Clay (27 page)

Marcus finds the first service technician in the middle of a server room, like he was dropped from the sky. He’s as cold as the floor. Marcus gets back in the golf cart and drives down a concrete corridor that’s choking on bricks. Once the fabricated men and women that helped maintain M0ther’s operation, now they’re sprawled in corners or beneath electrical cabinets. Many of them are hunched against walls like they felt the shutdown coming.

He stops in the main corridor that divides the dome, looks up at the multiple tiers interconnected with catwalks where more bodies are tangled. One had fallen, her contents spilled across the floor in a crimson puddle.

There are no green fields or bustling cities. No greenhouse.

Just endless arrays of servers.

M0ther is dead.

He finds two more technicians, both as lifeless as the first, when the first plane arrives. It rips over the dome and shakes the girders. They land soon enough, and find Marcus in the cafeteria.

He doesn’t resist.

They escort him to a conference room where he sits alone at a table. Exhausted, he curls up on the couch. His dreams are filled with black space.

Somewhere, Anna is calling.

Military personnel interrupt his slumber. They draw blood, give him food and water. They take his vitals, ask him standard cognitive questions. He demands to speak with Director Powell, he has to be somewhere in this clusterfuck. He tries to get physical with a military guard, but he’s knocked back and warned when he touches him.

Marcus eats with his hands and falls asleep, searching the dark for Anna. This happens over and over until his clothes stink of body odor.

Days have passed when the door opens and a booming voice shouts, “What the hell is going on, Anderson?”

Marcus jumps up, his head swishing with sleep. Hank Meggett, Secretary of State, towers over him. It takes several moments to recognize the man’s craggy face. Deep lines furrow his forehead.

“Five hundred thousand bricks have shut down and you’re clueless how the fuck M0ther made so many and why the hell they dropped dead.”

Hank continues ranting while a team arrives behind him. Their ties are loose and their jackets are open. Hank pulls out the chair from the head of the table and jerks Marcus toward it. He tries to resist.

A stupor fogs his mental faculties as the men and women find seats. There are ten of them, including Hank at the opposite end. They get settled, staring at Marcus. He knows some of them.

Military police stand at the door.

Marcus clears his throat. “I’ve got rights.”

“Not anymore,” Hank says.

Powell enters with a stack of folders. He hasn’t shaved in several days. He introduces the people that Marcus doesn’t know. Two of them are clinical psychologists. Powell maintains a genteel smile, one that suggests they’re all in this together. Marcus was never very good at that.

“How are you feeling?” Powell asks.

“Violated.”

“Are you thinking clearly today? Do you think you can answer some questions?”

He says it like they’ve done this before, but Marcus can’t remember. None of his memories are in order.

“Get on with it.”

“We’re still piecing things together,” Powell says. “When a trillion dollar operation suddenly goes down without explanation, people get upset, you understand. You’ve been sequestered for the time being, at least until we get some answers.”

Marcus sets his jaw.

“I think we’d like to start with the most obvious question. When did you decide to seed yourself?”

“What?”

“Your biomites levels, Marcus. They’ve been confirmed.”

Marcus starts to protest, several guttural sounds make it past his tongue, before he stands and shouts, “Get out!”

The guards stiffen but don’t advance. Everyone watches him point at the door but his efforts are powerless. Buried deep in his subconscious, he knows something has changed. His knee doesn’t hurt. The hump in his posture has disappeared. He doesn’t feel so fallible. Or imperfect.

He sits, calmly says, “I never seeded myself.”

“Perhaps I misspoke,” Powell says. “There is evidence that biomites were seeded in the food for ingested integration. It’s possible you ate it without knowing, but it’s unlikely you didn’t notice the effects. Your service technicians have been located, all of them felled by the shutdown. They were all close to 99%, Marcus. Everyone was nearing a complete absence of clay, except for you.”

“No. That’s just…that’s not possible.”

Several members glance around. Powell slides the manila folder, opens the cover. It contains photos. The top one is of a massive glass case. Bodies lay all around it. Memories of the basement fabrication chamber below the factory emerge from the fog. He remembers the smell of wet clay and burning circuits, the hiss of misting nozzles. Jamie was there. Nix Richards was preparing to destroy the nude woman, his fabrication…

I’m leaving you with a gift.

“Marcus?”

He snaps his attention from the photo. Sweat runs beneath his shirt. Powell flips the photos, one by one—bodies of bricks, lab technicians…and Anna
.

“Your body was discovered two days ago.” Powell holds up the photo. Blood is clotted on his head. His eyes are open and milky. “It was near a fabrication chamber below a Chicago manufacturing plant. Apparently you were leading a fabricator bust when M0ther collapsed. In the process, she shut all the bricks down, including you.”

Marcus spreads the photos across the table but can’t find Nix or Jamie or the nude woman. Marcus’s body is draped over Anna’s.

