The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Read online

  “Done.” She pointed at me, her fingernail tipped in iridium. “You the piggy?”

  Bitch. I wiped my hand on my pants and held out my palm. She drew her fingernail along my lifeline and zipped the terms, payment, and assurances into a New Delhi bitfold.

  “It’s going to be a pleasure working with you,” she said. Then she glanced at my pants and smiled. “I see you feel the same way.”

  Goddamn. A bio-script, woven into the transfer, had burrowed past my security and was giving me a hard-on. Cute. Real cute. Everyone was setting ground rules but me.

  “Combs and hairbrushes,” I said. “Get them to us within a week. One from each member of the family. Label them, and don’t mix them up. Underwear works too. Dirty of course.”

  “You want mine now?” she asked.

  She was not being helpful. I turned for a modicum of privacy, reached into my pants, and made adjustments.

  Bio-scripted worms aside, something about her piqued my curiosity. Clearly, she wasn’t just some nouveau riche walk-in looking to snag a Bonsanti for the guesthouse. Perhaps it was her air of assurance. Perhaps her damned fine glam-tech. Still, I couldn’t pinpoint my interest. She was cute in an off-the-shelf kind of way, but not close to the body-modded beauties Travis employed for nudes. I made eye contact with a sensor across the room and scratched my nose.

  Ops ran a syn-pheromone check. Nominal.

  “Mr. Bonsanti, your studio boy has nice manners. Not a single attempt at body mapping. But he likes to sniff me.”

  “Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” I said. I fished a vial from my satchel, snapped plastic, and slid out a swab. I took her by the chin. “Open up, Sunshine.” Angling her mouth, I worked the swab around the inside of her cheek, resisting the urge to flick her uvula.

  Head shaved, coiled filaments drooping from his scalp like silver dreadlocks, Travis finished a figure study. He was at the end of a ten-minute creativity boost, transcranial magnetism manipulating his brain activity.

  He had rendered an abstract of Anna. The piece captured her form, spirit, and yes, with a smudge of red, arcing from her mons pubis to the negative space of the canvas, he’d captured the tension of her presence. I’d exhaled a short, sharp breath the first time I saw the work.

  Travis stared at his canvas, repeatedly pressing his thumb against the tip of his painting knife.

  I shifted into conductor mode and mimed his stim settings to OFF, shutting down the magnetic bore in the ceiling. Then, eyes closed, I examined a skein of his neural activity. Hotspots were already cooling, blue regions warming. When I opened my eyes, Travis was still thumbing his knife.

  “Looking to shiv someone?” I asked.

  “I bet she’d donate to the cause.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She’d give up some of her eggs. You can run the harvest. Want a little peek-a-boo time?” His brain’s inhibition center, such as it was, had yet to re-fire after the brainstorm session. In that moment, even if he had been stone drunk, he could not have been more obnoxious.

  “Not funny, Travis. Not for one second. She’s a Chenko. As in the Chenko Oligarchy. Tell me you understand.”

  “She’s cute. She’s hanging around here. Do the math.”

  The math. Right. The last time Travis did the math, he’d harvested human eggs from donors, scrambled them for tempera, and painted a Christmas mural. Sure, sales and prices quintupled overnight, but my sleep retrograded proportionately as death threats poured in.

  “You can mag her,” Travis said. He bobbed his head, filaments rasping. “Take her to joy-ville. Give her a taste. She’ll book a return trip.”

  “What are you, a pimp or a painter?”

  “Binder and pigment, baby. When the mix is right, it’s all in the application. Hell, I bet I can get her to jump your gourd.”

  “That’s enough. I’m not kidding.” Sometimes I wondered if prolonged doses of magnetism hadn’t cooked his grey matter. “Just stop,” I said. “I bet our windows are already lased, pane vibrations read as we speak.”

  A month after returning with DNA samples, Anna sat across from me, prepping burnt umber for her family’s portrait. With mortar and pestle, she mashed kidney organelles cultured from her brother. The smell, earthy and pungent, mingled with the fragrance she wore.

  I gestured an inquiry.

  Lilac water, Ops responded.

