk about that, but for now we have a general working agreement?” Sara asked.
Tyler never had any fucking choices. “For now.”
“Ok. Next item. Did you know you’re being tracked?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s an interstitial metafilament transponder — IMT. It’s in his arm. We’ve been jamming the signal, but SLS has almost finished hacking us. The arm has to go.”
Tyler thought about this for a moment, then said, “I saw a meat doctor, but he wouldn’t do it.”
“Good thing. Probably would have given the boy anesthesia and killed you all.”
Tyler looked at Sara.
“The boy has a kill switch. Introduce anesthesia into his system and he melts down. Keeps people from reverse engineering him. Protect trade secrets and all that.”
“You want to cut off his arm. Without anesthesia.”
“If we had time, we could syncast over the pain, maybe, but as you said…on a clock.”
She waved and the soldier who’d been standing behind Tyler came around and unlocked his handcuffs.
“You’re strong.” Sara took Tyler by the elbow as they walked towards the kid. “Might be best if you hold the arm.”
The boy was hunched over, his elbows resting on his knees as he sat at the edge of the steel table. He looked up at Tyler. How much had he heard? Tyler couldn’t tell. He tried to slow Sara’s pace. Not so fast. Let him think for a minute.
“You know the crazy thing about that Kibashi girl?” Sara asked. “Two weeks later her old man hangs himself in his penthouse. The syncast she recorded of herself burning to death on loop. I guess he couldn’t stand the idea that he’d done that to his own daughter.”
The cackle of the plastic tarp. The slap of waves from the wharf. The rattle of the child’s shaking body as he was forced back on the steel table echoing the rattle of Tyler’s heart. These were the sounds he heard, or imagined hearing. He knew there was a line somewhere here. He couldn’t see it, but he knew once crossed, he couldn’t be who he had been any longer, he couldn’t wrap himself in those gentle lies any longer.
“Please,” said the boy after Tyler told him what was going to happen. “But how will I write my name? I’m sorry.”
“Maybe we can just go,” Tyler said to the woman. “What difference does it make if he sees us coming?”
“For whatever I am. I’m sorry.”
“You think Staern’ll just send a crawlbot and a couple of soldiers next time? Now that he knows a JACKK is escorting him?” She said it with a sympathetic smile on her face. Another mask to hide behind, this one of helplessness.
“I don’t want my arm cut off,” the boy said. His voice was climbing.
“You think they’d even let the boy live? Obviously, they’re controlling something inside of him.”
One of the surgeons pulled his cart closer.
The boy looked at the saws on it. “Oh, please, sir,” he said to the soldier who’d been guarding him since they arrived. “Help me.”
“Maybe the Twitcher is right,” the soldier said.
Sara turned a furious glare on the man. “Go,” she said. The soldier shrugged and walked toward one of the parked vans.
“Let’s go,” she said to the surgeon.
“No,” the boy shouted. “No!” He tried to sit up, but Tyler held him down.
“Please, Mr. Tyler.” He whispered, the words spilling out, desperate, chasing each other. “I’ll do anything you want and if they’re tracking me, I’ll run and I’ll lead them away from you so you can go and hurt Mr. Staern and I’ll hide and they’ll never find me and then you can sneak in and nobody will know you’re coming because they’ll think you’re with me, but I’ll be hiding and they won’t be able to find me because I’m really good at hiding, I hide all the time and even ask Mr. Fahrs, he said I was good at hiding when a logging-bot almost saw me. Please, please, please.” The last pleases were little more than cracks.
Tyler could feel the thwump, thwump of the kid’s heart, the scattered, seizing breaths, the rigid terror. He tried to remind himself that this boy was designed for killing, that if Staern had his way, the boy would massacre tens, even hundreds of thousands, including other children just like him, who would never have a chance to beg for their lives. He tried to remind himself that within two days’ time, the boy would be dead anyway and then he wouldn’t feel any of this.
He tried to remind himself to not care.
“I was in a scary time once when I was your age, too,” Tyler said. He brushed back the boy’s sweaty hair, then rested his hand on the boy’s head. “My mom put her hand on my head kind of like this and said that no matter what happens from this day forward, never let someone see you shake, no matter how scared you might be. Stand up tall, she said. Show them who you are.”
Snot bubbled out of the kid’s nose as he cried. He wasn’t gasping, or wailing anymore. He lay quiet in his suffering.
