Clay (17 page)

Jamie gets lost in the music.

There’s no Internet and her personal account is still trashed. She hasn’t been using her field, but this morning she felt colder than usual. And lonelier.

A long walk keeps her out of the house where the pipes rattle and the walls speak when the wind blows. The icicles drip into drifts piled against the house. When she returns, her teeth are chattering.

Her skin feels exhausted and her clothing wrinkled from nights beneath the covers. Body odor puffs out of her sweatshirt, reminds her how long it’s been since she’s showered. The wrapping around her arm has frayed.

It takes two minutes for hot water to reach the kitchen sink. Jamie unwinds the stiff gauze. The skin beneath is sickly white and smells sour. She clenches a fist, a slight tingle midway up her forearm where the swelling remains. She washes her hands beneath the hot water, the suds dripping from her elbows.

A long drum solo ends in her head. A voice interrupts the silence between tracks. She turns around, but no one is there. Drying her hands, she wanders around the table, stopping to listen.

The basement door is ajar.

Jamie calls the music off, stands with her ear to the gap. The hinges swing quietly. She slips inside, where the air is damp and moldy with a hint of vinegar. The steps are gray and worn.

A single bulb starkly illuminates jars and faded labels. She stands on the bottom step, waiting to see a human head pickled in an oversized jar instead of cucumbers and tomatoes.

“No. No, we can’t,” Nix says.

There’s an open door at the other end. Nix is sitting inside the room. His old man hair is shaved close to the scalp. Jamie walks to the doorway, peeks inside. His back is to her.

“What are you doing?” he says.

Jamie pauses. “Nothing. What are you doing?”

Nix spins the office chair around, eyes momentarily wide. He holds still, his head cocked, thinking. He looks to the right, nodding, as if he was talking to one of the computer monitors.

“Who you talking to?”

“Myself.” He hesitates. “I do that.”

“You’re weird.”

“I’ve been told.” He rubs the steel gray stubble on his scalp. “How’s the arm?”

“A little weak, but okay.”

“I’m sorry. I…I really didn’t know that was going to happen—”

“It’s all right.”

He asks about the arm every day and has apologized a thousand times. She wants to tell him it was worth it, that she hasn’t wanted to crawl out of her skin since they arrived. She doesn’t feel lost. For the first time that she can remember, she feels at home. She’s only been on the farm for a month, but that’s what it feels like. There’s no urge to leave somewhere, nothing to run away from.

She wants to tell him that it doesn’t hurt, not like before.

The room is a step up from the cold concrete. The floor inside is hard and shiny. There’s a long workbench to the right with a fume hood and an industrial-sized refrigerator. Another bench is fastened to the back wall with monitors and microscopes; notebooks are scattered on the surface. A rack of tubes is directly behind him, one of them wedged between his fingers with heavy metallic liquid inside.

“What is all this?” she asks.

“This is the lab. We built it about ten years ago, when we first moved here.” He slides a manila folder off a stack. “It was mainly to refine our biomites. No one in the world has nixes like us. As far as I know, we’re the longest surviving halfskins and we planned to keep it that way. The plan was to invent a new breed of biomites, ones that communicate completely different by means of quantum physics. We never had plans for mass production—just produce enough for us to stay off M0ther’s radar. But once the tower was built, Cali shut it down, locked me out.”

“How’d you get in?”

“I have a key, but I’ve been waiting for her to crash. She doesn’t sleep much, but she’s out now.”

“What are you looking for?”

“She took something away from me. I’m just trying to fix it.” He looks behind her. Jamie turns. There’s no one there.

“Why do you do that?” she asks. “Like you’re looking at a ghost.”

“Nothing.” He rubs the gray stubble. “It’s how I think.”

Data begins scrolling on the monitor. He turns around, muttering again. There are two more monitors at the end of the bench with more data and a bank of computers beneath them. This stuff belongs in an industrial park, not a farm house with pickled beets outside the door.

“Where did you get all the money?” she asks.

“Stole it.” He says it without flinching. “The seed money, at least. It’s not hard to skim accounts.”

While he watches the data, occasionally clicking and typing, he explains how they opened bogus accounts at banks under a variety of names. They mostly wrote deposits that didn’t exist, moving the money and closing the accounts before getting caught.

“And now?”

“Investments. The capital gains from market algorithms make more money than we can spend.”

He rolls over to the monitor on the far left, punches a few keys before searching the rack of tubes with gray liquid. He yanks one from the top, places it on the bench next to another.

There’s a box of equipment under the bench. A black cube with large numbers sits on top. She takes it out. It’s heavier than it looks, the edges crisp and cold.

