“Mr. Mink, it’s over. You’re going to recover.”
In the gaze of this unrecognized person, medical professional otherwise beyond memory, through bullet proofed lexan typical of twice-robbed convenience stores: the dour reservation preceding terminal prognoses.
Cancerous nodes and their inevitable spread through lymphatic systems.
“Recover,” he repeated.
Beneath his blunt hands, buttocks, rather than the single-use paper coverings from his youth, lay self-sanitizing newmaterial, arrayed with nanoscale, bacteria piercing needles.
The omelet-yellow bench padding slightly tacky, clinging as a microfiber towel to callus or scar.
“Your short term-memory, as you consented—” she indicated with raised chin and lowered eyelid toward the documents before him—“has been, well, ‘sacrificed’ is the word you used. More like damaged. But these are known side effects. We’re very confident you’ll heal.”
A small ledge sticking out beneath the scratched plastic barrier held signed paperwork he had only ever seen on screens.
Talern Mink remembered his name, nothing of breakfast.
Maybe then, his last good meal?
Yes, there it was. Delicious quality of the selfsteak grown overnight on his rice cooker’s “nurture” setting from a cheek scraping and seared himself in the classic style: with an iron pan over gas flame.
“You’ve been railed,” the woman said, unsmirking. “No sexual metaphor, taken from electrical engineering. Think of it like your nervous system kept briefly at max voltage. You’re going to experience very vividly while neuroplasticity reassigns pathways.”
Railed.
Talern felt, certainly, a kind of post-amphetamine raggedness of synapse that had come to follow overindulgent night living—unassociated with cramped, overlighted rooms and life-free air.
He tried to swallow, difficult as getting down gigantic krill oil capsules enclosed in sandpaper rather than their usual agar shells.
“What did you...?”
“Not me, our talented surgeons are in the clean room washing up. Getting auditory cortical implants aligned and folded is the delicate work. I’m Dyanna, your counsel.”
Breathing worked (scent of talcum, deodorizer-free antiseptic), but somewhere faintly, whining.
Noise approximating threat.
Talern dragged a nail along the crook of his ear, flicking away the grime that gathered underneath.
“Why’d I need surgery?” he asked.
“It was elective. I could offer technical reassurance on receiver lobes and intra-neuron signal to noise ratios, but clients want mental cosmetisurgery for any number of reasons.” She smiled at him, holding up a protofeathered hand, vaguely saurian, nails done up in points. “Body surgery too. But your operation was perceptual, no endocrine tampering. That’s why these documents are printout, your phone’s off.”
Talern understood finally the walls’ anthropomorphic portraiture, the counselor’s sub-centimeter cropped hair, gold ringed nostrils, and, yes, nearly-taloned hands.
These clinics had swallowed up market share when sex reassignment surgeries and abortion had been federally illegalized. Offering service based on constitutional rights to assembly and defining all procedures aesthetic rather than medical necessity, the clinics were subjected merely to domestic terrorism rather than regulatory foreclosure.
A dark skinned woman with dreaded hair entered from the doorway behind Dyanna. Her arms were tattooed in magnesium white ink, depicting various marine life (benthic gulper eels and tube worms toward fingertip and knuckle, toothed whales, thresher sharks in the pit of her elbow, light basking kelp and tidal anemones at deltoid).
She looked at Talern only once before handing over logo-embossed folders (“Tuck and Stuck,” Talern read). Dyanna creaked back in her five castor chair to thank over her shoulder the other woman—left already for the clinic’s depths.
“Don’t worry,” she said, examining contents, “finance got back, you’re paying very little, comparatively.”
Papers featuring more significant digits than the annual gross revenues of collegeless small towns revolved within the window’s tiny, bullet repelling cage toward him.
Economic calculus crimped lines into Talern’s forehead.
“Confusion, it’s normal Mr. Mink. And let me assure you, vague, custom jobs for feline subjective experience or ‘dragon vision’? Pricey and unpredictable. Your operation? It’s a rare one, but, well established, so the surgeons tell me.”
“That woman. Was she upset?”
Dyanna’s eyes slid from him.
