Bone Machine

O I XIII

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There is a certain line of thought on the nature of the human body; it is one that is held especially often by objectivist types, or that they at least pretend to hold, or that they just make it look like they hold to project a steady atmosphere of cool superiority. The position they hold up is this: A human being is nothing more than a machine. Their actions are predictable and unchangeable, a simple weave made from threads of action and reaction. Many of those people will say as well that the human body is a kind of bone machine, a construct that only feigns the miraculous feat of consciousness but can, in reality, be reduced to a chain of interactions — just like any machine. Chemical, neural, and emotional reactions, just alike to the mechanical ones of any lock, car, or computer.

Ray was a human being. An orphan, dropped at the Company's doorstep one night. He was draped in dirty linens splotched with rusted reds and browns, wailing, shivering, cold. From the day he was found there in the driveway, soaked with the metalic smell of rain water, he was put into the company's service. Anything he could contribute at his age, he would: As a toddler, he was chasing rats from storage closets, as a child, he was carrying biohazard containers to disposal, and as a teenager, he swept up indeterminable fluids from the lab room tiles; anything he was advised to do in a passing grumble, he would.
As much as any man could be, Ray was a good man: He performed each of his tasks eagerly and without so much as a whisper of complaint, regardless of any indifference and disrespect he encountered. Still, the Company granted him little more than the roof over his head: Every day, when the lunch break came to a close and people cleared out of the caffeteria, he could at least expect to find a way to sneak into the kitchen and help himself to the slim pickings that were left there. Even if he was unlucky and the woman behind the counter spotted him --- the woman whose tired, furrowed eyes only ever seemed lit up when she was screaming at him --- he had figured out which of the many trash cans tended to hold the largest, least damaged items. It was the ones in the middle of the hall, next to the grated air ducts. Fortunately for him, the trash was rarely emptied here. Someone had suggested they build a trash duct --- but management had deemed it too costly. His clothes, too, were whatever he could get his hands on. The first few years, just after he'd arrived, he wore a diaper cobbled together from a tied-up shirt. This shirt had been sent to the company as an advertising gift **--- it was marked up with the logo of a local kindergarten chain ---**, and had spent the previous three years folded up in a box at the back of a broom closet. Discarded lab coats, sorted out for holes or other material failures, were what he could get most reliably. At other times, janitors' denim overalls and **throwover** table cloths served him as clothing. The slightly discolored and eternally unnoteworthy attire seemed a perfect match for his faded brown eyes.

All of this made Ray invisible among the hallways and laboratories of the Company. Since he was dressed much the same as all the employed chemists, neurobiologists and physicists, people were generally not aware of whether or not he was nearby. And since his work exclusively involved the lowest, most despised tasks available, few had any interest in entering his daily routine. **For the longest time, no one had wasted a single thought on him.** His existence was nothing more than circumstantial. His employement was a matter of convenience. His inevitable absence some day in the future would find as little note as his presence did now.

Nobody is quite what happened that day. Not the least anyone outside those fluorescent-flooded hallways. Only few were actually involved in these events. Those responsible for them were in no position to recount them. And beyond even that, they lost their lives in a way which, judging from the few facts unveiled by interrogation, must have been painful beyond belief. Anyone with second-hand knowledge is either unwilling or unable to describe the happenings and circumstances of that day. The only thing the public knows for sure is this: there was an accident. Some accidental loss of control over one of the countless eclectic experiments that roamed the Company's labs and only rarely peeked any daylight. Ray was one of the people involved in the accident. And he was disintegrated.

Colloquially, "disintegration" is equivalent to "total destruction". By this understanding, every person involved in the accident was "disintegrated". A child who steps on a landmine is "disintegrated". But even a brief moment to parse this word will make it clear, that that is a warped interpretation. Disintegration is only one thing: the complete dissolution of a body's integrity. Ray was disintegrated.

This fact did not seem to be immediately clear to the first responders, the ones who came to investigate the source of the immense quake, the pungent smell of toxic chemicals and the electrifying heat. The lab, once a clinically cleanly and sterile room, was in chaotic disorder: The many tables, racks and vent ducts were either smashed to pieces, fallen and thrown through the room, charred where they stood, or molten into clumps of glassy black slag. Their burning, melting, and throwing seemed to have occurred without any quantifiable pattern. A forensic analysis could only conclude that multiple explosions of completely different sizes, forces, and origins must have occurred across the room simultaneously — including directed explosions in mid-air and some that must have originated from the same point where one of the victims stood.

