He reached the fence and lifted a little girl over it. She had dark hair and wore a dress the color of smoke. As he set her on the ground, she looked up at him and said, “You don't have to go.”

  “Yes, I do. I have to fight them. If I don't, they'll win.”

  “They did win.”

  He stared at the little girl. She turned away and walked across the field with her head down, searching the ground as she walked through scattered bodies of those who could not continue. Refugees ran past her as if they did not see her: a shadow among shadows

  Someone called his name as he stood at the fence, awash in refugees. He looked over the fence and into the blind, black eye of a gun. The soldier at the other end spoke without raising his head.

  “Come back, Allberg.”

  The guns around them opened up with a ripping sound and the fleeing began to fall. Screams and cries twined with the sound as they were cut down: a wave breaking against a leaden shore. Their shrieking mingled with the shadow-cries in his head and wrung his spinal cord. He wrenched himself around, searching for the little girl.

  He spotted the small, dark figure, moving slowly. The wave of death surged closer.

  “No!” He looked back at the soldier. “I'm not coming, yet.”

  He started running, back toward the little girl, to the little girl with eyes like Liss's.

  He felt the bullet smash into his spine and heard the crack of the shot. His legs folded and he fell into the harvest of death as the little girl turned…

  He shouted, slamming onto his knees as he flung himself out of the bed. He caught himself on one forearm and clutched the edge of the mattress with his other hand. He ached. He swallowed bile and choked on the urge to scream.

  “Allberg, Allberg,” he panted, swallowing again and again. “Who in hell is Allberg?” He pressed his face against the mattress and gasped until his chest stopped heaving. His spine still vibrated with the music of his nightmare, rattling his brain in his skull. He scrambled into clothes and ran.

  The alarm yapped sharply as he dove through the doorway.

  “Liss, Liss, Liss…”

  A pale shape like a ghost in the gloom rose up in the bed, the quilt slithering into a multi-colored puddle on the floor.

  He dropped down beside the bed, clutching her shoulders, his own violent quivering making her shake.

  She blinked groggily. “Wha— Greg? What…?”

  Dark shapes crowded the doorway.

  “Miss Mori, are you all right?” one of the shapes called.

  “I— I'm fine. I'm sure it's fine,” she called. “Just go back to bed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Greg turned toward the door with a vicious snarl. The security patrol recoiled, then started to step forward with clubs out.

  Liss shoved Greg aside and bolted out of bed, meeting them at the doorway. She slapped off the alarm.

  “It's OK, guys. It's OK. It's just Greg. Just a bad night. It'll be OK. You can go back to… whatever it is you do all night. Really—it's OK.”

  Shrugging and looking belligerent, they stepped away and started down the corridor, glancing over their shoulders at the glimmering shape of the naked woman in the doorway.

  Rubbing sleep from her face, Liss turned back into the room, raising the illumination from “drowse” to the usual night-cycle bronze glow. Greg still crouched on the floor beside the bed and stared at her with wild eyes. She picked up the quilt and wrapped it around herself, then sat on the bed near him.

  “What is it?” she yawned. “What happened, Greg? Nightmare?”

  “What was—” He stopped and swallowed against an impossibly dry throat. “What was your grandfather's name?”

  “Conrad. Why?”

  “Conrad… Oh, God… Then I don't know.” He stared at the floor in confusion. “What was his first name, then?”

  “That was his first name,” Liss replied, huddling a bit and pulling her feet up under the quilt.

  Greg smacked his head against the side of the bed in frustration. “What was his last name? Mori?”

  “No, Allberg. Mori was my father's name.”

  Greg moaned and scrubbed at his face with one hand. “I need you to look him up in the military database.”

  Liss blinked and stared toward Greg's downturned face. “Need? Why?”

  “Please, Liss.” His voice hissed between his clenched teeth.

  She scowled and sat still. She sighed. “Oh, all right.” She rose and padded across the small room to her desk, trailing a train of quilt, and flicked on the interface. The viewscreen brightened and flashed its “good morning” greeting, playing its little tune.