“She had, well, a friend, a close one, who underwent something like this.” She could not quite muster reassurance, but something slacked in her face. “Following this procedure Talern... career, interpersonal relationships? They tend to suffer. That’s why we want you to call us, if things get bad.”
To call the obligate parasitism of Talern’s labor “career” would have, had his nerves not been so recently flung sunward, brought him laughter.
Some of the last unalgorithmed work in pop music involved illegal hit-replication. Forgeries appropriate enough for unlicensed public room karaoke or autogenerated children’s television programming. Not so elegant as to flag these incorrect versions of Imagine or Hollaback Girl for DMCA strike via record conglomerates’ panoptic, all-trawling web crawlers, which sniffed unceasingly for the faintest carrionscent of potential lawsuit.
Talern clutched at the paperwork, thanking the woman whom he considered, heartily undershooting her job’s post-secondary educational requirements, a clerk or secretary.
Shuffling past weapons detectors and out into the street, Talern entered a diner neighboring the clinic whose name he did not bother to glance.
The medieval-themed chain restaurant sold terrestrial equivalents to bycatch that roamed the predator-extinct heartland of sub-suburban America: insect fat-added pulverized deer meats, deep fried and cornmeal battered.
The crisped granular breading felt to the tongue (or rather his still-irradiant brainstem) like carbonated static.
Pushing the deerpuppy’s crushed, single-use polystyrene casing past the eager, spring-hinged jaw of an injection molded trash can shaped like a tonsured monk in logo-clad brown robes, Talern found he could recall the location of his apartment.
He arrived—the thickly repainted door was locked.
His phone (embedded in the orbit of his left eye) was still off—he pressed a forefinger against closed eyelids, near the tear duct, until he saw the phosphenes of retinal interference.
Vision awash suddenly with notification (sidewalk occupancy fees, the lunch receipt from Deers Gone Friared, browsing history detailing searches for viscera-free intra-arterial neurosurgery), his phone unlatched the door as usual.
He shared the bleak-walled microstudio apartment with Elasma (given name Joshua Rennar), who worked third shift at a local customer service firm to practice her vocal register.
The scenario of their living evolved naturally from Talern’s shot credit (mostly, his income went unreported) and her lack of familial co-signature. Resulting per-hour, per-occupant rent payments left them, aside from asynchronous sleep schedules, rarely home.
Today what dishware they owned sat crusting in the one-gallon sink and, despite noisy, cranial-interior pinging, Talern managed (wielding years-unreplaced synthetic blue scrub brush) to swab free jasmine rice and yellow eyed peas from the dark bowl.
Two bowls, actually. Elasma had had company.
On the bed they shared (separately, every intervening delay long enough so as to dissipate warmth left by the other’s body), he had left himself a note:
“SOMEWHERE PRIVATE. AND BRING HEADPHONES—”
A web address printed below.
Light outside was cooling gently from transparant orange to dull bluish iron. Elasma would not be back until sunrise, but to stay wasted rent.
Frowning at their barely furnished room, he grabbed from among winestained plasticware and takeout trash his sling bag, loaded it with baggied yogurt-acridberry tobacco, rolling papers, vintage 1994 IBM Model M buckling spring mechanical keyboard, over ear amplifiers for the contact speakers attached to his eardrums, and left the dimming apartment.
Talern walked quickly to the remaining free-of-charge public space within ten blocks: his local empty lot.
He arrived to the smell of pre-formed, 36% grain-filler hamburger, weedsmoke, and wildflowers spread in handfuls by an anarchist collective hellbent on (to his mind, doomed) urban reforestation. Selecting a graffitied chair whose seat was least filled with standing water, he wiped the luridly tagged plastic (spray paint near geological in thickness) approximately dry, and assumed a hunched rodent-like posture, forelimbs and mouth delicately at work.
Cigarette rolled, wetted, lit, he pulled out the wireless-modded keyboard to turn on his faceblinding application, discouraging anyone else with a phone implant (and that was most) from talking to him.
Others scooted chairs or turned heads from the gray and beige monstrosity’s imperious keystroke clacking (as well the foul saccharine smoke), but had already been ignoring him.
