Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set Read online

  Defragmenting Daniel

  Jason Werbeloff

  Defragmenting Daniel

  Copyright: Jason Keith Werbeloff

  Editor: Rae Nash

  Published: 17 July 2017

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Fiction by Jason Werbeloff

  Series

  Defragmenting Daniel

  Fragment 1: The Organ Scrubber

  Fragment 2: The Face in a Jar

  Fragment 3: The Boy Without a Heart

  The Complete Trilogy Box Set

  Novels

  The Solace Pill

  Hedon

  Anthologies

  Obsidian Worlds

  The Crimson Meniscus

  Shorts

  Solace Inc

  Your Averaged Joe

  Visiting Grandpa’s Brain

  Falling for Q46F

  The Cryo Killer

  The Photons in the Cheese Are Lost

  Dinner with Flexi

  Bleed Me Silicone

  The Time-Traveling Chicken Sexer

  The Experience Machine

  F**king Through the Apocalypse

  Manufacturing Margaret

  Investing Isobella

  Oscillating Olaf

  Patenting Peter

  Severing Sidney

  Contents

  Fragment 1: The Organ Scrubber

  Fragment 2: The Face in a Jar

  Fragment 3: The Boy Without a Heart

  Want More?

  Acknowledgements

  Fragment 1

  The Organ Scrubber

  Organ Scrubbing

  The first organ Daniel scrubbed was a kidney. Easy organs, those. Plug in the renal artery, and you’re good to go. If the kidney worked right, you’d have green piss running out of the ureter in no time.

  “This one’s a dud,” said Hooplah. Daniel heard the wet slap of meat on stainless steel as she turfed a faulty organ onto the waste belt. “Cancer. Third one this hour. Kidneys ain’t what they were.”

  Daniel didn’t reply. He’d learned over countless shifts working beside Hooplah that she didn’t expect an answer. Unless she asked a question.

  He rotated the kidney on his tray to attach the renal artery. It wasn’t difficult, once you got the pipe and the artery lined up. They’d installed smart-pipes at the Organ Farm last month. Made scrubbing much easier. The first time he’d held the new tech, he’d freaked out. Damned thing had slithered in his hand when he’d touched it. Now, he held the squirming pipe to the kidney, aligning it with the severed artery. The pipe’s sensors detected the opening, and snuggled around it.

  “You’re getting better at it,” said Hooplah, slapping a gloved hand across his shoulder. Green mucous splattered his coveralls.

  After six years working in the Organ Farm, Daniel still didn’t know why it was green – the Rejek they pumped through the organs. They’d said something in class about photosynthesis. All Daniel knew for sure was that after you ran Rejek through an organ, it was good for transplant.

  He depressed the foot pedal beneath his desk. The kidney shuddered in his hand. Rejek coursed through its interior. And … there it was – a steady stream of green piss ran into the tray.

  Daniel removed his foot from the pedal. Detached the pipes from the quivering organ. He held it in his hand a moment. The kidney was the size of a large mouse. Or a small rat. It sighed as the Rejek drained from its tubes.

  He squeezed it just a little. Placed the organ on the success belt. His left eye watered as he watched the kidney slide away along the ever-receding line of scrubbed organs. He counted seven before it was out of sight.

  “You going tonight?” asked Hooplah.

  Daniel’s heart leapt. Tonight. It was tonight.

  He faked a yawn. “It’s Thursday. Cricket night.”

  She slapped him lightly across the shoulder. “It’s not just any Thursday, silly. It’s your birthday. We’ll watch cricket next week. You gotta go.”

  He turned away from her. Masked the movement by reaching for the next organ in his bucket. She’d never understood the concept of personal space.

  “Thinking about it,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. He examined the lung. Or tried to through his blurry left eye. The lung was adult size. Young though – no blackening. Anyone older than twenty-five who lived in the smog of the Gutter would have black edges.

  “Don’t you wanna know? I do …”

  “Not that important,” Daniel lied. His heart thundered in his chest. Tonight, his pulse shouted. Tonight … tonight … tonight.

