“What can we do?” Kalmea asks him.
The Surgeon sits quietly for awhile, staring at his poor Organic son. He remembers the day they received this bundle of joy. The Angel of the Potentates with its flaring feathered wings, its heroic shoulders, its smooth and featureless head. It had come to them as expected, on the middle of the Fifth Day in the Year of the Basilisk. They were in the back garden when it descended, shedding sunlight from its pristine limbs. In its strong arms lay a tiny being of pink flesh, swaddled in linen and sleeping peacefully. Alain.
The faceless Angel placed the infant directly into Kalmea’s arms, as was the custom. They were so exhilarated by the baby’s presence that they did not see the Angel rise into the sky and fly back toward the great hill where stands the Palace of the Potentates.
“What can we do?” Kalmea asks him again, grabbing his arm.
“Rid him of this weak flesh,” says the Surgeon. “His Conversion was due in twelve days. I’ll do it tomorrow instead.”
“Is that legal?” she asks. He senses fear like poison in her voice.
“I’ll write up a Special Permit tonight,” he says. “Send a runner for a coach an hour before dawn. Conversion will save him from this wasting disease…whatever it is.”
“Father?” Alain’s blind opticals flicker open. They are blue, like his father’s, yet so soft.
“I’m here, son.” He squeezes the boy’s limp hand.
“Help me.”
“You’re going to be fine, Alain. In a few hours you will be a man…free from this sickness. From all sickness.”
Alain shakes his head. “The walls…” he mutters. “Skin on the walls…”
Wail looks at his wife, then back to his dying son.
“What walls?” he asks. Could this be some clue to the origin of his sickness?
Alain swallows, coughs. Bloody spittle stains his lips, which his mother wipes with a damp cloth. “On the Avenue of Copper Lungs…I had to stop…I’m sorry, Father.”
“You had to stop where? For what? Tell me, son.”
“The buildings…the rust, the metal…it was all covered over. Covered with…flesh. Some kind of skin, pulsing muscles beneath the surface. The Clatterpox were staring…some ran away in fear…but it grew larger as I watched it. I had to stop…I had to touch it.”
The Surgeon’s heart skips a cog. “What did you touch? Something on the Avenue of Copper Lungs?”
“The flesh…” mutters Alain. “Walls of living flesh, Father….flesh like me…how could it? How could it? How…” He fades away, consciousness lost beneath a wave of bodily stress.
“What is he talking about?” asks Kalmea.
The Surgeon shakes his head. “I have no idea. Stay with him. I must draft the Permit.” He shuffles down the hallway to his library, where parchment and a quill pen await his efforts.
As he pens the document that will save his son’s life, the boy’s words ring in his mind, fireflies set loose in the Organic folds of his metal-encased brain.
Walls of living flesh…
In the morning his son’s suppurating skin is the color of charcoal. There is a sickly-sweet stench about Alain. He appears to be…decaying. The Surgeon says nothing of this to Kalmea. Like her, he has donned a grim-set face. He hopes he will have cause to wear a smiling face again after this day.
After hastily winding their heart-keys they load Alain into a carriage by gaslight. Kalmea insists upon travelling with him to the Ministère, and he cannot refuse her. The driver is another Clatterpox, but the coach and horses might be the same ones that brought him home last night. The vehicle rolls through the green lanes and descends into the serrated mass of the Rusted Zone.
“Faster!” he shouts at the driver. The Clatterpox complies, but hits a mass of early morning traffic on the Street of Coils. The Surgeon curses the crowds of steaming mechanoids. Kalmea clutches his hand. Their son lies dying on the floor of the coach. Rotting…
In the smoggy glow of sunrise the coach finally reaches the Ministère of Science. The Surgeon calls for Attendants and they carry Alain inside, prepping the Conversion Room for an emergency procedure. Dr. Wail pacifies his huffing Supervisor by handing him the carefully prepared Permit. He does not wait to watch the man sign it, but rushes instead through the doors of the CR. A top-of-the-line body was commissioned for his son months ago. Using it now, twelve days ahead of the ordained time, should pose no problem. Attendants prepare it for the procedure as sedative rushes into Alain’s purple veins.
The Surgeon works feverishly, but with no less precision than any patient demands. The Attendants mumble behind their impassive ceramic faces…the state of Alain’s body horrifies them. His flesh looks like spoiled meat…it has already begun to dry…soon it will be only a desiccated husk.
The Surgeon works his bone-saw magic, then drops the tool as the cranial roof comes loose. The Attendants moan, or curse, he isn’t sure. He cannot hear them. He hears only the terrible shrieking of his wife, who looks into the CR from a round observation port.
Alain’s young brain is neither pink nor glistening. It is black and putrid…atrophied. Little more than a fist-sized lump of rancid meat. There is nothing left of his son to save.
The Surgeon falls to his knees. A keening sound fills the room, and he recognizes it somewhere in the back of his mind as his own scream. Dr. Wail is wailing…
Attendants carry him away from the CR while Transporters in special hazard suits carry away Alain’s shriveled remains. Wail breaks free of the Attendants’ supporting arms and slams his skull against the wall, shattering his porcelain face to bits. His silver skull-face continues to shriek as they carry him into an isolation room. He does not see what becomes of his poor wife.
If his opticals were Organic, he would be weeping. But he can only scream, until a gear in his throat slips. He lays in the isolation room, twitching and moaning until oblivion claims him. Sleep offers little help…he dreams of Alain rotting to death before him, skin falling in chunks from a skeleton of brittle white bone. He wakes up and slams his head against the wall again, seeking to pulp the brain inside; but his miraculous body is made too well.
In the depths of more mad dreaming he sees faces of carven stone staring at him with diamond opticals. The stone is alive and the faces speak with eerie voices:
It’s all a lie, they tell him.
The Potentates have bound you in a web of illusion.
To see the truth you must look beyond who you are…what you are…
How their stone lips can move and produce sound he has no idea. But this is a dream, so he accepts it. He does not like their accusations.
You are as dead as your son…who was not your son at all.
Conversion is Death.
The Beatific lifestyle is a sham…you are all walking corpses.
Accept this and know freedom.
Accept this and defy the tyranny of the Potentates.
Where does the new flesh come from, Dr. Wail?
Where does the lost flesh go?
All sense of time is lost while he dreams.
Someone eventually comes in, takes the heart-key from his pocket, and winds him back to full strength. By this alone he knows that twenty-four hours have passed. Wishing they would just let his body wind down and his brain expire, he fights against this, but four Attendants hold his limbs. The Supervisor tells him the key will be waiting for him when he feels better. When they leave he sits quietly for some hours.