The web address (ambipodz.ufo) led, behind glosses of bottom-barrel pornographic advertising and specially offered non-prescription suicide pills, to a supposedly SETI-received audio file.
Ten hyperventilatingly intense hours later, Talern wiped sludged spittle from the corners of his mouth, mussed dew from his thinning hair, and headed from the emptied architectural cavity.
Talern arrived home to find Elasma zoning to an ultraviolent, alternatively timelined reboot of Igmar Bergman’s copyright-lapsed classic The Seventh Seal, still wearing her work clothes (gold foil pants and dark, stand collared, iris purple blouse).
He wondered idly why he had never noticed on her the scent of rusted chalk.
She sat up from the twisted bedspread and stared at him through projection glow, look showing sclera and disappointment. “Talern, uh, you look unwell,” she said, and raised her hand, tapping forefingers to palm—rampaging roboticized Death (black caped, fixed, metallic face marked with blood) faded as the projector powered off. Dawn impressed itself against drawn blinds.
“I listened to it,” Talern said into the gloom.
The points of his incisors grew hot and hotter with the imagined damages of plaque.
He pressed a thumbnail against the phantom heat.
“How about a subject Talern,” Elasma said.
His hand sank from his mouth. “The dirge. The symphony. Pop standards? Which do you think galactic civilization would liably beam at us?”
He saw her watching whatever evaporative melody had entered him, perceptible as halogen-bright, salt-choked halo glowing beatifically from behind his neck and head.
“Sure Talern. But why are you here? You know they’re charging double if we’re in here at the same time.”
“Why don’t we go out, I could tell you—”
Her eyes shimmered violently to glass and he broke into the sweat accompanying caffeinated fever dreams, of those that left in sour relief death’s worried contemplation upon damp bedspreads.
“The reason I live here is for halved rent,” she said.
An insect of sweat rolled merrily toward his lower back. “Help me. I’ll pay your day’s salary. Let’s eat, I—”
In the lightening room, from alien sensation’s implanted, medical approximate, through mesmeric doorway dulled so lengthily red in color, toward what pit vipers might analogize as “mouse heartbeat pitchcrimson,” emerged the stiffly actuating limb of the constructor of melodies.
Flesh pigmented like oxidated bronze.
Joints neither wrist nor elbow.
The limb’s hand’s petals folded at him in language of just-interpretable significance.
RUIN GORE RUIN GORE, the hand-thing palpated.
“Alright,” Elasma said, kicking his attention from seizurous, celestial distraction. “Anything to get out of here.” She pushed bleached ringlets into the unpopulated space behind her left ear consuming Talern’s attention. “And you’re buying.”
Safely arrived beneath fluoresced lighting proven now for decades to increase suicidal ideation, they ate: farm raised salmon nuggets with minute tubs of grape jellé dipping sauce, Cheez N Tater rounds gen modded for zero starch content, and plantmilk chocolate peppermint bark.
Elasma wanted reassurance he had paid for the food, tilt-lowering her head to catch the direction of his gaze.
“I think I figured it,” he said, looking through her. “A dyinglight. Some sorta final signal. Other people, online, said it’s an instructional transmission. You seen it, our version? Pioneer plaque? The Voyager record? Controversially naked Homo Sapiens? Pulsar star charts and chemistry fundamentals?”
Elasma sipped her negative-calorie dill soda cylindered in bright red corn plastic through matching straw. Scrutiny and amusement converged silently in her expression.
“Instruction and pointers, trite! Too human. Plus assumes an entire alien species represented in one signal.” Talern tore at the red foiled mylar that clutched double fried fish. “Back there, in the apartment, I saw the body plan, vaguely. An arm. But the website? Named after legs, don’t know why.”
“You overread online conspiracy theories and got listening surgery for deceased alien funeral marches?”
“Didn’t know in advance they’d be extinct, but yeah, one of those anthro clinics. You ever been in one?”
Laughter pushed through Elasma’s disbelief. “Yes Talern, in fact I have.” She snapped off a piece of candy caned chocolate (“CHRISTMAS IN JULY” shrieked the red-lettered packaging). “What’s believing you it’s non-fiction? Why actually-dead civilization and not space metalheads writing apocalypse into galactic power chords.”
