Halfskin (6 page)

"Got you now, halfskin." George chuckled, hands laced behind his head. His eyes were nearly hidden in folds of fat and untamed eyebrows. Nix had a feeling it'd take a 100 suppression rings to make George hairless.

Nix pulled his chair to the door. He studied the board through the embedded criss-crossed wires. He pretended to be thinking. He liked George. Anything was better than nothing. Most of the guards were good at their job, but not George. He talked with the redlines, got to know them.

Where’d you get the name Nixon?
George asked the day he arrived.

My dad was a fan of dead presidents.

George thought about that. It was the next day he came back, tapped on Nix’s door and then tapped his head.
I got that,
he said.
Richard Nixon, I got that.

He saw Nix playing chess one day on his monitor and, the very next day, set up a little table. Said he was going to teach this eighteen year old halfskin what a real man could do. Didn't matter Nix wasn't halfskin, he was redline. But that was a technicality. Really, he was a halfskin, just hadn't fulfilled his destiny, George would say. George would show him what a whole man could do. How a pure man could think.

Not a halfskin man.

George was still convinced the biomites were giving Nix superpowers, made him smarter. Maybe he was right. Nix wanted the game to last. If it ended too soon, George would take his game and go home. Might not come back. And then Nix would be alone.

Keep the game close, give him hope.

"Six months," George said, "but I'm finally going to beat you."

Nix planted his chin on his knuckles. Pulling off the con had become more fun than beating him. Watching him walk into the trap was a hell of good time, too.

"Good run, kid. I've beat every mite-infested halfskin in this place but you. It just goes to show you, God-given talent always beats the machine." He tapped his temple. "Creativity, son. It's the power to adapt and create, that's what God gave us, not you with the power to program your little computer-cells."

He leaned back some more.

"You had a great brain but you had to ruin it, had to eat the mites to get better than the rest of us and now look at you."

His eyes twinkled between thick lids. "You're paying for it now."

George thought Nix chose biomites. Most people did. You don’t have a choice when a drunk driver caves in the side of the car. But why spoil the fun, just lump all the redlines together: a bunch of greedy turds.

"You're going to owe me, William!" George shouted down the hall. "Got the kid stuck."

Nix cringed. He may have strung this one out too long. He didn't want to draw George too far into the trap of disappointment. Once, when he trounced George with a seven-move checkmate, the ring got turned up and Nix's head rattled all night. The biomites damn near shut down. No one knew how the ring got turned up, but George winked at him the next morning. Nix couldn't get out of bed for a week.

"There's a cure out there," George said. "A way to get rid of all the mites in your body."

Nix remained pensive. "Why would I want that?"

"You like what you are?"

Nix shrugged, slightly.
Sure, why not.

The front legs of George's chair hit the ground. "As long as you got mites, we know where you are, son. You got mites, M0ther’s going to always know what you're thinking, where you're going, whether you're picking your nose or sniffing someone's underwear. You get purged, you can be just like me—a whole man, free to do whatever you want. Why wouldn't you want that?"

Nix studied the pieces. George had been reading too many gossip mags. There was no such thing as a biomite purge.

"If you go to a plastic surgeon," Nix said, slowly, "and cure your ugly, will you still be you?"

Someone laughed down the hall. They were listening.

"I may be ugly, but I'm real."

"So are chimpanzees."

"I'd rather be a monkey than a machine."

Nix sat back and crossed his arms, stroking his baby-smooth chin. He looked up from the board for the first time. George stared back, eyes glittering and mustache quivering.

“What were you doing seven years ago?”

George’s eyes disappeared. “Hell, I don’t know.”

“You weren’t doing anything, that’s why. Because you didn’t exist.”

“The hell that suppose to mean?”

Nix leaned forward, pretended to look at the board. “Did you know it takes seven years for all the cells in your body to be recycled? That means all the cells that composed your body seven years ago have all died and been replaced by new ones. So, for a pure skin like you, the answer is simple, George. By your definition, you didn’t exist because that wasn’t your body. That is, if who you are is your body.”

“Don’t twist facts, kid. I ain’t changed, I’m still me. I’m still flesh and blood and you ain’t, no matter how you slice it.”

Nix hummed, rubbing his chin. "You ever get cavities?"

"Do you ever shut up?"

"What do you do, let them rot?"

"Course not. Go to the dentist, don’t
seed
a bunch of mites in my mouth to fix it."

"You get fillings, then?"

"That's right, kid. I go to the dentist and let her fix my cavities. Chimps don't do that and neither do machines. Real people do."

Nix nodded. "Is your mouth fake?"

"It’s fixed."

"Does it make it less real?"

"Does this look like a mirage?" He snapped his coffee-stained choppers with a hollow bite.

They stared.

"You got me there, George. You got me there."

George smiled for awhile, thinking about it. Nix got up and crossed the room. He folded his arms, tapped his elbows.

"Queen to G-6," he called over his shoulder.

A piece slid across the board. George's chin stubble rasped in his palm. He checked his phone a couple times, acted like there was a text.

Nix turned on the water and splashed his face. The chess game was over.

George just didn't realize it, yet.

9

Cali flashed her ID at the gate. The guard hardly looked at it. He glanced in the back seat but didn't bother talking to the ten-year old picking her nose. He stepped back into his little station and the flimsy chain-link gates opened.

He didn't bother telling her where to go.

