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  And sex. There was sex. Lots of it.

  I was twenty-five and had never been laid. Hell, I never kissed a girl or held a hand or even thought about it. Now it was every night. Sometimes three times in a night and not always the same girl. That was until Jace.

  I felt her before I saw her, the back of my head tingled and the little hairs in my nostrils stiffened. When she parted the crowd—she had a way of doing that—my throat went numb; words dissolved into lumping things that stuck together. She was ripped from a Photoshopped billboard. The skin glowed, the eyes pierced, the hips swayed like a body of water. She was an iSkin addict, but I’d learn that much later. And much too late.

  We made love for two hours that night. I timed it because I was doing things like that.

  Six months later, we were married. It was extravagant, to say the least. Multiple cakes, high-powered bands, a celebrity guest list. Most of them were her friends because I still didn’t know anyone. I could hang out with a group for days and not remember them the next week. Because it didn’t matter.

  Granddad came to the wedding with wife number three. I had stopped taking his calls, didn’t even listen to his messages. By the last week of the season, someone pointed out that his box seat was empty. I didn’t notice. He didn’t approve of Jace, but his wife was the same age and just as addicted to iSkin.

  “Pheromones,” he said. “She got you with pheromones.”

  I half-listened to him explain why I was so in love. It was pheromone targeting. Human pheromones, the chemical messengers that elicited specific reactions and feelings, were complex and often different for each person. Jace had pheromones injected into her sweat glands that specifically targeted my senses, designed to trigger a love hormone dump when she was around. I thought about the way my head tingled, how my throat seized. And that was before I saw her.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  Granddad jerked his head at wife number three. She worked for a biomite specialist and said that Jace had come into the office weeks before I met her. All it took was a dab of my saliva or a blood sample. She had both. I didn’t know how she got them, but I was forgetting a lot those days.

  “This is all confidential,” she said. “I could lose my job.”

  Granddad just wanted to shit on my wedding. My life isn’t going the way he planned it, I thought. My life.

  When spring training started the following March, I was still a blissful idiot with a rag arm not worth a slice of what the Mets were paying. But I kept on smiling and the party continued, even when the headlines read The Seams Have Unraveled.

  By July, me and my 4.33 ERA were sentenced to middle relief. By then, the trainer was coming to my house every week. I was dreaming of Granddad at night, remembering Dr. Cherry Smoke and my sudden obsession with red seams. Who am I? I would wake up wondering. What am I?

  The emptiness was returning.

  The lovely charged effects were draining off before the trainer could hit me up again. A year of injects and a million dollars later and the buddha couldn’t fend off the emptiness for more than a few days. The trainer gladly stabbed me with another dose even while explaining brain chemistry and neuroplasticity. He was either brilliant or memorized a Wikipedia passage. Either way, I didn’t care.

  “You might lay off a bit,” he advised. “Let nature catch up.”

  I wanted to put my fist into the back of his throat.

  Wish I could say the accident ruined all of that, that it would’ve been a fairy-tale ending with a picket fence had I not brought it all to a halt. Somewhere beneath all the dopamine and oxytocin, though, I could hear the fat lady.

  I was a Behind the Music episode.

  The motorcycle violated my contract, scared the shit out of my wife, and pissed off Granddad. But I needed something because I wasn’t me. I was an actor hitting my marks, saying someone else’s lines. I was damn good at it, but somewhere deep inside I fucking hated it. And Jace knew it.

  That was why she planned to have a baby.

  I found out through Granddad’s wife. She was still working for the biomite specialist and still giving up the gossip on my wife, even though she could lose her job. I knew every time she had a boob adjustment, a brain enhancement, or tummy trim. Even when she ordered a new pheromone, one that didn’t match my profile. She was targeting someone on the side and I didn’t do a damn thing.

  The baby, though… that was too much.

  Jace had an ovarian injection, one that would turn them on. She did it without telling me. Maybe she could see I was fading, I was losing interest. Maybe she really did love me, I sometimes wondered. But we couldn’t bring a baby into this scrap heap we called a marriage. I’d like to say Jace was a distortion of her true self, a reflection so warped that she wouldn’t recognize herself. But so was I.

  I just couldn’t do that to a baby.

  I climbed on a brand new KTM 1290 Super Duke R that morning and woke up eight weeks later. The news reports were blunt and viral images of the carnage filled the Internet—scattered teeth and my million-dollar arm bending the wrong way. Besides a new arm, they printed a new jaw, three new organs, a new lung and a new leg from the knee down.

  I was told that Jace left me and the Mets voided my contract. Only one of those things saddened me. Even worse, the doctor told me the extent of the damage done by the buddha.

  “Charred.” That was what he called it. “Your biomites are in a charred state.”

  My chemistry was overworked, the neurons going on strike. Charred was not the label an athlete wanted. It wasn’t what anyone wanted. Rehab, I was told, was my only chance to make things right. I figured it was my final stop because if it didn’t work and baseball was done, I was checking out. No point in living anymore. I didn’t want to be around to see the ESPN biopic of an athlete that had it all only to end with a fade-out of me sitting in a dark apartment.

