My left eye and right eye point in two completely different directions, and I can see both perspectives simultaneously, superimposed over each other, as the two halves of my brain try to reconcile the differing views, trying to merge them into a single image. It’s like looking at a big screen with two different projectors showing two different movies, overlapping in the center.
My left eye sees the cooler lying on its side. Left watches as Dodge, breathing heavily, lets the blade of the nanosword dissemble into its component nanites and disappear. He picks up the cooler by its handle and crosses the pavilion and out of Left’s field of vision.
But Right can see him grab the thermite charge and amble off, past the infinity pool, back down to the generator where I found it.
It’s beginning to dawn on me how ridiculous I’ve been. I keep thinking of “me” as if I were a single, continuous entity. But in fact, there are innumerable parts of me, networked together with the same identical consciousness. I am splitting the “I” ego of my self between the two halves of my head because visual stimuli are so much stronger than anything else.
The truth is, though, as hard as it can be for a mind trained to be a regular human to process, every part of me is as much “I” as any other part of me. I feel knots in my stomach even when my brain is three feet away from my guts. And in halves. My breath catches in my throat even when I have no lungs or throat.
Maybe I should stop obsessing so much over who I am. Simply accepting what I am is enough.
And the fact is, I am. Red Cell hacked me in half, but suddenly the right side of my face sees the ground receding several feet into the distance as it is pulled upward to, oh, about shoulder height on my body and is fixed there.
I am curious, and the rest of my body indulges that curiosity. As my left eye is suddenly raised upward, the hand that’s holding it turns it toward the rest of my body, and I can see the rest of me stitching myself back together at the seams, the nanites briefly visible as they repair the damage the nanosword did to me along the center.
Best of all, I don’t even feel a pang of hunger. Must be that I only need to add more nutrients when the nanites have to re-create cells that were destroyed or damaged by crude, explosive kinetic trauma. The nanosword cuts between molecules, so the nanites can just rearrange material that’s already there to heal me. No additional matter required.
If anything, the nanosword is the least effective weapon to use against me. Barely even slowed me down by a few minutes. The only problem is the nerve endings build back first, so I have to bite both halves of my tongue to keep from crying out. Why can’t those get built last? What’s the rush? Maybe Dad did that to keep me from running into traffic. Sure, it won’t kill me, but it may hurt badly enough I wish it did.
Now whole once again, I sprint in the direction of where I saw Dodge go and zero in on him at the same spot where I found the thermal charge earlier. He’s bent down and cursing under his breath as he tries to rearm the charge attached to the gasoline drum.
I clear my throat.
The look on Dodge’s face when he turns around and sees me coming at him almost makes the intense pain of my re-formation utterly worthwhile.
He produces the nanosword, and the blade re-forms by the time I reach him, but I grab the wrist holding the hilt and break it. He screams and lets go of the sword. I grab it in midair. He gibbers incoherently as nano-grown tentacles emerge from the wound and start re-forming his hand into some incomprehensible appendage.
“Sorry, Dodge, but I’ve been giving it some thought, and I’ve made a decision. There’s just no upside to you.”
“There’s no upside to me?” Clutching his broken wrist, he drops to his knees. “You don’t get to talk to me like that, Nepo-Frankenstein. I served my country! I broke my freaking skull open while serving my country. That’s supposed to mean something, okay? That means they owe me. Those bastards owe me!”
He tries to stand up, but I cut his belly open with the sword. He howls and falls back.
I pick up the thermite charge and make sure he stays on his back with my boot on his sternum. The wound is already beginning to heal at the edges, so quick as I can, I shove the bomb into his squishy guts as far as it will go. He screams again.
“You killed your family when they rejected you. You were going to kill everyone on this island. You’re going to keep trying to kill me. I don’t see an upside to letting you go. Sorry.”
The hole in his gut is already closing around the thermite, skin replaced by a scaly, ridged substance I’ve never seen before. I bet nobody’s ever seen it before. I walk away.
“At least I had a family!” he’s yelling, clawing at the inhuman scab but to no avail. “Nobody is gonna love a freak like you, buddy. Ever. At least I used to be human! There’s no upside to you, Bloodshot! You think PRS is just gonna let you walk? Tool around town paying your bills and clocking into work pretending you’re a person, instead of the out-of-control science-fair project you are? With nobody watching your back? You’re gonna miss me, boy, and sooner than you think.”
After about ten paces, I stop and turn back to him. This should be far enough. “Maybe you should’ve been nicer to me then.”
Laughing, he holds up a small device. “You forgetting something? What do you think you’re going to do without the detonator?”
“You forgetting something? I am a detonator. This is the end of our team-up. Goodbye, Red Cell.”
I wordlessly command the thermite charge to go off, and even my superhuman retinas flare out briefly as Dodge is consumed by a nova burst of white light, an earthbound star for a few fleeting seconds.
In the last few moments, there’s an inhuman hiss, and a few tendrils flail futilely outward in an attempt to escape the lumpy pyre, but then they’re soon consumed by the white-hot flames too.
Pretty soon, it’s just a pile of ash on the flagstones, no different from the dust that’s lain there since Hercules last passed by. It doesn’t move.
Looks like Dodge ended up in that incinerator after all.
I am aware of faces gathering around me from the darkness on the edges of the rapidly dying fire. They’re not coming any closer. Which is probably smart.
“Sorry to give you bad news, but you’re not out of the woods yet,” I call out. “You should get on the horn to your parents, to the press, everybody you know. There are people coming for you, and your only hope is they’re not willing to risk killing you out in the open where everyone can see. So tell people what you’ve seen here. And I mean now.”
