“Indefinitely. She’s a stubborn case, that one. She’s insisting on the full Repair, no matter how long it takes. When her Repairs are complete, we shall name her Pinto, and love her as a family should love a new member.”
Next to the door was a small framed black and white photograph of a young woman that would have looked right at home in the center of a roadside memorial wreath. “Is this her?” I asked, pointing at the photograph. “That is how her family chose for the world to remember her, yes.” “Was this taken from a memorial?” “Of course. That’s always the second step in the Repair process.” I stared at him for a moment. “What’s the first step?” “I’d think that would be obvious—taking the soul from the shell before the body dies completely.” I looked back in at Pinto. She shuddered once more, and so did I.
“I don’t…I don’t understand how this is possible,” I said. “How do you get their bodies? Rob the graves after they’re buried? What if they’re cremated?”
Daddy Bliss rolled toward me. “The bodies left at the accident scenes are of no use to us—besides, the survivors have to have something grieve over and bury, don’t they? We’re not quite that heartless. No, the soul is the key. The soul, as it turns out, is a curious thing. In the initial stages of Repair, the soul’s identity is still tied very closely to the individual’s self-image—how they think of themselves, physically.
“At some point in everyone’s life, they lock onto an image of themselves—how they looked at 27, or 32, or 45—as being, for lack of a better way to put it, the best they will ever appear, and it is this image that ties itself to the soul’s memory. Depending on how quickly the soul is retrieved, much of that physical identity remains easily accessible, so it’s not difficult to convince the soul to bring forth that physical identity once again.” He smiled. “You’d be surprised how easy it is for a just-taken soul to summon flesh from the ether.
“The difficulty lies in how long it takes to have the soul delivered to us. In most cases, the Highway People deliver them here in a few seconds, but sometimes, when the Road has been particularly demanding on certain nights, it may take as long as two minutes before they are brought to us. When that happens, the soul has already begun its process of ‘letting go’ of the physical identity, and so what flesh is summoned from the ether is, well…incomplete. When that happens, we are forced to improvise with whatever materials are on hand.”
I pointed toward the picture hanging outside Pinto’s room. “Why the photos?”
“Consider them a way of checking the quality of our workmanship. Luckily, those friends and family left behind inevitably choose a memorial photograph that was taken of their loved during this ‘ideal’ image time. When the soul has forgotten too much of the physical identity, we take the photograph and use it as our blueprint.”
“But how can you be sure that…that you’re Repairing them correctly?”
“Not to oversimplify, dear boy, but Road Mama and I decided long ago to use only three basic body types as our Repair base: endomorph—the larger and fleshier body; mesomorph—the more muscular type, and ectomorph—the slender or lean body type. These three types rarely show up in pure forms, but rather in numerous but finite combinations. Once we have what flesh the soul remembers, and the photograph, it’s not difficult to discern which body type—or combination of body types—is required for the Repair process. Would you mind showing me your watch?”
The sudden change of subject caught me off-guard, but I did as he asked.
“Ah, how time does slip away,” he said, looking at the hour. “Not that I’m not thoroughly enjoying our talk, Driver, but we’re on a bit of tight schedule this evening. Come along.”
He moved on down the hall.
I almost looked in at Pinto again, then knew I couldn’t; another glance at her condition, and I might start laughing, and if I started laughing, I knew I’d never stop.
So I followed him.
I did not look through any more observation windows or at any of the memorial photographs hanging beside the doors.
We turned right at the end of the hall and moved toward a door with frosted glass window with the words Control Center #1 stenciled onto the glass. A security camera mounted over the door tracked our every move.
When he reached the door, Daddy Bliss once again looked up and smiled at the camera; once again, the door automatically unlocked and swung open.
We entered a medium-sized room that was taken up by expensive computer equipment. There must have been a dozen high-end machines working away in there, all of them with 25- and 40-inch LCD monitors, and all arranged on a series of wall-mounted shelves so that the sole person working the room could roll her office chair from unit to unit without banging her legs against anything. And it appeared that Ciera—the strawberry blonde girl who’d been collecting the roadside memorials—was very busy, indeed. Daddy Bliss gave her a quiet, loving look. “How are things going, my dear?” “Just fine, Daddy. You’re just in time for Lexington.”
“Oh, excellent.” He rolled forward. “You should see this, Driver.”
“Is it going to be like back there with Pinto?”
Ciera stopped what she was doing and sighed. “Oh, Daddy! I wanted to show him Pinto.”
“My apologies, dear, but it couldn’t be helped. We were in the area and it seemed a pity to waste the opportunity.” He moved closer to her. “All right—how angry are you?”
“I’m not angry,” she said, pouting. “Just…disappointed.”
“Well, this will not do, will not do at all. I can’t have my favorite girl feeling this way, so here is what I propose: if the Road decrees as I think it will, then you, my dear, will be given the honor of starting the festivities.”
Ciera’s eyes grew wide, and then she squealed in joy and threw her arms around Daddy Bliss’s neck. “Oh, Daddy, I love you so much!”
“As I do you, dear Ciera. As I do you.”
This was the first time I got a clear look at what had been done to her arms, how the elbows had been replaced with hood hinges, her veins and remaining cartilage woven around and through the metal. No wonder they hadn’t looked right earlier, even though she’d been wearing a sweater; they were each roughly six inches longer than a normal human arm was supposed to be.
She saw me staring at her, then—giving Daddy Bliss a quick and affectionate kiss on the cheek—stood up, stretching out her arms, then crossing her legs and tilting her head to the side in an imitation of the Crucifixion of Jesus. “Be honest—do these make me look fat?”
Both she and Daddy Bliss exploded with laughter.
I was still busy replaying Daddy Bliss’s promise about her “…starting the festivities”, so it took a moment for me to realize that, once they stopped laughing, both of them were staring at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I drifted off for a moment.”
“You’re cute,” said Ciera. “I kinda hope you get stuck here.”
“Now, now,” said Daddy Bliss. “No flirting—at least, not right now. I, too, think the pair of you would make a handsome couple, but that’s neither here nor there.” He looked up at one of the wall clocks; there were several of them, covering different time zones. “I believe that Lexington beckons us, does it not?”
Ciera blew me a little kiss, ran her tongue quickly over her upper lip, then sat back down in her chair and rolled over to one of the computers with a 40-inch monitor. “About one minute.”
“I still get goosebumps” said Daddy Bliss. “Imagine that. After all this time, and I still tingle when this happens.” He looked at me. “You need to see this, Driver.”
“I’d rather not.”
“But I insist, really I do.”
Not wanting to find out what happens to someone who refused his insistence, I moved over, the three of us clustering around the monitor.