Cali parked her car in the middle of the visitor's lot with half a dozen other cars. The Center was only two-stories tall but sprawled over 7 acres with a courtyard for exercising. But there weren't tattooed gangsters pumping iron in the yard, just everyday people that redlined too many biomites. Doctors, lawyers, farmers... no one was spared.

Walking-talking machines
, she remembered a politician once said when federal money was available to build these Centers and create jobs in his district.
Biomites will turn us all into walking-talking machines. Unless we do something, this is the first step in the extinction of the human race.

Cali checked her face in the rearview. Her face had a strange color, something closer to bruise-yellow than blush. She didn't care, just didn't want Nix to worry. She took a few minutes to doctor her complexion, ran a brush once or twice through her hair.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her heart rate was up. She counted her breaths to ten and felt her blood pressure settle down. She couldn't look out of the ordinary. She always made herself look a little nervous when she arrived, so that when this day arrived, her emotional state wouldn't look out of place.

But not too nervous.

Cali looked through her bag, flipped through files and made sure a bottle of water and ink pen were at the bottom.
Distractions.
She reached into the backseat and pulled a drawing from Avery's bag, a scene of the ocean with a dolphin leaping out of the water and a yellow sunset. It was quite good for a ten-year old. Almost too good. She might have an artistic future.

"You going to be all right out here?"

"Yep." Avery didn't look up from her movie.

"I'll be in there for about an hour."

"I know."

"Of course, you do." She rustled her daughter's hair. "You're a big girl."

"Can you kiss Uncle Nix for me?" Her eyes were wide.

"Not yet."

Avery stuck out her bottom lip.

"Maybe soon, though."

"Okay."

Cali stretched over the seat and kissed her daughter's forehead, whispered, "I love you."

"Love you, too, Mama."

Cali stood at the door until it buzzed.

The floor was hard and shiny. The walls empty. At the end of the short hallway was a counter with a door to the left of it. Cali walked the thirty or so steps while the man behind the counter—wearing a blue uniform, hands folded on the countertop—watched her the whole way. He smiled in neutral.

"Where's Greg?" Cali dropped her bag on the counter.

"Called in sick."

The man's ID badge was clipped to his collar. One Mr. Franklin Moses, here to protect and serve. Franklin gestured to the right. Cali swiped her ID through the scanner.

"Dr. Cali Richards." Franklin looked to his left and pecked a keyboard behind the counter.

"I'm not a doctor."

"It says here you have a Ph.D. in Nanobiometrics."

"Don't call me doctor."

Franklin raised his eyebrows. He'd touched a nerve and, wisely, stepped off.

Cali slid her bag to the right side of the counter onto a black scanning plate. Franklin watched the monitor to his left. The plate vibrated, then stopped.

"Please empty your bag."

Cali let out an exasperated breath. She pushed her hand through her hair and began pulling out the items. She stacked the folders and placed Avery's drawing on top. She put the bottle of water next to it. Franklin picked up the water and turned it around. He looked at her.

"You have a doctorate in nanobiometrics and you don't know that liquid is not allowed in a Detainment and Observation Center?"

"This is a prison. And if I wanted to contaminate you or anyone else with a new strain of biomites – a super strain of biomites that I could control – I wouldn't have to bring it in a bottle of water, I'd just seed my salivary glands and spit in your eye, Franklin. All it would take is the most inconspicuous fleck of spittle to go airborne, one you'd never notice, and you'd be mine, just like that." Cali grabbed the ink pens from the bottom of her bag. "Taking liquid from people isn't going to make them safe. It's too damn EASY!"

Franklin's eyebrows went higher. He slowly put the water down and began to turn around.

"I'm sorry." Cali reached for him. "I get a little... stressed out coming here. You know biomites can't go airborne, I was just making that up. I'm sorry, I'm just... a little tight."

"You can't joke about that, Dr. Richards. Not someone of your caliber. And biomites can go airborne, that's why we confiscate any form of liquid. If it's atomized, there's a brief period that a person could be seeded with an unknown strain."

"Yes, yes, I know. I just... my brother... he's just... I don't agree with all this, you know. He doesn't deserve to be locked up. He didn't do anything wrong."

"He's not a criminal, Dr. Richards."

"He's being treated like one."

"No, he's quarantined. It's not illegal to be seeded, but it is illegal to contain too many. I don't make the laws, Dr. Richards. That's just how it is."

Cali locked her lips. She'd said enough. Anymore and he'd throw her out and she'd never come back. She needed to look concerned and worried, not unstable. Not a threat.

"I'm sorry." Cali took the drawing off the folders and pushed it across the countertop. "Look, this is all I want to bring to visitation. Could you send it up to Nix? It's from his niece. She'd come, too, but she's scared of this building."

Franklin paused. He put one finger on the piece of paper and slid it closer.

"She used colored pencils," Cali added. "It's all solid medium, the paper and everything. There's nothing there that can vector a viable biomite. It's like all the other drawings in his room."

He picked it up while staring at her. He lifted it toward the overhead lights and looked through it.

"You can run it through the sterilizer, if you like. Greg knows how much these drawings mean to Nix. And, look, I'm sorry about snapping. I just want to make sure my brother gets a little something every week. Imagine what it must be like in here."

Franklin looked at the dolphin and ocean and sun for a full minute. He placed it on the counter and nodded, curtly. "Very well."

The door to the left clicked.

Another guard.