Neon crucifix bleeds static through a smog of particulate haze over the clinic’s alcoved entrance, dispersed in shallows pooled on wetted stairwell, fractured glow into my retinas. Roach carcasses pop like meat-filled bubble wrap underfoot. The clinic’s an ancient relic buried under cycles of Detroit death and renewal: fossilized astroturfs, steel, glass, battery waste, anthropologic remnants. Peeling diaphragms of lead paint at its threshold expand and contract with the undercity’s nicotinic breath, wisping stilted in three time to the rhythm of my vascular processes. I mathematize my waned budget with the chromo check coming my way at the door as it reads my bio-cursives and clicks the lock open. Hydraulic whimper permits entry.
Lily’s clinic wafts a distinctive stench, blurry somewhere vague and left of legitimate but not the Cronenfoul bleak of your average underground bio-mod operation. Lily’s a decent doctor cusping prodigal butcher, ethics relatively intact though threadbare and superficial—girl still needs to make rent at month’s end. The smells come into my olfactory in waves: fermented disinfectant, singed keratin, scabs festering saccharine. Scalpels hang like windchimes over my soon-to-be death bed.
She materializes from dark asymmetrical. “You’re early,” she says, fingering into a cooler of expired organ donations. Her ocular implants flash, shooting diagnostics straight to her limbic. “And you’re high—don’t need a pair of military-grade Manthanos to see that. You glob a light ampsul brunch before coming here or something?”
“Just a light one, yeah,” I say as I strip down and hoist onto the operating table. “Need it—y’know.”
My left nipple turns lavender in her pinch, soft flesh perking between her icy fingers. “I won’t mom on you, Jasper, but ice hella spikes your blood pressure. I never had a junkie bleed out on the slab, but it does tend to make things…messy.”
“You’re a doctor. You could re-up my addy script so I can level myself legitimate.”
She grins as she caresses down my zippered sternum. “My license got got long ago, sonny. We’re in the same boat, huh? All our channels went static.”
“You think you’d be making the big bucks if you were bona fided?”
“Mm, maybe. But then I’d be running chemos and setting bones instead of implanting C4 body art. Boring, no thank you.” She dips a local anesthetic into the crook of my arm, numbness pulsing slow through my circuitry.
“Y’know, you really could be a butcher—the best goddamn butcher in Detroit—if you’d just break up with all those pesky morals.”
“It’s an itch, sure, but not one I wanna scratch. Believe me, I’d love to see just how far I can pull your leg till it pops out its socket, but that curiosity’s a black hole—it’d destroy me.”
“Every bio-modder’s a reluctant butcher.”
“And every junk tester’s a reluctant Luddite.” She brushes my hair back with a tender hand. “Within every man are two wolves, or however the saying goes.”
The anesthetic lulls me into chemical oblivion as she assorts her implements. I say, “Doesn’t matter now. Your Cherokee fable only made sense back when we knew the difference between good and evil.”
“We’ve always known the difference—just taught to ignore it.”
“Your two wolves’ names are Cynicism and Idealism. But when I can see them clear like this, it just looks like one big wolf. It weeps for the lamb it kills.”
“You always turn scholar when you’re strung out. It’s cute, in a fucked-up kinda way. But you wanna keep philosophizing or get down to business?”
“Gimme the rundown before I nod out, yeah.”
24-karat gleam catches in the overhead fluorescence, modest ring adorned with an eagle’s flight feather. Steel wire twines down from the jewelry and limps onto a squared lump of doughy plastic.
“Commission from some wannabe supermodel. I guess she wants to make a big statement at her next gig, but I need you to test it out before I turn the knife on her.”
“No extra organ, no tendon replacement, no integrated weapon system. This ain’t your average bio-mod.”
“It’s more rudimentary, more…incendiary. You know those toys with the pull strings, where you pull it and your action figure gives some cool one-liner?”
“Sure.”
“Same premise.” She brings the ring down to my level, my body naked and dopey in its yellowy sheen. “On the outside, this is just a normal nipple piercing. But this wire here will be attached to a C4 inserted somewhere in your torso. Pull the string and—”
“No one-liner?”
“A yield big enough to level a skyscraper and turn all organics within a block into pink mist.”
“So I should probably avoid airports.”
“It’s recommended.”
