The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (20 page)

Travis stared at his canvas,
repeatedly pressing his thumb against the tip of his painting knife.

I shifted
into conductor mode and mimed his stim settings to OFF, shutting down the
magnetic bore in the ceiling. Then, eyes closed, I examined a skein of his
neural activity. Hotspots were already cooling, blue regions warming. When I
opened my eyes, Travis was still thumbing his knife.

“Looking to shiv someone?” I
asked.

“I bet she’d donate to the
cause.”

“Excuse me?”

“She’d give up some of her
eggs. You can run the harvest. Want a little peek-a-boo time?” His brain’s
inhibition center, such as it was, had yet to re-fire after the brainstorm
session. In that moment, even if he had been stone drunk, he could not have
been more obnoxious.

“Not funny, Travis. Not for one
second. She’s a Chenko. As in the Chenko Oligarchy. Tell me you understand.”

“She’s cute. She’s hanging
around here. Do the math.”

The math. Right. The last time
Travis did the math, he’d harvested human eggs from donors, scrambled them for
tempera, and painted a Christmas mural. Sure, sales and prices quintupled
overnight, but my sleep retrograded proportionately as death threats poured in.

“You can mag her,” Travis said.
He bobbed his head, filaments rasping. “Take her to joy-ville. Give her a
taste. She’ll book a return trip.”

“What are you, a pimp or a
painter?”

“Binder and pigment, baby. When
the mix is right, it’s all in the application. Hell, I bet I can get her to
jump your gourd.”

“That’s enough. I’m not
kidding.” Sometimes I wondered if prolonged doses of magnetism hadn’t cooked
his grey matter. “Just stop,” I said. “I bet our windows are already lased,
pane vibrations read as we speak.”

A month after returning with
DNA samples, Anna sat across from me, prepping burnt umber for her family’s
portrait. With mortar and pestle, she mashed kidney organelles cultured from
her brother. The smell, earthy and pungent, mingled with the fragrance she
wore.

I gestured an inquiry.

Lilac water
, Ops responded.

“You could have just asked,”
Anna said without looking up. I bit my lip and watched her work.

When she’d first returned,
she’d offered Travis a sizable sum for painting lessons. He told her that money
meant nothing to either party–at which point I suggested he access last month’s
invoices. Instead, he agreed to an exchange and set her to work under my
tutelage. “You two work out the details,” he’d said with a slap to my back.

Now, as she leaned into the
mortar, her grip tight on the pestle, I watched the subtle dance of her
clavicle and the shifting hollow of her throat.

“Who’s your favorite artist?”
she asked, breaking my reverie. She looked up; I looked away.

“Leonardo,” I said.

“Da Vinci?”

I nodded. “Yeah. No contest.”

“He means me,” Travis called
from across the studio, where he had stretched an epidermal canvas, the skin
cultured from Anna’s cheek swab. With a sweep of his arm, he plastered
progenitor cells across the scaffolded skin and directed Ops to flash them with
UV. After another pass, he tossed his trowel into a bucket and joined us.

Anna withdrew a pipette from a
beaker and dribbled some lactic acid into her mixture. “How about Jackson
Pollock?”

Travis made a dismissive snort.
“Dripping paint across a canvas takes as much skill as pissing your name in the
snow.”

“Depends on the pisser,” I
said.

Anna nodded. “And the name.”

Travis
moved behind her. He leaned in, his head next to hers as if inspecting her
work. I closed my eyes for a quick settings check. He had been off mag-stim for
a good thirty minutes. His neural cloud looked fine.

“I splined a documentary,” Anna
said. “In it, Pollock said that a good painter paints what he is.”

Travis grasped Anna’s hand, his
fingers overlapping hers. He worked the pestle through her. “A good painter
paints desire,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less.” He let go of her hand
and ran his fingers through her hair.

“Hey, watch it.” She swatted
his hand away.

“Artists need muses,” Travis
said. “What do you say, would you like to amuse me?” He leaned over and
whispered into her ear.

