Max Collins - Skin Game

The hostage situation at Jam Pony had almost screwed up everything. Bobby was a transgenic passing as an ordinary, and not even Max or Alec had known; not CeCe, either. Max and Alec he admired for helping other transgenics; but he’d been unable to find the courage to join in.

Maybe he would find that courage, one day soon — after he reached his goal.

In his run-down rattrap of an apartment on the eighth floor of a condemned building, Bobby was glued to his tiny used television — which he’d liberated from a sector checkpoint — carrying coverage of the hostage situation at Terminal City. This shabby studio apartment with its tiny stove, dwarf refrigerator, a coffee table that Bobby also ate on, and worn-out sofa was not going to be his home for much longer. Once he reached his goal, and finished his project, and could truly pass as human, things would change for the better.

And Bobby Kawasaki would finally have everything he wanted.

Rising, Bobby wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. He stared at himself — the white face, the features sort of pinched, the bone structure vaguely reptilian — in a manner reserved only for the vain and the self-loathing.

He knew very well he’d been an experiment — something involving splicing chameleon DNA into his human genetics — though the Manticore scientists (his abusive “parents”) had reminded him over and over that he’d been a disappointment to them. Their goal, their project, had been for him to blend in with his surroundings on command; but as it turned out, this ability only manifested itself when his adrenaline spiked — something over which he had no control.

Fear, anger, anxiousness, any extreme emotion set him off; but any other time — zippo. Oh, he sort of blended in anyway, in a more subtle manner; just not to the extremes his Manticore creators had intended for their projected military uses.

The scientists had tested him extensively. In a crowd of Asians, Bobby appeared somewhat Asian, while in a crowd of Caucasians, he took on the poly-Euro cast thought of as all-American; if he’d been sitting with African-Americans, they’d remember him as a light-skinned brother, albeit a quiet, unremarkable, definitely undistinctive one.

Of course, that had been too distinctive for Manticore — the point had been for him to blend in so well, he would virtually slip away, and if anyone remembered Bobby at all, that was seen as a failure.

Manticore was looking for an invisible man.

And sometimes Bobby was just that — that was the worst part. On occasion the blending effect happened at the most inopportune times, as well. He’d lost a couple of job interviews and more than a few first dates when he’d simply blended out of sight in his nervousness to please.

And once the blending began, once he had faded into the woodwork, he could not speak, did not dare call attention to himself, lest he expose himself as the freak he was.

That had been the case until the drug, anyway.

The drug — Tryptophan, to be exact — worked differently on his X3 metabolism than it did on his later X5 brothers and sisters. He knew that in them it controlled their seizures, made them more human. In Bobby the results were much more extreme. Sure, it kept him from blending in, but it also kept him from living.

The pills made him feel like a hundred pound weight had settled on his chest. He felt drowsy, slow, and unable to connect with the world. They did allow him to hold down a job, though they had made him a different kind of invisible man: no one, not even at the hectic Jam Pony, seemed to notice either Bobby or his lethargy. His boss, Normal, dismissed Bobby’s listlessness as typical behavior, commonplace conduct among his regular layabout employees.

“Bip bip bip, Bobby.”

The words still echoed proudly in Bobby’s head. When Normal yelled at him, he was just like everybody else — human.

The recent hostage crisis had exacerbated his already high anxiety level, however, and he’d had to double his Tryptophan dosage to keep from blending during the crisis. If he’d blended then, there was no telling how much damage it would have done. The ordinaries would have seen him as a transgenic — he would have been exposed, as Alec and Max had been — and any chance to keep up his human life would have been gone.

Even the transgenics might have reacted badly, would finally realize he was one of their own, and perhaps see his blending as a betrayal. Either way, both sides would have hated him.

And hatred was one kind of attention Bobby Kawasaki did not crave.

Now, though, Bobby struggled to fight off the dulling throb of the drug. Tomorrow he’d have to be at work, and Normal wouldn’t expect any less from him. That meant by tomorrow he’d need to get back on his damn meds, so he’d have to pursue his project tonight, or else it would need to wait clear till next weekend. Though Thursday’s shopping hadn’t been discovered until yesterday, the effort of a midweek foray had weakened him considerably, and the double dose of Tryptophan on Friday had practically turned him into a zombie.

He needed to go shopping — he was so close! One, maybe two more trips, then the big one...

... and Kelpy — the name he’d been called by the other transgenics at Manticore — would be gone forever, and so would Bobby Kawasaki... gone, history, a ghost... as he evolved into the person he’d always wanted to be, the one person that would gain him access to the affections of the only woman who had ever meant anything to him...

... Max Guevera.

Looking into the mirror again, Bobby — for now he was still Bobby, stuck with Bobby — realized that he was starting to blend into the bathroom wall behind him. The drug was almost gone now. He would soon be at full strength and then he’d go shopping for material.

After all, he had a human suit — a suit of flesh — to complete.

Even though he bore a German name, Otto Gottlieb strongly resembled the Hispanic portion of his lineage.

Otto’s Jewish great-grandfather had smuggled his wife and two boys out of Nazi Germany just before the onset of the Second World War. The family had ended up in South America, where the two brothers, Otto and Fritz, had grown up safe from Hitler’s clutches. Though many Nazis came to Argentina after the war, the Gottliebs were already firmly entrenched and the family furniture business had flourished.

Otto’s grandfather had eventually married an Argentinian woman and they had a son, Samuel, who went to school in the United States, where he married an American woman and put down roots. Samuel and his wife, Eliza, lived the American dream. Selling furniture to families in Bloomfield Heights, Michigan, the Gottlieb family included Samuel, his wife, and two children — a girl, Elizabeth, and Otto, named after his father’s uncle.

Brought up with a deep love of justice and an even more deeply ingrained sense of patriotism, Otto joined the Army straight out of high school. Then, following his service stint, where he had nearly made a career of it, he went to the University of Michigan for his bachelor’s degree, followed by earning a master’s degree in Criminology. Not long after that, Otto had been recruited into the NSA and — after four years of dedicated service — found himself partnered with the enigma known as Ames White.

Not quite six feet tall, Otto liked to play basketball to stay in shape, but mostly he jogged, or really, ran — like he was right now. Sweat dripped onto the front of his gray T-shirt and his feet thudded on the concrete of the street as he ran alone in the cool evening silence. The shirt and his matching gray shorts were both emblazoned with the logo of the FBI; but being with NSA, Otto had many clothes and many IDs with the names of various agencies on them.