  “You could have just asked,” Anna said without looking up. I bit my lip and watched her work.

  When she’d first returned, she’d offered Travis a sizable sum for painting lessons. He told her that money meant nothing to either party–at which point I suggested he access last month’s invoices. Instead, he agreed to an exchange and set her to work under my tutelage. “You two work out the details,” he’d said with a slap to my back.

  Now, as she leaned into the mortar, her grip tight on the pestle, I watched the subtle dance of her clavicle and the shifting hollow of her throat.

  “Who’s your favorite artist?” she asked, breaking my reverie. She looked up; I looked away.

  “Leonardo,” I said.

  “Da Vinci?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. No contest.”

  “He means me,” Travis called from across the studio, where he had stretched an epidermal canvas, the skin cultured from Anna’s cheek swab. With a sweep of his arm, he plastered progenitor cells across the scaffolded skin and directed Ops to flash them with UV. After another pass, he tossed his trowel into a bucket and joined us.

  Anna withdrew a pipette from a beaker and dribbled some lactic acid into her mixture. “How about Jackson Pollock?”

  Travis made a dismissive snort. “Dripping paint across a canvas takes as much skill as pissing your name in the snow.”

  “Depends on the pisser,” I said.

  Anna nodded. “And the name.”

  Travis moved behind her. He leaned in, his head next to hers as if inspecting her work. I closed my eyes for a quick settings check. He had been off mag-stim for a good thirty minutes. His neural cloud looked fine.

  “I splined a documentary,” Anna said. “In it, Pollock said that a good painter paints what he is.”

  Travis grasped Anna’s hand, his fingers overlapping hers. He worked the pestle through her. “A good painter paints desire,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less.” He let go of her hand and ran his fingers through her hair.

  “Hey, watch it.” She swatted his hand away.

  “Artists need muses,” Travis said. “What do you say, would you like to amuse me?” He leaned over and whispered into her ear.

  With a quick turn, she slapped his face. “Make your own pigment, mudak.” She stood, tossed the pestle onto the table, and headed for the door.

  Travis followed her. “My mistake, my mistake.”

  “Just let her go,” I said.

  “But she’s earned a lesson.” He caught Anna as she opened the door. He stepped past and shouldered it closed.

  “Get out of my way,” she said.

  Travis locked the deadbolt. “Or what, you’ll call Daddy?”

  She swung at him, a roundhouse that glanced off his shoulder. Travis laughed, but Anna silenced him with a kick to his shin and an uppercut to his stomach. He bent with a grunt.

  “Are we done?” she asked.

  Travis, still bent, bowed more deeply. He gestured at the door with a flourish. “Your carriage awaits.”

  Anna glanced at me, and I shrugged a helpless apology. Then, as she turned to leave, Travis stepped behind her, reached out, and yanked her backwards by the shirt collar. Fabric tore and buttons popped off. They skittered across the floor like broken teeth.

  Anna cried out. “Let me go this instant,” she said. “Or you’re dead. Do you hear me?”

  “Ah, violence,” Travis said. “The Chenko oeuvre.” He dragged her to the center of the studio.

  She screamed, a strangled cry of frustration, and clutched at her blouse. “I’m not joking.”

  “No, I don’t
suppose you are.” Travis pulled a painting knife from his back pocket and set it to her throat. “Neither am I.”

  I stood in disbelief. “Travis, what the hell? Take it easy.”

  “Take it easy? It doesn’t get any easier than this.” He shifted the knife to Anna’s cheek and angled it back and forth, flashing light across her eye. “Tell me, does Daddy collect Picassos? A nose for an ear might look nice. How about a tongue for an eye?”

  “Stop,” Anna said.

  “But I’ve just begun.” He slipped his free hand through the buttonless gap in her shirt and moved it across her stomach, his thumb along her lower rib. Then, as he swept his hand up her side, fingers to her armpit, the fabric separated.

  “Goddamnit, Travis,” I said.

  Anna trembled and closed her eyes.

