Clay (11 page)

Cardboard trees swing from the rearview mirror.

The air fresheners battle a week’s worth of stale air. Jamie leans her head on the passenger window; the outside of the glass spattered with sooty snow and fractured lines of ice. The Colorado horizon is staggered with white peaks.

Sometimes, she rhythmically bangs her head to break the boredom. Paul thought, a few days back, that it was some sort of soothing disorder, an unconscious strategy to cope with psychological pain, but then he realized she was listening to music.

He still might be right.

“Surfing?”

Her eyes are dull. “What?”

“Were you surfing?”

“No.” She smirks. No one “surfs” the Internet. Now you “ride” it.

She’s lying and laughing, all at the same time. There’s plenty of public access near Denver. She was probably streaming and searching and chatting, everything he told her not to do. They didn’t need to be broadcasting their identities.

“You want to eat?” he asks. Jamie shakes her head. “Well, I’m stopping at the next exit.”

She looks out the window.

His niece is her age. His brother keeps a tight rein on her biomite levels, monitoring her activity and forcing her to learn through the clay rather than downloading lessons for integrated learning. Parents used to be at the mercy of genetics, research showing that parenting had less impact on a child’s development than the DNA they were dealt.

That could change now. Biomites could rewrite behavioral abnormalities, mold children’s thinking patterns. The controversy starts with free will. Opponents suggest this was programming because it is. Proponents of biomite training think it’s absurd to let genetic errors due to mutation or chance form a person.

If he could rewrite Jamie’s flaws, get her out of her head, stop listening to broken thoughts and chasing emotions, he wouldn’t dismiss it. Her parents were deeply flawed.

Did she even have a chance?

***

Paul sits at a rest stop, staring at the phone’s black screen. He caresses the power button, imagining how many texts, how many missed calls, how many voice mails have piled up since he left.

It won’t do any good to look. He can’t answer them. They have to stay lost for now, until he feels she’s safe. There are times he’s disappeared for good reason. His family will understand.

Jamie stretches outside the car, pulling her stocking cap low.

M0ther wasn’t looking for them. Despite what he told her, the bricks would’ve hunted them down by now. Maybe they already had what they needed from her, were using Gestapo tactics to scare her into giving up information that might be hidden in her clay. Maybe she told them without knowing it. That seemed reasonable. And since neither of them were halfskin, they’d be of no interest.

M0ther had bigger problems then a manic depressive teenager and a rogue cop.

“Why you got one of those?” Jamie points at the phone.

“You know how to use one?”

“It can’t be hard.”

“You’d be surprised. There’s an art to organizing apps.”

“Is that why you do it? Because you’re an artist?”

He holds the phone out.

She takes it, studies it, strokes the cold glass like a fragile fossil. “Works better if you turn it on,” she says.

“Not yet.”

“Thought you were a cop.”

“I am.”
Or was.
“I have the required biomite augments, but I prefer to operate the old-fashioned way on my own time.”

She tosses it back but doesn’t leave, shivering with her hands buried deep in her coat. Paul huffs into his hands. His feet are already cold but he feels alive. The car feels like a rolling coffin.

“How much farther?” Jamie kicks snow loose.

“As far as we need to go.”

“China?”

“Do you know what they were going to do to you?”

She can only guess the nightmares that movie producers cook up.
They take halfskins apart like broken toys, feed them to M0ther.

“I’m not halfskin,” she says.

“No,” he says. “And that’s why we keep going. Life’s worth living.”

“Oh, it’s been a blast. Can’t wait for more.”

“Life doesn’t care how you feel, Jamie.”

“I got that, believe me.”

“I don’t think you do. You’re all about Jamie.”

She digs her heel into the snow, sprays a passing couple with ice. Her music is up again, blotting out the world. She wanders to the car.

Paul rubs feeling back into his legs, jogs in place to circulate the blood, loosen the joints. He goes to the restroom, buys snacks at the vending machine and eats them inside the visitor’s center. When he returns to the car, Jamie’s in a glassy-eyed zone, banging her head on glass.

“Hey!” he shouts.

She jumps.

“I told you not to
surf
.”

“I’m not! Goddamnit!”

Paul gets in and drives away, smirking.

The motel room smells like cleaning supplies.

