Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

A voice came through Sylvie’s phone.

“I’ve got your boyfriend,” the man rasped. “Let me give you the address.”

Half an hour later, facing a theoretical New Jersey, Abby walked briskly across the planks of a pier toward a squat structure, the temporary office of a building contractor. She entered the building without knocking, squinting to adjust to the dark.

This kind of room had appeared many times in movies. Empty but for a chair in the center, with a battered man tied to it. Scribbly explosions of blood spattered the floor. Abby didn’t immediately recognize that this was Rocco, his face was so fucked-up. A figure stepped out of a shadow, a man seemingly composed of three bodies. His head was gray and old, sorrowful, unblinking. This head rested on the torso of a bodybuilder, a shirtless gristle of muscles, veins, and scars. This torso in turn sat atop a pair of legs that moved in spastic jerks, almost dancing toward her.

“This is your boyfriend?” Skinner asked.

Abby nodded.

“Should I let him go?”

Rocco was unconscious, his chin against his chest, his breath going in and out of his body in irregular sputters and coughs.

“What did you do to him?”

“He’s a DJ. He’s got hundreds of embodiments. Including you, before the monks snipped your connection.”

“He’s not a DJ. He’s just a Bionet technician.”

In the anime version, Skinner touched a key on a remote, bringing banks of monitors to life on every wall, the room’s darkness bleached by surveillance-camera shots of human figures going about their routines. This didn’t prove anything, really. It could have been footage of anybody. Here and there a person sat motionless in a chair or at a table. Others walked in circles, did jumping jacks, pounded their heads repeatedly against walls. Skinner pointed at a monitor displaying Abby sitting on her chesterfield, watching television. “These are just some of his embodiments,” Skinner said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Watch this.” Skinner fiddled with the remote some more, muttering grumpily at the buttons. For a second the screens went blank, then sequences popped open, shots of this room with the chair and Rocco more or less confined to it. Each monitor ran a different clip culled from hours of torture. In some Rocco was conscious and talking, or not talking. In others he screamed and writhed and passed out from the pain. Abby shielded her eyes but the violence came through the audio, the smack of flesh getting rearranged, bones snapping beneath muscles, the high-pitched panic of dental extraction. Bile curled in her throat. She turned her eyes to Skinner, expecting to see the smugness of a torturer, but finding his face defeated.

“I inflict violence on the world,” Skinner said.

“You’re a monster.”

“That’s about right.”

“Did you get the information you wanted from him?”

“He gave me a name, an address. I have no way of knowing if it means anything.”

“I still love him.”

“That may be true.”

“You think I should hate him because I was his embodiment.”

“I don’t care what you feel about him,” Skinner said. “I was just doing him a courtesy. Someone was going to have to retrieve the guy after I finished with him. He gave me your name.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “You think I do this because I’m strong and you’re weak? I do this because it’s my only recourse. I don’t enjoy this.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo for you.”

Skinner fiddled some more with the remote and all the monitors went blank except for one, in which Rocco, close-up, blood gushing out of his nose, spilled the beans. Off-camera, like a mobster-hunting detective from the world of noir, Skinner asked who he worked for. “Mr. Kirkpatrick. There have always been the slaves and the enslavers. The passives and the actives. I’m just a technician. I don’t pick the slaves. I get assignments. I establish their routines. When they wake up. When they eat. When they sleep. When they fuck. What they buy.”

The off-camera Skinner in the clip said, “I’m going to ask again why they took my boy.”

“There’s been talk there’s a clone baby with super-admin privileges. Not good. With super-admin privileges you can take down the whole ’net. You can lock out all the DJs or turn admins into embodiments.” Rocco spat out a gob of blood. “There’s only one super-admin, and that’s Kirkpatrick.”

A new clip. Rocco with his head cocked a different way, making a noise like laughing or crying, hard to tell which. “I saved Abby from getting arrested because I thought she was cute,” he said. “I wrote a program that kicked up her hormones to make her fall in love with me. Then I got tired of her. That fucker Bickle needed someone to babysit Kylee Asparagus so I volunteered her. While she was away we ran routines on the whole city. A massive orchestration. Every citizen an embodiment, their daily lives planned out for them without their knowledge. Just think of what you can make an economy do. Then she returned before she was supposed to. We stuck her in the apartment watching TV.”

Another clip, more violence. Coin-sized pieces of skin removed from the surface of Rocco’s body. Skinner turned it off midscream, then pulled a Bionet transmitter from his pocket and tossed it to Abby. “Most of the heavy organ damage has already been fixed,” he said.

“What address did he give you?”

“I’m not telling you. I don’t want to put you in any danger.”

“You’re a relic. You should have died in the FUS.”

“You’re probably right,” Skinner sighed. “Have you ever thought about why the world had to end? That once we hit nine billion people living on this rock, the only honorable thing to do was for most of us to kill ourselves off? And yet somehow the likes of you and me survived. Ridiculous, isn’t it?” He pranced, skipped, and twirled his way to the exit. Abby peeled away the duct tape binding Rocco’s hands and legs and pressed his bloody face to her white shirt.

“You’re safe now,” she whispered.

“Now?” Rocco wheezed. “Now I’m definitely not safe.”

You know that unsettling feeling when you’re moving from one place to another and you finally empty your old house and as you’re vacuuming you realize it’s just a space? That was how it felt at the academy. Something of consequence used to be here, but for whatever reason it disappeared. The windows were boarded up, the exterior was covered in grime and graffiti. Dead weeds where there used to be landscaping. As the real estate agent took down the “For Sale” sign I entered the main building. It felt like a grade school that had gotten roughed up and left for dead on the side of the road. All the rooms empty. No furniture, no artifacts to indicate this had once been a place to learn. The main building contained a dozen classrooms on two floors. There was a science lab building with a little planetarium, a library building with empty shelves, a maintenance building, and a dormitory with a cafeteria. There was a small athletic field and a gym.

I moved into what seemed like the headmaster’s suite in the dorm building, bought some cheap Ikea furniture, and made it up like a monk’s room. Minimal. I started to ask around the neighborhood about the building’s previous inhabitants.

What kind of neighborhood was it?

Typical southwestern exurbia. Retirees and Latino families. That weird, thick, southwestern grass kept green with constant irrigation. The academy itself was right up against the mountains. There was a strip mall with a Starbucks. I started hanging out there, introducing myself to my new neighbors and asking about the academy. Nobody knew what I was talking about. Some thought it was a typical grade school. One lady who lived three blocks away from it argued that it didn’t exist. I got monotone answers from the few young people I met. Everybody was entranced by their own gut-level routines, the pursuit of Frappuccinos. I got nowhere and soon gave up. Besides, it wasn’t as important to me anymore that I learn the history of the academy so much as that I start fixing the place to prepare for Mr. Kirkpatrick’s return. I started signing up for classes at the local Home Depot, reading home improvement books, educating myself on electrical wiring and plumbing. I did as much as I could on my own but when a job needed more than one guy I hired Mexican day laborers and learned what I could from them, too. I discovered things my hands could do. I spent the days sanding, painting, refinishing woodwork. I replaced broken toilets and installed light fixtures. I got scrapes and bruises and splinters under my fingernails.