Halfskin (4 page)

Along the wall to their left were reporters and photographers from major outlets across the nation. Cameras clicked and phones buzzed. A man in uniform patted her shoulder, whispered something comforting in her ear (she didn't understand it; she couldn't understand anything at that moment) before rustling the boy's hair and tapping the little girl on the nose.

Jennifer was going to stain her blouse with vomit.

In front of her was a brown podium with several mics. The American flag was behind it. The curtain on the wall was pulled aside. Her breath caught in her throat. It was hard to let out. A man stepped out. He was dressed in hospital scrubs for the announcement. Walter Reed Hospital wanted the world to see what they had done with Jennifer's husband.

That had to be good. Right?

Still hard to breathe.

“General McGee and other members of the army,” the doctor said, "ladies and gentlemen of the press, thank you for coming."

He took a moment to look at the podium, adjusted his cap.

"Jennifer." He smiled. "Thank you for your patience. I know this has been very difficult for you and your family. Your husband, Lieutenant Adams, was gravely injured during an assignment on foreign soil. He returned to the United States on life-support. He lost his arm above the elbow."

The doctor signaled with the edge of his hand somewhere in the middle of his left bicep. Jennifer looked down for a moment, unable to push away the memory of her husband. When she saw him in that bed with the ventilator and the bruises and the swelling... he looked so small. So fragile.

It wasn't him.

Cameras clicked to capture her raw moment.

"I know this is quite a spectacle we've created, but it is an event the world needs to see. Lieutenant Adam's injuries were fatal. The best we could hope for was to prolong his life with prosthetics and life support. But with the advent of bionanotechnology, his injuries were treated with artificial cell regeneration. We hope to show that this new approach to medicine will change the way not just our service men and women heal, but all of Americans. Lieutenant Adams has a new spleen and lung, his vision has been restored, his arm..."

The doctor adjusted his cap, again. He looked around, slowly.

"Let's not let words get in the way."

Jennifer couldn't feel her knees. She lowered her daughter to the floor before she dropped her.

She knelt next to her son.

Her hand quivered over her mouth. She couldn't breathe. She stopped trying.

Because when the curtain pulled aside—

When a man stepped out—

She recognized him. At last, her husband had returned from the war. All of him.

And the cameras snapped and snapped and snapped.

5

Albert Gladstone turned 50 years old.

That was a few days ago. He ate birthday cake. It was vanilla with chocolate frosting. His wife and two teenage kids were there. They sang Happy Birthday and watched him blow out the candles. Someone cut the cake and took pieces to his family. His son ate. His wife and daughter didn't.

Albert ate his piece. Even licked the icing from the paper plate. It wasn't particularly good.

But that was a couple days ago.

He didn't have an appetite now. He couldn't feel much of anything.

Albert wore loose fitting pants and a shirt that looked more like hospital scrubs. Felt like pajamas. He sat in a comfortable chair in a small room. A small empty room. The chair was cushioned but could've been made out of stainless steel and he wouldn't have known the difference. His biomites began dumping synthetic morphine into his bloodstream an hour earlier.

Life was bad, but didn't feel as such.

49.8%

"Jenny from across the street was walking her dog this morning," Albert's wife was saying on the other side of a thick square of glass, "and sends her best. She's got four cats and three dogs, now. I think it's too much, if you ask me. But she says what else is going to happen to these animals? I mean, she goes to the shelter and finds these poor pets that were abandoned by their owners and they're going to be..."

Her words trailed off.

She covered her face. Words had always been a buffer. They usually didn’t fail.

An elderly woman put her arm around her shoulder. That was Albert's mom. And behind her stood his dad and two kids. His daughter was leaking stained tears. His son wore a mask without emotions. Unlike his mother, he dealt with loss by killing his emotions.

Albert could hear his wife's sobs through a speaker. They sounded like tiny hiccups strung together with squeaky thread. His daughter stepped forward and smudged the glass with her hand.

"Do you feel all right, Dad? Does it hurt?"

Albert smiled as brightly and widely as possible, but it only translated into a slight upturn of his lips. He nodded once. The cushioned back of the chair crunched on the back of his head.

49.9%

"I'm proud of you, kids." His words were amplified into the other room. "If I was God and had to build a daughter and son, they would be just like you. I wouldn't change a thing."

He took a moment to draw in a breath. His lungs felt smaller.

His daughter's face was streaked with charcoal tears. She pressed both hands on the glass.

"This is inhumane!" The old man shook his fist. "How can you murder a good man and refuse to let his family be with him? How can you force us to watch him die from another room? This is... this is... it's diabolical! I am a lawyer and I will see to an end of these sinister laws! I will make sure this will never happen to another human being!"

The old man hammered the glass with both fists.

"THIS IS MURDER! YOU ARE A COLD-BLOODED MURDERER!"

He was speaking to the odd-looking man that was in the room with Albert. Marcus Anderson stood off to the side like an observer, wearing a finely tailored suit and silk tie. He occasionally looked at a device in the palm of his hand. He represented the government in these halfskin matters. Anyone with a loved one near halfskin status knew his face well, a face one would not call handsome. He was the same age as Albert but looked more like Albert's father. His thinning hair was prematurely gray, his head slightly misshapen much like the slight hunch on his back from a outward curvature of his spine.

He was as emotionless as the son.

A guard politely and gently guided the old man away from the glass but words of protest still trickled through the speakers.