She’d seen one of these before, back when biomite agents would come to your house, ask if someone was home. Like your dad. They’d put the cube on his chest, show him the number. If it was forty or higher, he went with them. And he wouldn’t come back.

Jamie presses an indention with her thumb. Numbers roll across a miniature screen. She pulls the collar of her sweatshirt down, places it just below the V where her collarbones meet. The cold surface sucks at her flesh and begins to warm. Pricks of heat are pulled through her soft tissue, puddle just below the surface.

When it cools, she pulls it off. 40%.

The number her dad saw.

“It needs calibrated,” Nix says.

For a moment, the thrill of hope swirls in her heart, but her internal app still registers 49.9%. It’s too good to believe, even for a moment. No one gets their clay back once the biomites take hold.

“What are you?” she asks.

He clicks through three screens of data before reaching for a cube next to a microscope, this one slightly larger than Jamie’s. He holds it against his chest then slides it down the bench.

99.1%.

“How’s that possible?” she asks.

“Biomites are synthetic cells. That’s all.”

“Does it feel different?”

“Than what?”

“Different than…before.”

“You mean when I was clay?”

“Yeah.”

She’d heard Nixon Richards got seeded when he was a kid. Back then, no one received biomites until they were twelve, unless it was life or death. Some rumors say he got them at birth. Others say he got them after a car accident. Either way, he’s had them most of his life.

And now he’s almost a brick.

He rolls toward her, holds out his hand. “Take it.”

She sandwiches it between hers. His palm is slightly callused; his pulse beating in his wrist. There’s nothing special about it.

“My anger is hot,” he says. “My aches are wanting. My joy is sweet. My loneliness hollow. I feel all the same things you do. Does the body make us human?”

“What if you become a brick?”

“I don’t think I’d know the difference.”

He pulls his hand back and immerses his attention in the data, again. His fingers crawl along the rack, finding another tube. This one he inserts into the base of a microscope and takes a look.

The left side of the lab is dormant. Tarps hang over much of the contents. Jamie covers her throat, the cold square still lingering on her skin. She pulls back the covers on several boxes with meaningless labels. A dozen metal canisters are stored against the wall. Tubes run from the canisters to a container in the corner, this one the size of another refrigerator. She peeks inside but the tarp is thick and heavy. She pulls it back to allow light to penetrate the glass walls.

It’s a clear box filled with polished cylinders with bundles of cables dangling like arteries. Nozzles are fitted at the end of the cylinders, pointed at a matte black floor. She’d seen this before, at the warehouse.

A fabricator. A three-dimensional printer of life. The God Machine.

Programmed biomites are laid down, line by line. This one looks like a prototype, something built from scratch. It probably took months to build a frog. The newest models only took days, until M0ther shut them down.

“You ever fabricate something?” she asks.

Nix is staring at something in empty space like before. He’s thinking, again. Haunted. He gets up and tugs on the clear door, but it’s locked.

“Baxter was the first one.”

“The dog?”

He smiles, smudging the glass with his finger. “It took seven months to finish that puppy. And when his DNA was ignited, the spark of life jump-started his awareness. He started wagging his tail.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Seven years.”

“And it still works?”

He bends over, awkwardly throwing the tarp over it. “No.”

She helps him cover it, not believing him. They tuck the corners so that it’s hidden once again. He gets that foggy stare.

“That’s what the fight is all about,” he says. “Cali wanted to disassemble the fabricator. It was a temptation, she said. I wanted to build someone and she disagreed. As you can tell, what Cali wants, she gets. She pulled its guts out, so I left.”

“You can make a human?”

“It needed some modifications, but yeah. It’s basically how bricks are fabricated.”

“But bricks aren’t real.”

He falls back into the office chair, rolling away. “Did you know the dogs were fabricated? No, you didn’t. You’re half a brick, does that make you half real? It’s just a body, a vehicle for memories. Biomites are close to perfection. One of these days, we’ll beat death. We’ll upload our memories into cloud storage as we live our lives. We’ll fabricate bodies like vehicles; we’ll go places human bodies can’t go. Maybe even discover new realms of reality.”

“Is that all we are, memories?”

“No,” he says. “We’re more than that.”

“What, then?”

He stares at empty space before turning back to the monitor to resume his search. The lab feels colder and emptier. Jamie looks around like an apparition might step out from beneath the tarps. She wonders how many times they tried to build something and failed. Did those experiments suffer? Did they know they were alive before they were thrown in the garbage?

“Why’d you bring me here?” Her voice shakes.

“That nixed pill you swallowed,” he says without looking away from the monitor. “It’s got imbedded code that will identify its manufacturer.”