The part of my body getting split down the middle is distant, incorporeal. Unlatching my sternum with the zipper Lily installed two years ago for easy access, my ribcage pops open like a gut-filled treasure chest with greased hinges. Tranexamic works its wonders clogging my veins, barely a drop lost to the slab. Queasy left me for the most part after my first augment, but the displacing of my guts still makes me fuzz. When she starts fiddling between my membranes, I turn my eyes up to the ceiling and play music in my head to drown it out. I fond down into my usual daydream, the one this desperate operation is funding: a home on the Texas range, quadruped ally panting alongside through fields of churning amber. The ceiling spirals down until my field of vision is pure, saturated gray, then emerges 1957 technicolor magic. VCR whirs a childhood phantom in mind’s ear canals, fast-forward through previews, C’mon Yeller. The tape runs, stops after Yeller saves his family from wolves, rewinds, restarts. C’mon Yeller, over and over. Here, Yeller—Come back, Yeller—Best doggone dog in the west! The film grounds me, more real than real, drawing boyish aspiration from an otherwise devoid vessel. The slab, the scalpel, the plastic explosive, limbo within limbo. Yeller is realer than the bomb, realer than meth breath, realer than hunger pangs and layoffs and overdue rent and insufficient funds notices. And when he hunted trouble—He always found it double—And that’s when Yeller had fun! Best doggone dog in the west—Best doggone dog in the west!
Post-op cauterization curls smoke up in DNA helixes, tendrils carrying fragments of my genetic material into the clinic’s ventilation. The explosive settles somewhere low between my lungs, my unbirthed sun. Lily sets the wire filament on the ring, pulling taut with just enough give to avoid detonation when I stretch, then the jewelry pops into my flesh, bizarro fashion statement complete. My fingers brush down the length of the eagle feather’s shaft.
“I’m sure this goes without saying, but this is a serious explosive stashed in your guts. Do not, under any circumstance, pull the string.”
“Sure.”
“I’m proud that I’ve never lost a tester to one of my mods, and it’d kill me if you ended up being the first.”
“Yeah.”
“And there’s one more thing I wanted to run by you,” she says, “better cash than anything I’ve ever offered because of the risks involved.”
“More risky than turning my tit into a suicidal pull string toy?”
“The risk is a little more…nuanced.”
Lily fades into a nearby closet, rummaging, then wheels a heavy-duty rig with a full-body mod hanging from its arms by chains. Chrome on chrome, the mod takes light like a mirage over hot asphalt, cyber-spectral. Mood curdles.
“No goddamn chance in hell,” I say preemptively.
“I had to get this high-grade piece repossessed last week. The merc took out a loan from me and just dipped. Usually I’d just take the odd loss on the chin and get over it, too expensive to hire repo, but for this hardware—”
“I said no. You know I don’t fuck with optical camos.”
“I know, but I thought I’d offer since the cash would help you out with that doggy daydream of yours. You’ll need to be sneaky as hell if you’re gonna sniff out a breeder without getting pinched. The patrols are everywhere out there these days.”
“I know how those things fuck people up, better than most. I’m already spectral by nature, thanks to my old man getting geno-scrambled in the war. I’m not worried about cops.”
“Look, Jasper, this trial would only be a short-term thing.”
“I won’t do it. Get some other mark to fry their brains.”
“Alright, I hear you. Not another word.”
***
Nadia works at a bar downtown, in one of the few specks of undercity that still gets a couple hours of sun each day. Libane’s a sleazy joint façading highbrow with artisanal cocktails and jazz nights, but the drinks are cheap and the company is alright—and Nadia works there. Something saxophonic blurs through the speakers quiet as I step up to the bar. Cobra starts prepping my usual gin and tonic.
“Make it a double, Cobra,” I say. “It’s been a rough one today.”
“Tell me about it?” he asks, sliding the drink my way across the bar top.
“You know I don’t go for bartender therapy sessions. I’ll be alright when I get a few drinks in.”
He nods and calls back into the kitchen, “Nadia, your boyfriend’s here.”
“Not her boyfriend no more,” I say.
“Not this week?”
“I’m too irresponsible, apparently. No prospects.”
“Sometimes lovers need room to grow on their own before they can come back together again as better people. Maybe some time apart will be good for you two.”
“I don’t think anything’s gonna— Goddammit, Cobra, no therapy sessions.”