The mortal remains of those scientists had met a similar fate: The solid components of their bodies — bones and cartilage especially — were melted almost without exception; apparently, this must have happened both while they were being displaced by an explosion as well as inside their bodies. Consequently, some of the corpses, ones whose torsos were untouched by explosive force, still showed caved-in skulls and deeply sunken eye sockets. This proved that the bone had turned into a viscous fluid under extreme external heat, and had only cooled and solidified shortly before the arrival of first responders. Soft tissues, especially fat and the walls of internal organs, was broadly charred, though the insides especially still exhibited severe thermal and chemical burns. Surprisingly, though, there were still copious amounts of blood spread across the room — it seemed that the heat had caused the victims' skin and internal organs to burst nearly immediately. None of the corpses remained remotely intact. This was seen as evidence for the presence of an explosion: all bodies had their limbs strewn far from the torso, the fingers, toes, etc. blown off even further. One thing, however, immediately seemed unusual: On most bodies, their skin had burst open in several places. For the others, however, the skin was not just less damaged, it was fully intact, despite the immense explosive forces involved. Same with the various types of connective tissue. Veins, nerves, and other string-like organs. This meant that the origins of these explosions became apparent primarily from one factor: the direction in which this heavy, blood-soaked net had been blown. All those whose remains were spread across the room showed the same signs of this grim process — including Ray.

After a short investigation of the scene, the bodies were soon carted away. The body bags, filled with cleanly separated limbs and other semi-fluid globs of tissue, were sagging so much on the quickly procured stretchers that they looked almost like trash bags. Remains were temporarily relegated to a broom closet off the loading bay; with Ray absent, no other employee would let themselves be denigrated into giving up their worn-in seat to call disposal. There were, of course, other people to do these tasks — but they would only arrive at the end of the week, to organize things that would require outside help, the kind of things they didn't want Ray to be the face of. When the first of these employees finally arrived one morning, most didn't notice. But once, after lunch hours, the cafeteria bins still overflowed with disposed food, some did try to get a hold of someone who would stop the smell of rotting trash. When they found themselves in the loading bay however, they quickly understood why the janitor had ignored his duties: Opposite the door to the broom closet, by the rail that overlooked the bay, he was lying on the ground, frozen in shock, breathing heavily. They realized why when they looked into the closet: The body bags had fallen from the stretchers, where they had been stacked on top of each other due to the tight space. Now, they lay strewn across the bare concrete floor. None had apparently been damaged by this — apart from one. A small hole had been torn into the side just above the zipper; the rough contour of the hole, lined by thinly stretched plastic, made it clear that this hole had indeed been torn and not cut. The hand that tore this hole lay in the corner of the room, limply wrapped around a broom, dragging behind it a string of tissue and organs in slow, uncontrolled twitches. One last twitch tore the end of the horrible slug from the plastic bag, where Ray's dull brown eyes skittered over the floor.

Nobody could offer any explanation for what had happened here. Any department of the Company that was consulted about it merely insisted that such a thing was impossible. Even if, through some cosmic miracle, the minimum of Ray's vital organs had survived the explosion, an organic system like this, left to the open air, could not sustain life for more than a scant few minutes. Beyond this, it was clear that not all of his organs had made it through the incident: His limbs — both hands and feet, plus parts of the arms and legs attached to them — were present, as were all the veins and tendons connecting them. His brain, still bedded in a part of his skull not much bigger than most of the cranial cavity, dragged behind him most of the time, looking like a modern *Ankylosaurus*. Attempts at communication ended up completely fruitless. All organs involved in speech — lungs, throat, mouth, and tongue — had been destroyed, the brainwaves that could still be measured were to erratic to indicate any kind of ordered thought: the results of his EEG looked more like a heartbeat. Since he had already displayed a remarkable amount of adaptability, some of the anthropologists believed that he would find some new form of communication. Possibly a controlled, highly precise vibration of his muscles, which could produce some primitive tones. Sadly, however, this hope never came to pass.

The remarkable thing was that Ray's system had not only remained intact in spite of the destruction of his body, it was also remarkably durable. In the initial phase of testing, when researchers were still unclear about his mobility, he was found more than once having dropped to the floor, in front of the table where his containment box had been placed, veins squashed under limbs that fallen down behind him. And yet, time after time, he remained unscathed, launching into some unknowable method of orientation and soon crawling ahead on nervously twitchy fingers. Preliminary results of these tests showed that his tendons, though of very low elasticity, could withstand any force they were subjected to. Everyone involved knew that they had come upon something truly special.

The feeling of shattering silence had long gone. Researchers had disappeared into their laboratories, kitchen aids took their lunch-break smokes in the loading bay, janitor cleaned out the cafeteria trash cans. Only when the cleaning aids came scuttling through the hallways at the end of the week was when some noticed a feeling of familiarity. Most could not remember that time anymore, the days when those hallways housed piles of body bags on stretchers. Even for those who had been on the front lines that day, few remembered that Ray had even been involved in it all — after all, they couldn't remember anyone who was involved that day. Not even the horrifying sight of what he had become had managed to stick in their minds, drifting into vague association. He was not even remembered anymore by the people who had put him back to work in some unknown cavity of the facility's walls. Some of them, if they had been asked, may have been able to recall small, specific details of the process that they had been personally responsible for: the functionally drab case of zink-coated steel that they had put him in; the pulley mechanism on which they had mounted his tendons; the chemical preparations that they had used to keep his hands permanently rigid. But none of them had the full picture anymore, or knew what the final purpose of this myriad of tiny actions had been. In the end, so long as their work was done, the food served, and the trash out of sight, they were only too happy to forget about the days small tragedies.