The Body Scout: A Novel Read online

  Trogstoys, people called them. Neanderthals cloned and grown to work the Siberian mushroom farms. Rare in the Remaining States, where cloning sentient beings was illegal. I’d never seen one in person. The woman seemed to be looking at me, but it was hard to make out her eyes under that brow.

  We were all on the 201st floor, which was a good thing because the lower part of the city was marinating in smog. It was the big cloud, the gunk that coalesced around the One China factories, thickened above the Pacific oil fires, and then floated across America like a dirty tongue licking the land.

  But up here, the air was cool and crisp. Ion vacuums in the shape of lollipops ringed the building below us. The oxygen being pumped in felt like it was blowing straight from the last chunks of the Arctic. I took a sip of shochu, closed my eyes, and breathed in deep.

  I liked being up high. Zunz and I had grown up in the burrows of SoCroHi, South Crown Heights, back when those underground apartments were touted as the solution to the housing crisis. Some Silicon Valley architecture firm pitched them as the way to provide low-income apartments without affecting the skyline. They were dirty, dark spaces with air so full of mold we might as well have been chewing on it. Ever since I’d escaped, I’d never been able to go underground without panicking.

  A gull flew by me with a tray of shrimp tempura rolls in its beak. A red light beamed like a third eye in the center of the gull’s head. Congress had recently passed a law requiring warning lights since animal forms were the latest drone craze and most were covered in plastiflesh to seal the smog out of the circuitry. People didn’t like being tricked into thinking something fake was real.

  I checked my screen. In the Patriot League, the Orioles and Sphinxes had gone to extra innings. I switched over to the Mets game. It was the middle of the fourth, still scoreless. Game four of the Homeland League Championship Series, Monsanto Mets looking for a sweep of the ChicagoBio White Mice. The fielders trotted to their positions.

  The center of my plate erupted in static. The AI waiter appeared with a digital grin. “Have you decided on any sustenance this evening, sir?”

  “I’m fine with the shochu.”

  “May I suggest our dragon roll? It’s the chef’s latest specialty. The synthetic Komodo has ninety-nine point three percent accurate musculature.”

  “Okay, sure. One dragon roll.”

  “May I also suggest—”

  “Nope.” I doused the plate with soy sauce until the waiter disappeared beneath the dark pond.

  A gull dropped an orange glob of fluorescent uni on Arocha’s plate. She placed it on her tongue and smiled as it dissolved. As she talked to the three deans, she stabbed the air with her chopsticks. She was describing some big plans, about changing the world or some other beautiful horseshit dream. I wondered how many years it would be before the biopharms figured out how to slice off a prospect’s head and preserve it in a jar. Cut out the middleman, call it efficiency.

  Baseball was a nasty business. I told myself all the usual things. How it would be some other asshole doing the job if it wasn’t me. How this was just how the modern world worked. It didn’t help. But dreaming of what the money could buy me did. A down payment on the shoulder tune-up, I thought, or maybe a new module for my eye. At least if I could buy some time from Sunny Day Healthcare Loans.

  Bottom of the fourth, Lex Dash at the plate doing a curtsy after dodging a curveball that cut behind her knees. Dash was the Mets’ leadoff hitter and was built like a kangaroo. The Mets lab team had her on a strict lower-leg regimen that had her halfway to first base the moment her bat cracked the ball.

  The ChicagoBio pitcher wound up. Flung. The pitch dropped low, bounced off the dirt. The floating strike zone flashed red. Fourth ball. A walk. Dash pranced mockingly to first and the pitcher threw his glove at the ground. The White Mice were one of the only all-male teams left, and still hadn’t gotten used to women in the league, much less other genders, and a switcher like Dash was good at getting under their skin.

  “Line them up,” I mumbled. Walking batters was never a smart idea with Zunz in wait.

  My sushi came, and I threw a piece into my mouth, almost choking. Over a decade having a bionic arm and I still hadn’t mastered chopsticks. As I chewed, I thought I noticed the Neanderthal woman watching me. She had an odd smile on her face. The kind that wanted to creep up behind you in the dark. I shifted my chair around to obstruct her view.