He smirks as he peels past Nadia through the kitchen door. My hands spider to unbutton my shirt as she comes up. Peeling from the shirt reveals a fresh scar down the middle of my cavity and the new nip piercing.
“Ooh, I dig this new adornment, Jasp,” she says as she pinches the ring and starts to pull.
I swat her hand away before detonation can be activated. “Jesus, Nadia, you hate working here so much you wanna crater it?”
“What?”
“Lily’s new mod turned me into a pull string doll, but there’s a twist—C4 in my guts. Pull the nip ring and we all get instantaneously vaporized.”
“You have a bomb inside you?”
“That’s right. Some fashion model got the idea and—y’know.”
Air distorts between us as her mild amusement turns to predictable annoyance. “You look like recycled meat, Jasper. I don’t understand why you let Lily use you like a lab rat instead of getting a real job.”
“I don’t like the term lab rat, don’t call me that.”
“The fuck am I supposed to call you then?”
“A human trial volunteer, a tester, I don’t know—just nothing derogatory.”
She speaks through clenched teeth, “Jasper, I’m gonna call you what you are because you don’t realize or don’t care enough to get it.”
“This is very uncool of you.”
“I just can’t wrap my head around it. You went to college, you can do anything, but instead, you just get high and let people use and abuse you so long as it pays rent and scores dope. This is exactly why I broke up with you.”
I drop the rest of my double gin and tonic to the back of my throat and stand. “Just forget it, I’m gone.”
“You can go and get a real job today. You can do that right now.”
“Nothing that pays as well as Lily.”
“No amount of money is worth having a bomb rigged to your insides.”
“It’s not about the money.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Jasp. Not this again.”
“I finally have enough saved up. I’m going tonight,” I say. “Speaking of, I need to split.”
***
My eardrums pop as the bar’s membrane shits me out into a downpour. It’s gone dark, streets lit up by storefronts’ neon signage and flickering lampposts. Commercial gut pulsates, elevated walkways and alleys dripping with ambiguous fluid and breathing raw sewage and necrosis. Streets narrow as they snake out into the derelict suburbs, houses hunched like cradled stillborn, rooftops flayed. Atmosphere shifts quiet and still. My watch reads late twilight, enough time to get through the ruins to the puppy pop-up I heard about online.
Old Yeller first blessed my dreams when I was a kid, watching the old movie on VHS at home with my dad before he died. I’ve wanted a dog of my own ever since. But making that dream a reality is harder than ever now with how unfamiliar canis familiaris has become after decades of rampant selective breeding and incest. Man’s best friend was betrayed, malformed into sterile husks. Since getting a pureblood requires a mortgage, desperate dog-lovers with double-digit credit scores resort to contacting shady black market breeders who, more often than not, peddle their inbred amalgams that only vaguely resemble the canines of old.
A form bleeds into my periphery as I make through and around rows of abandoned houses, Vantablack, death-shaped. The dark swells, approaching serpentine, lithium battery whirring. As I tilt to turn into an alley, the body unfolds and three men step out, each barking commands that conflict with one another. My foot crumbles dry-rotted pavement as my gait turns to a sprint. Oxidized chain-link cries under a graceful vault that flies me into a bed of overgrown lawn. The pigs’ patter close behind, but they’re too heavy to keep pace for long. I loop and turn through the backyards until a molded gap materializes under me. My feet kick at empty. The pool’s cement bottom meets me fast, knees buckling, something tender tearing in my knee. The scene distorts and loses focus. I can’t get straight. I hear the noise before pain shoots through my nerves, a dull thunk! to the back of my head, then my face meets ground. My scalp leaks warm down my back as I fade out.
***
I ask what I’m being charged with, why I was arrested.
“You’re charged with being a dipshit,” says one of the pigs, garnering a round of laughter from his blue-clad pals.
My cellmate wears nothing but track marks and a glare, hunched with his bony ass buried in the metal toilet bowl, bursting an angry brown deluge while making eye contact. The nip piercing feels nice between my fingertips. If I just pulled this little filament hard enough, I could get out of—
“C’mon, kid,” says a trench coat with its collar popped. I lose my staring contest with the shitting junkie to find Marcus Taylor standing at the opened cell door.
“Marcus.”
“You wanna stay here and gawk or get the hell out?”
