Halfskin (2 page)

"Nix?" Cali was the last to show. Avery was cradled on her shoulder. "You all right?"

Nix want to run to her. To hide behind her.

"Jennifer says he's been seeded."

And then the attention went from Nix to Cali. Parker bolted through the greenery, ditched the gun in the groundcover.

"Is that right?" one of the mom's said. "How'd you get him seeded that young?"

"You have connections at the lab?" someone else said. "Eric's having trouble with attention deficit disorder and I can't get the doctors to give him a release. Is there anything you can do?"

"Sally's suffering from constant ear infections and they want to do surgery."

"Benjamin's got acne."

"Nix." Cali stuck her hand out. "It's time to go. Come on."

Nix leapt up and snatched her hand on the fly. They walked briskly alongside the house with a cadre of moms in tow, all of them making their best offers. They were all wealthy, all connected, but none of them could skirt the laws.

Listen, if you want your kid seeded, all it takes is a near fatal car accident and two dead parents and you can have all the damn biomites your heart desires. Hey, it's a blast.

Cali didn't talk as she buckled Avery into the car seat, squealing.

"Sorry."

"Not your fault," she said.

"I didn't mean to tell them."

"Not your fault," she said, again.

The moms watched them drive off. A few were waving.

They drove home with the radio turned up, the way Avery liked it. Cali turned off her phone. When they got home, she told Thomas, her husband, they weren't going to any parties for awhile.

Nix went to his room. He was different.

He would always be different.

10 YEARS LATER.

M0THER

Blogger’s Reaction to the Birth of M0ther

THE REAL AVENGER’S BLOG

Shooting Truth-Bullets Since Birth

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It's the end of time, peeps.

Mark this date, put a black X on your calendar because it's all over, starting today. It used to be that if you didn't like the laws where you lived, you just moved to another state or another country. Freedom existed somewhere in the world. We had a choice. I mean, hell, if you were desperate enough you could live on the South Pole with penguins and shit.

Not anymore.

Today, it's all over.

Today, M0ther was born.

Who's M0ther? Our M0ther. Already got a mother? Now you got two, only this one will know everything about you. You can't hide from her, she'll know when you're full of crap, know where you stash your porn, know when you pick your nose and when you eat it.

You'll hate her, and she'll know that, too.

Case you've been asleep for the last 10 years, the Mitochondria Terraforming Hierarchy of Record is what I'm talking about.

Let's just call her M0ther.

A mother that doesn't bake cookies or wash your underwear. She's not getting up to make you French toast or wipe your nose. Nope. This bitch is going to spy on you until you’re dead. Which may be sooner than you think.

M0ther is somewhere in the frozen plains of Wyoming. No pictures of her exist because no one's allowed to even flyover. But rumors say she's this massive dome, a computer the size of a football stadium, like some artificial brain heaved out of the frozen soil that's wirelessly connected with every biomite in existence.

Did you catch that? EVERY BIOMITE IN EXISTENCE!

Hear that buzzing on your phone? She's listening.

Feel that tickle on your laptop? She knows you're tapping.

All that
Do Not Covet Your Neighbor's Wife
crap? Yeah, that's the real deal, now. M0ther might tell your wife what you're thinking about doing to Joe-Bob's wife mowing the lawn in a tube top.

George Orwell wasn't even close, man. I mean, Big Brother was just a pea shooter compared to M0ther. Big Brother was pissing on a forest fire; M0ther's bringing the goddamn ocean.

Here's the official statement from Marcus Anderson, Chief of the Biomite Oversight Committee.

(BTW, he looks like a gargoyle. Right?)

It is with great pleasure that, after ten years of global effort, I present to you the greatest feat of humankind. I present to you a regulatory system that will keep all people safer and healthier for centuries to come. Bionanotechnolgy has put us on the brink of greatness, but with that comes uncertainty and danger. The human species has the potential to live forever. Or end tomorrow.

I prefer the former.