  I closed mine too and brought up an interface. I gesture-flicked through stim settings as fast as I could, searching for a way to circumvent safety protocols on the magnetic bore. I rifled past programs that could induce kinesthesia, lucid dreaming, and out-of-body experiences, but found nothing that would paralyze Travis in one electromagnetic shot. Instead I settled on targeting his brain’s sleep centers.

  I opened my eyes and pointed at him, my hand miming a pistol. Ops read the gesture, and the bore in the ceiling swung around, its housing whirring like a Gatling gun. “Let her go,” I said. “Or so help me, I’ll drop you in a narcoleptic second.”

  Travis stepped to Anna’s side, placing her between the bore and himself. Although the armature tracked his movements, I hesitated. Anna wore no filaments to translate the radiation, but Ops had never run a clean scan. I’d no idea what implants she carried.

  “Let her go,” I said.

  Travis pulled his hand from Anna’s shirt and waggled his fingers, glossed with her sweat. “I have what I need,” he said, “Dial it down, and fire up the chromatograph.”

  “What are you on about?” His demeanor had changed, but I had no idea why. It was as if the assault had been a joke, and he’d just delivered the punch line.

  He grinned and blew across his fingers. “Fear and anger added to the palette.”

  Then it hit me. He wanted her scent for the portrait. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “All this for her pheromones?”

  “Nice and ripe.”

  “The progenitor cells—that’s why you infused the canvas?”

  “We differentiate them—”

  “—Into apocrine sweat glands,” I said, finishing his thought.

  “Exactly. By the time I’m done, that portrait will glisten under a pheromone varnish.” He kissed Anna on the head and tossed his knife onto the table.

  The color drained from Anna’s face. “Wait,” she said. “This was just an act? Some twisted game to scare me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Travis said. “Think of it as a defining moment. When people stand in front of the portrait, when they behold your family’s gleaming smiles and sparkling eyes, they’ll whisper, ‘How wonderful.’ Then, with each passing moment, palpable dread will grow. After a few minutes, people will wish to flee. But I ask you, what person would dare turn his back on the Chenko Family?” Travis laughed, his eyes bright with glee.

  “You’re sick,” Anna said.

  Travis winked. “So endeth the lesson.”

  Anna began to shake. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  I took her by the shoulders. “Take a deep breath,” I said, trying to settle things down. “He wasn’t going to hurt you. Everything’s fine.”

  She shook her head. “Everything’s not fine.”

  “Look, I know he could have done things differently–”

  “You don’t get it. I’m tripwired.”

  A cold weight settled in my stomach. Tripwired: she carried a distress beacon. Nodes tracked adrenaline and half a dozen other neurotransmitters. If biometrics reached designated levels, an emergency call tied to GPS alerted police or private security firms. I’d looked into getting one for Travis after the tempera incident. “Did it fire?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you reset?”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter. My father will tear this place apart. He’ll tear you apart. He won’t stop until he finds out what happened. You’ve got to disappear.”

  “Someone’s on a short leash,” Travis said.

  Anna threw her hands up. “Forget it. Forget the portrait, forget the money, forget I was ever here. What a mistake I’ve made. What a waste of—”

  A high-pitched whine pierced the air; pain shot through my teeth. A moment later, the entrance door groaned, metal on metal. It bulged inwards, a fizz of paint flecks popping from the casement.

  “Oh, God,” Anna said.

  With a thump, the room pressure changed.

  Anna dropped to the ground. “Get down,” she said.

  Before I could move, the door snapped back and crashed into the hallway. Immediately, four men, dressed in suits and ties, burst through the roil of dust and debris. They could have been executives arriving for a meeting. Instead, they carried laser-sighted pistols with blood-red beams that crisscrossed the air. The laser lines stopped, two on Travis, two on me.

  “Wait!” Anna said. She scrambled to her feet and ran at the men, cutting across the beams.

  The lead man holstered his weapon and stepped to meet her. He snatched her by the wrist and, with a quick pivot, picked her up like a child.

  “Put me down,” Anna said. “Put me down this instant.” She kicked and screamed as he carried her from view, her words tumbling into curses. From the hall, came one last cry, “Don’t hurt them. Please, please, don’t hurt them.”

  The average human body holds about six liters of blood.

