Creation

by Jesse Back

The little bio-bot was taking him out in its little boat. Well, really, the thing was the boat, its arm attached to the engine which was welded to the hull. It was humanoid, about 3 and a half feet tall, drab clothes with holes in them, hiding its metal carapace beneath. Its eyes sparkled with shifting neon colors, its thin, unmoving mouth made it look miserable. Maybe it was.

Clance couldn’t remember waking up, not exactly. He’d been on dopers and tropers and good ole distilled brown for two or three or seven days, getting over a bad one, looking for the next in line. If he could just give up the prosts he could give up the brown and the dopers and tropers would follow. There were so many though, every type and they all did their thing with a distinctive flourish, the subtle variations of the hand or mouth or ass. Maybe, with a little dedication and determination he could give up the uppers and downers and in-betweeners. Keep the prosts, drop the rest.

“How far?” he asked the little, miserable bot.

“zzzz,” the thing said, looking at him, using its free arm to point to its ersatz throat.

“Voice busted?” The bio-bot nodded, the squeaking of its head heard over the sound of the boat treading water. Behind him was land, the backside of the breakers climbed and plummeted into their troughs. The air was briny, smelled like dead fish, floating piles of dried kelp, dead shrimp and crabs clinging to the mass, fish picking from underneath the black water.

Clance waited for the hangover, for the pounding of the boat up and down, up and down to make him hurl over the side, but in truth, he felt great. His mind was clear even though his memory was faded, little images stacked nonchronologically, the start of the night, the start of the binge, the middle, a prost bouncing up and down, her shirt still on, the way she moaned, the way her face contorted with pleasure, with pain. If he could just keep those images, forget the rest like a game of five card draw.

The black horizon began to light up as they rounded the globe. Lights on the edge blinked on and off, one in the middle twirled around, lighting the way for all seafaring types. The little bio-bot was programmed, probably went back and forth between island and mainland its entire, horrible little life. “I’d tip ya, but I don’t have anything on me,” Clance said, checking his pockets. He felt bad enough he would’ve tipped the miserable little thing, too.

“zzz,” the bot said, its eyes turned feculent green.

“I’d put you out of your misery, but I don’t know who’s you are.” Clance patted the thing on the back, its frame even slimmer and shoddier than he’d expected. “Just, keep your head up.” The little bio-bot hung its head down to its chest and the lights in its eyes turned off.

“I’ll just tie us off here,” Clance said, getting out of the boat, noticing his feet were a little more unsteady than he thought. He managed to grab a line and tie the boat down. A little gesture he could perform for the little guy. “Good luck,” he said, walking off the long pier towards a little dirt path.

A string of tiki torches lit the way, the oil in them stinging his eyes, filling his nostrils with their unctuous stink. There was only the path, straight as an arrow that led to a black encumbrance in front of him, maybe a hundred feet, maybe a mile, the torches were throwing off his sense of distance and space. Behind the torches the night was blacker than if they were all out. Anything could be lurking, watching, stalking him. He was giddy though. The holo-tropers and upper-dopers were starting to rise, in an hour they’d plateau and he’d stay there for a while, depending on their quality. He usually would start sucking down more distilled brown on the way up, but he didn’t have any so he let it all slide and let it all just happen to him. Little mental implosions blowing his fucking mind up.

Images kept flickering back, he could see them in the dancing shadows of the tikis. Blosso, his number one prost. They had a thing going. He paid her and she did her thing. There was more to it though, not love, nothing so banal or vulgar. A transaction built upon mutual understanding and ability. He could go all night with most prosts but Blosso, she was a pro’s pro, he’d try with her, try as hard as he could, but she could wiggle it, jiggle it, breathe on it just right, wink at him, smile, flip her hair, claw at his back, squeeze his neck until right before he passed out, she knew the exact second to let go. The longest he’d made it with her was 9 minutes and 43 seconds. She’d never let him get to 10. It was their little game. Plus, if he got past 10, it’d be half price and the only thing she loved was money. Besides all that, amazing tits, just 11 out of 10, out of this world and the next.

He saw those tits in the shadows, her nipples the little pebbles discarded on the dry grass. One more time with her and then he was done with it all. Unless he went 10 minutes and then he’d have to keep going, for the industry, for Blosso.

The tikis were starting to turn his stomach, but he could see the end in sight.

His feet hit pavement and he looked back, the tikis were all out, he could make out thin whisps of gray smoke climbing into the sky. The smell would stick with him until he changed his clothes and showered. Island people, they had a thing for the tikis, for the twirling, dancing, mesmerizing lights. The pavement beneath his feet came alive with each step, right foot = neon purple, left foot = neon yellow, and so on. He took a few steps forward, then back, then forward again, laughing, right about now, high off his ass and feeling tubular.

