Idempotency by Joshua Wright Read Free Book Online

voice.
    He sighed heavily and looked around the room for nothing in particular. “Sure, why not? Roof opacity: 95 percent.”
    The blue sky darkened to a nearly imperceptible blue, and the chair reclined slowly as Dylan placed his drink on a tray that appeared out of the floor on his right. He loosened his tie, closed his eyes, and tried to recall the last time he had been to San Francisco.
    Dylan awoke naturally when his transport stopped moving. Immediately he wondered why his AI hadn’t awoken him before arrival. He asked and it smugly rejoined that they had not arrived yet. Annoyed, he followed up, asking why they had stopped if they hadn’t arrived. The AI eerily skipped a beat and replied with a default error message. Dylan scrunched his face in confusion, raised his chair, and faced forward.
    “Walls, opacity 100 percent, externally reflective.”
    As the walls became transparent, Dylan’s jaw went slack. Standing directly in front of him, not two meters away, stood the grotesque semblance of a man. The thing stood naked, and he swayed north to south. The aberrant nature of the scene was enhanced by the thick, ever-present Bay Area fog that was dampening the city.
    The man turned his head toward Dylan’s transport. As if looking at Dylan, but probably looking at his own reflection, the man appeared as though he were trying to speak. The skin around what was once the man’s face was stretched and wrinkled to the point that blood seemed to exhume itself from within the creases. The hole that served as a mouth had fluids leaking out of it, and the man absently raised a withered and crooked—yet well-muscled—arm up to his face and promptly smeared the yellowish sludge around his cheeks: Blood mixed with an inscrutable goo to paint a demented Van Gogh upon a withered Edvard Munch canvas of a face. The thing’s head suddenly bolted to the left, its eyes darting frantically to and fro. Then it leered back at Dylan’s window, its expression—if it could even be called that—appearing agitated now. The muscles of the skinless thing ripped to life, spraying tiny droplets of blood and pus in every direction, and the thing pounced on the window of the transport. Its hands balled into fists and flared violently against Dylan’s window, just one meter in front of him. Dylan yelped a slurred combination of “shit” and “God” that sounded more like “shod” and nearly fell out of his chair. The thing’s mouth moved vigorously as it pounded away at the glass, leaving smears of blood slowly cascading down the window. Had he turned on external audio, Dylan would have heard the thing ranting a nonsensical, frenetic diatribe between horrific screams. In an instant, the thing’s head turned back to its left, and it raised its hands to its neck as it did so. Its convulsions began to slow, finally swaying like a kite before takeoff, then it collapsed owing to a dead wind. Dylan catapulted himself out of his chair to get a look at the now dormant and supine body. In the neck of the victim, where it had been grasping, sat a small metallic object. Dylan breathed for the first time in a while.
    Five security officers appeared out of the fog from several sides. They wore black suits with black helmets, and they quickly encircled the body. Within moments everyone and everything was gone. The transport warned Dylan that he should sit down—he summarily ignored this entreaty—just before it proceeded on its way.
    Still standing, Dylan barked, “Search, recent news, San Francisco, vagrant, blood, traffic disruption.”
    The feminine voice responded, “Mr. Dansby, the item is trending locally among personal observation; however, there are no official reports on this particular incident, as yet. There are several related incidents matching—”
    “Is there a known cause for the . . . man’s condition?”
    “The most likely cause is external epidermis atrophication, more commonly referred to as dermatraphy, caused by an