Clay (25 page)

Cali locks the basement door and puts the key on the kitchen table. In case things don’t work out, she puts Hal’s name on a sheet of paper with an explanation scribbled beneath it. It starts out as an apology. She didn’t want him to discover the truth about her, at least not in this way. They’re good people—people she wishes, in another life, she can emulate.

She drops a white envelope next to Hal’s note. There’s a different name on it. There are explanations inside.

The musty smell of the house is rich today. She hasn’t noticed it this strong since she moved in so many years ago. That was a day she stopped right where she is now and felt the memories of the previous family saturating the old walls. This home, though, never felt like hers. She was always a stranger. She had hoped if she lived there long enough, the memories would become hers.

They were just borrowed.

She goes to the front porch and pulls the door closed, caressing the slick surface. She won’t open that again.

Paul’s in the gravel driveway, throwing a tennis ball across the field. The muscles ripple down his arm, lean from days of fasting. The dogs return, one of them with the ball. Paul sends them on another chase.

For a moment, she sees Nix playing with the dogs.

Cali slings an old wool blanket over her shoulder. She stops next to him. The dogs only have eyes for the ball. Cali heaves it one last time. Paul turns to her. He smiles briefly. It’s lifeless.

No one is ready to die.

Numbered breaths bring a stark realization of one’s mortality: when the light goes out, life ends. If she was Christian, perhaps this moment would be a little more joyous—she could hope for a reward. She had lived the best life she could. As a scientist, she had always professed, with steel honesty, that she didn’t know what happened after death. Her uncertainty slows her breathing. Each breath becomes more precious than the one before. She’s not ready to die.

No one is
.

They leave the compact driveway and traipse through the burgeoning green field. Clumps of May wildflowers sway outside the pasture. The crippled swing set is still standing. Cali drops the blanket beneath it. Paul helps spread it. They sit down, arms resting on their knees. The birds sing in the distant trees and a breeze rustles through the grass. The dogs return without the ball. Instinctively, they know she’s done.

Is this what you want?
Cali looks up.
Are you toying with me? Am I caught in your perception field, made to believe my actions are just?

Her desperation to find more breaths fuels her doubt; maybe Paul’s right. She should reconsider. But there is no room for thinking. She’s tired.

They lay back.

The clouds crawl across the sky. A hawk glides in the updraft. The last moments of life rest gently, never to be captured, only to be savored. She’s but a conduit through which they pass.

Paul’s hand moves warmly over hers.

She looks past the rusted chains of the swing set, into the endless blue heavens with a secret smile. Perhaps she knows why M0ther sent Paul.

She doesn’t feel alone.

Nix fell asleep sometime after the torso was finished.

The thrum of the replicator and hiss of the filaments was a distant lullaby.

When he wakes, a headless nude body glistens on the silver disc. Several misters work to keep it moist and sealed, preventing the inactive biomites from separating. The moisture beads and streaks like perspiration.

He stands the remaining hours.

The strokes are slower, more methodical. The full lips are pink. Her nose slim. Eyelashes long. Moisture runs down her cheeks, drips from her chin. With each pass, she becomes less of an object, more of a dark-skinned woman. He presses his palms against the glass as if he’s magnetically drawn to it.

The filaments finish her short hair with a sweeping flurry.

They draw up to the ceiling and lock into the mounts. The replicator no longer churns out biomites.

Silence.

The body of Raine is motionless, inanimate.

His breath fogs the glass with short and erratic strokes.

“Beautiful,” Jamie whispers.

He moves to the doorway—a seam etched into the wall. A burst of moisture is applied, running down her stomach. Water pools between her toes.

“We’ll need some time to verify connectivity.” Mr. Hansen is back, along with Mr. Sing and Ms. Chen.

Paul has waited years for this moment, but the next few hours feel even longer. The rudimentary tests are torture. Finally, her fingers flinch.

Her chest inflates and the flesh stretches over her ribs. Slowly, it releases. This is repeated over and over. Each time, a knot of anticipation lodges in Nix’s throat. The inflations become consistent, closer together, until her chest rhythmically rises and falls.

She’s breathing.

He leans against the glass.

The misters continue. A pulse begins thumping on her neck, light reflecting from the wet skin. She’ll open her eyes any second. She’ll see the outside world through flesh.

The lab is flung into darkness.

Red lights flash.

Generators grind to life in another room and emergency lights come online, splashing a yellowish hue across the room.

“What’s happening?” Nix calls.