  Hooplah leaned in closer. The warmth of her breath lapped his cheek. Condensation dotted his neck where her exhalation left its trace. He suppressed a shudder.

  “Come on,” she said. “You wanna know.”

  “I never met them.”

  But that wasn’t true either. He had a memory of Her. The blurry outlines of a woman’s face under the shade of a windy Birch tree. A smile the scent of pineapple.

  Daniel flopped the lung on its back. He could never quite believe how light lungs were. The organ bounced on the metal worktop. He clasped the pink tissue. Ran his fingers over its sludgy ridges. No obvious tumors.

  “Sure, yeah. None of us have met our parents.” She leaned in front of him, so her curly hair obscured his workbench. “But we still, ya’know, we still want to know who they are.” She stared into him with bulbous cybernetic eyes. They were malachite, greener than a vial of Rejek.

  He sighed. “Alright. I guess I’ll go to Administration.”

  Hooplah’s face lit up. He nudged her away with a slimy hand.

  “My birthday’s next week,” she continued. “I can’t wait. Bet my mother’s an actress.” She flung back her flaxen hair. “And my dad’s a pilot. We’ll live glamorous lives. Gorgeous lives. Once they reclaim me, that is. They’ve been looking for me all this time. I just know it.”

  “Sure,” said Daniel. “Not done with my quota though. Gonna miss the queue at Administration if I don’t hurry up.”

  “I’m already finished. You’re so slow these days. It’s because you look at them too long. Ya’know, that thing you do. Staring at the organs like you want their story.”

  Daniel harrumphed. Guided a slithering pipe into the trachea. The edges of the mechanical snake curled around the cartilage in a malevolent embrace.

  He shivered.

  A tear dropped from Daniel’s left eye. Landed with a gentle tap on the lung’s upper lobe. He hadn’t told Hooplah about the infection he’d had since they’d harvested his cornea three months back. Made it difficult to work. There was no point telling her, though. It would upset her – Hooplah was … sensitive about eyes.

  He depressed the foot pedal, and the lung inflated. He watched the organ swell, just as they’d taught him. Counted to seven before he checked for any leaks. Checked lung capacity. Or tried to. He swatted away another tear from his eye. It was almost shift-end, and the eye seared after the day’s exertion.

  “I’ll do the next one for you.” She grabbed a liver from his waiting bucket of organs.

  It was no good. His quota was forty-nine organs for the day. The perfect number. Seven-squared. “I don’t need your –”

  She ignored him. “What do you think they’re like?”

  His eye itched as he watched her work on the liver. Forty-eight it would be. A multiple of six. Six and eight. Their average was seven. It would have to do.

  �
��What were they like?” she repeated.

  “Who?”

  He returned his attention to the lung. Unhooked the pipe from its trachea. The lung deflated, and a fine mist of green vapor clung to the air. The cloud stung the back of his throat as he inhaled. He tried to taste it, that air breathed by a stranger, or a stranger’s lung. Tried to taste the breath of another. But it was no use. The printed tongue they’d given him still hadn’t grown buds.

  “Your parents,” she said.

  Daniel slung the lung onto the success belt. He counted as he watched the procession of silver trays carry the lung away to some distant corner of the Organ Farm. Two trays … three trays. How long would it be before the organ found its way to its recipient? Five trays … six trays … seven. The lung disappeared round a corner. By sunrise, he thought. A lung for breakfast. Some rich old man in the Bubble with a cough. No problem sir, they’d say. We’ll swap that one out for you in no time.

  “I haven’t thought about it much,” lied Daniel. “My parents could be any-bodies. No-bodies.”

  The truth was, Daniel had taken to thinking about his parents often. More and more as his eighteenth birthday neared.

  The dreams had started in his 210th month. 210. A multiple of seven.

  In his dreams, the blur of his mother’s face crystalized around almond eyes. Glowing cheeks. Deep smile lines danced about her mouth. It was a face he knew in his bones. In his sinews. Someone he would know at a glance. And someone who would know him too.