The rain’s let up outside and dawn is bursting at the skyline. A greasy spoon waiter greets us with apathy as we settle into a booth for coffee. Marcus is a strange cat, but he’s reliable. Dad’s old war buddy, the last thing Marcus ever told him was that he’d always watch out for me, a promise he’s followed through on loyally over the years despite how much trouble I cause him.
“How much was bail?”
“Kid, don’t sweat the—”
“Marcus, I always pay you back when you bail me out. It’s not about being nice, it’s about my pride.”
“If you cared so much about your pride, you wouldn’t have got pinched to begin with.”
“How much?”
“Three grand.”
And just like that, my dog dream is stalled yet again. “You’ll get it by the end of the month.”
“It’s whatever,” he says, dumping a creamer into his coffee. “The hell were you doing out there in those suburbs anyway? No one lives there no more, and you know it’s crawling with cops.”
“You already know why I was there.”
“Shit, kid, not this again.”
“I mean it, Marcus. More than anything, this is what I want, and I’ll do whatever I got to.”
“Kid, these dogs you’re looking for, they’re fuckin abominations. You don’t want this.”
“I do.”
He shrugs and sips his coffee. “I’m assuming your quest has been temporarily stilted now that you own me three grand.”
“Yeah. But Lily’s got an optical camo she needs tested, so—”
“Fuck, Jasper, you fuckin dumb? You don’t remember how fucked your dad was after the war?”
“That’s because he was using it long-term, before they knew about all the side effects.”
“Your old man was ghosting for weeks at a time, sure, but that don’t mean the short-term use won’t fuck with you.”
“Marcus, I gotta do something. I’m in the hole deep, and if that can get me out—”
“I’m telling you, you’re gonna regret this—the dog, the camo—you’re on a death trip, you just don’t realize it yet.”
“I been on a death trip for a long time now. I think this can finally get me up, get me motivated, get me moving again.”
Marcus sighs and scribbles over a brown napkin stained with eggy butter grease. “Here,” sliding it my way.
119 Heavy Glades Ave.
“What’s this?”
“What’s it look like? My boss funds all sorts of, y’know, operations—underground stuff, dark markets. It’s a breeder, Ezekial Hart, about the best you’ll find outside legit channels. If you’re really set on this, go ahead and see for yourself.”
“Marcus, this—I don’t know—thank you.”
“It ain’t a favor, kid, it’s a reality check. I’m telling you, you’re not gonna like what you find there.”
***
“This operation’s gonna be a bit more invasive than what you’re used to,” says Lily as she preps the optical camo alongside her carving tools.
“Any more invasive than having C4 in my guts?”
“It’s high-grade shit, experimental. Even the one your dad used in the war was primitive compared to what we got these days. It’s gonna be like going from a shitty Civic to a Ferrari.”
“And this suddenly doesn’t feel like such a bad idea.”
“I know you’ll be fine, but there’s always gonna be side effects, even from short-term use. I need you to stay clean the next couple weeks. No drinking, no drugs, not even an aspirin.”
“Sure.”
“I mean it. This is important.”
“I’ve stayed clean longer, it’s no prob.”
Even with the anesthesia blurring all my nerves, the first incision still feels like my death sentence being carried out. Lily pries into parts of me I never knew existed, cartilage popping like dislodging a clogged sink. Without feeling, I dissolve away, mind separating from body. The gutted meat sack below my neck isn’t a part of me, chrome receptacle made to make money. A bone saw purrs into my disembodiment, tongs rearranging flesh to accommodate plastic and metal. Without the camo augment, I’m already half-spectral, the chrome completes my phantomhood. The machinery feels like sex, slow metal death swallowing. I hide from myself until I’m unrecognizable. The few parts of me that are still real dissolve away. Best doggone dog in the west—best doggone dog in the west!
My hand displaces dust and light through a mirror, stroboscopic mirage. Flies flee at my approach, flight paths confused. Intangibility feels like cool fire under skin. The only clue to my presence is residual body heat and a smell like burnt plastic dipped in ethanol. Bone and muscle shift soundless. I’m not here. Lily discards her surgical mask and marvels at the frown-shaped stain she leaves behind.
“Two grand now, three after the trial’s finished,” she says, fanning through a stack.
Enough to score one of Ezekial Hart’s defects and pay back Marcus.
“How long?”
“Just two weeks. Anything longer and your brain will go full spectral. Also, a little tip—the camo’s integrity is best when you’re emotionally inert.”