Mr. Hansen and the others scramble to their computers. He’s shouting at Mr. Sing, something about power failure and redirecting pathways. The computer monitors begin to glow; tiny green lights flicker beneath the benches.

Raine is still breathing, but her eyes remain sealed.

“What’s going on?” Jamie asks.

Nix bangs on the glass. The inch-thick walls barely shimmer beneath his blows but the reverberations echo inside. She won’t open her eyes. Adrenaline dumps into his system, poking fear with a cold stick.

“Open it! Open the door!”

Jamie hammers on the glass, too. Their appeals thunder inside the cube.

“The emergency exits aren’t responding,” Mr. Sing says. A quiver in his voice suggests ideas that don’t include Nix and Jamie.

“We’ll override it.” Mr. Hansen starts taking off the white coat.

“Where the hell are you going?” Nix grabs his sleeve. Mr. Hansen whirls around.

“You did this!” Mr. Hansen shouts. “You bastard, you did this!”

He throws a glancing blow off of Nix’s head. He tries another and gets slammed against the cube. Nix has two fistfuls of his lab coat bunched under this chin. “You realize what you’ve done?” Mr. Hansen says. “You betrayed us, you fuck; led them right to us. This might be the last fabricator in the world, and you just handed it over to them.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Watch your lady disintegrate, you bastard.”

“No.” Nix flings him to the floor. Mr. Sing and Ms. Chen help him up, the red light splashing alarm across their faces. “You’re not leaving. Get back there and finish. I haven’t done anything.”

They step away.

Their movements, though, begin to slow, like they’re going through a thick and invisible substance. Mr. Hansen appears to harden, like a flash-frozen statue.

And then Nix feels it.

Pressure.

It fills him like viscous fluid. He blinks, slowly, turns to Jamie; words try to escape her throat. Their bodies betray them, their muscles seize.

The laboratory’s main door opens.

Bricks stride into the dim light. Men and women, dressed casually, surround them. With his last bit of strength, Nix forces his head to look into the glass cube.

Raine’s eyes are open.

The elevator descends.

Anna was always a few inches taller than him, but now, with his chest puffed out, he’s reached his full height. The perennial hump near his shoulders has receded. Not an ache in his body.

I can feel him.
He takes a deep, tantalizing breath.
Nix Richards is here.

His spiritual intuition is awake. He senses the fallible Nix Richards in the next room, surrounded by bricks, with nowhere to run. There are no barriers to Marcus’s senses, like his inner eye has opened to show him the Lord’s path.

“Marcus. Are you all right?”

The elevator is open, waiting. The smell of baked earth is strong. The power has been turned back on for his arrival. Anna slides her hand around his arm. Her complexion is without blemishes, or even pores—porcelain with pouty lips.

She escorts him to the lab.

The track lighting illuminates the room like a Broadway stage. The feature act is contained in a larger-than-life glass box where a woman is wet and nude. Her skin is the opposite of Anna’s: dark and luscious.

Three technicians stand shoulder to shoulder. Their white coats are wrinkled and bunchy. Marcus pauses before entering, fully absorbing this moment. Not a detail will go uncovered or forgotten.

He stops at the first technician. Anna announces the man’s credentials and history. This Mr. Hansen keeps his eyes forward like a new recruit. Only the knot in his throat moves; the words are trapped by the iron-clad grip of the twenty bricks in the room that have seized control of his biomites.

After eyeballing Mr. Sing and, finally, Ms. Chen, he stands before them with his hands clasped behind his back. They reek of halfskin, he is certain. How many souls have they turned halfskin, as well?

“You have committed crimes against humanity. For this…” he says, letting their thoughts fill in the blanks. They are unable to protest.

“Their nixes will be decoded in thirty minutes,” Anna says.

Marcus nods. “You have thirty minutes left to live. Count your breaths. Savor them.”

He could commit more bricks to decoding their nixes, or just shut down the ones that are visible. But making them wait is a just punishment. Perhaps they will repent and God’s mercy will be granted.

Beyond them is the girl. She’s almost unrecognizable without the stocking cap and sad eyes. He could mistake her for an educated young lady, one with promise and a future. But he knows what lies beneath.

He lifts her chin. Her eyes quiver, attempting to lose focus, to look away. Despite the bricks’ grip, she shivers. He can feel the memories of their last meeting rise in her awareness: the horror and hopelessness driven deep into her heart. She was damned and she knew it. Marcus would’ve dropped her in a tank, had M0ther not interfered.

He brushes the hair from her eyes.
There’s still time.

