By Mark J Rankin

I shuffled over to my desk, coughing up blood as I moved. I had ceased to bother wiping my mouth, content to let the fluid dry on my lips and chin. Collapsing into my high backed chair, I read the instructions on the screen. I placed my left thumb into the divot in the middle of the smooth plastic box at the edge of the desk, and winced as the needle plunged into my flesh. In a moment it was over, and the flashing lights indicated that my blueprint was on its way. On the screen I was informed that the Company had received my order, and that I was being offered a final opportunity to cancel or proceed. But I had already chosen my path, and no further contemplation was required. Everyone wants a second chance, even when the price is ruinously high.

***

A month later the delivery truck carrying the polished metal vessel arrived. It resembled an oversized double doored refrigerator. Company employees, dressed in dirty white jumpsuits, and wearing logo adorned caps, carefully unloaded the package. At my request they installed it in my bedroom, on the far wall opposite the bed, connecting it directly into the main power supply. I tried not to glance their way as they went about their work; they all knew the character of my acquisition, and their disdain was palpable. They only spoke to each other in whispers, and as they left I pretended not to notice their cold stares. It didn’t matter now anyway; the machine and its contents were mine. I lit a cigarette, and sat at the foot of my bed studying my distorted reflection in the doors of the machine, and wondered how long it would be before I opened those portentous gates.

***

The machine hummed incessantly, and I didn’t sleep for days. Although I had generally accepted the consequences of my dark purchase, I struggled with the desperate hope that perhaps my drowned integrity might resurface and prevail. But this was a deluded ambition, as I was fading rapidly. I could barely walk, if you could call it that, and the relentless pain was a constant reminder that the end was near. So, I opened the cold silver chamber and chose. This. And that. And then I would be reborn. And then nothing would change. But I would still breathe, and another breath speaks for itself. My tacit companion residing within that steel shell fed me, as he was born to do, and I became addicted to his corpulent bounty.

***

I lay in bed and listened with my eyes closed as the apparatus grunted with each surge in power. I had grown accustomed to the imposing device, and now found its presence almost comforting. But I was failing again. I got out of bed and opened the machine. I examined my depleted image, sculptured by years of infectious avarice. He had only one eye left, the other a ghostly stain. The running eye I had sewn shut years ago when I first saw that eyelid flutter during an especially gruelling harvest. He was ravaged and stretched thin. His exposed muscles were dry as parchment, attached to taut tendons clinging to the ends of fractured bones. A dwindled cage of bloodless ribs protruded from his torn translucent skin, revealing his abject poverty of parts. But floating within the vivifying fluid he still retained his slowly beating heart.

With one withered hand still on the door of his barren home, I gazed out the mud encrusted window behind this container of flesh, beyond my painted and furnished cocoon, at the sprawling desert upon which this city of twisted wires and coughing monstrosities had sunk its feet into. Green had long since faded to grey, and fauna was fantasy from another age. But it was still mine, this diminished domain. 

As he was. Yet the corporeal is finite, and he was empty. He was done and now repulsed me. I sometimes dream about how I used to hesitate, but there is no real substance to these memories after so many years.  So, I contacted the Company and ordered anew. I’ve heard the new models don’t flinch.

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