  Sam Tzu struck out without much of a fight. Henry “Hologram” Graham was on deck and Zunz was waiting in the hole. I could see the brown smudge at the corner of Zunz’s smile, a small birthmark he’d declined to laser off because he thought it was shaped like a baseball glove. “The game is etched in my skin,” he liked to say.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman in the crocodile suit stroll toward me. She walked with an odd mix of power and grace. Her legs put tree trunks to shame.

  “Mr. Kobo, I’m afraid I have bad news.” Her voice was higher pitched than I’d expected. A little nasal on the vowels. She had freckles as faint as ghosts on her skin and a nose the shape of a baby’s fist.

  “Oh yeah?” I pulled out an eraser, offered her one from the pack.

  “I only smoke naturals,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t have guessed there was anything natural about you.”

  Her lips made a crevice of a smile. “If you’re referring to my laboratory origins, I’ll remind you we Neanderthals evolved before you sapiens. Perhaps that makes us the truly natural ones. The archaeological evidence suggests we were quite happy before your ancestors murdered us all. May I sit?”

  “Sure, and my apologies,” I said. I figured she was a Sunny Day officer here to haggle over money I didn’t have. There was no point in pissing her off with a debate about prehistory. “I’m glad we brought you back.”

  “It was the least your kind could have done.” She tossed one leg on top of the other. Her eyes were large and green. “You can call me Natasha, Mr. Kobo. I know you sapiens prefer to be on a first-name basis. It establishes a sense of friendship, a closeness. Yes?”

  I glanced at the screen. Graham had two strikes. Zunz was taking practice swings.

  “I don’t get close with loan sharks. But you can tell Sunny Day they don’t have to worry. I’m on a job tonight and will have a nice payout when I deliver.”

  “See, that’s the bad news I was referring to.” Her long lips frowned affably. “I’m not a loan officer. I’m here representing the interests of Dereck T. Mouth. Owner, CEO, and president of the Monsanto Mets.”

  “You’re a scout? I haven’t seen you at the conferences.”

  “Let’s call me an executive assistant. I’m afraid Julia Arocha is no longer on the market. My employer heard the Yankees wanted her and so he decided he wanted her more. You know how these owners get.”

  My breath came out hot and slow. If I didn’t bring Arocha in, I didn’t get paid. And then Sunny Day didn’t get paid and someone a lot less friendly than this Neanderthal paid me a visit.

  “The deal is already worked out,” I said, standing up a little too quickly. “There’s a contract.”

  Natasha laid an upturned hand on the table next to the wad of wasabi. “Oh, everyone has contracts. But only one can have possession. At least until we get the kinks of duplication cloning worked out.”

  I saw her mean-looking friend amble toward the Columbia table.

  I needed to get there first, talk to the deans, figure out what rotten stunt they were pulling. Or simply nab Arocha and get her in the van, haggle over the details from the sealed Yankees compound. Possession was nine-tenths of the law in contract negotiations.

  “Please, Mr. Kobo,” Natasha said. She placed her warm hand on top of mine. “I’m telling you as a professional courtesy.”

  I called my backup, told him to fly the van over for a quick evacuation job. But my legs got wobbly. Like someone had swapped out my bones for rubber tubes. I fell down beside a pair of slender, engineered legs atta
ched to one of the socialites. “Ew,” the owner said. Pushed me away with one of her elongated heels.

  Natasha strolled over and grabbed the metal of my forearm, pulled me up as easily as a bag of feathers, and flopped me back into my chair. She waved over a seagull and ordered an espresso and a glass of water.

  “You Americans have always been unsuspicious of your restaurant food,” Natasha said. “Dereck Mouth owns this restaurant, among many other fine establishments in the city. Although I’m not sure how I feel about it myself. Raw flesh? Even synthetic, I don’t understand the appeal. When my people discovered fire, we never looked back.”

  Natasha put two white pills beside my soy sauce dish. They looked like two moons about to be sucked into a black hole. “When you’re able to move again, take these. They’ll help with the headache. You’ll want help.”

  “Fuck you,” I tried to say, but it came out half a syllable. I wanted to grab her throat and squeeze. My arm only twitched.