Nix locks the door. He brushes his teeth beneath a burned out light bulb, spits in a stained sink. He relieves himself before taking off his shoes, arranging the pillows to support his arms and legs. When everything’s right, he sits down, stares at the wrinkled face in the mirror for several moments before laying back.

Deep breath.

He doesn’t have an elaborate method to leave his body. He doesn’t even close his eyes; he just wills it to happen. He barely feels the falling as his consciousness goes inward.

The old man aches fade.

The ceiling becomes timber rafters. Cedar-paneled walls replace faded wallpaper. Somewhere, a candle is burning. Nix sits on a firm bed, sees his reflection in a full-length mirror, his hair blond, the wrinkles ironed out. He looks like a stranger.

“Raine?”

He looks over the loft railing. The fireplace is burning.

He stops in the kitchen to grab an apple, a pleasure that eases his hunger but does nothing to feed his body. He goes to the front porch. The weathered boards are wet. Dark clouds hang above the distant mountains, waves chopping the shores. Boats are tied off in the harbor.

Raine is behind the house, where apple trees grow in rows. Shep greets him at the first tree. Raine stands on a ladder, reaching through the branches, plucking the ones worth eating. She’ll take the basket to the market, sell them for a good price. It’s not money they need, but it keeps them connected to the town. It also keeps him sane.

“My sister called,” Nix says. “She wants to talk.”

“That’s nice.”

Her overalls are damp. Her bare arms are scratched and dirty from a long day in the garden. She climbs off the ladder with a basket full of ripe apples, begins walking toward the house.

“That’s it?” Nix says. She keeps marching. “Hey! My sister calls and you say ‘that’s nice?’ She might finally want to help.”

“What do you want me to say? Congratulations? I’m happy for you?” Apples tumble out as she spins. She drops on her knees to pick them up. “You were gone a week, risking your life, and for what? Looking for something I told you I don’t want? Something that got between you and your sister? How many times do I have to tell you that it doesn’t matter? Your mad obsession with a fabricator is destroying everything you love, and you can’t see that.”

Nix kneels to help but she leaves the last apples in the grass. She plants her hands on her hips, basket looped around her arm.

“It rained last night,” she says. “A black cloud crawled over the mountains, a storm that reached the heavens. Shep and I watched it unleash a torrent of rain that washed away the dust and scoured the land. When it was done, everything smelled new. It was beautiful.”

She turns around.

“And you weren’t there to see it.”

“
Our
lives,” Nix says. “I’m risking our lives.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I am Dreamland, Raine.” He thumps his chest. “This reality exists inside me; I created this. When I die, it dies. When we have children, I don’t want them inside my head.”

She shakes her head. “You didn’t used to think that.”

“I faced the facts.”

“You think I’m in your head? Just your imagination?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“You said everything comes from you. I’m here, Nixon. I was born here. You’re saying I’m not real, I’m just something you dreamed up.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what? You can’t have it both ways. I’m in here, I’m part of Dreamland. I know this is real, Nix, because when you’re not here, I still am. I think for myself. I get sad, I get happy. I sleep and eat and everything that defines a human, you know that.”

“I can’t…” He paces beneath an apple tree, grabs a branch. He can’t explain that part. She doesn’t feel like a dream, he just knows Dreamland is inside him. “I can’t take the chance, Raine.”

“This is my life.”

“That’s what I’m fighting for.”

“You should ask me, first.”

She strolls up the slope, hips swaying in time with the basket. She shrinks at the crest, Shep trotting next to her. When Nix was young, he was convinced that biomites helped transport him to another reality, a technological portal to a heavenly dimension. He would lead humanity to this paradise that existed in their minds, show them that problems didn’t exist, that Heaven was right here and now.

But thoughts are convincing, and often deceiving. Not necessarily evil, perhaps even protective. But thoughts can make us believe the imaginary. Cali eventually convinced him there was no alternate reality inside the biomites, that he wasn’t going anywhere other than a dream—a lucid one.

And Raine is part of it.

Perhaps that’s the initial wedge that split them apart: his refusal to accept her rational explanation that biomites create a dream. In the end, she changed his mind and he hated her for it. If Dreamland wasn’t real, then he had to get Raine.

