Faith Healer: Part 1 (New short story)

Don't worry, I'm still working on Archemi and Brute Force. This is the first chapter of a new Angkor short story (the same protagonist from Those Who Breathe Under the End) that I'm writing to refresh my creative palate. Enjoy!

"Be healed!"

Thwap. My jacket hit the woman with the heavy slap of leather, hard enough it rocked her in her wheelchair. I almost winced - not a good look on stage - but managed to turn it into a beatific grin just in time. "Be healed, Marguerite Lopez Pereno, by the power of Jesus!"

Marguerite here had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as ALS: a degenerative motor neuron disease that would kill her within two years, if left untreated. And it would go untreated. Before her illness, she was a factory worker in Tapajós, an industrial town wallowing in the polluted mud of the Amazon River. Like nearly everyone here, she was poor, one disposable cog in the great fascist machine known as Estado Integralista Brasileiro - the Brazilian Integralist State. In Buenos Aires, a party member with her condition would have access to the best nanotechnological medicine in the world. Here in Tapajós, all she had was me.

Marguerite's hands shook with effort as she tried - and failed - to lift them. Her face screwed into deep lines as she strove with all her might to pray. I hit her with the jacket again. The audience trembled fervently. Crosses were lifted, candles were lit. They had all turned out for their neighbor, their wife, their mother, their daughter. All these hopeful, loving people.

I wasn't a preacher. I wasn't even religious. In fact, the man known as Camilo Fukai didn't even exist.

While their eyes were closed, I went to Marguerite and made a show of praying with her, closing my eyes and concentrating. I exerted a small amount of will, lay my hands on either side of her head, and engaged my gift.

The superficial appearance of this woman - mid fifties, obese from a life-time of poor quality state manufactured rations, her hair grey with stress - deepened and expanded as my Lifesight engaged. Suddenly, I could sense her muscles, atrophying. Her blood, low in iron. Her DNA, telomeres unravelling too fast, too early, destroyed by the stress of raising a family under a fascistic, militarized Brazil. A Brazil that dominated the world with the machines that had ruined Marguerite's village, her health, and - if left unchecked - her world.

The source of the disease was easy to find: moth-eaten neurons that were being gnawed at by this woman's immune system, the same way that ARMATEK's war machines chewed away at the smoldering wreck of the rainforest around Tapajós. 

I coaxed her immune system to back away. Under the gravity of my will, my gift, the inflammation ebbed. The gnawing stopped.

"Can you feel that?" I whispered to Marguerite in flawless Portuguese. "Keep your eyes closed, and tune into your body. I need you to breathe."

"Yes, Brother Camilo." She whispered back. "The pain... the weakness... I feel your strength flowing through me."

"God's on the phone. All you have to do is listen." I replied simply, refocusing on her wounded immune system. Energy flowed through my fingers and into her, soft as sunlight. Marguerite gasped as millions of nerves stirred, rippling with electric current. They began to re-myelinate and knit, frayed ends reforming into healthy receptors, clumps of amyloid protein unravelling and dissolving. 

The disease that had taken years, even decades to cripple her to the point she couldn't walk took mere minutes for me to eliminate. I burned the energy stored in her excess adipose tissue - fat, for you non-doctors - and used it for protein synthesis. While I was there, I corrected her metabolism as well, nixing the damage that a lifetime of intensely sugary food had done to her pancreas, blood insulin levels, and heart. I couldn't clear the plaques in her arteries, but I knew they would cause a heart attack that would surely take her out within the next decade if they weren't removed. I needed an operating theater to extract those. If I used magic to dislodge the plaques and attempted to get her body to absorb the coagulated, insoluble palm oil, I risked causing an infarction that could kill her on the spot. There were limits to miracle working.

"Open your eyes, Marguerite!" I cried out for the audience's sake as I stepped back. "Open your eyes, and walk!"

Marguerite's lovely brown eyes flickered open. She breathed deeply, and looked up at me suspiciously. She was a true believer, a dyed-in-the-wool Christian, but she wasn't stupid. She had some doubt in me, the faith healer. She'd seen so many of them.

I offered her a hand. Without thinking, she placed her work-worn fingers into my smooth-skinned surgeon's palm, and I pulled her to her feet. She wobbled... then stood. 

Her jaw fell open. "This... this is impossible." She looked down at her hands. They no longer shook.

"Everything is possible, Marguerite. All possibilities are equally real." I smiled at her. It was the first honest thing I'd said since entering the church.

At a fake healing in a megachurch, the signs would flash and people would start cheering and collapsing in fits of tongues. But this audience was simply stunned into silence. Everyone in the village knew Marguerite. Everyone had watched her decline from an energetic mother of four to a wheelchair bound Inútil: an invalid, someone the government no longer considered to be a 'human resource'. Her family had taken care of her as she'd lost the ability to feed herself, clothe herself, swallow her food properly. And here she was, standing.

Marguerite gazed into my eyes in disbelief.

"Take a step." I let go of her hand and moved back, motioning to her.

She looked to her village with an expression that said: "Can you believe this guy?", but then took a step forward. And another. And another.

While she moved, I monitored her vital signs with my Lifesight. This was the best part of my job. I was a predator, a wolf in sheep's clothing, but these honest everyday people were not my intended prey. If I could help them, I would.

