Skinner clutched a shrub. The sky looked like a black-and-white photograph of scrambled eggs. Rivulets rushed down the gully’s pebbly slopes, forming little puddles that grew and merged and turned into pools. Skinner beat his legs to will them to move but they wouldn’t budge; the lower half of his body appeared to belong to a corpse. Soon a shallow pool rose around him. He strapped his backpack to the front of his body, stuffed three capped and empty water bottles inside, then waited until the water began to move before he let go of the shrub. At first it was like a child’s ride at a theme park, the old man bobbing along idiotically, squinting up at the rain hurtling into his face. He spit, cursed, coughed. The stream started moving faster, egged on by gathering volume and dropping elevation. Within an hour the formerly dry riverbed was coursing with water. Skinner, a tiny object flung along by the current, strained to keep his head up. An uprooted tree passed nearby, then bits of campsite garbage and a rodent riding a log. On either side of the waterway evergreens swayed and shook water from their boughs. Skinner shivered and chattered profanities. His head went under for a second before he surfaced long enough for a gasp to fill his lungs, then he was down again, scrubbed against the gravel riverbed, lifted up for more air as if the river was toying with him, prolonging his death. He grabbed the exposed root of a tree dangling in the water but couldn’t summon the strength to pull himself up and decided to let go. Let me be washed from this earth. He bobbed up onto his back and saw the sky, was flung sideways and upside down and caught glimpses of green and brown then was dunked into impossibly silent water for what appeared to be his final moments—Chiho Waitimu Roon—the water went black, then resolved to bluish green and in the shadowy depths he saw something moving: steel beams, some kind of machine. As his remaining breath dribbled from his nostrils he discovered that he was in a net, then sensed his body rising quickly to the surface. When he broke through he winced, sucked air, coughed. From above, a mechanical squeal. A leg-like thing moved in his periphery. The net rose above the surface of the water and now he saw that he was dangling from the underside of a multilimbed contraption, like a spider with the net hanging from its abdomen, its mechanically articulated hydraulic legs wobbling as the thing rose up to twenty feet tall. Eight of these legs came together at a central hub, a battered disc about the size of a compact car, from which the net swung. The machine stumbled drunkenly out of the river and onto the bank, then picked its way along a trail through trees reluctantly letting in the daylight. Skinner watched the forest floor beneath him: reddened cedar boughs and the occasional vine maple. Branches crackled around him as the robot awkwardly bumped against tree trunks and stumbled over exposed roots. A fir bough whacked Skinner in the face. The path widened and became a logging road, over which the mechanical beast moved with more confidence. Skinner smelled burning wood. The robot lurched in a new direction and entered a clearing. A little A-frame cabin stood with its roof covered completely in moss, smoke curling from the chimney. From inside came the sound of a stereo cranked full-volume, a sort of freak-out guitar solo interminably carving up sixteenth notes. The robot sighed and came to a halt. Skinner choked out a “Hello?”
A minute or so passed and the solo showed no sign of stopping. A naked man appeared. Looked to be about forty, grayish blackish hair pulled back in a ponytail. Skinny. Thick bifocal glasses. He tapped an elaborately carved walking stick on the mossy ground and stared at the net, slack-mouthed.
“Hello?” Skinner said again.
Keeping his eyes on the net, the man called out of the corner of his mouth, “Number 167! Hey, 167!”
When no one named Number 167 answered or arrived, the man cursed and walked to the door of the cabin, which he proceeded to beat with the stick. He paused, waited for 167 to appear, then beat the door even harder. Finally the song ended and the door opened a crack.
“167! There’s a corpse! In the net!”
What emerged from the cabin was a figure far more squat than the naked guy, wrapped in layers of flannel, denim, and quilted down, a stocking cap pulled low, his face puffy red and covered in whiskers, eyes open the width of hyphens.
“What the freak, 218?” 167 said. “Shee-it.”
“167, there’s a corpse in the net.”
“A corpse?”
“I could use some medical attention,” Skinner croaked.
“What should we do?” 167 said.
“Bury him?” 218 said.
“We got to let him down first.”
“Let him down.”
“Good idea, 218. Let’s let him down.”
The two walked over to one of the legs and opened a sort of flap, argued about what button they needed to push, then started randomly pushing buttons to prove their respective points until the net dropped and Skinner landed face-first, from ten feet up, in the dirt. The two guys rolled him over. 218, the naked one, squatted for a closer look, his ball sac penduluming alarmingly close to Skinner’s face.
