UnSouled

“Sid and Nancy,” the clapper says. The girl chuckles nervously. He could have said Tom and Jerry; it didn’t matter. He could even have given their real names, but fake names somehow add to the authenticity of the deception.

“Come on. Let me give you both the grand tour.” Jeff’s wholesome smile is reason enough to blow the place sky-high.

He leads them past the manager’s office. The manager, on the phone, glances out at the clapper, catching a moment of eye contact. The clapper looks away, feeling read. He feels as if every stranger he sees can read his intentions, as if his hands are already spread wide, ready to swing together. But the manager has a real air of suspicion. The clapper moves out of his sight range quickly.

“Over here we have our free weight area. Our resistance machines are to the right. All state of the art, of course, with holographic entertainment consoles.” Neither of them is listening, but Jeff doesn’t seem to notice. “Our aerobics deck is upstairs.” Jeff beckons for them to follow him up the stairs.

“You go, Nancy,” the clapper says. “I’m going to check out the free weights.” They share a brief nod. Here is where they put distance between themselves. Here is where they say good-bye.

He moves away from the stairs and toward the free weight area. It’s five o’clock—a crowded time. Does he feel remorse for coming at this time of day? Only when he looks at people’s faces, so he tries not to. They are not people—they are ideas. They are just extensions of the enemy. Besides, he didn’t choose to come at the gym’s most crowded time. They were told to come precisely now, precisely on this day—and when an event is this big, it’s easy to hide behind “I’m just following orders.”

Stepping behind a pillar, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out the circular Band-Aid-like detonators, affixing them to his palms. This is real. This is going down. Oh my God. Oh my God—

And as if to echo his thoughts, he hears, “Oh Jesus.”

He looks up to see the manager standing there, catching him with the penny-sized detonators glaring from the clapper’s palms like stigmata—there’s no mistaking what he means to do.

The manager grabs his wrists, keeping his hands apart.

“Let go of me!”

“There’s something you need to know before you do this!” the manager hisses in a loud whisper. “You think this is random, but it’s not. You’re being used!”

“Let go or I swear—”

“You’ll what? Blow me up? That’s what they want. I’m an organizer with the Anti-Divisional Resistance. Whoever sent you here has been targeting us! This isn’t about chaos. It’s about taking us out! You’re working for the wrong side!”

“There are no sides!”

He pulls away, ready to swing his hands together . . . but suddenly not as ready as he was a moment ago. “You’re ADR?”

“I can help you!”

“It’s too late for that!” He can feel his adrenaline surge. He can feel his heartbeat in his ears and wonders if a pounding heart is enough to detonate him.

“We can clean your blood! We can save you!”

“You’re lying!” But he knows it’s possible. They disarmed Lev Calder, didn’t they? But then the clappers came after him and tried to kill him for not clapping.

Finally one of the various self-absorbed weight lifters notices the nature of the conversation and says, “Clappers?” and backs away. “CLAPPERS!” he yells, and makes a beeline to the door. Others quickly size up the situation, and the panic begins—but the manager doesn’t take his eyes off the clapper.

“Let me help you!”

Suddenly an explosion rocks the gym, and the cardio deck comes crashing down upon the first floor. She did it! She did it! She’s gone, and he’s still here.

Bloody people stumble past him coughing, wailing, and the manager grabs him again almost hard enough to detonate him. “You don’t have to follow her! Be your own man. Fight for the right side!”

And although he wants to believe there is a right side—that this hint of hope is real, and not false—his head is as confused as the burning rubble still raining down around him. Can he betray her? Can he close the door that she opened and refuse to finish what she has begun?

“I can get you to a place of safety. No one has to know you didn’t detonate!”

“Okay,” he says, making his decision. “Okay.”

The manager breathes a gasping sigh of relief, letting him go—and the instant he does, the clapper holds his hands wide and swings them together.

“Nooo!”

And he’s gone, along with the ADR organizer, the rest of the gym, and any question of hope.

3 • Cam

The world’s first composite human being is in black-tie attire.

His tailored tuxedo is of the highest quality. He looks handsome. Impressive. Imposing. He looks older in the tux—but as age is a fuzzy concept for Camus Comprix, he can’t quite say how old he should look.

“Give me a birthday,” he says to Roberta as she works on his tie. Apparently of all the sundry bits and pieces of kids in his head, not a single one of them knew how to tie a bow tie. “Assign me an age.”

Roberta is the closest thing he will ever have to a mother. She certainly dotes on him like one. “Choose your own,” she tells him as she tucks, tugs, and tightens the bow tie. “You know the day you were rewound.”

“False start,” Cam says. “Every part of me existed before I was rewound, so it’s not a day to celebrate.”

