“True,” 218 said. “We could decoratively bead in a pinch. What about you, old man?”
“Skinner.”
“Skinning,” 167 nodded. “It’s an acquired skill.”
“That’s my name. Al Skinner. I’m retired military.”
“I see,” 218 said. “Going after newmans? Clones like us? Vampires? The mutant throngs of Nova Scotia?”
“Newmans, mostly.”
“What company were you with?” 167 said.
“Boeing, Exxon Mobil for a while… then News Corp.,” Skinner mumbled, zonking out. Ah, lovely Bionet, stepping in and beginning the restoration of his spine, flooding his system with synthetic opiates manufactured inside his body by nanotech what-have-yous. He wanted to laugh. Not that he thought any of this was funny, this cluttered cabin and the two clone stoners attending to his recovery.
He woke in darkness in great pain, writhing on the couch. The two men appeared and held him down as he thrashed. “It’s going to feel like this sometimes,” one of them said, “but if it feels like this it means it’s working.” The words rattled around in Skinner’s head like a rock in a bucket.
Days passed in which little seemed to happen besides 167 and 218 arguing over who had eaten the last of the instant udon. Occasionally one of them ventured into town for supplies in a battered, powder-blue pickup. Skinner couldn’t be certain what town it was they were venturing into but when they returned they brought freshly baked bread, soup, cheese, and fruit. Skinner was able to gradually piece together a semireliable history of how the two dudes had ended up in the mountains with their fishbot and Frank Zappa’s complete discography. They spoke cryptically and cynically of some ancient rich queen on an island surrounded by hundreds more of their clone brethren. They’d grown up on her estate and had passed as full-bred clones for a while, only to be cast out as teenagers when their corrupted profiles came to light. Or maybe they’d done something horrible and had to leave under duress. Hard to say. It didn’t help the story that Skinner passed through a series of narcotic fugues.
One morning Skinner’s legs tingled a bit and he tried to stand. He fell. At some point the two guys had crafted a sort of wheelchair, really just a swivel chair bolted to a couple skateboards. The thing looked treacherous. Nonetheless, Skinner let the two younger men lift him into the contraption and roll him onto the porch. The fishbot knelt in the front yard, dormant, as if inspecting flowers for bees. 218 thrust a bowl of rice and tofu in front of him and demanded that he eat.
“I killed many of your kind,” Skinner said. “I want you to know that.”
“We figured as much,” 167 said.
“Eat your rice, you old freak,” 218 said.
“Why are you being kind to me?” Skinner asked, trembling. Against his will, a sob came out of his body.
“You’re hungry, your body is being repaired, there’s all sorts of crazy chemicals in your blood,” 167 said.
“Thanks for the rice,” Skinner said.
Slowly, improbably, the feeling in his legs began to return. Days flickered by, bright in the middle, darkened at either end. He spent many hours sitting in the chair by the open window, listening to birds, a robotics magazine open to an obsolete article in his lap. His spine tingled. He found it hard to discern what the clones taking care of him actually did. He came to suspect that his appearance in their lives had given them a momentary purpose. Whatever genes had been screwed up during their incubation, they’d clearly been bred to care for people. Skinner wondered why this particularly tendency hadn’t been bred into him. It confused him, the care and upkeep of other people’s inner selves. To his daughter and late son he must have seemed like a preoccupied bastard most of the time, hauling his bag of demons through his days. Whatever capacity for familial tenderness he’d possessed had been molded in war into a plethora of survival instincts. He imagined the only reason Waitimu had signed on as a contractor was because he felt it was expected of him. The boy should have gone into something constructive, like reverse- engineering a fallen city like Roon. Or something frivolous and ephemeral and vital, like poetry or music. But he’d followed his dad into the brutality business, the Darwinian industries, and unlike his lucky or unlucky old man, Waitimu hadn’t been saved by an angelic sniper perched on a rooftop.
As he stared out the window at the tottering fishbot it occurred to Skinner that he’d never questioned why there’d been so many attempts on his life. At the time, he’d chalked it up to eye-for-an-eye score settling from the last throes of the newman resistance. But why him and not Carl? Carl had offed just as many nooms… His head hurt. He fell asleep.
Soon Skinner could stand. He wobbled with 167 and 218 steadying him on either side. He could only stay upright for a minute or so but it was something. The little nanobots or whatever the hell they were were obviously working overtime in his spinal column. He wanted to walk through the field just beyond the window. He imagined his arms stretched out to either side, the feathery heads of waist-high grasses sweeping through his palms, catching their seed pods in the crooks between his fingers, the satisfying rip of seeds separating from stalks. The sun rose on the drizzly day that Skinner finally took his first steps. The clones let him walk about five feet before insisting that he sit again.
“Are they supposed to feel like my real legs?” Skinner asked.
“I don’t know,” 167 said. “I’ve never had to relearn how to use my legs.”
“Beats me,” 218 said. “The most extreme thing I’ve ever used this transmitter for was psoriasis.”
“What about your swollen left nut?” 167 said.
“Correction. And my swollen left nut.”
For the next three days, Skinner tried walking farther distances. At first he could rationalize the something-isn’t-right feeling as the simple weirdness of having to relearn how to walk. His legs jerked, twitched, flopped, kicked, and propelled him across the ground. After a week of regaining his strength, the sheer oddness of his gait wasn’t going away.
“What the hell,” Skinner said, shuffle-stepping then high-kicking his way across the field. “Why can’t I walk normally?”
“Idiot,” 167 muttered to his clone brother.
“Hey, I wasn’t the one who claimed to be a Bionet expert,” 218 said.
The two snarled at each other while Skinner danced through the grass, added a pirouette, then strutted like a cowboy with saddle rash. “I hate this! I want my real legs back!”
The clones bickered all the way home, Skinner prancing and cursing behind them. At the cabin he gathered his belongings and stood with his left knee wobbling Elvis-like, as if preparing to perform the Electric Slide. The clones stood in front of him looking awfully embarrassed.
“You guys saved my life. I thank you for that.”
“Technically, the fishbot saved your life,” 167 said.
“Which reminds me. We gotta get that thing fixed,” said 218.
Skinner embraced the clones and asked them for directions to the Cascade Highway. They pointed him toward the logging road and with a nod, the old man duckwalked into the forest. Half an hour later the road intersected with the highway, and an hour after that he made it to the trailhead where his RV was parked. The mobile container of a previous life shocked him when he climbed into it, with its framed pictures and inert mementos. He put it in gear and stepped on the accelerator.
As Skinner stood in front of his daughter’s building his hand crawled inside his jacket to flip the safety on his Coca-Cola. He looked down and realized what his hand was doing. Shoppers entered the flower shop across the street, a cyclist coasted through the intersection; nothing external was awry. But there was his heart again, quickening under his ribs. Once inside the building he found himself sweating and had to stop at the landing of the first flight of stairs. He unholstered his Coke and proceeded. When he came to Roon and Dot’s floor he passed through what felt like an invisible heat blast of death. Panting, he kicked open the door of the condominium, firearm drawn.