“I’m not dead,” Skinner said, “I’m pretty sure.”
“Ah, well,” 218 said, “chalk it up to inexperience on the fishbot’s part.”
“Was it supposed to kill me?”
“No, it was supposed to let you go.”
“I almost died. It saved my life.”
“Well, it’s obviously busted, then,” 167 said, “Thing can’t fish for shit.”
218 said, “What were you doing in the river, anyway?”
“I had an accident. I fell. I can’t move my legs.”
“Let’s get this guy inside,” 167 said. They half dragged, half lifted Skinner to the cabin. Inside, vaporized marijuana had for all practical purposes replaced oxygen. Tapestries of Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, bicycle parts, gutted computers, cedar burls carved into the faces of characters from The Lord of the Rings. Soda cans, garlic braids, gears and rods, a stack of yellowed Penthouse Forum magazines, a couple screens, old-school video game consoles, a lamp that in a former life had been a chunk of driftwood, a bowling trophy, liquor-bottle candle holders, mouse traps, rag rugs, manuals for extinct machines, rope, frying pans, guitars, hunting rifles, optical devices. Shit hanging from the ceiling: fishing poles, a kayak, a bucket, pulleys, climbing gear, a couple more guitars, a tricycle, snowshoes, snowboards, inner tubes. Was there furniture? Sort of, buried amid the stuff. Perhaps a couple couches, two hammocks hanging Gilligan and Skipper–style on one side of the room. On the coffee table smoldered a Gaudiesque glass bong. There was a loft reachable by ladder and beneath it a cramped, overwhelmed kitchenette. 167 and 218 deposited Skinner on the couch. He lost his sense of time for a moment, then opened his eyes to see the two guys still standing over him, arguing maybe.
“The thing, you know,” 167 said.
“Like for his legs and shit?” 218 said.
“Yeah.”
“Do we have a thing, um, what do you, um, call it?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
“I don’t even know what it’s called.”
“A bio…”
“A bio…”
“Yeah, one of those.”
“For his legs? Do you know how to use one?”
“Well, first we have to find it.”
“I know we used to have one, I think.”
The two wandered to separate corners of the house and started extracting physical objects, disrupting the disorder of things, upsetting piles of parts of stuff, tossing aside tools of dubious purpose. Skinner, shivering, pulled a blanket off the floor and arranged it over his body. The effort was almost too much. Eventually, the two guys reappeared, bearing a black box with some cables sticking out of it.
“You’re kidding me,” Skinner whispered.
“It should still work,” 218 said, “if it ever boots up.” He gave the ancient Bionet transmitter/receiver a slap, blew some dust off the device, and toggled a switch. “Think it still works?”
“Test it and find out,” 167 said.
“What do you think I’m doing? When did you use this last?”
“When I had a skin rash.”
“No you didn’t, you used it when you sprained your ankle that one time.”
“I broke my ankle, not sprained it.”
“You’re high.”
This indisputable fact seemed to momentarily resolve the bickering. Skinner swallowed and asked, “Who are you guys?”
“Us? We’re Federicos 167 and 218,” 218 said.
“Brothers,” 167 said.
“Heteros,” 218 said, and they both laughed.
“Exiles,” 167 said. “Rough drafts.”
“Genetically contaminated.”
“We didn’t exactly fit the description on the menu.”
“We were sent back to the kitchen.”
“I’m not tall enough, for one.”
“And I have no interest in household chores or hip-hop dancing.”
“We’re individuals!” they said in unison, then laughed again.
“We’re polluted with individuality,” 167 said smugly.
A dull green light had begun to flicker on the console.
“That’s our fishbot that fished you out of the river,” 218 said.
“Thanks for that.”
“Don’t thank us, thank the fishbot,” 167 said. “Usually it’s a pretty useless piece of crap.”
218 asked 167, “What’s it doing now?”
“It’s asking for a code,” 167 said.
“I guess that means he has to enter his code,” 218 said.
167 presented the console’s interface to Skinner. “You’re supposed to enter your code.”
Skinner tapped his code into the keypad of the sketchy-looking Bionet uplink device. 167 set it on the coffee table next to the bong.
“Paralyzations take what, a week to fix?” 167 said.
“Give or take,” 218 said. “But don’t worry, old man. We’ll get you back on your feet.”
“How come you’re naked?” Skinner said.
“I’m taking an air bath,” 218 said.
“What do you guys do up here? What’s your line of work?”
“A little of this, a little of that,” said 167.