  “Liver done,” said Hooplah, and flung it on the conveyer belt. “I love livers.”

  Daniel glimpsed the clock hovering above the workstations. 6:50 p.m. Ten minutes till shift-end, and there was still a heart and a temporal lobe in his bucket. He groaned. Temporal lobes took forever to scrub.

  “Iii’ve got it,” sang Hooplah, and yanked the gray matter from his bucket.

  “Don’t –” But it was too late. She was already scrubbing.

  “It’s your birthday,” she said, and smiled. He knew it was genuine. Knew her care was sincere, from all the years he’d known her. Hell, they’d grown up together. ‘The O-Team’, she’d call them. She’d always thought that was clever. ‘O for orphan. O for organ.’ But no matter how well he knew her, he couldn’t help but cringe at the sight of her lidless cybernetic eyes ogling him. The Bubble had taken her eyes, lids and all, last year.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled, and looked away. Forty-seven organs today. Not a multiple of seven, nor six or eight. Forty-seven. A bad number.

  She leaned in to peck him on the cheek, but he reached for the heart in the bucket before her lips found their mark.

  *

  Heart scrubbed.

  Day-end bell.

  Decontamination.

  You’d think they’d use warm water to hose down the workers. No-sir. ‘Boiler ain’t workin’,’ they’d say. The boiler never worked. Not since Daniel had begun his employment at the Organ Farm just after his twelfth birthday.

  “Raise your arms.”

  Daniel braced himself for the icy jet, but it was no use. It sucked the breath out of him every time.

  His muscles bunched under the force of the spray. “Cold,” he muttered. The tremors began. It was a thing – not shivering. He didn’t like giving them the satisfaction. Some days he managed not to move for a full forty-nine seconds into the decontamination sequence. But he didn’t have the energy today. His mind was elsewhere. He didn’t even count.

  “Turn around,” said the speaker mounted to the ceiling.

  Eighteen. Today was his eighteenth birthday, or near enough. Nobody knew for sure exactly when he’d been born. But when the Orphanage took you in, they gave you a name and a birthday. ‘Daniel’ worked well enough. And today was as good as any. Better than most. It was the seventh of July.

  “Bend over.”

  Except today wasn’t like any other. Everyone at the Orphanage knew that your eighteenth birthday was special. Today was the first time he’d get to read his File. Today he’d find out who his parents were. His real parents. Not the instructors and the matrons at the Orphanage. No, these parents were the people who’d birthed him. They were people who’d, at least in some way and at some time, in some moment, wanted him.

  The cold burrowed through his costume, into the crack of his butt. His legs quaked. Glaciers scampered down his thighs. His teeth chattered.

  “Scrub.”

  He snatched a brush from one of the hooks. Left-arm, right-arm. Left-leg, right-leg. Chest. Neck. Face.

  Seven areas scrubbed.

  The jet dribbled to a limp stream, and switched off. The chamber door unlatched.

  “Proceed,” said the speaker.

  Daniel snatched a towel. His clothes. He was on his way. Administration closed in under an hour. The queue was permanently long, often snaking outside the building. If he didn’t get there soon, he wouldn’t make it to the front desk before it closed.

  The sun was just setting behind the Bubble as Daniel stepped outside the farm’s front doors. Golden light shimmered through the edges of the forcefield, drowning the Gutter in a lugubrious sepia. Everything around him was tired. Decrepit. He glanced back at the squat building that housed the Organ Farm. Fissures tentacled across its façade. The shadows within the cracks deepened even as he watched.

  Daniel. Move.

  He’d been waiting for this day for eighteen years, and he was watching the sunset.

  Daniel broke into a gallop, ignoring his grinding knee servos. He dashed through the broken Welcome Archway, past the living quarters, over the courtyard, toward Administration. Toward the Bubble. The Orphanage was situated just outside the forcefield, with Administration almost touching the shimmering barrier. That way, the Administrators didn’t have to walk any distance through the Gutter to get to work.