  Travis needed more. He always needed more.

  Upside-down, cables tied about his ankles, Travis hung like a side of beef in a slaughterhouse. Beneath him lay a canvas I’d unfurled at gunpoint. With ruthless efficiency, Chenko’s men had jacked Ops, flayed the data banks, and stripped my qRAM. Then they’d flooded Travis’s creativity centers, dampened his pain transmitters, and opened the veins in his wrists with the same painting knife he’d set to Anna’s throat.

  Now, Travis’s movements alternated between composed and frantic, as the men took turns swinging him over the canvas. Part of him seemed to know what was happening, but part was unconcerned, immersed in the experience. Every few minutes he’d strain to reach his bonds with blood-slicked hands. But eventually, he’d fall back and sway with exhaustion, as threads of blood fell from his fingertips.

  By the second canvas, Travis began to paint. Whether it came from the loss of blood, the magnetism flicking his neurons, or a realization that this was to be his last work, I’d no idea. But rapidly, he achieved surety. Looping and gliding to an inner music, he directed his symphony of blood–his drips, lines, and spatters. With a drifting beauty that iterated, never repeated, Travis painted his life away.

  Midway into the third canvas, one of Travis’s languished moments exploded into a spray of rapture. He hurled collected fistfuls of blood. With it, I reached my limit. The horror pierced my numbness. “No more,” I said.

  In unison, the men turned from Travis and raised their pistols. Lasers placed a solitary red dot on my breastbone.

  I took a deep breath. “Just end it,” I managed. Motes glittered in the beams.

  In response, my cochlear implants burst with static. Breathing replaced it, each breath punctuated with a short wheeze. “My daughter is quite unhappy with me,” a voice said.

  Alexander Chenko.

  Whether he waited in the hallway or a continent away, I’d no idea. His words came through a tightcast directed at my implants.

  He sighed. “She fails to apprehend that a man in my position cannot afford to leave certain insults unanswered.” He paused. “Ah well, such is the idealism of youth, da?”

  “Anna—she’s all right?”

  “That you have a tongue with which to ask provides th
e answer.” His voice boomed, omni-directional. Godlike, it filled my head.

  “Tell her I’m sorry,” I said.

  “And you expect this to provide sufficient recompense?”

  “No. Not really. I just want her to know.”

  Silence fell and my vision darkened; Chenko was making sure I knew who was in control. In the muffled darkness, I felt as if I were trapped in a coffin awaiting the thump of burial dirt. Such was the moment of his judgment.

  Then static ate the silence. My vision returned with a burning flash.

  “Consider her intervention as the sole reason you will not join your associate in collaboration.”

  Without a word, Chenko’s men turned from me. I was free to go.

  Filled with a hollowness that has only deepened with time, I watched Travis’s blood pressure plummet. My vision blurred with a cascade of Op warnings and my ears rang with a klaxon, echoes of which awaken me yet, in the deep of night, to sheets soaked with sweat.

  Suddenly, the data ceased; the alarms snapped silent. Chenko, of all people, was sparing me the final details.

  All but one.

  In the quiet, I realized Travis still had time to assess his work. His spatters had become random; his lines, thin and lifeless; his flow, stagnant. His final painting amounted to little more than a Jackson Pollock knock-off.

  I wanted to say something, to offer comfort, to ask forgiveness.

  Words wouldn’t come.

  Turned out, none were needed.

  With one last gesture, blood dripping from his fingertip, Travis signed his canvas.

  Organ Nell

  Jennifer Pelland

  Nell Gabrielli: They tell me I’ve saved nearly two hundred people’s lives already, and helped almost five hundred more. (Pauses.) That’s important. That’s real important.

  Richard Forrest, Medical Ethicist: Ms. Gabrielli is a prisoner of the medical system, plain and simple. What’s been done to her is a travesty. And the fact that she was convinced to consent to it only makes it worse.

  Dr. Sylvia Burbage, New England Medical College: Nell is a miracle. All our team did was take the genetic bounty that nature provided her and find a way to make it benefit others. I understand that people find this disturbing, but how could we let this gift of hers go to waste? Now that would have been irresponsible.