Harbinger: A Journal of Art & Literature | 2018-2019

lights, and bitter cold. Pain. Hot, searing fire shooting through him, across him.
“Oh shit.”
Travis tried to sit up, but his body was not his own, and it ignored his mind.
“Get Dr. Larson. Now.”
A buzzing sound, then a hiss. A loud click of a heavy door closing.
Travis pushed the memory away. It was not a fond memory. Dr. Larson called him
Chaos. The unintentional creation born from technology that was advancing faster than
it could be understood. That was what Larson had said. He had said a lot of things to
Travis, in their private conversations, and Travis was terrified. The world had changed
while he was dead, with extremist groups rising up under the ever-tightening hand of the
Church and the government. Religious guerrilla wars had broken out across the world.
A second colony had been established on Delta Bravia 4, delivered by a ship that had
launched before Travis’ had died. The colony had terraformed the desert planet into a
farming utopia, and were a year away from completing their space station.
The seam between nanobot skin and organic skin curled over his shoulder, and ran
down his torso, a serpentine line, cutting across his hip bone. Halfway down his thigh,
it started again, a seam that marked all the missing pieces of his body. Under his fingers
the seam felt like the bead of a fine weld, slightly rippled where each puddle of metal ran
over the next, but it was malleable, giving to pressure just like the organic skin next to
it. Sunlight was beginning to turn the room a yellow gold, a beam of it reaching out to
touch him, moving slowly across the floor toward the bed. He imagined that when the
light touched his fake body, it would burst into flames, like a vampire, and that the nurses
who checked on him would have to push a stake through his half-nanobot heart.
He swung his legs off the other side of the bed, avoiding the sunlight, and reached for
his clothes. They were in a pile next to the bed where he had dropped them the night
before. The shirt was a soft white fabric that lay close to his body, letting the seam show
across his chest and down his back. He pulled the black pants on, dragging the fabric
across his fake skin. He thought that the real Travis was numb to its touch. That he was
still frozen, and the only warm part of him was the parts constructed of microscopic
machines. He would never tell that to anyone but Larson. Larson knew he was Chaos.
The feeling of spiraling out of control hit him. His chest tightened, his breaths came
short, and his hands shook as he pulled his shirt over the waist of his pants. His mind was
not in his body, his body was not his own. The world was spinning out from under him,
and he was watching himself, standing there in the stark white room.
Travis stood very still, squeezing his eyes shut, and raising his hands slowly to cover his
ears. He held a breath, forcing himself to let it escape slowly. Forcing himself to take a
long, deep breath in.
Right finger.
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