I awake.
Hers is the first face I see.
“Congratulations on another successful mission, Ray,” she says. Her dreads are pulled back in a scrunchie, and I can sort of see the tablet she’s holding through the reflection in her glasses. Oddly, her foot is up on another office chair, in a plaster cast halfway up her calf. “Ready to establish baseline?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“Dr. Perlin is fine, I’m not your nanny.”
“Sorry. Do I ever remember to call you Dr. Perlin?”
“No. But hope springs eternal. We always end up settling on Nina.”
I sit up in the protein-rich nutrient bath I lie in between missions so my nanites can replenish themselves without the necessity of cohering to my body. As I get up, the milky slime washes off my body, and for just a second I can see a glimpse of the me that is me without the nanites: bones and veins and muscles. But then the nanites swarm over me like a parent wanting to shield their kid from the harsh realities of the world, and my chalk-white skin covers my delicate human insides again. How much of me is human and how much is nanites? I’ve tried to ask Dad, but the whole line of questioning makes him turn green. I guess it’d make me sick too if I gave it any thought. And if I had anything resembling a regular human digestive system and nanites didn’t microscopically break down every bit of food and drink I swallow. I haven’t gagged, much less puked, since I became their carrier.
I sort of miss going to the bathroom, which I know makes me weird. I couldn’t really tell you why. My body doesn’t produce any waste materials it needs to expel. Any organic molecule is useful for rebuilding bone, muscle, and skin, and my nanites don’t let anything useful escape their grasp.
“What is your full name?” Nina’s fingernail hovers over the tablet’s screen, ready to check off the box for each correctly answered question.
“Ray Garrison Jr.”
“Operational call sign?”
“Bloodshot.”
“Who employs you?”
“Project Rising Spirit.”
“What is your primary overall mission?”
“To safeguard regular Americans from coming to harm as a result of unsecured psiots.”
“What is your secondary overall mission?”
“To apprehend previously unsecured psiots before they can become a menace to themselves or others and bring them in for safekeeping and study.”
“What is your tertiary overall mission?”
“To kick ass and look great doing it.”
“Ray . . .”
“To accomplish my primary and secondary missions with a maximum of stealth and a minimum of collateral damage, to prevent generalized knowledge about the existence of psiots from leaking out into the general public before decision-makers at the appropriate level of government deem it the appropriate time to divulge that knowledge to them.”
“Good. Is every point on a circle an ending point or a starting point?”
“A starting point.”
“What is more real to you, your dreams or your waking life?”
A girl’s face. Wispy blonde hair swept over the left side of her head past her ear, right side shaved. Green eyes, long lashes. Small nose stud, left nostril. She’s leaning on the railing of a balcony. She’s looking back toward me, smiling, and then she dissipates into the air, like she’s made of vapor. There’s a glittering cityscape that she merges into, as if she’s made of light. I don’t have any reaction to this, like it’s natural. Like it’s what she wants, to be part of everything around us all the time.
“Ray?” Nina is looking at me over her glasses.
“Waking life,” I say.
“Is the sun new each day?”
For some reason, that one gives me trouble.
“Yes?”
“Are you asking me or are you telling me?”
“Telling you. The sun is new each day.”
“Mmm.” She frowns and speed-types something one-handed on the tablet. I can’t read what it is in the reflection of her glasses. Annoying. Makes me feel like a new shampoo that’s being market tested.
I nod at the cast on her foot. “What happened to you?”
“I’m the one with questions. Do you have any recollection of any details from your previous mission?”
I think of my dream of the vanishing girl, but that can’t possibly count. “No.”
“Can you tell me why your short-term memory is wiped after every mission?”
“In case I’m captured or scanned telepathically in the field, I can’t give away any actionable intel about Project Rising Spirit, its methods, or ongoing operations.”
“Perfect.” She pokes the last box on the screen. “We’re done.”
“Great. My turn. Ankle, what gives?”
“Ah . . .” Nina rubs her brow. “Car accident. Tractor trailer.”
“Oh, man. That sucks. You get the guy’s license plate?”
She blinks at me and sighs. “You know, the son of a gun just drove off like he didn’t even know it had happened.”
* * *
Chef is a genius. Egg-white omelet with feta, sliced cherry tomatoes, and baby spinach. A lumberjack stack of pancakes with two over-easies on top and layered with maple-smoked bacon, Canadian bacon, and chicken sausage. Blueberries atop yogurt. Grapefruit juice. Energy drink. Two-percent milk. Earl Grey tea.
The nanites can snack on their nutrient slime all they like. Me, Ray Jr., I need a bit more flavor.
I’m the only one in the mess hall other than Chef when I set my two trays of breakfast—one in each hand—down at a table and start eating. Dad likes to keep as few eyes on me as possible. He wants me mysterious and a little bit scary to everybody. Half rumor, half urban legend. It’s hard to be a fearsome bogeyman shoving a chocolate croissant in your mouth and getting crumbly flakes all over your lips in a cafeteria at five thirty in the morning.
I feel the cold metal of the katana against my neck before the keenness of the blade edge threatens to cut my flesh. I don’t see any reason not to finish my croissant, though, sucking the pasty chocolate and pastry flakes off my fingertips.
“Cold! Real cold. Them nanites grow your cojones back, Junior?” With a deep, raspy chuckle through his respirator, Dodge takes the sword off my neck and walks around the table to drag a chair out, turn it backward, and sit on it, facing me. He has two arms and two legs and just the one head, so he must have survived the last mission relatively unscathed too.