“If I feel anything stronger than existential malaise, I’ll leak back into reality.”
“That’s about the gist.”
“Don’t worry, natty spectrals take to dissociation like fish to water.”
***
Existence haunts into Detroit’s background, pulsing incorporeal among detritus. The malevolence can’t touch me here in my machine. Neon tongues around my form, white blood cells holocausting the citywide sepsis. I’m a distortion-fielded Czar Bomba that doesn’t exist, purging into purity, cyber-spectral. A McDonald’s fluorescent hum blurs at my limits, burgerphages sending soundwaves to each other past my invisibility. A man scrambles under his table for the misplaced quarter-pounder I peck in the corner—too many pickles, cheese counterfeit, sour beef. My magic trick hiccups when I gag, revealing circulation, then returns to infinite i-frame bliss, fleshless shadow.
K-9 unit nostrils flare at the first checkpoint where an animavangelist is hassling the pigs for rapture. The dog snarls wary and confused at my passage. The stress is making me leak. Scanners chirp alert to my nothing, but the pigs are too stupid to pick up on the cause, just beat the machines until they’re quiet and dead.
***
119 Heavy Glades materializes through smog like metal through an x-ray, porch sagging and rotted, molded brick façade dusting. Front door hisses the smells of synthetic amniotic and CRISPR mishap. Hart looks full butcher, seething through and at me, dollar signs on all my functioning organs. Nervous, I leak until visible.
“I’ll be damned,” he says, fixing his crooked glasses. “A phantom visits.”
“Uh, Marcus Taylor gave me the address. I’m here for a dog.”
“A dog? Well, that is my specialty.” A row of locks turn open from inside and I’m in. “Marcus sent you?”
“He’s a friend.”
“I didn’t take him as the sort to have friends.”
“Well, he’s my dad’s friend, but—”
“Ah, I see. Well, come down to the basement. I’ve got three pooches for the choosing.”
The air curdles into jellyfish consistency, shit-piss-stench becoming malleable. The stairs lead down into blaring white light. At the landing, what should be basement becomes cathedral of stainless steel and dormant biology. Chromosomal decay surfaces every inch. Dog-shaped discards stack bloody in a bathtub.
“Here is our forge of post-Darwinian triumph,” says Hart, sarcasm barely detectable. “The living specimens are here.”
He peels a threadbare tarp from a trio of kennels tubed with machinery. Within the first cage a creature hangs like rotted fruit from a saddle, hairless mass with stunted legs that skitter in panic at our approach. Buboes secrete off-white pus onto the floor. The skin of my ass cheeks starts to visualize through the camo. The second snarls through a violent seizure, eyes milky with cataracts and weeping curdled bio-refuse. Its teeth are a mangled teratoma, septic abscesses full of greasy hairs. The third more closely resembles something living, whimpering through only half-mangled vocal cords. His pupils disappear in their irises, clouded and fixed to nothing. His back left leg hike up as he licks his ass, shorter than the other three. Stilted and arthritic, he wags his tail. My full body unveils from the haze.
“This is the best of the three, much more viable.”
“How much for this one?”
“He’s imprinted on you, huh? Considering his quality, twenty-five.”
Everything I’m worth. “I’ll take him.”
The dog whines into my arms, Milo.
***
Milo’s weight is nothing in my hands as we course out the suburbs, his legs too atrophied to walk on their own. Musculature shifts awkward under paper-thin dermis. My vellus stands on end disembodied, eyes float within the vague notion of a face. Milo struggles to lap my cheek. A brutalization in process at the checkpoint, the animavangelist’s corpse bullet-aerated in a slump, rapture achieved, resurrection pending. Milo hovers through the busted scanner. The K-9 only watches, the shattered lifeform in my arms registered hardly threatening. Our trek slows at an intersection where the floating dog and my shadow attract wary looks from the pedestrians. My hand cradles Milo at his midsection, feeling his heart’s tiny pulse. His arrhythmia steadies after his wilted lungs allow a brief mew that shatters my frailty. After a shuddered kick with his gimped leg, he’s limp, waning. Light’s tickle numbs over my skin until there’s nothing, every hint of my existence wiped. Together, we’re erased, full spectral.
— guyliner is an amateur writer and game developer. His first game, The Donation, is releasing soon. X – @guylinerwords