  The cool, dead air of Administration bit into Daniel’s corneas as he entered the building. His chest inhaled the sudden drop in temperature and humidity. Asthma is normal with generic lungs, they say. Daniel tried to not to cough as he found the back of the queue.

  “Not that long today,” said a girl with no lips. She was last in line, or was until Daniel stepped in line behind her.

  “What isn’t?”

  “The queue. Normally longer than this.”

  Daniel didn’t know her. He didn’t know most of the orphans. And not just because Daniel was the quiet type. There were just so many in the compound. Thousands. Tens of thousands.

  “Why you here?” she asked.

  Daniel tried not to stare at her teeth. At the spittle dribbling down her chin. He licked his lips, checking they were still there.

  “Eighteen today,” he said.

  The lipless girl dried her chin with a tissue. Grinned. Grinned a little wider at least. “Same here! Happy birthday!” She seemed to consider hugging him, but stopped herself. “You excited to find out who they are?”

  She had eight top teeth visible. Eight at the bottom. Not seven.

  Daniel grunted.

  The girl’s eyes narrowed. Finally, she seemed to understand he didn’t want to talk, and she turned away. Hooplah could learn something from her.

  Hooplah lived in a fantasy world. Actresses and pilots – pfft. Of course his parents were likely Gutters – as hers would turn out to be too. Bubbler babies almost never ended up in the Orphanage. Why would they? If mom and dad died, grandmother or aunty or someone else would happily take them home. Bubbler babies were wanted. Gutter kids … well, they were a different story.

  The queue shortened. Daniel’s knee creaked with each eternal step toward the gleaming granite counter.

  The knee was cybernetic, and you’d think it wouldn’t mind the cold. But ever since they’d harvested Daniel’s knee when he was nine, winters had been difficult. It was summer now, but the cold air in Administration wasn’t helping.

  “ID?” said a man making his way down the queue. The smart-fabric of his uniform glinted. Circuitry along the cuff of his shirt lit up
as he neared each outstretched identity card.

  Daniel reached into his pocket and fished out the polycarbonate rectangle as the man approached. It hurt Daniel to look at that picture. He’d been sixteen then. Before they’d harvested his lungs. His cheeks had been full and rosy once upon a time. Alive. Not the lumpy gray he saw in the mirror these days.

  The Administrator passed his wrist over the card, and glanced at an LED screen at the back of his cuff. He didn’t give Daniel another look as he continued down the line.

  The girl without lips walked ahead to the Administration desk. Her cybernetic feet clunk-clunk-clunked on the marble floor.

  Daniel was suddenly grateful they’d never harvested his feet. Sure, artificial knees were a pain, but feet seemed … important, somehow. Daniel couldn’t imagine himself without feet.

  He watched as the girl received her File. Her hands trembled. Metal toes curled against the floor tiles with a hair-raising screech.

  She flung open the flimsy cardboard cover.

  Daniel slurped a deep breath to steady his heart. He was next. He thought about his father. He knew nothing of the man. No memories of him at all. He was likely a Gutter when Daniel was born. But now? Maybe he’d risen up in the world. He could be a Bubbler by now. Would he want Daniel? Why hadn’t he tried to find his boy all these years? Why hadn’t the man claimed him?

  The girl closed the File slowly. Stared at the beige cover. Rubbed its edges gently with her thumbs. Without her lips it was difficult to tell for sure, but Daniel thought she looked lost. She peered around the vast air-conditioned space.

  “Next,” echoed the woman behind the glass. The Administrator’s face was a warble of worry. Valleys and craters puddled in concentric circles around her eyes. Daniel had been told that administrative duty wasn’t the kind of work Bubblers liked. That it was just one step above being a Gutter. The pressure showed.

  His heart in his mouth, Daniel stepped forward. But the lipless girl hadn’t shifted. She stood in place before the glass, unmovable.

  “Next,” repeated the clerk.

  Daniel was unsure what to do. Everything in him wanted to shove her aside. It was his turn. On the other side of that glass was his File. In it, his parents. And maybe, just maybe, a way out of the Gutter.