“I’d ask if they reconstructed your brain, Dodge, but it’s hard to build back what was never there to begin with.”
Dodge chuckles, adjusting the four-lensed shades that conceal whatever horrible shapes his eyes have grown into. “Tough talk for a kid who’d be absent one head if I wanted to make it gone. You let me get the drop on you way too easy.”
“You just keep telling yourself that, Dodge.” In reality, I could sense the nanites in his body as he was coming down the hall into the cafeteria, a low hum like the buzz of fluorescent lights. He’s obsessed with bullying me, but I can’t quite bring myself to hate him. Life gave him a bad deal.
When Dad first got his hands on the nanites, he tried them out on wounded soldiers. Dodge was supervising his unit’s evacuation out of Afghanistan during the first pullout when he made the poor decision to take his helmet off to adjust the photo of his kids inside it right before his armored personnel carrier went over an IED buried in the road by the Taliban as a going-away present. The blast blew apart everyone in the vehicle but him. Still, the explosion propelled him headfirst at the ceiling of the cab so fast it caved in his skull. The impact destroyed enough of his brain that he would have been in a veterans home staring into space for the rest of his life had PRS not gotten its hands on him.
The nanites had rejected every other soldier Dad injected them into, breaking down their cellular structures in a writhing mass of mindless gray goo, forcing PRS to incinerate them in a magma-intensity plasma bath.
That wasn’t Dodge’s fate, though the way he complains, he might think he got it worse. The nanites reconstructed his flattened brain, let him walk and talk again, but for whatever reason didn’t allow him the same level of control over the microscopic machines that I enjoy. His nanites keep him alive, but whenever he needs them to regrow his body, they do so in pretty creative ways: extra limbs, bulbous growths, multichromatic tentacles. My nanites are loyal workhorses; Dodge’s nanites are drunken rebel artists who do whatever they darn well please.
So while he’s strong as I am and has more practical real-life combat experience than me, it’s hard to send him out into the field publicly because if he gets shot up, he can turn into a horrific mutant within the first few rounds of the firefight. Hard to convince people you’re the good guys fighting against psychic monsters when the so-called good guys are way scarier than any psiot anybody’s ever met. Dodge serves as my primary support in the field but has to lurk in the shadows, stepping in whenever I walk into something hairy.
I wonder sometimes about the family in the photograph that was in his helmet. I can’t get much out of anybody, but Nina intimated to me once that Dad let Dodge go back and visit his family, even after PRS had him declared legally dead on the operating table. That meeting must not have gone very well because he lives here at Fresh Kills now. I haven’t heard about his family since. I try not to think about how Dodge might have reacted if they rejected him. I’ve certainly seen what he’s done to total strangers.
Dodge unbuckles his respirator. He lights a cigarette and lets out the smoke with a leer in my direction. Idiot. Who knows how the nanites are reconstructing the lungs he’s ruining? I get the impression Dodge just doesn’t care anymore. Hard to trust someone like that to have your back in the field. I should probably say something to Dad, but . . . PRS is all Dodge has going for him. It’s this or the incinerator.
“They tell you anything about the last mission?” he asks.
“Dumb question. You know they don’t.”
He shrugs with a maddeningly private chuckle. “You never get curious?”
“Obviously. But it’s war. Us versus the indigo children. Stuff happens. Better I don’t know every last detail. Besides, I like to live in the moment.”
“Sure that isn’t just ’cause they don’t give you any other choice?” He slices his thumb open on the blade of the nanite-thin sword lying on the table between us. He watches the wound erupt in an orange lichen-like growth. He loves that stupid katana.
Oh, who am I kidding. The katana is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll get to wield it someday.
“Say, how old are you supposed to be?”
“I was sixteen when . . .”
When my internal organs failed. When I nearly died.
When Dad got fed up with no doctors being able to do anything about my AML—acute myeloid leukemia. My blood had turned against me, abnormal white “blasts” clogging up the marrow in my bones, preventing any good red or white blood cells from getting produced. I struggled for a few months on various exotic, painful treatments. Still, by that point, any other kid, with any other father, would have been dead.
Any other kid wouldn’t have had a dad with access to a top-secret nutrient pool full of nanomachines that could reconstruct cells on a molecular level but had rejected every other human host they had been tried on—except Dodge. Sort of.
“You even know how long ago that was, that your dad, uh, ‘saved’ you?” he asks me. “No windows in this bunker. You don’t go to school. You don’t have any little buddies to cut class or sneak smokes with. They scrub your noggin clear after every op. You got no way of knowing how time’s passing. They say you were sixteen when your dad filled you full of bugs. Okay, fine. But do you know how old you are now?”
“Do you?” I get why Dodge hates me. I’m the boss’s kid, already privileged, yet I was the trillion-in-one test subject whose nanites bonded with him as soon as Dad injected them into my body. It’s like my mere existence is fate giving him the finger. I totally get it.
Doesn’t mean it’s not totally annoying to have him constantly laughing in my face and making his cute little remarks. He ashes his cigarette right onto the cafeteria floor and makes a little shrug. “What’s in it for me to tell you?”
“Well, why don’t you tell me what it is you want, Dodge?”
He thinks about it a little bit, then drops the mostly smoked butt on the tile and crushes it with a boot. “A rematch.”
“I don’t have any memory of us fighting, Dodge.”
“Maybe that’s because I smacked you so silly it knocked the memory right out of your head.”
“Then why would you need a rematch?”
“Because you keep getting back up.” He pushes back out of his chair with the shriek of its feet on the floor tiles and, nanosword in hand, stalks out of the cafeteria.