  “Oh, shut up,” she grumbled at it. She turned off the voice interface and typed.

  Greg crept close. The database responded and scrolled information. He leaned over her shoulder and stared. Text reeled off for a moment or two, then stopped.

  “Time, place, location of death,” Greg whispered.

  Liss typed. The information displayed on the viewscreen. A small icon flashed near the bottom.

  “There's video. Play it.”

  She looked at the screen and not at him and said, “It's going to be gruesome. We all know what happened.”

  “I need to see it.”

  She shrugged and touched the icon.

  The video image was poor and pixelated, blown up by vast percentages from an old standard. Even enhanced, it was difficult to make out. The crowds of refugees on the field looked like a storm cloud’s shadow moving on the trampled grass. A yellow circle marked Conrad Allberg as he moved forward, well ahead of the line of soldiers. He shouldered through the refugees, paused occasionally to shoot, though it was hard to tell what he was shooting or what the results.

  He reached the fence and stopped, facing the open field beyond, standing knee-deep in the dead and dying. He slung his rifle, turned twice, then climbed over the fence and stood there, not moving. A dark clot of refugees washed up against the fence near him. At first, he did nothing, then he reached back over the fence and helped them.

  Five people crossed the fence alive because of him. Then they stopped coming. There were no more alive to help on that side. And Conrad Allberg just stood there. It was impossible to tell if he was facing the open field that led to safety or the trampled sea of blood and bodies from which he had come. Another soldier came to the fence, approaching him with caution at the length of his rifle. Allberg didn't move for a while, then he suddenly stepped away from the fence and ran into the open field. His compatriot put up his weapon, then rested the butt on the ground and stared after him.

  A puff of smoke from another direction and Allberg fell where the tag on the field had been.

  The video stopped on the last frame, paused, then reverted to the file icon. Even the archivists hadn't wanted to linger over that.

  “Explanation of death,” Greg demanded.

  Liss typed.

  “Accidental: friendly fire.”

  Greg sat down hard on the floor and shook.

  Liss knelt down beside him, draped the quilt around his shoulders, and urged him to his feet. “Come on, Greg. Go sit on the bed. It's cold down here.”

  Numb, silent, he shrugged the quilt up around his face like a child and walked with her to the bed. Sitting on the mattress, he hunched his long frame into a folded cone under the flowing quilt; he sat silent and staring as Liss slipped into a dress.

  She sat down next to him. “Now. Tell me.”

  “I- I- I had a nightmare. The dead… they play games in my head. They… they… I don't know why they do this to me. Why they picked me. They tell me their names and their stories and they cry in my head.”

  “I know, Greg. You've told me.”

  He nodded. “I was walking through the field, not the killing field, the open side. I came up to the fence and stopped. I helped a little girl over the fence and she told me I didn't have to go back because the bad guys had already won. Except that they didn't win, not in the end… And I stood there and thought about it until a soldier came up to me, just like that one did to your grandfather.

  “He called me Allberg and I turned and looked at him with the distance of his weapon between us. He told me to come back and I said I wouldn't yet, then I turned away and ran after the little girl, to save her from being shot. And they killed me.

  “And she looked like you, Liss, and she spoke with your voice.”

  “Are you sure that you've never seen this footage before?”

  “Of course, I've seen the footage before! Hundreds of times. You can't grow up around here without seeing it, having it rammed down your throat from the first image you ever see. But not this: not these details. How would I know these things? Why would I look for them?”

  “I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's funny, though, that you started out on the free side of the fence, not on the side with the soldiers.”

  “I was just me when I started walking. I often walk through that field in my nightmares. I even walk through it when I'm awake, sometimes. This time, I had to go to the fence. I didn't want to, but I did it. I wanted to run away, but I wasn't allowed to.