With a quick turn, she slapped
his face. “Make your own pigment,
mudak
.” She stood, tossed the pestle
onto the table, and headed for the door.

Travis followed her. “My
mistake, my mistake.”

“Just let her go,” I said.

“But she’s earned a lesson.” He
caught Anna as she opened the door. He stepped past and shouldered it closed.

“Get out of my way,” she said.

Travis locked the deadbolt. “Or
what, you’ll call Daddy?”

She swung at him, a roundhouse
that glanced off his shoulder. Travis laughed, but Anna silenced him with a
kick to his shin and an uppercut to his stomach. He bent with a grunt.

“Are we done?” she asked.

Travis, still bent, bowed more
deeply. He gestured at the door with a flourish. “Your carriage awaits.”

Anna glanced at me, and I
shrugged a helpless apology. Then, as she turned to leave, Travis stepped
behind her, reached out, and yanked her backwards by the shirt collar. Fabric
tore and buttons popped off. They skittered across the floor like broken teeth.

Anna cried out. “Let me go this
instant,” she said. “Or you’re dead. Do you hear me?”

“Ah, violence,” Travis said.
“The Chenko
oeuvre
.” He dragged her to the center of the studio.

She screamed, a strangled cry
of frustration, and clutched at her blouse. “I’m not joking.”

“No, I don’t suppose you are.”
Travis pulled a painting knife from his back pocket and set it to her throat.
“Neither am I.”

I stood in disbelief. “Travis,
what the hell? Take it easy.”

“Take it easy? It doesn’t get
any easier than this.” He shifted the knife to Anna’s cheek and angled it back
and forth, flashing light across her eye. “Tell me, does Daddy collect
Picassos? A nose for an ear might look nice. How about a tongue for an eye?”

“Stop,” Anna said.

“But I’ve just begun.” He
slipped his free hand through the buttonless gap in her shirt and moved it
across her stomach, his thumb along her lower rib. Then, as he swept his hand
up her side, fingers to her armpit, the fabric separated.

“Goddamnit, Travis,” I said.

Anna trembled and closed her
eyes.

I closed mine too and brought
up an interface. I gesture-flicked through stim settings as fast as I could,
searching for a way to circumvent safety protocols on the magnetic bore. I
rifled past programs that could induce kinesthesia, lucid dreaming, and
out-of-body experiences, but found nothing that would paralyze Travis in one
electromagnetic shot. Instead I settled on targeting his brain’s sleep centers.

I opened my eyes and pointed at
him, my hand miming a pistol. Ops read the gesture, and the bore in the ceiling
swung around, its housing whirring like a Gatling gun. “Let her go,” I said.
“Or so help me, I’ll drop you in a narcoleptic second.”

Travis stepped to Anna’s side,
placing her between the bore and himself. Although the armature tracked his
movements, I hesitated. Anna wore no filaments to translate the radiation, but
Ops had never run a clean scan. I’d no idea what implants she carried.

“Let her go,” I said.

Travis pulled his hand from
Anna’s shirt and waggled his fingers, glossed with her sweat. “I have what I
need,” he said, “Dial it down, and fire up the chromatograph.”

“What are you on about?” His
demeanor had changed, but I had no idea why. It was as if the assault had been
a joke, and he’d just delivered the punch line.

He grinned and blew across his
fingers. “Fear and anger added to the palette.”

Then it hit me. He wanted her
scent for the portrait. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “All this for her
pheromones?”

“Nice and ripe.”

“The progenitor cells—that’s
why you infused the canvas?”

“We differentiate them—”

“—Into apocrine sweat glands,”
I said, finishing his thought.

“Exactly. By the time I’m done,
that portrait will glisten under a pheromone varnish.” He kissed Anna on the
head and tossed his knife onto the table.