Growing up,
Cali had explained,
means accepting life as it is.

But that doesn’t mean he can’t change things.

If Raine is a construct of his mind, he’ll make her flesh and blood. He’ll incarnate her in the real world. She’ll be her own person. And Cali will help.

Until then, Raine and Shep will be alone.

Wind gusts against the house.

Cali exits the kitchen with a mug of peppermint tea, the floor protesting her footsteps. A large recliner is positioned next to a cluttered desk. She closes the blinds.

Her head throbs with urgency.
Bing. Bing. Bing.

The dogs curl up at her feet, groaning. She sips the tea; butterflies flutter from her stomach and lodge in her throat. She allows the discomfort, watching her thoughts and expectations, not expecting peace to come, simply settling into the present moment.

A deep breath.

The cup shakes as she places it on the desk.

She sits back and opens to the pressure in her head. Warmth floods through her, followed by thoughts and sensations of another person, someone far away, synchronizing with her biomites.

Her inner ears itch. Her eyes sting.

A shadow forms on the braided rug. It takes the shape of a young man, the edges wispy and undefined as her eyes interpret the data flowing through her secure connection. Colors bleed from within the mysterious cloud, swirling and solidifying until he’s there.

Nix is standing in the room for her eyes only.

His face is smooth; his hair short and sun-bleached. The image is tainted with the memories of her little brother, making him appear much younger than a thirty-nine-year-old man. Certainly more youthful than the old man body.

It’s what she wants to see.

“You’re in a secure location?” she asks.

“I’m using your line.”

“What about your body?”

“It’s fine.” He steps off the rug, accessing her senses to see the room. He studies the shelves of books that never get opened. “Everything still looks so old. Even you. I thought you were all alone. Why are you still modifying your appearance?”

“It’s just me, Nix.” She reaches for the tea, her hand now steady. “But people come around.”

“Do they?”

He stops in front of a photo of Cali and her daughter, Avery. She feels his thoughts. He wonders if she’s conjured up her daughter since he left, created an illusion much like Raine. She’d tried that years ago, learned that the dead should stay dead.

Delusion frays the fabric of the mind.

“It’s good to see you,” she says.

“Why didn’t you answer my calls?”

“You know why.”

“You’re too late now, sis. The warehouse is cleared out, the bodies are gone, including the girl you could’ve saved.”

“You’re blaming her on me?”

“Isn’t that why you waited, so it wouldn’t be your fault?”

“Why the girl?”

“Why save someone that’s innocent?”

“Stop, Nix. Just…stop. You weren’t there to save the girl.”

“Neither were Marcus Anderson and his bricks. That girl was a survivor in that shutdown and they were going to take her back to M0ther.”

“How do you know that?”

He pauses, considers whether the truth would help or hurt him. She never pried into his thoughts, always respected her brother’s identity, even when his beliefs threatened him. She could force a look at his deepest secrets, but she didn’t have to.

He kept them on the surface.

“I pawned her.”

He took over her senses, saw through her eyes, and heard through her ears when she was in the warehouse. “Fool.”

His silent footsteps stomp across the wood floor, the dust bunnies undisturbed. “You hide in here while the world is falling apart and call me foolish?”

“You’re not saving it, Nix. You’re searching for a fabricator that has nothing to do with the rest of the world.”

“You don’t know what it’s like out there, you don’t see what those nixes are doing to people. It’s like a drug the world has never seen and M0ther is turning them off by the thousands.”

“Sacrificing yourself won’t change anything.” She sips the tea. “Why were you at the warehouse, Nix? Why did you pawn the girl?”

“Time’s running out, Cali. It won’t be long before M0ther clamps down on everything. Fabricators are getting rare. I’m afraid it won’t be much longer before they’re extinct.”

“I can’t help you.”

He twitches, not able to look at her for several moments. She feels his connection weaken, senses his impulse to disconnect.

“Marcus is leading this witch hunt,” he says. “You think he’ll stop when nixes are eliminated? You think he’ll be satisfied when M0ther still hasn’t found you or me?”

“Sticking your neck out is not helping us.”

“You know why I’m doing it!” His voice rattles in her head. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me. He won’t stop until he has you.”

Marcus Anderson.