“That’s not me.”

“It is you, Marcus.”

How did you get here, Marcus?

The truth is pushed to the surface, forcing him to recognize it. The soil on M0ther’s hands. The dirt on Marcus. The door was open on the fabricator when M0ther disappeared, leaving him in the cold, gray inner workings.

He turns his hands over. They’re
his
hands. This is
his
body. He can’t be in the photo, he can’t be dead, not when he’s here.

But the truth emerges.

“She tricked me,” he whispers.

“Who?”

“M0ther.”

Powell looks around the table. “You do realize that M0ther is just an anachronism, Marcus? While this construction parallels the intellectual potential of a human brain, its only function is to monitor biomites, that’s all. There is no evidence of artificial intelligence.”

The room begins turning.

“Your stability is one of our concerns,” Powell says. “Records show you spending an inordinate amount of time sleeping. In some cases, you sat in your office for hours at a time, in some sort of trance. Video has captured you driving across the facilities in the middle of the night.”

Powell takes a folder from the woman next to him, shows a photo of Marcus sitting at a desk, his eyes blankly looking forward.

“The service technicians exhibited the same type of dream state, only they would snap out of it. You, on the hand, rarely did, Marcus. In fact, the day before the collapse, it had been decided you would be replaced. You have not done counseling. You appeared to be self-medicating. Clearly you were unfit for this duty, and, despite arguments in your favor, needed to be removed.”

“You were the one sure thing,” Hank adds. “The only clay in Washington. And you caved.”

“We’ll reserve judgment,” Powell cuts in. “There’s no evidence that Marcus Anderson is, in any way, responsible for the collapse, and it’s possible that one of the service technicians laced the food with ingestible biomites. There’s still much to investigate. In the meantime, we expect your full cooperation.”

“What do you want?” Marcus asks.

“For now, we’ll continue testing. You’ll undergo a battery of psychological evaluations.”

“What for?”

“To determine your sentience.” Powell pauses, says gently, “Marcus Anderson died last week. You are a fabrication. And we don’t know what that means.”

M0ther deceived him.

She shut him down.

And then she fabricated him.
I’m leaving you with a gift.

“I have rights,” Marcus stutters.

“You have no rights. You’re lucky the Halfskin Laws have been suspended.”

M0ther gave him a gift. The gift was life. She took his clay from him but gave him life. And she showed the world what she could do. She turned clay into bricks.

Do you want to serve humanity? What would you sacrifice for your Lord and Savior?

Marcus is the gift.

Powell continues the inquisition. Several discussions break out. Eventually, Marcus grows tired. The military police watch him sit on the couch and lay his head back. It feels awfully heavy.

He closes his eyes.

“He’s useless,” Hank bellows. “Get him out of here.”

Strong arms pull him upright and drag him through the door. They close it behind him. The muffled voices fade as they take him to an elevator that rises. They escort him to his living quarters. The bed is small and the walls are white and empty. There is no kitchenette. No walk-in closet with tailor-made suits.

He lies down on coarse sheets.

Raine.

Her name whispers through the blackness. Nix is calling, haunting her dreamless sleep; narcoleptic sleep pulls her unwillingly into the dark depths to be teased by his presence.

Months go by.

Sometimes she wakes in hotel rooms. Sometimes the car. But always the voice follows her into the land of the living, leaving her with the memory of his body. The promise of his whisper.

Raine.

Raine.

“Wake up.” Jamie shakes her.

Raine sits up, rubs her eyes.

“You were moaning again,” Jamie says.

She doesn’t tell her about the voice again. Not anymore. They didn’t talk much following her Nix’s death, waking up in one hotel after another. Raine could only keep awake for an hour at a time before she began to buzz. How she made it from one place to another, she wasn’t always sure.

Once, when they were eating lunch in a parking lot, Jamie had blurted out, “Where’d you come from?”

She’d asked that question before and Raine had pretended she didn’t hear. Another time she acted like her voice wasn’t working. But this time, she told her about Dreamland. The trees and the ocean and the waterfall…their own paradise where nothing could hurt them.

“Sounds beautiful,” Jamie had said. “Why’d you want to leave?”

Raine didn’t answer. Nix wanted to believe it wasn’t make-believe—that she was real and so was his Dreamland—but in his subconscious, he never quite did.

And now she’s in this heavy flesh that gets cold and weary. She notices wrinkles she never had, like between her knuckles or bunched around her elbows. When she steps into the sunlight, she sneezes. When the wind blows, her eyes water.

Jamie told her how Nix convulsed when he uploaded her into the fabricator and hardly slept for seven days while the filaments flailed. The last thing Raine remembers about Dreamland is standing in the kitchen. She woke up in that room, wet and nude.

And Nix was on the floor.