The color drained from Anna’s
face. “Wait,” she said. “This was just an act? Some twisted game to scare me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Travis
said. “Think of it as a defining moment. When people stand in front of the
portrait, when they behold your family’s gleaming smiles and sparkling eyes,
they’ll whisper, ‘How wonderful.’ Then, with each passing moment, palpable
dread will grow. After a few minutes, people will wish to flee. But I ask you,
what person would dare turn his back on the Chenko Family?” Travis laughed, his
eyes bright with glee.

“You’re sick,” Anna said.

Travis winked. “So endeth the
lesson.”

Anna began to shake. “I’ve got
to get out of here.”

I took her by the shoulders.
“Take a deep breath,” I said, trying to settle things down. “He wasn’t going to
hurt you. Everything’s fine.”

She shook her head. “Everything’s
not fine.”

“Look, I know he could have
done things differently–”

“You don’t get it. I’m
tripwired.”

A cold weight settled in my
stomach.
Tripwired
: she carried a distress beacon. Nodes tracked
adrenaline and half a dozen other neurotransmitters. If biometrics reached
designated levels, an emergency call tied to GPS alerted police or private
security firms. I’d looked into getting one for Travis after the tempera
incident. “Did it fire?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Can you reset?”

“Look, it doesn’t matter. My
father will tear this place apart. He’ll tear you apart. He won’t stop until he
finds out what happened. You’ve got to disappear.”

“Someone’s on a short leash,”
Travis said.

Anna threw her hands up.
“Forget it. Forget the portrait, forget the money, forget I was ever here. What
a mistake I’ve made. What a waste of—”

A high-pitched whine pierced
the air; pain shot through my teeth. A moment later, the entrance door groaned,
metal on metal. It bulged inwards, a fizz of paint flecks popping from the casement.

“Oh, God,” Anna said.

With a thump, the room pressure
changed.

Anna dropped to the ground.
“Get down,” she said.

Before I could move, the door
snapped back and crashed into the hallway. Immediately, four men, dressed in
suits and ties, burst through the roil of dust and debris. They could have been
executives arriving for a meeting. Instead, they carried laser-sighted pistols
with blood-red beams that crisscrossed the air. The laser lines stopped, two on
Travis, two on me.

“Wait!” Anna said. She scrambled
to her feet and ran at the men, cutting across the beams.

The lead
man holstered his weapon and stepped to meet her. He snatched her by the wrist
and, with a quick pivot, picked her up like a child.

“Put me down,” Anna said. “Put
me down this instant.” She kicked and screamed as he carried her from view, her
words tumbling into curses. From the hall, came one last cry, “Don’t hurt them.
Please, please, don’t hurt them.”

The average human body holds
about six liters of blood.

Travis needed more. He always
needed more.

Upside-down,
cables tied about his ankles, Travis hung like a side of beef in a
slaughterhouse. Beneath him lay a canvas I’d unfurled at gunpoint. With
ruthless efficiency, Chenko’s men had jacked Ops, flayed the data banks, and
stripped my qRAM. Then they’d flooded Travis’s creativity centers, dampened his
pain transmitters, and opened the veins in his wrists with the same painting
knife he’d set to Anna’s throat.

Now, Travis’s movements
alternated between composed and frantic, as the men took turns swinging him
over the canvas. Part of him seemed to know what was happening, but part was
unconcerned, immersed in the experience. Every few minutes he’d strain to reach
his bonds with blood-slicked hands. But eventually, he’d fall back and sway
with exhaustion, as threads of blood fell from his fingertips.

By the second canvas, Travis
began to paint. Whether it came from the loss of blood, the magnetism flicking
his neurons, or a realization that this was to be his last work, I’d no idea.
But rapidly, he achieved surety. Looping and gliding to an inner music, he
directed his symphony of blood–his drips, lines, and spatters. With a drifting
beauty that iterated, never repeated, Travis painted his life away.

Midway into the third canvas,
one of Travis’s languished moments exploded into a spray of rapture. He hurled
collected fistfuls of blood. With it, I reached my limit. The horror pierced my
numbness. “No more,” I said.