He hadn’t thought of that.
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Look Talern, you’re real sweaty, and twice as maniacal as usual. But these hallucinations... Where’d you get money for any of this?”
He drew back his lips. “I don’t live with you because I’m poor Elasma, I’m just cheap.”
She frowned.
“Maybe a little subsidy, billionaire financiers backgrounding,” he said. “No idea. Plus, risky. A little brain damage for your trouble.”
“Billionaires don’t give away money Talern, they set up foundations to own whatever charitable product is supposedly fixing the world’s problems.” She sat back into the (also red) laminated plastic booth. “Why Talern? Why do this?”
Something dazzled in the soles of his feet. “For beauty, Elasma. What wouldn’t you give up for the chance at more? The artwork of an inhuman mind!” Gooseflesh like a standing wave sprang, puckering, between his shoulder blades. “The only thing, is why the music was so gorgeous and the rest of this so scary.”
He reached for her feet—no, wait, hands!—which she yanked into her lap.
“You know, they said relationships strain, after? But I haven’t been on a date in forever!”
There on her lips, the sound for the word “grave.” Maggots glinting fiercely in the corners of her eyes. Overwhelming scent, of daylilies: rotting to powder, renewing. Rotting again to powder. Sulfurous, geothermally heated water.
Elasma asked something he could not hear over the roar of subjugation, of vast bulk looming below, slip-thin envelope above, endless evacuate beyond.
She asked again.
“Is it permanent? Oh, definitely,” he said, too loudly. “Vasectomy style, don’t go getting one thinking things can be reconnected. If I really wanted, yeah, an expensive ‘undo’ lobotomy.” He grinned. “Workarounds but no cure.”
Elasma rose, mentioned working another shift.
She stabbed chipped nails (the black of driftwood forests, wet and rotted) toward his untouched food. “Feel free to finish this.”
“Hey thanks, so much. I’ll see you around I’m sure.”
She hung her cropped hi-viz windbreaker around her shoulders, dodged the offer of his hug, and left.
Talern sank back into the empty lot dream, where he found himself afloat again in fluid, holding as half-evaporated seas. Chilled so slightly as to pimple the skin with anticipation—warmed enough by bent solar ray so as to lose his track, nearly, of self’s distinction from surroundings.
Chords composed explicitly for him, for these new-formed, skull-closed tissues.
Breath and life giving water run through, smelling of ambergris and lustrous honey. Cloudscapes glistering with the wealths of spring, of jewel.
His then-musculature, corded to match ancient athletic heroes, supported ray-finned fans at elbow and palm and hip by which he had danced, glided, fell. Aching supple comfort and pleasure seething in complement and punctuation, in reprieve to images of glory and auric grandeur and motile ease and—
Freed from memory, Talern found himself supine, watching familiar plastic tiling.
An exorbitant bill from the taxi company that delivered him him, glowed softly in the corner of his eye.
He rose from slicked sheets.
Someone had cleared the apartment’s only table of trash. Flatware gone from its clear bin beside the sink.
His phone jutted messages labeled, “Lessee Termination Feeage,” a text from Elasma beginning, “good luck...”
Talern brought a heel into his palm to scratch.
From behind him, sunset played sallow light over preinstalled shelves lining the apartment corner that passed for a kitchen.
Out again, from yawning sore blistering now the room’s only exit, this time clothed in hanging drapery, came again the limb.
Smooth muscle in his stomach cracked, and he, in choked paralytic screams, asked why had there been so much and everything of beauty, while now, gaze locked upon not even the entire figure of the being who had composed such joy, there shone only terror.
In radiative malefic wave: vitriol, subsuming and believable.
The ceiling tore free. Walls raised infinitely, corners converging like double paired railway lines upon this vetically shifted horizon.
The hand, geckoid palm ridges silently wavering, communicating this time not in language but direction—pointed.
Unadulterable power demanded natural law fall apart at some central, necessary area of Talern’s body.
He rose, sternum first, all gravitational dependence magnified upon a single point—hung from that locus around which alien concentrations coursed and wove.
Brain helpless with understanding, Talern fell into yawning beneath him, as the extremity belted, obscenely, on and again.