“The niiiiiggghhhttt is younnnnngggggg!” he shout-sang into the darkness. He felt good, better than he had since he’d started, or since he could remember. The list of things he could remember was dwindling. He didn’t care, if it got too bad there were clinics, there were dopers and tropers for good too, they’d help him remember, bring light and life to parts of his brain that were being smothered in dark.

The neon path flowed beneath him and led him up a wide staircase with no handrails. Thirty-seven stairs and he was in a wide courtyard lit by ambient light hidden in the banana leaf trees. A soft wind blew in the courtyard leaving the rest of the night tender and free. The air smelled of lavender, pineapple, of cinnamon and something else, new plastic, peeled off the edges, fresh off the line.

Soft chittering from the trees, the soft thump as several feet hit the ground at once. A half dozen little monkey-like things came over to him as he continued on his path. The way back was dark, the way forward, lit, he was brought to this island for a purpose. In his doped up state, he was willing to try anything, at least, that was his current motto.

They weren’t monkeys and as they got closer their chittering took on a metallic tone, hollow, tinlike in their small carapaces. Something like coati with neon pink eyes, lidless, always on, never moving, locked in on him. “Little, lil things,” he said, wanting to hear his own voice above their relentless blather.

The bots stopped, sat on their hind legs, stared up at him. One, the leader or the proxy, made a few distinctive chittering noises and the five others spread out around him, taking up defensive postures in a threatening semicircle.

Clance took a step forward, they took three, all in sync with his own and with themselves. He took a step back, they followed, keeping him as their foci. Out of curiosity he took off running, they skittered along in an impossible way, their legs at their sides, becoming half crab to keep up, but they did. “Okay,” he said, out of breath, the drugs and brown weighing him down as they lifted him up, “just take me where you want me. I’m yours, all yours lil monkey guys.” The dopers and tropers were lessening and the dormant alcohol was rising, slurring his mind. The smell of pineapple became stronger, intoxicating, like a rum drink filled the air and he took slurps of it, closing his eyes, imagining Blosso’s legs parted and his head darting between them.

Light piano music was playing, a lot of flats and sharps, dissonant but not unpleasant. The monkeybots led him to the open entrance of a villa with wide, curved arches, etched with ancient symbols Clance was sure meant nothing. At the entrance the lil monkeys spread out in a line and stared up at him, 12 pink eyes hard in their black carapaces. “Thank you, do I tip, or is it included on the check, later?” He laughed at his own joke and on unsteady, brown-induced feet he made his way into the house.

As he stepped over the threshold the monkey bots began to clamor, shrieking, a sound like two knives slicing into one another. “You’re here,” an androgynous voice said around him. Clance looked forward, backward, all around, and up and down. From behind the grand piano, splashed in gold and neon green, glided a revenant. Clance sobered up, his feet wanting to turn and leave, his body immobile, stuck. “How was the trip?” The revenant came over, put its spectral hand on his shoulder and led him further into the villa.

Clance opened his mouth, tried to force meaning out of his sounds, but there was none.

“I know, I look ghastly. Can’t be helped, sadly, a rare condition.” The revenant bade Clance to take a seat in an ornate, gilded chair, a throne with deep cushions and the heavy weight of opulence. “I should be dead, but, shouldn’t we all?” The revenant opened a case full of reds and blues, oranges, greens, and an ominous black troper that immediately called to Clance. “Take! Whatever you want. There is no too much, I can always fix you.”

“Th-thanks,” Clance said, grabbing a few reds and greens, one black. Looking into his hand he decided it wasn’t enough and grabbed a random handful, including a white, which he’d never seen or heard of. He knew the black ones. They were trouble, but only if the chemist was sloppy. The others, the reds and greens, there was plenty of wiggle room between high and too high, blacks depended on subject mass and neural activity.

The skin of the man was stretched taut against every bone, stomach caved in, his arms just white sticks. He had legs to walk, he wasn’t gliding, but the transitions were smooth, easy, enough to be mistaken as hovering.

“You’ve got a lovely home,” Clance said after popping four reds. It was the right thing to say when entering a home and he was no neanderthal. “Your companions could use some work, maybe a nice old butler next time instead of the screaming monkeys with evil eyes.”

“I made them,” the revenant said, levity gone, a serious tone now. “One of my first out here. They are…very protective of me and this house.” Eyes like factory smoke, teeth black against black gums. He shouldn’t take any more pills but Clance had made a deal with himself long ago: someone offered him something, he took it. That’s how you built tolerance, how you became impervious, immortal.