  “I wanted to stop them. I felt that I could stop them, somehow, that I had to. But then, the girl… In the end I wanted to save one person more than I wanted to save myself or anyone else. Why?” He stared at her over the edge of the quilt. “I'm not a hero. I'm a broken thing, a monster. Monsters don't help people, they don't sacrifice themselves for others. Why, even in a dream…?”

  “I don't know, Greg. Maybe you don't want to be a monster anymore.”

  His eyes grew harder, narrower, and the muscles in the corner of his jaw bunched. “I can't just change my mind and change what I am. It isn't that easy. I almost killed someone a few days ago. I got so angry I was ready to throw him in the tank, after beating the hell out him. I'm not a good guy; I'm a villain.”

  “Why do you always believe the worst of yourself? You didn't hit him and you didn't throw him in the hypo tank. Did you?”

  “I hit him. I hit him pretty hard. A couple, three times, I think. But I didn't throw him in the tank, no.”

  “Why didn't you, if you wanted to so much?”

  “I just… didn't. I dropped him and just walked away.” He let go of the quilt and it slipped down into a lumpy arc around his hips and feet. He put his feet on the floor and leaned his forearms against his thighs. “I don't know why I did that any more than I know why he set me off in the first place,” he added, sighing.

  Liss stared, caught her breath and reached out, touching his near arm with her fingertips, then drew back.

  “Oh, my God, Greg… What's happened to you?” she was staring at his near hand.

  He looked down at his hand in surprise. The skin was nearly transparent and had a greenish tinge to it. His fingernails looked like disks of slightly dirty plastic. He sat up and studied his hand, turning it over, back and forth, fascinated and slightly sickened.

  “I… I don't know. It's been a little stiff the past few days, but… this…” Beneath the surface, the structures of his muscles, exposed veins and ligaments, the yellow masses of fat, were visible as an anatomy lesson. The back surface was slightly cloudy, as if scratched. He brushed at it and some of the hairs on the back of his hand rubbed away, leaving a clear patch. His skin was cold to the touch and rigid.

  He flexed his hand and heard a minute crackling noise. His hand flushed pink. Slow, pale blood rose to the surface of his knuckles, lingered in the cracks of his transformed skin and then oozed outward.

  “This is… rather disgusting, actually. What is it, Liss?”

  “I don't know. May I… may I see it?”

  Frowning, he extended his hand to her. She took it in both of hers, examining it carefully.

  She could find no sign of the wound on his palm, but, then, she could not properly see his skin. She couldn't feel any scab or cut. As she held onto it, she felt his hand warm up, but the flesh itself remained hard and stiff. Not like a callous, more like some kind of icy plastic, perhaps. She could see that the effect had begun to spread into his wrist and forearm. Though the skin there was still mostly normal, the upper layer was already transparent and cooler to the first touch than the normal flesh just beyond it. She was repelled and fascinated at once.

  “Can you feel my touch?” she asked, pressing her fingers against his hand and wrist.

  “Yeah. It's fine in the wrist, but in the hand, it's kind of… blunted, like the surface's been anesthetized, or something. Liss, this is giving me the creeps.”

  “It's giving me the creeps, too. We have to see a doctor. I don't know what this is, but I can guess it's not good. How could this happen? Why didn't you notice?” she demanded, standing up and finishing dressing.

  “You told me to ignore it. I've been ignoring it.” Greg also rose and hunched his shoulders, stuffing his hands into his pockets. He winced slightly as the strange hand brushed the tight fabric at the pocket's throat.

  “That was more than a week ago,” Liss chided. “How could you ignore this? Your hand is semi-transparent.”

  “I've been in the tank a lot. Wearing suits and gloves. When I go home, I'm too tired to notice anything except how tired I am. I fall into bed like a cut cable. Then I start dreaming, and I dream about them and I wake up shuddering or screaming, and still too tired to notice anything.”