And there, facing the brown goddess on display, is the true prize. The gift.

“Just couldn’t resist,” he whispers.

Nix is not a boy anymore. His innocence lies in a shallow grave with his parents. Perhaps the beginning of his fall from grace wasn’t entirely his fault—a drunk driver plowing into the car that kills your parents and leaves you dying is forgivable.

But this.

Nix could have lived his life in hiding, never showed his face and denied Marcus this euphoric moment of victory…but he needed to fabricate this woman.

Marcus touches the glass.

“Twenty years I’ve waited,” he says. “Twenty years I’ve dreamed of this, for you and your sister to make a mistake. I have you, Nixon Richards. And soon I will have your sister.”

Nix shakes. Anger quakes beneath his unresponsive repose—a prisoner in his own body.

“You’ve been up to the Devil’s work, son. You can’t shut down your 99%, I won’t let you. But you’ll beg me. You will beg for the relief of death, but all I’ll have to offer is penance.”

How do I know he’s 1%?
He can smell it, that’s how. The stench of biomites is strong; the odor seeps from his pores. He feels like a brick.

“And this.” Marcus taps the glass. “What is this?”

“The coding is elusive,” Anna reports. “The fabrication appears to be composed of nixed biomites with a completely a new operating system.”

“Open the door.” No one responds. Marcus points at Mr. Hansen. “You.”

He’s released from the invisible grip. A helpless whine escapes him, an involuntary spasm that had been bottled far too long. With a few keystrokes, the seal around the door is broken. Warm, humid air escapes. Marcus slowly opens it and lets the stench of freshly ignited biomites rush past him—a foul odor he’s come to associate with M0ther’s garden.

Water droplets hang on her fingertips. The dripping echoes in the chamber. Nix is beginning to spasm.

Marcus paces around the wet specimen, letting his eyes examine the exquisite beauty: the deep brown skin, the flawless curves and toned musculature. She’s not without imperfections, though: a scar here, another there. She lacks the airbrushed quality of Anna, as if she’s been plucked from the street and copied. She even has pores.

He could take her, right on the silver dais. Marcus could make Nix watch him sexually defile this abomination, make him feel what it’s like to lose everything—an eye for an eye, and the pleasure of watching him suffer while Marcus took such…pleasure.

Anticipation unfurls in his groin.

The glass chamber feels tight; the humid air is sickening. He steps out.

“How do we get rid of that thing?” he asks.

“A defragmenting solution,” Anna says. “It strips the membranes from the biomites, causing them to dissolve. A fabricator, such as this one, will have one for sterilization.”

“Mr. Hansen?” Marcus turns.

A few panicked strokes of the keyboard and a red button on the computer console lights up.

“The process can begin once the door is sealed,” Anna says.

“Which nozzle applies it?”

“There’s a hose clamped near the door.”

There were hoses bundled on vertical mounts and others dangling from the ceiling. This one was hung on a rack, waist-high.

Anna updates him on the decoding progress. The technicians were several minutes away from shutdown. Once their nixes were deactivated, all the ones associated with it would be, too. How many drank from the same fountain as these fools? How many contain the same strain of nixes? She estimates the number and it is very high.

But punishment without atonement is merely torture. Something should be learned from the suffering or else the lesson is wasted. The opportunity lost.

“Nixon Richards.” Marcus breathes into his ear. “This is your chance for forgiveness. Reject the false idol before you. Take your first step towards contrition, son.”

Nix’s complexion is the color of hot metal. His efforts are valiant but, in the end, useless. His resistance only causes his muscles to cramp, his limbs to convulse. Still, he moves into the chamber.

“She’s not real,” Marcus says. “Not even 1%. Strip away the delusion; wash your false idol down the drain.”

Several of the bricks step closer, focusing their efforts at subduing his rebellion. Marcus feels the pressure around him. Something begins tingling in his head, like a finger running over the rim of a wine glass.

Nix reaches for the hose, fingers closing slowly, tightly, around the nozzle. The metal prongs ting as he jerks it off the rack.

His boots jerk over the slick floor.

“Ask for forgiveness and mercy may be yours.”

Marcus’s ears pop.

The air is thick and difficult to breathe. Maybe the air from the chamber is toxic, but the bricks are laboring, too. Anna is looking around the lab. She feels it.

“What is it?” he asks.

She looks at him. Her eyes widen before losing focus, as if she’s just emerged from M0ther’s garden. And then she falls, a puppet without strings.

They all fall.

Including Marcus.