"My god!" She cried. "My family! It worked! It worked!"

Then the crowd cheered, as Marguerite Mala Lopez stumbled over to her husband for the first time in five years and began to sob. Before I knew it, the audience heaved, and sick person after sick person was carried, dragged, or limped toward the stage.

"Comms Zealot." A soft, deep voice purred through my radio, buzzing the eardrum of my right ear. "You've got incoming."

"Wait: already?" I hissed back, turning slightly so the camera didn't see me appearing to talk to myself. "Where? How many? I literally just did the first one!"

"State Censors must be watching the stream. There's two teams of secret police closing in to perform an extraction. There's two teams of secret police closing in to perform an extraction." 

"Fuck, Doug! Why didn't you... I need to get these people out of here!"

"No time. Brace for contact." Doug's voice was grim.

I closed the comms link with a thought, and turned back to the agitated, desperate people with my trusty jacket in hand. But Doug was on the ball, as usual. Before I even had a chance to open my mouth and yell at people to evac, black-clad men burst in through every entry and exit door simultaneously, assault rifles up, fingers beside the triggers. The north entry teams were humans, standard fireteams of four. The ones from the larger southern doors were comprised of three human soldiers and one robot. UMA Panteras. Even my guts froze up a little at the sight of their black, lethal, low-slung bodies, which glided into the church hall on silent rubberized feet. They superficially resembled jaguars, but their necks and spines bristled with long javelin-like spines and sensors.

"This is a sanctioned entry! All citizens will be searched and identified!" The leader of each fireteam yelled in electronically modulated voices as they swept in. "Hands in the air! Hands in the air! All citizens must be identified!"

Fear immediately gripped the room. The civilians went down to their knees, or sunk into wheelchairs or seats with their hands up. The faces I could see had shifted from hopeful to fearful and furious, and there were several people - men and women both - who had the look of people preparing to disobey.

"Good people of Tapajós, be at peace." I dropped my jacket and held my hands up like the rest. "These good men of the government are here by GOD's will."

The SNI soldiers swept the room, using the sensors on the ends of their rifles to scan the citizen identification chips in the wrists of everyone in the room. I glanced at the Panteras. They'd taken up secondary positions to either side of the congregation, their skin humming with electromagnetic force. I knew from my briefing that those two robots along were capable of killing everyone in the room within seconds.

I was the last to be scanned. Two identically anonymous soldiers thundered up onto the stage, guns leveled. The guy on the right was the one in charge of scanning me, while his buddy kept his laser sight trained on my forehead. I started placidly at the barrel of the rifle pointed at my face. A triangle of bright red dots on the soldier's featureless visor tracked and registered my face, mapping my retinas. He found no errors. The chip in my wrist pulsed and beeped, like everyone else's.

"Camilo Fukai." The man to the right of me ground out my name in a modulated, electronic voice. "You are being detained by the Party for peddling anti-government religious propaganda and misinformation. Consent is mandatory. On the ground, now!"

With my hands still up, I slowly went to my knees, then my face. Calmly. A murmur of agitation passed through the crowd, and I felt the energy in the room shift from fear to rage. Now I was the one praying: praying they wouldn't decide that now was the perfect time to rise against their omnipresent fascist government.

I was cuffed, taken up under the elbows, then hauled up to my feet. You could have heard a pin drop in the formerly boisterous room. The Panteras scanned every face for compliance, shoulder cannons twitching like nervous whirlygigs on their shoulders. The crowd, to my great relief, were cowed by their presence. Except for one person.

"Jesus protect you, Brother Camilo!" Marguerite sobbed, once we were almost at the door. "You are a true healer! A miracle worker! Bless you! Bless you!"

Marguerite, no. For the first time since the operation had started, fear clutched at my gut with an icy hand.

The Panteras didn't fall out behind the soldiers as the SNI dragged me out the southern door. There were two more of them waiting outside, camoflaged against the peeling white paint of the church's exterior. They uncloaked as we passed by them, and moved to block the doors. I heard a radio voice mutter inside the helmet of the man to my life, but only caught one word. Limpar. The Portugese word for 'purge'.

"No! Wait!" I gasped before I could help myself, twisting back to the doors of the church. "Please! They're innocent people, they're just-"

The Panteras at the door opened fire on the hall inside, a thousand rounds a second. The guns drowned out the screams, but not the smell, as bullets chewed through wood and flesh. It was all I could do not to start shouting in rage as the cops unceremoniously dragged me toward an unmarked black van. More men ran past us, guns clutched in their hands, as my head was forced down and I was shoved into the cage in the cargo hold.

The soldier slammed the door across, muffling the sound of gunfire. Shaking, teeth chattering, closed my eyes and turned my lifesight inward, suppressing adrenaline and cortisol and testosterone until my jaws stopped trembling and numbness replaced horror. I had to be calm for the mission. It was why I'd been sent to Brazil. It was why I'd altered my retinas and accepted the chip; it was why me and my agency had worked for months on the passable fake identity of Camilo Fukai, a Japanese-Brazilian state preacher gone rogue. The bloodshed and brutality on this world, a near Earth alternate reality not too far from my own, was what I'd been sent here to stop.

I was here to kill the President of Brazil.