Mitochondria Terraforming Hierarchy of Record is linked to every booted cellular-sized biomite living inside our bodies. Its primary function will be to monitor individual levels of biomites and take appropriate action if, or when, they cross a previously determined threshold. This will keep us human.

This will keep us safe.

Forever.

I don't know about you, but this is not a gross infringement on our freedom: it's raping it. I don't want anything or anyone peeking into my biomites; that's none of your business, none of my neighbor's, and it sure as hell ain't the government's.

Biomites aren’t evil, dude. They’re artificial stem cells, that’s all. What’s the big deal? If you want to be 100% artificial, be my guest, that's your business, bro. I don't give a rat's pink sphincter what you do with your body. You want to boost your brain with biomites to get smarter? Hey, as long as you got the cash, good for you.

What the chief didn't say in his official statement was what exactly the
previously determined threshold
is.

Want to know?

You should, before you rebuild your kidney or tone those wrinkles, you should know that when your body is 40% biomites, you're a redline. And redlines go to jail.

JAIL.

Think I'm joking?

They call it a Detainment and Observation Center. You can't leave, you don't order takeout, you shower with other redlines. That's jail. You get a federally funded cot and three hots while they watch your biomite levels. On a side note, you’d think the scientists could figure out how to keep biomites from reproducing and slowly taking over our bodies once we get seeded. They are the geniuses, for Christ’s sake. Doesn’t seem like it should be all that hard.

But all right, whatever. So they continue dividing once they’re in our bodies. It’s worth the trade off: they are the answer to every disease, every shortcoming, every desire known to man. They’ll figure it out, give them some time.

But here’s the kicker. Guess what happens when you hit 50%. Guess, no seriously. Take a stab. When your body becomes halfskin, when it's 50% God-given, good ole' fashion organic cells and 50% artificial biomite cells, guess what M0ther’s going to do?

Bitch is going to shut you off.

That’s right.

And when she does, when she turns off all your biomites like a light switch, what do you think happens to the other half? The living half?

Yeah. That's right.

It's real, peeps. Real as it gets.

The death of human liberty happened today and you probably didn't even feel it.

Well, I did.

2

Cali knelt down to reboot a server. Her knee hit the concrete, driving spikes up her thigh. She cursed and didn’t hold back. She stood a little too fast and steadied herself against the stainless steel rack. A head rush stormed her entire body, weakened her knees. She remained still until it passed, made a mental note to drink some water.

She walked two more rows. Computer after computer blinked green lights at her. No one would suspect she was in a suburban brick house with a pink flamingo in the front yard. The basement looked more like an industrial IT department. It took two air conditioners to keep the house cool.

She couldn't afford to shut her lab down.
Not now.

No one could afford a set up like that – hell, there were companies
that couldn’t afford it. But she had money.
Blood money.
When she married Thomas, he joked he’d need another life insurance policy. Luck was not something Cali’s family possessed. She thought he was joking, but he took out a ridiculous life insurance policy on himself so that Cali, Avery and Nix would never worry about money again if something ever happened.

And it did.

Cali sat at a desk cluttered with gadgets and monitors, microscopes and assemblers. She sipped at a water bottle while waiting for an espresso-like machine to drip a gun-metal droplet into a flask. No coffee from that machine. It was uniquely constructed to produce congealed biomites: the raw synthetic stem cells with designer DNA coding. At one drop per day, it was a slow process.

She took a heavy flask of mercury-like liquid off the shelf and swirled it under a circular magnifying glass attached to a hinged arm.

Good.

It would take a complete analysis to see if they worked, but she'd seen enough raw biomites to know the subtle colors, just like an Eskimo knew snow. These were brighter than usual, less viscous. Exactly what she expected.

There were six monitors arranged on the wall in two rows of three. The one in the middle, bottom row, was the largest. Numbers scrolled down a column that she occasionally stopped with a mouse-click. Several sub-menus expanded with another series of clicks. She sat back and let the numbers continue to run. The analysis was taking too long, but the program needed time.

Time was the only thing she couldn’t afford.