“Why?” the boy whispered. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. Why can’t everyone just let me go?”
“Pain is a part of life,” Tyler said. “All you can do is breathe and wait for it to go away.”
“Please, mister. Pretty please.”
“It’ll be okay.” When had it become so easy to lie? “Retreat forward, kid.”
“No,” the boy screamed. “No! No! No!” He bucked his hips and tried to kick.
“Hold him,” the surgeon snapped.
“It’ll go faster, if you hold still, you little shit,” the soldier holding his legs said.
“Don’t talk to him like that,” Tyler growled. They locked eyes, but there was no debate who would blink first.
“Just breathe, kid,” Tyler said.
“Save the fistula,” Sara said. “We’ll need that for the recombinant.”
The surgeon inserted the scalpel several centimeters below the port on the kid’s elbow. Blood pooled and cut tiny rivulets down his soft skin.
“Owy, owy, owy,” the boy gasped. “Oh God, please stop.”
Tyler closed his eyes.
“Please,” the boy screamed.
When Tyler opened them again he saw the back of Sara as she walked away. So that was the kind of woman she was. Tyler felt he had her measure now.
Cords of muscle bunched and contracted like spasming snakes in the kid’s arm. Desperation makes men powerful, Tyler thought. Even boys.
“I hate you!” The boy began gasping. “I hate—“
The doctor finished his initial incisions and began peeling back the skin and muscle tissue.
If Tyler thought the boy had been crying before, he wasn’t prepared for the sounds the boy made now. His ears dampened the wails to protect his hearing.
The boy spasmed and vomited a spray of yellow bile. It lanced across the Silent Uprising soldier holding his shoulders.
“Son of a—“ the soldier jumped back.
The boy coughed and spit several times. “I hate you. I hope you all die. I hope everyone dies!”
A salty spurt of blood hit Tyler in the mouth.
“Shit,” the surgeon said.
Tyler looked down. That was a lot of blood.
The surgeon was moving faster now, his fingers deft, but edging on panic.
The boy stopped screaming and his arm went soft. He’d lost consciousness.
After a few seconds the doctor let out his breath. “Okay,” he said. “Saw.”
The assistant handed him a small saw with a circular blade. It hummed when he flipped the switch forward. “Get the pump ready.”
The assistant lifted the glass canister and pulled out a tube with a black suction cup looking thing from inside of it.
“What is that?” Tyler asked.
“Hold the arm. He might wake.”
The doctor lowered the saw into the opening and Tyler could see the boy’s bones. The radius was all w
hite, but the ulna was black from the webbing wrapped around it. The saw cut into the bone with a whine two or three centimeters away from the sheath.
Moments later, the arm was free and the doctor handed it to his assistant. The man attached the black suction sleeve onto the amputated end, closed it in the glass case, then pressed some buttons on the base of it. A second later the assistant nodded and handed the case to another soldier who had approached during the procedure.
“It’s pumping. You’ve got thirty, maybe forty hours,” the assistant said.
Meanwhile, the surgeon was grinding off the ends of the bones, smoothing them out. Tyler watched as the doctor finished stitching the muscles over the ends of the bones, then folded the skin over that.
“Normally, we’d have the cybernetics ready to attach,” the doctor said. “We’d be here another couple hours shaping muscles and getting blood vessels and nerves ready to couple, but no need for that today, is there? Kind of nice doing a surgery where you don’t have to give a damn.”
“Doctor,” Tyler said.
“I’m just saying, if you know the house is going to burn down in a couple days, you don’t bother fixing the broken windows. Am I right?”
“Doc, look at me,” Tyler said. “Finish this without another word, or I will use that saw to make you into a woman.”
“But—“
Tyler cocked his head.
The doctor looked back at his work.
Once the doctor was bandaging the arm, Tyler let go and straightened up. He wondered if the boy would live. He wondered if there was an answer to that question that he should hope for.
They were in the back of a van traveling to the Silent Uprising’s base. The boy lay unconscious, a blanket folded between him and the steel rivets. Tyler watched as the boy’s chest rose and fell, his bandaged half-of-an-arm taped to his body. He could still taste the boy’s blood on his lips. Could taste his sins writ across his own mouth. The sins of a man against a boy whose only crime was being what someone made him to be.
Tyler tried not to throw up.