  “You have what they call heart, Mr. Kobo. Perhaps we can work together at a future juncture.”

  I watched Natasha walk away, turning as blurry as a bigfoot photo. I blinked. Looked to where the Columbia table had been. A big, wide figure was lifting an unformed shape.

  My head throbbed. The restaurant seemed to be dissolving into thick mist. The waiter reappeared in my plate, his face faint beneath the puddle. I couldn’t hear what he said. Something about dessert options. I couldn’t move, yet I felt at peace. As if I was evolving, or devolving, into a human jellyfish. A clear hunk of skin drifting in vast waters without struggle.

  The figures left. The other customers seemed disturbingly unperturbed. They’d stopped looking at me, began looking at their screens.

  I could only move my eyes. I looked down at the screen where the game was still playing. I thought I was starting to hallucinate. Zunz was at the plate, but he wasn’t swinging. Not exactly. His body was shaking, glitching almost. His skin seemed to be turning blue. A drop of blood dripped out of his ear. Another from his nose. Then red strings were streaming down his face.

  I closed my eyes. Opened them.

  I saw Zunz drop his bat, collapse. My best friend, my idol, my brother. Knees and face in the dirt.

  “He’s dying,” someone said.

  Zunz looked up. His eyes and mouth were wide open. Three big circles.

  I tried to move.

  The sound was off, but a man at the table next to me screamed “No.” I couldn’t make out any of the other words. Only “No.” Then again, and louder. “No. No. No!”

  3

  THE DIFFERENT DEATHS

  It wasn’t a hallucination and it wasn’t only Zunz’s face. Whatever poison they’d slipped inside him traveled through his system, turning the skin strange colors. Blues and greens blotched with red. Chunks of liquifying matter had dripped out of his nostrils alongside the blood. Splattered on the plate.

  His teammates ran toward him, then stopped. Backed away. Zunz was on the ground, a red puddle expanding under his face.

  I learned all this from the replays when I got home. I was shaking all over. I dropped Natasha’s painkillers on the kitchen counter and forced myself to see what happened to Zunz with undrugged eyes.

  On the news a woman in a white blazer stood outside of the golden Mets stadium, dazed fans stumbling around behind her. “Police say it is too early to call this an act of terrorism although Monsanto insists the death could only have been caused by a new bioterrorism agent or advanced nanobot attack. Monsanto CEO Dereck Mouth, known affectionately as ‘the Mouth,’ accused the Mets playoff opponents of foul play.” The footage switched to the Mouth, his golden face grinning with a surgically elongated smile, waving off reporters as he strolled into his segmented limo. “Mets manager Gil Stengel hasn’t commented on how this will affect the starting lineup when the game resumes tomorrow night. No matter what we learn, this is a sad day for baseball and a tragic loss for the Monsanto Mets.”

  My mind tried to swat the words away. It refused to believe. But my body understood. My hands shook. My stomach turned into a hunk of iron, twisted around, tangling up my insides. I knocked an eraser out of the pack, lit it. Puffed it down in thirty seconds.

  The news was now talking about Zunz’s charity work. Young children waved foam fingers and wept outside of a run-down school. “The Mets star, who grew up in the Ebbets Field subsidized subterranean apartments, was known for his work with the No Body Left Behind fund. NBLB works with international philanthropists to provide physical and cerebral upgrades to low-income NYC schoolchildren.”

  I switched channels and there was a report on the new GenSlice B3-Bees. “These will be the only agricultural zootech genetically tailored to pollinate. Is that right?” the host said. The GenSlice scientist nodded, turned on a hologram of tiny bioengineered legs scraping across a flower. “With the collapse of ninety-eight percent of native pollinating moths and other insects, farmers and—if I can be frank—world governments will need to purchase our B3-Bees to sustain current mass agriculture production.”

  “Now we go to the tragedy shaking the sports world and the entire nation.”

  Zunz was at the plate. He had that gap-toothed grin I’d known since childhood. Yet something was off. His eyes looked vacant, painted on.