“What do you do out here? What’s going on?” The reds hit quick. They made him gregarious, talkative, yearning for companionship. A few greens would dumb those feelings down, make him complacent, calm, a benign smile plastered across his face.

“I am creator.” The man said. Was it a man? Clance wondered. Nothing else had been living flesh, all little bots, little trinkets with their little jobs.

“I like your creations,” Clance said. “The boatman, Charon, I bet you call him. I like the sidewalk too, the tiki torches, I don’t know, maybe—”

“When do you expect to die?” the man asked, cutting Clance off but not raising his voice.

“Maybe tonight,” Clance said, smiling, popping an orange and yellow, one for laughter, the other for serenity. That’s how they were advertised anyway, the real effects depended on the person, their gut biome, and what else they had in their bloodstream.

“No, not tonight. Did you like the piece?” the revenant asked. “I wrote it. Just on the edge of distasteful and vulgar. That’s where creation is. Right on that line. It’s the thinnest of lines,” the skeleton held out its right hand, held its forefinger and thumb just a hair’s breadth apart, its skin gray, cold, dry. “If I can find that line, discover its exact dimensions, then I will be creating the unique.” Clance was drowsing now, staring down into his hand. The only pill left the black one, ominous, no capsule line, no markings, it said and spoke of death, but on the other side…

“It’s not a straight line. It curves, zags, wounds back around on itself. So, I must poke at it, test it, every inch of it. And, here you are.” The revenant glided back over to Clance on his throne. It bent down and opened its mouth. Inside the black began to fade as neon fire began to percolate and appear. “You won’t sleep and you won’t be awake.” It leaned in and spoke into Clance’s ear, he could hear the gears turning, the mechanical emblem of its speech. “You’ll be in the liminal space, where creation thrives.”

A bony finger curved and beckoned Clance to follow. He stood on his own feet, expecting to be unsteady but finding more purchase than his mind thought possible. His feet were clomping on the hard, tiled floor, black and white squares, he felt like a chess piece, only able to move forward and backward. His feet began to sink into the floor, but he’d been there before, it was the drugs asking him to stop, to sit and lay, to sleep.

The revenant took him to a sterile room that smelled of antiseptic and blood, more than that, of fat and muscle rendered, old skin that smelled like mildew, dust. “There,” it commanded and Clance stood in front of a silver slab of metal. “Tie your feet and your right hand, a little tighter. There.”

A soft clacking began and a three-foot-tall spider appeared in the doorway. Its carapace polished silver, eyes pink like the monkeys, like the boatman. “Ready the patient, Brum,” the revenant said.

The wraith stripped, its frame even more morbid and awful bare. There was a hole where its genitals should be, its muscles hung around its bones like they were separated, like bags of fetid meat. “Our society, your society,” it began, as it put on gloves and Brum tied Clance’s left hand, tightened the other straps, it continued, “is obsessed with turning man into robots. Implants, subdermal-plating, solar cells, nanobots cleaning us, inside and out. That’s how I got like this. I’m Dr. Ormeau.” Clance registered the name and filtered it through the sludge of his slow-moving mind. “There it is, yes, that one. Exiled, sure. A madman, I am definitely that. Every madman in history went against his society and you can recite their names because they accomplished.”

Clance couldn’t move his mouth anymore. His face numb but his idiotic smile persisted.

“I created the bots that clean your teeth, keep your arteries clean, your lungs clear, muscles and tendons stretched and pliable. I human-tested the first round on myself. They began to eat me. I had to kill myself to expel them. Dead for two days. Yet, I persist. I am creator. Unable to live, unable to die.”

The revenant clapped its hands three times, quick. Out of the floor, holes in the wall and ceiling, out of hidden doors and cabinets; his creations. A swarm of bots, buzzing, forming as clumps of gunmetal gray, came together, formed into the shape of a man, Clance. When he blinked, they blinked, the same inane smile spread across their face. “It takes time,” the skeleton said, admiring his nanobots, watching them mimic Clance. “Haven’t found a use for this one yet, it’s not perfect.” At the last word, Clance’s doppelganger collapsed in on itself, the face caving in, taking mouth, nose, and eyes with it, until the bots were just a gray rug on the floor. “They’ve spent themselves.” Another bot came over, one hand a dustpan, the other a broom, and it swept all the pieces up and put them in a receptable that oozed with liquid nitrogen. “They reach 92 degrees Fahrenheit and they lose their shape.” The revenant shrugged, or it meant to, the movement came off as threatening, like a massive vulture raising its wings to attack its prey.