“Some of the other thing,” 218 said.
“Which means robotics, fishing, decorative beadwork,” 167 said.
“What are you talking about? We haven’t done beadwork in forever,” 218 said.
“But it’s something we’re capable of doing if we have to,” 167 said. “If, say, there’s an emergency beading need.”
“True,” 218 said. “We could decoratively bead in a pinch. What about you, old man?”
“Skinner.”
“Skinning,” 167 nodded. “It’s an acquired skill.”
“That’s my name. Al Skinner. I’m retired military.”
“I see,” 218 said. “Going after newmans? Clones like us? Vampires? The mutant throngs of Nova Scotia?”
“Newmans, mostly.”
“What company were you with?” 167 said.
“Boeing, Exxon Mobil for a while… then News Corp.,” Skinner mumbled, zonking out. Ah, lovely Bionet, stepping in and beginning the restoration of his spine, flooding his system with synthetic opiates manufactured inside his body by nanotech what-have-yous. He wanted to laugh. Not that he thought any of this was funny, this cluttered cabin and the two clone stoners attending to his recovery.
He woke in darkness in great pain, writhing on the couch. The two men appeared and held him down as he thrashed. “It’s going to feel like this sometimes,” one of them said, “but if it feels like this it means it’s working.” The words rattled around in Skinner’s head like a rock in a bucket.
Days passed in which little seemed to happen besides 167 and 218 arguing over who had eaten the last of the instant udon. Occasionally one of them ventured into town for supplies in a battered, powder-blue pickup. Skinner couldn’t be certain what town it was they were venturing into but when they returned they brought freshly baked bread, soup, cheese, and fruit. Skinner was able to gradually piece together a semireliable history of how the two dudes had ended up in the mountains with their fishbot and Frank Zappa’s complete discography. They spoke cryptically and cynically of some ancient rich queen on an island surrounded by hundreds more of their clone brethren. They’d grown up on her estate and had passed as full-bred clones for a while, only to be cast out as teenagers when their corrupted profiles came to light. Or maybe they’d done something horrible and had to leave under duress. Hard to say. It didn’t help the story that Skinner passed through a series of narcotic fugues.
One morning Skinner’s legs tingled a bit and he tried to stand. He fell. At some point the two guys had crafted a sort of wheelchair, really just a swivel chair bolted to a couple skateboards. The thing looked treacherous. Nonetheless, Skinner let the two younger men lift him into the contraption and roll him onto the porch. The fishbot knelt in the front yard, dormant, as if inspecting flowers for bees. 218 thrust a bowl of rice and tofu in front of him and demanded that he eat.
“I killed many of your kind,” Skinner said. “I want you to know that.”
“We figured as much,” 167 said.
“Eat your rice, you old freak,” 218 said.
“Why are you being kind to me?” Skinner asked, trembling. Against his will, a sob came out of his body.
“You’re hungry, your body is being repaired, there’s all sorts of crazy chemicals in your blood,” 167 said.
“Thanks for the rice,” Skinner said.
Slowly, improbably, the feeling in his legs began to return. Days flickered by, bright in the middle, darkened at either end. He spent many hours sitting in the chair by the open window, listening to birds, a robotics magazine open to an obsolete article in his lap. His spine tingled. He found it hard to discern what the clones taking care of him actually did. He came to suspect that his appearance in their lives had given them a momentary purpose. Whatever genes had been screwed up during their incubation, they’d clearly been bred to care for people. Skinner wondered why this particularly tendency hadn’t been bred into him. It confused him, the care and upkeep of other people’s inner selves. To his daughter and late son he must have seemed like a preoccupied bastard most of the time, hauling his bag of demons through his days. Whatever capacity for familial tenderness he’d possessed had been molded in war into a plethora of survival instincts. He imagined the only reason Waitimu had signed on as a contractor was because he felt it was expected of him. The boy should have gone into something constructive, like reverse- engineering a fallen city like Roon. Or something frivolous and ephemeral and vital, like poetry or music. But he’d followed his dad into the brutality business, the Darwinian industries, and unlike his lucky or unlucky old man, Waitimu hadn’t been saved by an angelic sniper perched on a rooftop.
As he stared out the window at the tottering fishbot it occurred to Skinner that he’d never questioned why there’d been so many attempts on his life. At the time, he’d chalked it up to eye-for-an-eye score settling from the last throes of the newman resistance. But why him and not Carl? Carl had offed just as many nooms… His head hurt. He fell asleep.