  For the first time in my life, I was scared.

  Granddad was there. After all that, he came in and hugged me. I started crying right there in the hospital.

  He found me a rehab center that specialized in biomite addiction. In the old days, someone could throw away the booze or flush the coke, but what did you do when your own body was getting you high? I could just stop taking the charge, but there were others out there that had transformed their brains into opiate factories that just flat-ass collapsed. They had become the bottle of booze. I was lucky, someone told me. The buddha was a kinder, gentler charge. It gave me a chance to recover.

  As much as I wanted to get better, I hated that fucking place. I don’t remember much, but at one point I was put in a straitjacket. Much later, I cried for my dad. Someone said that was good.

  There were also clay injections, the extraction and replication of my own organic cells and reinsertion into my body to cleanse it of toxic biomites. For all the good biomites had done in the world, for every case of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and autism it cured, there were ten biomite addicts chasing the buddha. Experts were saying that biomites would soon go beyond the body, that phones would be integrated into the brain, there would be thought transmissions like texts and audio implants and imbedded video in the visual cortex. The world would be more connected than ever.

  “It’s too much, too fast,” a counselor said. “The human race isn’t ready for that.”

  Granny would’ve loved that place.

  There was even some brainsculpting treatment to return my habit of thought back to normal. How they knew what normal looked like was beyond me. I didn’t. The technician that put me in the brainsculpter, this MRI-looking machine, said my body would know normal. That seemed a little shortsighted since my body craved the buddha. Besides, what did my normal look like? Was it before Granddad brainsculpted me into a Hall of Fame pitcher? (Hall of Fame was a little in doubt, at that point.) Would I give a shit about baseball when the technician pulled me out of the noisy tube, or would I come out loving fingerpaints and gardening?

  “You can�
��t change your true nature,” the counselor told me.

  Isn’t that what Granddad did?

  A year in rehab and I was clean and normal. I was thirty-five and, as it turned out, still loved baseball. I stopped asking myself if that was my normal or if that was Granddad’s doing. It didn’t matter. Everyone always thought that once diseases were cured and the problems solved, life would be just a long road of green lights.

  I couldn’t sit at home watching baseball if I wanted to stay clean, so I started advocating for biomite reform. Abuse wasn’t limited to the addict. It was everywhere. A girl was disqualified from the National Spelling Bee when it was discovered she had been brainsculpted with an unsanctioned strain of biomites that boosted her intelligence equal to Deep Blue. They asked her to spell pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis. She did.

  A teenager had been dropped off at an emergency room when her head swelled to the size of a pumpkin after they applied a knock-off strain of iSkin meant to facesculpt their features. She looked more like a Bratz.

  A Little Leaguer was found to be 99% biomites after his parents arranged for a complete transfusion. That became a landmark debate on whether he was still human or a synthetic being.

  I was asked to coach a minor league team. I declined and, despite the advice of everyone to give up the dream, including the agent I made wealthy, I made another run at the majors. The new arm from the motorcycle accident was lively and, once my mind was right, every bit as good. It was the strain of biomites used to rebuild it that made it spectacular. Granddad never said so, but he had a little something to do with that.

  A year after I returned, Major League Baseball established biomite augmentation limits and brainsculpting directives to protect the integrity of the game. That would have prevented me and my new arm from ever playing again.

  It also explained how a fifty-five-year-old was pitching the World Series.

  There would always be an asterisk by my name. History wouldn’t remember me asking for the seams or all those strikeouts. I would forever be the poster child of brainsculpting. Was it fair that I was made that way? Was that really human?

  Biomites got me back in the game, put me in Wrigley with the bases loaded and a chance to reverse the curse. I was fifty-five years old with the seams in my hand. I didn’t know what I would be the next day or the day after that.

  But I was made for this.

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  Halfskin

  BOOK 1

  The Halfskin trilogy

  M0THER

  Blogger’s Reaction to the Birth of M0ther

  ______

  THE REAL AVENGER’S BLOG

  Shooting Truth-Bullets Since Birth

  Subscribers: 3,233

  ______

  It’s the end of time, peeps.

  Mark this date, put a black X on your calendar because it’s all over, starting today. It used to be that if you didn’t like the laws where you lived, you just moved to another state or another country. Freedom existed somewhere in the world. We had a choice. I mean, hell, if you were desperate enough, you could live on the South Pole with penguins and shit.

  Not anymore.

  Today, it’s all over.

  Today, M0ther was born.

  Who’s M0ther? Our M0ther. Already got a mother? Now you got two, only this one will know everything about you. You can’t hide from her. She’ll know when you’re full of crap, know where you stash your porn, know when you pick your nose and when you eat it.

  You’ll hate her, and she’ll know that, too.

  Case you’ve been asleep for the last ten years, the Mitochondria Terraforming Hierarchy of Record is what I’m talking about.

  Let’s just call her M0ther.

  A mother that doesn’t bake cookies or wash your underwear. She’s not getting up to make you French toast or wipe your nose. Nope. This bitch is going to spy on you until you’re dead. Which may be sooner than you think.

