Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

It was hard, hard, hard to convert fat into light. The body, Carl’s body, wanted good fats, bad fats, a salt lick, a fat friend. His cravings went berserk. He dreamed of fat, thought of eating parts of himself. The tech for the fat conversion was pretty crude. Understatement. Carl pictured Madame Blavatsky at a loom. How do you speed up fat, make it invisible, but also really fast, really powerful? You could do it, but badly, and this sort of light just balls-out hurt going in. Hurt and burned. Or the reverse. The flesh was chilled by it, for some reason, and there could be rot. Of the skin.

There were some glitches. Display burnout, necrosis. The paint on the cubicle wall behind Carl’s head, which collected the light when he wasn’t sitting there, bubbled up and peeled. There were side effects, including the dark hardening of Carl’s face. They called it “blizzard face.” A team was already at work on a grow-light recovery lotion to market as a solution to the problem they’d created.

Carl felt like an astronaut, a child, a corpse. He asked the obvious questions. Why not some other patch of skin? Something less, maybe, facial? But Kipler was adamant. The face was already getting bathed in light all day by people looking at their computers and phones. “All day! Take what’s there and body-slam it!” he shouted. That was the entire point.

“We use the gestural habits that are already in place. What’s already happening! There’s nothing new to learn, nothing to do, nothing to think, nothing to feel. Victory! Do you not see that? Get out of my world if you don’t see that. People don’t want to think about eating. We are giving them a gift. The invention is hidden. It’s nothing! Think nothing.”

During an early charrette, after the experiment began, a tech ran in yelling about an update to the display, some UV dilation they’d pulled off to widen the protein band, muscling it into something called gray light. They’d crowded one more amino acid onto the spectrum, apparently.

“Carl,” the tech said, bowing. “Your presence is humbly requested in Albuquerque. We’ve freaking iterated the shit out of this display. It’s like pure food. We cooled the bitch right down. You’re going to feast, my man. Bring your goggles.”

And then, in a fight announcer’s voice, the tech boomed, “Let’s get ready for Pro-Tein!”

High fives all around.

Carl stood up and shadowboxed, ducking and weaving, but the effort left him dizzy and breathless. He sat back down.

When he returned from Albuquerque, he was hungrier than ever. He had a potbelly. A sore had formed on his chin. He’d enjoyed a small boost in his folate level. In iron. Magnesium. But he was still losing muscle mass, and he felt a tight bulge in one of his eyes. The medics kept waving him through, chortling about miracles. The project was considered a success. Carl was a great explorer. They pushed him in a wheelchair down hallways, just to keep his energy up. Sometimes he slept through a feed, waking up famished with a hot, tight face. Carl dreamed of the sort of hood used for falcons. Someone could push the shrouded man around and everybody would whisper, “That’s Carl. Look at Carl. Oh, my god, there he is.”

“I want what he’s having,” Carl would say to himself, in a voice he could no longer recognize.

When Carl finally senthis crotch shot out into the world, the testing had been going on for endless hungry, scorched weeks. The computer displays were fucking hot, and for a while, before the hardening, Carl rashed up. His skin tightened, his face itched, and something behind his face, the fascia, they called it, seemed to kind of break up. Which caused a kind of feature slide. He submitted to daily bloodwork. They gave him some drug called Shitazine, or that wasn’t exactly what it was called, which turned him totally off mouth food. So they could do a full nutritional assay. On weekends, ravenous and puckered, he got a smoothie, jacked with protein, just to keep him off life support. Monday mornings they chelated him, or something that sounded like that, to zero out his nutritional stats, so that he could sizzle-fry in front of the panels all week and they could clock what was coming in.

If he thought about it, having survived the genital share, there wasn’t a simple answer to why he’d sent the picture. But there wasn’t a complicated answer, either. To Carl himself, it seemed both obvious and mysterious, inevitable and random. He could embrace nearly any interpretation. But since no one appeared to have seen it for what it was, trying to understand it suddenly felt bizarre. He was embarrassed that he’d done it and also disappointed that he hadn’t done it well. He was ashamed and indifferent. Disturbed and content.

But most of all his body was empty and dry, and he was powerfully, powerfully hungry.

Carl was due at the lab on Thursdays, but this week they called him in early.

“You are technically malnourished,” the doctor told him, smiling. “But here’s the thing. So are most people, and they actually eat food. Being malnourished is not per se a concern of ours. You’ve lost a few pounds—well, more than that—but that could be attributed to stress at work. And, anyway, ideal body weight? Still not quite there. So okay. Pretty much. Muscle mass, sure. And your fingernails are brittle, which, of course. Well. What’s important, what’s kind of amazing, is that you’re not starving. Your magnesium levels are ridiculous. I mean, just a joke, in terms of not eating anything. This isn’t possible. What we’re doing. It’s not possible!”

“Okay,” Carl said.

“I mean, you’re hardly in ketosis here!” the doctor shouted, waving his clipboard.

Carl wanted to enjoy this news. Some carbs were flowing in. Whoopee. He was not technically dead. He looked at the two-way mirror, wondering who was back there. Kipler, no doubt, every single version of him. He had a lot riding on Carl. He needed this to work. Why was he hiding? Carl wondered. Afraid of a man whose face has died?

Then Carl did that thing he’d seen on TV where the suspect in the interrogation room gets up and confronts the two-way mirror. Pounds on it to call out the lurkers standing in judgment, deciding his future. Come on out, and all that. What are you afraid of? Except Carl did it sort of mildly. It was hard to walk. He tottered over to the glass, cupped his hands against it. He didn’t want to break anything. Just a few taps on the glass. Hello? he thought. Hello? Did he really need to say it out loud? How much of this shit needed to be spelled out?

“Uh, what are you doing?” the doctor asked.

To answer that in detail, Carl would have had to wave a pretty complicated set of emoticons. Desperation, suspicion, apology, and, hovering over all the others, exhaustion. Just a yellow ball of tired face. Not yawning, though. Not that kind of tired.

“Tired face, tired face,” Carl said to the doctor. “Just fucking tired face.”

“There’s nothing back there,” the doctor said. “It’s a closet. I’ll show you.”

Carl waved him away. He apologized. He was being paranoid, he explained. It’s just that he was always so hungry, and it wasn’t pain so much as tremendous pressure flushing through him. “It’s like someone keeps pouring hot water inside me. Inside my whole body. I’m getting rinsed out by very hot water. Agony face. Face for I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

The doctor looked at him but made no note.

“I’m just being foolish,” Carl said. “You know me.”

The doctor nodded. They hardly knew each other.

Carl ducked out and resumed his session at his desk. The light from his computer today was cool, almost soothing. Maybe they’d iterated a healing blue ray. Maybe this would all start feeling better. To kill time, he fired up a lost-person website and put in his own name. The tracking on these things was pretty poor. You could register, supposedly, and get better data. Live tracking was promised. Was it real? Could he pay the money and then see, in digital scribble, the path he’d been taking these past few months? Would the bird’s-eye view reveal something new? Because he’d been through it on the ground, in person, and even he couldn’t be sure.