"It's all right," Albert could be heard, whispering. "We all have to end. This isn't so bad."

They didn't believe what he said. Later, they told the press that the gargoyle (they refused to call Marcus Anderson by his name, he was a monster, leave it at that) had drugged him so he would say stuff like that. They probably shouldn't have called him a gargoyle.

"Shhhhh." Albert was too tired to say anything else so he just made that sound so they would feel comforted.

He didn't want them to feel sad. He knew the rules. He knew he was pushing his luck with his biomite population. He'd exceeded the biomite seeding recommendation to his brain stem but it had paid off. His memory and analytical abilities were computer-like. He won a record number of federal grants for his lab. He thought the seeding would boost his intelligence to find a cure for the runaway biomite replication before he went redline. It was a gamble.

But Albert wasn’t much of a gambler.

If he was honest, he didn't like the way it felt. The more the biomites replaced the organic cells in his body, the less present he felt. He was smarter, more successful, more secure... but he just less...
real
. The agents took him from his lab the moment he went redline. And as he neared the halfskin threshold, he wrote to his wife that everything felt the same, he just felt less real.

He couldn't explain it any better than that.

Shutting his biomites down wasn't such a bad idea. Not the way he felt.

50%

Marcus put the device he was obsessively watching into his pocket and respectfully folded his hands. A doctor entered the room.

The sandman began pouring his magical dust into Albert's body. It started at the top of his head and filtered down to his toes. He was becoming heavy. Gravity pulled him into the chair. His head lolled back and forth like he was refusing. He barely heard the sobs get louder.

His eyelids were too heavy.

He wanted to see his kids one last time, but that wasn't to be. He wouldn't hear them again. All he heard, as the biomites slowly shut down, pulling his life with them, was the sound of a leaking tire. A sound that slid through his lips.

"Shhhhhh."

The doctor knelt next to Albert and pressed his fingers to his neck. He checked an instrument that he briefly pulled from his pocket. He stood, nodded.

"MONSTER!" The old man had to be restrained. "My son... was good—"

The speaker clicked off. The glass dimmed.

The family would remain in the room to grieve. Once Albert was fully examined, they would get to see him one more time but would not be allowed to take possession of it for burial. Albert would be cremated and his ashes sent to them.

Marcus Anderson let his people attend to Albert's body. The man known as Albert Gladstone was gone from this world. If anyone asked Marcus, the man began dying the moment he chose to be seeded.

Marcus stopped outside the room to rub anti-bacterial gel on his hands. He went directly to a room on the bottom floor of Cleveland’s Detainment and Observation Center where a cadre of reporters would want a statement from the Chief of Biomite Oversight and Regulation regarding the shutdown of another halfskin.

He would happy to report one less halfskin in the world.

6

Marcus Anderson sunk into the soft leather of the heated back seat, taking comfort in the laptop's blue glow. His flight from Ohio was uneventful. He stayed long enough to answer questions and went directly to the airport to fly home.

The driver turned into the Washington D.C. neighborhood of Spring Valley. The streetlights illuminated the wet pavement.

He adjusted the Bluetooth in his ear. The Press Secretary wanted to be briefed on the halfskin shutdown. When laws regulating biomites went into action, there was revolt throughout the world. But the evidence was overwhelming: if something wasn’t done to curtail biomite integration, the human species was in danger.

The models predicted that biomites would essentially consume the human population within twenty years without regulation. The Halfskin Laws declared that—until biomite replication was cured at the cellular level—no citizen would be allowed to contain more than 50% biomites. Once over that threshold, you were more machine than human.

Marcus couldn’t agree more.

The result of shutting down a person’s biomites was always death of the body. The President was concerned about the family and the halfskin’s comfort level. The President had signed the M0ther Oversight Agreement with the United Nations; America would abide by its laws. But, still, the President needed to show compassion for the victim and his family.

He is not a victim. He simply failed to exist.

That's how Marcus framed the definition. If a healthy human cannot exist without the assistance of biomites, then it was a failure to exist. There was a flaw in the definition (people were kept alive by artificial assistance all the time) but Marcus simply drew the line with biomites. These weren’t plastic arms or legs, they were artificial living cells. Replacing your God-given bodily cells with man-made ones was Marcus's beef. A plastic arm was one thing, trading God's temple for a slimmer, stronger, faster body with killer blue eyes was quite another.

The car eased to the curb. The brick house was set back from the street, a sidewalk meandered toward the front door. Marcus packed his leather briefcase and checked the mailbox on his way inside. Crickets sang and the night smelled wet. He didn't get outside much.

One of the kids was crying upstairs while Marcus hung his coat in the closet. His shiny shoes clapped on the bamboo floor, making a harder click as he turned onto the kitchen tiles.

"Good evening," he said.

Janine was sitting at the breakfast table with a phone pressed against her ear, surrounded by eternal stacks of documents. He'd had a discussion with her about that—orderliness of body brings orderliness of mind, especially for lawyers—but there were many things they disagreed upon. Their marriage was not a good one by conventional definition, but it was fruitful. It was powerful. Their children would be very successful, given the gene pool from which they were spawned. (Marcus knew this because he had their genomes mapped.) So, they called a truce on the paper stacking.
Pick battles, not wars.

"Dinner is just about ready," Ariel, the head nanny/cook, said. She stirred a pot of red sauce. Marcus stopped to smell.