Another clap and the bots left. Only the spider with its pink eyes remained, its gaze fixed on Clance, its legs shifting with each breath, front left, front right, middle right, back right, and so on, all the way around. “Keeps me calm,” Dr. Ormeau explained. “Have to have something making noise.” He turned to Clance. “Or I might lose what’s left of this mind.” His eyes flashed a bright orange, mouth open, the black void sucking Clance in. It laughed.

The doctor took a seat near Clance’s midsection, began to draw little marks. “Humanity thinks they can perfect themselves with implants, nanobots, tropers, dopers, and whatever else.” He looked at Clance, squinted, trying to make the drunk understand. “You can’t build something perfect with an imperfect foundation. The human body isn’t finished evolving. Our instincts, all of them, geared towards procreation. How can a being be perfect if it’s expected to sacrifice itself, if it’s expected to spend itself making another. A perfect being doesn’t create. It’s finished. Everything else is an imitation.”

The spider trundled over, clack-clack-clacking with its metal stanchions on the tiled floor. Clance’s mind was reeling, the white and black melting together, swirling, the fluorescent lights making him sick. The pills were all coming together at the wrong time, the brown was starting to come back up. He vomited in his mouth, it poured from him in an orange froth. The doctor made a click with his mouth and the spider came over, its front legs longer than the rest, more dexterous, little phalanges projected from them and wiped up the mess. “Zofran,” the doctor said, the spider set up a couple IV’s and began to run the clear liquid through. “You’ll feel better in a few minutes. You take too many drugs, drink too much, you know why?”

Clance couldn’t move, could only make a sloppy gurgling sound in his throat. “Exactly. You’ve no point.” The revenant stood then, to his full height, half a head taller than Clance. It patted Clance on the cheek in an awkward, avuncular manner, though the skin was dry, cold, sandpaper. “Most people don’t, nothing to be ashamed of. Few individuals matter.” Clance felt pressure in his abdomen, no pain, just the presence of an interloper.

The doctor took his seat back and began to cut, to pull, to insert catheters and tubes. “I build something perfect. I create. Once it’s perfect then I introduce the alien material, human. A machine, a bot, whatever its purpose, can only do so much. Humanity can’t out-process a bot, that’s not possible,” he wagged his long finger up into Clance’s face, “but they have that other thing, a soul, spirit, vitality, humanity, who knows. It’s essential to the perfect being.” He stood, took a few steps back and examined his work.

Clance’s torso was open, skin pulled back, pinned in place. The revenant traced the vital functions as he spoke, “All these are pointless, just machinery to keep the brain, the nervous system functioning. I’ve removed other specimens piecemeal, testing out when the body is overcome, when the secondary or tertiary organs are expected to perform this or that job. You can take out 75% of a man’s body and he’ll live, for a few days at least. Agonizing, I’m told. Pain doesn’t make us human though.” The doctor grabbed a scalpel from a stainless-steel metal tray the spider was holding. He examined it, held it next to his right eye, judging the sharpness of the blade. Clance could feel the pressure in his skull, could hear the drill as it made a hole, feel the blood and cerebral fluid trailing down his face, onto his chin, like tears.

“Animals feel pain. I believe I’ve felt the most extreme form of pain. Imagine billions of bee stings, all at once, over and again. Inside your body, your temple. An invasion of my own doing, of course. I don’t blame anyone else, and I don’t blame you now, for where you are. I don’t want to inflict pain upon you, you’ve been numb your entire adult life. Pain for you is want. It drives you, makes you what you are. Imperfect in this form, with the possibility of something greater.”

Clance’s right eye went black, all sound lost in his left ear. He began to convulse but the spider shot him with something and he stopped. Everything was happening in a slow, protracted way for Clance. Each word was drawn out for seconds at a time, sentences eating up minutes, hours. The doctor’s face going in and out, blurring, coming back. Clance lost 2 or 3 minutes with each blink, trying to keep himself awake, trying to move his hands, feet, but they wouldn’t respond, not a single toe or finger.

“You’ll be you, cognizant of the change, of what’s expected of you. Right now you think you won’t do it, you’ll fight it, whatever it is. You won’t though. That part of your brain won’t be available to you. You’ll be compliant.” The revenant pulled something from Clance’s skull, showed it to him, said, “This is your rebellion.” He gave it to the spider and it took it to a biohazard receptacle. “You,” he said, holding Clance’s numb face in both of his hands, “will be my perfection, my bright, shining star. My Creation.”