That name used to accompany a cold shank of fear somewhere in her solar plexus, would leak it’s venom into her legs. If he had a single biomite in his body she would destroy him, turn his body into a slow-rotting corpse.

The sick bastard with his sex toy fetishes and trails of lies.

His wife had secretly recorded dozens of masochistic sex parties with fabrications that looked ten years old. The wife had used it to get everything in a settlement in return for her silence.

But the world needed to know what made that sick fuck tick. Cali made sure of it. But in the end, he ended up working with M0ther and now wielded more power than ever. The irony was insufferable.

“He didn’t take the halfskins,” Nix says. “He just left them on the floor, let family and friends weep over three-day-old corpses. The girl wasn’t halfskin, though. She was under 50%, still legal to exist, and he didn’t care. He was going to take her back. Instead, he got what he wanted and left her cold. It’s not just halfskins anymore. He’s killing who he wants.”

“And how was I going to save her?”

“I don’t know.” He paces around the rug, running his hands through his thick blond hair. “Reach out, manipulate the network, alter the bricks. Make them take her away from Marcus.”

“I can’t do that.”

“No, you
won’t
do that. You could’ve manipulated someone to get her out but you’re afraid to compromise your safe house, afraid to see what you’ve done to the world.”

Twenty years ago, the nixes had saved his life. Now he curses them.

“The girl’s not dead,” Cali states.

He continues pacing. “What do you mean?”

“She’s still alive.”

“How?”

Cali looks away. She swore she wasn’t going to do this. If she was honest, the guilt worked. It was absurd to believe she’s responsible for people’s actions. She released the sex videos of Marcus Anderson, but she never leaked the code for nixes. The story of their escape eventually got out and that’s all it took for garage nanobiometric hobbyists and big corporations to break the invisibility barrier. They discovered their own nixes without her help. Yet she still got the credit.

And the guilt.

Cali, though, had plenty of guilt parked inside her. Nix only had to kick over one domino to get them all to fall.

“The photo you sent…her name is Jamie. Her background wasn’t hard to find—single-parent household, mother guilty of substance abuse, arrested for shoplifting, possession of firearms, and other petty crimes. Jamie’s last registered biomite scan tapped 49.9%. She was going halfskin when the bricks hit the warehouse. I scanned her biomite identity, found it still active.”

“Can’t be. Maybe her identity had already been recycled.”

“She’s alive, Nix.” She leans back. “Trust me.”

He doesn’t ask why she investigated such an innocuous person. Why go through all the trouble? Why the risk?
Because Avery would’ve been her age.

Would Cali’s daughter have been in that warehouse? Would she have succumbed to the halfskin promise of everlasting pleasure, even if Cali told her such promises were empty?

Truth be told, Cali didn’t want Jamie to be dead.

“Whose body was in the warehouse?” Nix asks.

“Maybe Marcus fabricated it.”

Innocence haunts him, reminds Cali of the little boy she’d cared for when their parents died. Life seemed so difficult then. How could it have possibly become harder?

“Did he take her back to M0ther?” he begs.

“I don’t think so.”

“You know where she’s at?”

Cali cups the mug, swirls the contents. She didn’t tell him all the layers of encryption it was buried beneath. Someone didn’t want Jamie to be found.

“It’s a trap, Nix.”

“You think everything’s a trap.” The childish visage fades.

“That’s why we’re alive.”

“You’re surviving, Cali. Not the same thing as living.”

“We can’t beat M0ther, Nix. Twenty years ago, maybe, but not now. She’s learning, evolving. Her intelligence is increasing exponentially. Despite all the safeguards, I think she’s evolved into an identity that could threaten everything, not just the halfskins. People are still blind to her power. We have to hunker down and survive until the world sees what she’s become. They need to see the truth.”

“And you see the truth?”

How does a person see truth? Once upon a time Cali was a bionanometric engineer, brilliant and savvy, and yet she couldn’t see the truth of her life. Not then.

What about now?

“Where’s Jamie?” Nix asks.

Cali drums her fingers. It only takes a thought to transfer Jamie’s identity code. That’s all he’ll need to find her.

His image fades.

She remains in the recliner with a cold cup of tea and warm dogs on her feet, knowing why she had told him. Knowing that he’ll need her again.

When he does, he’ll come back.