  “The first signs of trouble started in the fourth inning, when Zunz slipped at the plate.” I watched him swing, lose control of his balance, and take a knee to the ground. “Zunz recovered and knocked a single to right field. But by the eighth inning, Zunz was visibly ill.” You could see pustules emerging along the limbs. Behind him, a robot ump stared silently.

  My brother died again. Horrifically, painfully, and absurdly. I rewound it and watched it a second time. A third. I felt dead and drained.

  I switched to the hologram feed to see everything in the worst details. Took control of the image, moved it up to JJ’s face as the pitch came in. His pupils were so dilated they were practically black holes. A drop of blood appeared at the corner of one eye, like a red tear. I zoomed back. Zunz’s mouth was open now, but you couldn’t hear him scream.

  “No,” I said quietly, to no one at all.

  Even with the eraser smoke in my lungs, I could feel my insides being torn apart. Static flowed through my veins in place of blood. I vomited, finally.

  Zunz had been the only steady thing in my life. The one rock I could cling to when the world was a storm. I couldn’t help thinking that if I hadn’t taken the Arocha assignment, I’d have been in the stadium and done something. What, I didn’t know. But something that wasn’t doing nothing at all.

  I turned off the hologram feed. Turned off my screen. Turned off everything until I was alone in the dark.

  In my dingy Brooklyn apartment, I felt small and alone. I desperately wanted to pick up the phone and call Zunz. Have him calm me down. Have him say something about how “we’ll get through it, man,” or “you can only look down so far until you swing around and start looking up.” He’d always been an optimist. And things had kept working out for him in the end, until the end.

  I walked over to the window. Pressed my face into the glass. The air was murky and filled with indiscernible objects. In my tiny window of my tiny apartment, I might as well have been a lost microbe in a foreign, hostile host.

  I stayed at the window for some time.

  4

  THE OLD DAYS

  Before he was my brother, Zunz was the best friend I’d ever had. I’d been an only child, and for many years that simply meant I was alone. My father was out the door each morning before I woke up. He was a parts gardener, tending lips and ears growing in lab dishes. My father made sure these future features of the wealthy got the proper nutrient inputs, the necessary bacteria scrubbings. It didn’t pay as well as you’d think.

  When I was eight, my parents got evicted from their Bed-Stuy stack apartment to pave way for a new fifty-story condo complex. We were relocated to a burrow in SoCroHi. The subseventh floor.


  The subway train rattled past our walls every ten minutes or so. Black mold lined the hallways, thick as paint. My father grew angrier. My mother spent more and more time in her augmented-reality romances, helmet obscuring her face. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. No real dogs or cats, and no money for robotic ones. I was short, sad, and alone. Until I met JJ Zunz. Julio Julio, “So nice you have to say it twice.”

  When I was chasing a ball through the underground hallway, a gangly kid with a goofy smile and a birthmark shaped like a tiny glove on his cheek picked it up. “You like baseball?” he said. He spoke fast, with exclamation points. “Do you collect sims? I’ve got twelve! Including my favorite, Derek Jeter. He was a player from my grandpa’s day. He was super good! Have you heard of him? Do you want to trade?”

  “Sure,” I said, despite never having watched a single game.

  I went to his place and he showed me his cards and virtual sims. His family’s apartment was smaller than ours but cozier. Brightly patterned blankets hung from the water line running through the living room. Dozens of candles burned with natural fire. Back then, it felt like the most comfortable place in the world, even with the rats.

  Pretty soon, I was going to Zunz’s a couple times a month. Then a few times a week. Then every day.

  We’d watch dating shows with his abuela on her ancient flat-screen, or help his father cook dinner while his mother worked. Every morning at 6:00 a.m., Mrs. Z commuted to a warehouse in Queens where she was hooked into a remote suit and spent thirteen hours controlling distant orange-picking machines in the offshore groves. A way to get around regulations. You couldn’t unionize a robotic arm.

  At school, we became so close the kids called us ZuBo. As if we were one person. I think the name was supposed to be an insult, but it made me smile.

  My homelife was unremarkable. Then nonexistent.

  When I was twelve, I woke up gasping under a pile of dirt and rubble. A wall had collapsed in the burrow. Subway line maintenance in a tunnel nearby, or so the city later said when they denied the insurance claim.