I take a step toward them, and the would-be reality show contestants scatter into the night. I see the detonator Dodge dropped on the ground when he ignited. I crush it under my boot in case anybody gets any ideas. I see Dodge’s skull comm lying on the flagstones nearby. I pick it up and press it to the side of my head, reattaching it to my throat.
“How much of that did you get?” I say.
“Way more than I wanted to,” Nina says. “You’re making a big mistake, kid. I don’t know if they’re gonna let you come back from this one.”
“You seem like an all-right sort, Nina. I like you. I really think you ought to get another job.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Then let me simplify it for you: If you’re still at PRS the next time I see you, I won’t treat you any differently than the rest of them, no matter how I feel about you personally.”
“Damn it, Ray. Dodge was scum, but he was right about one thing. They’re not going to just let you walk away.”
“Feeling’s mutual.”
I rip off the comm and crush it between my fingers.
Then I run and dive off the edge of the cliff, into the Mediterranean.
* * *
I try swimming toward the mainland. One hundred kilometers, give or take.
It takes a while.
To replenish my protein stores, I do it like a whale would do it, swimming underwater and hoovering all the small marine life and seaweed in my mouth that I can. Seawater, my body simply expels through its pores.
The McEverything, Mediterranean version, is a thought that pops into my head, though from where I couldn’t tell you.
During the day I dive as deep as I can and swim as far as I can below the waves to avoid detection. Turns out I can, in fact, go underwater for about an hour before my “lungs” start seizing up and I have to return to the surface. The nanomachines must require contact with air to maintain regular functioning.
(Yet I still think of them as “the nanomachines,” as if they’re separate from me instead of all I am. I don’t think, I must require contact with air. I’m not ready to fully embrace the real me, not yet. I’m not ready to give up on a Bloodshot that is a self, a person, different from the machine collective.)
When the sun sets again, I stop swimming and float on the water, looking up at the stars in all their infinite glowing combinations. You feel like you can see every part of the universe when the sky is clear like it is tonight.
I feel like I have as many pasts as there are stars in the sky.
There’s the Bloodshot that PRS wanted to sell me, Captain USA Man, taking out Uncle Sam’s enemies and tossing the ol’ pigskin around with Pops until it’s time to video chat with my devoted girlfriend.
Then there’s “Nepo-Frankenstein,” as Dodge called me, the accidental killing machine, an artificial-intelligence-plus-body with the actual age of a first grader but the mental and physical development of a college-bound senior. The last-ditch attempt to control a willful technology by repeatedly lying to it.
Both versions have pluses and minuses, but I’m not a big fan of either. What I’m after is this third Bloodshot, the one they’re all scared of back at Fresh Kills, the Bloodshot that must have come to life during my last, mysterious mission. They keep trying to wipe my short-term memory after every op, but that must be producing diminishing returns. Some emotional connections aren’t so easily erased. They lurk under my conscious self, waiting for me to access them.
That’s the real Bloodshot. That’s the Bloodshot I want to be.
On my back, with nothing but the stars above me and the sea beneath me, I empty my mind and try to meditate. I try to make my mind completely empty and hope what I’m looking for will bob to the surface.
A seagull’s scream and then another and finally another startle me into opening my eyes. I must have fallen into whatever passes for sleep for me—I mean, even computers sleep if you let them go idle for long enough.
The stars are gone, replaced by a gray sky getting brighter by the slowly rising sun. I roll onto my stomach and look ahead, my feet kicking below me. The horizon at what I’m pretty sure is north is dominated by a green strip of land.
My attention is brought to my right side by another cry, this one quite human. I turn and see a squat, rusty tugboat bobbing a short swim away from me. A tall, skinny man is standing at the prow in khaki pants and a life jacket, close-trimmed Afro whitening at the temples. He waves half-heartedly at me, as if not entirely believing what he is seeing and embarrassed to be trying to get a mirage’s attention.
I wave back, and his hand lowers. He seems almost disappointed that I’m real.
I swim toward the boat. The man picks up an oar, and at first I think it’s to help me up, but he clutches it defensively across his body as I clamber aboard. “We don’t have any more food and almost no water,” he says in English in an East African accent. His thick, intense eyebrows give his face a very serious cast. “Nothing left for you. You understand me?”
I nod. I see now sitting on the main deck are about a dozen people across three generations, a white-haired grandma right down to a months-old baby in his mother’s arms. Most share oar guy’s imperious eyebrows. Their bodies are slack with misery and hardship, and their faces are taut with fear. Of me specifically, but of their current situation in general.
My friend with the oar eases his grip on it somewhat. “Where do you come from? A ship? Is there a ship nearby?”
I shake my head. “Small island. Way off that way.” I wave toward the southeast. “What about you?”
I can tell he has a million other questions, not the least of which is, Then how are you still alive, but instead he answers mine. “Addis Ababa, originally. On the Libyan coast, we give the man the euros we’ve scrimped and saved for months—years!—expecting him to take us, but no, he gives us a chart and this piece of garbage”—he kicks the bridge cabin with one foot—“points north, and says, ‘Go with God.’ For the first few days, we did all right for ourselves, but then on Friday, this massive storm comes through, and a giant wave flips us over, then a second wave flips us over again. We all survived by the grace of heaven and the edges of our fingernails, but all the instruments—the engine?” He draws his fingers across his throat. “Kkkkt! We’ve been praying for days for a ship to come by, or for that land to get closer. But neither’s happened. You know anything about machines?”
I blink. “You could say that,” I say.
“Ah! Then perhaps I spoke too soon. Some of our prayers have been answered.” He reaches a hand out. “Yonas. In Hebrew, Jonah. My brother-in-law told me people named Yonas should avoid sea voyages. I should have listened.”
It’s my turn to hesitate. “Ray,” I finally say when I take his hand.