“But you don’t need biomites.”

“Where nixes are made, there’s going to be a fabricator.”

He searches for another vial, mumbling as he goes, as if answering a question. Jamie uncovers the other office chair and sits down. She doesn’t want to be alone right now. And she wonders.

Do bricks know they’re fabricated when they open their eyes?

By late March, the nights were still cold but the snow had melted. In the morning, shallow puddles would harden. By the afternoon, they’d be wet again.

The roof is missing several shingles and the ones remaining are brittle. Paul found more than a few leaks in the attic. April would be a good time to replace the roof, when the wind wasn’t so frosty. In the meantime, there was an antenna to fix.

The pitch made the climb a nervous one. A misstep would be a long drop. Cables swing from the three-sided antenna. The metal artifact is a reminder of age-old television. PBS is the only broadcast signal. The big stations still go through satellite and cable, but the majority of programming goes through internal feeds, projecting directly into retinal and auditory senses.

Paul loops his arm around a rung while stripping the insulation from the frayed cables. Up there, his fingertips are numb and his cheeks raw. It takes almost half an hour to splice the cables and make an adjustment. The tower sways and the mounts creak. His thighs are numb on the climb back to the roof.

A car door slams.

Paul bear-crawls to the crown, his tool belt dragging over the shingles. A truck is parked out front, plow blade still attached.

“Hello!” Paul shouts.

Hal looks at the pasture. Nix and Jamie are on the far side of the barn with the horses, too far away to be seen. His daughter, Megan, gets out of the truck carrying a green container.

“Up here!”

“Oh, hey.” Hal shades his eyes. “What’re you doing up there, Paul?”

“Just fixing the television. A bit of cabin fever is going around.”

“That’s what I hear. Talked to Stacy on the phone, said she was still a bit under the weather.”

It takes a moment to connect the dots—
Stacy is Cali
. “Well, you know,” Paul stammers, “she’s been better. Flu, we’re guessing. She’s trapped in bed, said if I didn’t get the TV working she was going to lose her mind.”

“Well, can’t say as I blame her. We brought some chicken soup, get her back on track.”

“That’s awfully nice of you. You want to put it in the kitchen, Megan?”

Megan goes around to the side door. Surely, Cali knows they were coming. She can hide long enough to avoid being seen.

Hal talks about the weather taking a good turn, that he might take the plow blade off sooner than he thought. He asks about the horses, too. Paul sits on the roof’s peak.

“We worry about Stacy being out here all alone. She ain’t had any help in a while. She could use some looking after.”

Megan returns to the truck. Hal hangs his arm over the door. “Listen, y’all are welcome at the church this Sunday. Service is at ten o’clock. No need to dress up, just bring yourselves. And if you just want the coffee and donuts, come about eleven. The company’s not bad, either.”

With a final wave, they drive away. Paul rubs the feeling back into thighs. He feels a bit like a gargoyle, perched high above, surveying the endless country. Carefully, he works his way off the roof, the metal rungs biting his fingers.

The container of chicken soup is on the counter, the broth still warm. The coffee pot, however, is cold. He pours two cups and waits at the sink while they rotate inside the microwave. Nix and Jamie have the horses near the fence. Nix swings onto the larger one, settling into the saddle before galloping across the wet field.

Maybe Jamie grins, maybe not. She’s fallen back into a slump, facing those hard feelings, again. Still, he’s caught her smiling. Ironically, the farm has been a biomite detox, even though there’s more biomite technology on these acres than most small towns. With no Internet access and no personal account, all her biomite apps are limited. It’s the horses and the country and the old house that have grounded her. It’s the wind and the sun, the elements of simple living that have taken her out of her head, put her in the present moment.

How much of Jamie’s experience is Cali’s field? And am I still in it?

Jamie gets depressed when Cali sleeps, it’s obvious the way her shoulders slump. But the blissful peace is always with Paul. He thought about testing his theory, going out to the road where her field would weaken, perhaps even drive a bit. Would he become that person he used to be, the Seattle cop living day to day? Or had she somehow changed him?

Cali’s bedroom door is ajar. The shower, however, is running. Paul nudges the door open to leave a cup of coffee on her dresser.

A television console is in the back room. A converter box is wired to the back, converting broadcast signals for the antiquated television to interpret. A channel scan picks up nothing but static. The antenna looks like a dead soldier until the scan cycles around, nabs a snowy channel.

“Victory.”

Paul settles on the couch. It’s been months since he really paid much attention to current events. The coffee warms his stomach, the caffeine buzzing his senses while two talking heads debate biomite genocide.

The news is bad.

Especially for Paul.