  Liss walked out of the cubicle and Greg followed her, talking quietly. “I'm a machine these days, Liss. I work and then I work some more. I want to be too tired and too numb to feel anything else, too tired to dream, too tired to remember. It doesn't work, but I keep trying. I still wake up in the morning and I remember their names and how they died and what they said to me. I write it all down, so it doesn't stay in my head all day. Then I can work without them coming into my head, most of the time. But sometimes, they still come in, with their anger and their pain and I… I lose it. Any little thing will set me off. Like that guy the other day. I wanted to kill him. It's not just that I felt I could, not just that I was angry, but I actually wanted him to be dead, wanted to watch and feel his life ebb away at my hand. I wanted to take it away from him. I wanted to destroy him. I feel sick thinking about it.”

  Liss stopped walking and turned back to face him. Her eyes ached and she blinked so he wouldn't see the tears building up in them. “Greg, it doesn't matter what you thought as much as what you did. Or didn't do. You didn't kill him. You didn't give in to this monster you always believe you are. We all want to do horrible things, sometimes. We just don't do them. You didn't do anything wrong by thinking. This is much better than you used to be. Remember?”

  He closed his eyes, his face twisting for a moment into a mask of torment, then easing back to a near-expressionless smoothness. “Yes,” he hissed. “But it's so little…”

  She reached out and touched his arm. “Little is a matter of perspective. Compared to you, I'm rather little.”

  Slowly, he closed his hands on her shoulders and looked at her. “You're not small, even if you're not as tall as I am.” He thought he might have done something like this before, holding on to Liss when he felt like the world was too slippery to stand on. It seemed funny that he couldn't remember it better. He never seemed to forget anything else. He felt cold slide down his back, pierce into his chest, and thought he would gag on it. He swallowed hard and shivered. He stepped back from her, reluctantly.

  “You OK?” she asked.

  “Just… tired, maybe.”

  “Ah…” She nodded. “I wish you didn't feel you have to drive yourself to exhaustion just to put your mind to sleep for a while.”

  “It works… sort of.” He crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at her. Something struggled to break the surface of his mind and he didn't want to know what it was. He stuffed it back down, scowling.

  She frowned up at him and backed away. “All right.” She didn't say any more, just turned and started walking again.

  He walked slowly next to her.

  The doctor kept making a disconcerted face. He poked about in his medical database a while longer, but, in the end, he just sat back, shaking his head.

  “This is crazy.”

  “What is it?” Liss asked, leaning forward.

  “Well, I've never seen anything like this. I can't find anything really like it in the database, either, so, I don't have any explanation, but, somehow, Greg's skin… Sorry,” he added, turning to address Greg directly, “your skin seems to be converting into some kind of hybrid silicate, with all the characteristics of old-style silicon-dioxide.”

  “What the hell is that?” Greg demanded, glowering.

  “It's glass,” the doctor replied with a helpless shrug.

  “That's just not possible, Doctor,” Liss objected. “I know enough medicine to know that.”

  “Yeah, I know. But, it is happening. As I said: it's a hybrid of some kind, so it's still functioning like skin in most ways, but the material is a lot more like glass, or glass fiber, than it is like human skin or even synthetic replacement. This is totally different and I have no idea how or why this is happening. I have blood samples and I'm going to keep on testing them until I either find something or exhaust the possibilities, but it could be a while.”

  Greg pushed himself away from the wall he'd been leaning against and stalked toward the doctor. “And what do I do for now? Just watch myself become transparent?”

  The doctor blinked at the younger man and sat up straighter, slightly affronted with just a hint of fear under that. “Well, that and try not to break yourself. I could surgically excise the hybrid skin and try to replace it with graft or synthetic, but that's all I can think of. If, however, there is some underlying cause I'm not aware of, then all I've done is push the problem back a little, temporarily, and the hand would be useless to you for about five days while the graft integrated with the rest of the arm. Is that what you want to do?”

  “No,” Greg spat. “I can't afford to forfeit my time in the tank on a maybe.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa… You're working in the hypo tank? I thought you were out in engineering.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30