  M0ther is somewhere in the frozen plains of Wyoming. No pictures of her exist because no one’s allowed to even fly over. But rumors say she’s this massive dome, a computer the size of a football stadium, like some artificial brain heaved out of the frozen soil that’s wirelessly connected with every biomite in existence.

  Did you catch that? EVERY BIOMITE IN EXISTENCE!

  Hear that buzzing on your phone? She’s listening.

  Feel that tickle on your laptop? She knows you’re tapping.

  All that Do Not Covet Your Neighbor’s Wife crap? Yeah, that’s the real deal now. M0ther might tell your wife what you’re thinking about doing to Joe-Bob’s wife mowing the lawn in a tube top.

  George Orwell wasn’t even close, man. I mean, Big Brother was just a peashooter compared to M0ther. Big Brother was pissing on a forest fire; M0ther’s bringing the goddamn ocean.

  Here’s the official statement from Marcus Anderson, chief of the Biomite Oversight Committee.

  (BTW, he looks like a gargoyle. Right?)

  It is with great pleasure that, after ten years of global effort, I present to you the greatest feat of humankind. I present to you a regulatory system that will keep all people safer and healthier for centuries to come. Bionanotechnology has put us on the brink of greatness, but with that comes uncertainty and danger. The human species has the potential to live forever. Or end tomorrow.

  I prefer the former.

  Mitochondria Terraforming Hierarchy of Record is linked to every booted cellular-sized biomite living inside our bodies. Its primary function will be to monitor individual levels of biomites and take appropriate action if, or when, they cross a previously determined threshold. This will keep us human.

  This will keep us safe.

  Forever.

  I don’t know about you, but this is not a gross infringement on our freedom: it’s raping it. I don’t want anything or anyone peeking into my biomites; that’s none of your business, none of my neighbor’s, and it sure as hell ain’t the government’s.

  Biomites aren’t evil, dude. They’re artificial stem cells, that’s all. What’s the big deal? If you want to be 100% artificial, be my guest, that’s your business, bro. I don’t give a rat’s pink sphincter what you do with your body. You want to boost your brain with biomites to get smarter? Hey, as long as you got the cash, good for you.

  What the chief didn’t say in his official statement was what exactly the previously determined threshold is.

  Want to know?

  You should, before you rebuild your kidney or tone those wrinkles, you should know that when your body is 40% biomites, you’re a redline. And redlines go to jail.

  JAIL.

  Think I’m joking?

  They call it a Detainment and Observation Center. You can’t leave, you don’t order takeout, you shower with other redlines. That’s jail. You get a federally funded cot and three hots while they watch your biomite levels. On a side note, you’d think the scientists could figure out how to keep biomites from reproducing and slowly taking over our bodies once we get seeded. They are the geniuses, for Christ’s sake. Doesn’t seem like it should be all that hard.

  But all right, whatever. So they continue dividing once they’re in our bodies. It’s worth the trade-off: they are the answer to every disease, every shortcoming, every desire known to man. They’ll figure it out; give them some time.

  But here’s the kicker. Guess what happens when you hit 50%. Guess, no seriously. Take a stab. When your body becomes halfskin, when it’s 50% God-given, good ole-fashioned organic cells and 50% artificial biomite cells, guess what M0ther’s going to do?

  Bitch is going to shut you off.

  That’s right.

  And when she does, when she turns off all your biomites like a light switch, what do you think happens to the other half? The living half?

  Yeah. That’s right.

  It’s real, peeps. Real as it gets.

  The death of human liberty happened today and you p
robably didn’t even feel it.

  Well, I did.

  2

  Cali knelt down to reboot a server. Her knee hit the concrete, driving spikes up her thigh. She cursed and didn’t hold back. She stood a little too fast and steadied herself against the stainless steel rack. A head rush stormed her entire body, weakening her knees. She remained still until it passed and made a mental note to drink some water.

  She walked two more rows. Computer after computer blinked green lights at her. No one would suspect she was in a suburban brick house with a pink flamingo in the front yard. The basement looked more like an industrial IT department. It took two air conditioners to keep the house cool.

  She couldn’t afford to shut her lab down. Not now.

  No one could afford a setup like that—hell, there were companies that couldn’t afford it. But she had money. Blood money. When she married Thomas, he joked he’d need another life insurance policy. Luck was not something Cali’s family possessed. She thought he was joking, but he took out a ridiculous life insurance policy on himself so that Cali, Avery and Nix would never worry about money again if something ever happened.

  And it did.

  Cali sat at a desk cluttered with gadgets and monitors, microscopes and assemblers. She sipped at a water bottle while waiting for an espresso-like machine to drip a gun-metal droplet into a flask. No coffee from that machine. It was uniquely constructed to produce congealed biomites: the raw synthetic stem cells with designer DNA coding. At one drop per day, it was a slow process.

  She took a heavy flask of mercury-like liquid off the shelf and swirled it under a circular magnifying glass attached to a hinged arm.

  Good.

  It would take a complete analysis to see if they worked, but she’d seen enough raw biomites to know the subtle colors, just like an Eskimo knew snow. These were brighter than usual, less viscous. Exactly what she expected.