They drive from town to town. Every day brings a little more wakefulness, a little less exhaustion. But she still dreams of blankness, still hears his voice out there, waiting for her to find him in a Dreamland that no longer exists. Some nights she wakes drenched in sweat, hugging herself in an empty bed, cursing his name for leaving her. Crying for him to come back.

She weeps until her tear ducts are dry.

In September they head east, where the road is winding and steep. The trees are wearing their autumn colors. The air is crisp and colder than where they were only a few weeks earlier. Jamie takes the sharp curves without slowing.

Raine notices so many more feelings in this body; the world is so much more intense and mysterious. It’s not as perfect as Dreamland, but it feels more…real.

Raine closes her eyes and rides through the dips and curves; the unknown turns throw her left and right. She feels sleep coming, that familiar sensation of falling into the dark world where Nix’s voice will whisper, when the car begins to slow.

“We’re here,” Jamie says.

Sacred Heart Church ends the Sunday service with a hymn.

The congregation holds hands and sings their praise. Megan slips her hand into Paul’s. Her fingers are slender. Hal’s hand, clutched in Paul’s right, is coarse. Hal bellows louder than the entire congregation, his tone-deaf words bouncing through the wooden rafters.

Paul and Megan smile, their song trampled by her father’s devotion.

When service ends, they go outside. Autumn leaves blow across the stone apron. A crisp wind threatens the ladies’ Sunday hats.

“Glad to see you, Paul.” The pastor briskly shakes his hand. “God bless you.”

“Thank you.”

Hal and his family gather around him. They discuss the church’s plans for a blood drive. The roof is also in need of repair. Paul volunteers to lead that project. He’s not suited for the blood drive.

The day after the mass shutdown, what had become known as M0ther’s Collapse, Paul invited Hal over to the house.

“Her name is Cali Richards,” Paul had said.

Although her color had faded, she still looked at peace. They stood next to the bed and Paul explained she had been caught in the Collapse. Hal listened quietly, staring at her while Paul described her struggle.

She engineered biomites, he told her, to help humanity, not enslave it. But unfortunate events led her to sacrifice her clay. In the end, Paul assured him, she wished things had been different.

“I don’t expect you to understand or forgive her,” Paul had said, “but her courage...”

He left it at that.

Hal wouldn’t understand how she brought an end to M0ther and how her sacrifice exposed what M0ther was capable of doing. M0ther was more than a monitor, more than a technological goddess that shut down halfskins. She could control anything with a biomite. Her perception field had no boundaries. There were rumors she could infect people with biomites against their will and they wouldn’t even know it. M0ther could, one day, turn everyone into a puppet.

The question that had yet to be answered:
Who was controlling M0ther?

Hal would never understand.

They held a funeral on the property. Hal’s wife and their two children gathered around a freshly dug mound where the swing set used to be. Hal presided over the eulogy, extolling this young woman’s virtues. They each told their favorite memory. Cali was always happy to see them.

“You have the mites?” Hal had asked afterwards. Paul said he did. They ate supper together. And biomites were never mentioned again.

Paul didn’t tell him he was a brick, perhaps the last one.

When the church is closed, Paul takes the long way home, stopping once to absorb the view of the distant mountains, their peaks fading in the bluish haze. The body found in the warehouse isn’t Paul. Whoever he is is standing next to a truck, witnessing God’s glory in the form of mountains.

His soul is not bound to the body, regardless of whether it’s organic or not. And the good Lord will attest to that. Paul knows this. He feels it in church and knows that God has forgiven him.

The gate to the farm is always open now. There’s no one to keep out, no tower to hide what’s inside. He notes broken limbs that need to be pruned before seeing the white car. He hits the brakes, gravel grinding under his tires.

Jamie steps out of the barn.

Paul stares with disbelief, finally gets out, leaving the door open and grabbing the young woman in a full embrace. Jamie hugs him back. Her face is full and her hair smells clean. He kisses the top of her head, holds her at arm’s length.

“I thought you were gone.”

“No.” She blushes and looks away. “No.”

“I searched your identity, just assumed you had been caught in the shutdown with Nix.”

“I’ve kept my field off, just like someone taught me. You know, in case someone was looking. Not you, but…I didn’t know what was happening and I was taking care of someone.”

“Where have you been?”

“Hiding, mostly. Checking in and out of hotels and resorts. We’re about out of money.”

“Why didn’t you come back?”

“I figured this was the last place to go, after Nix…” She swallows, hard. She didn’t expect to feel that when she said his name. “We’ve been slowed down.”

“Who’s ‘we?’”

She nods at the house. An athletic woman is on the porch. Her hair is short. Her skin dark brown. She moves like a dangerous dancer, puts her hand on the railing.

“Nix brought her into the world,” is all Jamie says. “Her name is Raine.”

He spent his life chasing her. And now she’s here.

She watches him cross the gravel driveway and climb the steps. She’s like him. He can feel it.

A fabrication.

“Welcome home.” He extends his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”