Filaria - Brent Hayward [84]
“I beg your pardon?”
“Inside that thing. Who was inside?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a sheath from the archives. It once contained a DNA pattern. No? A human’s code was in there.” The boy handed the hunter back to Phister. “Someone pretty important, too, by the looks of it. With an army of nanites, ready to roll. They were in there pretty recently, too . . . Sure you don’t know who was in it?”
“Uh, no.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I found it.”
The boy stared for a while, not blinking. “Found it?” He tried to size Phister up. “So this dead guy, in the car. Did you bring him here so he could see a doctor? To get him fixed?”
“No. I came here by, well, by accident. I’m trying to get home. To bring him home, I guess. But I can’t find my way back. What . . . Who are you?”
“An old friend of mine used to call me dead boy. You could call me that too.”
“Dead boy?”
“Do you always repeat everything people say? It’s pretty annoying. But yeah. Dead boy. ’Cause to tell the truth, I don’t know what my name was when I was alive. Now I’m part of the world around you. You can call me what you want.”
“How did you die?”
“I’m not sure. Gardening accident, maybe. Possibly murder.”
“Murder?”
The leer on the boy’s face was horrific. He had turned his head so that the gashes opened wide. Phister swallowed hard. Murder. Did the boy know what Young Phister had done to Cynthia and her cohorts? Had he been sent to make Phister answer for what had happened? But the true question was: what had really happened? Did Phister even know what he had done? Was there any way that carnage could have been real?
“Kidding,” the dead boy said, and he chuckled. “Boy, you look like you could use a doctor yourself . . . I think the supervisor who reanimated me knew what had happened to the kid who owned this body, and maybe even what his name had been, but it never let me access that data.”
“Reanimated?”
“Didn’t I tell you that I was dead? Are you deaf? A supervisor made me into what I am today. How else do you think dead people get up and walk around? Nanites again, just like in your little tube. We might not be the same as we once were, and we might have different agendas — ” that grin again “ — but we can reach out and touch someone.”
Phister recoiled from the pudgy hand.
“Of course, the main problem is we have to go for regular treatments to stop these damn corpses from falling apart. So now that the supervisor who sponsored me has stopped responding . . .” Seeing the expression on Phister’s face, the dead boy said, “Look. I’ll give you a crash course in reanimation. As an ex-person, I play host to an army of tiny machines that keep this body moving and working and stop it decaying too much. These tiny little machines do the bidding of, well, of the world. They’re emissaries, you might say. So basically I work for the network. Understand?”
“No.”
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: if he’s being run by a million nanites, then why don’t they do something about those big ugly cuts?”
“That’s not what I was thinking.”
“My supervisor used to call them affectations. And I guess they are. You see, I do have a little bit of free will. I like these gashes.” With one hand he slapped at the flaps of skin. “What can I say? I like the effect they have on people. Anyhow, all those little guys inside me are starting to lose the battle now that Sam has powered down. So you see why I’m here.”
“Uh . . . No. I don’t.”
“For goodness sake! You’re on the medical level; I need a lift. It’s perfect. And when we do find a doctor, we can get it to look at him too — your friend. If you want. Maybe even at you. Although it seems that now might not be the best time to become reliant upon the infrastructure, if you know what I mean.” A knowing wink.
Everyone spoke in riddles. Phister was utterly baffled. “McCreedy doesn’t need a doctor,” he