Soon Skinner could stand. He wobbled with 167 and 218 steadying him on either side. He could only stay upright for a minute or so but it was something. The little nanobots or whatever the hell they were were obviously working overtime in his spinal column. He wanted to walk through the field just beyond the window. He imagined his arms stretched out to either side, the feathery heads of waist-high grasses sweeping through his palms, catching their seed pods in the crooks between his fingers, the satisfying rip of seeds separating from stalks. The sun rose on the drizzly day that Skinner finally took his first steps. The clones let him walk about five feet before insisting that he sit again.
“Are they supposed to feel like my real legs?” Skinner asked.
“I don’t know,” 167 said. “I’ve never had to relearn how to use my legs.”
“Beats me,” 218 said. “The most extreme thing I’ve ever used this transmitter for was psoriasis.”
“What about your swollen left nut?” 167 said.
“Correction. And my swollen left nut.”
For the next three days, Skinner tried walking farther distances. At first he could rationalize the something-isn’t-right feeling as the simple weirdness of having to relearn how to walk. His legs jerked, twitched, flopped, kicked, and propelled him across the ground. After a week of regaining his strength, the sheer oddness of his gait wasn’t going away.
“What the hell,” Skinner said, shuffle-stepping then high-kicking his way across the field. “Why can’t I walk normally?”
“Idiot,” 167 muttered to his clone brother.
“Hey, I wasn’t the one who claimed to be a Bionet expert,” 218 said.
The two snarled at each other while Skinner danced through the grass, added a pirouette, then strutted like a cowboy with saddle rash. “I hate this! I want my real legs back!”
The clones bickered all the way home, Skinner prancing and cursing behind them. At the cabin he gathered his belongings and stood with his left knee wobbling Elvis-like, as if preparing to perform the Electric Slide. The clones stood in front of him looking awfully embarrassed.
“You guys saved my life. I thank you for that.”
“Technically, the fishbot saved your life,” 167 said.
“Which reminds me. We gotta get that thing fixed,” said 218.
Skinner embraced the clones and asked them for directions to the Cascade Highway. They pointed him toward the logging road and with a nod, the old man duckwalked into the forest. Half an hour later the road intersected with the highway, and an hour after that he made it to the trailhead where his RV was parked. The mobile container of a previous life shocked him when he climbed into it, with its framed pictures and inert mementos. He put it in gear and stepped on the accelerator.
As Skinner stood in front of his daughter’s building his hand crawled inside his jacket to flip the safety on his Coca-Cola. He looked down and realized what his hand was doing. Shoppers entered the flower shop across the street, a cyclist coasted through the intersection; nothing external was awry. But there was his heart again, quickening under his ribs. Once inside the building he found himself sweating and had to stop at the landing of the first flight of stairs. He unholstered his Coke and proceeded. When he came to Roon and Dot’s floor he passed through what felt like an invisible heat blast of death. Panting, he kicked open the door of the condominium, firearm drawn.
Blood all over the place. Broken furniture. Pictures ripped off walls. A woman’s hand on the coffee table, palm up as if beckoning the owner to come back and claim it.
The kitchen. His daughter. Pots and pans.
Bedroom. Parts of bodies in the hallway. Bullet casings.
Skinner got to the bathroom and found the upper half of his wife in the bathtub, clutching a Bionet transmitter, and the lower half of her body sitting on the toilet. Her eyelids fluttered. He clutched her head and kissed her and wept. “Chiho, Chiho, Chiho.”
“Al?” Her voice scraped the word through his head.
“Tell me who did this.”
“You bastard.”
“Who were they—”
“Is it you? The old you? Which one of you are you?”
“Come on, old girl, we’ll fix you. Just hang on to that signal.”
“Oh Al, fuck you. I’m going to die.”
“I’m not going to let you leave me. No. Pull it together, soldier.”
“Why’d you do it, Al? Are you… are you still on a mission?”
“Where’s the boy?”
“Newmans. Alki.”
“I need you, Chiho. Don’t go.”
Staring straight ahead Chiho reached up to touch his face. “I loved you. That’s… the most fucked-up… part of this whole…”
“Okay. Okay, you go. You go, my love.”
Skinner reached into the tub and found the transmitter’s OFF switch, touched it, and was done.
Thirteen hours passed.
Dark outside. Sitting on the floor holding his dead wife’s hand, Skinner finally let go, picked up the transmitter, and typed in his code.
“Welcome! What can I do for you today?” the transmitter chirped.
“Make me combat-ready,” he said.