“Every part of everyone exists before they are presented to the world as an individual.”

“Born, you mean.”

“Born,” Roberta admits. “But birthdays are random. Babies come early; babies come late. Defining one’s life by the day one was cut from an umbilical cord is completely arbitrary.”

“But they were born,” Cam points out. “Which means I was born. Just not all at the same time, and to multiple mothers.”

“Very true,” says Roberta, stepping back to admire him. “Your logic is as impeccable as your looks.”

Cam turns to look at himself in the mirror. The many symmetrical shades of his hair have been cut and combed into a perfect style. The various skin tones bursting forth from a single point in the center of his forehead only add to the stunning nature of his looks. His scars are no longer scars, but hairline seams. Exotic, rather than horrible. The pattern of his skin, his hair, his whole body is beautiful.

So why would Risa abandon me?

“Lockdown,” he says reflexively, then clears his throat and tries to pretend he didn’t say it. Lockdown is the word that comes out of him lately whenever he wants to purge a thought from his mind. He can’t stop himself from saying it. The word brings an image of iron blast doors falling into place, locking the thought in, refusing to give it purchase anywhere in his mind. Lockdown has become a way of life for Cam.

Unfortunately, Roberta knows exactly what the word means.

“October tenth,” Cam says quickly, before Roberta has a chance to commandeer the conversation. “My birthday will be October tenth—Columbus Day.” What could be more appropriate than a day commemorating the discovery of a land and people who were already there and didn’t need discovering? “I will be eighteen on the tenth of October.”

“Splendid,” says Roberta. “We’ll throw you a party. But right now we have another party that requires our attention.” She gently takes him by his shoulders, forcing him to face her, and she adjusts the angle of his tie the way she might straighten a picture on the wall. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how important this gala is.”

“You don’t, but you will anyway.”

Roberta sighs. “It’s not about damage control anymore, Cam,” she tells him. “Risa Ward’s betrayal was a setback, I’ll admit, but you’ve moved past it with flying colors. And that’s all I’ll say on the matter.” But apparently not, because she adds, “Public scrutiny is one thing, but now you are under the scrutiny of those who actually make things happen in this world. You cut a striking image in that tuxedo. Now show them you are as glorious inside as out.”

“Glory is subjective.”

“Fine. Then subject them to it.”

Cam looks out of the window to see their limousine has arrived. Roberta grabs her purse, and Cam, always the gentleman, holds the door for her as they leave Proactive Citizenry’s lavish Washington town house and head into a steamy July night. Cam suspects that the powerful organization owns residences in every major city throughout the nation—maybe throughout the world.

Why has Proactive Citizenry put so much of their money and influence behind me? Cam often wonders. The more they give him, the more he resents it, because it makes his captivity increasingly apparent. They have elevated him on a pedestal, but Cam has come to understand that a pedestal is nothing more than an elegant cage. No walls, no locks, but unless one has wings to fly away, one is trapped. A pedestal is the most insidious prison ever devised.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Roberta asks coyly as they pull onto the beltway.

Cam grins, but doesn’t look at her. “I think Proactive Citizenry can afford more than a penny.” And he shares none of his thoughts with her, regardless of the cost.

It’s dusk as the limo rides along the Potomac. Across the river, bright lights already illuminate the monuments of DC. Scaffolding surrounds much of the Washington Monument, while the Army Corp of Engineers struggles to correct the pronounced tilt it’s taken on over the past few decades. Bedrock erosion and seismic shift has given the city its own leaning tower. “From Lincoln’s chair, it leans to the right,” political pundits have been known to say, “but from the Capitol steps, it leans to the left.”

This is Cam’s first time in DC—but he has memories of being here nonetheless. A memory of riding a bike down the paths of the National Mall with a sister who was clearly umber. Another memory of a vacation with parents of Japanese descent, who are livid that they can’t contain the irascible behavior of their little boy. He has a color-blind memory of a huge Vermeer canvas hanging in the Smithsonian—and a parallel memory of the same work of art, but in full color.

Cam has come to enjoy comparing and contrasting his various recollections. Memories of the same places or objects should be identical, but they never are, because the various Unwinds represented in his brain each saw the world around them in very different ways. At first Cam had found this confusing and disconcerting—a cause for panic and alarm—but now he finds it curiously illuminating. The varied textures of his memories give him mental parallax on the world. A sort of depth perception beyond the limited point of view of a single individual. He can tell himself that and it would be true—yet beneath it, there is a primal anger brewing at each point of conversion. Each time merging memories contradict, the dissonance reverberates to the very core of his being, as a reminder that not even his memories are his own.