Biomites were humanity’s greatest invention. Forget telecommunications, forget transportation… bionanotechnology changed everything. Once humanity controlled the human body, they could cure disease, heal bones, alter brain chemistry. Biomites were the answer, the one big answer to every question.

Only one side-effect. It was big one.
They were malignant.

They were exact duplicates of the body’s cells but, for some unknown reason, wouldn’t accept enzymatic cues to stop dividing. No matter what coding bionanoengineers inserted into the DNA, they always reverted back to runaway division, replacing the body’s natural organic cells.

Cali had a theory.

She believed the biomites intuited the weakness of organic cells—their susceptibility to random DNA variability, cancer, disease—and logically replaced them. Biomites were doing what we wanted, they were making the body sound and impervious.

Perfect.

The monitor to the left, bottom row, chimed. Another email arrived and filed at the top of a long column of unread messages. The office manager confirmed Cali’s paid leave of absence was nearly depleted. She'd spent her sick days and vacation long ago. Pretty soon, her leave of absence would convert to unpaid. Her employers had been very sympathetic. They gave her more time than they should have. She was a valuable asset, a deserving individual, but a Fortune 500 company can only bend the sympathy branch so far. Pretty soon, they’d prune it.

Cali finished the water and rubbed her eyes. She saw her reflection in the dark monitors. The shadows across her cheeks were long and dark, disguising the red rims of her eyelids and cracked lips. Oily blond hair hung over her eyes. She retied the ponytail.

She rolled the chair to the right and touched the electron microscope. Images lit up a dark monitor, obliterating her deathly reflection. The previous batch of biomites that percolated from the espresso machine was still active. Under magnification, they looked like grains of sand jittering on meth. Excellent stability, that was good. She wouldn’t know if they possessed runaway division until further testing, but she didn’t care about that. Not anymore.

Priorities change.

She was looking for biomites that would disappear. Not physically, but virtually. Every biomite emitted a frequency that could be monitored. That’s what M0ther watched, the frequency with which biomites
spoke
to each other. M0ther was an eavesdropper, downloading everything they did. There weren’t enough zeros to count how many biomites were in existence, but everyone had them.

So M0ther knew what everyone was doing.

Cali wanted to change that.

So far, nothing worked. There was still hope. There was still time. But not much of either.

Someone squealed upstairs, followed by a fit of laughter. Avery was about to pee herself. Only Nix could make her laugh like that. She loved that sound, her favorite sound in the entire world. Without Nix, she might not hear it ever again.

This is all my fault. All mine. I knew this day was coming, knew his redline potential, but I waited. I waited because I'm selfish. Nix is going to pay for that. We're all going to pay.

The numbers continued to scroll in a fuzzy line.

She rubbed her eyes and tried to focus but it only smudged the images further. She didn't have time for this, not now. She could sleep when this was all over, she just needed to focus, to see the data come together so that she could hide her little brother.

Get him off Mother’s map.

M0ther won’t care what he means to her, what he means to Avery. They would come, they would take him, they would take him from her life, from Avery's life, and he was all she had, all she had, he was all she had—

She closed her eyes.

Breathing slowly, breathing deeply.

She relaxed before opening her eyes. The images around her weren't sharp but she could make them out. She could read them. The analysis was almost over. Once that was done, she could get the next batch started and then lay down for a nap. She'd done it earlier that day (or was it night, there were no windows in the basement), fell directly into REM. Twenty minutes later, she was brand new.

She took the water bottle to the bathroom and filled it. She heard a bell ring, leaned out the door to see if the analysis finished early. The numbers were still scrolling. She sat back down and took another deep drink—

BING.

That was upstairs.

The doorbell.

Cali stayed completely still, ears pricked with attention. There were muddled voices. A long silence. She remained as still as a stowaway.

The basement door opened, snapped closed.

Little feet danced down the steps. "Mommy," Avery said. "There's some guy at the door talking to Uncle Nix."

Cali stood too quickly, braced herself on the desk. "Who?"

Avery shrugged. "They want him to go."

Cali stumbled to the steps, barely seeing the door at the top rush towards her. She punched it open, slamming it against the wall.

Time is out.